I have so much to say, but organizing my thoughts in the aftermath of the disaster that happened here and in the run-up to tomorrow’s election has been hard. So this may be a little run-onny and scatterbrained.
In the middle of the storm, my favorite sites (all of the Gawker Media sites, basically) went DOWN, leaving us with their skeletal Tumblr backup blog, which just wasn’t the same without the Gawker commentariat, frankly. There was Gothamist, though, which was a great source of up-to-date storm information and photos (and they even managed to keep some snark happening).
New York fell in love with Lydia Callis, Mayor Bloomberg’s ASL translator. I don’t think I was the only person who would watch ONLY HER as the mayor spoke.
Our elected officials were spot on, for the most part. Mike Bloomberg did have one great big, huge stumble, when he failed to cancel the New York City Marathon in time for runners to seek other accommodation, resulting in bad feelings all around. I get it, Mr. B, you wanted to provide a sense of normalcy for folks, but putting 47,000 runners on Staten Island, which hadn’t even finished finding bodies in its smashed homes, then running them through the other hard-hit boroughs, handing out free food and water to them while people didn’t have flushing toilets, and diverting an already-overtaxed NYPD to police the route — it was a teeny-tiny bit short-sighted. The optics were bad, as people would say. For once, I was glad to see him cave to the mass of pissed-off New Yorkers. We can get back to dealing with the fatties and their bigass sodas later.
I did make it back to work on Thursday. There was no way I was going to fight huge crowds to take the free MTA buses from the Barclays Center, so I decided to take the ferry across the East River instead. It wasn’t free ($8 a day round trip), and I had to walk to the ferry landing (1.5 miles) then from the 34th Street landing to my office (another 1.9 miles), but it wasn’t terrible. There was one moment on Friday evening as I stood on line to get on the ferry — a hipster couple tried to do a weasel-move into the line at 35th Street (the end of the line was at 32nd Street), the way people do at airport gates. “Hm, hm, you don’t see us, we’re just blending in here, look, we’re in this line.” What then happened was that five scary Gorgon women on line stepped to them (physically blocking them from moving further), all saying stuff that basically boiled down to, “What.The fuck.Do YOU think. You’re Doing?” They got scared and slunk away (to the back of the line, I presume, because I can’t imagine anyone who witnessed that was going to let them get away with line-jumping, either). It was a beautiful thing to see, and I swear I wasn’t one of the five scary women. Actually, I was, and I gotta admit, it felt good being a scary Gorgon woman. We were all very pleased with ourselves, but refrained from high-fiving. We just looked at each other, smiled, and went back to our waiting.
When I got home on Friday night, I was very, very tired.
Well, here I am on a scheduled day off, our power never flickered except for one 11-hour stretch at the height of the storm when our cable/internet went down, and in my obsessive internet surfing, I found Tavi Gevinson’s Blog. Which was the point of me blogging today in the first place. She’s only 16, and she wrote better stuff about creepy Terry Richardson than pretty much anyone out there. She’s fucking fabulous. Go read her.
Wanting What I Get 