I Put My Thong On Sideways... Again.

You'd be surprised (or I suppose men would be surprised; not women who wear these things) how easy it is to do. This happens to me fairly regularly, me with my undies on sideways, and sometimes I catch it before the jeans go on, and sometimes I 'm in a hurry and don't figure it out until I get home and wonder what all the weird, pulling was down there (when I was younger, I might have gotten some sort of thrill out of it - now I am just annoyed), and then I have a good chuckle once I figure it out. I'd like to say my old boyfriend used to chuckle heartily along with me, but no; the boyfriend was always appalled at this; he thought it was inconceivable. We're no longer together.

I mean, it happens! Thongs are like this, this triangle of cloth, with three sides, three openings, and a front and a back. Geometry was the only kind of math I was good in at school, but this thing is like a really hard geometry question on a standardized test, with a misleading drawing and no multiple choices below. In the half-dark of my bedroom, in the morning, when I'm tired, every corner of the thing looks the same; every corner offers a pocket where the… goods go. Here's me, standing there at first, with all the confidence in the world, on one leg, thinking I'm getting dressed. Still on one leg, I see it's one of these inscrutable pairs (question: why is a single piece of clothing referred to as a "pair"? This query includes "pairs of pants" but not "au pairs"), of which I have a few. There are a few pairs in the drawer but not a lot, and since I only wear them for dates, or the prospect of sex, they rest, for the most part, untroubled by my hand, which is why when I pull them out, it's like, "Oh these are nice! When did I get these? How do these work?"

So OK, now I realize there's going to be some trouble ahead, so the raised leg gets lowered; I'm going to need my balance, in fact, all my faculties if I'm ever going to get these on.

The tricky ones are the ones without the identifying tag at the back (that makes it easy!), and are small and cute, like a Russian doll's headscarf, with perhaps some ruffles. Sometimes, the little ruffles go in the front and sometimes they go in the back, so here's me, turning it back and forth, back and forth, trying to figure it out.

Say I choose putting the ruffle in the front. Ok, I've made a commitment. That leaves those three holes. And you'd think it'd be obvious, the pelvis on (most) women being slightly larger than her thighs. But we're dealing with a thong here, isn't that the thing David used to slay Goliath? (And what was David doing with a pair of women's underwear? Was Goliath standing there thinking the same thing? "What the hell, Dave, where did…" THWACK!) And it's meant for war. It's meant to baffle and lull its enemy into a false sense of security by its tiny flimsy little self, cute, sweet, weak. But man, it is powerful. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So back to the triangle. Now I've got a front, and a back (probably) and I know your ass is supposed to sort of be exposed a little in the back, so I'm thinking the back part of the material should be kind of smaller than the front… but not on this pair. This pair, every way you turn it, you have the same amount of material. You've got about one inch of material on each of the three sides and so even though I have a back and a front, I'm spinning them around and around, like a guy spinning plates, really, or like a girl trying to get into a game of Double-Dutch, trying to figure out how do I get in.

After a while, I just stop spinning, sigh and climb in anywhere, just so I can get dressed. I have, on occasion, felt that weirdness you feel (or women feel), when you've got your underwear on sideways, where you can't take quite a full step over to the dresser, because something's pulling on your… parts. Since I'm not a regular thong-wearer, sometimes I just chalk this up to: this is the way these things feel, and this tightness in the wrong (or right) places, is just part of the deal, as is feeling the material of your jeans on your bare butt and trying to remember if you put underwear on at all, since it seems nothing is coming between "you and your Calvin's" if you know what I mean.

But sometimes I have to go to the mirror and look, because it's the only way I can confirm my suspicion that all is not right with the world, or at least with my panties, which, at 6:30am in your bedroom is where your world starts.

And yes, there I am, looking unsexy, ridiculous even, with the little hanky sort of listing to the side, with the middle part really taut across my belly, and on the left side, the material kind of puckering out because I've stuck my leg in the part where the whole body is supposed to go. If you've ever seen one of those ads for weight loss where the formerly fat guy climbs into one leg of his old gigantic pants, that's sort of what this looks like.

This is not a good look. Even alone, just you, it's not a winner. When the ruffles are going kind of vertical but on a slant, instead of parallel to the floor, this is a problem. So I take 'em off and start again, and, it has happened on more than one occasion, sometimes when I put them on the second time, they're still wrong!

And that, sir, is why I was late to the meeting.

I Don't Understand What's Going On Upstairs??

I have put my earplugs now, and I can just barely hear the sound of rocks being tumbled in a cement mixer in the apartment above, so now I can gripe. It’s noisy here. Real noisy. I recently bought my first apartment in NY.

I was living the cloistered contented life of an Upper West Sider, living in a solidly built, Pre-War building, with walls a foot thick, taking the quiet for granted, clueless and happy. But I was renting and wanted to own, and so I departed that gentle place.

After the typical tortured search, I found a place I could afford to buy, in a Post War building. My new apartment was the right size, a decent price, in a good location. Being a Post War building meant it didn't have the details of my old place – in fact it looked a little like a hospital inside – but it was immaculate and on a block I loved, and did I mention it was affordable?

The noise didn’t begin until the second month I’d been there. It was the most amazing sound: the crisp, clipped, clomp of high heels, treading down the public hallway upstairs. I sat up and did the human equivalent of cocking my ear as I heard the key upstairs inserted into the lock, the turning of tumblers, the entrance of the high heel-wearing neighbor above.

As my eyes widened (which they do, by the way, whether or not you can see the remarkable thing happening), I heard her (I assumed it was a her – I hadn’t yet gotten into the fantasizing part of this sonic experience), put her lead-lined handbag on the floor, kick off her heels – into the wall – and pound into the kitchen.

After a few minutes of quiet, I relaxed. I comforted myself with the thought that there must be some special level of humidity in the atmosphere, carrying the sound in a particularly extreme way, like how you always hear a train when it rains, or a lawnmower when it’s sunny outside, and never any other time.

An hour later, I was lying in my bed and I heard the woman above clomp into the bedroom above me, and heard her take off her high-heeled shoes again – didn’t she already take them off once?? – that I knew this would be my acoustic fate. As I lay there, now with my book on my chest, I heard her take off her shoes two or three more times, each time flipping them handily off her big toe against one wall or the other. I imagined she was seated and about to recline when I heard her get up and walk around the room WITH HER SHOES BACK ON. (With no actual visual evidence I started now to try to deduce what was going on up there. Fantasies began forming, not of the fun variety).

It was like “Ground hog’s Day” or a Stephen King novel. The shoes would not stay off her feet, and she could not stop walking around. Even more bizarrely, as I followed her path with my eyes marking my own ceiling, it seemed that she was walking on every inch of her bedroom – criss-crossing here, tossing the shoes off on this side of the room, and then the next.

Where is the bed?? I thought to myself. In every bedroom I’ve ever known, you can’t traverse the entire floor because: there’s a bed in the way.

But no matter how I tried to visualize the space above, she kept thwarting me – because she walked here, there, and everywhere, as, I assumed, she tried to shake off those horrible shoes (Manolos?) that kept re-attaching themselves to her feet!!

I finally fell into sleep (dreaming about Savion Glover trying to put out a fire) until 6am the next morning.

My eyes opened without my moving my head because I was on a certain level, still asleep. Working nights means that I sleep in, at least until 7:30am, and this particular morning, my body couldn’t believe that I had set an alarm. Only it wasn’t an alarm.

The woman upstairs gets out of bed and, yes, she already has shoes on. She must sleep in them I think. They must be sleeping stilettos. In a new state of amazement, I listen as she clomps to one edge of the room. A moment, and then I hear her pull out a Titanic-era steamer trunk from her closet, dragging it to the middle of the floor where she unzips it. (I know most steamer trunks don’t have zippers – this one apparently does). She unzips, and then she unzips some more, and then I hear the zipper chattering yet again, or in another direction, and then again she unzips, and then one last long unzipping makes me sit up in bed. This is ridiculous. How many zippers does this thing have?

But it’s the packing that gets me standing.

For apparently she is (I imagine) a shoe salesperson, and she stores her 600 shoe samples in various bedroom closets, and when she leaves each morning, she packs by yanking out pairs and throwing them across the room into the suitcase. Clomp, Bang, Clank, Whap. The banging continues, until she’s finished, and then she zips the trunk’s eleven zippers up again. Finally, she sets it upright and drags it away. Some mornings she has a limp as she drags, making the whole thing fairly sinister.

Suddenly the walls of my apartment shudder with the slamming of her door, and the world is still again. A picture tilts on the wall.

Since then, I’ve come to know her and her partner well without ever having met them or even seen them. He arrived the next night, unzipping his suitcase (!) for he too it seems, is a shoe salesman. He (apparently) sells steel-tipped work boots. Each night, when they get home, the routine is the same. They tip their suitcases onto the floor of the bedroom, spilling the shoes out into an enormous pile (there’s room because there mustn’t be a bed). And then, each takes turn putting the shoes on and clomping around the room showing each other the new product line. Sometimes he wears the heels, sometimes she wears the boots. Each time a route is completed, they ceremoniously remove the shoes and throw them against the wall.

They also (apparently) sell steel cylinders, perhaps thermoses? which they carry from the bedroom to the living room and back, dropping 4 or 5 in each direction. They may also sell aluminum pots, small dogs with unclipped toenails, cymbals, gongs, cue balls, and loose marbles.

There is occasionally an electrical motor of some kind that sounds in the bedroom. This thing is fascinating to me in its mystery. Even as I lie there at 1:30am, exhaustion tugging at my eyelids, I still muster the strength to marvel at the mystery of this sound. There’s electricity involved, simultaneously grinding, creaking and buzzing.

It must be a winch I imagine, perhaps used to lower the bed from the ceiling or tilting down from the wall, like a drawbridge. Even in my semi-conscious state, I admire their clever use of space.

Revenge is not called for since these two are blameless – this is their job (I think). Everyone needs shoes, and I get a sense they’re good at what they do, or at least they have an enormous inventory. But I can’t do nothing.

My newest idea is to start painting. Buy some Benjamin Moore white, and start rolling it on the ceiling. Just start that first layer of paint that every Pre War building started with in the early 20th century, lapping on another coat every year for the next 80 years, until my ceiling is 5 inches thick and soundproof.

By then I figure the market will have improved and I can just sell the place and go live in an Ashram. As long as it’s in a Pre-War building.

Is It Just Me? I Don't Understand How Someone Can Misplace $40,000.

Forget all this twaddle about people going broke and losing their homes and living in tents and not having enough money to buy milk and bread and Tall skim frappuccinos.

If you just look around, like open up empty boxes left in a corner of your office hallway, you too can be rich!

I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon of money being lost. Misplaced. Forgotten. And we're not talking a tenspot.

For example: in 2009, the New York Times reported (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/26cash.html) that a little box was left on the counter at a car dealership in Orlando filled with $40,000 in cash. The box was small and unassuming, unmarked, unlabeled, unnamed, containing a mix of old and new bills, none of it “dirty”. Cash. $40,000. That someone “left” there, the assumption being (since no one there could recall threatening to break someone’s kneecaps if they didn’t “pay up”) it was left “accidentally”.

So my question is: how the hell does someone put $40K in a box (in a box?), take it somewhere for whatever reason, whether it’s on its way somewhere else or not, and then, like a $12 pair of sunglasses or a $3 New York umbrella, leave it on a counter? Forget about it?

When I go to Duane Reade for a pack of gum, occasionally I drop a quarter on the way from my hand to the clerk’s. When that happens, all commerce stops for 10 minutes, while I hunt for it in among the Snickers bars under the counter. I enlist the help of the salesperson who is apologetic and equally concerned, and sometimes someone in the line behind me will join in the search. This is for a quarter. I am slightly less anxious about dimes and nickels, but I will take a moment for those as well. Pennies? Eh.

But $40,000 in cash? That I would not walk away from. Not only would I push the Snickers bars out of the way but I would tear open the counter with my bare hands, knocking People Magazines and Chapstick out of the way, clawing and scratching like a terrier until I found that cash.

Forget about the ridiculousness of having that much cash on hand, and the equal insanity of putting it in a cardboard box; how could you just leave it somewhere, because, why? You got a really important text message from your spouse about picking the kid up from school? Did an old flame friend you on Facebook? Did you get a raise or get fired? WHAT could distract you enough to forget about your $40,000??

I guess it wouldn’t have come to this - a post - if it weren’t for the frequency with which this happens. Why work for a living when, in April of 2008, you could find $140,000 (in cash) on a street in Cerritos California, tied up in bundles of twenties? Left (again, “left”) by a Brinks truck on its way to make a deposit (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/04/09/state/n113337D59.DTL&tsp=1).

Or the more modest $10,000 left in December of 2008, on a grocery store bathroom in Federal Way, Washington, by someone who was moving (http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=230943)? Hey it’s not $140K; maybe some people would leave it holding out for the bigger payout, but, you know, it’s better than a quarter.
Or what about one of my favorites: the $97,000 that was found in another bathroom (it pays to hang out in bathrooms despite the experience of some Republicans), this one a Cracker Barrel in Tennessee (http://www.blinkx.com/video/lady-finds-97-000-in-a-cracker-barrel-bathroom-and-gives-it-back/ONajwyt8uqhyH1SHcCvsVw) in the SAME MONTH as the $10K was left in that Washington water closet? (Proving I suppose that absent-mindedness occurs at every latitude and longitude…)

The $97 grand was in a purse, which makes slightly more sense I suppose than a cardboard box, or a paper bag, the more typical conveyances for wads of cash to be left in. But then, who leaves their purse hanging in the public bathroom? Where are you car keys or your bus pass? Your sunglasses? Your cell phone? How did this lady get home? Even if you forgot about the $97,000 you had jammed in there; what about your breath mints???

In October of 2007, another $65,000 was “dropped”, “left behind”, “lost” by another armored car (http://www.sptimes.com/2007/10/05/Southpinellas/Hey__65_000_in_cash__.shtml) near St. Petersburg, Florida. A sanitation plant employee found it lying in the roadway near the garbage bags. It wasn’t in one of those cool canvas bags with the single dollar signs on it (which I know they come in from years of “Batman” reruns), no, it was in a PLASTIC BAG. Apparently it had been run over several times. It apparently dropped out of the back of an armored car which had recently passed through.

Hey, forget about bolting sheets of lead onto your truck! Just CLOSE THE BACK DOOR. Write it on your hand if you must, as soon as you put your hollow point bullet-loaded gun away: “Note to self: Close back door of armored vehicle!”

In Littleton, Colorado in 2005, a teenager left the $50,000 his father had given him “to start a new life” (http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local/4926337/detail.html), on top of his car and DROVE OFF, spilling the money all over the roadway. I too have left stuff on top of my car and drove off; many cups of coffee, a few cans of Diet Coke; at least two times, the gas cap after pumping my own gas.
But I just know that if I left, like, the change from buying the newspaper, or say, $50,000 in cash, I’d have this little niggling feeling like, “Where the heck is that $50,000 in cash? Darn, it was just here…” Not to mention, WHY WOULD YOU PUT IT ON TOP OF YOUR CAR IN THE FIRST PLACE??

It’s much more common of course for people to leave cash in taxis, along with the iPod, or iPhone or iGlasses. And that’s what happened in July 2007, in Manila, when someone left $17,000 in a “motorcycle taxi” (what’s that?) (see: http://hubpages.com/hub/Taxi_driver_returns_lost_money_worth_US17000).
The other favorite thing people love to forget about: priceless Stradivariuses. (Stradivarii?)

In April of 2008, some guy left his $2 million dollar Stradivarius in the third row of a shuttle van he’d taken from Newark after returning from a concert in Texas (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90252259). So, you might ask yourself, when you’re exiting the shuttle, “Ok, I’ve got my rolling bag, my camera, and my house keys. Now what am I coming home from? Why am I here? Oh yeah; I just was in Texas performing on my $2 million dollar Stradivarius. Well, I’ve got my house keys; I’m good to go.”
In May of 2004 (http://articles.latimes.com/2004/may/18/local/me-cello18) a Stradivarius cello valued at $3.5 million dollars was left on the owner’s front stoop in California. Some lady found it a few days later near a Silver Lake dumpster.

In October of 1967 (now we’re going back), some guy in LA left a “Duke of Alcantara” Stradivarius violin either ON TOP OF HIS CAR or maybe (he can’t remember) in his UNLOCKED car when he went grocery shopping (http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/pearl101794.htm). Who goes grocery shopping when you have a Stradivarius in your car?? Can’t the Pop Tarts wait? Can’t you go home and drop off the (in this case, piece of crap, valued only at $800,000) instrument before you go into Waldbaums to buy your arugula??

And again, who puts their Stradivarius on top of their car? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?? I am starting to understand the $50K, but the Stradivarius??

As it turns out, even those people whose names are synonymous with their instruments can forget their names, er, instruments in the back of taxis as Yo Yo Ma did in 1999, forgetting all about his $2.5 million cello on the way to a hotel from his home in Manhattan (http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19991017&slug=2989399). Did I mention he was in the taxi on his way to rehearse for a concert that night, which would certainly have been a boring concert without his cello?

And the most amazing thing of all? All these wads of money were either returned to the owner, or pending return (except for about $29,000 that the teenaged boy lost in increments of $100 bills). That’s pretty cool.

I once found a $20 bill on the sidewalk and I was happier than a clam for 2 days. I felt lucky, privileged, attentive and in the right place at the right time for the first time in my life. Clearly, I was wrong.