"Things I Love" Thursdays - Movie Premieres

It may be just a coincidental pattern, but some of the best recollections of pivotal moments in my life have fallen on Thursdays. Maybe it's true what they say about the power of positive thinking. In any case, today's Thing-I-Love Thursday is "movie premieres."

Who doesn't love movie premieres? Whether you are the quintessential New Yorker, born and raised, who simultaneously loves and hates everything that makes this city what it is -- or the trite and contrived wanna-be, who - in an effort to feel like less of an outsider - does not respect their role as a transplant New Yorker -- either way, it's cool as hell to turn a corner in the streets of Manhattan and roll up on an A-list celebrity event (no matter how long you've lived here as noted in Exhibit A or Exhibit B). But how cool would it be if you were ever actually invited?

I found out on Tuesday morning when my best friend called me on my cell phone. I slipped out of my cubicle and into my boss's empty office to take the call.

"Guess who's coming to tomorrow night's premiere?" she squealed. With a small - yet substantial role - in Tyler Perry's latest film, she was in New York, crashing at my apartment and meeting with her agent, publicist and stylists for Wednesday night's red carpet event at the AMC Loews on the Upper West Side. Not to mention that a BET camera crew would be following her through her premiere day preparations. When she walks out of an apartment door in Hell's Kitchen and introduces herself, I am proud to say that the apartment door would be mine. (The previous sentence is meant to be read using Chandler-from-"Friends" inflection.)

Looking out over my boss's high-rise view of Bryant Park, I blurted out viscerally, "Denzel Washington!"

"Nope," she replied. Michelle Obama. Nope. Oprah? Nope. Angela Bassett? Nope. Will Smith? Nope. Diddy? Nope. I went through my personal list of top Black actors and entrepreneurs. Impatient, she began to drop hints.

"She's a secretary."

"... Of State?" I said. "Hillary Clinton?"

"No!" she finally exclaimed. "You!"

"Me?!?!?!" I could barely contain my excitement, jumping up and down and struggling to keep from screaming in my boss's office. However, there was one issue that I had to address before I let the exhilaration consume me. I momentarily stopped bouncing around the office and said matter-of-factly: "But, Tokii ... I'm not a secretary. I'm an executive assistant."

With less than 24 hours to the premiere, I left my office immediately after work and went hunting for a dress, which I found quickly and easily at a store in Columbus Circle. I wanted to find something classy, but not overdone. Something that looked like I was meant to be there, but didn't look like I was trying too hard. Something that said, I'm so proud of my best friend and put careful time and thought into honoring this invitation, but without drawing unnecessary attention. How does one dress for a movie premiere? That's already a tough question for the people who actually have to fear widespread post-event wardrobe criticism. It's an even tougher question for someone who was just invited solely because their friend's agent was able to get an extra ticket. I went with a low-cut, sleeveless black trench dress that seemed appropriate for a guest of an actor and was also appropriate for my wallet - especially after I applied the $100 American Express gift card that my boss had given me recently.

When I arrived at the theater, I met my best friend's agent at the side entrance and we found a front-row spot near the end of the red carpet, adjacent the E! and BET camera crews. The stars arrived, one by one, pausing expertly with their best angles projected toward multiple shutters. I waited eagerly, tiny digital camera at the ready, for when I would see her appear on the red carpet, and only slightly aware that I was lightly trembling and intermittently forgetting to breathe. As the seconds ticked away, I tried to mentally process what was happening immediately in front of me. And to enjoy the moment. Because, from what I've perceived of an industry like Hollywood, you have to indulge in each blessing you receive. Actors - and the people who know and love them - can just never be sure when their next blessing will come around. One moment you might be the next up-and-coming sensation, another moment you might wine-and-dine at the very top of the A-List, the next - the tabloids are publishing your most unattractive photos and reveling in your demise.

And as I stood gazing down the red carpet, watching the shutters flash and the reporters thrust their microphones into the faces of Tyler Perry, Derek Luke, Keshia Knight Pulliam, Sofia Vergara, Mary J. Blige, and Ray J. to name(drop) a few, I thought about how much work has gone into these few strolling red carpet moments. And I don't just mean the rolling out of the carpet and setting up of the lights. As often happens whenever I get exciting news regarding my best friend's acting career, I could not stop the mental reel of flashbacks over the last ten years - filled with shining moments and false hopes, extreme highs and incredible disappointments, a rollar coaster of emotions, physical strife and the risks of the unknown, all which leave you simultaneously anticipating the next thrill and dreading the next fall. I'm not going to go into the clichés of Tokii's starving actor story, but the clichés for actors - or anyone with a dream - are the mere truths of entire lives - most of which goes unseen, unnoticed, unacknowledged, unrewarded. The camera catches the glamour of the Hollywood red carpet, but not many outsiders really comprehend the volumes of proverbial blood, sweat and tears that go into a few snapshots and sound bites. I certainly don't have a fundamental grasp of it all - at least not more than peripherally.

And then, there she was. My best friend. Smiling for the wide-angle lenses and chatting comfortably with reporters. As I strained to get a shot of her on my own tiny Canon digital camera, a bodyguard poked a little fun at me: "Why are you taking that picture from so far away?"

"Leave her alone," a woman wearing a headset and carrying a clipboard said over his shoulder, "She's with the talent."

In characteristically-corny-Katie, the headset-and-clipboard-woman's brief statement went on repeat in my head. She's with the talent. If I were a peacock, I would have been slowly pacing along the end of the red carpet with a huge, open plume of feathers. If pride were helium, my head might have exploded.

"Why don't you go out on the red carpet and get a closer shot of her?" the bodyguard whispered to me.

"No way!" I hissed back. "I can't do that."

"Sure, you can," he insisted. "Hurry before you miss all the good shots."

I hesitated, too timid to set a foot on the red velvet in front of me. The simultaneous anticipation and fear of the unknown washed over me, much the way it did when I was riding up I-81 to begin my new life in New York City over three years ago. Much the way it did when I went apartment and job hunting to open the next chapter of my life. The risk of embarrassment at being shooed away as an outsider on this coveted Hollywood landscape loomed. But the idea of the personal shots I could get of my best friend being interviewed and photographed sparked some courage. I leaned toward him, "Will you go with me?"

He laughed, "Sure! Let's go."

So I did.


"Things I Love" Thursdays are inspired by "I Love New York" (BNY, February 14, 2007).
A Year Ago Today:
Official Quotes of Our NBA All-Star 2008
NBA All-Star 2008
Two Years Ago Today:
More Reasons to Love New York

Phone Photo Op - Juilliard Diploma

Today I attended my best friend's graduation from the Juilliard School. She is finally done with four years of intense training and has earned a diploma in drama with the special honor of scholastic distinction.

Scholastic distinction at the Juilliard School:
"The Juilliard School [was] pleased to recognize three students for Scholastic Distinction, an honors program for exceptional undergraduate performers and composers who wish to expand their scholarly activity by engaging in an extended independent research project in their senior year. Working under the supervision of a faculty advisor, these students prepare a substantial document that is reviewed by committee in the final semester. Successful completion results in the awarding of credit and the designation "with Scholastic Distinction" on the graduate's diploma and permanent record."

In addition to this year's graduates, the school also awarded seven honorary doctorates to Frederic Franklin, Benny Golson, Dan W. Lufkin, Sam Shepard, Stephan Sondheim, Audra McDonald and Stephen H. Clapp, who are among the greats in their respective arts and accepted their degrees before an ecstatic auditorium.

Audra McDonald, with whom my best friend has now joined the ranks as a Juilliard alum, also had the honor of serving as this year's commencement speaker. Though her speech was inspirational and riveting, I couldn't help but imagine that it might be my best friend on that stage one day addressing a graduating class of Juilliard students as their commencement speaker - and perhaps even accepting an honorary doctorate of her own. I am almost positive that all of her family members in attendance and her fiance were looking up there and wondering the same thing.

As the graduates crossed the stage, many families erupted in cheers and applause despite an initial request from the President of the school to hold all applause until the end. While it can be considered tacky by some, even the President seemed to understand that - regardless of the traditional protocol to request the withholding applause - sometimes you just have to let your joy break the rules.

There are few things I have been absolutely sure about in my life, but here are two - that moving to New York City is the best decision I will ever make - and that my best friend will have an amazing acting career. Fame and international acclaim are no guarantee; even Whoopi Goldberg said that those elements of the industry are strokes of luck as there are thousands of talented actors gracing the world's stages.

One should be careful not to confuse fame and success, but for my best friend - there is no doubting the latter.

How Do You Deal With a Mooch in NYC?

... Hopefully, better than I am.

The Scenario
The Mooch moved to New York City from Arizona in the last week of December in 2008. The Mooch shares a full-size bed with my roommate, who has been a close friend of hers since high school. The Mooch does not allow my roommate's own dog sit on or sleep in my roommate's own bed in the apartment for which The Mooch does NOT share equal financial responsibility. The Mooch's best friend lives in Harlem, but - regarding location - our Hell's Kitchen apartment is more convenient for The Mooch. The Mooch still lives with us (note the date of this blog post).

The Error
The direct fault I carry in this situation was believing that the best friend of The Mooch - and mutual friend of ours - was completely out of line for initially wanting to charge The Mooch $600/month to share the mutual friend's $1200-studio in Harlem. I wrongfully thought that the mutual friend was trying to take advantage of The Mooch's unstable relocation situation and wanted to profit from having The Mooch stay with her. In all actuality, the mutual friend was fairly requesting upfront that The Mooch assume equal financial responsibility for the space they would have shared. She was well within her rights - as both a New Yorker and as a friend.

However, my roommate and I - initially and foolishly finding it harsh to charge The Mooch immediately upon her arrival in the city (even though millions of other NYC transplants begin paying outrageous amounts for a roof over their heads the moment they change their zip code) - offered to let The Mooch stay in our Midtown apartment under the following conditions:
1) She could stay with us as long as she needed.
2) She could sleep in my roommate's bed (with my roommate) regularly; she and her boyfriend could sleep on my couch whenever he wanted to stay over; she and her boyfriend could use my room whenever I was out of town as long as they washed the sheets before I returned.
3) She should start contributing financially as soon as she could.

Number 3 was where we went wrong. The Mooch moved in the last week of December in 2008. By May 2009, she had still been unable to secure full-time employment, yet refused to consider waitressing, retail or other gigs not befitting "a recent college graduate." By June 2009, she had been living with us rent-free for five months.

Things I Now Know Since The Mooch Moved in Six Months Ago
1) After one month - or even just two weeks of staying in our $2500-month, 600-square foot, two-bedroom apartment in Midtown - The Mooch was no longer a guest; she was living with us.
2) Once she began forwarding her mail and listing our address on West 51st Street as her own - The Mooch was no longer a guest; she was living with us.
3) Once I began overhearing her tell friends on the phone, "I'm back at my apartment now," - The Mooch was no longer a guest; she was living with us.
4) Once she began asking me and my roommate if her out-of-town friends could stay at our apartment during their NYC visit - The Mooch was no longer a guest; she was living with us.
5) Once The Mooch stopped allowing my roommate's own dog into my roommate's own bed - The Mooch was no longer a guest; she was living with us.
6) I should not have assumed that The Mooch would have a personal sense of self-accountability for the space she shared with us.
7) I should not have assumed that this said self-accountability would compel The Mooch to feel responsible for contributing to the rent within 1-2 months (maybe even three, tops).
8) I should have been clear on my expectations instead of assuming that The Mooch had the same sense of personal responsibility that I have (e.g. when I slept on an air mattress for three months in the living room of my best friend's $1000-South Bronx, two-bedroom apartment, I contributed $200/month toward their rent, bringing their equal portions to $400/month each, and I took it upon myself to keep toilet paper, paper towels and other "communal items" fully stocked over the three months I stayed there).
9) The Mooch once tried to pretend that she didn't know we were out of trash bags, even though someone had emptied the trash can half way to make more room instead of buying more trash bags (and my roommate told me that she had not touched the trash). The Mooch also often acted like she didn't have to buy more toilet paper because she bought the "last round". She'd rather substitute travel tissue paper, napkins and paper towels while waiting for me or my roommate to get the next round of TP, which always made me want to scream, "Dude! You live here rent free! We shouldn't be taking turns buying the toilet paper; you should always buy it!" But I didn't.
10) My roommate and I are enabling The Mooch to have no sense of urgency to find permanent, full-time employment, to have no need to pick up a second part-time job after finally obtaining a full-time job with a low salary in late-May, and to take a week of unpaid leave from said low-salary employment to go on vacation with her boyfriend to Aruba in June. Rather than help her develop into a proud, independent New Yorker, we allow her to spend her money frivolously instead of paying a fair portion of the rent. Meanwhile my roommate and I continue to make careful decisions and sacrifices in order to sustain our lives in New York City. We are enabling The Mooch to do things that most middle- and lower-income people cannot do when they first relocate to New York City.
11) The Mooch moved in with my roommate and I just six months after we began our $2500-month lease on West 51st Street. Just like the mutual friend in Harlem was within her rights to expect rent immediately from The Mooch upon her relocation from Arizona, we would have been within our rights to ask her to split our $3000-broker fee three ways and divide the monthly rent fairly between us. If we had known that The Mooch was going to end up staying over half a year (not to mention the $5000-security deposit and first and last month's rent that my roommate and I paid up front), we would have expected an equal contribution.
12) I was wrong for denigrating the mutual friend for wanting to charge The Mooch half the rent on her $1200-Harlem studio.
13) I am a coward for blogging about this instead of telling The Mooch how I really feel.

Things The Mooch Does Not Know That We Know
1) The Mooch, who relocated from Arizona, is using my roommate and I to live closer to her boyfriend, who lives with his parents in Long Island. She doesn't want to contribute financially to our current living situation because she wants to save money while waiting for him to be ready to move into an apartment with her. So she is using us to be closer to him and foster their relationship until he is ready for cohabitation.
2) When The Mooch goes shopping with another mutual friend, that mutual friend reports back that The Mooch throws away her receipts, shopping bags and boxes and hides her new purchases in a large purse or tote bag because she doesn't want my roommate and I to know she has been shopping.
3) After searching craigslist job postings for about 20 minutes a day, she walked leisurely around the city throughout most of the spring months, with Starbucks coffee in hand, accompanied by the same mutual friend mentioned in #2 - instead of visiting more temp agencies, going door to door with her resume, and looking for jobs (however, she knows that we know not to even ask her to consider the food service industry even though we live in the heart of Hell's Kitchen and mere steps from the plethora of restaurants on Ninth Avenue).
4) The Mooch bought her boyfriend a $350-camera for his recent birthday, but led us to believe that she could only afford to bake him a cake.
5) The Mooch had just learned of her boyfriend's disloyal indiscretions a few weeks prior to his birthday - thus proving that she'd rather buy her cheating boyfriend a present than pay rent to her more-than-generous friends.
6) We were willing to do more for The Mooch than her own family was willing (case in point: her own brother and his new wife live on the Upper East Side and would not have allowed her to crash with them for half a year, rent-free).
7) The Mooch doesn't want to live in New York City. She wants to be a merry, little housewife, and her current boyfriend is the best - and maybe only - shot she'll ever have at achieving her marital, baby-making dreams.*
8) People who really want to succeed in New York City are willing to wait tables or fold T-shirts in a GAP or do whatever it takes to be self-sufficient. She is not one of those people. She shamelessly continues to take advantage of a generous living situation despite the fact that I am making it clear that she has worn out her welcome.

To be fair, The Mooch is relatively easy to live with. She is clean, she didn't often leave her stuff all over the apartment (though I often tidy up after her), and she is generally friendly. However, I initially became irritated when my roommate expressed her frustration to me regarding The Mooch's response to a possible receptionist position at the engineering firm where my roommate is an executive assistant: "I didn't move to New York City to be a receptionist." And I further lost my patience with our living arrangement when we asked The Mooch to begin paying $300/month on June 1 and she replied that she would rather pay $200.

To continue fairly noting the occurrence of events, The Mooch did end up taking the receptionist position at the end of May 2009, but not without some strong encouragement from my roommate. And The Mooch did begin paying $300/month on June 1 after I made it clear that it was not negotiable. But to be completely blunt, I don't know how The Mooch failed her NY teacher's licensing exams this month when she has supposedly been studying for the last six months - sans the responsibilities and long hours associated with full-time, or even part-time, employment. Maybe she should have spent less time walking leisurely around the city with Starbucks coffee.

I don't know what to do even though I know what I need to do. But even though she has it in her heart to completely take advantage of our generosity - and potentially permanently tarnish her close friendship with my roommate - I don't have the heart to tell her that I think she's a puerile, manipulative, indolent sloth - to put it lightly.

Help!

Dear Abby ... [sigh]

*No offense to current baby-makers; I totally want to be a baby-maker one day, but I refuse to use my current so-called friends in order to achieve my eventual, long-term dream of family life. Or step on my friends for any other reason, for that matter.

"Things I Love" Thursdays - New York Moments

So here is how a moment in New York feels more magical than anywhere else in the world. Last night, I received great news that would have been good to hear anywhere, but to receive it while walking through the Village in a Halloween costume on a brisk New York night felt iconic - and ironic - in ways I can't describe. Maybe because this is my life, and this is New York.

I was exiting the train station at Christopher Street-Sheridan Square between Marilyn Monroe and Cat in the Hat when my phone rang. I am not a habitual call screener, but I am also not one of those people who feels the need to answer my cellphone every time it rings, and I was in no mood to chat. I wasn't feeling irascible, but to briefly describe the atmosphere, I was amidst an intense crowd created by the Halloween Parade on Sixth Avenue, in which the scuffle to either enter or exit the train station prompted one stranger to yell at another: "Bitch! I will slap you!"

But since my best friend's name popped up in the caller ID as I filtered through the crowded sidewalk, I flipped open my phone.

"What are you doing?" she asked. I smiled and replied, "Oh nothing, just trying to cross Seventh Avenue dressed like a slutty devil. You?"

She laughed and started talking about driving home (just across the Hudson River in Jersey) and deciding against ordering fried chicken for dinner, then she slyly added, "Besides it probably wouldn't be a good idea for me to eat fried chicken when I'm going to be ... 10 episodes ... Tyler ... of Payne."

"Wait? What?" I stopped dead in my tracks, straining to hear her above the groan of the subway below my feet and the commotion on the city streets. A fairy stepped on the back of my red, Patton leather stilettos. I turned around and mouthed the word "sorry" to her and then almost stumbled into the gladiator in front of me. The police had paused the ghoulish pedestrian traffic crossing Seventh, and as I tried to keep my balance on the uneven sidewalk, she laughed and casually said again, "It probably wouldn't be a good idea for me to eat friend chicken when I'm going to be on TV in 10 episodes of Tyler Perry's House of Payne."

With no regard for the sexy French maid, Groucho Marx and the pirate smooshed on the curb beside me, I began to jump up and down and scream into the phone. I had so many questions and wanted every detail. So from there, I was half skipping, half jumping and fully squealing along West 4th Street to Sullivan, tears streaming down my face, and barely cognizant of the fact that I was almost jogging in stilettos with no regard for why my body suddenly seemed to be in such a hurry.

For whatever primal reason created by my own primitive stereotype of what my life would be like in New York, I can't think of any other scenario in which receiving this news might have been more fitting. If that moment is ever reenacted in a biographical movie about my best friend, this is how the screenplay will read (proper screenplay formatting has been compromised by Blogger's inability to center only selected text and the fact that I am not a screenwriter):

EXT. WEST 4TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY - NIGHT

A crowded West Village street on Halloween night. Noisy and frenzied.

People in Halloween costumes of all variety hustle and bustle in every direction and create bottlenecks, where police officers and barricades are trying to maintain organized pedestrian and vehicle traffic flow.

KATIE exits the subway station with her cell phone pressed to her right ear and begins squealing on the curb as she waits to cross Seventh Avenue. She is jumping up and down in her red stilettos and despite a few looks from the painted and masked faces immediately surrounding her, her screams are lost in the chaos of the New York night.

KATIE
(screams)
Oh my God! Oh my God! Are you serious?
(continue with incessant, blurted expressions and questions mixed with shrieks and squeals)

As KATIE crosses Seventh Avenue, she receives the exciting details from her best friend of 10 years as she heads along West 4th Street to to join friends at an apartment on the corner of Bleecker and Sullivan.

Tears stream down her face as she struggles emotionally to grasp the reality of this news while an alternative realm of myth and fantasy floods around her.

Surrounded by ghouls, goblins and sexy nursemaids, she zigzags in and out of the crisscrossing pedestrian traffic along West 4th Street. The Halloween night seems to blur and the bustling bodies around her become illusory figments as if she were the only person in New York.

[Cue wistful music that tugs at heartstrings]

KATIE continues to talk excitedly into her cell phone.

[Zoom out from West 4th Street to Birdseye panorama of New York City]

[Fade to black]

"Things I Love" Thursdays are inspired by "I Love New York" (BNY, February 14, 2007).

“Things I Love” Thursdays - It’s a Small World

I am quite certain that Walt Disney came up with the theme after spending time in New York. It can feel like a small world if you run into someone in Pobunk, Nowhere, but the big city intensifies the small world feeling because it seems like it should be less likely to run into a random person from your present or past in such a crowded, busy place, where skyscrapers dominate the skyline reducing you to a figurative needle in a concrete haystack.

Yet small world tendencies are so New York. Aside from coming into daily contact with almost every culture on the planet within 22.7 square miles, over the last year Terrence and I have shared separate A-train reunions (1 and 2), my co-worker Jenny and I met a guy at Bryant Park Café who had been an elementary school student in West Chester under Jenny’s mother, I discovered a second or third-ish cousin (by marriage) works with me in another division of the same company (3), my co-worker Scott went to high school in North Carolina with my best friend (4), I recently found an old friend from my high school # 1 town (Camp Lejeune) who is living right across the Hudson in Bergen County, my best friend ran into an old classmate from our North Carolina college on the subway, a former colleague from my days in NC higher education administration got a job two blocks away from my office … and within the last few weeks:

While I was in my high school #2 town (Asheville) over Thanksgiving, my old classmate Ben and I realized over a beer in a North Carolina bar that we had seen the same stealth bomber flying over New York City on the same day in 2006. I had, in fact, randomly included my sighting from the 167th Station in the Bronx in a blog post (5), and he had been visiting New York two Septembers ago and had seen it glide over Central Park that very same day.

Iris and I left our respective offices (at 42nd Street and 34th Street) during rush hour and ended up on the exact same uptown no. 1 train when I switched from an express at 96th Street. Granted she was on her way to my apartment and we had coordinated our departures to arrive in Harlem around the same time, but the trains run more frequently at rush hour so the chances of meeting on the same car become even less.

I received texts from my secret service buddy and Brian when they ended up in the same midown diner as Iris at 4 a.m. And I received another text from my sorority sister Tiffany when she met Iris for the first time via Iris' former Brooklyn roommate (Iris just moved to a luxury highrise in Harlem this week).

I am frequently reminded how small the big city is, and that is something to love when the big city can just as frequently make you feel so small.

"Things I Love" Thursdays are inspired by "I Love New York" (BNY, February 14, 2007).

My Evil Ego

Some people have an alter ego. I have an evil ego. I am convinced that the evil ego who lives inside me is an angry gay man. He rolls his eyes and snaps his fingers at things and makes shallow remarks, and is usually brought out by my best friend because her evil ego is another angry gay man, who just so happens to be the best friend of my evil ego.

I suppress him most of the time because the other side of me is a deeply caring person, who has a tendency to empathize so much with those who are less fortunate that sad things often weigh very heavily on my mind for periods of time that are extended beyond the standard empathy time (whatever the standard is; I know I just usually feel bad about random shit longer than other people normally do). However, my evil ego also loves to play pranks on dearly loved ones. This I do not suppress.

A friend of mine from North Carolina can vouch for my evil ego as she will recall how much joy I found in renting a sad movie and giggling softly from my corner of the couch as I watched her ball her eyes out. I pride myself in not crying during movies, and after I saw "My Life," my first thought was, I have got to rent this movie for Daphne. Daphne cries in almost every dramatic movie, regardless of the degree of sadness. I particularly delighted in watching her cry during "Finding Nemo."

Yesterday morning, my colleague Jenny and I decided to make a quick Starbucks and Bryant Park Post Office run before the morning got too hectic. We were approaching the post office when I realized it was still before 9 a.m. There were people standing outside waiting for it to open, and as we got closer I slowed down and stopped at the curb.

Jenny, who - as long as we've worked together across the street - didn't seem to know exactly where the post office was (it's kind of hidden by scaffolding at the moment), looked back at me and asked, "Where are we going?"

"This is it," I replied. She turned toward the door: "Oh ok, let's go."

I stood at the curb with a huge smile, my chin tilted downward and my eyebrows slightly furrowed (this is my evil ego face when something devious is taking place) as I realized that she did not realize that the post office wasn't open yet.

She passed the other people waiting outside the post office and yanked on the door. Of course, it was locked. I know those people were thinking of her what I often think of those who push elevator buttons in the lobby after someone else has clearly pushed it: Thanks for pushing that, buddy! I was just going to stand here in the elevator bank and wait for someone else to push the already-lit-button again so that the elevator will actually come.

She looked back at me and - upon seeing my evil ego smiling intently at her - yelled, "Oh! You're so evil!"

Exactly.

Comparing Ends

Cullowhee, NC. 2003. Rickey and I had not spoken in two weeks. Following a fight over his attempt to illegally fill a forged prescription for pain medication, I had been ignoring his phone calls from Augusta, Georgia. I wanted him to feel like he was losing me, like his behavior was destroying all we'd ever had. And if he didn't get his life together, there wouldn't even be a friendship left. I wanted to make him suffer a little. How immature it seems now. How stupid it seemed immediately after the phone call.

When his father's name flashed the incoming call on my cell phone, I assumed it was Rickey. That his cell phone had been turned off yet again. That he was using his father's phone as he had numerous times before. I remember the last thought I had just before I heard the Earth crack in two: "Ok. I'll talk to him now."

The thing that perplexed me the most after Rickey died is that no one else's world came to a deafening halt. The Western Carolina Men's Basketball Team still left for their WCU Canadian Tour a few days later. My best friend still left North Carolina a few days later for her role in "Mother Divine," which WCU was producing in New York.

After the funeral in Augusta, our friends went back to their lives, and much to my amazement, life went on around me. And my mother temporarily moved into my apartment to fully devote her time to helping me get on with mine. Brushing my hair for me or running my baths whenever the simple act of looking in the mirror would bring me to tears. Giving me pedicures while I stared at the ceiling. Finding shows on television when the remote in my hand idled listlessly on the TV Guide Channel. Forcing me to eat when I actually valued the sharp hunger pangs that dulled the intense pressure crushing my heart. It's like my mind could only accept so much anguish at one time. As if soothing the throb in my stomach, allowed my mind to fully bear the agony in my chest. I preferred to feel hungry.

Much of the day after - and the days in the wake of - his death are blurred in my mind, but some moments are clear, defined in the creases of my memory. I remember laying in the bathtub and listening to a repetitive drip ripple on the surface above my feet. If I focused on the tiny sound of the drip and magnified the echo in my mind, I could make the bathroom tiles stop spinning.

I fought sleep because each time I awoke, I had those first fuzzy moments where I had to realize he was gone all over again. There are few things worse than having a dream where everything is alright and waking up in a reality where everything isn't. And then more tears. I cried so much that I began sobbing to my mother about how I didn't want to cry anymore. It is a painful thing to cry because you can't stop crying.

Terrence, a member of Rickey's former basketball team and a good friend of mine, held fast in his vigil by my side, literally and figuratively. On that first night of the rest of my life without Rickey, Terrence sat in the living room with my roommates all night long while I laid motionless in my bedroom between brief fits of tears and even briefer moments of restless sleep. He sent letters and postcards from Canada during the basketball tour. He called every morning and every night. And when the team returned a few weeks later, I could feel him reading my moods. He and I still wonder how that innate need to take care of me sprung out of no where.

That day, after I received the devastating phone call from Rickey's father and news spread across campus, Terrence was at the foot of my bed immediately after basketball practice. Unlike everyone else who tried to touch me, hug me or offer consoling advice that day, he sat there unmoving in the evening darkness of my room for what may have been an hour. I can't remember how long. I know that he listened to me cry. That he listened to me breathe. And then he listened to me cry again. I know that just before he left my room and joined the growing group of friends and a few university staff gathering in the living room that he said something I will never forget. I have carried it with me since.

New York, NY. 2008. As I walked to work this morning, the front pages of every newspaper featured Heath Ledger. The wake of the day after. And while the world is pausing long enough to read the latest news of his untimely death while they sip their coffee and google updates during breaks at work, I know that other headlines will take his place tomorrow. He'll have a few things that Rickey didn't, like memorial tributes at this year's awards shows, entertainment television documentaries chronicling his last days, and piles of flowers on his Soho doorstep placed delicately by fans. But all of the normal things will continue.

I remember wanting to scream at the world for all the things that I no longer felt mattered. Getting out of bed. Hearing the trash man on the curb. Seeing the postman deliver mail. Life went on.

That's life. It makes history. It repeats itself. It brings back memories. It is what it is, if that means anything at all. I don't always like where it takes me, but I try to hang on through the ride.

Impromptu In Review

My best friend had called me in New York at 10am to see if I could join her for a few entertainment industry events in Washington D.C. surrounding the Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama. She joked that as an H-List celebrity, she does not often receive much advanced notice for events, and since her husband could not attend at the last minute, she hoped I would join her for the three-day MLK Weekend and pre-inauguration festivities. I was on a plane out of JFK by 3:30 in the afternoon.

The focus and highlight of the weekend was watching my best friend find her place amidst Hollywood minglers. After ten years of watching her perform at WCU, The Juilliard School and in the small but gratifying array of professional stage, TV and film credits to her name, it was incredibly surreal and exciting to join her in this weekend's perks of her budding success and act like I attend stuff like this all the time without also appearing trite and contrived.

If my best friend ever becomes an A-List celebrity, events like these may likely become commonplace routines in her life, which will ultimately lack the electrifying amateur excitement of rookie Hollywood minglers. I can only hope that her talent and love for acting breeds a career that makes her a famous A-Lister - not because of socialite association or shock-valued scandal - but because the skill in her craft touches the spirit, moves the soul and inspires the creativity of art imitating life. Until then, her "H-List" status will ensure that industry events, to which she may be invited - even if her RSVP is not A-List priority - will continue to make us giggle like school girls at the end of the night.

A Year Ago Today: No post
Two Years Ago Today: Becoming 27 in New York City

Top 10 Favorite Cullowhee Memories

One week from today I will be leaving for New York City! Here, in random order, are my Top 10 Favorite Memories from college and the place I will be leaving behind:

The Battle for the Old Mountain Jug
Some question whether or not the mountain rivalry between Western Carolina University and Appalachian State University is a true collegiate football tradition or a clever 1970's marketing ploy, but for those of us who took down the goal posts in Whitmire Stadium in 1998 following Western's first win over ASU in 13 years and subsequently left one of them on the Chancellor's front yard, it will always be a favorite, genuine and unscripted college moment. Sheer joy. True bliss. Solidarity among thousands. Whenever I think of that moment, I will forever have an image in my head of Tokii and me, linked arm in arm, racing onto the football field and screaming as the goal post fell and narrowly missed both of our heads.

Summer in Park Place
 As much as we hated it at the time, we love to laugh about it now. The summer that Jessica, Daphne, Shameika, Dominique, Travis and I all lived in a two-bedroom (single-wide) trailer in Park Place will always be one of my most unforgettable and vivid memories. This was not just any trailer. It was undoubtedly the worst trailer in the world. To briefly describe it, there was a hole in the living room floor under the stapled-down carpet that everyone used to stumble over; mesh netting was duct-taped, thumb-tacked and stapled over the windows (a quick fix by Travis after the landlord continued to ignore our requests for new screens); a system of box fans in different windows served to facilitate airflow through the trailer in the absence of air-conditioning (it was basically a metal box sitting in the sun); the hard water, which smelled of sulfur, left an invisible film on your skin after showers and was unsuitable to drink (ask Dominique about the time he accidentally made a pitcher of Kool-Aid using the tap water); about half a dozen stray cats lived under the trailer (which was my fault because I kept feeding them); there was a wasp nest with an indestructible force field and super, incredible-hulk wasps above the back door; we woke up to our neighbor's Mexican music on full blast every morning at a quarter to eight; there was only one bathroom so we all got to know each others' scents a lot more than any of us would have liked; a crack head showed up on our doorstep one day when I was home alone and tried to sell me a boom box and a box of cassette tapes; I slept in one bedroom, Jessica and Shameika slept in the other, Daphne slept on a couch, Dominique slept on a futon, and Travis slept on his 6x1' military cot. Dominique and I used to ride around in my little, green Saturn or hang out in Burger King just to be in an air conditioned environment. Late into the night when he and I were the only ones left awake, we'd watch infomercials about exciting products like the Revostyler, the Perfect Pancake and steak knives. And after Travis moved out, Dominique was the only male with four women, who would all go on their period at the same time. I think that may have been the closest we have come to hell. But there is no other group of people with whom I'd go to hell and back ... again.

Hide & Go Seek in Hunter Library
Hunter Library, on the campus of Western Carolina University, is the largest library west of Charlotte. In the basement there is an endless sea of enormous bookshelves and study cubicles with group meeting rooms along the perimeter. I will never forget playing Hide & Go Seek with my girlfriends and a bunch of the players from the Men's Basketball team in the basement of the library during my sophomore year. You know it's a big library, when there are over half a dozen 6'6"+, 250+ pound dudes running around and nobody can find anybody else.

The Brothers I Never Had (besides my real brother)
Dunston, Jon and Pat were three of my best friends from my college daze: sledding and snowball fights in the winter time; summers at East Laporte; riding aimlessly around the Cullowhee-Sylva-Dillsboro triad; do-da-do-da-do by the track; dragging furniture into the elevator in Walker Hall, sitting in the chairs and waiting for someone to call the elevator to their floor; educating me on Sports Center; hanging out at the airport or on a random mountainside; showing me my first porno film; taking care of a puppy that my freshmen roommate and I adopted and illegally housed in our dorm room. BJ was initiated into our little clique later and never failed to make us laugh with his impersonations of Bernie Mac. They were the brothers I never had - in addition to my nearest genetic match, David.

Coco Cherry
The greatest hamster to crawl the Earth - or to ever run on a stationary wheel - went by the name of Coco Cherry. His first name was Coco because I love to name animals Coco. And his last name was Cherry because his eyeballs looked like cherries. He was the illegal dorm room pet of Helder 350, the room Tokii and I shared our junior year. We bought him in Greensboro (the same night that Jagged Edge spotted our clique in the mall, and gave us free tickets to their concert during A&T's Homecoming) because he was the only hamster we have ever seen who would chase your finger if you dragged it along the bottom of his cage and would crawl into your open hand on his own. His only flaw was that he had really bad gas - unless Tokii and I were always placing him to blame. He had a long, happy hamster life and ended up living out the remainder of his days at my parents' house while I was out of the country. I did not get to honor him with an appropriate hamster burial because I was studying abroad in Spain when he died, but I believe my parents buried him in the backyard. It was either that or they sent him to the happy farm where all of our other pets have gone.

The Night I Met Rickey
Rickey and I saw each other on campus for the first time when he approached our parked car near a short row of commercial buildings - jokingly referred to as the Cullowhee Shopping Strip - and flirted with my friends. I knew by the way he peered curiously at me in the back seat that he liked me immediately. We were formally introduced later that evening on the University Center Lawn during Valley Ballyhoo, a welcome back event hosted at the start of each fall semester. I was a sophomore and still dating my high school sweetheart at the time, and Rickey and I would not end up dating until almost a year later. However, the way he genuinely approached me that night and the perseverance and sweetness in which he pursued me over the following months was so remarkably sincere that we became inseparable almost immediately after the distance between WCU and UNC-Wilmington ended my three-year relationship with my high school boyfriend. Rickey and I dated for almost four years ...

He died unexpectedly in Augusta, Georgia. One of the hardest things for me to deal after his death was my foolish immaturity following an argument that we had two weeks before he died. That would be the last time we would ever speak. My biggest regret is that I tried to make him suffer after our last fight by ignoring his phone calls. I foolishly wanted him to really fear that he was losing me for good. The morning his father called to tell me that Rickey had died, I saw his number appear in my cell phone. Just before I decided to answer the call, I remember thinking to myself, Ok - I'll talk to him now...

... Losing him that way with so much left unsaid - just losing him at all - was nearly unbearable. Sometimes I go back to that moment in mind. Just before I answered his father's phone call. To a moment when everything in me knew that I was about to speak to Rickey. When hearing his voice still felt familiar. And I wish for that feeling. That feeling of knowing that I am about to talk to him. I don't know if I'll ever get over the fact that I can't anymore. That no matter what I do, his absence is permanent. That I can't change it. That I can't go back. That I'll never see him or talk to him again. That every day, his existance becomes more and more distant in my memory. That if I live to be 70 years old, he will still be 27.

I do know that now, when I forgive someone, I forgive them without any games or stipulations. I'll never play around with time again.

The Pretend For-Real Marriage of Daphne A. Moore & Kevin Garnett (The Newly Weds, Season Going-On-At-Least-Five)
I don't know when they were married exactly, but I recently found an email from 2002 regarding this blessed union, so this serves as direct evidence that this charade has been going on for at least four years. Daphne Moore, the self-proclaimed Daphne Moore-Garnett, has been living an imaginary life in which she is married to Kevin Garnett, #21 of the Minnesota Timberwolves. It's almost like having an imaginary friend with a mild case of borderline stalking. Yet despite the fact that my boyfriend's best friend plays for the Kings, our sorority sister's ex-boyfriend plays for the Wizards, another friend's brother plays for the Warriors, and two members of our college circle dance for the Bobcats, she has never had a chance to meet him and inform him of their nuptials. How can something so beautiful be so sad?

Ms. Sue Ella
My best friend Tokii is a master of impersonation. She is a gifted actress, who will soon begin her fourth year as a drama student at The Juilliard School of the Arts in Manhattan. Give her 30 minutes and she can mimic most - if not all - of your personal idiosyncrasies. Those nearest and dearest to her, and some random bystanders from time to time, have had the pleasure of meeting one of her alter egos, Ms. Sue Ella. Ms. Sue Ella is a combination of several ghetto-fabulous women, including a former coworker of Tokii's who always ate beanie weenies and Spam during breaks. It was always a pleasure to run into Ms. Sue Ella in one of the residence halls, especially when we were on RA duty. We've got several encounters on videotape!

Flipping for Directions
My current boyfriend Terrence and I started dating after I had graduated from WCU and had joined the university as a member of its staff. My closest friends, and even my family, were initially concerned that I was using Terrence to fill the void created by Rickey's death. I even tried not to worry about that, too. But our friendship eventually became the relationship we have today, and both of us believe that it would not have developed so deeply had it not been for a classic case of the right place at the right time. The summer I graduated from college, Terrence and I used to pass the time by jumping in my car (when gasoline was less than $1.50 a gallon) and flipping a quarter to determine whether to take a right or a left at each intersection. Our 25-cent (plus a tank of gas) adventures led us to a giant chessboard in Dillsboro, a hidden dirt road along a beautiful area of the Tuckaseigee River, and the train and bus wreckage purposely leftover as a tourist attraction from the movie The Fugitive, among other places. Well, we went to college in a place where a Super Wal-Mart is downtown.

Unbreak My ... Splat!
Another cameo from Tokii makes the Top 10 Favorite Cullowhee Memories. Our clique will recall a particular night when she and I were on RA duty. Since we couldn't leave our post in the RA station, our friends came over to hang out with us in the lobby of Scott Hall. While sitting on a couch, I used a video camera to record Tokii as she strutted atop a coffee table, singing Toni Braxton's Unbreak My Heart to the camera as if we were shooting a music video. Through the lens, I recorded Tokii's sexy rendition of the sultry verse "unbreak my ..." and then a nanosecond of sheer horror crossed her face just before she disappeared from view. I immediately panned down to the floor, where Tokii had fallen at my feet between the coffee table and the couch and was laughing uncontrollably. The tone and volume of surrounding laughter on the video is sharp and piercing, yet contagious, endearing and characteristic of my girls. I will love them always.

Blind Faith is Not Foolish

Taken from a random myspace profile. I don't know if this was his original thought in his own words, but I've taken the advice of a stranger who doesn't even know I exist and I'm applying it to what I know does ...

"Life is a beautiful gift that is often taken for granted. Sometimes we don't look at it this way because we are too busy comparing our lives to others. Then we spend the rest of the time trying to live up to the expectations that others help set for us. I've made so many mistakes in my life, I don't have a choice but to be wise. Life's greatest challenge is to be happy with yourself and the choices you have made in your life - to treat your life like it's worth more than gold. I understand sometimes we end up getting lost in our chaotic lives and adjourn things we love. Just jump and believe you will land on your feet - and if you fall, believe that you have the strength to try harder. Some call it faith, others call it confidence. If you don't have both, at least have one."

And when I was initially impressed by a man who offered to read my palm for free while I was walking with my aunt in Queens (NY) last month, my best friend (who currently lives in the Bronx) sent me the following text message:

"Ok. Just don't let it tempt u. Not 2 b a bummer but u r not the kind of person that needs her future success & comfort validated. Aside from my personal convictions about it I just remember the types of people that buy n 2 that never prosper (i.e. [she named some people we know here]). The type of people that go 2 them are kind of weak. U may worry a bit, but blind faith is a good thing and that's a muscle of yours that can stand 2 be worked missy! (Insert finger wagging here)"

As my move date draws nearer, the frustration of apartment and job hunting continues to stress me out, and the exhaustion from my three jobs weakens my spirit (yes, I have been working three jobs to save extra money and fund my relocation), my confidence and faith have begun to waiver. I saved the text message that my best friend sent me last month while I was apartment hunting in Queens - not to remind myself to avoid horoscope hype (which I don't believe in anyway) - but to remind me that blind faith is not always foolish.

Lunch Break/ing News - It IS a Small World

So I learned this morning that one of my coworkers went to a high school in Raleigh, North Carolina with my best friend. They graduated a year apart; he in 1997 and she in 1998; they both worked in the high school's television studio, and now they live in New York without having ever known that they both ended up here (well, she just moved to Jersey with her fiance after graduating from Juilliard, but close enough). This within two months of learning that I am working for the same company in New York City with someone who is related to me by marriage.

It reminded me of a time that Terrence and I - in typical Terrence-and-I fashion - confused LGA and JFK (since it's easy to fail to differentiate between "LGA" and "JFK" and those too airports are soooo close to each other - especially when using an MTA-approved mode of transportation). After we finally realized that he wasn't at La Guardia (so he should stop looking for the M-60 bus and take the AirTrain to the Manhattan-bound A), he ended up running into someone he hadn't seen since his high school graduation in Atlanta while passing through Brooklyn.

And recently another thought-provoking scenario came up while Terrence and I were chatting on the phone as he was leaving the NBA Summer League in Vegas. He and his best friend were heading out on separate flights to his best friend's city, where they'll continue with off-season work-outs, when Terrence saw a little kid wearing his best friend's jersey and mentioned to me, "This kid is wearing [his] entire NBA uniform in the airport and doesn't even realize that [he's] in the next terminal. Kind of weird, right?"

All of this had me wondering how many times in New York City I might be a city-block or a subway-car away from someone that I admire, haven't seen in years or perhaps knew in high school. It is a small world after all.

Weekend on Wisteria Lane

"What is this weird gushy feeling I get whenever I see our friends' babies?" I asked Tokii over a Saturday brunch of pecan pancakes, french toast, hash brown souffle and scrambled eggs with cheese at a Cracker Barrel outside of New Haven (brunch location per Tokii's request; you can take the girl out of the South, but you can't take the South out of the girl).

"That would be called your biological clock," she replied between bites of sausage.

"I don't know why I start to feel like I want one of these when I see them," I said, nodding toward the miniature human in the highchair at the end of our table. "Can't I hit a snooze button?"

Friday evening, Debasha and I had arrived in Connecticut via the Metro-North to see Tokii perform in "The Bluest Eye", in which she was terrific as Claudia, just as The New York Times had said she was. Cassie and her best friend joined us for brunch, and in between hilariously inappropriate for family-style restaurants conversation, we were all oohing and aahing over her best friend's adorable baby boy.

"Slow your roll, girl!" Cassie's 23-year old best friend laughed.

"Slow my roll?" I shot back. "I'm 28."

She was surprised. I supposed her genuine shock at my age was a good thing. But I found myself wondering if my life choices were leading me down a path to being the unmarried, childless auntie of all of my friends' kids.

Cassie took Debasha and me on a tour of Yale University since Tokii had matinee and evening performances at the Long Wharf Theatre and was preparing for family members to arrive from North Carolina. So we transitioned from Tokii's temporary New Haven apartment on Friday night to a Saturday night in Cassie's third-floor space of the family she works for. She is the nanny of an Icelandic family of three adorable boys. I often joke that I would never hire a hot nanny, but I realized immediately that this wife should have little to worry about since she is a typical Scandinavian beauty.

New Haven is a picturesque town with tree-lined streets, white picket fences, old New England homes and adorable storefronts and cafes. Around every corner, I felt myself admiring the beauty, the space and the family-oriented landscape. And with every manicured yard, baby carriage and camera phone photo op, I felt either the urge to go watch Desperate Housewives or respond to my biological clock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

We had a fun girls' evening on the town, where I learned in New Haven - of all places - that I love Cuban food, and ultimately ended the night only slightly earlier than usual with Cassie's DVD box set of "Sex and the City". The next morning we were awakened before 9 o'clock by the shrieks, bangs and crashes of three giggly little boys.

"Yes, it is this loud every morning," Cassie groaned from under her pillow as somewhere on a floor below us there was a giant thud and a shrill scream followed by laughter.

I rolled over and found the snooze button on my biological clock.

Miracle on 34th Street

I was not permitted to blog about the great news until all pertinent parties had been informed. Now that the cat is officially out of the bag, I am celebrating in the blogosphere.

On Thursday, November 20, heretofore known as "HeSheIt" Day, I was standing on the southwest corner of 34th and Seventh with Tokii after dinner and a basketball game in Madison Square Garden (her husband is an assistant coach for a top NCAA team playing in the 2K Sports Classic benefiting Coaches vs Cancer). Yawning through farewell hugs, I was bidding her good night when she paused and took my hand. Placing it on her belly, she said, "But first, meet your god child."

Suddenly wide awake, squealing and jumping up and down under the neon lights of Midtown, the curious stares actually blurred around us. I could not just go home after news like that. After regaining my composure, we went to get coffee and talk about the he/she/it forming inside of my best friend ... and more importantly, what an amazing God Mother I am going to be - the years ahead of cards and presents for Birthdays, Christmases, Graduations and HeSheIt Days.

She might not believe it - so I didn't tell her - but when I was standing in line for my ticket at the team will call and she waved from beyond the barricade to get my attention, I experienced nanoseconds in which I thought, "Wow. She is glowing." Yet within those mere seconds I assumed that either (1) the TV studio sure does take good care of their actors' skin and hair or (2) she is really happy to see her best friend. Looking back now, I want to believe that I had sensed something was different about her.

Over coffee in the lobby of a nearby hotel, we discussed how she might surprise her husband with the joyous news, how her family and our friends would react, and what challenges lay ahead in juggling her unplanned pregnancy with a significant role on a national television show. Her husband called periodically as the night grew later and his evening obligations to the team were winding down, and we giggled excitedly about the fact that he would soon be a father. I did not get home until after 2am and still had to pack for a weekend trip to DC for an Andrea Bocelli concert at the Washington National Opera. When I woke up a few hours later to get ready for work, it was the funniest thing ... the sky really was bluer.

A Year Ago Today: Back to My Life
Two Years Ago Today: When the Past Comes Back

The Official-Unofficial Inauguration Party

Making responsible choices - like not flying back to D.C. yesterday after work on the 7:55pm JetBlue flight for a post-inauguration gala party hosted by Jeffery Wright, to which my best friend was invited, and fly back today - SUCK.

Our plan was for me to return to New York this morning on a 6 o'clock flight out of Dulles. Just in time for me to drag myself into the office in yesterday's little black dress. The only obstacle that stood in our way was car service to the airport directly from the party at 4am. Car service companies were either completely booked, charging $200+ from Georgetown to the surrounding airports or requiring three-hour minimum reservations. And on-call taxi companies were expecting to run on two-hour-plus delays. All options that diminished the welcome surprise of a fairly inexpensive, last-minute, round trip airfare.

Since I had already afforded myself the entire three-day weekend for a last-second trip to D.C. and enjoyed the adrenaline rush of spontaneity on my race to JFK a few days earlier, my best friend and I agreed that a mature, 29-year old, with a middle-class income and upper-class rent, would opt not to return to D.C. less than 24 hours after leaving. I reminded myself to be grateful for the recent inaugural opportunities of which I had been able to take advantage and decided not to pout.

While alleviating the final wisps of disappointment with a bottle of Two Buck Chuck, my roommate and I discussed our New York City Inauguration options: pricey socialite, celebrity and charity balls, neighborhood bar presidential specials, our living room ... And that's when we - and our empty bottles of Two Buck Chuck - devised a most excellent plan. We would have an Official-Unofficial Inauguration Ball in our Hell's Kitchen apartment. We would dress up in evening gowns. We would pop cheap champagne. We'd serve light hor'devours from Food Emporium. We'd watch Barack and Michelle dance their first dance as First Man and First Woman from our own four-floor walk-up. It was brilliant. Never mind the weeks of PR surrounding Obama's Neighborhood Ball, where the use of interactive technology including text messaging and webcasting, would link together attendees at other neighborhood balls across the country. Our idea was incredible. We invited Neighbor Dave. He happened to have a tux. It was like kismet.

Our plan was to dance and drink in our apartment until we were brave enough to venture into the bar downstairs in our formal evening attire. Instead we danced and drank until we fell asleep.

The country awoke this morning in a world where a Black family is making the White House a home. And I woke up remembering that I'm not 19 anymore ... but it sure is a great year to be 29.

Photos to be posted.

A Year Ago Today: The London Post
Two Years Ago Today: Juilliard Sunday Football

T minus 5, 4, 3...

In response to an email I sent yesterday to various coworkers among my three former jobs, a very good friend of mine replied, that was a very “Jackkerowackesque” letter. You should save it for your diary/journal. And so I am ...

Good Evening,

If you are receiving this email, you are on Katie’s Preferred Contact List, which really has no obvious benefits of membership, especially since I will be joining the world of the unemployed tomorrow and – minus moving expenses – will be straddling the poverty line in one of the most expensive cities in the United States. I would really like to keep in touch with you so I am providing my personal contact information at the end of this email.

For those of you who are unaware, today was my last day at Western Carolina University. I am leaving the Cullowhee area to try out New York City life. I have no lucrative job offer waiting or a sugar daddy off which to binge; I am just going. It’s not as wild and adventurous as I’d like for it to sound because there was a year's-worth of intense planning involved; however, if I do not receive a job offer soon, I just may have to begin seeking a sugar daddy. Just kidding. Maybe.

Please keep in touch with me – if nothing more than to remind me from time to time that I left the majestic beauty of the Appalachians to attempt survival in a concrete jungle. In addition to joining the ranks of the unemployed, I am still also seeking a permanent residence. In the interim, my address will be My Best Friend’s Couch, Bronx, NY 10452 … it’s going to be one of those things that I’ll be able to laugh about later, you know?

My personal email address is (omitted for the purposes of this blog entry). Email will be the best way to reach me for the next few months – maybe longer. If any of you are ever in New York City and need a place to stay (and if I have a $1200/mon, 500 sq. ft. apartment of my very own by then), please know that you are always welcome. Your feet may be in my kitchen when you lay down in my living room, but it’ll be free.

It has been a pleasure knowing and/or working with all of you in various capacities. I thank you for the opportunities and the memories. As we say at Western, “Go Cats!” As we say at the casino, “Good luck and oh yea!” And as we say at the crab shack, “Remember you got your crabs from Stoney!” And I hate to say good-bye so I’ll just say I hope to see you soon!

This is Katie. Signing off from North Carolina.

The Loves We Leave Behind

Choosing one life means giving up others
From GLAMOUR
LISA BAIN

My father met my mother in a poker game. He said she was the best bluffer he'd ever seen. She sat with five men at a table under an elm tree that shaded them from the hot Kansas City, Mo., sun. Her talent for subterfuge lay hidden behind her sweet, serene smile. She beat them all. My father couldn't take his eyes off her.

It was her company's annual picnic, and he walked her home. The next week, from his home in Chicago, he sent her a post card: "Remember me? Please do, 'cause I'll be calling you one of these days. David."

She still has the post card. I'm not sure what made her save it. Though he already had his heart set on her, she hadn't chosen him yet, at least not consciously.

As my father often told us while we were growing up, it was blind luck that he was at the picnic that day. A salesman for a big electronics company, he was in town to meet with clients and happened to stop by the branch office that Saturday morning to make some calls. The telephone rang; it was the manager of a local radio station with whom my father had done some business. "Dave! Glad you're in town!" he said, and invited him to come right over to their annual picnic.

My mother was a writer at that radio station. If my father hadn't stopped by the office that morning, he told us, or if he'd gotten there two minutes later ... We shivered with a delicious horror at the opportunity, the life - our lives - that would have been missed.

My mother saw him when he was in town, but she dated other men, including a car salesman who entered our family lore. Soon after she met my father, the car salesman gave her a watch for her birthday. In those days the gift of a watch meant the relationship was moving toward engagement. But she returned the watch, and one night a few months later, she woke her mother and told her she was going to marry Dave.

A few months after the wedding, my father was transferred East. They settled in New York, in the house where I grew up.

I was eight years old when I met my future husband. He was in high school, a friend of my brother's. I remember him only peripherally, as I was much more interested in my brother's other friend - Francois, a Swiss exchanged student, dark, mysterious and polished.

Fifteen years later the man I would eventually marry came back to town for Christmas and stopped by my parents' house to pick up my brother for an evening out. When he saw me in the next room, he hissed, "Who's that?"

My brother looked at him strangely and said, "It's just Lisa."

He walked into the room, reintroduced himself and pretended he didn't know how to wrap his Christmas gifts. I pretended to believe him and helped. He came around a lot over the next few days. "I don't know who he's interested in," my mother told me, "you or your sister." I knew. But later that week I flew across the country to spend New Year's Eve with another man. Though I'd been chosen, I wasn't ready to admit it yet.

If the timing had been different, the distance less daunting and my heart not already - albeit unknowingly - engaged, I could have ended up with that man whom I went off to visit. Or if not him, then with someone else. Sometimes I think about that, how time sweeps us along and puts us in a certain place where we're faced with one option or another. By chance and by the choices we make, we leave behind whole other lives we could have lived, full of different passions and joys, different problems and disappointments.

My father could have missed that picnic. Or my mother could have picked the car salesman. She would have had other children and an entirely different future.

Other times - particularly when I come home late to a sleeping house, my husband and daughter curled around each other after drifting off during the third reading of Jane Yolen's Owl Moon - I think about the lives we would not have had if chance or choice had brought us to a different place. And I shiver, much the way I did as a child at the story of my father's near miss, at the thought that I might have missed this life, this man, this child, this love.

GLAMOUR (MARCH '96), 1996 GLAMOUR, 350 MADISON AVE., NEW YORK, N.Y. 10017

Creating Coincidences

I don't know if it's coincidence that major personal events often take place around June 7 or August 3 or if it's Rickey's way of helping me not dwell on anniversaries. The part of me that aches to believe in the impossible wants to embrace the latter, but the part of me that clings to logic reminds me that - five years later - I am still vainly searching for some sort of connection with him.

It's like when my mom - a devout Catholic - found me a few days after Rickey's death sitting at my brother's computer in their Asheville home, crying and googling psychics who claimed to communicate with the dead.

"Oh, Katie," she said as she touched my shoulder, "I know you want to believe in things like that right now, but those people are taking advantage of those who are hurting like you are."

I knew she was right, but it made me angry that she said that. I wanted someone to tell me that he wasn't gone forever. That there was still some way to reach out, to communicate, to right our wrongs, to say all the things I should have said. Maybe that's why I can't help but count coincidences.

September 3, 2003. A month after he died, I received the job offer for my first post-collegiate job.

August 3, 2004. Nothing happened. I called in sick to work and kept my bedroom door shut. I fully expected to spend the day crying. Instead I was numb. I screened phone calls and watched TV.

August 3, 2005. Terrence and I were driving overnight from Sacramento to Las Vegas. We had been camped out at Kevin's new house trying to catch overbooked flights to Atlanta. We drove overnight to the Las Vegas airport in order to catch an available flight and drive to Cullowhee in time for his college graduation. Long story.

August 3, 2006. Due to circumstances beyond my control, my scheduled August 1 "Move to NYC" date got pushed to August 2nd. The overnight journey in a rented stow-and-go minivan - packed to the brim with every possession I hadn't sold, donated or thrown away in North Carolina - had me riding over the George Washington Bridge in the early morning of August 3, blinking into the sunrise and not believing I had finally arrived. It was the hottest week in New York City's history. It was already 90 degrees and I was about to begin moving into the living room of my best friend's fourth floor walk-up in the South Bronx.

June 7, 2007. I was helping Tokii prepare to move from the South Bronx to New Jersey and into her first apartment with her fiancé.

August 3, 2007. I was in the middle of last minute bridesmaid duties for Tokii's August 10th wedding.

June 7, 2008. I was so busy closing the lease on my new apartment and preparing to move this week that June 7 crept up on me. I realized it was Rickey's birthday shortly after midnight as I was unpacking boxes in my new bedroom. He would have been 32 today.

I tear up over Rickey at random, unexpected times. When I see something, hear something or smell something that reminds me of him. But oddly enough, on most anniversaries, my emotions are dull. My eyes are dry.

I'm not grasping at as many straws as I used to when I was trying to keep my head above the emotional flood that gushed into my life after he died, but every now and then I notice a coincidence. And I reach up, grab a tiny straw and hold it tightly.

To A/C or not to A/C?

On Sunday, May 27, I blogged about the heat and my need for an AC:

"... Despite roughly four hours of sleep, I woke up early this morning in a puddle of sweat in the sauna that is my apartment and immediately decided that today will be the day that I make legitimate efforts toward finding an air conditioner and having it installed in the air conditioner box under my window.

As the back of my legs began to stick to the normally soft microsuede on my couch, I came across reruns of "Run's House" on MTV and noticed in one particular episode that DJ Rev Run's birthday party had been held in Tenjune recently.

"Oh, that's where we were last night," I thought to myself as I seriously debated whether or not to buy a lawn chair at the corner $.99 store and camp out in the frozen food section of the C Town across the street. I've had two cold showers in the last seven hours."

However, I have been dealing with this inner turmoil over the purchase of an air conditioner since I moved into my apartment last November. I knew when I moved from North Carolina into my best friend's living room in the Bronx during the hottest month in New York's recorded history (August 2006) that an air conditioner would be a necessity. I even had all those winter months of opportunity when air conditioners were cheaper.

Yet the same financial reasonings of a recent East Village Idiot blog post have had me in my own internal back-and-forth for months while my family and friends (who live in the South and don't understand housing without AC already included) regularly ask me, "Have you bought an AC yet?"

PLUS, I can only buy an AC that fits in the huge sleeve in my wall, which - though covered - is not insulated and let in the cold air all winter. My ONLY window won't accommodate one, which would ultimately block my view of Jimmy Hoffa's burial ground anyway (= Hudson River) and the only ACs that fit in sleeves at PC Richards currently cost more than another plane ticket to Miami.

And don't even get me started on how I'd get it home. Ever since I sold my car and became a card carrying member of the MTA, I've been stuck in that dark public-transportation abyss: if I can't carry it, I generally can't have it.

That abyss has kept me from making large purchases in New York that I would have easily made in the South without having to mull over the following options: 1) pay for delivery, 2) pay for a cab, but then figure out how to get it up to my apartment, 3) push, pull, heave, drag it - or a combination of (2) and (3) - all the way home.

And thus the question of a new New Yorker becomes: To be with AC or not to be with AC?

Signed!

I had a frustrating adventure this morning while trying to sign my lease and pay my deposits for my new apartment in Hamilton Heights. I hopped on the 4 train in the Bronx around 7 a.m., switched to the 2 train at Grand Concourse and realizing that I was cutting it close if I wanted to be at work by 9 a.m., I got off at 135th Street with the intention of catching a cab across town.

I ended up crossing several avenues before I was able to catch an empty cab. On Broadway, I went to a C Store to purchase two money orders per my broker's direction - only to discover that this particular C Store (or perhaps C Stores in general) don't process money orders.

At a check cashing place up the block, I waited in a line for 20 minutes before reaching the window and learning that money orders cannot be purchased via debit card. Cash only. We're not in North Carolina anymore, Toto.

I ended up accessing four different ATM machines within a three block radius (because of small amount restrictions enforced by the machine) before my ATM card reached its own limit and stopped accepting transactions. After learning that there was a post office about eleven blocks north and one avenue over, I called my boss to explain why I was running late. She immediately offered to front me the money in lieu of ATM card limitations. I politely refused, but how cool is that?

Then, as I power-walked (without the exaggerated swinging arm motion) up Broadway, I called my bank to ask them to reset my ATM card. In addition to resetting my card, a very pleasant representative increased the card withdrawal restriction to accommodate the amount I needed. It will revert back to its previous security restriction tonight at midnight.

At the post office, however, I was able to pay for two money orders with my debit card and apply the cash I had all ready withdrawn toward the overall total. Finally, I raced back down Broadway to the management office, where they greeted me and my money with a smile.

Roughly two-and-a-half months of camping out in my best friend's living room, eleven brokers (over half of which were arrogant, insincere or don juan-ish), 100+ Craigslist hits, two dozen viewings and a two-hour frantic cash crisis later, I am now a signed, deposit-paid renter in New York City.

On July 1, I started my 30-day countdown to becoming a New Yorker. Now I'm counting down to move-in day of first New York City apartment.