Stewart's Birthday

It was weeks ago but I misplaced my card reader lead so couldn't upload the pictures and I can't seem to sneak this post in chronologically so imagine it's further down the page if you can bear it. Also facetoss is requiring plug-ins (whatever they are) which I've downloaded but apparently aren't there (Arron or Louis or Lewis you may need to email me instructions. Nominate Arron as he owes me for the approaching abandonment I shall be suffering in April) the alternative method is incredibly laborious which is why I haven't added any pictures in a while. Trust me there are loads.

This is the amazing curry house we went to after the zoo-no photos of that because of the glass cases and bars and the suchlike but I have a Moleskine (thanks Dad!) sketchbook full of inky little drawings of bears and kingfishers and tree frogs and the like:

This is the restaurant where Stewart had 'the best chicken korma he's ever tasted' which is quite an accolade from somebody who dines in Pollokshields. There were red chilli shaped fairy lights and tinsel and mirrors hanging from every corner of the ceiling and the walls and it was tiny and cramped and garish and superb. Almost every table was a celebrating a birthday (I strongly suspect Stewart was the only one there whose birthday it actually was but seeing as they made such a brilliant fuss with lights being turned off and bells and singing and free mango ice cream who could blame anybody for trying their luck?) A wonderful day

Oh dear

No job, no money, nowhere to live and virtually no friends. Plus it's raining.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up drinking $7 bottles of Evan Williams Kentucky Bourbon before lunch.

x

Yes I know the blue bit is on the wrong side

 

I just didn't notice at the time/in time to stop her. She didn't speak English anyway. Still the best twenty four bucks I ever spent.

Just for Luke

                                       

HAPPY ST PATRICK'S DAY!

I for one will certainly not be at the parade; by all accounts it is like the worst hen and stag nights rolled into one with Guiness Hats and 'Kiss Me I'm Irish' t-shirts. I'll be sitting at home dressed as a snake or a potato blight. I hope you have a good one love.

xxx

Absence makes the heart go wander

I'm not doing a very good job updating this. The main reason is that my nails are getting far too long and I am having terrible difficulty typing, that and all the whiskey.

New York is still super fun. The weekend was marred by treacherously bad weather but luckily Alex and I were so hungover on Saturday we were just holding each other and weeping all day and had no need to leave the house. It was super sunny today and according to the 10 day forecast will continue to be so Stewart and I had our second day out to Coney Island Baby today. It gets better every time. We are trying to cram in all the fun we can before the season starts at the end of March. Obviously it will be a different kind of wonderful when the cotton candy stands and hot dog stalls and rides are all open but it has a certain beauty all shut down and derelict. I didn't have a paddle this time but I did last week and it was probably colder than anything I've been thigh-deep in before, my legs were so numb I thought I was going to fall over.

We are going to Bronx Zoo tomorrow, also for the second time. We went last week for Stewart's birthday and Wednesday is 'Donation Day' i.e. Free/$1 Day so we'll be up with the lark to cram in a full day of drawing as we didn't get there til about half past two last time and it shuts early out of season and it's really massive so we didn't see an awful lot and as the animals are all too busy pacing and pulling out their own fur to sit bloody still for five minutes drawing them takes forever. I am hoping there will be owls; beautiful and wise and they barely move. I have my misgivings about zoos obviously but I think it's very important that people can engage with animals they would never normally see or they are less interested in saving them. Or perhaps that is just what I am telling myself. Either way I'm going and I'm going all day.

I will add in some posts about Stewart's birthday and the last few days/weeks with photos when I locate the cable for my card reader. In summary; keep a closer eye on passports as they are a bugger to lose, if it's 5am NOBODY will stop you smoking on the subway, water is definitely thicker than blood and drag queens love it when you know all the words to Dolly Parton album tracks.

Grosses bises

Twenty Fucking Seven

Thursday: TwentyFucking Seven. What a waste of a considerable length of time. Sleeping, swearing, getting too drunk, being sick, being rude, arguing, eating samosas, eating spaghetti, being cold, having blisters on my heels all the time, twisting my ankles all the time, complaining that my feet hurt all the time, regrets about various inappropriate people and places (my parents read this so it is heavily edited) I could go on. Suffice to say, a lot of hangovers and a lot of mistakes. Luckily however, je ne regret rien so it's all sweet like Tropicana.

Horrible slushy snow that meant we couldn't really go far from the apartment in the morning. My ridiculous footwear situation also meant that the only shoes I have that weren't scraps of ribbon and cardboard were high heels so I was teetering about the place in these. James insisted we go to a god awful bakery that is also sort of a diner for homefries and eggs because it's close by the apartment. They didn't have homefries so we ate horrible egg and chips followed by horrible cakes. Opposite the diner was a nail bar and seeing as it was my bloody birthday and I'd been deprived of the only thing I truly wanted to eat I got these bitches done.

 

What the photo doesn't quite capture is that they are a startling neon pink not the sophisticated coral they appear. Drag queen hookers everywhere are crying into their wigs wishing they were me.

More later, I need to go and get something to eat, it's 2 o'clock and I've not had any breakfast. Bella, I am hitting Bedford to get some $5 Thai food. I'll tell them you said hi.

Kisses
x

Toilet Humour

I've just remembered that Monday was spent in the most part trying to unblock the loo.

From what we could make out  the problem was too much paper and not something more untoward. It was fine and then one flush filled the bowl filled up with shredded paper and what looked like bits of leaf. I was concerned for a minute it could mean there was some sort of external plumbing/pipework nonsense or the pipes were connected to another apartment's drains or something, then I remembered that Unit B1 was a total anomaly and nowhere else would dream of doing that. I wish I had Arron's letter to our landlords at this point. Anyway, we made the fatal error of flushing it twice and it was full almost to the brim. Nightmare. We poured a whole bottle of bleach and 2 kettles (this is when it started to resemble rice pudding soup) but nothing was shifting it. At least paper and leaves (which may have been the residue of somebody's digestive tract but we tried to pretend it wasn't) don't smell so it wasn't as bad as it could be. We were hoping it would go down on its own but it didn't. I spent a long time looking up handy hints online, we all had a go with the plunger and destroyed about 6 wire coat hangers to no avail. Dionne was having people over for a meeting and we couldn't contact her so I'm not ashamed to say there were tears and screams and some of us had to be slapped to calm down. When James came home we decided the only way to tackle it was an extreme one. See below:

 

Yeah he went right in there like a trooper. Couldn't shift anything though. We did the honourable thing and jacked it in and called a plumber. We had to go out and get Mexican food just so we could use the loos though. In a way it wasn't so bad as it meant DD's meeting didn't drag on. Utterly vile though. On the plus side La Burrito was not only cheap but delicious, Stewart and Alex couldn't even finish theirs-obviously Fatty Fat Fat Loveday and Greedy Guts Skinny Malinky Loveday left their plates clean as a whistle. If we'd stayed in we probably would've just had spaghetti al pomodoro, just like EVERY OTHER MEAL James eats. I have never seen anybody, Italian or otherwise who can eat the same meal at least twice a day every day and not get bored. Madness.

After Tuesday night's filthy excesses Wednesday was mainly spent on the sofa feeling awful. 5 people in a two bedroom apartment was beginning to take its toll as well; not just on the plumbing. I went to my cousin Cecily's apartment on 5th Avenue to see her and Nikolai and baby Celeste. She is super cute with bright blue eyes and cheeks that I had to stop myself biting. I am not a particular fan of babies per se as you know but this one was topping the polls. She didn't cry at all and was chatting away to herself and crawling about like a nutter. I may steal her at some point. I was feeling pretty rough so despite being offered Prosecco, whisky, wine, Bloody Marys, G&Ts and pretty much anything I wanted I had to sip water and try not to be sick (I was sick in the kitchen sink the night before-while Stewart was making pancakes) I also couldn't even stomach a kettle chip let alone some of the delicious sounding Italian food they were ordering. For shame. I had to go home early and try not to be sick in the taxi that I had taken specifically so as not to risk being sick on the subway; I could not have anticipated such erratic driving, even for a NY cabdriver. Poor Clare.

More later.

Kisses

Just for Arron

Right, I am bowing to Arron's constant and relentless harassment and updating now, despite the fact it is nap time. I made the rather foolish decision earlier to spend a king's ransom on a huge pile of not very nice nachos in a diner off Times Square because the waiters dress all '50s and sing show tunes and rock classics and jump all around on the furniture. Lesson learned, I feel ill. ANYWAY, It has been about a week since my last blog post, loads has happened and I probably won't remember all of it as we have mainly been drunk and the bits that I shall remember probably won't be in the right order. I'm also not in the least bit sorry for this. Arron, your name is in the Bully Log.

Saturday: No idea, probably nothing as we were pretty hungover from Friday. This is subject to change if I remember. I wasted £15 on a pretentious diary and am not even using it.

Sunday: Pizza at Vinnies on Bedford Avenue (Williamsburg is more or less the equivalent of Shoreditch without the stag nights/Hackney Wick in 2 years from now when there will be more wanky cafes and vintage clothes shops. Bedford Ave is its lynchpin; you literally can't move for cunts with beards and skinny jeans in coffee bars on macbooks and scruffy girls with long dark hair and fringes and oversized glasses scowling in eyeliner and men's shoes) which was top delicious then we went and looked at the apartment I am now in and had a wander around Williamsburg. In the evening Stewart and Alex and I went to a bunch of bars in the the Lower East Side. New York may well be the city that never sleeps but it seems they are mostly at home on Sunday night, it was pretty quiet and we had not learned the rule of asking for 'well' spirits instead of Bacardi or Jack Daniels etc so it was more expensive than it could've been given that'll drink any old shit and am in no way fussy. It's like getting Totov vodka instead of Smirnoff. We were more or less on a pub crawl across Avenues A and B trying to find somewhere that wasn't a) dead as a dodo or b) showing the fucking winter olympics, not even figure skating either-CURLING! Can you imagine! We ended up back in some awful bars in Williamsburg and I had a huge row in the street on the way home with some cretin who was taking the piss out of my accent (to his credit he knew it was north London) then it somehow escalated into the political situation in Cyprus (Chimp, RS would've been well proud of me and ZS would have something terrible about the Greeks) he claimed he was Greek Cypriot but I didn't believe him, stupid Americans with their one grandparent bollocks. It ended with him repeatedly screaming at me to go fuck myself. No way to speak to a lady if you ask me.

Monday: Can't remember-all of the above may have actually happened on Monday. I'll get back to you.

Tuesday: We had some drinks in the apartment then went to a bar in the Lower East Side that Stewart had wanted to go to on Sunday called Angels and Kings but it was shut. Yes Cara, that is who you think it is in the top right corner. It's owned by this loser who alas wasn't there (nor was Ashlee or Papa Joe more's the pity) but Stewart's friend Erica from RISD was DJing and he had been before and had a really good time so went down, my friend Chris came too, it was super sweet to see him. They had loads of free drinks deals, which happens quite a lot here. Pretty dangerous if you ask me, especially when it's free vodka then free wine then free tequilas. Messy. We went to some other bars after that, some of them we'd been to on Sunday but they were a lot busier. Stewart had got talking to some girl who worked for Sony records and was busy trying to get a record deal and I was pretending to be Jewish to some girl that looked just like Princess Beatrice and have invited her over for Pesach. I'd better learn to cook matzo. Anyway, I somehow ended up getting in yet another drunk row with a stranger because he said something about Lady Gaga looking like an ugly Jew. Apparently if you are Korean you can't be racist. Ha! It made me think of Saskia from BB 2005.

I'll update the rest later. I need a lie down. I'm still full of nachos.

Arron I hope you are happy.

Kisses