March 2006 Archives

Food is one of my favorite things about life, which is why New York is a great city for me. Everyday is a new opportunity to try something new, whether it's lunch from a different street-meat vendor or dinner from a country I'll never get to visit. Sadly, my entry-level ass doesn't have the funds to support the epicurean lifestyle I would love to have, but today I threw caution and my pocketbook to the wind and took a lunchtime adventure with my new co-worker and buddy, Emily.

Let me explain why lunch with a co-worker would be an adventure. Emily is a food expert, and has started to commit to a raw-foods lifestyle. This means our lunch options together are quite limited, as Taco Bell has not yet created a vegan-friendly menu. Pity.

I know what you're thinking. Raw foods? Nora, you have lost your mind and your sense of self. Don't get me wrong, I'm a carnivore to the core. Our ancestors didn't get us where we are today by gnawing on roots, progress was made because they strangled saber-toothed tigers with their bare hands and roasted the bloody meat over flames they tended day and night. They understood that having dominion over the earth meant that they had the right, nay, the duty, to eat other living creatures and enjoy it. Nothing makes me feel more connected to my caveman roots than tearing into a steak that was lovingly prepared by my Momma and doused in A-1.

But still, lunch at Bonobo is an experience to be had. Tons of fresh-faced hippie dudes and bitches are itching to hand you samples of crazy juices, cold soups, and super spreads. They want you to know how every ingedient is good for you and how it will make you feel. I got fake sushi, just veggies and walnut spread wrapped in seaweed and chased with the water of fresh young coconuts. An hour later I felt like I could wrestle a hippo to the ground and then whittle myself a kayak and paddle myself around Manhattan with my bare hands. Psychosomatic? Perhaps.

Fear not, though, tonight there is meat on the stove in Apartment 9. My stomach can rove all it wants, but it will always stay true to her first love. And her second love, which is peanut M&Ms. Ice cream is up there, too.

This morning I paused to check my reflection in the window of McDonald's. Glancing past my bedhead, I saw a homeless dude inside the restaurant take down his pants and start peeing on the floor.

The M*Inerny diaspora has reached a new level. For those of you who didn't get the family Christmas card, where again I'm the one pulling a dumb face, my Dad is in California, my older brother in Philadelphia, and my Mom and sister are holding down the fort in Minneapolis. Patrick has been serving his time in the Navy (cue strobe lights and flamboyant dancing) in Florida and now in Mississippi, where he is in training with the Sea Bees.

Patrick recently called to tell us that he was going to be stationed in Iraq, which was a joke, since he is really going to Guam. That's the kind of joke I can really get behind, kind of like the April Fool's Joke I played where I told my family I was engaged and was dropping out of college. And by April Fool's Joke I mean a three-week lie that I told for my own enjoyment. My mom got such a kick out of it that she ignored me for two weeks.

Say what you want about the military (well, don't say it around me) but I credit it with giving my little brother a tall glass of grow the hell up. Patrick was a kid who twice overslept the noon shift at his job as a bagboy. He was a kid for whom "hard work" meant dumpster diving at Wuollet's bakery for some day-old muffins. He was a kid who broke my tailbone after I punched him in the face for stealing the remote. {Middle child comment: After hearing my bone break, I shouted the F word. I was sent to my room. Patrick got to watch TV all night}. Now, he's got two standard-issue biceps, earned through his hard work on the U.S.S. Carney. He has nice posture. He knows how to iron almost as well as my father. And he looks so cute in his uniform. I'm very proud of my baby brother, even though he no longer has adorably chubby cheeks.

So, like others before him (cue the Felicity soundtrack) Patrick heads off into the great unknown of the Pacific. I see a vacation to Guam in my future, and a possible handful of illegitimate half-Asian babies in his. I'm talking about adoption, Mom.

From March 9-12 I was thrilled by the presence of two of my best and oldest friends, Erin "SaleRack" Mulcahy and Cara "The BusinessWoman" Shannon. Within 10 minutes of arriving at my apartment Erin had started her shopping trip with "the find of the century" and I had laughed harder than I've laughed in 6 months. While they spent the majority of their time lost in the subway system (even though I had provided them not only with a detailed Itinerary but also with a very comprehensive subway map) I spent most of my time with them laughing until my stomach hurt and tears were streaming down my face.

What is it like when 3 girls share a 200 square-foot apartment for four days? Let's just say that the floor was completely covered in panties and jeans and that on Saturday night I burned off part of my bangs and my left eyebrow.

One of the best things about friends you've known since the most awkward of awkward phases is that you have such a rich shared history. And I want to share a part of that history with you. I met Erin and Cara in 2nd grade, when I moved back to Minneapolis and started going to Annunciation Catholic School. We weren't friends until 5th grade, however, in part because I lived on the wrong side of Lyndale, and in part because they were, as I wrote in my 4th grade journal, "brown-nosing rat hogs." We had rats in our classroom and Erin, a true youngest child, would wait until 10 seconds before the bell rang to share them with other kids, simply because the last person holding the rat was the one who had to clean up after it. Clever little bitch.

When we moved to 53rd and Humboldt the girls and I started walking to school, and so started a friendship that was based on mutual nerdiness, wild imagination, and unabashed self-entertainment. We were the girls who made up our own way of speaking (the dreaded sing-song that makes my mom's hair stand on end) and made up rhyming songs about everything that happened to us. We gave each other nonsense nicknames (I have no idea how Cara became Barnabas or how Erin became Barnell). We had bangs and braces and high-waisted jeans and had never kissed boys and got drunk off of Kool-Aid or chocolate milk and we were totally fine with that.

For years Erin and Cara and I entertained each other by playing a simple game of the imagination. It goes something like this: you describe an encounter with a prostitute, where you meet her, what she's wearing, any distinguishing features. After you give a detailed description, you end your story with some variation of, "you look closely, and you realize that you almost slept with {insert name of your grade school principal, high school gym teacher, or classmate's unattractive mother here}. I don't know where we got such vivid descriptions of hookers, or why or how we invented this game, but if you're ever in New York, we'll play this game until you pee your pants. That's a promise.

Cara also kept us entertained with her super-human memory. Erin has zero memory of the past. She would sit next to someone for an entire year and copy their math homework and still not be able to remember their name. I thought I had a fairly good memory of our early years, but as with every other memory I have, it is selective. Cara remembers every gem. Our sixth-grade math teacher screaming, "I ONLY MAKE SIXTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR!" Who went to what dance with whom, who made out in the lunchroom, nothing is too small to have a space reserved in Cara's superbrain.

Now, Cara has fulfilled her destiny and is actually businesswoman in Seattle. Erin turned her ADHD into a career and is a pediatric nurse in Minneapolis. How wonderful it is that even being spread out across three time zones we can get together for a weekend and be 13 again, only without the braces and with more alcohol. I'm sure Cara can remember all that we've been through, and I'm not sure that I want to remember, but I'm so happy to say that these girls are my friends. Having them around made me realize how hard it is to find friends who really get you, who understand you when you say, "I can't handle this" and laugh when you say you want to kick a pigeon in the face. I love both of you bitches.

My beautiful friends.

The smartest girl I know and the girl with the best sense of direction sitting next to the subway map that they found unreadable.

Resting after a long but triumphant day of shopping.

Never let an elderly waiter take your photo. Unless you only want half your face in the picture.

Because I now know that so many awesome people (Ratchet, Jennie, some Xavier folks, and a handful of M*Inernys) read this thing, I have a question. I know most of you are dudes and the girls who read this will just tell me I look fine (except my mother, who will tell me to lose 15 pounds before I think about my hair), but I gotta ask:

What should I do with my hair?

No seriously. Right now it's long and scraggly and this in-between shade of blondishness. Plus, I got these dumb bangs.

.

On Thursday I took my first American train ride, or at least the first one I remember. I think I recall my parents saying they took me on the train as a baby, but it doesn't count unless you get your own seat and are drooling on yourself instead of your mother while you sleep.

I Amtraked it to Springfield, Mass. to see one of my favorite aunts, my father's sister Mary Margaret. As the baby of 9 children, my dad ended up more than a little spoiled. Some hypothesize that it was due to the fact that his mother was too plain tired (after having him at age 44) to not give him everything he wanted. Some claim that he was so strikingly cute as a child that nobody could refuse him. And while after seeing childhood photos of my Dad I can vouch for the undeinable cuteness, a weekend with Mimi proved that she and her sister were the Steve Spoilers.

Side note: If you've never met a M*Inerny, it's likely that you've never had wait on them. I rag on my Dad for his helplessness but in actuality we're all like him. We won't ask big favors of people, but we're unable to commit to small tasks. Mary Margaret says her husband Pat poaches her eggs every Sunday after mass, and whether they admit it or not, it's true of all of my siblings and myself that if we are already sitting down or out of arm's reach of something, we'll ask someone else to get it. So if you don't want to grab four glasses of water for us, don't walk into the TV room at 53rd and Humboldt during the Simpsons.

Staying with Mimi and her husband Pat for a weekend is like having a VIP pass to the M*Inerny lifestyle. You get great magazines to read, plenty of hot coffee in the morning, slices of fresh banana bread, naps, your own little guest room with towels laid out for you, plenty of conversation, and no time to get hungry before the next meal is served.

Mimi and Pat's beautiful daughter Patty came over on Friday with her adorable children: the beautiful and talkative Grace:

And the sweetest little boy since my brother Patrick, determined little Owen:

In one of those, "oh this is neat" moments of life, Pat and Mimi took me to the Spingfield Quadrangle, where there is a permanent exhibit celebrating hometown boy Dr. Seuss, including a large sculpture of his famous book, Oh, The Places You'll Go, which was weird because Ryan.
had just blogged about Dr Seuss. See? Life IS neat.

I also spotted my favorite Dr. Seuss character of all time, The Lorax:

I know, it's not like me to adore a tree-hugging shorty with a flowing beard.

I arrived back in NYC on Saturday morning, to find that all of the subways were in chaos. The R became the F, the F was still the F, the N didn't exist between 42nd and 59th Street, and the E became the R. Every MTA employee had a completely different idea of which trains were and weren't running, and which stops would and would not be made. I felt like I was trapped in a tunnel of lies. It took 5 different trains to get back home, and I only made it back because I shouted in exasperation, "I just want to go home, but it's too hard!" Which prompted an MTA worker to pinky swear to me that the next train that came would indeed take me to my stop. He was right. Finally.

My sister on American Idol contestant Ayla Brown:

Ayla can't win. She's too tall. It's called American Idol, not Gangly Idol.

It should be noted that Ayla, like myself, is 6 ft. tall.