before the burn

sunday's jaunt to brighton beach turned dangerous for some. and it wasn't even just the haoles!

we started off all sunkissed and fabulous. here's me and Y, thrilled to be on the beach. brighton isn't the most beautiful beach in the world — the proportion of shredded glass to sand seemed just about 1:1 — but it did the trick for those of us jonesing for some ocean. look at how happy K is! she's off in miami now. don't get eaten by gators, little lady. i had no idea that AB was a full-on sun warrior, but he battled the sun on every front. sunscreen, umbrella, suncreen, umbrella ... and then more sunscreen. here he is, chilling in the shade. apparently, this is something that each of these kids should have done too. AG, D, and G all got wicked burns. protection, people! protection! here they are, slowly learning their lessons ...



i know it's not funny ... but maybe kind of it is a little bit? that D had to have the director of HR aloe her back while in the office? that G's head sizzles if you put an ice cube on it? the fact that G was so desperate to cool off his scalp that he put an ice cube on it? that AS never, EVER learns her lesson that girls with porcelain skin should NOT hang out all day in sunshine?

Y and i are trying to organize yet another day in the sun this weekend, to replace the elusive camping trip. damn HH and his fickle ways ... damn him! but anyways. not to fret. looks like we'll be in a trolley sipping wine in long island or lolling about a beach with sand creeping into inappropriate places. i'm excited, either way.

summer makes me happy.

choi-ing out

i just completed my first morning commute of the season.

my thoughts:

"you fat, sloppy, sweaty beast, if you step on my foot or brush your sticky back against me one more time, i am going to whack you over your greasy head you dumbfuck bitch."

this is affectionately known in some circles as "choi-ing out." the show is sure to come soon to a subway car near you.

well ...

the downside: i lost $200 at the roulette table. the upside (kinda): it wasn't my money.

thanks, GM, for sponsoring the evening's debauchery, and my ill-fated return to gambling. next time we go 33 black all night, my love. 33 black.

how does the desert make everyone white?

i am on hour 51 in las vegas, and i am sleepy. talking all day makes me sleepy. haoles make me sleepy. haoles in business suits make me sleepy. creepy drunk haoles at networking parties with only one woman to every 28 men make me sleepy.

the thing is, talking all day to haoles in business suits that i saw the night before being creepy and drunk at networking parties where there was only one woman to every 28 men ... it really, really, really makes me sleepy.

still, because i am in las vegas, and because, well, i am in las vegas, i am refusing to succumb to the sleepiness. it won't win. i'm on my way out to the hard rock with some guys from my old job — haoles, of course — but nice guys nonetheless. a drink and some tunes would be nice. i can't wait to be back in new york. i want to see brown people! yellow people! black people! rainbow people! next time i have to travel for work, i'm packing some non-haoles in my bag for emergency purposes.

yes. really.

aloha report, v2.2

i am totally blissed out.

7am friday found me at the blossoming lotus cafe in kapa'a, a historic town on the east side of the island, sipping on organic chai tea with S, freshly imported from the north shore of oahu for the weekend. there were little burning sticks of sage brush on the patio, which S informed me is used to cleanse people and places of negative energy, unhappy memories and unwelcome spirits. sounds good to me. once we were all cleansed, a strange thing began happening. everything started taking on this certain glowy sheen. i don't know ... maybe it's S and his whole surfer spiritual energy connection seek union with the cosmos and be one with the ocean and world thing, or maybe it's the aloha getting to my head, but i swear, this new age crap really works. after an hour or two hanging with the sage at the blossoming lotus, everything kind of just became its most perfect version of itself. i even have photo evidence to prove it. after breakfast, we found ourselves at the kilauea lighthouse, which is the northernmost point of all the hawaiian islands. now, tell me this view doesn't break your heart and then make you feel whole again, all in one breath? anyways. okay. i guess i don't need to tell you how it makes me feel.we arrived back in princeville for another fantastic vision. momma and poppa choi, off to go "practice" and hit golf balls. my parents literally worked every day of their lives until retiring last fall, and just took up golf in april. i honestly can't think of a sight more precious than this.more fortuitous things kept happening. at hanalei bay, the sun was just starting to scorch us when a runaway umbrella from the family a few hundred yards away came and bonked S on the head. the mom ran over to apologize, then said oh, we're leaving the island today, do you want the umbrella? why yes, yes we do. here's S assembling aforementioned runaway umbrella, which now lives in my parents garage. the umbrella. not S. java kai and delicious tropical fruit smoothies eventually called us back into hanalei. for those of you who remember the aloha reports of 2005, you know how i heart java kai. we returned there later in the weekend so i could have a papaya boat for breakfast — a hollowed out papaya filled with chunks of papaya, pineapple, banana and smothered with shredded coconut, and served with a dollop of yogurt and granola. sigh. have i mentioned i heart java kai? then again, after a few days in hawaii, i kind of start to heart everything. especially when cute boys do this:and i happen to be sitting across from them doing this. which is to say, doing nothing. except slurping down pineapple smoothie. back at home, sometime this weekend — friday? saturday? i honestly don't know — i became deeply obsessed with our neighbor's palm tree. this particular tree sits on the corner of kekuanao'a lane and honoiki street. if i were a giant, i'd pluck it right out of the ground and use it as a fan. as i am not a giant, however, i will just admire it. i like this tree best just before sunset. it gets all ringed with pink. S and i went to a beach i'd never been to before, at ha'ena beach park. there are some big surf breaks off of the shore that he'd surfed a couple years back, so he bonded with the lifeguards over cannons and tunnels and i think a break called dumptrucks? there was also a lot of conversation about shark attacks just offshore. sharks? from where i'm sitting it doesn't seem possible. sharks? really?despite some fairly involved conversations about hungry, carnivorous water animals, we still got in the ocean to play. S taught me how to body surf, but i was approximately as successful as when he taught me how to surf-surf. basically, i got ragdolled every time i attempted a big wave. but no matter. he made sure i a) didn't drown and b) didn't get rolled into the reef drop off, both of which were very good things. an even better thing was this perfect specimen of tourist that showed up at the beach that afternoon. classic: handheld camcorder. fisherman hat. white sneakers and tube socks to the knees. i heart this man. i hope he found whatever he was looking for. i found good things at the beach, too. i had wanted to find a new shade of yellow to paint my bedroom in my parents house. and an afternoon's worth of hard work at ha'ena yielded these lovely samples in the perfect buttery shade. sigh. i had fun. aloha, elmo. thank you for helping me make new memories, and reminding me that we have to love people for everything they are, and give them everything we have, always. til next time!
now it's sunday night, i am all cosmic peaceful sage-bushed out, full of my favorite soup, made for me by moms, and getting sleepy. tomorrow is my last day on island, then i'm on the red eye to phoenix tomorrow night. on tuesday morning i land in phoenix to get on a plane that will land me at good old newark sometime tuesday evening ... and then i begin the trek to sweet sweet brooklyn.

yay brooklyn. dare i say, i missed you, even in paradise?

aloha report, v2.1

i have eight mosquito bites.

after nearly a week in tropical bug-land, this is a record low for me. i am one of those people you should always try to sit near at a picnic or while camping or in the forest or any other such place where biting insects are likely to be looking for a feast, because they will ignore you entirely in favor of chomping me to bits. i am like a bug lamp. but anyways. only eight bites! they are torturing me, but at least there are only eight of them. thank you, oh makers of DEET. how i love thee.

i still, however, have managed to get myself some funny blotches of redness on my shoulder and neck. sun poisoning, maybe? i dunno. i think it might be a reaction to the tropical plants that kept reaching out and touching me today. but it's not so bad. i think maybe, just maybe, it's worth it to have some skin irritation to be able to go on walks like this with my dad? this path is just off of ke'e beach, the northwesternmost point of the island and the furthest you can travel by car. ke'e is also the northern end of the na pali coast, which covers the entire west side of the island and is inaccessible except by boat, or your feet. the kalalau trail, the most famous hike in hawaii, and the only way to really see na pali, starts here. over christmas B and i did the first four miles of the kalalau, taking the two-mile side trip to swim in hanakapi'ai falls. and it was gorgeous. but today, i contented myself with chilling with my dad, and stopping for little breaks on the rocks. and for C, only for C, i made my dad take this picture. note the thumbs, please. after lunch at zelos — grilled mahi mahi tacos and beer battered mahi mahi burgers — and our walk at ke'e, me and the p's headed home to veg. i finished the secret life of bees, decided i wanted to live in a honeycomb, and delved into the source of trouble. it's good but the stories are getting a little heady for my sun-addled brain. i went for a walk at dusk and ended up at the neighborhood beach again. and there, i made the most amazing discovery. my elbow, when covered with sand, looks just like a toasted everything bagel. yes, these are the things that one discovers, and finds astounding, when one is wandering solo. things like mosquito bites. and elbows. at least i'm not taking pictures of my feet again. but really. such constant, slow solitude, after new york recently, just makes me want to — i don't know. just take these really big breaths to make sure i don't forget anything. actually finding room and space to breathe, alone, after everything that has erupted in my life in the past six months, i feel this mixture of total relief, and refreshment, and happiness, and wistfulness, and thoughtfulness, and acceptance, and just this need to stretch my arms out and somehow hug the whole world, and release it again. there's a line in the secret life of bees that describes dusk as the unknowing place between coming and going. dusk is the time of saying goodbye. and it kind of makes me ache on the inside. but i guess ... i guess if something is going to make me ache, it might as well be a dusk as pretty as this?

aloha report, v2.0

aloha. today was spent with momma and poppa choi, snorkeling and then lounging at tunnels beach: yesterday was spent with my dad puttering in his garden like this: admiring the baby papaya tree and his pepper plants! then around sunset, i went for a walk: and ended up at the beach: happy like this:

thankfully, the rocky beginning of this trip was no indication of how the trip itself would go. Y's birthday party was splendiferous in every which way, except for in the morning after, which is when i overslept, didn't pack, ended up throwing flipflops and three bikinis into a rolling bag, and then got into a car for 15-plus hours of traveling while still unshowered and painfully hungover. and when i say painfully .... i mean painfully. i mean wondering how much tel aviv was going to charge me when i booted in the backseat of the lincoln town car hungover. i mean thinking i might cry if the security guys made me wait for one more second before i got to sit down hungover. i mean wishing i were dead hungover.

it was not very aloha.

but, upon landing, finally, in lihue, all icky feelings were washed away. my parents and a bunch of their friends whisked me away to kintaro, a fantastic sushi joint, so i ate all manner of delicious fish surrounded by happy korean people, all of whom were exclaiming just how BIG i was! for the record, i was the same height as all the men and had anywhere between 4 and 6 inches and up to 30 pounds on the women.

things have continued to get more aloha since then. i've spent my days putzing around the house, either reading or sunbathing out on the lanais—i actually chase the sun from the east side of the house, when i read on the lanai off of the downstairs kitchen, to the west side, when i read off of the upstairs living room—admiring my dad's garden, overeating my mom's food, and making little walks to the neighborhood store, neighborhood pool, or one of two neighborhood beaches. my second day here i had a deep tissue massage that was so relaxing, i swear i started hallucinating. since arriving on island, i've eaten approximately 12 tons of grapefruit, 6 tons of pineapple, 4 tons of kimchi, and today, 2 tons of kahlua pig from the mixed plate food stand in hanalei.

mmm. kahlua pig.

it's 9pm and time for me to go to bed. i'm sleepy and my skin's hot all over. i've been vigilant about the sunscreen but snorkeling today did me in — i'm a little pink on my arms and tummy and back. and i actually have a tan line on my back of the knot in my bikini! the knot! good lord. talk about a winner of a line. but. eh. this is what happens when one spends a morning on her stomach swimming in a reef with tropical fish. things could be worse.

status check, four days into vacation:
sunburn — medium
freckles — extremely high
tummy — full
mana — strong

until next time ... aloha!

birthday bonanza, part 2

on may 5, Y did the deed.

another one bites the dust, and turned 27. here we are in the beginning of the evening, at a bar in chinatown. isn't the birthday girl just radiant? C and K and i are doing some kind of weird monochromatic thing in this picture. but why did i let C unzip my dress so far? why did i think it was a good idea to wear an item that many, many people would try to unzip, anyways? and as long as we're asking questions, who's the dood in the background? he looks mighty happy. AS arrived a bit later, pooped out from the opera. but she wouldn't miss phase two of birthday bonanza. look at how my ladies glow! of course, how could one NOT be happy? there was bel biv devoe. there was salt 'n pepa. there was arrested development. there was prince. there was michael jackson. there was even — and i mean really, does it get better than this? — boyz II men.

M got into the spirit of things, even though he didn't quite get all of our ecstasy when we imitated the monster dance from "thriller," or why we all started suddenly started screaming "push it, unh, push it GOOD!" in unison. of course, he has an excuse, having grown up in cuba and not the bloated, MTV-addicted american suburbs of the 1980s. anyways. here he is looking devilishly handsome on the dancefloor. M's confusion for the music was tempered, however, by AB's enthusiasm. inner monologue as he rolls up his sleeves: "yani, watch me! i'm gonna show them this white boy can DANCE!" i think MU shared AB's sentiments. at least, they both danced so much they ended up taking off their shirts. MU's clothed in this picture, but i do recall some serious flashing of marine corps tattoos throughout the evening. this angel face and battlefields in iraq don't really seem to jive, but he's got the ink to prove it, so it must be true ... i include this picture, because this picture is why i love this girl. LOVE her. C and i were both pretty happy about 2 minutes before we left Y's bonanza. then we both hit a wall. then we both climbed into a cab, assisted by AS and G. the cab booted us out because his meter didn't work, even though both of us had already taken off our shoes, and that seemed good enough reason to us that he should take us home, immediately. we then reluctantly climbed into another cab, whose driver was even more reluctant to take us to williamsburg, but took us home anyways ... and who we then made wait while i ran inside at 3am to retrieve a vacuum for Y, to give to C. (see "my heart was mended" for why i might possibly have Y's vacuum.) C obliged, willingly. yet another reason why i love this girl. of course, in our collective state, she may not have had a clue what she was agreeing to, but that is beside the point. this is what cosmic sisters do for each other.

why did i need to give C the vacuum at 3am? doesn't that seem like a weird exchange after, oh, six hours of drinking and celebrating our best friend's birthday?

because at 6:30am, a mere three and a half hours later, a car was coming to pick me up to start me on a journey that would include 2 hours of car travel, 3 hours of airport waiting and layovers, and 11.5 hours of flying before i arrived at my destination.

that was not fun.

but more on travel, and why one should never, ever do so after having drunk innumerable champagnes and jack and cokes, later. for now, a big big big happy birthday smush for Y, who i've been lucky enough to have in my life for nine years and whose friendship just gets more precious with every single one. love you, little rat.

seen in the subways ...

10:48pm, wednesday night at the essex street J/M/Z platform.

a yellow emergency telephone box, covered in the typical graffiti and stickers, with these words printed in small capital letters on the side: DEVIOUS SEMANTICS

birthday bonanza, part 1

oh, birthdays.

here we find ourselves, celebrating 27. and it’s the NINTH year i’ve celebrated a birthday weekend with my lovely dearest AS. happy birthday, steelie! here she is friday night, at bleu evolution up in washington heights, also known as The Other Side of the World. she had a tiramisu. with a candle. when we talked to the wait staff and asked them to hook us up for her birthday, he said, “oh! for the lady in red?” the next night, I had no such waiter clamoring to give me tiramisu. but I did have a case of champagne, 30 champagne glasses, a bunch of sliced strawberries and a couple of good friends to help me celebrate. due to much drama with a craptastic landlord and a whole lot of craptasticness, we had a change of venue from tribeca to a little hole in the wall in billyburg. this was actually an ingenious idea cooked up after midnight on thursday, when i had finally calmed down from the craptasticness and C, Y and i were sitting around Y's apartment deep into a bottle of rioja. actually, C and i were. Y was asleep in my lap. but C, who suddenly was overcome with a bout of brainstormingmommykickassness, took control and chatted up sweet tammy sue at boogaloo, an underground "bar" just under the J tracks, next door to a pumping latin club, and stumbling distance of my apartment.

i say “bar” with some skepticism, because i very, very, very much doubt that the main business of this “bar” is distributing alcoholic beverages. or any beverages. or anything dry of any kind, come to think of it. but no matter. the “bartenders” at this “bar” gave us free run of the place, let us bring in as much champagne as we wanted, set up all of our bottles and glasses as we wanted, let us play our own music for the first couple hours, and giggled a lot. they did want us to have a one-drink minimum to make sure the “bar” made money, but cared zero about how it was implemented and didn’t seem to care very much at all about anything, even after they realized we gave away dozens of free drink tickets by the end of the night. eh. who cares. champagne — and the other substances that i believe the "bartenders" were floating around the "bar" — has that effect, i find... anyhoo. here i am: yay champagne!

now, there were all kinds of worlds mingling at the “bar.” but somehow, it seemed to work. here is the world of the newly Nastefied, the people who make work not unbearable, and dare i say — fun?here's the world of AM, the only ex I’ve ever managed to — come to think of it, ever wanted to — stay in touch with. i think it's that whole unbelievably-talented-thing he's got going. yay AM.and the world of out of town friends! here’s DR with DG, surprising me from the nation’s capitol. DR, by the way, completely forgot that he was responsible for me this morning. i sat numbly at my computer for 45 minutes, waiting forlornly for DD, my usual editor to find me, before i finally asked DR for work … can you believe that at 7:30am on Monday morning i was asking somebody to give me work to do?DR came with D — you sneaky girl, you are good at keeping secrets! — who had her fake boyfriend N in tow. i think she hearts him. but i think i do too. he gave me a cupcake. and my heart is easily bought by things such as cupcakes. here is the world of hearting:ES, writer extraordinaire, and of the world of my philly friends, was in town, also from the nation's capitol, for a meeting with newsweek. bless his stars, he hauled his ass out to brooklyn despite evidence of harsh flu-like symptoms. he and his new blonde mop deserved a kiss:

in fact, I think K, world of you know, world, deserved a kiss too. a big one. a big big one. K secretly wants to move into my apartment. it's okay. i kinda want her to, too. 22.okay. so speaking of kissing. i think maybe i gave AB a big fat smacker on the mouth? MAN. i was kissy on saturday night. but look at him! too precious. i think that maybe on my 24th birthday i maybe grabbed his butt? oy vey. if Y were not one of the most beautiful women in the world, and of the world of the chosen few, and of the world of incredibly patient people who can handle me when i'm freaking out over something like, oh, a venue change for my birthday party, and cool enough to take calls at 3am from "bartenders" ... she might have cared that i was smooching everyone in sight, including her boyfriend. however, she is, and is, and is, and is. here she is with C, the other half of Amy's Fantabulous Wonderful Party Planning Crew:and here’s G, also of the world of the chosen few. he makes me giggle. he also wins the prize for dealing with me at the end of the night, when i was approximately 4 bottles of champagne deep, and insisting that somebody, namely G, walk me down broadway so i could look for pizza at 3am. what i learned on this adventure: there is no pizza available on broadway at 3am. only fried chicken. and empanadas. and slightly scary neighborhood types. no pizza. i also learned that G can manage a verrrry tipsy, hungry girl in 4-inch wedge heels that is trying to lean over the bridge railing to take pictures of the cars on the BQE, and still carry a bag of 30 dirty champagne glasses for several blocks without breaking a single one. good job, G.here’s AS, fresh from her own 27th. what is that they say about opposites attracting? you're the light to my dark, AS ... and i couldn't think of a better person to share a birthday with. chosen few chosen few!
and of course, my lil C. i believe mischief was afoot. but we deserved a little mischief. maybe it was the thought of all those metal buckets. maybe the "thank you" offered to us by the "bartenders." maybe the pictures in the bathroom? oh wait. um. uh. anyways. sigh. what would i do without these girls?

here’s to year 27. thank you to everyone who came and for making my birthday splendid :)

splendid!

the birthday baton has been officially passed. next up: Y.