No Boys Allowed

Perusing half-priced review at the Strand, I came across, This Is Not Chick Lit, a compilation of short stories by women. The book had a story by Curtis Sittenfeld, one of my favorite writers of either gender, so I bought it.

I can’t think of a more aggressive title for a compilation of female writers than This Is Not Chick Lit. Instead of being empowering, the title is self-hating. To the millions of women who enjoy chick lit, the title is saying, “This is book is not for you, you’re an idiot.”

So the chick lit fans are out, and so are the guys. A collection of short stories by women would have a tough time winning a male audience anyway, but a mean spirited title doesn’t help. I wouldn’t recommend the collection to a friend, male or female—it was uneven—but it annoys me that Random House is putting out a book that actively splits an already gender divided reading market. From Huckleberry Finn to Philip Roth, so much of American literature is devoted to the male existential crisis. I don’t mind reading about their problems, but I think men would also gain something from an Alice Munro collection. The title only reinforces the idea that chick lit, or what is not chick lit, is for women only.

Be That Change

As I mentioned previously, my dad described Prospect Heights as a “changing neighborhood.” Since I moved there in October, I have seen the area change quite a bit. For one, there are more people in my, um, demographic living there; the group of people who get off at the Eastern Parkway stop has become more mixed. And the neighborhood is beginning to reflect the shift: Teddy’s, a Greek restaurant, is opening on Washington Ave. in a few weeks.

While many Brooklynites consider gentrification a dirty word, I don’t really see the problem. The influx of affluent people to my neighborhood will lead to more restaurants and better grocery stores, which will mean more people (eyes) on the street, leading to an altogether safer community. Prospect Heights is close to major subway lines, Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Museum. It’s just a matter of time before it becomes the kind of neighborhood people from Manhattan consider dear. I’m excited to watch these developments. Like Mahatma Gandhi said, you must be the change you wish to see in the world. Living in Prospect Heights, I’m doing my best.

Sweet Spot

New York is one of the few American cities where the weather really makes a difference. Minneapolis may be colder in the winter, and Atlanta may be more muggy in the summer, but in those cities, the outdoors is sort of a waiting area between cars and buildings. New Yorkers brave the elements every day, and the weather changes the way we move. During the winter, the closest bodega is my preferred bodega, but in the summer, I can’t stand to be inside long enough to ride the subway.

In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas describes how the lights in Coney Island gave the resort a sort of second sun, and made the night just as alive as the day. But that second sun is contingent on warm weather. Friday night was beautiful, and at around 8:00, I saw a concentration of people reminiscent of midtown at rush hour crossing Third Avenue at Astor Place. These people weren’t rushing to work; they were rushing to play. New Yorkers with means are eager to leave the city during the summer months, but the rest of us get to experience New York at its most vibrant.

Related to warm weather: If you’re ever hanging around Carroll Gardens with nothing to do, I recommend stopping by

Theories About Real Estate, Money and Hipness

Cheap rents attract young people. Young people create demand for bars and restaurants. Bar and restaurants make neighborhoods safe and appealing. Safe and appealing neighborhoods are no longer cheap. Original gentrifiers complain the area isn’t what it was.

Williamsburg and Dumbo followed this cycle. But on closer inspection, cheap rents don’t always turn neighborhoods into epicenters of cool. Turns out poor people are more discriminating.

Take the Upper East Side: Close to the Met, Central Park and your general practitioner. My brother just rented a largish studio there for less than what a friend of mine was paying in the East Village. While the Upper East Side is one of the most expensive neighborhoods for families in the city, proximity to Dalton isn’t exactly a selling point for young people. The concentration of wealthy families is a turn off for young people renting small apartments. Until studios in Greenpoint start going for $2000 a month, I can’t see many people taking advantage of this real estate loophole. Who wants to live around people who wear real fur?

And why hasn’t Astoria, with its tasty ethnic food, easy access to Manhattan and low rents, become the new hot thing? Well, before parts of Brooklyn became social destinations themselves, their trains offered fast service to hip areas of Manhattan. The first Manhattan stop from Astoria is the basement of Bloomingdale’s, and if you’re living in Queens, you probably don’t have a preferred membership card there. Astoria’s distance from downtown Manhattan creates a Catch-22. A lot of people won’t live there because it’s far from hip areas of Manhattan. And without an abundance of young people, the neighborhood can’t grow into the kind of neighborhood that attracts young people. For the time being, Astoria is stuck.

That said, the Beer Garden is pretty sweet.

Reality Bites Suddenly More Relatable

My senior of college my old boss bet me a sushi dinner that I would go to grad school. After 17 years, I was sick of required reading and said I was done with school. But he insisted that I’d be back for at least one degree.

Older friends and cousins justified going to grad school because they preferred school to a miserable job, and eventually wanted some sort of career. Even my dad went to grad school for that reason; in fact, so did my brother and my mom. And I judged—I couldn’t imagine how writing meaningless term papers would be preferable to real life. But now, two years after graduating and in the midst of a quarter life crisis, I can see the appeal of taking two to three years off the 9-to-5, going into debt and ending up with an extra set of initials on your business card. As much as required reading sucks, working under fluorescent lights sucks more.

Sorry to Offend

In between adventures this weekend, a friend and I struck up a conversation with the guy behind us in line for a bar. As big as New York is, it’s also quite small. It turns out he was from Scarsdale, a town that neighbors mine, and knew my cousin. Leigh, if you’re reading, Todd Goldstein says hi.

After hearing his last name, I asked him if he was into Japs, to which he replied, “Actually, I find that term offensive.” Translation: Yes.

While the appeal of well groomed, demanding women is nearly universal, the question remains why the term Jap is offensive. Even though I feel awkward describing someone as black, I wouldn’t have a problem calling someone a Bap. To me, both terms are more about being a princess than being Jewish or black. While all Japs are Jewish, the princess instinct crosses ethnic boundaries, as proved by the virtual ethnic rainbow that is My Super Sweet Sixteen. Maybe Mr. Glickman is offended by idea of the princess stereotype as applied to Jewish women. But anyone who has been around New York knows that just as many Jewesses don’t even have a Bloomingdale’s account. Some of us have to get by charging things directly to Daddy’s credit card, without the 10% discount and special seasonal offers. It’s a tough life.

New York to Make an Honest Woman of Me

This weekend a friend asked me, “When you ride the subway to work each morning, do you think to yourself, ‘Damn, I’m in New York. This is awesome!’” This friend just moved here from Cleveland.

Actually, friend, when I’m on the subway, I’m usually thinking about five letter words for Nagano noodles (Ramen).

Growing up in Westchester, going to school in Manhattan and only leaving the tri-state for a brief stint in DC, it’s easy to take New York for granted. But this weekend New York put the charm on and won me over again.

Last Monday, I found three suspicious bugs in my bed, the modern equivalent of discovering your buboes on your body during the middle ages. But on Saturday night, a bartender who had recently survived a plague of bedbugs told me that what I had found were just ticks. The possibility of Lyme disease was never more exciting. She even gave me a free drink. New York is good to me.

After that happy news, my friend and I went to another bar with an outdoor courtyard. There were apartments above us, and the bar manager encouraged us to maintain five feet voices. His elementary school instructions were lost on us, so the residents in the apartment above us took a middle school approach and egged us. Once my car was pancaked in high school, but I’ve never had food throw on me. New York is exciting.

Saturday night’s adventure continued when a friend with a car picked up my friend and me from the bar and drove us around Manhattan. It was an intense ride. This friend likes to ride the wave of green lights and race taxis. New York is thrilling.

On Sunday, New York made me the urban adventure equivalent of breakfast in bed. Another friend and I rode our bikes to Coney Island. We went on the Cyclone—which is actually quite scary due to its shoddiness—and had drinks and pickled vegetables at a Russian restaurant on the boardwalk of Brighton Beach. We were the only ones who spoke English at the place and bill had commas between the dollar and change. On the way back, we passed through two separate Hasidic neighborhoods. New York has character.

It also has my heart.

From the (Ir)rational Fear Department

Here’s the great thing about little kids: To get them to like you, all you need to do is hang them upside down by their ankles. Winning their favor is certainly easier than using the 10-day forecast to make friends with adults. So at family functions, I often hang out with my younger cousins, aged two to six.

This has earned me a reputation. At my grandfather’s 90th birthday party on Saturday, my cousin’s wife told me that I have a gift with children. But I’m worried that all this playing around has given my family the impression that I am the second coming of Jodi*, a cousin of mine who is attractive-ish, but was always single.

When her brother had his first child, she played with him in a desperate way. I was only 13, but even I could tell she was jealous and wanted a baby of her own. Eight years later at a wedding, I heard her mention that she was on all the online dating sites, which means that even with the concentration of Jews in New York, she still couldn’t find a man on jdate.

But there’s good news for Jodi: at 36, she’s getting married this summer. And she found him through a friend, so she doesn’t need to contrive a meet-cute story from being hot listed. When my Aunt announced the good news at Rosh Hashanah, my whole family cheered as if Jodi embodied the 2004 Red Sox.

While I do have fun with my little cousins, I’m worried that all this rough housing will end in either tears or me coming off as a spinster. My preference reveals the limits of my gift with children.

*Name has been changed.

Milk & Money

I would join Sovereign Bank so that when I needed cash, I could go to one of the ten CVSes in this city, but I already signed up with Apple Bank for the ATM access in all those Walgreenses.

Check It Out, Asshole

Gabriel Delahaye, author of what is occasionally one of my favorite blogs, Corporate-Casual, has a segment on this week’s This American Life on discovering that his friends and family think he is an asshole. Despite producing a funny and sincere piece, Delahaye really does come off as an asshole. I can’t tell if that makes me more or less attracted to my Internet crush.

Also, check out his post on what true hatred is.

Tomorrow’s Trend Stories Today …

∙ How did NBC become the most trusted news network for suicide mass-murderers?
∙ After Monday’s events, Virginia Tech gear becomes the new American flag pin.
∙ Like after 9/11, where international sympathy for America peaks while tourism falls, Hookie support grows as Virginia Tech’s matriculation rate drops.

Is New York Overcompensating for Something?

New York City has been giving out free subway-themed condoms since February. Protecting against STDs and unwanted pregnancy is great and everything, but let’s keep it real: this whole thing is a PR stunt. With a few million prophylactics, the city government is saying to the world, “Come to New York. We have sex here.” Apparently that has more appeal than a 24-hour subway system.

Maybe if these had come out earlier, we would have gotten the Olympics.

Embarrassing Details about My Life: Romance Edition

Recently I turned 24. Now I am a young, carefree single, but I know that in six years or so, I will become a bitter, marriage minded 30 something. Women in this city are like milk; we only have so much shelf life until we’ll go on sale to shorter men.

With this in mind, I’m not above going on blind dates. In August, my dad’s co-worker set me up with a friend of hers named Marc. Our first date was at a coffee shop in Williamsburg.

Marc does not live in Williamsburg. He does not live in Brooklyn. In fact he lives in Murray Hill, and in retrospect, this outing was something of hipster field trip for him. Yet, we had a good time and created a good rapport for two strangers. Even though he was on the shortish and soon-to-balding side, I had fun and hoped to see him again.

The following week, he asked me to meet up with him and friends at the Queens Museum. I was in Boston, and for the next few months we tried with limited success or enthusiasm to arrange a second date.

Eventually, as in November eventually, we met up for round II at Coffee Shop. I judged. The date was not good. I don’t remember what was bad exactly, but it was clear that neither of us wanted the Brownie Sundae or whatever such crap passes for dessert at Coffee Shop. During the date, he mentioned that he had Netflix account. Even though I never wanted to see him again, I did want to see his queue and I added him as my Netflix friend. He never accepted my offer.

This should be the end of my courtship with Marc, but in February, he e-vited me to his 31st birthday party at a bar. I don’t know why he would want me, a person’s who Netflix’s queue he had no interest in, at a party with all of his friends to celebrate his birthday. I ignored the e-vite.

The story isn’t over. As a precaution, I erase all the numbers of men I’ve dated. (Sometimes I get bored and drunk, and it’s best for all parties involved not if I don’t have that option.) So a week before the party, I get a phone call from a number I don’t have in my phone.

It’s Marc. He wants to know if I’m going to his party.

Even if his party had been an apartment with free drinks, I wouldn’t have gone. On the phone, he continues to encourage me to go his party, and finally I ask him if he rejected my Netflix friendship. He said he didn’t reject it, so much as ignore it, which is the same thing in terms of Netflix friendship. To make up for it, he offers to be my real life friend, to which I reply that I’m only interested in his online friendship.

At this point, the story was over. In fact, I have told this as a story. But apparently Marc took my advice on online friendship, and today, five months after our second and final in person encounter, sent me a link to his vacation pictures from Spain.

Stay tuned for the next episode in July when Marc invites me to MySpace.