He said WHAT?

I wonder if there's something about me that just screams IF YOU'RE A STALKER, COME TALK TO ME.

I had a meeting in midtown today. As I waited in line at the security desk at the lobby, the man in front of me offered to pass my ID to the security desk. I almost handed him my ID, and then he laughed and said he was joking. He did, however, want my information so he could call me some time.

I "laughed" and politely told him I didn't think it was a good idea.

Unfortunately for me, we ended up in the same elevator together (with a poor woman who tried to pretend she was invisible). The man was very persistent and asked again if he could have my contact information.

Once again, I said, "NO."

He asked why I wouldn't give it to him. Since I was in an elevator, it was extremely awkward and uncomfortable for me to continue to have a conversation that I clearly didn't want to have, and I couldn't leave, I tried to be polite and make a joke out of it.

"I woke up this morning and decided that I wasn't providing my contact information to anyone today. Sorry," I told him.

He promised that he'd be back tomorrow to sit in the lobby and wait for me all day.

"Well," I said, "seems like it might be hard for you to get any work done that way."

It reminds me of someone I dated someone briefly last spring. Let's call him X.

X pushed things between us to become serious and exclusive (I'm not a huge fan of exclusive dating. What's the point, unless I plan on marrying someone?), and then quickly decided things weren't working out because he needed "to be free and to see what else was out there." This was after he already already made ridiculous declarations of his love for me within our first month of dating (which made me extremely uncomfortable because WHO DOES THAT?!?).

While I wasn't particularly happy that X had insisted I jump through hoops to "commit to an exclusive relationship with him" when I clearly didn't want to be exclusive only for him to realize that he needed to be "free," I didn't object too much because if I were honest, I agreed with him. Plus, I don't want to be with anyone who needs to see "what else is out there" before knowing if they want to be with me. If they haven't already figured it out, then they ought to go find out without my participation.

X was an inappropriate partner for me in every way possible. The only reason we began to date was because I had just ended a very important relationship with A (who is amazing and now a close friend), and I was in a vulnerable state. X had been persistently pursuing me for over a year, and he happened to call and ask me out at a time where it was hard for me to say no.

A month after X ended things, he came back and wanted to try again because he thought he had made a mistake, and he missed me. I had started to come out of my A-break-up-induced funk by then, and I didn't cooperate with X's attempts to restart things because he wasn't someone I wanted to be with. I was polite. I went through the motions of going on a date with X, but...eh.

I don't trust wishy washy people, especially men. There's something about wishy-washy men that reminds me of temperamental children. They always want the shiniest and newest toys, but they lose interest quickly. I've heard my share of stories about wishy-washy men who decide, after 20 years of marriage, a mortgage and 3 children, that married life isn't for them. It's sad and a little selfish for them to make that decision with disregard for how their actions will affect their ex-wives and children. If that's the way they felt, perhaps they ought to have realized that before having a family? Anyone who starts throwing "I love you" around after only a month of dating someone is one of those men.

After X's second attempt to "date" me, I didn't hear from him for a while. Then, I ran into him a few times, and we were polite to each other each time. I had no hard feelings towards him, and I can't imagine that he'd me mad at me in any way. The last time I ran into him, he called me within minutes of seeing me to ask if I wanted to stop by his home to check out ___________ (insert whatever hook here, like art, gadget, whatever). I may have an annoying tendency to take people at face value, but I am not completely naive. I politely declined.

Since then, X occasionally emails, texts or calls (and usually leaves vmails, since I almost always screen calls unless I'm in a rush). It seems to happen about once a month, probably when he's a little bored and lonely and wonders where his friends are or what everyone's up to. According to my apartment super, a man fitting X's description even stopped by my apartment once to ask if I still lived there. Every once in a while (about three or four times now), I'll get a voicemail from X telling me he's at my gym and hoping to run into me. (I live in the West Village, he lives on the East side, and we both have gyms within 2 blocks of our respective apartments.) While I want to tell X to bugger off, I don't because we operate in similar social circles and I would prefer things to remain friendly. But, I do think that X is a stalker if I've seen one.

Goodbye Silver Fox

Goodbye Silver Fox.  Here's why things will never work for us:

1. I eventually figured out that you are close to 20 years my senior, and when I jokingly mentioned you were twice my age, you got offended. Let's call things as they are and admit that you are not as young as like to pretend, and you are not good at pretending.

2. You made me go outside an admire your new BMW on our first date as if I cared what sort of car you drove.

3. You drink too much and then start shouting random Rolling Stones lyrics even if they aren't playing at the time.  We were at Crispo for dinner, and every few minutes, you'd get up and start belting out Rolling Stones lyrics even though there was no music and we were in a sit down restaurant.

4. You drink too much and then start telling me that I'm not going to do any better than you because you're extremely good looking, very successful, tall and in the best shape of your life.

5.  You drink too much and then imagine yourself friends with everyone. We went for drinks at Cibar, and you proceeded to yell Rolling Stones lyrics across the bar at the British DJ and explained that you two were great friends.  Later, the DJ asked me what was up with the annoying guy who kept yelling Rolling Stones lyrics across the bar, because every time he was at Cibar, that's all he did.

6. You told me you when to Yale at one point, and when I started to ask you about it (because I know people that went to Yale), you explained you attended a high school gifted program at Yale University one summer.  We both know that is very different from "going to Yale."

6. You enjoy hanging out in the meatpacking district and spend most of your weekend evenings there.  The one night I got to pick the bar, we ran into Heather Mills at the Rusty Knot.  When she left, you told me that you two were part of the same social circle in the Hamptons, and Heather has thrown herself at you numerous times, but you weren't interested.  At this point, I'm certain you had drank too much.

7. On our second date, you tried to get me to go home with you, using the very convincing and original rationale that you are very good looking, successful and tall.  I went home alone.

8.  On our third date, you upped the ante, and in addition to good looking, successful and tall, you also told me that you really really wanted a girlfriend, and if I went home with you, you'd take me shopping.  I went home alone.

9.  The morning after our third date, you sent me an email with a subject line: let's consummate our friendship tonight.  intimacy is very important to me."  In the body, you had attached a picture of two women in various stages of undress.  That's when I finally picked up the phone and politely ended any interaction with you by telling you that despite your height, success and good looks, we were in different places in life.  You agreed and told me I was boring.

Well, it's a good thing that I'm wishing you a goodbye then, Silver Fox!

Oldies but goodies

I love stories and shows that can weave historical facts into an interesting plot.

Last year, I watched New Amsterdam because the central character was 400 years old. He came to North America with the first Dutch settlers and watched the small settlement grow into today's New York City. He would get these really cool flashbacks of historical New York. There was a particularly cool sequence where he took a picture of Times Square every year and lined the pictures up on a wall so he could see how Times Square had changed over time. I thought the concept was awesome, but the show got cancelled. Most shows I really like get cancelled. I think it's an indication of how out of touch I am. (Ahem, when will they make an Arrested Development movie?!?)

This year, I've been watching Life on Mars for similar reasons. The hero in Life on Mars is a present day policeman who gets hit by a car while pursuing a suspect and wakes up to find himself in 1973 (he's actually in a coma in 2009). The show works very hard to make sure all the props are consistent with the 1970s, and the show is often shot in industrial parts of Brooklyn where signs of progress are less apparent. It's pretty cool.

Finally, I thought I'd share The New York Public Library Digital Gallery -- it's cool because you can type in a street in Manhattan, and it'll show you all archived pictures of that particular street corner over time so you can see how it's changed.

Here's a picture of a street near my apartment that was taken in 1933.

Here's a picture of what it will look like this fall once construction is done on the glass building.

Check it at http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchresult.cfm?num=72&word=13th=

New Yorkers are Resilient (aka self centered and annoying)

Recently, New York Magazine did it's annual Reasons to Love New York issue. I was amused by Reason #59. Because We’re Resilient:

... In other words, New Yorkers are preternaturally resilient. And that’s not just romantic, self-flattering I [Heart] NY bullshit. Psychologists define a resilient person as one who after experiencing a trauma has one or no symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder. A Columbia study of New Yorkers a few years ago found that 65 percent of us were certifiably resilient following 9/11—as were more than half the people who’d actually been in the Trade Center buildings during the attacks. But the study’s finding I love best describes what kinds of 9/11 survivors were least affected, the quickest to bounce back, the most resilient: the so-called self-enhancers. They, according to the psychology professor who ran the study, “are somewhat grandiose. They are preoccupied with themselves, they score high on measures of narcissism, and the research shows pretty clearly that they are annoying to be around.”

He said WHAT?

I've lived in a rent-stabilized walk-up apartment in downtown Manhattan for the past four years. I've noticed that rents in nicer units near me have fallen. Since my rent is rent-stabilized, I expect it to be slightly below market.

Plus, my building is pretty neglected even by New York City walk-up standards. My neighbor's dog urinates daily in the hallway, and no one cleans it so the building reeks of urine. We have a rodent problem. There is a hole in the corner of my bedroom floor so I can look down into the unit below mine and hear everything that goes on there (and vice versa). Our bathtub leaks. Our front door lock is broken, so I installed a deadbolt which is the only lock we use on our door.

In addition to our problems with the general care of the building, the building has been subject to several acts of crime. In 2008 alone, our neighbor was mugged at knifepoint by a man waiting in the stairwell. The apartment on the floor above ours was burgled via fire escape.

The management company and super have been generally unresponsive to our requests to have the dog urine cleaned, the hole repaired and the lock in the front door replaced, but we have not complained too much and are low maintenance tenants. When I began to take stock of the cost of living right after I lost my job, I called my management company to ask if they would consider lowering my rent by $200 so it was back in line with my rent in 2007.

I'd noticed tenants in my building had been moving out (probably for the reasons listed above), and the unit across the way from my apartment had been empty for at least 3 months so the management company was losing money on a monthly basis. The way I saw it, it would be expensive for me to move out, but in the long run, I'd make up the loss of my deposit through the lower rent and nicer amenities. It'd be costly for my management company if I moved too. Yes, I'd forgo my deposit of two months rent, but in the long run, the management company is required to spend a minimum of $5,000 to fix up the apartment before they can take on a new tenant, and the unti wouldn't be able to command the same rent I was paying (even at 2007 levels) for the next tenant. A decrease of $200 would this bring my rent back in line with the market and would also help me considerably with my short term finances until I found a job.

When I explained this to my management company, I got the run around. After several tries, I spoke to Paul S. His response was, "I don't understand what an extra $200.00 would do for you if you no longer have a job. It sounds to me like you just made up being laid off as an excuse to renegotiate your rent."

I didn't think it was any of his business, but I explained I had a little severance. Paul then said the decision wasn't his to make, and I needed to speak to Mark W.

I called Mark W. every day for the next two weeks. He was always "out of the office." I left him a message each time I called. He never called me back.

Eventually, I received another call for Paul S. Mark W. had asked him to call me. I restated my request, and Paul S said "he would ask." He stepped away from the phone for 30 seconds and came back to tell me, "Mark says no."

I'm pretty certain Mark didn't say anything and that the management company just doesn't want to entertain my offer. It was pretty unprofessional for them to give me the run around -- if they didn't want to negotiate, they should have told me no upfront.

Uh oh, gold diggers may soon have to find real jobs!

With the market in serious trouble, well-to-do bankers and hedge fund guys in search of arm candy is harder to come by.

...being unemployed is not hot. Real estate broker Sammy, a 37-year-old "single girl in the dating scene" (who would rather keep her real name private so that her boss doesn't know she's a gold digger), wrinkles her nose in disgust. "Will I knowingly date somebody who is in the sh--ter right now? Probably not." Sophie agrees, "I would never go out with someone who came up to me and said, 'I don't have a job.' " Emilaya shakes her head. "No, no, no." Even the non-English speaker shakes her head no. It's universal: No banking job, no service.

Hippie, Yippie, Yuppie, Hipster! Schlemiel, Schlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!

With New York City caught in the vortex of one of the worst financial crisis in history, is the New York of old to be the New York of new?

Jay McInerney looks back at 20 plus years...



I first remember hearing the Y-word in ’83, when I was living in the East Village... I was enjoying a hung-over midday breakfast (we didn’t use the word brunch in the East Village; it was breakfast whenever you woke up)... An ostentatiously besplattered painter was sitting next to me at the counter, and I heard him mutter, “Fucking yuppies.” I looked up to see a young couple I myself would have characterized as “preppy” waiting to be seated. They looked as if they were visiting from the Upper East Side—all chinos and oxford cloth. We were all uniformly nonconformist in our black jeans and our black Ramones and Television T-shirts. As a Williams alum, I knew all about preppies even before they’d gone mainstream with the publication of The Official Preppy Handbook in 1980. My younger brother, a Deerfield senior, was a preppy. Many of my classmates were preppies. But this yuppie thing was new to me.

The term probably first appeared in print in 1983, when columnist Bob Greene wrote a piece about former Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, who was hosting “networking” events at Studio 54. Greene quoted a participant as saying that Rubin had gone from being the leader of the Yippies to the leader of the yuppies. The neologism stood for Young Urban Professionals and might have gone down in history as yups if not for the Rubin connection. The term yuppies suggested a certain evolutionary—or devolutionary—trajectory from the hippie and the Yippie. The story had everything—the double irony of the revolutionary trickster turned entrepreneurial capitalist cheerleader and the setting in the glam palace of mindless hedonism, as well as a zippy catchphrase that actually seemed to describe an instantly recognizable new minority. Once we had a name for them, we suddenly realized that they were everywhere, like the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—especially here in New York, the urbanest place of all. We might have even recognized them as us.

From the beginning, there was a certain subject/object confusion associated with the yuppie concept, a certain “we have met the enemy and he is us” self-reflexivity to the phenomenon. Downtown mohawked squatters aside, it was sometimes hard to find a Manhattanite without some taint of the new lifestyle. Did gym membership qualify you as a yuppie? Snorting coke? Eating raw fish? When I heard a movie agent slinging the term at a group of bankers at the Odeon, I wondered about pots and kettles.

“Who are all those upwardly mobile folk with designer water, running shoes, pickled parquet floors, and $450,000 condos in semi-slum buildings?” asked Time magazine in its January 9, 1984, issue. “Yuppies,” we were informed, “are dedicated to the twin goals of making piles of money and achieving perfection through physical fitness and therapy.” The Yuppie Handbook, which had just been published, defined its subject: “(hot new name for Young Urban Professional): A person of either sex who meets the following criteria: (1) resides in or near one of the major cities; (2) claims to be between the ages of 25 and 45; (3) lives on aspirations of glory, prestige, recognition, fame, social status, power, money, or any and all combinations of the above; (4) anyone who brunches on the weekends or works out after work.”

Apparently, the creatures anatomized in The Yuppie Handbook were just common enough to elicit recognition, but not so general as to provoke a shrug. The concepts of “brunching” and “working out” were apparently new and humorous. A few of their defining characteristics—dhurrie rugs, potted ferns, pickled parquet floors—sound suitably dated. But many more—European automobiles, gourmet kitchens, computer literacy, designer clothing, and sushi—fail 25 years later to convey the exoticism that the authors seem to have intended. Oh, those wacky yuppies, eating raw fish and going to the gym.

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