i love new york

This morning I went with Neighbor and her boyfriend at sunrise to shoot in Highbridge Park. I've been getting up really early every day to take advantage of good lighting conditions. Thursday I got up at 4 a.m. and went out to Jamaica Bay to look for interesting things to shoot. It would have been awesome but I had a slight camera malfunction. I'm tempted to go back, but it's a long fucken ride and the sun just keeps rising earlier and earlier every day. I have trekked all over the city lately and I love it. It is really nice to start the day off doing something that is exciting, while there aren't too many people awake. Sometimes it doesn't really pan out, but it's still interesting.

I'd signed on Joe to make the trip to Highbridge with me. It's the one park I won't go to by myself even though it's about eight blocks from my house. The reason for this is that it's depressed (literally), sunken into the river bank, and so there's really no foot traffic that goes through there and so it's rumored to be pretty shady. So, Joe was supposed to go with me. But then...I think I sort of told Joe I don't want to see him anymore...? I've been a moody bitch this week. So Neighbor and Neighbor's boyfriend graciously got up at 6 a.m. with me and tromped through the mud and homeless encampments with me and then we had a glorious pancake breakfast. All in all, the best Valentine's Day I've had in recent memory. Being single is going to be so effing good for me. I'm going to swear off boys for the month of March, I really am. I'm off the Booze and the Drugs and even off the Coffee now, so I might as well go off the Boys...

I met some interesting people yesterday, none of whom I will ever date. Have you ever read Andrew Sean Greer? I love him. He wrote The Secret Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Story of a Marriage. I went to a reading of his last night at NYU. I was shocked that there was hardly anyone there. I don't know any celebrities, so I'm always shocked when the people I think are famous turn out to be less than that. I mean, he was on Oprah's Book Club. He's like a god to me. After the reading he told this story about how this past fall he RSVP'd to his 20-year high school reunion and when they emailed him back with the details, one of the events was "an evening with author Andrew Sean Greer." He didn't want to do a reading and no one had asked him, but he went there anyway, and then nobody showed up ("I wasn't one of the popular kids," he explained).

What the fuck? I didn't go to high school with ASG, but I still went to his reading. What are they, illiterate? Anyhow, I love him, love him, love him. You should read him. Maybe you would love him, too. It was great talking to him about writing, and talking to other people about writing, too.

I am feeling better about life.

In my last post, I wrote that I had been missing Ex, and then two days later he called to tell me he is coming to visit. He'll be here when I get back from Chile. I haven't seen him since the summer. The summer. Holy jesus. That seems like a lifetime ago.