treated myself to mcdonald's fries after the gym yesterday. here's what the young black guy behind the register said when i rolled up to the window:

"you know what i'm gonna do one day? i'm gonna order a medium fries, no salt, with caramel dipping sauce."

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currently watching: "la dolce vita," fellini and "curb your enthusiasm" season 1

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i finally finished reading "slouching towards bethlehem" and now i know why all the teachers at the j-school recommended the book. i love joan didion - she is my writing idol. my favorite pieces from this book were "some dreamers of the american dream," "life styles in the golden land," and "goodbye to all that."

I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always had an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwartz and being fitted for shoes at Best's and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live. But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions ("Money," and "High Fashion," and "The Hucksters"), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of "living" there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not "live" at Xanadu.

i highly, highly recommend you read the final chapter, about living in new york. maybe i will scan it up here (screw you copyrights).