“Relationships are hard”

So since I’ve recently become single and am no longer in the middle of fucking nowhere in the middle of America I decided to try out the online dating thing. My goals here are very small.

1. I’m not looking for a boyfriend, I just want free drinks and fancy bars that I can’t afford to go to myself. I figure that despite the fact that i make almost no money my high brow education and worldliness has made me very able to mingle in the world of the wealthy so dating rich men could be fun.

2. Since in real life I’ve never actually dated wealthy ibanker/consultant type men I decided that in my online life this would be my goal. And since new york is kind of like a fake life in an of itself I thought this would be the perfect place to test out this type of man. Are ibankers assholes? Yes. Do I want to marry one? Probably not. Do they have lots of money and can take you in cab rides and pay for EVERYTHING? Absolutely.

And those friends, are my 2 goals. To get free drink from rich men. Lofty, I know. So join me on my adventure!!

What would Sally say?

so me and my man ended things because sometimes people don't know what they have and they take it for granted and a woman has to respect herself. I've been doing better than with other break ups. no tears, no overdramatic remarks of how "no one is ever going to love me again!" etc etc because come on. i'm awesome and will have many lovers. And New York is an awesome place to be single so i've been living it up but i have my moments and that's all i'll say on the topic.

BUT sometimes the world gives you signs and you just have to listen to them. So i lost my phone at thanksgiving dinner at my own house. It was next to me and then as everyone was leaving around midnight someone must have picked it up, thrown it in their bag, and is too careless to look for it now. At any rate, it's gone and i can't do anything about that. And whatever, it's just a phone but i lost all of my numbers and that is annoying as shit. And i guess i also lost any old text messages i've ever had not to mention all the photos i've taken the past year. This year includes what i thought was memories of a happy relationships. aaaaanyways i started feeling mopey about it wishing that it would just appear, and hoping that if i just visualized it the power of "the secret" would make it somehow magically reappear. And then i started remembering how when david and i broke up i was miserable and thought i was going to die (but in the immortal words of peggy lee, "but then i didn't, and i said to myself, is that all there is to love?"). I lost my phone then, and along with that phone i lost his number and any contact we had ever had. And i felt awful! but then i started thinking, you know this could be the push i needed to really force me to move on. And it really was a turning point and after that the healing started Well it's only been a month since this last love ended and the world has taken my phone from me again and i can't help but wonder if it's a sign that i need to move on or something. All photos of our impromptu roadtrips just gone. His number, gone, text messages he has sent me, gone. So i guess that's that.

Musings on Subway Rides

You always hear the most random things on the subway. For the most part people keep to themselves but there are always those few, usually ethnic people, let’s keep it real, who just like to advertise their problems and their conversations. Case in point, today a woman who I garnered was named Erika and who I based on the conversation was either a cleaning lady in some sort of medical facility or a cleaning lady in a hotel was talking about her boss who she refered to as Miss Mary. Erica was black and had a slight Jamaican accent and wore ONE rasta colored giant peace sign as an earing on her right ear. Not 2 earings, just 1. And she was yelling to her friend who was sitting across the tube from her. Things that I learned:

1. Miss Mary is a real bitch and has it out for Erika

2. Erika got a tip from a patient/customer of 25 dollars in an envelope addressed to her because she talked to a sick elderly woman about Texas.

3. But Erika found out from Jose “who barely speaks no English” that Miss Mary had pocketed her tip instead of giving it to her and she was planning on figuring out a way to let Miss Mary know that she knew she had taken her money.

4. Jose’s was presented in the story as a comparison for how awful Miss Mary is. Because even Jose, who didn’t’ speak no English, which was supposed to be evidence of his inferiority, still had the morals to tell Erika about the stolen money.

4. Erika’s wore her one peace sign earring as a message to Miss Mary. “do you see this peace sign miss mary! Do you see it! It means peace! So stop being a bitch!”

5. Erika wanted to buy some smoked sausage with her 25 dollars, which was the only thing that she ever liked from Texas.

6. Cleaning people hate when they have to clean up our tissues from the bed or the hotel room.

And that is your lesson for the day from subway. Clean up after yourselves and peace!

Going Back to High School

So it turns out when you take a long sabbatical from writing it’s really hard to get back into it. Humph. Anyways I’ve been spending a lot of time at this high school in Brooklyn where I’ve been doing my research and so I’m trying to integrate myself into the community by doing things like going to basketball games, chaperoning high school dances (no joke!), going to after school events with the kids. It’s been really cool actually and i’m hoping that in the process I may finally heal the wounds of adolescence that have been gaping since I was 15. Here’s a rundown of my week there.

1. Basketball game: freshmen and sophomores are really tiny! They might technically be taller than me but they just look like kids. This actually makes me feel old.

2. I’m just going to come out and say this and I apologize if I offend anyone, but high school dances in the hood are WAY MORE AWESOME than high school dances dominated by white students. Imagine being in a real life Sean Paul Music video like this



mixed in with a little bit of this



yes, there was an actual vogue battle happening in the middle of the dance floor and it was AWESOME! I left before this happened but apparently during “I whip my hair” shit got real serious. Also instead of having a dj the kids just had a kick ass sound system and played music from their ipods so I got introduced to what is hot right now for instance have you ever heard of a song called “teach me how to dougie” cause I haven’t! And because most of them are Caribbean they were playing totally awesome music I had never heard from the islands like this




But someone who i guess is into "old school" music put in Shaggy "wasn't me" and it took me back to pimp and ho parties in college. it unfortunately did nothing for the kids so they quickly changed it. In addition "ignition remix" got NO response and was also quickly changed which was so shocking!! I thought that for sure R. Kelly would have withstood the test of time. S o yeah this is just my PSA to let you know that we are old.

Dear Sally,

As you can see I’ve changed the title of the blog. When I chose “the good times are killing me” I was at a different point in my life and the good times literally were killing me (note all of the drinking and physical alements which have all but left me now). So as I enter the middle of my 28^th year on this earth it seems that a shift has happened and a new title is necessary. “So what does new shoe leather mean?” you may ask. Well first of all, if you don’t know, I judge you. But let me drop some knowledge in the form of a song

I recently moved to New York in an attempt to briefly escape my old life, take a time out from all that nature and Midwesternness. Granted I was able to sell it to my department as a professional trip where I would be doing data collection. But really I just needed to get away from academia and figure out what I want to do with my life. Become a new version of me, if you will. Well it only seemed fitting that since I was moving to New York I should take the time to rewatch one of my most favorite shows of all time “Felicity.” Young girl from California moving to the new big city to follow a dream! Hello, this is my life! Except that I’m 28 not 18...wah wah wah

So I reconnected with my old coop friend Tory here in Brooklyn, Park Slope to be exact. She and I have emailed over the years since college mainly about cheese and sandwiches that we've eaten. But back in college one of our favorite things to do was to randomly belt out the revised Felicity theme song of season 3. It was our motto. It got us through most days. And occasionally when we wanted to say that we had moved on or needed to move on we’d just say “new show leather, whatevs” and we both knew what it meant. And so it only seemed appropriate that in this new journey to become a new version of myself I should change my title to reflect that journey. So join me friends! There will be lots of critiques about things I find silly about new york generally and park slope specifically. There will be lots of discussions about my day trips to soho and day drinking with my fellow “self employed” friend Ramit. There might even be some discussions of this "work" that I am so diligently completing here. But most likely it will just be gratuitious puppy shots like this one.

and this one
she really is, dare i say it, a strikingly handsome animal. So welcome back friends. Leave a comment if you still read or care.