An Open Letter To: The New Tenants

Dear New Tenants in Our Old Apartment:


I know you intercepted both a package and a card meant for our new baby. I don't know why you chose to keep both these things, despite my note on your door with my phone number and email address so I could come pick them up. 


I also know you cashed the $200 check my aunt included in the card meant for the baby. That takes a lot of balls, New Tenants. Unless you coincidentally have the exact same name as my youngest child - which is highly unlikely - I have no idea why or how your bank went ahead and deposited $200 into your account. I can only hope someone there catches this oversight at some point and fines you $200.


Here's what else I hope for you:


I hope every time you get in line at the supermarket, the person ahead of you pays in pennies.


I hope every time you try to have a picnic in the park, a sudden thunderstorm breaks.


I hope you get an infestation of mosquitoes this summer. (I used to live there. It's entirely possible.)


I hope you develop chronic ingrown toenails.


I hope every time you place a food order it gets delivered to you missing one item.


I hope your laptop, portable DVD player, smart phone, iPad, e-reader, or other personal entertainment device dies five minutes into a long flight.


I hope you never get a table at Al Di La.


I hope you never get a cab in the rain.


I hope your DVR always cuts off your favorite shows 2 minutes before the ending.


And mostly, I hope that someone does this to you some day, so you'll know how it feels when people try to celebrate something special with you, but accidentally send gifts to your old address, and the people there keep your stuff instead of calling or emailing you to come get them.


Jerks.


Most sincerely,
The Previous Tenant

Pregnancy Cliche Bingo

This week I made an executive decision for myself to stop trying to finagle into maternity jeans and just wear yoga pants or sweat pants for the remaining three months of my pregnancy.

And no, I'm not looking for "helpful" suggestions or advice, thanks. Let's just pretend like you already told me what worked for you, and I tried it, and it did not work for me.

At some point the battle to remain even remotely stylish got lost in the shuffle. Actually, no, I know exactly where the battle was lost: last weekend at the New York Botanical Garden Holiday Train Show. What should have been a fun, festive family activity turned into a craptastic, disappointing waste of time. I'm sure the Train Show is fine for normal families, but my son, the Juban Princeling - who loves trains the way I love cheese, that is, he's never met one he didn't like and will take them in any and all forms they come in - was on Day 3 of what turned into a 4-day nuclear meltdown. Even taking two subways, including his new favorite, the "Orange Compress" (express) to get there did not help, especially when he reached out and accidentally shoved a train off the tracks and my husband and I went all psychotic modern parent on him: carefully looking around, self-consciously reprimanding him and wondering if people thought we were being too harsh or too gentle. 

Meanwhile, we shoved our way through the crowd of half-dazed parents holding piles of coats and restless, overexcited little kids, in a hot and humid conservatory. 


Maternity jeans are not designed to last forever, and mine were already so stretched out they kept falling down. At the same time, the "Secret Belly" band pulled on my belly - I'm carrying high this time around - and irritated the skin and caused what I'm sure is massive internal bruising.


So there, somewhere in the middle of the New York Botanical Gardens Annual Holiday Train Show, amongst throngs and throngs of parents and children, I lifted my shirt and yanked my jeans up while simultaneously stretching the band away from my poor, battered, six-month belly. 


I'm not generally one of those people who gets embarrassed easily - behold the photo I let my best friend Tia take of me in Miami a couple of weeks ago - and pregnancy demolishes whatever shame I have left. I'm sorry, world, but you are going to have to put up with my desire to be comfortable for three more months BY WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY and then I promise never to gestate again, ever. 

No, you would not be the first to make a joke
about me and my love of Cuban c... roosters.
Not shown: the epic amounts of pain I'm in.

A few days later I sat in a run-down Quest Diagnostic office for an hour and a half, starving from fasting for my glucose tolerance test, with the radiator cranked up to "Hellfire," and The Today Show blasting at top volume into my ears against their will, feeling sorry for myself but wearing highly stylish maternity jeans. This time I opted for a pair with a low, supportive band that worked fine when I was standing up, but rolled down and squashed me and The Fetus whenever I sat down. Which was a lot. The Fetus and I had this conversation about it in my mind:

Fetus: Ow! What IS that?
Me: It's part of my jeans. Sorry.
Fetus: Get it off! Get it off! Get it off!
Me: I can't.
Fetus: Fuck you. *kick* 
Me: I know it's uncomfortable, but it's only for a little while longer. Please just hang in there.
Fetus: Fuck you, and fuck Kathy Lee Gifford. *punch kick jab* Also, I'm hungry. *kick kick punch elbow*
Me: *cry*


Screw fashion. Screw style. Screw the world. I am going to be comfortable for the next three months and everyone who looks at me will just have to deal with it. I dragged the Juban Princeling to Motherhood Maternity at rush hour on a Friday and bought myself some righteous black velor sweatpants, and ordered a pair of grey velor sweatpants.


I don't care if I don't have anything that goes with them.


I don't care if I look like a Real Housewife of Long Island in them.


I don't care if they are already covered in lint.


I don't care that they don't quite work with my winter boots.


What I care about is that they are comfortable and don't hurt my baby belly. Even if Barack and Michelle came over for dinner, I'd probably wear the velor sweatpants. Michelle's had two babies, she would totally understand and be all, "If anyone can rock velor sweatpants, it's you, Mer." And then we would fist bump in sisterhood and be BFFs.


So deal with it, world.


And, as I told my brother Mr. Funny, for those of you playing Pregnancy Cliche Bingo at home, here's another square to mark.

Home (Expletive) Home

Please pardon me while I bang my head against a wall.

It's less painful and more productive than apartment hunting in New York City.

After 15 years and 7 apartments you'd think I'd have a grip on this whole thing but I don't. It never gets easier, never. I think in some episode of "Sex and the City" (tagline: "No, Really - This is Totally What Living In New York is Exactly Like!") Carrie Bradshaw says that New Yorkers are always looking for either a romantic partner, a job, or an apartment. I'm happily married and happily a stay-at-home-mom.

But I do feel like I am perpetually looking for an apartment.

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. That explains why New Yorkers are so crazy! We all have to live here, and in order to live here we all have to throw ourselves into the sarlacc pit of New York City real estate, hoping to come out of it alive! What is wrong with all of us?

Some try to beat the system by stubbornly staying in the same place for years and years even in the face of changing family circumstances. I knew someone who got married and had three kids, all while living in the same studio apartment. And no, "studio apartment" in New York doesn't mean a 5-bedroom luxury condo: it means a 1-room apartment. Not one bedroom: ONE. ROOM. How do you even make more babies when you're sharing ONE ROOM with your other kid(s)?

Others, especially in our neighborhood, cram enormous families into tiny apartments. It goes something like this: four or five kids share one bedroom, five or six other kids share the second bedroom, the parents sleep in the bathtub, and the grandparents sleep in the refrigerator. Why? The school districts. And rent. Park Slope has become like the Lower East Side tenements of the early 1900s, all in the name of getting kids into P.S. 321 without paying more than $50 a month for rent because you moved into this apartment back in 1997. Or something.

And yes, rents in New York, even out here in Brooklyn - especially here in Park Slope, where a friend once emailed me, "So which school did the Princeling get into, Beansprouts or Yale?" - are really as high as you've heard about. I'm not going to say how high, because I'm embarrassed. Our yearly rent is about what some people make at part-time jobs. But we pay it, because we love living in New York City, we don't have car payments or gas prices to worry about, and because we have that advanced brain damage specific to New Yorkers who think that paying a kajillion dollars a month for a dishwasher-less rat-infested hellhole is justified by saying we get to live in New York City and we don't have to have a car.

We currently live in a nice 2-bedroom apartment with a balcony and views of the Statue of Liberty, and we love our apartment. But we're having another baby because we are idiots and masochists, and we need another bedroom. The bathtub just isn't big enough for both me and my husband. So we're stuck in the ninth circle of Hell known as apartment hunting, and so far I've only threatened suicide maybe three times. I've also decided that we are going to move to Montauk and become seafaring people; that we're going to move to London and become those funny Americans everyone teases; and that we're going to move back to South Florida to be closer to our parents. (Husband: "Every time you get a little depressed you threaten to move back to Miami.")

I've seen an apartment in a fourth-floor walkup in a building that had fist-sized holes in the hall floorboards and a cinder block holding the front door on its hinges (Me, to broker: "We have a preschooler and we're having another baby. What makes you think we want to live in a fourth-floor walkup in a condemned building?"); we've seen a very nice 3-bedroom in a very nice elevator building that happens to be located half a block from the new Atlantic Yards project and shares a street with a sports bar; and a few owner-owned very nice condos where they either wanted to charge us half our internal organs plus one of our children for rent, or they wouldn't commit to a longer lease so that we'd have to go through this all over again in a year. And then there was the duplex that looked promising, but the owner was sure she could get even more rent than she originally asked for. Last I heard it was still on the market and the landlady wouldn't come down on price.

That's what we're dealing with here, people.

Maybe we should just stay put. I'll take the bathtub and the Husband can sleep out on the balcony. He always says he wants to go camping.

Summer Sucks

Summer has arrived here in New York City, and I can't help but hate it. I love New York and will never (voluntarily) live anywhere else, but let's face it: this city is an assault on the nose on the best of days. In the summer it's downright horrific. It's like torture porn for the olfactory sense.

The problem with summers here is that the crowded buildings, masses of people, and pollution-spewing cars combine with lack of central air conditioning most places (including my apartment), pedestrian lifestyle, and public transportation to create a perfect storm of stagnant heat, oppressive humidity, and sticky, stinky bodies pressed close together without a lot of relief.

When I tell people how much I hate the summer I get a lot of, "But you're from Miami!" To which I answer, "Yes. And I left there."

I'm just not a hot weather person.

As I type this I'm sitting in a cafe, under an air conditioner AND ceiling fan, sipping an iced tea and wearing shorts and a tank top. And it's still only May.

My mother-in-law, a native of Havana, Cuba, cannot stand the cold, and to her "cold" is anything below 75 degrees. As I said in a recent review for Moms Who Need Wine, "As soon as the mercury in the thermometer dips to 74 or below, she turns into a woodland animal and falls instantly into deep hibernation. True story."

I'm the opposite. As soon as the time and temperature box on New York 1 reads anything above 65, I start whining about how hot it is and turn into a Grumpy Gus. The heat makes me tired, and the dinky little window unit a/c's we have at home just don't quite cut it unless I crank them down to 68 degrees and blast all three of them together. I'm very sorry, Mother Earth, but I figure my carbon footprint is little enough that I can afford to be bad in the summer. Either that or I may kill all my friends and family in a heat-stroke-induced rage.

Things I hate about the hot weather:

• Everyone smells. No matter how much we all shower and use deodorant, it's just a fact of life that in a city of 8 million people riding public transportation together, it's going to get a little stinky pee-ew. And by "a little" I mean "it's so bad that I often throw up a little in my mouth from even the shortest of subway rides."

Not too different from how New York City subway
straphangers stand. (Photo courtesy of smallguyseo.com)

• It's hard to cool off. Most other cities have nice, new, modern apartment buildings with central air conditioning. And the shops and restaurants and cafes all have central a/c, too. When you don't have those things, life in the heat can get...rough. It reminds me a lot of the 6 weeks I spent on a study abroad trip to Italy. My friend the Jewtalian, an ex-pat New Jerseyer who married a guy from Italy and moved there to be with him and raise her family, tells of how the Italians fear moving air of any kind. The summer I was there we all nearly passed out on a daily basis from the lack of modern comforts like air conditioning or ceiling fans. And that's kind of what New York is like in the summer. Maybe not as bad - lord knows New Yorkers love them some ceiling fans. (I had one installed last summer to try to maximize the efforts of our window unit a/c.) But still, when you read the bit below you'll wonder how 8 million people make it from May to September every year without collective, en mass dehydration and heat stroke.
• New York is an outside kind of city. Few New Yorkers own cars. And why should we when we have the best public transportation system in the world? And by "best" I of course mean the worst. The buses come only in clusters, and if you miss a cluster you'll likely stand at a bus stop - without shade or a place to sit - for up to half an hour, waiting, melting, burning from the outside in. At some point the heat will scorch its way through your skin like a laser and fry holes in your internal organs. People have DIED from 3rd degree sunburns on their livers in this city! True story.
  

Going underground isn't much help. The subway stations are...how can I put this without offending your delicate sensibilities? The subway stations are like the lowest pits of Hell, un-ventilated, reeking of urine both stale and fresh, with traces of vomit and feces, rats scurrying about, sludge flowing between the subway tracks, and a press of humanity crushing you with their sweaty selves. At least the subway trains themselves are air conditioned. Most of them.

And if you're not taking the bus or subway, you're often walking. For blocks and blocks and blocks. In 90+ degree heat, with no hope of cooling down once you reach your destination unless you are prone to filling your bra with ice. I won't say I've never done that, either.

My friend Tia once came to visit us over Labor Day Weekend, and after living my life with me for 5 days she lost so much weight her clothes no longer fit her. We did THAT much walking.

Now imagine either pushing a heavy stroller full of squirmy toddler in that heat, or else constantly coaxing a walking little boy who has to stop and look at every. damn. object. from one block to another. Yeah.

• The beaches here are...interesting. At least in Miami when you go to a beach you can be reasonably assured that the water will be blue or green or some combination of the two, the sand will be white, and the people will be at least mildly attractive, what with most of them being sexy European tourists and all. New York is surrounded by water, it's true, but, um, uh...it's not Miami. Let's just leave it at that.

Coney Island beach. Sigh.
(Photo courtesy of wanderingbrooklyn.com)

• Speaking of water and a lack of relief from the heat... It's hard to cool off aquatically here in New York. In Miami everyone has a pool as a matter of course. They just do. In-ground, above-ground, whatever. When you live in Miami you are assigned a Publix shopping card, a hurricane tracking map, a gun to shoot looters with after you are hit by the hurricanes you just tracked, and a swimming pool.
  

In New York, not so much. It's hard to have a pool when you live in an apartment building that abuts several other apartment buildings. So we have "community pools," but there is not enough chlorine in the universe to make me allow the bodies of myself or anyone I love to become immersed in those. I mean, think about the words "community" and "pool." Am I just paranoid here? Come on.

Not for me or mine.
(Photo courtesy of locals.oyster.com)

The playgrounds have sprinklers, but those are for the kids. So what are we grownups left to do to find watery refreshment from the terrible scorchiness of New York summers? I won't name names, but I happen to know for a fact that I am not the only person around here who takes cold showers in the evenings...

• It's hotter than Satan's Asscrack*. I love the change of seasons. Nothing makes you appreciate the crisp, cool Autumn air like 500-degree summers. But, as with everything else in New York, our change of seasons are neither mild nor subtle. Our winters are harsh, with at least several blizzards per moth for three months in a row, and temperatures well below freezing from December through March. In spring all we get is rain. March showers bring April showers bring May showers. And when the rain ends we get summer, which is a brutal, evil mix of heat and humidity. Last summer we had five heatwaves in a row, a "heatwave" being defined as above 90-degree temperatures. We regularly go days at a time above 100 degrees, usually right around the Fourth of July. Now, think about that, and think about it in the context of everything else I just said about living in New York in the summer.

So yeah. Summer can suck it.



*TM my friend the Ex-Pat from Detroit.

See You in Hell, Osama Bin Laden!

...except that I won't, because I'm a Buddhist and I don't believe in Hell.

Being a Buddhist, I realize that I should not take pleasure in someone's death. I should pity him or meditate for him or something like that.

But the fact is that I am a 15-year New York City veteran, and I earned my Hardcore New Yorker card on September 11, 2001, by being right here when it happened. I breathed the smoke from the fallen towers, I read the thousands of gut-wrenching Missing Persons flyers that Guiliani finally had taken down, I walked the streets near Ground Zero weeks afterwords when the ground was still torn open from the impact, even blocks away.

And so, I cannot let this one go. Bin Laden was as evil as they come, and this is how I feel about his death:

Maybe the universe will forgive me for this one.

Meanwhile, I have some Conservative friends (what? You should get some. They're fun, and certainly make life more interesting.) who are STILL hating on my man Bar (I assume Barack Obama would let me call him that if we were FB friends, which we technically are, but he has yet to answer my invite to come over for gluten-free pasta and Tasti-D-Lite). I mean, what's it going to take for these people to just STFU for a few hours and enjoy the good news? Will the man have to hold up Bin Laden's bloody, lifeless head for them to be happy?

I also made Husband promise to be careful today while going to work in Manhattan.

Him: "What, exactly, should I do?"
Me: "Avoid gathering masses. If you hear or see anything even remotely suspicious, you run home, OK?"
Him: "How am I supposed to avoid crowds if I have to take the subway to work? Walk?"
Me: "YES!!!"

It's a good day. But still kinda scary. Let's be careful out there, people.

On that note, I leave you all with one of my favorite odes to my absolute favorite city in the world: