Vacation

I’m going on vacation folks! I’d do the “guest blogger” thing if I thought I had enough readers to notice I was I gone!

I’m so excited about my vacation to Germany! I’m going to be visiting one of my bestest friends ever who lives in Germany and I usually only get to see for a day every year or so when she's in Atlanta or we are both in Florida for a holiday. We’ll be traveling all over Germany visiting lots of castles and museums in Burbach, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Nuernberg, Munich, Bodensee, Zugspitze, Cologne, Frankfurt and Mosel. I doubt we’ll hit everywhere we planned, but I’ll be sure to tell you all about it and share my pictures when I return.

It will be weird to be blogging and internet free for such a long time; I’m sure I’ll break down and Twitter a little.

Jumpsuits are back!

I saw the weirdest thing walking back from the gallery walk I did on Saturday. You know when people line up for a group shot and the photographer is in front of them? Well they lined up like that across the sidewalk but then turned to the right just a little so their faces were toward the woman with the camera who wasn’t in front of them but in the street. I stopped walking so they could finish and stared at them with a perplexed look on my face who taught this woman to take photographs and why wasn’t anyone saying anything? There is no way everyone even could have gotten everyone in the picture that way, it was weird.

Anyway the gallery walk was fun I had no idea there were so many little galleries in my neighborhood. I’ll have to do another walk like that on my own sometime and check more of them out there were 49 galleries participating and we only made it to about 7 of them. We walked for 3 hours and I didn’t even realize how much we’d walked until I looked at the time (yay exercise). At one gallery we met one of the artists, Vladimir Kush in person who does amazing surreal, metaphorical works, he not only paints but also makes sculptures, and pen & ink drawings it’s all really amazing to look at.

Sunday I went to a friends annual clothes swap party/brunch and let me start off by saying that my hash brown casserole was the hit of the event, everyone loved it! There were 22 girls at this event and it was a mad house to say the least. If you’ve never been to a clothes swap a person holds up the and clothes reads the label, size, etc. and you raise your hand if you want it and the first person noticed gets the item, and someone can second it incase it doesn’t fit, but it becomes a free for all no matter how you look at it. Then there is a “try on” session and if something doesn’t fit you throw it back out for the masses. This year there was so much stuff we had to take a couple of breaks and by the end my friend was barely holding things up before just sticking it in the donation bag we were THAT tired of looking at clothes. And if you know girls, and shopping and free clothes well you’d be surprised to learn that 4 hours of mimosas, brunch food and fighting for clothes does actually get old believe it or not!

I didn’t think I’d find anything with my recent weight gain but I went home with a pretty big bag and when I started pulling stuff out to hang up last night I was surprised at my luck. I got a lovely yellow vintage winter coat that I’m still on the fence about; I don’t want to look like a banana after all. I got a black cashmere turtleneck, ski pants, 2 scarves, a formal dress with its tags on (that I might wear to City Wendy’s wedding reception) a Diane Von Furstenburg jean skirt and a couple other things I can’t really remember. One of the entertaining things my friend likes to do is take the craziest items people bring and put them on, this year there was not one but three, THREE jumpsuits! Who knew people had held on to things for so long! The party was a great time maybe I’ll get inspired and throw one myself some time.

Estranged

I’m writing this post about a boy. Not just a boy but a friend who was a best friend and now we are estranged. When I moved to NYC I didn’t know anyone. Well I knew a couple people I used to work with at JP Morgan only they lived here and I lived in Atlanta so its not like we were bestest buds. Anyway, one day I approached our receptionist and pathetically asked her to hangout with me, and luckily she agreed.

She invited me to her roommate’s birthday party. Her roommate was a guy who for several years would be my best friend we’ll call him Stephen. Stephen was funny and charming and I hung out with him most of that night. The next day I asked her if she thought he’d come over help me hang pictures and hook up my stereo (yes I’m the girl who is completely lost by wires). She said he had a tool box and loved to do boy stuff like that. He came over we hooked all the stuff up, hung pictures and I took him out for dinner and from then on we were inseparable, I don’t think I ever even hung out with his roommate again.

I met most of my friends in NYC through Stephen and there wasn’t anywhere we didn’t get invited to together. He is blond like me and I used to drag girls over to him pretending to be his sister and if we were out and I ever heard him say something like, “Mom called today…” then I knew a girl was around that he wanted to meet. He was fun and crazy, he was a huge jokester, we knew everything about each other, we traveled together, we met each others families and it wasn’t long before people started asking why we weren’t a couple. We had actually drunkenly kissed once back when we first started hanging out and never talked about it or did it again. When asked I would say neither one of us were attracted to blonds, or that we didn’t want to ruin our friendship which all were true, but also I knew he was a bit of a commitment phobe and when relationships started getting to serious he cheated or treated the girl bad so she’d break it off. We had a lot of discussions about that but I think for me I didn’t want to be the next broken hearted girl in his wake and not be friends anymore.

One night we were all out for Halloween and he left the party with a friend of mine. No biggie, I left with a hottie myself. But suddenly this girl started joining us every where we went. Most of the time he didn’t call her until after midnight and she always dropped whatever she was doing to meet up and hook up with him. I wasn’t jealous or anything just tired she was always around and kind of embarrassed that she didn’t seem to have enough respect for herself to want him to actually take her on a date.

This all went on for awhile until she and I had a falling out on my birthday. I had reservations for dinner and she said she was coming but didn’t show up, or call or anything. Apparently she’d told Stephen she had other plans (rude) at 1am she called, him not me to see if he was still out because she wanted to hook up with him. I was mad, I mean she couldn’t bother to tell me she wasn’t coming and then she called him and not me, I told him to tell her he’d meet her at her place, for her not to bother coming by then. All she would have had to do the next day was apologize, you know tell me why she said she was coming but didn’t. But Stephen told her I was upset and she decided I was in the wrong because I didn’t want her to show up after 1am. She refused to apologize and she refused to ever speak to me again. I tried to get Stephen to sort things out but apparently she would not talk to me until I apologized. Whatever the whole thing became much bigger than it ever should have but it put Stephen in a bad spot because he had to hang out with us both but not together (which was ridiculous but how she demanded things be). Stephen begged me to apologize which I of course refused to do. In the end she didn’t want him to spend any time with me and of course she won over me because, well they were having sex after all.

He and I had several talks and fights over the situation and ended up seeing less and less of each other. He ended up dating her for close to four years and during that time I not only lost my best friend, but mutual friends and family felt uncomfortable, some choose sides and I spent a lot of time broken hearted about being tossed to the side. I do know that she’d become increasingly jealous of our friendship and had asked him to break it off. In the 4 years they were together we didn’t ever completely loose touch, we emailed, sometimes we even secretly met for dinner but mostly we were out of each others lives, and we still are.

I have to admit that one day about a year or two ago I remember I was walking around thinking about the whole situation when I stopped walking and stood in the middle of the street and thought, “Oh my God I think I do like him as more than a friend!” I have no idea when that happened, I have no idea why it took him being out of my life for me to realize it, I have no idea if he’d ever felt the same way. The realization of it being too late felt overwhelming as if everyone else saw it all along and I never did. I’d had chances, he’d taken me in his arms and slow danced with me after dinner once, but I felt that it was “too soon after his recent breakup”. Once when he’d been drinking and I put him in a cab at the end of the night he opened the door and asked me to come home with him and I laughed and kissed his cheek and told him to be safe. I’d blown it, by being too cautious to take the chance and lose our friendship, I lost him and our friendship anyway.

Last Saturday I was out with a couple of friends on the UWS. We were talking about where to go next and a place called Peter’s came up. Stephen and I were regulars at Peter’s, everyone knew us there. I told them the whole story. Ten minutes later we walked into another bar right next door and there was Stephen. I was blown away! I was so amazed and I turned to my friends and said this is the guy I was just telling you about! He was with a cute girl who was exactly his “type”, she told me they used to work together. I asked him about his girlfriend and he said they’d broken up, and a few too many vodka’s made my next comment escape before I could think about it, “Why haven’t you called me?” He looked taken aback and said it had just been a month (A MONTH!) and he hadn’t been going out much. We chatted a bit more, I talked to his friend, he talked to mine and then they left for a party and we left to go to Peter’s. Part of me feels like maybe this is it, maybe this is our chance and part of me thinks that window closed long ago. The lest I can hope for is to try to salvage some part of our friendship now and I have no idea how.

A very scary night

Saturday night I ended up staying in instead of going to a birthday party underneath the Brooklyn bridge as planned. At 3:30am I was rudely awakened by a door slam, I figured it was just a drunk coming home. And hey I’ve been there right? So I rolled over to resume sleep. But I kept hearing door noises, so I sat up to listen more closely and the door noises continued. So I got up and walked slowly down the stairs. That’s when I realized that the door noises were coming from MY DOOR. My heart started beating a mile a minute and I walked slowly towards the door as I watched it and the hinges shake violently. I peered out the peep hole and saw a large black man; I took a step back and tried to breathe. Then without thinking I screamed at the top of my lungs, “GET AWAY FROM MY DOOR!!” The shaking stopped, and a reply came. “Oh, I thought this apartment was empty.” Then he rambled away and I stood at my door visibly shaking.

I grabbed my phone and called my mother, in FL, clearly confused. She answered the phone and asked what was wrong. “SOMEONE JUST TRIED TO BREAK INTO MY APARTMENT.” I cried. I was shaking uncontrollably now. I told her what happened and what he’d said. She told me to hang up and call the police. “Are you sure?” I asked, I didn’t want to bother them maybe it was a worker who had the wrong apartment. My mother was silent as she let my words seep in. “Oh, obviously no one is coming to work at 3:30am on a Sunday”, I realized. “Right!” she said, “and he may be trying more successfully to break into another apartment right now. Now call the police!”

I called my Super first, wanting to confirm that maybe it was a worker and that one of my biggest fears hadn’t just happened. He didn’t pick up, and I vaguely recall leaving him a message telling him how scared I was. Then I called the police. I’ve never actually called 911 before it all seemed so surreal. The police arrived in less than 10 min and as I stood in the doorway shaking telling them what happened, two more police arrived. Are you sure it wasn’t a drunk at the wrong apartment? I gave them my description again and his clear un-drunk reply to my screaming at him and they were off. They split up and began searching the building. When they returned they told me he was gone, and that they had searched every floor including the basement and the roof. They assured me I’d be fine. I wanted them to come in and hang out until I stopped shaking or the sun came up or both. But they tried to reassure me again and left. I put a chair in front of the door. It was too short to go under the doorknob so all it would have succeeded in doing was making noise and alerting me that an intruder was indeed inside, I didn’t feel safer.

I called my mother and made her talk to me for an hour on the phone. She spent most of it wondering what kind of alarm she should buy for my door. I got off the phone and turned to Twitter hoping someone was up at 4:30am that I could communicate with, but no one was. Then I sent an update on my Facebook page saying I was wide awake and freaked out because someone tried to break into my apartment. And someone did respond to me. It was one of those people that had asked to be my friend that I didn’t know. He actually offered that I could come over or call him if I needed to. I was overwhelmed that a stranger reached out like that. I even briefly considered going however that would have meant A) going outside alone and B) going to a strange man’s apartment. I decided to sit up and watch TV. I finally fell asleep around 6:30am.

The next morning I started thinking about what could have happened to me the night before. How different the day could have unfolded for me. How I could have been raped and killed in my very own bed. How my little safe haven from crazy NYC had suddenly made me feel vulnerable to the outside world. That crime and terror had touched my life and I sat numbly for several hours until I decided I needed to get out of my apartment and out of my head for awhile. So I called a friend and met her at the movies. It was a good break to get outside and back in the real world and I felt fine again, until it was dark outside. Earlier I had asked my neighbors if they’d seen or heard anything, and unfortunately they hadn’t. Alone in the dark I became terrified again. What if he came back? What if he got in? I finally fell asleep with the lights on around 2am.
The first thing I did when I woke up this morning was call locksmiths. The third one I called said the magic words, “Top of the line lock system.” So $300.00 poorer I now have 2 additional locks on my door. I know it’s a lot and I’ll be eating romen noodles until my next payday but really how much would you pay for a piece of mind. The new key for my top of the line lock has a computer chip in it. It looks really high tech and I feel like I may be able to sleep much safer in my bed tonight.