chandelier

It has been an odd week.

I spent last weekend catsitting a big orange cat named Jackson in a beautiful Williamsburg apartment. My only duties were to play with Jackson an hour a day, scoop his box filled with what looked like white crystal diamonds, and keep the water and dry food flowing. However, the extremely kind catowners invited me to enjoy their Netflix, their air conditioning, and their private rooftop patio and its glorious views of Brooklyn and Manhattan. I felt like I was on vacation in a penthouse getaway. Netflix is an bogglingly addictive thing and I watched the entire first season of Portlandia and that documentary on the portrayal of women in the media, Miss Representation. It was okay. Felt a little exaggerated at times. I watched my new favorite music video, Sia's for "Chandelier," over and over and danced extravagantly in the living space and practiced my wannabe-splits. I stood on the patio woozy from my own wine and watched the sky change from day to dusk to night. It was completely otherworldly to inhabit this incredible quiet space when I am so rarely alone.

Monday I decided to take my laundry to the laundromat across the street just to try it out. As I was walking in I ran into a boy I went to undergrad with in Los Angeles. Apparently he lives on my street and moved in the same time last year that I moved in. I hadn't seen him since we were both on the undergraduate student government's programming board's concerts committee circa the 2007-2008 era. He's now in New York, starting a job as an editor on Teen Mom. What's funny is that the laundry ended up being more expensive than I'd thought so I took it back to my building anyways.
That night I attended a wholly audience-performed Mariah Carey musical in Williamsburg with Brenner and he was cast as Nick Cannon and I was Mawaiah and together we sang Hero. After our show-stopping performance I ended up talking to another person I haven't seen since undergrad. The only time I'd ever spent time with her was when we went clubbing together in Shanghai in 2007. She'd just moved to New York and fate brought us together at a Mariah Carey musical in the back of a shitty bar in Brooklyn.

Tuesday I started at that new yoga studio. Wednesday I went out to dim sum in Chinatown with anyone else I could think of who is currently unemployed. That night I went to a virtual reality event at school. All of us starry-eyed students thought it would be about how people are pushing the VR boundaries and doing cool things. In reality it was a bunch of start-ups trying to monetize the Oculus via 360 video and a lot of other people lining up to put Oculi on their faces. Youjin Jay and I abandoned ship to eat Chinese food and feel a little confused about who we are now that we are masters. Thursday I wasn't feeling too great so I decided to go to a cemetery. Aijia came along and we walked to a graveyard a few blocks north of us in Queens and we sat and talked amongst the graves and then afterwards were overcome with an intense desire to do things that living people get to do, so we had happy hour beers and and then hot dogs and sliced potatoes. I then discovered that I'd been invited to interview for what could potentially be a dream job, but that it would force me to move away and that gave me an insurmountable amount of anxiety so Youjin came over to be my therapist. She told me to imagine my life as a book, and to imagine what that book contains so far and what I would want the next page of the book to be. Then we sat in the backyard with Jed and our summer subletter Lenka and drank whiskey by fairy lights while large fireflies came to visit us and flash around our heads like ideas.

Friday Aijia and Lenka and I tried a new neighborhood bar on Troutman for happy hour. The neighborhood has been changing before our eyes and suddenly there are more glamorous bars nearby than we can count. One even has chandeliers. Saturday we went to our friend Rios' housewarming but the house was already so unbearably hot inside that we ended up spending the night outside sitting on the stoop. On the way home Lenka and I went dancing until 3 in the morning. Yesterday I watched the World Cup and it was mildly entertaining and then I went to a going-away party with a lot of our crazy Chinese classmates for a girl who's moving back to Singapore. One of the girls in attendance had just gone to an S&M club in Manhattan for the first time and was telling us what it was like inside by making everyone act out the different scenarios she'd encountered.