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Friday, November 18, 2005

I've Got a Job

You read the title right. I just got a job at Uno's Pizza, and yes I'll be a waiter. I'll also be waiting for your responses. Yes, that was a joke. Yes, it was an awful one, but things cost more in the city.

I had my notebook filled up with like 18 pages of leads and phone numbers and jobs to look for and amazingly enough, Uno's was actually looking for workers. I was incredulous.

I went in to the resteraunt and was greeted by a smiling manager with an earpiece named Chad who seemed like your typical cool dude recent college grad. And somehow he was the manager, maybe the fact that this location is across the street from New York University in the East Village (Manhattan) has something to do with this. I don't know. But right now I'm feeling overwhelmed with joy from finally getting a job, combined with the sudden drop of having one of my main goals knocked out of the way and I was so tired from that struggle that I feel the need to recharge my batteries till next week when I start (hopefully) tackling getting a manager and an agent and going on auditions and actually serving food to people again and getting paid for it.

Currently I'm using the computer in the hallway of the main office at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on Broadway and W 38. It's free. That's one of the benefits of going to church folks, besides the breakfast muffins served afterwards of course.

I've met a lot of people, and maybe this weekend I can finally start hanging out with them somewhere besides in the lobby of the Bowery Poetry Club which is an absolute hipster mecca, and for obvious reasons I feel right at home at.

That was the longest 2 weeks of my life by far when I was going door to door looking for work, and fortunately it was unseasonably warm the whole time. It just now got cold around here yesterday. It almost seems like New York was waiting for me to get started. It's still a cruel world, but it just seems a little friendlier now.

I feel way too off to amuse anyone with funny anecdotes right now so I apologize to all readers about the tone. I'm sure everything will settle in as soon as I get the internet in my room and can type in the comfort of my santa claus long johns.

Hopefully this internet thing happens soon, because before I moved in, I was told that the internet was part of the utilities that I was paying for, and now my roomate is trying to push me to get Verizon DSl because he's having a hard time paying the old cable bill, which is the reason for the hangup and the headache right now.

INCONVENIENCE BEGONE!

And that's the way I feel about it right about now.

This funk is so rubber.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Why I'm Embarrassed to be a Football Fan

This is a piece that I wrote at Starbucks the other and it was performed at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan at approximately 2:12 am November 14th 2005. My apologies to whoever have already heard it, or who will hear it at the next open mike at this other place on Sunday.

Ahem

It all started the other day when I was watching the game and the announcers came on and said, "Welcome back fans, you're watching the first matchup in 56 years between left handed quarterbacks." I sat there for a minute with a puzzled look on my face as several large men with shoulder pads played a modified version of kill the man with the ball and I thought to myself, "Why would they say that?"

Because you know I can't really see how that helps anyone watching the game to understand it better, or figure out what they're looking at. It seems that this is about as relevant as saying that this is the first ever sold out game at Giants Stadium when in odd numbered years the temperature was exactly 49.3 degrees Fahrenheit at tipoff when hosting the Vikings.

But then it occured to me that maybe part of this was my problem in assuming that announcers are supposed to say relevant or important things to the fans at home watching the game on their 43" Sony Plasma Screen Television which can display NFL High Definition broadcasts in approximately a billion pixels per inch which enables the average viewer to see sweat droplets on the receivers face, and of course everyone understands how important that is to your viewing experience. It tells you that the receiver is working hard to get the ball. It's important for you to know this for your own personal well being so you aren't screaming things like "Come on, you're getting paid $555,000 per game and you can't even work up a sweat?"

After this you can relate to your buddy in detail about how in 1985 that you could run the 100 yard dash in 5.3 seconds flat, and that's a fact. Your buddy probably listening to you thought because he was completely absorbed in hearing the announcers explain what the quarterback is thinking after being sacked by a 350 pound lineman and he only has 43 seconds left in the half to move the ball 27 yards and score a touchdown.

I used to be impressed by football announcer's psychic ability to know exactly what all the players on the field, and coaches innermost thoughts were, until I realized that this is what separates them from announcers of other sports who merely give you play by play, and aren't privy to that kind of insider information. During a boxing match for instance, all you get to hear is someone droaning on about the number of hits that guy just took to the head and the subsequent body blow that puts him away. Now how interesting is that?

Football announcers are much different, it is their solemn and sworn duty to bring you up close and personal to the beauty and pageantry of a sport where dozens of similarly uniformed individuals are trying to kill each other for the entertainment purposes of millions of people.

I get on my knees every day and thank God for their wisdom and clairvoyant powers. Because I for instance would assume that a quarterback that just survived a vicious clothesline from what can only be described as a bloodthirsty assassin and seeing that he has precious little time left to move the ball would be first be muttering a serious of lewd expletives about the pain he is in, and then thinking, "I hope that sweaty receiver can catch the ball this time."

Fortunately for the world, the announcers see it differently from me and they know that the quarterback after hopping up from the near fatal injury is merely telling his teammates that he is okay and ready to go another 9 innings. The announcers also have to use the word football a lot when describing action like this. In this case, they would say, "That guy, now he's a football player," or after the game they will describe the coach as, "A real football coach. That guy, he knows how to coach football."

Clearly you or I would not have known that without them. We also wouldn't have known why it's called football when there was already a game played for hundreds of years under the exact same name. Maybe it would have been too complicated to call it the "throwing and catching and running with the large spheroid object league."

But, as Americans, we already stole this country for a handful of beads, so why should we go to the trouble of coming up with an original name for something that largely keeps our economy intact when there was already a perfectly good name to appropriate from the rest of the world.

Monday, November 07, 2005

Tactfully Yours

If I started at the beginning of this story, leaving off not at the place where i stopped during my last blog, but at my last blog in virginia, then I would be writing for an awfully long time and I don't know how much of it would be any good. I suppose I shall have to explain how I got to where I am sitting right now at this very second typing to all of my expectant hysterical fans.

I am at an Internet Cafe on 42nd Street in Manhattan. For those of you who don't know what an Internet Cafe is, it's basically just a place where you pay to use the Internet, and occasionally you can get coffee i think, but I could be wrong. I don't see any flipping coffee here at this time.

I understand that the odds that people who read a blog would not know what an Internet Cafe is are relatively small, but however I do what I can do for the people.

There is however an open bottle of Poland Spring water in front of me which was probably
left here by the previous user of this particular internet kiosk who paid for 4 hours of time and promptly got up and left with over 3 hours left to go, which probably goes a long way towards explaining my current lack of brevity in this most recent and solemn post.

I originally paid a dollar for fifteen minutes of time, and wasted most of it on looking at fantasy football scores. Then I was thinking of paying out another dollar just to post this blog when I noticed that the computer next to where I was sitting was presently being unused and was miraculously paid for. This was almost as great as the time I found an unopened snickers bar beneath the bleachers in 6th grade.

Well, almost anyway.

Alright, well clearly I have to get moving so I'm going to divide the rest of this blog into highlights of my time in New York as well as gripes and passing observations.

Obviously the gripes will come first.



Gripes



My second roomate weighs as much as a young female musk ox and smells strangely enough like one to the point where I am surprised that our apartment has not been invaded by any neighboring male musk oxen. After all, this is mating season.

My first roomate is the lease-holder, as well as being a smallish, rotund, Italian of quick temper and short patience. He doesn't like the smell either. He is also the one who didn't tell me before I moved in that the previous roomate left behind a bevy of unpaid cable bills which means that I still do not have internet access at my apartment. He really likes smoking cigars in the house, and reminds me a little bit of Lex Luthor. After a week I'm still on pins and needles around him like a girl on the first date, "I wonder if he likes me?", "I wonder if he'd mind if I did this?"

Roomate number 1 gave me the impression that I would be hired right away by these catering companies that he made it sound like he was buddy/buddy with and he also gave me wrong numbers for 2 of them.

Roomate number 2 almost never leaves his room except to watch television between 4 and 6 in the morning. Since he has no internet access either, I can't help but wonder what diabolical plans he's planning in there. Confession: He's probably just writing letters to his mother asking her how she is, and to please send money. Also he has the body of a walrus and likes to come out of the room wearing only black boxer shorts and slippers. Additionally his moustache scares me.



Highlights



I was at a costume party with my friend slacker superstar and his other friend who was curiously enough also named Josh, and about 8 of their friends that I also didn't know, and I can tell you right now that 8 is enough. The 3 of us dressed as Team Zissou from The Life Aquatic and the whispers of admiration from the adoring crowd were almost more than I could handle. All was going well until a second Team Zissou descended on the party to destroy us! We compared shoes and sadly theirs were more authentic because according to them they ordered it off a place called "The internet" while we got our stuff from a place called "Payless Shoes", and "K-Mart".

To get to this Internet Cafe I walked right past The Soup Nazi's new restaurant on 42 street. I would have gone in except there really was a huge line of people spilling out all over the sidewalk. I think I caught a glimpse of him, but I didn't want to gawk and look like a frikkin tourist. I'm a New Yawker okay.

I left my car lights on all night the other day and was about go drive around, a suprisingly spurious activity that I frequently do in my car, when I noticed that my car wouldn't start. Almost exactly that second some large mustachioed men pulled up in a big white van which I would have thought contained Libyans out to kill Dr. Emmet Brown. They tried to help me jump my car, and gave me helpful advice (don't do that again, try not to frighten children, etc.). Then they left, promising to return and like the cat in the hat, they did and my car started like a charm after I turned the key which I did not do until I was given the head nod by henchman number 2 named Julio. The gentlemen departed and would not even give me the name of their company or accept any payment for their services. Instead they piled into their large white van, handed me the jumper cables which they had just purchased, and drove away.

Casual Observations


While driving through Williamsburg: There sure are a lot of Jews around here!

While driving through Flatbush: There sure are a lot of black people around here!

Walking through Times Square: There sure are a lot of tourists around here!

In the subway waiting for a train: There sure aren't any drunken bums sleeping around here! Thanks a lot for cleaning up the city Guiliani!

On the subway: People sure don't talk on here.

In Manhattan: There sure are a lot of places to buy pizza around here!

In the hallway of my room when roomate number 2's door is open: There sure is an unpleasant odor around here!

Wrapping Up



Still don't have a job. Still mostly broke with just enough to pay next month's rent. Still sitting here. Don't know when next post will be so I made this one huge to tide you all up for a while. Going to East Village to apply for more restaurant jobs.

Ciao!