Shades of Grey

I spent 59 hours babysitting last week. I wont tell you how much money that made me, but do keep in mind I make my hourly rate, get cab fare after 9 pm, and I’m frequently being tipped for just being me.

Before I can detail the feel of the mountains of gold coins in my water-tower-safe which I dove into, and proceeded to then back stroke though, on Monday (note: this does count as my daily exercise), I have to admit the experience did not come without its problems.

Problem 1: New York Times successfully gives me nightmares.

On Thursday I agreed to watch a one-month old baby for several hours. This is a daunting task, but I was up for the challenge.

Then Friday came and I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about shaken-baby syndrome that made me almost pee my pants.

It’s an interesting article, but its long, so here’s the gist of it: there are cases of caregivers and parents being put in prison for years because of faulty medical evidence that they shook a baby, when, in fact, the evidence might have been pointing to a previous medical condition or the abuse or accident could have taken place hours before the child showed evidence of the damage.

Oh Billy who art in Long Island, please don’t let a little baby stop breathing due to brain damage (or at all, for that matter) while under my care….

Problem 2: Some of the Children I babysat were very harsh critics of both my character and skill sets.

Scene 1: Wednesday night in Battery Park.

The characters: Me and a four year old girl.

Girl: Talia-

Me: It’s actually Tolly, sweetie

Girl: Talia, what is your job?

Me: I’m a babysitter

Girl: Hmm, you’re a pretty good babysitter, but you’re a really really REALLY great at being a monster. A scary and mean monster!

Me: Thanks.

Scene 2: Friday morning in Chelsea.

The characters: Me and a 22 month Italian baby.

Me: (opens door to apartment) Hello!

Baby: CIAO! (uses his whole body weight against door to slam it in my face.)

Scene 3: Friday Night in Union Square

The Chracters: Me, a 5 year old girl (sister 1) and a 7 year old girl (sister 2)

Me: (spills a few Chinese noodles on table next to sister 2’s plate while serving food. Nobody

notices. I don’t bring their attention to it.)

Sister 1: OoooOH! Sister 1, you spilled noodles!

Sister 2: That was Tolly!

Sister 1: NUH-Uh!

Sister 2: (indignantly) Just because Tolly is old does NOT mean that she’s elegant.

Oh Billy, please teach me to be more elegant in the eyes of sever year olds, less monster-ish, and use your other-worldly powers (the USPS) to bequeath onto me an Italian-to-English dictionary so that I can learn the meaning of “Ciao.”

Problem 3: Hughie may be planning to terminate my position as his long term part-time nanny faster that I was expecting.

Hughie, his friend Jesse, and I were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at the marble statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa. I told the two children the entirety of the myth. I explained how Perseus was a hero who was sent to slay the evil serpent-haired sorceress. I told the bit about how, with just a glance at the wicked witch, a person would turn to stone, and also about the mirror-shield from Athena, the invisible cap from Hades, and the badass winged sandals from Hermes. I was on a roll telling the myth and, when I led to the epic conclusion where Perseus is able to sever Medusa’s head by only seeing her through the reflection in his shield and then brings the head of Medusa triumphantly back to the gods, I looked over to Hughie and saw that he was impressed.

Hughie stared at the detached head with a calm seriousness only ever seen in humans many years older than he. He nodded slowly, staring in Medusa’s horrifying large eyes, as if he had come to some deep understanding of the beast. He didn’t stop his gaze, or his slight frown, for even a moment when he said quietly, “I’d chop off your head Tolly”

I was baffled, but before I could muster up a response or question him on his murderous intent, he lost interest in the statue, turned to Jesse and proceeded to engage his friend in a role-play where they were heroes who were going to chop off bad guy heads.

Was their weapon of choice for the decapitation a sword forged by Hermes? Nope. Lightsabers.

Oh Joel, please do not allow modern science to advance in such a way that lightsabers are real.

But, if you can make a real one, make sure I get one before Hughie.

Also, make sure it's a blue one.

Amen.

The Downeaster Alexa

Ah, Craiglist, my old friend and enemy. I know you all to well.

Yep, that’s right it’s the time of year again where I talk about what apartment I’m going to move into next.

Oh and by “year,” I mean season. This will be my fourth apartment in the 16 months that I’ve lived here.

Oh Billy, why don’t you just face the facts? There are only two feasible outcomes to our relationship. The first being you get that restraining order, but the second, and I like to think more realistic choice, is that I become your fourth wife and we life happily ever after. So why don’t you just ask me to move in with you already? I’m not above living in sin if it’s with you! Please give me a house and I’ll be your cabin, your castle, and your… your instant pleasure dome?

“Instant pleasure dome” was the best choice of lyrics you could come up with for an otherwise perfectly sentimental love song?

Regardless, I’m willing to go there!

Well, until Billy takes me up on my proposal I suppose I should give an update on the craiglist roommate search. The place I’m currently in I’ve been subletting from a friend while she was in Europe. I didn’t have to worry about hitting the craigslist trifecta of a decent place, decent area, and decent people. Instead, I was guaranteed a decent place, great area, and amazing people. That being said, it’s been quite the shock to the system to be thrown back into the apartment search vis-à-vis the sketchiest/jankiest website in America.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of normal people advertising their places, but the bad ones always stick out in your mind. So here goes my advice for what to look out for when you’re looking for an apartment.

1. Sometimes at the beginning of the ad the person will state they are looking for a female roommate and sometimes at the end of this ad you will see the phrase “The only catch is…” Now this statement could be followed by a lot of things: I’m a vegetarian and you can’t cook any meat in this household, you absolutely cannot go a day without showering, the shower is in the kitchen, you cannot cry in my presence because I despise little bitches, ect., all of which are reasonable “catches” as far as craigslist goes. In fact I have answered ads before with each of those factors (except the little bitch one). However, if the person says “The only thing I ask is that you occasionally don’t wear clothes around the apartment, no sex,” you should probably not answer. This ad will be posted quite frequently in different locations and for different prices. Still, don’t answer.

2. If the person writing the ad writes “small bedroom, kitchen, bathroom,” that’s exactly what they meant. They were not accidentally leaving out “living room”. So when you go to see this over priced, badly located east village rat hole, do not be surprised when it’s a kitchenette that can’t even fit one person, a 9 by 9 bedroom without a closet and it has no couch, no common space, and no table to eat at. Oh and your expected to share this space with your roommate who lives on the other side of the hallway that serves as a kitchen.

3. Occasionally you will come across an ad that goes like this “$850 for an East Village apartment on (a street that is an amazing location). A big bedroom, living room, a kitchen…the thing is I’ve been using the bedroom as a studio for my photography and I would still like access to the room. Absolutely nothing sexual will go on there and I will not touch your stuff and will give you plenty of notice if I need to use the room.” A red flag went up for me when this man said “nothing sexual,” as I hope it did you, but still I was intrigued. Big bedroom! Two bedroom apartment in (AMAZING location) for an almost decent (by Manhattan standards) price! Well, I went ahead and emailed him using my junk email address. The reply I received went something like this:

Hi Tolly! Thanks for your interest, blah blah blah, 28 year old male, blah blah blah, I work as a fetish photographer and filmmaker. I’ve been using that room as my studio. Blah blah blah

Ah yes, nothing says doing “nothing sexual” like make fetish porno -- or rather -- films.

Billy, any time you want me to move my stuff in, I’m available.

Only the Good Die Young

Billy, I try to be good. You know that.

I also try to teach Hughie how to be good. I work on him with his pleases and thank yous, his sharing, his playing with others, and generally try to teach him to be considerate and sensitive to the world around him.

However, I have occasionally failed.

When the seasons changed and it became cool in New York, Hughie and I started to wear our light jackets around the city. I’m not sure how it developed, but we developed a recurring joke. The joke would start when Hughie would cover his hand with his sleeve, while I mirrored him, and then one of us would ask to hold the other’s hand.

The same events always happened after this settup: “Hey, Hughie let me hold you ha-AAAAAH!!!!!!!! Where is your hand?! Oh, no! Where’s MY hand?! AAH!” We would then flail are arms about until our hands, inevitably, came out of our sleeves. Our choreography that followed the rediscovery of our hands took synchronized precisions: we would look down at our hands for two beats, look up at each other for one, and then say, “Oh…Oops.”

Hughie found this little scene to be hysterical every time we did it. If ever he was starting to get cranky all I would have to do was put my hand up my sleeve, turn to Hughie I’d see the little smile growing on his face, and I’d know we were golden. Goodbye grumps!

Well, one day we were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We were sitting in the statue garden and trying to reenact all of the expressions and poses we were seeing. The museum was fairly empty that day so we had some room to do this. I was intently staring at one of the statues when Hughie suddenly grabbed the bottom of my shirt and started tugging. “LOOK TOLLY! We should ask him to hold our hand!”

I turned around, not understanding at all what Hughie could possibly be talking about.

Sure enough, Hughie was jumping up and down in excitement while pointing to a real amputee.

Joel, I was so horrified that I decided that I would need to pray extra hard to you that night. To repent for my sins I even actually listened to some of your classical music.

You know how much that must have pained me.

I knew I was Running on Ice and, you would think, one such horrible mistake would teach me the error of my ways forever. Unfortunately Billy, I am not an Innocent Man...

Last week Hughie and I ate at a new café in the East Village. When we were leaving the café to go to his friend’s apartment for a play date, Hughie noticed a couch the establishment had placed under its awning on the sidewalk. I could have explained to Hughie that this was probably an ironic hipster observation of white trash culture, but that’s a lot of concepts for a four year old to get his head around. Instead I said, “Oh man, isn’t that silly!”

He snickered at the silliness. “Yeah,” he exclaimed, “they must sit OUTSIDE on their couch.”

Something about the way he said this struck me as funny. “Do you think they sit on that couch and watch their TV outside?”

“YEAH!”

“Do you think they also have their washing machine and dishwasher outside?”

“YEAH!”

At this point Hughie was practically doubled over laughing at the thought of it all.

“Do you think they keep their bed outside?”

“YES!”

Hughie then decided to get involved with the game and he one-upped me, “AND their trundle bed!”

“Yes, yes, of course their trundle bed. I bet they also keep their desk out there too!”

The game was stopped suddenly when I looked ahead of us down the street. There I spotted the mattress lying on the sidewalk of Avenue B that would stop our good natured fun dead in its tracks.

“Look! He’s sleeping on the trundle bed!” Hughie said while he jumped up and down and pointed at the homeless man. This sight earned 10x the enthusiasm from Hughie as the man with a missing hand.

Billy, normally I would take this time to blame you for these two instances. There is, after all, a noticeable lack of good child-rearing advice available through your music. Or, for that matter, good advice for young listeners to take to heart in general (I mean really Billy, do all the Catholic girls start much too late? Really? You drove a motorcycle in the rain when the girl asked you not to, crashed said girl’s party, and you’re a lunatic but she should still get with you?).

That being said, I realize that it is me, and only me, that is at fault for young Hughie’s actions.

It’s just common sense to stop the joke about outside furniture with a dishwasher.

Famous Last words

I sneezed glitter at work the other day.

Excuse me, did I say glitter? I meant snowflakes. I sneezed glistening snowflakes. Well, I shouldn’t say that I sneezed snowflakes; it was more like I sneezed and glitter, excuse me, snowflakes, came out of my nose and onto my tissue. But you understand.

“God bless you!” A little voice said. The child was standing right next to me in the maze.

I squatted down low to this little girl, a complete stranger, and said, “Why thank you! I knew Santa put you on the nice list for a reason this year! He can’t wait to see you!” I gave the child a high-five.

“Thanks, how many Santa’s you got working today?” The child’s mother asked with a thick Jersey accent.

There are four to six Santa Clauses working at any given time in Macy’s Santaland.

“Oh! There’s only one Santa Clause of course!” I replied in a loud voice, hoping others in the line would get it.

“Ok, but really?”

This mother was a persistent. Er, mother? I meant big kid. There are no moms, dads, or grandparents; only kids and big kids in Santaland.

“Haven’t you ever seen Miracle on 34^th Street?! Santa Clause is here and he’s the real deal!” I said, correcting the big kid. I then channeled Vanna White and made a big sweeping arm gesture with a smile on my face in an effort to kindly tell them to keep the line moving.

Two and a half hours later I was still standing in the same spot in the maze. I was positioned at Santa’s sleigh, right before entering Santa’s Village. My main job was to stop children from grabbing hold of the toys and to keep the line moving. Occasionally I’d tell children about how it was my job to load Santa’s sleigh, or I would point to the huge snow globe directly behind me, where a video of Santa waving was playing, and tell the children that Santa could see them through the globe and was waving at them specifically because he was so excited they were coming.

“Step right up! Every step is a step closer to Santaaaa!” I yelled. I was using my hands as a megaphone. My words startled the family that was using the scenery as if it was there for their personal photo shoot into moving. I had seen the mom position her three children into at least five different poses and each time the youngest child would look away at the last possible moment.

The family moved along, but I soon realized it was part of a mega group: a big extended family of nearly twenty people. The end of the line was mostly made up of 20-somethings, meaning that I didn’t have to come up with the same creative bullshit (“I know the tooth fairy”, or “Mrs. Clause designed our costumes!”) like I usually do.

“Merry Christmas!” I exclaimed.

“Merry Christmas,” a cute 20-something male replied back. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Silverbelle!”

“Well, how are you today Silverbelle?”

I could have explained that I had been standing in the same spot for three and half hours. I could have told him about how I had woken up at seven a.m. in order to get to Macy’s in time for the beginning of my shift. I could have related to him that I either was suddenly feeling hung over from the two glasses of wine I had had the night before or was possibly being let down by the caffeine high I had experienced after my large cup of coffee I drank earlier. But I didn’t do any of these things. Instead I answered, “Great! How about yourself?”

This time the man didn’t answer, instead his girlfriend chimed in. The woman said, “Well, we stood in line for an hour and a half, and now we’re being rushed through Santaland. This whole thing blows, Silverbelle.”

When Santaland reaches its peak hours, roughly one-thousand people see Santa. That means that if this family was standing in line for an hour and a half, there were roughly fifteen hundred people standing in line before them. During a trip to see Santa in peak hours you spend only about twenty minutes in actual Santaland. The other hour-and-some-odd-minutes you spend in a line that snakes through several open spaces, hallways, and all around every hallway of Macy’s Harold Square’s Human Resources department. If everybody took their grand old time in the maze around Santaland this line would be at least an hour longer. Macy’s, the largest department store in the world, cannot accommodate this.

I was trying to come up with a cheerful happy-go-lucky response, but I was saved by Nutmeg coming to take my post. I traveled the rest of the way through the maze and into the hidden doorway going toward my manager for my next marching orders. Outside the manager’s door there was a line of four or five other elves.

“It’s hell out there, isn’t it?!” one of the elves says to me.

I’m not sure which elf; she could have been named snowflake, gumdrop, or hazelnut for all I know. Whichever it was, I thought about her words, and I thought about my saga in the North Pole. It was tiresome, and the frozen smile on my face hurt all of the muscles in my cheek. My throat was dry and my voice husky from all the lies I had told about me and my relationship with Santa and the other elves. It was annoying to think about all the people who took the experience for granite.

But before I could say any of this, a funny thing happened: I remembered all the children who gave me huge grins, shy smiles, or looks of wonderment every time I told them something about Santa.

I took out a tissue from my apron and I answered her, “eh, it’s not so bad.”

And really, it isn’t so bad.

I hardly noticed the glitter in my booger as I threw away the tissue.

Really.

The Longest Time

Today I was in the Natural History Museum and a butterfly landed on my hand.

The butterfly was extraordinary. She had a body that was bright pink and had wings that were dark brown, almost a shade of black. She stayed perfectly still on my hand as I gently lowered her so that Hughie could see her. “Hughie, look at this!” I stage whispered to my ward, my eyes welling up at the sight of such a rare creature choosing to sit on my hand.

Hughie was unimpressed.

One of the volunteers working in the Butterfly Conservatory squealed with delight and told me that I had to make a wish. She told me that a Native American tradition, “because butterflies can’t speak, they take your wishes up to heaven with them.”

My impulses lead me to make the exact same wish I’ve been making for the past eleven years. The words are so etched into the back of my mind that I don’t even realize that I think them. In the past decade I must have wished compulsively the same wish upon ten-thousand pennies, new moons, shooting stars, 11:11s, birthday candles, prayers, and eyelashes.

Yet, this was the first butterfly, and will probably be the only butterfly, to ever land on my hand and stay there.

Somehow I couldn’t help but to think I might have wasted a wish. I looked at the butterfly and tried to think if there was something better I could ask for. I stared at her and wondered what else I could possibly want more than my regular old wish. Hell, not even what I would want more, but what I would want instead.

Hughie shook me out of my thoughts. “Tol, can we please go now,” he whined. I mentally said goodbye to my butterfly; if she could hear my wishes, why couldn’t she hear my thoughts? I gently blew and my butterfly opened her wings and flew off.

I’m sorry it’s been the Longest Time since I’ve posted. I’ve had possibly 24 different entries that I’ve thought about writing, but haven’t. I could tell you about officially living in New York for one year (!), about maintaining this blog (poorly) for just as long, about Hughie’s and my first anniversary, turning 21, my new job as “Silverbelle” the Macy’s Christmas elf, my new apartment search, my acting career (ha!), my weekend in the Hamptons, my first Thanksgiving in New York, my battle against a mouse in the house, or about my college search. But how will I ever find the time to write about all of them?

Well here’s the deal. For the month of December, leading up to Christmas, I will attempt to post an entry every two to three days about each subject. Maybe this won’t last very long, I’ve been a fool, and it will take the greatest miracle of all to pull it off, but after Billy Joel blessing me with that butterfly, I am hoping (too) hard that since I’ve come this far, it can be all that I hoped for.

Storm Front

(Discovered dead in a pair of my shorts yesterday morning. God Billy Joel, in that River of Dreams somewhere upstate, please hear my prayer and bless this apartment with screens)

As I mentioned in my last post, I have officially moved to a new apartment. This is the third time I’ve moved since coming to New York late last September, and I’m planning on moving again in January or February.

Yep, I’m subletting again.

In my experiences as a 21^st century urban nomad, I’ve grown accustomed to only moving bedroom furniture, and never accumulating any things. Normally this is for the best. It is not, however, the best when your moving into an apartment that is brand new a month before the permanent residence move in.

Right now I am pioneering an apartment with another subletter.

It’s a new experience, that I’m not sure I’m always fond of. And, if you chose to forget the fact that I suffered so much in my life without internet that I ran away to the beach for a week, I think that I’ve met the challenge head on.

Without further ado, I bring you: TOLLY VS. THE COCHROACHES AND OTHER PESTS

While I was enjoying a completely air conditioned condo in Rehoboth Beach, this picture was sent to me by my fellow pioneer:

The Caption: “the kitchen floor *shudder*”

I had a moment where I convulsed on the couch and said “EWW! Eww! Eww! Eww!” But once I got over my adverse reaction I got the details. The roach was found dead, and, so far, it was a lone warrior.

I might have continued to freak out, but I remembered my first apartment in New York. The one where I found a dead mouse next to my mattress on the floor, yet there were no more mice sightings after that day. I was hopeful for this new place.

It was false hope. Baby cockroaches were coming out of the cracks in our shower after dark to terrorize my roommate’s feet.

(Okay, from the picture you can't really see them, but they're quite menacing)

I took matters into my own hand:

With my trusty Raid gun (and believe me, it is a gun) I waited until night fall and attacked the baby roaches on their own territory. As I shot at them, both the ones brave enough to venture out of the crack and the ones who cowardly took refuge in their home, I found satisfaction in watching them drown in the chemicals and their bodies slow down. Is this how psychopaths feel with their guns?

Honestly, I don’t care.

Next came the mosquitoes. When “OFF Deep Woods spray’ wasn’t enough to combat the fact that the apartment windows doesn’t have screens , I got down to business:

While this dinky little fan is adorable and less offensive to my nose than the conventional spray, it is only effective when you don’t move. This meant I had to stay perfectly still for hours on time on the cot in our kitchen (we don’t have a couch, we’re pioneers, remember?) which is the only place in the apartment where we have internet access. So, two K-Marts, a Duane Reade, and one amazing Walgreens later, I came back with these babies:

I made it through the storm front and I declare myself the champion.