The Reluctant Receptionist

i almost forgot—pictures from this weekend’s apple picking! all in a fancy google slideshow.

still no word on the alyson/kaiser sklown front, so i can either assume that she’s still in labor (it is her first child, after all, EEK) or that she’s too busy being part of a new happy family, gazing lovingly down at her newborn child in the hospital bed (cut to stock footage) and then looking up at her husband adoringly. maybe they both do a little smiling through tears. i don’t know; i’ve never had a child, and unless they make some amazing advances in medicine (hello, colonic pregnancy!) i won’t be having one any time soon. all i know is that if the baby (our GODSON. i’m sorry, secondary adult life partner) has been birthed, i’ll be hearing about it soon. or else we’ll never hear from any of them again, in which case i will assume that the new little family has fled for canada for some reason, having assumed new identities, deciding to start a new life. it could have something to do with that slave/porn ring they’ve been running out of their living room. but that’s just a theory.

ah, yes, the day their son is born i’m talking about them running a slave/porn ring. why? because i have CLASS!

anyway, that’s all that’s really going on here in new york. things continue to spin along, the neverending string of work and rehearsals and application-sending. we had church rehearsal last night, and it’s been interesting trying to meld my “new” voice (the one that i’ve been working on so hard with ira, the one that has a full bottom end and a resonant, spinning [kind of loud] top end, with everything in-between having the kind of cut that can get through an orchestra. meaning, basically, re-finding my opera voice) with something that i can use in the tenor II section of a choir. granted, there are some big, big voices in our choir and it’s ually not an issue at all. it’s only when we sing softly that i have to modify, and so far it hasn’t been a problem. what’s funny is that even though i’ve been singing only baritone rep, it’s actually easier for me to hit all the high notes in choir this year.

oh, singing. you are a cruel mistress.

well, some BIG BIG news, readers. as i went back to my blog to enter today’s entry (hello, redundancy!), i noticed that there were a couple new comments. one from andrea, one of the most faithful commenters, concerning my new possible stage name, since there’s already a baritone with my name (albeit dead): robert sklute. definitely has a ring to it, no? it’s a little JEWY, though. jaykay, jews, you know i love you. then alyson left a comment, to which i responded “shut up and pop out that baby!”

i wasn’t surprised that she nearly immediately e-mailed me back. she always does, because she sits in front of her email hitting the refresh button much the way i do. what surprised me, dear readers, is that she sent me this message:

“har….
btw, i am totally in labor! my contractions are about 7-10 minutes apart. baby, here we come! just hanging out until they become 5 min. apart. for an hour. i will keep you posted….”

that’s right. she is IN LABOR and checking her email. this is definitely going to be a child of the 21st century. i immediately called amanda since she’s my future wife er i mean fellow godparent er i mean fellow secondary adult life teacher. what if i insisted on being called “godparent” even though alyson and max are agnostic? and then tried to insist on the baby being christened (in the catholic faith, of course, even though i’m methodist.) in a big white christening gown while amanda and i stood there pretending to be a straight couple (with everyone whispering what is that poor woman doing married to that gay guy?)? i think maybe we will.

and so alyson, the first of our group to reproduce, is busy contributing to the population. kaiser cook sklown. comin’ at ya.

i’d planned to be at home last night, since it was my only night to actually eat a leisurely dinner in astoria and then watch some of my own television, which i pay for even though most of the television i watch is at phong’s house between the hours of 10:15 and 11pm. when jeremy asked me, though, if i wanted to go downtown to try and track down our friend aron at the restaurant where he works i couldn’t really say no. i mean i literally couldn’t say no: i’d bailed on very similar plans last weekend and couldn’t be like, “jeremy, i am sorry but i am much too important and busy to follow through on the plans that we made together over a week ago!” it was really just icing on the cake that aron apparently works at some fancy pants restaurant downtown in the bowery hotel called gemma. what’s the definition of gemma? yeah, i thought it was totally gross, too.

according to the new york magazine review of this place, they tried to make it all like the waverly inn (this pretentious restaurant that famously didn’t open to the public for like months and months and months, meaning that it was an invite-only restaurant where only famous people and rich people and famous rich people got to eat.) except that no one was actually trying to go there and even though it was supposedly “closed to the public” no one ever had to wait more than 25 minutes for a table. now you still had to be able to afford the food, which means i could never go there.

we didn’t have to afford anything besides drinks, however, so we went to see him there. we hadn’t seen this guy in seven years (he’s one of our oklahoma friends from, believe it or not, right after high school) and he looks great. older, sure, but we all look older (and in my case way hotter! jaykay.). aron planted us at the bar, but made sure to walk us around the entire perimeter of the restaurant so that a) we could be seen being walked by the manager around the entire restaurant; and b) could crane our necks and roll our eyeballs around and surreptitiously look at joaquin phoenix and eva mendes, who were raucously drinking champagne in a corner table.

so chalk it up: another star sighting. two, in fact, though i had no idea who eva mendes was until i looked her up this morning. the main event of the evening was reconnecting with an old friend, which means that at this point four people i was friends with in high school are now in new york. nice.

remember how i always post samples of anna ditkoff’s writing for baltimore’s city paper? you don’t? how about if i jog your memory?

well, she just wrote her farewell bar scars column for citypaper, and i wrote her an email saying how much i’d always enjoyed her writing and she wrote back saying, “of course i remember you—we’re close, personal friends.”

which is fantastic, because i always joke about us being close, personal friends.

ah, baltimore. i miss you so bad sometimes it hurts.

well, dearest reader(s), it’s already friday, with a great big three-day labor day weekend stretching out ahead of us. labor day is admittedly a little bittersweet: another summer come and gone, september giving way to the awesome crispness of october and november, which will then give way to the bitchass hateful shitfuck eastern seaboaord bullshit winter weather. it was a big summer, though, i have to admit, one in which i got to wear my speedo quite a bit (maybe a little bit more than some people would’ve liked. those gradeschool kids at the jersey shore can be so puritanical!), one in which we partied like crazy, went outside a lot. oh, and my boyfriend moved here from san francisco. that happened, too. so here’s labor day, the official end to all of that, if not the end to the heinous heat. and, obviously, it’s our last two days to wear white shoes or seersucker, so break out those stripey suits and white loafers! dear god, i wish i were kidding, but i’ve already worn my seersucker for what i announced to phong to be “the last time for the season,” which was, as expected, met with a grand eyeroll. early next week i’ll take it, with my sweaters, to the dry cleaner. in with the old, out with the new.

the biggest thing we have planned for this weekend is helping cory and sean move from hoboken (a.k.a. sobroken, ho-pokin’) to astoria. they’ve been in exile, somewhat, because cory moved out of his apartment in astoria that he shared with courtenay because her brother moved in, and he and sean hadn’t found a suitable place. by what i’m going to call an early christmas miracle, they found what they say is an awesome place—a two bedroom, no less, even though they’re boyfriends—for a reasonable price, right off the 30th avenue stop in astoria. what does this mean? it means that they’re like practically down the street from me, as new york city goes. we’re like next door neighbors, except that my real next door neighbors are of the latino persuasion and obviously don’t care that they’re literally crawling with bedbugs, that they have so many bedbugs that the little fuckers have to crawl under the baseboards to come feed on us. but i digress.

so we’re getting up early tomorrow morning and hauling ourselves out to hoboken, where we’ll load up their truck then, i assume, take the train back to astoria, where we’ll unload the truck. what’s funny about this is that i swore after my last move that i once and for all was never moving myself again, never hauling furniture and boxes up and onto and then out of a budget rent-a-truck. that i would forever hire other people to do it, as i was no longer in college. and because i am, as you all know, a pretty princess. but phong said that it was good exercise, and he’s right. power yoga and moving apartments. i’m gonna be jacked.

i seem to have somehow beaten everyone to work today, which i always enjoy. granted, i didn’t really get here any earlier than i usually do (that isn’t really true, i guess, since i got here at 8:30 instead of 8:45, which means that i get to leave work at a blissfully early 4:30 today), so that probably means that everyone is at some extremely-important meeting where if you don’t go you get fired but i somehow didn’t find out about it and i’m sitting here in a t-shirt and two-day-old khakis. but so it goes.

speaking of working overtime (or totally not working overtime, since i’m leaving today at 4:30), amanda’s been up to that lately. we’d planned to have dinner last night (vegetarian chili, at amanda’s suggestion. specifically, that irritating little sprite rachael ray’s “veg-head tex-mex chili.” did you ever hear something so obnoxious? oh, wait. i have. it’s her “why the chicken crossed the road chicken tortilla soup.” christ almighty i hate that woman. unless, of course, she googles her name [i know you all do sometimes] and finds this blog, in which case yummo! love you and your e.v.o.o. that stands for extra virgin olive oil just eyeball it!) but amanda still wasn’t home at 7 o’clock, which is strange because she always gets home between 6:30 and 6:40. unless, of course, the train is a shitty wreck and none of us make it home until 8. so i called her and when she answered the phone all quiet-like i knew exactly what was going on: this girl was still at work. at her day job, might i add. not at some great rehearsal where she’s going to be the star soprano.

apparently, someone fucked something up at her job—not her, of course, but one of her underlings, because she, unlike pee-on me, has underlings—and she was staying at her job until it was fixed. i gave her the usual speech:

“amanda. are they paying you for the extra hour you just gave them?”

“no.”

“is the person who fucked this shit up even THERE anymore?”

“no.”

“so why didn’t you leave their problem for them to clean up instead of fixing it for them? aren’t they the ones who are going to get in trouble?”

“i know.”

“i want you to turn off your computer and leave. you are not getting paid overtime. do not give these people any more of your time than you already are.”

“i know.”

so she finally made it home around 8 o’clock, and i somehow avoided going off on a diatribe about how corporate america is sucking its workers into lives that revolve around nothing but work, guilting them or scaring them into working 10 hour days with little or no vacation. i’m on a one man mission to take that system down.

an email from my friend mandy:

“here’s what watching a movie with you was like in high school:

you and me in my room. my parents asleep at 8o’clock.

if you liked the movie, then we watched about half of it, then snuck out on the back deck for a cigarette, then got a light snack, then finished the movie.

if you DIDN’T like the movie, then after 10 minutes, you got on the computer, then after 10 more minutes you went to the kitchen and prepared a gourmet “bread tray,” which included various breads and balsamic vinegar dips and cheeses, fruits, and whatnots, then you came back to the room, snacked around, and THEN proceeded to try and bother me into giving up on the movie…this included, taking the plastic stick thingy off my little entertainment center and whacking me while singing made up songs (the most famous of which was the “cramps” song)...Finally, you would bribe me with the promise of a Diet Peach Iced Tea Snapple and we would go cruisin’ and never finish the movie…and I think this is what happened when we watched Lost Highway…

P.S. Sometimes instead of a bread tray, you would make homemade quesadillas.
P.P.S. You would also have to spray yourself down with Lance’s colognes before you went home, so your parents wouldn’t know you were smoking. And don’t think I forgot about how you told your parents that the cigarettes they found in your car were mine and that you were trying to get me to quit…Ha! Only YOU smoked Camels with a “K.” I wonder if those still exist.”

amanda and i went last night to the “babies ‘r’ us” at union square. we had to fill out our registry, and fast, because the baby we conceived eight and a half months ago could pop at any time. ew just kidding. we were buying a baby shower gift for our friend alyson in boston, whose shower we’re going to this weekend. i’d love to tell you what we got her, but she reads this blog. i’ll tell you what we didn’t get her: the four hundred pound high chair that she registered for is one of them; we also didn’t get the baby anything like new chefs knives or shards of twisted, rusty metal (i’m gonna call you dizzy!). i kept wanting to but amanda wouldn’t let me. i also kept wanting to buy things that were in no way related to the regsitry whatsoever. “what if we just bought her this high chair instead,” i said, pointing to a strange-looking european design wooden high chair called something like ‘skoopa.’ “what if we just tell her that this was the one on the registry?” not because it was cheaper, mind you, because it was nearly twice the price. but because it would’ve been hysterical to try and convince her that this weird high chair was actually the one she requested.

walking around “babies ‘r’ us” i was reminded of everything that a baby really entails: the endless mountains of shit in diapers, the diaper warmers, diaper dispensers, changing tables, changing table covers, changing table cover warmers, changing table cover warmer covers. and everything is either light yellow or light green or light pink or light blue. alyson and max did the only thing that they really could, as parents who have had gender studies in college: they went with one of their two gender-neutral options, butter yellow, knowing how lame it would be to surround a baby boy with light blue because boys are supposed to like light blue. i was trying to convince amanda to let me buy the baby all pink things. a baby named kaiser sklar who’s a boy and dressed in pink? it might as well have baby tattoos and guaged-out baby sized ears. that’s totally my kind of baby.

in the end we went with everything from the registry. i don’t mean that we bought everything (i do, after all, have 68 dollars to my name and had to write an IOU out to amanda) on the registry, just that everything we bought was actually something alyson requested.

as i went off on a diatribe about baby smell and breastfeeding (mainly joking, of course, since i constantly see babies at my job and have actually grown to quite like children), amanda reminded me that we are this child’s godparents. or “secondary adult life teachers,” as alyson doesn’t plan on raising the baby in a particular faith. of course this means that i plan on kidnapping it and dunking it in a bowl of holy water, thereby branding it a methodist for life. but don’t tell alyson that.

as a sidenote, i keep calling the baby kaiser sklown, because every time i think of that name i lose my mind laughing. here’s the backstory.

Robin: i want a puppy. i want an italian greyhound. and i want to name it iris or nigel.
me: HAAAAAAAA. i’m sorry, that can never compete with my puppies, glen and linda.
Robin: iris the italian greyhound
me: HAAAAAAAAAAA
Robin: and greyhounds are the prissiest dogs ever. and you have to brush its teeth. and it won’t step on wet grass. and it gets cold.
me: and you actually want this?
Robin: so you have to put it in sweaters.
me: you are inSANE. you can just TELL what a prissy dog that is
Robin: PRISSY
oh my god. and it’s “timid”
me: HA
Robin: and basically has social anxiety disorder, so it just stays with you
me: glen and linda
Robin: nigel or iris
me: well i’m sorry but my brother and sister pugs will kick timid iris’s sweater wearing ass. they’ll chase her right onto wet grass
Robin: and then she’ll cry. CUTE. maybe i identify with her social anxiety
me: oh probably.