I Live Here Now

Last night, I was planning on taking it easy, trying make headway on the stories I've been working on, and seeing if I could spend an entire evening in my apartment without making nachos.

I did not have a chance to fail that little self-imposed test.

Instead, my roommate was performing in a lounge show at one of our favorite venues and said he could get me in and that there would be drinks and that they would be free. I know that lately the girl who is working out for a year without buying gym memberships is getting a bad rap, but I understand her [and love her punny blog headline]. Living in New York is expensive. Whereas she has become creative and enterprising with her lack of funds, I have just taken to doing pilates on the [carpeted] floor of my living room.

What I'm trying to say here is: if it's free, it's me.

Adding to the price fitting the bill, this show was also a 60th Birthday party for Karen Carpenter. They were singing from The Carpenters songbook and I didn't know much about them. I remember the Behind the Music episode, knew about the whole eating disorder thing, and thought they were married. What I learned was that they were NOT married, they were siblings - which I suppose explains away their creepily similar marionette-esque faces. I learned that you will get in trouble with the Carpenters diehards if you refer to the music as anything but "prog rock." So I go, and while I had never been a fan, you better believe I was singing along to the chorus of this song:

[Can we just take a minute to fully appreciate the absurdity of the video's epitaph? Can you even make it that far?]

Yes, there were recorders, there were at least four women with the Karen bouffant and floor length flowy dresses, there were in-poor-taste [pun so intended] anorexia references, and there were drinks and they were free. This is where I get in trouble.

Moments are returning to me: my roommate and I sitting in the audience rocking out to a really good cover, a 60 year old woman sitting on his lap, discussing the politics of Catholic school and FTM transsexuals with a gorgeous girl with a bleached mohawk and pearls who was in the dressing room waiting for the next show to start, which was a burlesque tribute to Pulp Fiction [no, I am not kidding] and the girls called themselves "The Tarantinas" [I really couldn't make this stuff up], me asking a friend of my roommate's [who I had just met and who works for a very notable TV station in a very real capacity] how much time he needed to fire his current assistant before he wanted me to start working [oh my god, did I really say that? Yes, I did.]

And then, of course, puking all over our front sidewalk with a force and a volume that I thought was not possible to achieve after receiving your undergraduate diploma. It was embarrassing, it was painful, and it laid me out on my back for most of the day.

This morning, though, upon waking up and discovering that my life had not, in fact, ended, I saw a text message I had sent a friend in some fleeting moment of clarity last night. It said: i puked all over oure [sic] front sidewalk. i live here now. And, although I much would have preferred to keep my dinner to myself, it was one of those times where I really believed that to be true.