Blogs, beer, and conversation

The NY Bloggers Meetup group meets tonight for our 7th meeting. If you're in the NY area and want to attend, there is still time!

Click HERE for more details.

See you all tonight!

A place to lay my head

Yesterday morning, for the first time since college, I woke up in my own bed. My own, real, actual bed--as opposed to the mattress and boxspring combination I've been using in the interim. A bed made of wood and iron that I picked out, paid for, and eagerly anticipated throughout six weeks of backorder until it finally arrived in two boxes and even more pieces courtesy of the super who had actually received it several days earlier (but who had neglected to inform me).

"What is that?" My cousin asked, walking out of the bathroom wrapped in a navy towel and dripping water all over the floor. She was visiting for the weekend and was a little surprised to find me contemplating giant boxes when I should have been getting ready to go out.

"It's my bed," I replied. "I ordered it forever ago and it just arrived." With the help of a paring knife, I sliced into the first box to show her the gold-brushed iron scrolling of the headboard

"It's beautiful!" She agreed, but she looked doubtful. "Is your dad coming to help you put it together?"

I laughed. My dad is the least handy man I know. His version of “fixing something” involves taking the day off to oversee while Jose, the housekeeper’s husband, paints, installs or repairs whatever current project my dad has decided needs paint or installation or repair. On the rare occasions when something must be done right away, it’s usually either my mom or I who does it. It's been this way for as long as I can remember—the earliest example being that Christmas morning when an impatient seven-year-old me pulled a fresh-out-of-the-box NES away from my puzzled dad and quickly figured out which wire went where.

"No," I replied, pushing the boxes through the living room into my library. "I can do it."

The next day, my parents drove into the city to join us for lunch, after which we returned to my apartment.

"Look," I told my dad excitedly, pulling him into the library. "It's my new bed!"

I'd taken the pieces out of the box to get a better look and they now lay on the floor in a bed of Styrofoam chunks and cellophane. My dad admired the ironwork, noting the way that it matched my dining set and the accents on my dresser.

"Are you going to ask Looney to build it?" He asked me, referring to my friend Looney's upcoming visit.

"No," I said. "I'm going to do it alone." My dad sighed and made that face he sometimes makes, "O-kay, if you insist..."

"I insist," I replied with a smile.

After they left, I poured myself a glass of water and sat down on the floor to gauge the task at hand. The instructions were a bit blurry, but they looked easy enough. A screw here. A bolt there. Tighten, et voila! I got to work on the headboard, which I managed to put together. It was fairly straightforward, but took a little bit longer than I expected.

One piece complete, I, in true Alejandra fashion, decided to take a break and stretched out on the couch to watch Brokedown Palace on Oxygen. Two hours later, moved to tears by the film, I went back into the library for phase two of the bed assembly.

As I tightened and sobbed, I wondered whether or not I would be self-less enough to accept life imprisonment in a Bangkok jail so that one of my best friends could go free. The question made my stomach turn a bit so, upon completion of the footboard, I decided to distract myself with something a bit more amusing. Two episodes of Hotel Babylon later (fabulous BBC America show available On Demand), I realized that the sun had set and that I really needed to get a move-on with this bed situation. With only a modicum of difficulty, I next carried the two completed pieces into my bedroom and stripped the mattress of the layers of down and pillows I nestle into each night. I worked the mattress and box spring up onto their sides and then used my pink measuring tape to determine where the bed should be placed.

Now came the hard part, attaching the rails to the bed resulted in multiple bruises and one nasty scratch where an ill-conceived plan to balance the rail on my thigh went awry. Once I got the first rail done, I decided to make myself some dinner while watching yet another episode of Hotel Babylon (I’m telling you, it’s fantastic!).

It was another hour or so before I finished and got everything back into place, but once it was done, the feeling of accomplishment that seemed to flow over me was great. I giggled and jumped up onto my perfectly made bed, reveling in the delicious feeling of having completed it all by myself.

I called my dad and shared the news. “I just finished my bed!” I told him proudly.

He laughed, “really? Alone? Are you sure it’s...safe?”

“Shut up,” I said, laughing.

I looked around the apartment—the painted walls, the restuffed couch, the furniture that I’ve been slowly collecting and purchasing. Everything has bits of me in it. I realized recently that it was right around this time last year that I made the decision to move here. It was a difficult time for me—losing my job, leaving my apartment, saying good-bye to the people that I loved. I felt uncertain and untethered and really rather unhappy with just about everything. But there was one thing that I was sure of, and that was that coming to NY was the right decision.

It’s been one year, two cities, two jobs, and two moves later, but I know that for the first time in a VERY long time, I am exactly where I need to be.

That bed took me hours to build and it wasn’t anywhere near as easy as I thought it would be. I got knocked around a little and distracted a few times (ok, maybe more than a few times). And yes, there are still little bits of Styrofoam floating around the apartment that I have to clean up.

But I did it. And it was all worth it.

Vanilla, Chocolate, and now...MySpace!

Because last night I asked myself, "what could I possibly do on the Internet to waste even more time?"

Sent from My Dell Desktop now has her very own MySpace page!! The profile is still a work in progress (it's a little too dark and brooding right now), but it's ready to be revealed. Now all I need is a few friends...

A virtual profile for my virtual blog--you all knew it was just a matter of time...

Mission Accomplished...

So I didn't get a bottle of Bertolli olive oil, but I did get him to sign this book (Ahem...please note the XO...yeah, you know what that means...):



The man is, in the words of a friend of mine, a good-looking guy. A VERY good-looking guy. Much better in person than I could have ever imagined. So much so that when I got back to my office I forced the other women who had decided to skip it to go down and see him in real life.

"I don't care if you don't know who he is. You know what sexy is and it is downstairs signing autographs right now!"

So they went. And they swooned.

The best part? He's sweet, too! The line to meet him was long, but he patiently shook hands and chatted with everyone that came by. While he signed and chatted, a group of assistants handed out free samples of Bertolli pasta (surprisingly tasty). When my turn came, I shook his hand and told him what a fan I was. I asked him to sign the book and spelled my name out for him. "It's a tricky one, I know," I said somewhat apologetically. "Nah," he replied. "Rocco isn't so easy either." In my head I thought "Actually Rocco is five letters and fairly simple," but what came out of my mouth was a lot closer to: "ha ha mmmmm ha..." Eloquence at her best...

At least it wasn't a recap of the Tucker Carlson freakout of 2001.

And as a special (and equally exciting note): Welcome Gawker readers!

It has been quite the lunch hour...

A quick note about Gossip Girl

Am I the only one who noticed that this show is basically Cruel Intentions with lots of text messaging? Lots and lots of text messaging...

My favorite scene in the premiere was when the young freshman, about to get date-raped by the striped scarf-wearing senior (played by some creepy Jimmy Fallon clone), actually text messaged for help.

I'm going to say that again. She text messaged for help. Twice! Instead of, oh, I don't know...running?

A Tasty Meatball

During lunch today, I was thrilled to see a sign announcing that the very sexy chef Rocco Dispirito will be guest appearing in our office cafeteria tomorrow at noon.

Besides sexiness, Rocco is best known for his short-lived reality tv show, The Restaurant, in which he ran around experiencing creative differences with just about anyone who crossed his path (except for his Mama, Nicolina, who makes awesome meatballs). Rocco then moved to radio, where he hosted a pretty popular talk show for a year. His contract wasn't renewed, however, due to (you guessed it!) creative differences with the show's producers.

Say what you will about him, I think he's great. If you've ever eaten at Union Pacific, the Gramercy Park restaurant he helmed for several years (until he left over what I can only assume were creative differences), you'll appreciate his brilliant take on Italian-American cuisine. Also, I kinda have a soft-spot for feisty NY boys who love their Mamas...

Rocco, who has been bopping around making guest appearances on assorted food-related reality shows has recently landed a gig as the Bertolli whore spokesman. Sell-out, you say? Possibly, but the truth is that Bertolli makes good olive oil. And Rocco is hot. If he wants to hawk Bertolli pastas and oils, then that's fine with me.

My plan is to get him to sign a bottle of Bertolli olive oil for me... At the very least, I'm going to try and touch the hem of his Bertolli logo polo shirt.

I'll be sure to provide you all with a full report... (and maybe pictures!!)

About freaking time...

NY Times finally catches on...

(Now I have two years worth of archives to catch up on.)

Putting it Down

I'm not quite sure why I've had such a hard time putting the words down lately. A friend asked me this over drinks one night not long ago. We'd finally managed, after weeks of conflicting schedules, to meet in the cool September evening on a street corner in Chelsea--a location chosen for no reason other than its equidistant proximity from her apartment and my office. Wine poured, cigarette lit, we launched eagerly into that scattered kind of catch-up people do when it's been much too long. Racing from my new job to her new-old boyfriend to the mutual friend in absentia and, of course, the book club that only lasted a couple weeks but which brought us together (in person) for the first time.

"I expected there to be something good like the last time," she told me when the conversation drifted (inevitably) to the blogs which we both had admittedly been neglecting as of late. A touch of disappointment was audible in her voice--or perhaps it was merely my self-imposed guilt. I knew what she was referring to and she wasn't the only one of my friends surprised to not have found anything "good" in the previous days.

"I know, I know, I know..." I said, nodding my head and taking a sip of wine. "Well my laptop isn't working..." I started with the usual explanation, but then stopped, my eyes fixed on the couples passing down the street--shirts tight, arms linked, oblivious to the world...details logged for some future composition. She's a writer too, and if not her then whom else to tell the truth?

"Really, it's just not ready to come out yet, I think. It's all there kind of building up, but I'm not quite sure how to write it..."

And I guess that's really what it boils down to. I've never been very good about writing every day. I'll try, working in spurts, but really preferring the haphazard midnight moments of inspiration. The funny thing is that I have the stories...I write them all out in my head, laying on my bed, watching the sunlit patterns on my bedroom wall. I work out the dialogue, the colors, the reflections, and shadows...all of it. I laugh or cry or simply revel in how raw it feels, but it's that final step--translating it all to paper (or the screen, in my case) that seems to evade me lately.

I've been here before, in this space between daydreams and storytelling, and I know that soon enough it will all come tumbling out and it will be good and I will read it and tweak it over and over again in that perpetual search for the perfect phrase.

"It'll show up in a couple weeks, I'm sure," I told her. A promise more to myself than anyone else.

A Lucid Spoonful

Back in the spring, I took an incredible writing workshop that helped me figure out a few things about what I wanted (and needed) to be doing. I ended up taking some pretty bold steps soon after and I know that much of the clarity that I needed to do so came from the conversations and realizations that I made that day.

Classes are really only as good as the students in them make them out to be, and this class was no different. There were six of us, all women at different stages of our life, but with one very important thing in common--we all wanted to write.

One of the girls that I met that day is Paula. A brilliant writer and raw food chef, Paula has started a blog chronicling her research, experiences, books, and other things having to do with the intersection of food and culture--specifically the culture of France and America. I particularly love her reminisces about her time spent living at the bookstore Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. Woven throughout all these experiences is her interaction with the other key figure in her life--her omnivorous French husband.

You can read her artfully crafted words at: http://alucidspoonful.blogspot.com/

Sent from my Treo Wireless Handheld

My computer has failed me once again. It's the adaptor this time; it'll be the third one I've been forced to replace and I'm really not pleased about it. I counted the number of parts I've had to replace since getting this laptop a couple years ago. In two and a half years time I've gone through three adaptors, three motherboards, two hard drives, and two batteries. It's basically a franken-laptop at this point...merely a refurbished shadow of its former self. I've never been so disappointed with a product in my entire life--and I'm including the defective BabyTalk doll I got for Christmas in 1987 in this list.

I'm still catching up on moving expenses, so I'm not really in a place to buy the computer that I really want (and no, it is most definitely not a Dell) so I'm evaluating my options. I'm getting another adaptor, of course, because I need a computer as soon as possible, but I think that I might also invest in a used Mac Mini. I found a few on craigslist and am kind of excited about the prospect. I don't know... It's incredibly frustrating not having a working computer at home. Even when it comes to writing--there's so much that I want to put down but it seems that I have much more fluidity with pixels than with ink...

And, to answer the obvious question, I'm blogging from my phone. This Treo being the brilliant little gadget that has made the past computer-less week tolerable.

Kids, We Need Your Help...

Not long ago, blog rockstar I-66 and I met for the very first time in real life. A spectacular lunch (complete with deadly white chocolate martinis) was complicated only by a very strange, very confusing, possibly coded message. A message that we need your help with...

Earlier in the afternoon, I heard a great song playing in the restaurant. It was loungy and jazzy and had a sexy female vocalist. I asked our waitress if she could get me the name of the song and then promptly forgot about my request. A deadly martini later, she wordlessly slipped a folded message next to my plate. I-66 and I looked at it a bit nervously completely perplexed about what it contained. Once we opened it, we were even more confused. The note said this:

Zo MCDE

ONE SELF

"What the...?!" It took us a few seconds to realize that the code was supposed to be the song and artist. It looked weird, but assuming that our beverages were adding to the confusion, I tucked it into my purse for later googling.

The problem. It's been over a week and neither one of us has been able to find this song. The puzzle is compounded by the fact that we can't really tell if "One Self" is the band or the song name. After various tricks and tries (including, apparently, a few spins through an anagram solver), we've decided to open the mystery up to our reading public.

So, your mission (should you choose to accept it): find me this song...

The winner gets a magazine subscription of his/her choice (to be selected from a list of the ones my company publishes). If the winner is in DC, then he/she will also get an added bonus courtesy of block rockstar....