emilyrems.com

Me at 9 am on my birthday

I can’t belive my birthday is already half over, but so far it’s been awesome! I rolled out of bed and my sweet boyfriend muttered a happy birthday to me even though he was still asleep. Then I fed the cat, grabbed a cab, and took myself to my favorite restaurant in the world, Shopsin’s, for a decadent birthday breakfast. While I chowed down on mac ‘n’ cheese pancakes, vegan sausage, and coffee, I got to sit back and watch the restaurant’s infamous proprietor Kenny curse a blue streak to a young mother who worked there and her toddler. Sometimes he would stop to ask the  mom inappropriate questions like “Do your nipples get hard when your daughter feels you up?” and stuff like that. After he cooked my food, Kenny’s son Zach came out and started juggling cabbages, and the toddler sang happy birthday to me, and Kenny told me he thought my mag was cool. What more could I ask from my special morning? On the cab ride to work, I got birthday well-wishes and advice on aging from my Pakistani cab driver. Then there were flowers on my desk from my boss Laurie, and Amy put Morrissey on the office stereo in my honor and my mom called and sang me Happy Birthday, which marked the first time I’ve ever heard her sing in my whole life. I got ecards from my parents and my BFF Johanna, and a super-sweet email from gay boyfriend Dan, and lots of well-wishes on Facebook, and a gift certificate to Amazon from my college roomies Anya and Alpha, and even a call from my brother! Overall pretty swell. Lots to be thankful for this year, and still lots to do before people show up for my B-day bash tomorrow night. Thanks to everyone for making me feel special. And big ups to New York for being such a kickass and welcoming home to me today. What have I done to deserve such good fortune? (If you’re Jewish and you just read that, feel free to spit in the sky for me.)

Yesterday, Omar sent me a link to this interview done a couple of years ago with one of our most beloved profs from Emerson College, a cranky, demanding, inspiring poet named Bill Knott. I took his workshops in ‘96 and ‘97, weathering the storms of his outright disdain, striving to please him with a flash of something that could pass as a poem . He taught me to respect the rigors of form, and he never coddled his students or couched his words. Unfortunately, this sometimes resulted in aspiring poets (mostly girls) running from his classroom crying after one of his critiques. But that girl was never me. I wanted to know what he thought. I wanted to get better. And most importantly, I trusted his judgment. Even though I was somewhat terrified of him, I would sometimes ask him questions or borrow poetry books from him during his office hours. Once I even mentioned to him that as my senior thesis project in directing, I would be putting on a production of my stage adaptation of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at the end of the semester. I didn’t expect him to care. I was just trying to show him what kind of reading I was getting into. But when opening night finally rolled around, there he was, in the front row, wearing a sweater full of holes and glasses held together by a safety pin. Looking back, I realize that seeing him there in the audience has become one my happiest memories of college. Even now, I can’t believe that he actually cared enough to stop by, and to tell me afterwards that he thought my play was “interesting.”

Which brings me to the interview I mentioned up top. What goes down in this lengthy Q&A with Bill Knott is probably one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read. Ever. In it, he basically details all the ways in which he’s a failure, both in life and in art. He discounts everything he’s ever done. It’s a monument of self-loathing. I actually almost cried when reading it, especially when I got to the part where he says:

“I regret everything I had to do with poetry in my life. My involvement with it has brought nothing but unhappiness and bitterness.”

Or how about this one…

“Maybe I could be thankful to have survived the unhappiness of the past if the unhappiness of the present wasn’t overwhelming me. I’d be happy to pay the price of the experience if the resulting poems were worth it, but they aren’t.”

I’m feeling clobbered by the whole interview because it’s just further evidence that a lifetime of dedication to your art can leave you just as empty as you would be if you had never even tried. Maybe even more so. He’s wrong. His poems are not worthless. And as a teacher, he’s improved the work of literally thousands of writers. But I doubt he cares enough about what his former-students think of him to let that be any comfort. It would be a real shame if he finally got the recognition he deserves after his death, which at this point seems likely. I think he deserves it now.

My most frequently recurring dream by far is what I refer to as “the packing dream.” These dreams vary widely, but they always involve me having to pack a small bag and leave somewhere very quickly, presumably never to return again. Failure to complete this talk will result in dire consequences, so this dream is always a nightmare, and often causes me to wake sitting bolt upright, sweating in the night.

Last night, I thought I was having this dream, but instead it morphed into something else. Something I’ll call, for lack of a better title, “the packing dream 2.0.” In this dream I was in a house I didn’t recognize, and LCF came bursting in to the room where I was and said he was in trouble and that we had to move to Europe right now. Like, NOW! I didn’t ask any questions, I just stuffed whatever random shit was lying on the floor into a small duffel and headed out with him to the airport. This is the first time ever, having suffered through this dream probably hundreds of times, that I haven’t agonized over what to pack. I honestly didn’t even look at what I was packing. I just grabbed what was within reach, and when the bag was full, I was done.

The dream then fast-forwarded, as mine often do, and I found myself in Europe. No country in particular, just Europe. The first thing LCF and I did when we arrived was go, luggage and all, to a tiki bar where a mostly naked girl was flirting with the male customers, and where our English-speaking waitress was flirting with LCF. Between flirtatious interludes with the waitress, LCF made sure to tell me that I was awesome for leaving with him on such short notice, and told me he couldn’t have done it without me. But all the flirting in the bar was making me feel awkward and ugly and scummy after the long trip, so I told him I was going up to our apartment to change. “Our apartment” was a tiny little tenement room above the tiki bar with a shared bathroom down the hall. I opened my duffel, and realized I had only packed the most useless and embarrassing clothes from my past (I won’t go into detail, but a couple items were procured at the Maryland Renaissance Festival in the early ’90s. ‘Nuff said.) Literally, there was nothing in the whole bag I could use. I was left with only the scummy clothes on my back. I felt tired. Overwhelmed. I went to find the bathroom down the hall and passed an African woman with braids whose kids were roughhousing in front of my room. I found the bathroom, locked myself inside, and looked outside the bathroom window at the dirty, smoggy, nondescript city below. I felt hollow. Empty. My life was now a blank slate and my mind was also a blank. I was about to use the toilet, when I woke up and had to make a dash for the bathroom.

Saturday was a marathon. I hung with Min and Matt and their wee bebes in Central Park, jetted up to Harlem to kick party prep into overdrive, helped Errin throw the party of the century, played drums at the party of the century until the cops came to shut us down (then waited a few minutes for the cops to leave and commenced playing drums again -shhhhhh), witnessed my man’s electrifying return to the stage as he busted out an incredible acoustic mini-set after Royal Pink played, unwittingly caused a cashier to undergo a complete psychotic break at Cosmic Cantina around four am by attempting to order a deluxe veggie burrito to-go even though that item was not officially on “the new menu,” the list goes on and on, till the break of muthafuckin’ day.

But despite all these varied and remarkable experiences, nothing came close to the landmark event I witnessed post-burrito, when LCF actually, truthfully, and without Williamsburgian irony, slipped on a banana peel. For Real. On Third Avenue. Never, have I ever in a million years, considered that the iconic slipping on a banana peel gag would ever make it’s way organically into my everyday life. But there it was! I had to snap the pic above just to prove to myself later that I wasn’t dreaming. Once it was established that LCF and his guitar were unharmed, that shit was hi-LARIOUS! I guess those olde-tymie-comic-cliche-craftspeople really knew what they were doing after all!

This just in from Min, who’s coming up this weekend with the whole gang for some Little Mermaid on Broadway action:

“I printed out a picture of us from your last visit and stuck it on the
fridge, and Simone pointed to it, and said ‘Emily!!!’ (without any
prompting from me). Pretty cool, eh? Totally unexpected.”

Way unexpected! Especially considering I only ever met the precious lil’ Simone just that one time (as documented above in a photo taken by her big sister Audrey). Mighty impressive. I’m sure her first full sentence will be something along the lines of “Wanna see my MENSA card?” I’m psyched to get my mitts on Min & Co. this weekend too. No time like the present to strongarm my way into that coveted Auntie Mame position.

Speaking of Auntie Mame, that broad knew how to party and so do I, (despite what previous posts may have led you to believe). Come see for yourself this weekend as the laydeez of Royal Pink throw our very first Super-Deluxe-House-Party-A-Go-Go!

Because of a weird little health issue, today I had my first introduction to a space-age gadget known as an MRI machine. For anyone who’s never had to have an MRI before, the contraption is a big white plastic thing with a hole cut out of the middle for you to lay in, so when you’re inside, it feels like you’re being abducted by aliens via a weird, white, plastic cocoon. Once you’re in the thing, it makes an impressive variety of super-loud, jarring sounds that require the use of earplugs, and the whole experience takes a surprisingly long time. While I was encased in the latest in medical technology, here were the two things I kept thinking about:

1. My Secret Agent Loverman Errol Morris opened his TV series First Person with the story of Temple Grandin, an Autistic woman who designs humane slaughterhouses. The reason I was thinking about this in the tube, was that at the beginning of the program, she shows how she made a “squeeze machine” designed to contain and calm cows before slaughter. She demonstrated how she tried it out on herself, and explained that something about being immobilized and gently squeezed by the machine (see above), calmed her own sensitivity to external stimuli. I got into thinking about it as I slid further into the tube, realized that it was kind of cozy in there, and started relaxing until my mind wandered to thoughts of being prepared for slaughter. That’s when I forced myself to think of something else, which brings me to…

2. Kingdom Hospital!  Am I the only person who watched that Stephen King series about the haunted hospital? With the amazing Diane Ladd starring as the psychic who keeps faking illness so she can get admitted to the hospital in order to make contact with the restless ghost of a ye olde creepie waife girle? That shit was priceless, and I remember there was a very suspenseful scene involving Diane, an MRI machine, and angry, restless, supernatural activity. Thinking about that episode made me wish I was still thinking about being turned into hamburger, but it was too late. I was already thinking about ghosts. Ghooooooosts.

And that’s when the lab technician’s voice came through some intercom inside the tube asking if I was OK. But I didn’t know there WAS an intercom inside the tube. So I almost soiled my gown. But I didn’t really. I was just startled or whatevs. You get the picture. Stay tuned for more true tales of neurotic tomfoolery as I continue my regional (haunted?) hospital tour.

It’s hard to say exactly why I haven’t posted here in so long. Many exciting things have happened in the last three months. LCF and I went to Paris, where I modeled for Velvet D’Amour and hung out with my beloved pal Rufus, I turned another year older and had a party, I dragged LCF down to VA for his very first Passover with my fam, I finally made it out to Night of 1000 Stevies (The ultimate Stevie Nicks tribute party) with Karen, and I did all the other band and magazine and cooking and just living things that I normally do. But for some reason, I suddenly got shy about documenting my life. Not that I was afraid someone out there on Al Gore’s world-wide Inter-web would read it, but because I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t want to think about it (it being my life), and this shyness started permeating more than just my blog. I haven’t been as excited about going to parties and events. Sometimes even small gatherings with friends make me anxious (my clothes are stupid…what if I say something offensive?). Overall I’ve been quieter. More withdrawn. I’d like to say more introspective, but that would imply some sort of deep, intellectual goings-on that I don’t really feel are warranted. Anyway - today that seemed to lift a little. I started looking at my photos from the last three months and they made me smile, and I thought that maybe writing here again would give me something else to smile about if I decide to look back and read it some time in the future. Maybe in an especially troubling or isolated moment, I’ll be able to read something here and remember all the reasons why it’s a good idea to leave the house sometimes.

I’ve often accused our cat Xiola of using psychic mind control on us, (look into her evil eyes! I dare you!), but this most recent incident takes the catnip cake. For a while now, she’s been formally protesting something by crapping right in front of her cat box. Like, literally,  right in front, on the floor. And we’ve been doing everything we can to try and figure out what her deal is. We change and scoop the litter on the regular, we moved the box around to see if she needed a change of scenery, we changed the brand of litter, no dice. Then a couple nights ago, I had a very vivid dream.

In it, I was going on a job interview at the Smithsonian’s Modern Art Museum in  D.C., but for some reason, I had to take Xiola with me, which was very awkward. As I walked through the tunnels of the Smithsonian looking for the right room, I was hobbling around on high heels I couldn’t walk in, and was juggling my resume and cover letter, my coat, Xiola, who was perched on my shoulder, and her her cat carrier, which she loathes. When I finally got to the right room, I was informed that I would be called in shortly, so I had to stuff Xiola into her box and lock the little door, explaining that it would only be for a few minutes and then I would let her out. When I put her box on the ground though, I heard a little crackly voice that sounded just like her voice when she meows say:

“Get me out of here.”

I dropped to my knees on the floor in front of the cat carrier even though I was in fancy interview clothes and said, “Xiola! Did you just talk?”

“I said, get me the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks out of here,” she crackled again, then hissed menacingly at me through the bars.

This totally made me explode laughing, which seemed only to further piss her off. “Did you just say H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks?????” I asked her, almost crying I was laughing so hard. “Where did you even pick that up??? Who says that???”

“Just get me out of here!” she demanded, clearly tired of my shit. “I don’t like enclosed spaces.”

And that was the last thing I remembered before I woke up. I was still kind of laughing about it when I got out of bed to pee, but on the way to le toilette, I stopped for a minute in front of her litter box. Though she had grown up in Brooklyn with just a pan on the floor, the litter box I bought her when she moved in here has a little cover over it with a swinging door on it for privacy and odor control. But in my dream, she had specifically told me she doesn’t like enclosed spaces. So I just took the cover off the box to see what would happen.

Voila. No more protest craps on the floor. Xiola’s powers are so far-reaching and diabolical, she was actually able to invade my dreams to tell me in English what the issue was. Beware of our cat. She is always lurking, preparing to take over the world and make us all her slaves.

…This man. I interviewed him today about his amazing new movie. He was lovely. So brilliant and funny and fascinating to talk to. Made me fantasize about running off to join his research team so I could help him ferret out injustice wherever it lurks. Integrity gets me sprung.

Check this perfect pony poster The Dutchess of Pink made for our show on Saturday! Seriously - I’m obsessed with it.

I’ve often marvelled at food blogs and the people who painstakingly maintain them, occasionally thinking, These crafty bitches have too much time on their hands. But the more I try to teach myself how to cook, the more I find myself posessed with the urge to “style” my food before I eat it. Then once I’ve styled it, I show it to LCF, who very supportively says how pretty it is. But he says it in a way that lets me know that he won’t eat it, either because it has vegetables in it, or because I’m still so slow in the kitchen with my prep work that it takes me upwards of four hours to cook anything, so I’m usually shoving a plate in his face at midnight. Then I try to sit down to eat it, like with the above Ginger-Mango Tofu I cooked outta Vegan With A Vengeance last night, and am seized with the urge to preserve my project for posterity since it took so damn long. So I take a picture. And now I have all these pics of things like Vegan Mac ‘n’ Cheese from Skinny Bitch in the Kitch, and BBQ Pomegranate Tofu with Coconut Rice & Garlic Spinach from the aforementioned Vegan With A Vengeance…

plus these cupcakes I made from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, a book LCF’s mom gave me for X-mas.

So  - yeah. I guess I’m turning into one of those psychos who posts pics of the food they make on their blog. But don’t let that in any way lead you to believe that this means I have too much time on my hands. These were all completed amid a hail storm of swearing in the early morning hours. Am I making anyone hungry? It’s lonely cooking all this food just for myself. Well, except the cupcakes. LCF and my bandmates graciously agreed to help me out with those!

Sometimes in the winter, when it’s cold and wet and my ceiling’s leaking and the rent is due and the holidays are over and everyone is grouchy and tired and stressed and pissy out on the street, it can be easy to forget that this city is a little floating island of magic. But then there are days like yesterday:

I was hustling up 6th Avenue to get to band practice after work when I happened to glance inside the Chipotle on 6th and 22nd, and there, perched on a high stool, sitting with some dude, was Amanda Lepore in full makeup and perfect Barbie ponytail. Alas, I would have given my left tit to see her tackle a burrito with that giant red mouth, but she’s from space so she doesn’t have to eat.

She was just sitting there, looking bored. The most amazing thing was that the place was CROWDED and nobody was paying her no nevermind. I guess that’s one of the magical things about NY, that no matter how attention-grabbing a personage you may be, new yorkers are too self-absorbed to give a shit, so you can zone out at Chipotle all you want without causing a frenzy.

It does lead one to wonder though, what does a drama queen have to do to get a little attention around here?

I sprained my ankle on monday in a spectacular step aerobics accident, but my million-year-old doctor told me I should be OK to play the big gig at Luna Lounge with Royal Pink tomorrow if I rest it up until then. So I’ve been, you know, resting. As much as I’m capable of rest anyway. The cool thing is, the more I’ve rested, the more my usual onslaught of nightmares has seemed to mellow into just general vivid weirdness. Here’s an indicative little gem of a dream from this morning:

I was a teenager with lots or red hair wound around my head in elaborate braids like Princess Leia or somethng, and I was attending a sleepover camp with tons of other teenage girls. The camp was pretty unstructured, so the girls my age and I spent lots of time hanging out at a candy store run by Vinnie the Tampon Case guy who works on my floor in real life. In my dream, the candy store was incredible - super-colorful and stocked with thousands of different treats that Vinnie had made and designed wrappers for himself. Plus the Hell’s Angels were there too, who I guessed were Vinnie’s friends. We didn’t really eat the candy. Everyone, which included me, the teenage girls, the bikers and Vinnie, mostly just stood around shooting the shit, until Vinnie  dissappeared into the back of the store and came back with a big “bologna lasagna” for us to all eat in his formal dining room. It was gross-looking but also funny with lots of red tomato sauce and gooey cheese layered with tons of garish, pink bologna. The bikers ate it, but the teen girls were skeptical. Then Vinnie announced that he was about to launch his own cooking show, and that as his first recipe, he was going to make “Penguin Soup.” I was like, “What’s that?” And he went into the kitchen and came back with a big giant Vitamix blender with a big, live penguin inside.

He said “All you have to do is add some heavy cream to the penguin and blend!” The girls started freaking out and some of the bikers were like “No way man!” Vinnie dumped the cream over the penguin’s head and it ruffled it’s feathers. The girls screamed. The Hell’s Angels laughed. I started chanting “Penguin soup! Penguin soup!” over and over again, encouraging Vinnie to push the button. And that’s when I woke up, still chanting “Penguin soup!”

Maybe I’m not cut out to be a vegan after all…

Only 13 hours into 2008, I checked off another item from my life’s big “To-Do” list when I finally made it down to Coney Island Beach on new year’s day to swim in the Atlantic with Brooklyn’s famous Polar Bear Club. This year’s swim was a benefit for Camp Sunshine, a retreat for terminally ill kids and their families, so not only did I get to fulfill a dream, I also was able to scrape up enough pledge money to get a commemorative “Freezin’ for a Reason” T-shirt to mark the auspicious event. Big ups go out to LCF and Alison, who hauled their asses out to the ocean with me this morning, hangover (LCF) and all, to hold my coat and take my picture and wrap me in a towel and robe after I took the plunge. The ocean was a daunting 41 degrees, and running into it produced such a rush of adrenaline, I was hyper and euphoric for hours afterwards. A soon as I was submerged, I couldn’t stop laughing and screaming and there were hundreds of crazy people all around me doing that too - just jumping up and down, yelping and squawking and shaking all over. Men were holding their nuts, women were chasing little kids through the surf, it was pandemonium of the best kind, and I wished I could have stayed in the waves longer, but by the time I got all the way up to the bodysurfing line I couldn’t feel my feet at all so I wriggled back onto shore after just a few minutes. After the swim, I had a big goofy grin plastered of my face for the rest of the day (see below). I wore that grin all the way back to Manhattan where we had brunch at Little Poland, and where I thought I was hallucinating over my pierogies when Chloe Sevigny walked in completely glammed out and waited with her friend for, like, ten minutes next to us until a table freed up. Seriously - this is the weirdest, most fucking awesome city evs.

Sunday started out all idyllic ‘n’ shit. I woke up early and went to Trader Joe’s to get groceries so I could try out the waffle iron attachment on the new Foreman grill my mamma sent me for Channukah and surprise LCF with a fancy homemade breakfast. Behold! Above you see evidence of the very first waffle I ever made in my life. It was kind of a fancy one too - a lemon-cornmeal waffle with blueberry syrup that I also made myself on the stove while the waffle was waffling or whatevs. I made it from a recipe I found in my favorite cookbook - Vegan with a Vengeance.

After doing a victory lap with the plate and singing “We are the Champions” to the waffle and obnoxiously waking LCF up so I could stuff him with food, we both started the epic task of caulking every crevice in our apartment. In our perpetual battle against our falling down building’s aggressive roach population, we kept putting off caulking because it was so messy and icky and irritating. But the time had finally come. So it happened that I was on my hands and knees on the floor in the narrow hall by the door caulking the place where the wall was supposed to meet the floor but so did not that I heard it:

Chhhhhhhhggggggggttttttt.

Someone was hocking the biggest loogie evs, and it sounded like they were only a few feet away. Then I heard boots. Then I heard nothing. I put down the caulk gun, opened the door, and sure enough, the front door to my apartment was covered in phlegm. I calld LCF over. I knocked on Heavy Metal Neighbors’ door. We all met in the hall and stared at the door. I was all like:

“Umm, someone loogied our door. SOMEONE LOOGIED OUR DOOR!!!!!!!!!”

Everyone seemed to agree that it was probably the crazy lady who lives upstairs. She hates us because she keeps getting plumbers sent to her apartment by the landlord because she’s always doing crazy shit involving millions of gallons of water and in two years has successfully managed to create ceiling leaks in ever room of our place. I wasn’t so sure though, and now it’s been almost a week and I’m still obsessed with who would possibly cover our door with phlegm and run away. Here, so far, are my top suspects:

1. The aforementioned crazy lady

2. The most recent plumber. He stopped by our place first. Said he’d come back to fix our ceiling, spent the rest of the day with crazy lady and never came back. Maybe she told him we’re lizards who remove our human skin at night and that’s why she’s trying to kill us slowly in our sleep with chinese water torture.

3. A disgruntled delivery guy. Delivery guys are always trying to guilt trip me into giving them more than my customary three dollar tip with emotional blackmail, exasperated sighs, and exagerated eye rolls. Perhaps one was actually mad for real, not for fake.

4. Punk ass kids. Nuff said.

5. The flasher who used to live downstairs until LCF testified against him and he got arrested. Could he be out of Rikers already????

6. The neighbors in the building across the way who I spied on while they were having sex last week. Could they actually figure out which apartment is mine from the back?

7. The drunk lady I heard screaming racial slurs outside in the alley a few minutes before the offending loogie was hocked. I don’t know - just cuz.

I obviously have deep emotional problems for obsessing over this for so long. But seriously! You guuuuuuyyyyyysss!!!! Who spit on my door????????

In completely unrelated news, a former member of Smashing Pumpkins showed up at my office’s Karaoke Holiday Party a scant three days later and sang Bowie’s Changes. Can you spot him in this picture? Do you think he could tell just by looking at me that someone spit on my door? I need help.

OK, so I’ve been too shy to mention this here until now, but this year Jennigirl and I decided to try and tackle National Novel Writing Month together and we both did it!!! We fucking did it!!! We both won!!!! Ahead of schedule!!! Hell yeah!!!! The challenge was to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch between November 1 and November 30, and while at this exhausted juncture we make no claims for superior quality, we both walked away with nifty winnner’s certificates and big chunks of work we can hopefully edit and refine once we regain control of our lives and our bladders again. Thanks so much to everyone who let me get away with disappearing off the face of the planet to write this month - especially Han and LCF. I also wanna give a big shout out to this place, where I spent four summmers of my life in the ’80s. If you weren’t so fucking insane, I wouldn’t have had so much to write about.