I don’t usually enjoy or even bother to examine subway ads, but this one was pretty well-done. Allow me to translate as it’s a touch blurry: “Everyone has to grow up. It is a fact of life. Don’t be scared of it. Just make sure your apartment grows up with you.”

Even though the design made me chuckle, I call bullshit on both ideas: That people’s friends look down at them because their apartments are too cluttered, and that people should care even if their friends do think that. It’s New York. No one’s surprised to walk inside a studio and see piles of crap (left), mine especially. Yes, visitor, my extra-large-for-some-reason futon does happen to puncture your thigh as you step through the door. So what? It likes you. There’s a place for you to sit and a toilet. Get over it. I don’t need to hear that it’s small, or that you “really like the exposed brick.” People usually tell me both things — the latter purely out of pity. It’s oddly reassuring.

Note to Manhattan Mini Storage: No one in Manhattan whose apartment looks “scary” has too much stuff. They just don’t have any space to put their normal amounts of stuff because evil powers much like yourselves charge them inordinate amounts of money to occupy indoor space in Manhattan. I ride the subway because sometimes it’s fun to roam around such a huge space with more than one partition. I do it to forget the low-lit troll cave I just minutes ago escaped. A reminder that I live in a freaky dungeon is simply uncalled for.

I really need to move to Brooklyn.

For some reason, the news on Channel 1 (that’s New York 1 to those of us “in the loop, but not that Loop”) was on my TV at 10:17 p.m. tonight, just moments before I pressed play on my cool DVR recording of the Project Runway finale.

I generally hate NY1 because it’s the channel that always just starts playing when my DVR/life partner decides it’s been paused too long. (Because it obviously has the power to decide things. It’s tough being in a relationship with an inanimate object, but we manage to “make it work.”)

NY1 also starts playing when I roll over my remote control and accidentally turn my cable box on and off in the middle of the night. It’s really annoying.

Okay fine. I turn it on and off myself, deliberately, because I’m wide awake in the middle of the night and think the black hole that is the news will serve as a lullaby. I seem to be a little unclear on the definition of “lullaby”. As an added bonus to this TV habit, I also get to torture my neighbors with noise compositions as inexplicable as the saxophone-solo opening song for the NY1 news. The NY1 news plays every 10 minutes. I am begging NY1 to get a new song. That one is OBNOXIOUS.

I did get to see this, though, and somehow NY1’s entire loathsome existence was suddenly all worth it.

I’m glad they were considerate enough to wait until the fifth bullet to mention “mentally challenged.” It’s probably only a minor detail.

Come to think of it, they should add a sixth bullet: “Occasionally guests on Desperate Housewives“

New O.C. tonight, finally. I was beginning to forget what the Cohens’ fake pool looks like. (I remembered: Really fake.)

I’ve about had it with the freakin’ piegeons. I used to get rid of them by banging one of my 17 remote controls against my window, but now they’re so used to my presence that I’m not even a threat to them anymore. Sometimes I even open the window with a flourish and let out bloodcurdling screams. They just dart their heads back and forth as if something might be a little off, but that’s it. GOD!

Also filed under Things I Hate But Photograph Anyway for Shits & Giggles… DR presents this girl, her thong, and her Pooh tattoo. I hate to admit this, but I actually just spent two whole minutes debating whether the photo should be displayed to the side of the text like most of the pictures, or whether it warranted an entire column’s width. I went with the latter:

If you’re so turned on right now and feel the urge to save this image to make it your desktop pattern, you’ll notice that I named it “buttcrack_pooh.jpg.” Nice. Was she being ironic?

I am really, really mean. And probably losing readers by the tens by posting this. It’s something no one’s supposed to see, and my partner-in-crime Kate and I had to go and capture this atrocity with the triple-zoom. But you just can’t turn down the opportunity to snap a crack when one’s staring right at you. About a month ago, concerned reader Dee made a post demanding to know WHY I was so obsessed with putting SEC (Someone Else’s Crack, you know, instead of SEP, Someone Else’s Problem) on my personal website. I believe my exact response was “Mom, we live in a society. It’s just what people do.”

Huh? I’m not sure what it means either. But in that spirit, DR would like to extend a Call For Buttcracks. It’s sort of like a Call For Papers, which occurs in graduate school when prestigious universities hold conferences and need people to read at them. Well, this presitgious purveyor of Crack is holding firm on its SEC policy and needs people to send in their sightings. Happy hunting.

Note: I’m aware that the above photo does not contain VISIBLE Crack. But when the huge thong (and such a large portion of it!) is all up in your biznass, you really can’t tell the difference. And if you call this “covered-up Crack,” then I beg to differ. This is Crack! Say hello! Deal with it.

I confessed to Meghan my psychological problems involving Magnolia cupcakes, and instead of empathizing with me like I thought she would, she laughed in my face. Here’s the problem: When there’s a food product I really value - and this is not limited to junk food like 99% of this site - I need to have a backup if I’m going to indulge.

This means that if I decide I want my last orange, I need to go out and buy another orange (or six) before I eat the first. The supply must be replenished before it depletes, or “diminishes,” if I want to be cute about it.

This isn’t funny. I have a serious problem. Late at night, I’ll decide I want to cook penne pasta, and unless there’s another box somewhere in apartment, I can’t bring myself to do it because then I wouldn’t have any more penne.

What?! I am insane! I know this. Just let me get it out, because you’re already here and probably not about to leave (although now would be a great time).

I do this with mini Twix, mac ‘n’ cheese, lime Tostitos, and eggs, to name a few. I will even let rotting flowers sit on my coffee table while I procrastinate buying new ones, instead of just throwing them out as soon as they start to flake out.

I’ve thought about it for a few hours now (I have a really fulfilling life) and have concluded that it’s only store-bought items that I need immediately replenished. If I cook eggplant parm or make tuna salad, it’s not like I’m going to whip up another tray of it just because I’m almost done with the leftovers. That would be crazy! And when I have restaruant leftovers, I don’t feel a strong urge to run back and order the same thing right away. Unless it was, you know, really good. No, the OCD seems to be limited to single items that are sold as small wholes unto themselves.

Case in point: Magnolia cupcakes. Meghan and I decided to split a box of four. I assumed this would provide a pretty good buffer zone for me, because she would only eat one (to my one) and leave me with two extra when she left. Then, I could safely eat the third while planning another trip to the bakery for more.

This is just wrong. I would apparently rather let the fourth innocent cupcake become stale and possibly never eaten than just eat all my purchased servings at once and live without the presence of cupcakes in my apartment for one whole day. I need some help.

When it was clear that Meghan was going to eat her second, I became despondent and confided this particular food-related OCD to her, to no avail. She thought I was nuts when I suggested that before we eat the second pair, we should walk over and get two more because the bakery wasn’t closed yet!

When I type it out, it doesn’t seem logical to me either. But at the time, the feeling was so intense, so certain. Look at those colors. Would you want to part with all of them without backup? Think about it. :(

This weekend I walked around for a total of about eight hours. Everyone was outside, all excited that it was “warm.” It was maybe 45 degrees during peak hours. Anyway, on Saturday, the Zach Attack and I headed out to the piers with coffee. I thought my face got a little color, which Zach callously threw down as just a “raging case of windburn, if that.” Thanks.

At 3 p.m. amidst all the wind and warmth, there was really no other option than to co-host an impromptu beerbeque (sans any sort of meat, so just… beer) on my roof. Check it out.

Note the obligatory feather boa with its own chair. Here’s the view northward, and eastward. Oh no! I’ve become “that New Yorker.”

And Dee! Look what else made it up there! Nothing goes better with Sierra Nevada special-edition “Celebration” ale than Kirschbaum’s tea cookies. And ridiculously strong barbeque chips. And… salsa. I think these rancid chips burned a sizable hole in my stomach lining. To prevent permanent damage, I made sure to coat the area with a thick, steady stream of alcohol the rest of the night. I call it “Safe Drinking.”

There are at least 10 pigeons gathered on my two windowsills and the two directly across the five-feet alley. They will not shut up. They’re making this woo-ing noise. It’s awful. It’s like what I imagine people hear in their heads just as they’re about to die. “Deathbed: The Soundtrack” or something. Oh shit. I’ve just jinxed myself. Please, if I’m dying, crank up the music. It can suck — it can be like those cheesy ’80s mixes that everyone loves (because “how can you not!”) but I hate. Anything but this. This is torture. I haven’t even fallen asleep yet. It’s 7:15 in the morning.

Just when I think they’re about to let up, one starts up again and then the rest “catch on” and become the chorus for the most awful song imaginable. I literally wish I could kill them. Look at me in the left corner, glaring at the pigeon and scheming. This is intense.

I probably couldn’t actually kill them. As soon as I opened a window, they’d fly away, and if one happened to fly into my apartment, it’s more likely that it would end up killing me. I just wish there was some sort of homemade poison pigeon-killing concoction, like an over-the-counter thing I could whip up in my one medium-sized pot and smear onto the entire side of my building. Maybe even superglue — the squawking would be horrible for a few days until they died, but at least their friends would have learned their lessons and I might get some cool digital photography out of it.

Speaking of CDP, this is the best (and worst) thing I’ve ever seen on Gawker. I don’t approve of security guards watching DVDs, but I wholeheartedly admire the person who took that photo. I’d probably mess it up by using a flash or something. Harold and Kumar. If that’s for real, it is truly priceless. Good thing that when I slack off at work, there’s no one sneaking behind my back and catching me in the act. Oh wait.

Finally, I’d like to extend a giant F-you to winter, courtesy of DR fan D.R. It must be from somewhere in Boston. My thoughts exactly.

At the risk of sounding like a bad stand-up comic, which is still one rung higher than a bad sit-down writer, what’s the deal with fruit flies? I now host an entire army of them. I gather that they “go to where the rotting food is,” as someone told me on the phone. Brilliant!

That’s fine. I’ll take the trash out. My question is, where do they come from? Do they just hang out under the floorboards or between bricks in little colonies, waiting for me to throw out the bags of salad mix I buy and refuse to eat? Is it possible that they spontaneously materialize WITHIN the trash can once the produce has been deposited there?

I know the latter option is a stretch. But think about it: isn’t it a little more settling to imagine bugs forming themselves within a receptacle in which you can sustain their lives than to have to cope with the idea that they are everywhere, all the time, possibly staring at you while you eat caramel brownies and then furiously do your situps?

As usual, I didn’t bother to look something up before blabbering about it. Check out this explanation garnered from the creative Google search - get this - “where do fruit flies come from”.

Okay. I’m sorry, but isn’t the imagery in that paragraph like, alarmingly harsh? I seriously think the writer was trying to freak people out. It’s almost like he’s on the fruit flies’ side, calling their range of nutrients “impressive,” having them “flourish” instead of just existing, and noting the miraculous “special” capability to thrive in the face of poison. Way to go, fruit flies!

I can only conclude that the paragraph was written by a fruit fly. No human is that sympathetic to the cause of insects. And I can understand how, since people are really annoyed by fruit flies, they’d want to sort of prove their worth with powerful adjectives and a heroic tone. They’re all, “Take that, humans! We can infest the Internet, too!”

I just spent over 90 minutes pacing around The Room looking for my camera-to-computer cable. This was especially frustrating because given the square footage of the Pink Palace, I knew it had to be less than five feet away from me no matter where I was standing. I eventually uncovered it under one of my many bags of trash. Whew! That was close! Dee NEEDS documentation of my new apartment, NOW. We must not deprive Dee of photos. Click below if you too are interested.

( The Room. )

I’m about to start rereading a book I first read in high school for my summer class. I’m a little afraid because I know I’m going to be horrified by the marginalia. After randomly opening to page 173 and reading the comment, “WEIRD!” in jade-colored ink, I know I’m in for a treat. Some of my other gems from that era include “Huh?” (which has since been replaced by “WTF?” during graduate study), “haha” (which I still use), and my all-time favorite, “is this foreshadowing?” I don’t know Annie, read the rest of the fucking book and find out.

Shout-out to my new friend Lindsay and her kickass blog. It’s funnier than mine, so I don’t know if we can actually be friends because now I have a complex.

I saw Anchorman last night and somehow really, really enjoyed it.

I told myself I’d have to go running if the UPS guy came before 2, and he just did. Shit.

Hello … hello again! (totally ’80s guitar riff) I have Internet again! The Time Warner Man defied my expectations completely and showed up. Now I have no excuse for not obsessively updating my blog while obsessively not updating DR.

After entering The Room, Time Warner Man walked up to the TV and said, “Is this the TV?” I assumed that after doing a double-check over the rest of my living space, he’d become more confident in his guess - so I didn’t respond. Indeed, it was the TV, but why should I have given away the answer? But then the man actually turned around and waited for a reaction. I considered shrugging helplessly. But then I just nodded.
The new apartment kicks ass! But there is one glaring problem. The paint color turned out to lean towards the “rosey” side of the “nice rosey orange” spectrum. I never looked at the paint after I bought it, so this is my fault. (Your runny nose, Larry having a blog, and the overwhelming April-May profits of the 23rd St. Nuts for Nuts cart are also my fault.) The painting occurred while I was romping around the Midwest, so I wasn’t there to stop it. But I wouldn’t have anyway. It’s not that bad. It’ll be like a test of character! Uh, you lose.

So much for my brilliant plan to offset the dark brick wall (wouldn’t any color have done that?). Or maybe I’m overreacting. Here’s a low-quality preview of the paint:

Notice that the orange is just dying to come out. But it can’t. It’s being suffocated by the parasitic pink, rendering a hue that can generously be classified as “coral.” But we all know it’s really “pink.” Below is an alternative:

Okay, that was intended as a joke but it seems my “joke” looks better than my reality, so I’m not even going to attempt other colors. I would probably stay up all night and waste time on the computer if I did that. Oh wait.

It’s really not that bad. I have a lot of stuff to throw on the walls, and the color does kind of remind me of a Matisse painting. (I’m not one of those people who name-drop painters, BTW. Matisse is the only artist I know. Are there, like, others?) Plus, anything’s better than white. Plus:

Check out this cute sweet shop across the street. It actually says “ice cream artisans.” I am pumped. I’ll have the pink kind!

I’ll post silly pics of last weekend soon. Amazingly, I’m tired before 5.

Hi. It’s the Internet exile coming to you live from my “job”. I decided to go with POPPY for the apartment, which will from here on be designated as “the room” instead of “the apartment.” Let’s be realistic here. It is a small room with a stove, a fridge and - brace yourselves - a toilet. I don’t even have my own shower. I have to share it with the two androgynous installation artists down the hall.

BTW, totally kidding about the shared shower. They’re not androgynous! They’re really hot men!

Debating among paint colors:

a) Golden Cricket
b) Sea Fantasy
c) Rustic Pottery
d) Cajun Shrimp

About to go with (d) because it’s food.

Happy Father’s Day, Barnacle Bill.

Today I signed the lease on a studio apartment in the West Village for July 1. I am PUMPED. Granted, the apartment has roughly the same square footage of all of the mice I have caught and killed in my current apartment (if you laid their glue traps side by side on the floor). Oh wait. That’s actually pretty big.

Here I am, larger than life in my new neighborhood:

The Wendy’s homestyle chicken strips are hit or miss. Tonight’s taste amazing, but maybe that’s because I paired them with a “spring mix” salad. With fries and a small Frosty they sort of lose their glamour.