Laugh Riot

It's pretty much a non-stop joke-fest around these parts lately. Instead of sitting around watching television we just sit around and watch Milo, who is way better than anything on TV with the possible exception of Mad Men, which hasn't yet returned with it's new season yet anyway.

Yesterday I was sitting reading the paper and Milo was bringing me things, which is usually how the weekends go in our house.

"Here's your lunch," he said yesterday, bringing me a bowl. "It's some left over chicken and something else."

I looked into the bowl and saw that he had taken a small plastic bag and covered the bowl as though it were plastic wrap. I took the plastic bag off and inside the bowl was a forklift and, lo and behold, a plastic chicken. Naturally. Leftover chicken.

Milo has also been asking us to sing songs around certain themes on demand. "Sing a song about a fish," Milo asked the other day. The only song I could think of that mentioned a fish was Joy To the World, so I sang that. Now Milo drifts off to sleep to the lyrics "Jeremiah was a bullfrog." But he also asks for songs about trains. A lot. Which is how he ended up asking Steven what sound the doors make on the midnight train to Georgia.

If you are Milo this is a perfectly reasonable question.

When The Tap Runs Dry

Me: The other day Milo drew a picture of a whale.

Steven: Milo, will you draw me a picture of a whale?

Milo: I don't want to draw you a picture of a whale. I'm exhausted of whales.

New York City Breakup

We have less than a week left in NYC, the place that I have called home for nearly eleven years. Behind those eleven years are seven apartments, two boroughs, six jobs, two graduate schools, visits to five hospitals, one marriage and one birth. I feel a little nostalgic about leaving, but mostly I feel betrayed.

I never thought I would leave New York. My entire childhood I dreamed about living here. I watched the movies of the 80s and learned that you could work in a bookstore, yet live in a cute apartment on the Upper West Side and have lots of literary friends (Crossing Delancey); you could get a job on Wall Street, change your hairstyle, read the Post and suddenly find yourself merging and acquiring your way into your own office with a window and a secretary (Working Girl); you could be a starving artist and still rent a gigantic SoHo loft with amazing light and quirky neighbors (any of a billion movies). When I first moved here a lot of those things were no longer true - no one seemed to have secretaries any more, and most offices were cubicles -- but some of them were.

I rented my first apartment near Union Square in a beautiful pre-war doorman building for $1600 a month. It was almost twice what I had been paying in Chicago, but it was everything I had imagined my New York existence would be. And this was because while the rent was high, it was still within the range of what I could afford on my 25-year-old salary. I lived there for three years, and many of my friends lived in walking distance. No one lived in Brooklyn. Why would you?

I went out all the time. I had a 20-something's dream refrigerator -- half a bottle of wine stuck in the door, a jar of mustard, milk, nail polish. I got a boyfriend, changed jobs, broke up, changed jobs again, got a new boyfriend. A friend of mine who was in her 40s would sometimes call and say, "How are you and your young life?"

I discovered pedicures, took writing classes, rode the 14th St. bus to Chelsea Piers and spent lonely summer days sitting in a lounge chair overlooking the Hudson River, trying to make my way through The Power Broker. I never managed to get very far. My rent went up.

I broke up with my boyfriend, changed jobs, discovered martinis, lost weight, found yoga, road tripped, wrote more, got fired. My rent went up.

And then, almost as though I had sleepwalked over the Brooklyn Bridge, I found myself living in Brooklyn. Brooklyn was not my dream. It was a perfectly nice place to live, and it got nicer as the years went on, but it wasn't the plan. But then there was marriage and then there was Milo, and suddenly we needed three bedrooms -- two for sleeping and one to store all the crap that children come with. Our rent went up. Manhattan was out of the question.

Also Manhattan was no longer Manhattan. You could no longer be twenty five and rent a one bedroom in Union Square. You could no longer thrill to the danger of a midnight subway ride. The people started to look different. There was money everywhere. There we thirty-year-old finance people talking about which $3 million apartment to buy at the table next to us at my birthday dinner. There was Prada in SoHo. The price of admission at the MoMa went up.

In the time since I had moved to Brooklyn, so did everyone else. And Manhattan became something clean, exclusive, and boring. And Brooklyn. Well, now it's expensive too. When I'd dreamed my Manhattan childhood dream, I'd forgotten to add "smart real estate investment" or "job in finance" to the list. High-paying job: check. Published book: check. Husband: check. Baby: check. But oh, those qualifiers. REALLY high paying job was what I needed. How could I have known? You never needed it before.

And so, eleven years later, a little heart broken, I'm leaving. I'm sorry it had to end this way, Manhattan. I loved you so.

New Videos

The camera is working again - new videos are up here, including the long awaited Milo Sings The Four Questions, also below for your convenience:

Milo Goes Electric

Milo rocks out on Guitar Hero, and other pictures from a surprise trip to the Jersey Shore up on Flickr.