Joint Sayings and Commingled Assets

Joint Sayings and Commingled Assets

“WE don’t like that color sofa”
“OUR taste is modern, but not that extreme weird, minimalist stuff. You know the kind of sofas that look like some bad 80s movie with James Spader.”
“Can you show US a carpet which matches those chairs…something which can resist dog stains?”

I spat out instructions, likes and dislikes to an extremely overwhelmed salesperson in the Bloomingdale’s furniture department. As M and I perused the furniture departments of every major department store and Googled our way to the lesser known shops and outlets across the Tri-State area, we attempted to blend both our tastes and our possessions.

I have been used to being an I…not a We, or an US as my coupled friends diction has changed over the years. I dissolves into We, individual thoughts and preferences meld into joint opinions and joint sayings. Comprise becomes the language, and two becomes one.

Over the years, I have carefully selected the crap, garbage and clutter which has become my décor and style. Lovingly, I have chosen bedding and artwork based upon my current thematic taste. “We need to get rid of most of your furniture,” M said as he assessed the floor plan of our new place. “That atrocious wall unit needs to go,” he said. And so began the purge of what is mine for what is ours.

Fortunately our predilections run in similar streams. “Fine, if the wall unit isn’t coming then neither is your: sofa, dog fluid covered loveseat, headboard, TV stand, hideous fishing poster, your rug, or that blue and purple striped shirt.” I basically discarded all of his earthly possession leaving him with an antique Queen Anne tallboy and two chairs which I deemed fit to add to our apartment. Back and forth we went, vetoing each others possession until we were left with barely enough to furnish a tree house. “So, I guess we will need some new furniture,” M said.

While I meticulously measured every nook and cranny of the apartment, sketching out the floor plan to scale on graph paper and utilizing my one semester of insight gained from the New York School of Interior Design’s program, I mapped out our new home’s layout and M concerned himself with how large a plasma TV we can get. “I think 42 inches is big enough,” M said with crossed arms staring at the wall where the TV will soon hang and ICF fights will stream into our home. There are some things which I know are a man’s domain…and area where I don’t want to go or need to go. The choice of televisions and BBQ grills remain solely in the control of M.

After we dissolved our assets into donations to the Salvation Army we began the process of buying things together. While my apartment doesn’t look like a post-collegiate hodgepodge of Ikea pieces, I never invested in good furniture. But entering an adult living arrangement, I wanted to create a home, not a shrine to single life replete with movie posters and a shoe chair.

I did most of the leg work. While M went to the office, I set out this week for research and to pre-survey the stores. “I LOVE this sofa,” I said to M as I tried to describe it over the phone. “It’s brown. It’s leather. It’s smaller.” As I writer, I should have been able to reach and find better words than those to describe the item, but I my description fell short. When the weekend rolled around, I brought M to see the sofa.

“No,” he said.

One word. He didn’t need others. Just no.

“Why? What is wrong with it?” I pushed.

“I just don’t like it. Icky - Schmaltzy - Cheesy”

All of my leg work, shot down with ICKY –Schmaltzy - Cheesy.

Standing in front of the Ralph Lauren home section at Bloomingdales as the sales person went to check on the availability of a certain sofa M HAD to have, he had an epiphany.

“Wow, a year ago when I was moving into my place – my bachelor pad, now everything is so….,” he paused. “So not just about me anymore. It’s about us.”

As it turned out, the sofa M HAD to have wasn’t available until October. “We can offer you a loaner in the interim,” the salesperson offered helpfully trying to make a sale like a guy on a used car lot looking to unload a lemon.

A Loaner? This isn’t a car I just wrecked, it’s a friggin sofa!

M pondered this proposition for a minute, as if it was a good idea.

“No way. A loaner sofa could be some hideous monstrosity that someone else returned. Someone with terrible taste.”

We finally agreed, compromising on a sleek black (aka dog friendly) leather couch. Moving in together we are uniting our aggregated belongings building a home from pieces old and new. Commingling tastes and property to blend into one proved more difficult than I had anticipated.

Back in my apartment I was emptying my matchbook collection into a giant glass cylinder. I have collected them from everywhere I have been in the world as a souvenir, oddly M has too. “I have room in here for all of yours too,” I said to M. He smiled. He understood. It wasn’t about the matchbooks.

Pieces of Me

In New York City, we are many times defined by what we own. Judged by our clothing and our possessions; stature measured by a power tie, power suit or power purse, people’s opinions of us are based upon what is in our closet and what is on our back.

For that reason and because I am a packrat, I have years of unworn clothing, solitary socks and who knows what else buried deep in the nether regions of my closet. I refuse to throw things away, whether for sentimental reasons or on the off chance that one day, just maybe acid washed jeans will make their way back on to the pages of Vogue, I have stored, saved and kept every thing which could possibly fit into my apartment.

“I don’t know where to start,” I cried to my mother on the phone as I sat in the middle of my bombed out apartment. I had begun the gargantuan task of packing up the apartment which I have called home for eight years. Moving in with M, though exciting was taxing in terms of packing and the act of moving.

Books lay strewn across the floor, dresses from my Playboy party days in bags marked “Skinny Slut Wear” for donation and dust balls the size of those in Grapes of Wrath wafted across the floor as the breeze from the open window drafted in. My apartment was in complete disarray. The movers had delivered boxes and while I attempted to approach this in an organized fashion, I quickly became overwhelmed at the enormity.

“I’ll come into the city tomorrow,” my mother said reassuringly. “We will get it all done. No need to worry,” she added with a motherly confidence as I tried to make some headway on my own.

The hours rolled on and soon in the early morning hours, after I had made three piles: donate, keep, send to parents – I found myself slowing down as the coffee grew cold and the empty cans of Red Bull accumulated in another overflowing garbage bag. Working with robotic precision, you cannot stop and think about the item – instantaneously you need to decide keep or toss. I tossed a lot, but a there are some things which I couldn’t part with.

Sure, it was easy to donate the once rode mountain bike which I bought a few days after 9/11, believing that should there be another terrorist attack this all-terrain bike would be my savior as I rode it across the Queensboro Bridge to safety. But it was the smaller things which lingered between piles: a book given to me as housewarming gift, a blazer I wore on all of my interviews when I moved to New York, an old notebook which housed the details for the first Playboy party which I produced. It was the gadgets and gizmos, trinkets and treasures – which I held on to: each one representing a moment in my life, good and bad, but the parts of the whole.

Dawn crept in through the windows and though I had 26 garbage bags to show as progress, my apartment still resembled a trailer park post tornado. My Nana recently passed away and we had the morbid task of going through her apartment to stake claim to things which we wanted. An oak antique dining room table, a marble hall piece, a wrought iron umbrella stand, her 94 years of life condensed into a garage sale of antiques and personal items. As I wandered through the empty rooms of her apartment where I spent many childhood Rosh Hashanah dinners and Sunday afternoons, it wasn’t the heirloom furniture which I wanted. It was the smaller things which were infinitely more her that I wanted to preserve, cherish and keep. The washed out old black and white photos, bleached by years of sun that hung on the walls, of great grandparents and relatives I never met, the books which sat covered in dust on the shelves in her study – books which I wondered where she was when she read, which were her favorites -the homemade magnets, ashtrays and plates which my brother and I constructed from pipe cleaners and macaroni, these were the items which meant the most to me.

In my own treasure trove of memories, I have accumulated much over 32 years. I have saved football game ticket stubs and Amtrak train tickets (my first to Philly to see M). I have squirreled away matchbooks, Casino chips, nightclub wristbands, bobble head dolls, mixed tapes and countless photos, some of which I look at now and cannot recall the moment that made me save the item or the importance of that moment, but I do know that at the time, it was a moment I never wanted to forget.

But I am beginning a new life with someone in a new place, with new memories to create and new items to save. And unfortunately New York space on the Upper East Side is not like gigabytes or kilobytes in the digital world where space is unlimited, we have 1200 square feet to live, work and breathe and no extra room for a gum wrapper saved in a memory box of which I cannot recall the relevance.

Sitting amongst the ruins of my apartment, with closet contents flung across the room, I tired to make peace with my past and the pieces of me; deciding what to recycle and what to save. I cannot save everything, pack it away and hope one day to return to it for reassurance, comfort or nostalgia.

And I realized, as I cleansed the clutter from my past I was in fact doing what I set out to one day do. I was reliving my past, celebrating what I had accomplished. And now it was time to part with some of the items. I carefully selected items to be boxed and saved, perhaps one day to go through again…and well, for the others. I neatly placed them in Hefty Cinch sacks, tied a knot at the top of the bag and dropped them down the incinerator shoot.

Sometimes you need to get rid of the old to make way for the new.

Smoke Signals

Smoke Signals

“So it’s kinda like electroshock therapy,” I asked the woman on the other end of the phone before I booked my appointment.

Her answer was a resounding “NO”, but I still wasn’t convinced.

As a moderate smoker (a couple a day), I decided it was about time to become a non-smoker (maybe one every few weeks). With M’s prodding and my parent’s constant stream of disapproving rants, I started to consider kicking the habit for good. It was a habit which began in college. Smoking was as popular as flannel shirts and ripped Levis in Ann Arbor in the mid-nineties. And now, just like those outdated fashion statements, it is time to update my sensibilities.

My friend Grace and had recently heard about a new technique in the war against nicotine that was touted on Good Morning America. “You should try it,” she said. “It is acupuncture done with lasers.” A few Google searches later, I found my way to Anne Penman’s website where they boast of their 80% success rate.

Located in Cherry Hill, NJ – this tiny house which sits off of Route 70 houses the Anne Penman Center. Plastic banners hung like Christmas decorations from the roof and on poles in the front yard promising the panacea to quitting smoking and losing weight. I was skeptical that these lawn ornaments over vinyl siding offered anything but false hope to those with a credit card and desperation.

“Hi, I’m here for an appointment for electrocution,” I joked to the woman behind the desk who saw no humor in my comment. Without cracking a smile, she handed me a clipboard full of papers which I needed to read and sign.

I chicken scratched my name through the stack, ignoring the required reading. I had decided upon looking at the waiting room that this was akin to a bikini wax and not a medical appointment. I handed the papers back to the technician and she proceeded to sit down in one of the club chairs in the waiting area.

“You should be very proud of yourself for coming here today,” she started. “The first step in a non-smoking life is the hardest, but we are going to try and make this process as painless as possible.” Less painless than a bikini wax, I hope.

She rambled on about the benefits of a smoke free life. Using her story as the example: Nannie was a 2 pack a day smoker for 30 years who was saved HALLELUAH by the miracle of lasers after many failed attempts by more traditional means. Her voice was still that of a smoker, thick and musty like an old house attic’s air. She showed me a jar filled with sludge, a molasses like black tar substance that represented one year of smoking hugged the insides of the glass jar. “In the first few weeks after you quit, you may develop a chest cold which is very painful. It is your lungs healing. Also you will sweat out the nicotine which is trapped in your body and your clothing will be stained yellow. You may experience a metallic taste in your mouth, but this is all how your body starts to repair itself. It’s normal.”

“You should do breathing exercises,” she continued. “Take in clear air with deep inhalations and then release.” She illustrated by example. “You need to drink 8 glasses of water a day, take Vitamin C and chew on Cinnamon sticks, these help suppress cravings.”

I nodded my head, expressing my understanding.

She continued talking from what seemed like a very ill-conceived script from which she did not waver. “Did you know that arsenic, benzene and rat poison are just some of the things which you inhale in a cigarette.”

“Wow, no. But those are also the ingredients in Cheerios,” I snapped back with some off color yet needed humor after a half hour of cancer, tumor and emphysema talk.

“Really?” she said perplexed. “I have Cheerios every morning.” Nannie truly looked worried.

No dumbass, I was kidding; I thought, amazed that anyone would believe that line of BS or even respond to it.

“Now you can go outside and have the last cigarette of your life,” she said and pointed towards the front door. I stood outside on the stoop and smoked the cigarette as cars whizzed by the giant signs which lauded the sure fire cure to quit smoking…..and me, with a plume of smoke around me. They really should consider using the back driveway for the “last cigarette rites”.

Back inside, my nerves soothed by nicotine, we complete the 45 minutes of “Talking Therapy” which was like lecture by a high school principal who caught kids smoking in the boys’ room. “Are you ready for the laser now?” she asked as she showed me to a back room.

Enya played over the speakers and I was instructed to make myself comfortable in the over-stuffed reclining chair. Nannie handed me a pair of futuristic looking sunglasses to protect my eyes from the laser. The process was quick, painless and simple….and I was pretty sure, useless.

She used a laser-light pen and gently dabbed pressure points in my ears, on my nose and on my wrist. I emerged twenty minutes later…cured of my addiction.

Well, not exactly.

Two treatments and one week later, I can credit willpower for my success. I have had a few cigarettes - here and there – at a wedding where everyone was smoking, out for drinks with some friends….I am not 100% smoke free, but I haven’t had any during the day nor do I crave any. While I won’t completly disparage the laser as pointless or credit Cinnamon candy as a miracle, I think it comes down to mind over matter.... as it really is with anything in life.

Or as this case may be, mind over laser beam.

OPP (Other People's Problems: Heavy Lifting)

OPP: Heavy Lifting

Like some movies such as Star Wars and Rocky, franchises develop and epic sagas are born.

It seems “Bill Richfuck” strikes again.

While I was pumping iron with my trainer during my weekly weightlifting session at Crunch Gym on 58th and 2nd Avenue, we prattled on about clothing, shopping and the state of affairs on the Upper East Side, trying to distract me from the task at hand. Pam went on to tell me about her friend who is using Jdate.

“My friend just had the oddest date,” she said as I huffed and puffed balancing myself on a medicine ball, my abs burning in pain as I contracted every muscle in my core.

“She got an email from this girl who wanted to set her up with some guy she knew,” my trainer continued. “The girl went on in the email to talk up this guy – he’s successful, rich, handsome, a magnate of industry.”

I listened as I tried to do a push up while balancing with both arms on the ball.

“So, my friend agreed to be set up and she went out with him,” Pam kept talking and I kept my balance. “They met at Caviar Russe for drinks early after work last week. He suggested the place; I think he is regular there or something.”

As she said this, it clicked in my mind “Bill Richfuck”! It had to be the same person. Even with the few details she had shared, how many single guys are running around the Manhattan dating field using Caviar Russe as their club house? I began to think about Keri’s run in with this vile creature and wondered if Pam’s friend suffered the same fate.

Not being able to catch my breath right away and jump in with my assumption, Pam continued with the story. “He offered her a gift certificate for a $1000 to any store she wanted if she brought him four other girls he could date.”

I rolled myself off the ball and onto the floor and motioned for her to wait while I caught my breath and get out the words which were being pushed down by the 30lbs of weight I was precariously balancing while simultaneously rolling my body down the medicine ball.

“No fucking way,” I said a bit winded. “My friend went out with this guy. I am sure it is the same one. He crammed a $1000 into her handbag at the end of the night and told her to buy some new shoes and lose the underwear for their next date…which of course never happened since it was apparent this guy was one sick dude.”

After we connected the dotted lines and confirmed in fact, this was the same perverse individual, Pam tried to recall the second hand information for me. My curiosity piqued, my mental scratchpad filled with notes.

“My friend totally was not into him. She tried to get out of there early and jumped into a cab outside the restaurant. He proceeded to jump in behind her. He was relentless,” my trainer continued as we moved on to the circuit training machines.

“He was on his way to another date at the Carlyle Hotel. He told her he goes on at least three dates a night,” Pam said.

After an hour of an intense workout and comparing our second hand tall tales of Bill Richfuck and his continued battery of the women on the Upper East dating scene, one thing was very clear: even the most brutal workout and taxing day in the gym isn’t nearly as grueling as one night on the single’s scene with Bill Richfuck still out there. You need to do some heavy lifting to shovel the lines of bullshit that this town feeds you.

A Tight Squeeze

When the cowboys sing of wide open spaces, and home on the range, they are obviously unfamiliar with the cramped and tiny spaces with which we urban cowboys contend.

“Move over,” I pushed M the other night as he was deep in REM sleep. Somehow in the three hours since we had gone to bed, M had usurped most of the bed as he lay sprawled across horizontally and I clung to the 3 inches of mattress left before I plunged off the side.

“What?” he said groggily, ignoring my request and drifting peacefully back off to sleep. The air conditioner upstairs had stopped working correctly and I keep neglecting to call maintenance to have the repairmen come and fix it, so it coughed out dribs and drabs of cold air while making the noise of an airplane jet engine. I lay awake listening to the cacophony of sounds unable to get comfortable on my postage square share of the bed.

Frustrated, I grabbed a pillow and headed downstairs to the sofa. Chief was stretched out almost taking up the entire length of the couch. “Chief,” I whispered into his floppy ear, “Move.” He ignored me. Realizing I could outsmart this 200lb mass of brainless matter, I dug a Scooby Snack out of a box in the kitchen.

“Hey buddy, want a treat?” I asked him as his ears perked up and I got his attention. “Come here,” I said luring him off the sofa and onto the floor where he devoured the treat in one bite. While he was busy combing the rug for fallen crumbs, I took over his pre-warmed spot and closed my eyes. I settled into the plush faux suede of the cushions and flipped the pillow over for the cool side leaving Chief to find a spot on the floor.

Within in minutes, I felt hot air blowing on my face and smelled what could only be described as rotting fish. I opened my eyes and Chief was standing over me, a string of drool precariously close to dripping on my chin. “Chief, go lie down,” I instructed him pointing to an area on the carpet he had already marked with drool stains. I was not giving up my sofa to a dog. This was one battle where his size wasn’t giving him the advantage. I am a smart, college educated girl, and I can easily outwit this 4 legged creature.

He didn’t budge. At first he tried to manipulate me with his sad puppy dog eyes, quietly staring at me as if to plead for his soft spot on the sofa. “Go away,” I whispered to not wake up M. Instead, Chief sat down and continued to stare at me and I attempted to ignore him by feigning sleep. Then, a low thunder-like rumble shook me fully awake. Agitated that I wasn’t paying attention to his plight, Chief growled his discontentedness. If he was a normal size pooch, we could share the sofa as I do with Ryder and Spinner (my parent’s dogs) who are Whippets and can easily curl themselves into a ball in a corner of the sofa. This Mongo oaf needs his own sofa, which he has, at M’s house. In my small 800 square foot one-room loft apartment there was no where to run from this beast, no sofa for him to call his own.

Finally, Chief had enough. He put his two front paws on the end of the sofa where my feet were and proceeded to climb up uninvited. He nudged my legs underneath the back cushions and stretched out on top of me, nearly crushing me with his mass. I contorted my body into a ball and managed to fall asleep in a position similar to the one I use to sleep in a coach seat on an airplane.

A few hours later, I woke up and slept walk to the kitchen for a bottle of Poland Springs. I stumbled back towards the couch in the darkness, tripping over Chief’s bone, my shoe and a misplaced chair.

“Ouch, fuck, ouch,” I screamed under my breath as I felt my way Helen Keller style back over to the living room area. My eyes adjusted to the dark, as I made it to the couch I could see the outline of the dog’s body. Chief had reclaimed the sofa, I believe, intentionally taking up as much as space as possible. “Chief, I am serious get down. Off the sofa!” I said as he ignored my pleas, closed his eyes and I swear, made a moaning noise of delight which would be his way of giving me the finger doggie style.

“Oh Chief, I have a treat for you,” I said attempting the same ploy he fell for earlier. I took the box of Scooby Snacks and shook it to make the rattling Pavlovian sound that would instinctively cause him to jump into motion. Not a movement. Not a flip of the tail, a bat of the eye; he lay motionless, content to bask in his victory over the sofa acquisition.

Fine, I thought, as I grabbed my pillow out from under his head and marched back upstairs to get in bed with M. At least he isn’t as rude or selfish as Chief was. I woke him up, “Move over,” I demanded.
“Huh?”

“Let me back in the bed.”

He slid over a few inches, leaving me enough room for me to squeeze in. In the morning, I woke up with a crimp in my neck, a pain in my back and Chief, the giant pain in my neck - with his head hanging off the side of the sofa, grinning ear to floppy ear with pleasure that he exited our battle victorious.

“We cannot live like this,” I said to M as he straightened his tie getting ready for work. “The amount of body weight in this apartment would crash some elevators. We have no doors, no space, no privacy and Chief seems think he is president.”

Between the enormity of my clothing and shoe collection and M’s minimal additions to my closet, we are bursting at the seams. The only tight squeeze in life which is acceptable, are jeans. This apartment has no spandex to allow for a big meal or bloating. It is time to move.

“Let’s start to look for a bigger place together,” M said as he picked up his briefcase and kissed me on the head.

It’s official now, we are moving in together. The hunt begins for a new home, home on the range….with enough room for Chief, the antelope and the deer to all play.

Well, that should be easy thing to find on the Upper East Side ;-)

Independence Day

Independence Day

Besides the long weekend and mass exodus from the city, the July 4th holiday weekend is always one of my favorite. The boom of fireworks exploding in the distance, the muffled cheers of beachgoers on Nantucket echoed in the night air, as I stuck with tradition yet again this year.

Standing on our deck behind our summer home, M, my parents and I stared up into the night’s sky watching the burst of colorful explosions light up the darkness with fury. The fogged had rolled –thick and damp – the turn of weather limiting the power and viewing of the show.

It had been a full four days already, filled with food, sun, tennis and a tour of the island with the windows rolled down in our old Jeep as the salty island air blew our sun bleached hair and newly bronzed skin. Tired from nothing but overfeeding and mid day naps, we gazed upwards with wine goblets in hand waiting for the clap of thunder followed by the slow drip of color which disintegrated into the blackness, leaving the sky as still and quiet as it began.

It was the first time I wasn’t alone on this holiday.

Our weekend excursion, despite flight hassles, lost luggage and some rain turned into an extended weekend vacation. Nantucket has been my island escape since childhood, since the days my parents piled my brother and I into the back of the car, plying us with travel board games, walkmans and Mad Libs to keep us entertained while they fought the traffic on I95.

I detested these family trips: 7 hours stuck in the car with my parents – long before the days of cell phones, I was unable to converse with my friends about important life issues such as what outfit to wear the first day of school or what friendship bracelet was traded the last day of camp. Back then my parents were un-cool and Nantucket was some isolated fishing village filled with male oddities in pink pants and fashion atrocities who wore whale accessories and too much pastel.

But both the island and I matured. Nantucket grew from a sleepy island of local fisherman to the pinnacle of escapism for the Upper East Side jet-setting set. My parents were ahead of the eight-ball on this one.

“Are you kidding me?” M asked looking out the window at Logan Airport. “That’s more like a short bus with wings than an airplane,” he said as he inspected the flying apparatus we were about to board. The six-seater Cessna prop planes that make the run between Boston and the Islands are no bigger than an average sized SUV. I assured him that these Wright Brother contraptions were safer than the mega-sized jumbo jets which make the cross-Atlantic voyages. I pulled this piece of information and statistics straight from my ass (where most of my knowledge and witty insights are stored). I figured once I got him on the plane, there were no emergency exits and he had no where to run.

Once on terra firma again, M seemed to lull into vacation mode. I was hoping he would fall in love with this island paradise as I have, as I have with him. Granted it took me years to appreciate the silence of wind over the crash of New York sirens, I hoped he would be quicker study.

When our bags were unpacked, I packed M up in the car and drove into town. Town being a five block city center hub of small quaint shops which specialize in scrimshaw and the traditional Nantucket Red pants. We wandered down the cobblestones streets, browsing in the craftsman shops; M purchased a pair of Whale flip flops with my prodding. “I have an entire wardrobe just for here,” I explained. The Lilly Pulitzer dresses and ultra preppy green and pink items which would be laughed out of downtown fashionable Manhattan eatery remain locked away in my closet space in Nantucket. I was glad to see M getting into the flavor of the island, his Vineyard Vines flip flops clicking away down the wharf as he wiped the remains of the lobster roll from his chin.

Having come to this island for 20 years now, it took until 2 years ago that I had any island friends, having to import playmates from New York. Unlike the Hamptons or the Jersey Shore where it is nearly impossible to go thirty feet without seeing someone from the gym, or camp or college – Nantucket remained an oasis far from the populated and popular getaway locales.

“Carrie? Is that you?” I heard someone ask from across the bar. M and I had just finished dinner with my parents and opted to go out and grab a drink rather than drift off to sleep before Saturday Night Live even began. I turned to see Lisa, a friend and fellow book club member from the city.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her as if she had unearthed my secret garden.

She and her boyfriend had sailed up here on his boat. “Is this the M I have read about,” she asked as I introduced her to M and the letters to follow. We shared some drinks with them before we grew too exhausted to stand or drink – the three block walk home from the hottest new place on Nantucket LoLa seeming like a hike from Tribeca to the Upper East. Paying our bill, it became very clear that this shanty fishing village was entirely gone. $23 for champagne, we may have been far from the Pentop Bar at the Peninsula, but the prices on Nantucket surpassed those on Fifth Avenue.

As the week drew to a close and our vacation merely became pictures on a memory card, I was happy to be at my house, at home with M. This is a holiday about tradition – for me, it is the tradition of returning to this island paradise each year to share the weekend with my family, with my friends…in a place where I am reminded on change and time. This also is a holiday about freedom and independence, as the parade in town that day celebrated. Red, white and blue streamers blowing through the air – as children in whale skirts and pink headbands waved at the old cars with costumed Uncle Sams. These are traditions – old ones, repeated and replicated each year. And there, that night, I was happy to renew my traditions and this time, this year, to be just a little dependent on someone….Freedom and Independence, in some senses of the words, are just a little bit overrated just like the drinks here are little bit over priced.

Death by Stiletto

There is no way I could let this news story pass without commenting on it.

I always knew wearing stiletto shoes in Manhattan can be dangerous. Between the potholes, the grates on the sidewalk and the sheer difficulty of finding balance in pointy skyscraper shoes, this fashion statement conceivable could send one to the hospital with injuries.

But now it seems there is a new weapon in Manhattan: the Stiletto!

Forget knives and gun-toting bouncers, now clubgoers must concern themselves with the footwear of fellow bar patrons. The New York Post reported that two female patrons at Corner 51 in Midtown Manhattan got into a brawl last night which led to one girl stabbing the other with her stiletto. The victim, Vicki Herrara reportedly received stitches after the brutal attack. The perpetrator, 28 year old Jessica Miller could face up to 25 years in prison.

Now call me old fashioned, but whatever happened to the good ole knock-down-drag-out cat fights? I guess I need to keep my heels and my nails sharpened when I head out into the war zone of the Upper East Side bar scene.