August 27th, 2001.  Monday
 

    I suppose I'll sum up the last two weeks.  Well, Nora left last Monday.  It was awfully weird to come home and see all her stuff gone.  It kind of made coming home less eventful.  And since then I've had trouble getting up in the morning, with nothing to get up for in my sad, sad life.  Um, I mean, with no one there to yell at me to get up.  I'd kind of gotten used to it.  Anyway, we spent the Saturday before she left at the beach out on Long Island.  Pretty standard.  It wasn't that hot out, just a nice day to be at the beach. Jed and Matt and I decided to dig a hole a few feet from where the tide came up, and then built walls and moats to protect the whole.  this has always been a favorite beach activity for me.  I mean, you know, that is, when I'm not drinking lots of beer and scoping out the chicks.  Anyway, so that night we went out to a club, which I hadn't done in about two years, outside of magazined-sponsored events and whatnot.  It really bothers me that you pay different amounts to get in if you're with a girl than if you're not.  Of course, I walked in with Nora, so I paid 5 bucks less than Matt or Jed.  I suppose I owe them a drink or something.  Anyway, the club was about what I expected.  We stayed till around 4, then Jed, Nora, and I walked down to the Purity Diner and for no good reason ate some greasy hot food.  I had a meatloaf sandwich. I've been doing terrible things to be body lately, almost all having to do with disgusting amounts of disgusting food.

    So since Nora's departure, I've been spending most nights trying to tidy up my room, in anticipation of a feng shui tinted rearrangement. I gotta change things up a bit.   I've also been trying to use few commas, as Nora was particularly harsh about my comma usage.  I also bought a new firewire cd burner.  I mentioned it to Nora, and she said "That's good. I'd hate for you to want something and not get it."  Hardy fucking har har.  Hey, I worked for that money.  Anyway, I love it.  I really like making cds.  Right now, I'm making a modest mouse cd for Jen in DC.  It's a great machine to have, and the best purchase I've made in a long while.  It's name is Roy.

    So Caryn was good enough to get me some more transcribing work.  And I actually finished it in a fairly speedy amount of time, despite the interviewer's constant stuttering and mumbling, which infuriated me to the point of stomping my feet and screaming in frustration in my office.   But the couple hundred bucks extra will help a lot.  Speaking of a couple hundred bucks, Caryn, her friend Nate, brother Geoff, and I were eating dinner at this sushi place friday night and decided to go to Atlantic City.  And for only the third time in 4 years,  I came out a winner.  These things only seem to go well only when we go to A.C. on a whim. When we make a big deal of going and plan it out, we seem to lose.  When we're just like "Hey, let's go to Atlantic City."  "Really?" "I'll go." "OK."  "Let's go."  "Cool." is when we seem to do well.  So we piled into a rented Ford Taurus, and reached Atlantic City a little before 1 AM.  I figured this time I'd do everything the opposite that I usually do. So, while Geoff was off playing black jack at tables too rich for the likes of us, Caryn, Nate, and I played the slot machines.  Caryn infuriated me early on by being that person who walks around and drops single quarters into random slot machines, and wins like 20 bucks on the first try.   i decided to play this nickel slot game I played in Vegas, though after being perplexed by the math of why I had 20 credits after putting in a 5 dollar bill, I soon realized I was playing a quarter machine.  But I stuck with it, and ended up winning 20 bucks, on top of my initial 15 bucks.  So while Nate and Caryn went to find food, I figured I'd go drop my 35 bucks on one spin of the roulette wheel.  Anyway, I played 20 bucks on red and threw the other 15 on 3 numbers, 5 bucks on each.  After red hit twice, on the third spin red 3 hit, and I slammed my fist in joy as I collected a cool 195 clams on that one spin.  So that pretty much finished my gambling for the night.  I dropped another 25 bucks foolishly at the Wild West Casino, where I have never ever one anything and will never make the mistake of going to again. Caryn however did win quite a little bit o' money there.  So then we found Geoff, who'd been going up and down for a few hours, and finally left 50 bucks down at 4:30.  Pretty good, i'd say to play for that long and only lose 50 bucks. He could left dead even, but what's the fun in that?  It'd be a complete waste of time.  It's weird that it's more fun to lose 50 dollars than leave with the same amount of money, as if you never even came.  For me, anyway.  Oh yeah, another highlight of the evening came when I got mixed up at a revolving door and slammed right into the bulbous glass around it.  Caryn fell down laughing. I kinda fell down from the pain in my knee.  So after an unexpected detour up to the Bronx, and after dropping everyone off, I finally got back to Park Slope a little after 9 in the morning.  I was tired and kind of cranky and my back hurt, but all I knew was that I had two one hundred dollar bills in my pocket that I didn't have 12 hours ago.  Of course, since then I've been making a lot of purchases on the strength of this 200 bucks, probably to the point of actually exceeding that amount.  Anyway, so I slept till three, got up, returned the car, had some sushi, did some transcribing, and went down to Great Lakes with Jed and Dylan.

    Got up relatively early on Sunday to finish up the transcribing for Spin, then caught the one o'clock bus for Reading, PA.  My maternal grandmother was having her annual birthday hoe-down, and all the relatives were recalled for the event.  The food wasn't great, and the room was sort of depressing, but all in all it wasn't too bad.  And it was the shortest of these dinners in recent memory.  So the plan for the later evening was to meet up with long lost high school friend Jaime.  Actually, I guess I've know her since elementary school.  Her mom was also my kindergarten teacher.  Anyway, she'd found the webpage a few weeks ago and emailed me.  So I called her when I got into town, and we made planz to meet that night.  We met up in front of a coffee shop that ended up being closed, so we walked a few blocks down to the West Reading Diner.  For the first few minutes, it felt like a dream or something, probably due in large part to my sleep deprivation, but also because i just hadn't seen her in about 4 years.  She looked just about the same, but different enough to give it that dreamlike effect.  She seemed pretty tired, and I felt a little bad dragging her out on a Sunday night.  But it was really good to see her. I started getting nervous for some reason before we met up.  I suppose twas because we had seen each other in so long.  I was trying to remember what I was like when I saw her last, and how that compared to me now.  I'd venture to say that I'm markedly different.  Maybe a tad more bitter.  Maybe.  Anyway, it was really good to see her and hear a little gossip about high school people.  She's fairly unhappy about living in Reading, but everything else sounds ok. She's a doctor, she's engaged, and she's buying a home.  That's absolutely unfathomable to me.  Anyway, it was still sort of weird, but pleasant.  It kind of seems like that was days ago, and it was just last night. I havent' been getting much sleep at all.  For no reason, I didn't go to bed until almost 4am last night, and had to get up to catch the bus this morning.

    So i came back to Brooklyn, skipped work, and went to a job interview. It was for a part time, night shift job, watching tv shows, then writing trivia questions about the shows for a website.  I had to watch a show and come up with some questions.  So they gave me a tape of the uniformly terribly Steve Harvey Show.  First of all, I don't like shows where the show is named after a person, and that person has a different name on the show. Why bother?  Anyway, the show is really terrible.  Although that Cedric the Entertainer is kind of funny.  I wasn't sure how they'd like my questions. I was fairly stupid about it, throwing in terrible joke answers on almost every one.  the guy told me they'd call in two days, and he called tonight to ask if I could start tomorrow.  So that was a nice little surprise.  Though it doesn't pay much at all.  Of course, I am just watching TV and doing about an hour of work.

    So after that, and after a quick trip to the gym, I met up with Jen K, whom a worked with at the Parks Department.  At both Parks and at the magazine I worked for in the fall, I became fairly close with the 19-year olds I worked with.  It makes me feel both very old and very immature.  Though i must say, Jen is as together a person as I've known in a while.  So I went over to her apartment, or really dorm room, at the NYU building on Union Square West.  It's kind of a crappy building, but she does get to live on Union Square West for less than a thousand a month. Of course, she does share a room.  So we git some deli food and sat around her sparse room.  Just caught up a little, her about her trip to Belfast and Denmark, talked about Parks a bit, and just generally shot the shit.  Speaking of shit, she reported that when she moved into her room yesterday, there was a big turd in the toilet.  Anyway, we sat around for an hour or so, then went and got some coffee and sat around on 14th St., outside the Painters and Paper Hangers Union building, drinking our coffee and eating cookies and watching the people on the treadmills at the gym across the street.  She got a kick outta that.

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