Images

On my most recent trip to Ikea, I kept running into three long, euro-faced, skinny girls.  Models, it occurred to me, furnishing their new modelly digs.  Even though I watch ANTM and read Jezebel and am constantly reminded of how dysmorphic the fashion industry is, it is hard to believe how skinny these girls are.  Even more shocking, as I peruse bedframes and lampshades shoulder-to-shoulder with the brunette, is how we are not really shoulder-to-shoulder.  It's more shoulder-to-mid-arm.  This girl was a solid four inches taller than me, and she wasn't even standing up straight.  And I am tall. 

 You're bound to overlap with other customers in a place like Ikea, because it's huge and confusing and you spend a lot of time there.  As I was preparing to check out, the three sveltesketeers were still adding items to their cart.  The three of them were hovered over a box, variously heaving and hauling its bulky corners to the edge of the shopping cart, allowing it to teeter, and then come to rest among the candles and curtains.  At first I thought they looked like vultures hauling a cow carcass to some horrible nest.  Now I think otherwise; I think the whole scene, in its messy bulk and awkward elbow angles, looked like a broken umbrella.

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The last time I drank too much and threw up, it was black. 

I had been drinking a black beer, so it made sense, but it was visually stunning.

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P.S. 1 is a contemporary art gallery within a mile of my home.  I went there the other day, and there were cool things and weird things and creepy black rooms filled with the recorded sound of manic laughter.  

One room had a little print out announcing "This display contains some graphic images."  I thought, I'm in!  

There were a couple of different parts--it was a whole installation thing--there were seizure-bait blinking lights and humming digital rotating shapes and a handgun positioned provocatively with two billiard balls, and the promised graphic imagery.  But then I stepped into the last room, and there was a horse-sized unicorn behind glass.  The glass sometimes fogged up, and there were some other lights on the floor, but man!  Giant white unicorn!  As I entered  the room, I gasped and grinned.  The lady-hipster already in the room commented to her dude "I love P.S. 1."

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Mysteries of our Neighborhood:  the bookstore across the street

KT: Everything in that store appears used...but I'm not sure it is?