Paints

Sunday finds me particularly rested and satisfied. We haven't had the most eventful of weekends in the grand sense of touring New York, yet enough unfolded. Friday after work we came home and got cute, then went to Penang East at 83rd and 2nd. We've walked by it countless times and vaguely planned to go sometime, so Friday it was. And I hadn't realized in advance of reading reviews Friday afternoon that Penang is Malaysian, which we've neither tried before. As an appetizer we had a pretty savory chicken satay with peanut sauce. Then, oddly, my entree (grilled chicken with asparagus beneath a thick blanket of maroon-colored Malaysian spiced sauce) arrived substantially sooner than Craig's beef dish. I was slightly confused, and of course I politely tried to wait, but the time between the arrival of mine and his increased enough that he offered that I go ahead (plus I eat at approximately the speed of a turtle so it wound up working out alright anyway) but I still felt strange. We'll try it again, of course. The food was all pretty decent. After dinner we went to a bar that Craig has passed and wanted to try, but we didn't stay too late. We needed to be home and in bed early enough to prepare for Saturday's errands. So, Saturday we woke up, ate breakfast, and headed over to our Post Office at 91st and 3rd, where they accept passport applications. Recall, last weekend was Veteran's Day holiday and the applications have sat around the apartment idle ever since. When we walked up to the counter, we were third in line behind the following New Yorkers: a couple with a baby (at the counter when we arrived), and a line of females with one man (behind the couple with the baby). The line of females consisted of a grown woman in a knee-length black quilted winter coat, and three duplicates of her (not wearing the same coat but all with the same dark hair, the same wide blue eyes, and thin legs - all of this I noticed in small increments at a time while we stood behind them). The duplicates appeared to range in age from maybe six years old to early teens. Craig noted in my ear early on, "Poor guy, he's outnumbered three to one." The couple with the baby wrapped up their process and next up was the long line of dark-haired family. As it turns out, they will be traveling abroad in two weeks and all needed passport renewals. By doing some fairly blurry math that would lead me to suspect that each girl has been abroad at least once in her respective young life, and from early on enough that they needed passport renewal already (don't passports last ten years? Maybe for children the time is shorter?) and Craig peeked over their line of shoulders to see the teenager flipping through her passport's stamps. He again whispered to me something about how well-traveled she was already based on the number of country's stamps she had. Anyway, we continued to wait as this family went on explaining that they were expediting their renewals, and the passport lady behind the counter had to go through various steps to see that this could take place. Meanwhile, the line behind us had grown to probably about ten people. We were nearing our fortieth minute of standing there as the family was informed that because of expediting, they would need copies of their travel itineraries. At that point, the dark-haired man had to scramble out of line and go home to retrieve that because of course, they hadn't brought it along. Somewhere in there Craig also noticed their Park Avenue address (he was being awfully nosy at this point, peering at their information over their shoulders, but I was attributing it to boredom from standing in line). By this time, people were grumbling behind us - one woman, in fact, was not being shy about her irritation with this well-to-do polished family. She even used the word "rude" loudly to ensure they heard her. The teenager, bless her poor little rich heart, became increasingly mortified at the unrest her mother and sisters' respective passport renewals was causing. She was wearing her embarrassment on her sleeve, at that point. Nevertheless, the family finally was asked to step aside, and Craig and I moved forward and our processing took less than ten minutes. Alas, we waited approximately one hour for a ten minute ordeal.*After that, we headed off to Home Depot at 59th and 3rd to pick out paint for an accent wall. It would only be appropriate that the line at the paint counter would be ten people deep, wouldn't it? But by that point, waiting felt like it was becoming second nature. We wound up with what we hope will be a beautiful rust color (see above paint splash on the can near the colored square we were trying to match on our area rug). Seeing as we were supposed to have visitors next week (my friend Jen and her husband aren't going to be able to make it afterall) we took off Tuesday through the Thanksgiving Holiday. In essence, tomorrow is like Friday again. I needn't express my relief at that. So tomorrow night after my class we have a date in the Village, then Tuesday morning we will wake up and begin the process of prepping the wall for paint application. Undoubtedly the color will be shocking - hopefully in a good way. I'm anticipating it taking a day or two to get used to, seeing as we've had stark white walls for five months now. But I'm excited. I mentioned, long ago, that we were planning this. The execution just took longer than either of us expected. Today there is a lot of football on television so I am either meeting Lauren this afternoon for a couple of Sunday margaritas, or simply rooting myself to this chair and forcing out the long running list of metaphors I had in my head beginning yesterday. My latest achievement will be a page or two of metaphors I can shuffle into stories when and where needed. I think it's one of my stronger points, and the actual narration (the heart of any good story) being my weakest. So maybe clearing my head of metaphors will be like paving the way to a clean narrative which I can later decorate with fancier words. I don't know - I'm struggling here. It's like running a certain distance, developing a cramp, stopping to rest, then deciding if I have enough energy to keep going. Oh, the process.*