Posted 10:31 AM by Michelle
Night before last I slept ten hours without waking. I don't know why, but working night shifts again at the restaurant- it's been almost two weeks that I've only worked days- is much harder than I remember. I'm actively yawning with hours to go, and I fall asleep on the subway on the way home, and then I am down for the count for almost half a day. I hope I am able to adjust... can't pay rent on lunch shifts.

The weather is back to awful. Wednesday it hit 86 degrees, and by 9 AM Thursday morning it was in the 30's. I can barely grasp how that can happen. I'm hoping that today, hovering just above freezing, is the last of it's kind.

I hate to restate the painfully obvious, but how could our troops allow the looting of the hospitals and museums in Iraq? They said they had orders to do so... from whom? The Grand Idiot in office? Or a bunch of grander idiots under him? I simply cannot understand. They "liberate" the people and then stand by while looters destroy the city. Someone explain this to me. Someone explain why if our whole tactic was to try to spare civilian life, why are there so many orphans lacking limbs all over the country? And why the hell is our government going to "watch over" the country? I feel almost worse now than I did in the middle of the fighting. We will never catch Saddam Hussein- I called it before this war began. The government-controlled media will let his name fade, like they did with Osama Bin Laden (yet another scapegoat figurehead- both terrible men, yes, but let's call a club a club) and then years later they will pop up and nail us harder than they did on 9/11. Wanted Dead or Alive? Give me a fucking break. I just can't deal anymore. I still want to spend the summer or fall in Iraq, but only with a humanitarian organization that had NOTHING to do with our government. How many days is that stupid clown left in office? I think counting them might make me feel better.

Ugh. I just don't even know how to deal.

On the home front, I'm heading up with Ian, Tessa, and my mom to the farmhouse... soon to be joined by Sean and Jordana. If my mom is 71, and I'm 30, and we are the two perpetually single people in these crowds, should I be worried? I guess I don't really have a choice until I actually meet someone. But my mom has had 5 kids and written tons of brilliant music and has had an incredible life so far. Sometimes I honestly doubt, in the bottom of my heart, that I will ever marry or have children. Who knows- maybe I'm meant for something else altogether.

And I have to say, I don't miss a day of being with my ex. Or really, any of them. My relationships have been plagued with doubt and tension and ugliness, and frankly, abuse, and I don't miss the feeling of going to work having just had a fight with my alcoholic boyfriend because he doesn't remember all of the terrible things he said to me the night before. I don't miss not inviting my girfriends over because my other boyfriend was so insecure he would spend all night flirting and hanging out with them and ignoring me. I don't miss finding out that yet another boyfriend spent the night at a strip club- not a problem with me- but thinking I was the kind of person he had to LIE to about it. I don't miss always being alone even though I was supposed to be in a serious relationship. I've never had a partner, someone who was as independent and smart as me, someone who could teach me things and who would be willing to learn from me. And until I do, I will continue to do things like have an affair at work, eat lunch alone, and be fully responsible for my own peace of mind. I would love to meet the man who rises above the rest, but until I do, well.

I guess I'll go get some lunch.

Posted 7:08 AM by Michelle
This morning I woke up and my DSL was not working. When I tried to open my web browser, it went directly to a troubleshooting page which walked me through fixing it. "Fixing it" meant turning it off for ten seconds and then turning it on again. And it reset itself, and now it is working fine. I was thinking that I wish I had a reset button, one that would turn me off for a few seconds and then recharge me, good as new. Or my cat Zooey. What if he had a reset button? Or any of the men I’ve ever dated? Usually my reset button is a trip to California. Or, on the shorter term, a massage. Or a day off with a yoga class and a bike ride. And a really good dinner with a great bottle of wine. Alas, none of these are free.

Yesterday was a pretty amazing reset day. It hit 78 degrees here in sunny New York, and I took full advantage. I spent the morning cleaning my apartment, and by 1 PM was on my Casati, heading for the city. I rode across Brooklyn on Flatbush, crossed the Manhattan Bridge, took 9th Street across the city, and looped up the West Side Highway. There are stretches on the bike path on the west side that are as beautiful as one could ask- the piers that stretch out into the river, the marina with all the boats ready for spring, the rolling hills as you near the GW Bridge. Just gorgeous. And it was almost hot! Crossing the GW was a challenge only because of the wind- I had to hold on tight to my handlebars just to keep the bike straight. When I got to New Jersey, I took my first wrong turn, heading away from 9W rather than towards it. But I discovered a little downtown with a sandwich shop and esspresso bar and my bank- -good to know if I get that far and haven't brought enough food with me.

I turned around, sensing my error, and crossed back under the bridge. Less than a mile later, I found the park I'd been looking for. This park is about fifteen miles from where Christopher Street meets the West Side Highway, and on the AIDSRide, pit stops are about fifteen miles apart. This is the way we train- regardless of how long a ride we are attempting, we always stope every fifteen miles. However, since I had started in Brooklyn, this was twenty miles, and that having not done a long ride yet this year. When I pulled into the park, my legs were wobbling and I was panting. I threw down my bike, stripped off my shoes and socks and laid down in the warm grass.... ahhhh.

The miles back into the city were much harder than the miles out, even though I got to coast down all the hills that I had just climbed. I rode to Ryan's Pub in the East Village, since that is where B and Olivia and Simone and I ended all of our training rides last year, and met my mom for a beer and a salad. We sat outside, marvelling over the weather. And lamenting the fact that Thursday it's going to be 40 degrees and raining. Ugh.

Today I have to beg a shift at work off of somebody who needs the money just as badly as me... my plan is to show up, and give everyone the option of the night off. I am hoping for success.

Posted 8:06 PM by Michelle
This has felt like one of the longer days of my life. Not a terribly interesting one, but there were certainly more than 24 hours. I was up by 8, on my bike by 9, dressed and ready for work by 10. After a rather boring and not very lucrative eight hours, I was out into the late afternoon sun at 6. I took a short ride up the West Side Highway, one of my favorite bike paths on earth, and then rode to Laughing Lotus for a 7:30 yoga class. At 9:30, I carried my bike down the subway stairs (I don't ride the bridges at night) without stopping for a bite to eat, since I just wanted to get home.

So here's the funny part. I ride the three stops to my transfer, but as luck would have it, my transfer train was not running. So I carried my bike up and down another two flights of stairs to get on the train going back the way I came. Which I did, to Canal Street, because my Q train is also on Canal street. When I got there, I checked out the map, carried my bike up another two flights and rode in the nighttime traffic to Broadway. I carried my bike down TWO MORE flights of stairs, only to find that the particular Q entrance I chose did not have a booth, and therefore did not have the big "special entry" door, but only the person-high turnstiles surrounded by metal bars. I couldn't bear to go up the stairs again, so I tried to squeeze both me and the bike through the turnstile- which naturally didn't work- and then I got the bright idea to take the front wheel off. By the time I did, the time on the turnstile ran out. My metrocard is an unlimited, which means that you have to wait 18 minutes between each use. Oh. My. God. I put my bike down and lamented my situation for a minute or two when a tiny Korean woman came up to me. She had watched the whole thing. "You use my card," she said. "Really?" I said. "Yes," she said, "Two dollar fifty". Which I fished out of my pockets. She ran her card, me and my bike sans front wheel barely squeezed through, and then she handed me my wheel through the turnstile. I thanked her, and then realzied that I was at the N and R platform. To reach the Q, I kid you not, I had to carry my bike down three flights and up two.

So I get to the Q platform, my legs weak from the riding and the yoga, my arm feeling like a noodle, and I wait. And wait. And wait. Twenty minutes later, it came, I rode it, carried up two last flights, sailed two blocks home, and... gasp... carried my bike up my brownstone steps. Here's the double kicker. I get home to a bed covered in, well, Zooey pee, and other messes in the kitchen and bathroom. All I want to do is eat a bowl of cereal, take a bath, and go to bed. And instead, the first thing I do is take a trip to the laundry room. Oh. My. God.

Really, I'm not complaining, much as it sounds I am. But if I'm going to be this tired at the end of the day, I want to be saving lives or curing cancer or something a little more rewarding.

Last week, I met this guy who is a good friend of a co-worker. The co-worker has been trying to set me up with him for months and we finally met after a show one night. I was, uh, well, on my fourth gimlet so I wasn't in any sort of state of sobriety and the next morning I knew we talked at some length but I couldn't remember the whole conversation. So today, as I joke, I asked my co-worker if the guy thought I was a freak. "Yeah!" she cried. "He said you grilled him about his family. He's having a really hard time with his family so it made him really uncomfortable." Christ. I remember that I had felt like I was talking too much so I asked him about his family. And he replied in detail. If it made him uncomfortable, he should have freaking said so. I'm so tired of this. I was asking him questions, which in my mind is the way to get to know someone. He was really nice otherwise, but I wasn't drawn to him in any way, and this closes the deal. You simply have to know how to ask for what you want, or what you don't want. Yeesh.

Word on the street (and in some news sources) is that the pulling down of the statue in Bagdad was staged, that the Iraquis kissing our flag and stomping on Hussein's image were ex-pats flown in for this specific purpose. Huh. Put that in your hat and chew it.