Hot hot heat.

I love the way the laundromat looks in the dead of night when I am walking by it after a late night craving for a BLT and a pack of freshly taxed $12 cigarettes. During the day it seems like an ominous place. Everyone has such an intense objective when they go there. Get in. Clean clothes. Avoid eye contact with the Asian lady who runs the place and is always surly when you ask for change. Get out. At night it seems calm. Well-kept. Like a place that could potentially be a sanctuary were it not for the damn heat permeating the walls.

My late night strolls through Greenpoint bring such a powerful sense of peace. Pain I am not yet ready to deal with has surfaced in my chest and found a home there so these after hours ventures steadies them and makes them bearable. I think about all of the missed Blog entries. My ideas for a TV show I think my best friend and I should write. How I would love nothing more in this world than to write a comic book. My recent fetish for autobiographical humor like David Sedaris and Chelsea Handler. Then I wonder why I'm reading things that focus on that. Maybe it's because I'm desperately searching for my destiny while I approach my thirtieth birthday and do co-DJ gigs at Alligator Lounge, thinking about my unemployment running out while I fruitlessly search for jobs that aren't quite me. Then my thoughts turn to loss. Egregious, horrible loss that I am not yet capable of facing. Thoughts of my life, a life I have recently said goodbye to, and my future jumble into my head and reveal a hard, horrible anguish that terrorizes me and makes me unable to sleep. Hence the late night walking. Or maybe it's because my destiny lies in this stupid talent that I am convinced I do not possess called writing. I stalk the night time hours the way a dieting obese woman stalks a Dunkin Donuts. Shamefully and with an ultimate desire to seek validation through something they know is never going to give them what they want.

My recent unemployment has given me a lot of free time. And while I have been using that free time to explore NYC I have not found what it is I had hoped the freedom from 60 hour work weeks in the hospitality industry would afford me. A purpose. I know. It's pathetic. Poor little sad privileged white girl hasn't yet found her purpose. But fuck that. I'm almost thirty and am rapidly approaching my promised deadline of quitting smoking so I'm allowed a little room to be self-involved. Well, not really.

The spring and summer in NYC have brought with it a sense of home and openness I did not think was possible in this city. Upon arriving to this town to end all towns I was scared shitless, but hopeful. Then winter hit. And it was like a nuclear bomb exploding in this Floridian's life. What the fuck is snow and why do people think it's so great? Admittedly, upon my first sight of it in many years I thought it was pretty. Then I got trapped in it and walked home in knee deep drifts that would make even your Grandfather's stories of "we walked uphill" seem bland in comparison.

Warm weather came and people changed. We stopped walking briskly by one another in an attempt to ignore everything around us but our attempt to get warm and actually starting conversing outside of places while we lepers called smokers enjoyed our hedonist bounty. We began to be polite to each other again. Not on the trains, that's just ludicrous, but at least when we were waiting in lines at the bodega. It was a wonderful season to enjoy a glass of white wine on the patio while people watching dog obsessed people carrying on full blown conversations with their schnauzers like they were their children. Grand time to be alive.

Ha. Summer. Totally different animal. Heat. This Floridian knows heat. But this Floridian does not know heat without central AC. I believe that hell is without central AC. And unfortunately stocked with non-Alcoholic beer (that's kind of what makes it hell). No window AC unit made it even worse. In Florida there is water and greenery to absorb the dense wall of humidity that manages to skulk into every corner of your life. In NYC there is pavement and buildings that trap it in and enable it to jump onto your back like a stalker when you have no restraining order. Who the hell can live like this?

Cue romantic and clichéd movie music. Enter the boyfriend. That is an entirely different blog entry. I promise we'll get to that. He gives me (and installs!) an AC unit in my room. Everything should be perfect. Right?!?!?

Yeah it doesn't change the fact that I am unemployed for the first time in my life. Not adult life, mind you. Life. I have worked since I was 14 years old. It is not for a lack of trying. It is for a lack of skills. I detest not being productive. Marx said that we attribute our worth as humans to our ability to produce so I can't be entirely wrong. Unless he was. If that's the case then I'm screwed. Nonetheless I am idle and seeking more in this city that I have slowly (and begrudgingly) come to love.

This has been coupled with my Grandmother recently dying. I almost made it through this whole post without mentioning it because it is too personal. And too painful. I wanted this post to be another random musing of a lost soul but I cannot bear to not talk about it. I am hurting too deeply from the loss of someone I loved so much. I need the catharsis of writing about it because my chest aches so much that I feel I will never recover. I will not go off into a self-indulgent tirade about the pain of loss because we have all been through it. I did not handle it well. Needless to say that I spent two full days in a pot-hazed (sorry to my parents but I needed something to dull the ache), drunk state while I tried to cope with one of the most amazing people to have ever lived no longer gracing the Earth with her presence. What I will do, however, is remember her white knuckles kneading dough for baking. Her boisterous pride of her gravy recipe. Her infectious laugh that made everyone around her smile intensely just by hearing the sound of it. She would laugh at everything you said, making the most serious situations feel light. Her ability to make you realize there was a simple solution to every problem. The fact that you could not mention her name in conversation without eliciting a sincere grin that made you ecstatic just to be talking about her, let alone to know her. Her generosity and willingness to share anything she had. Her love of Jesus. Playing cards with her at the table at 2am with her always sportmanslike smile when she lost (when she was most likely letting you win.) Her hearty, whole body hugs at the end of family vacations. Her love of anything canine. Her beautiful Southern drawl that slowed down everything in the conversation and made you think about what she was saying. Her modest home with my Grandfather in Tennessee, a place she treasured so much she would never leave. Christmas mornings listening to Elvis and the porcelain dolls she gave me every year with blonde hair and blue eyes that I know she painstakingly chose because she loved me and wanted to make me happy. Her constant forgetfulness and addiction to coffee. Her chain smoking. How she always made my Mom let me stay up late when I was a little girl to watch TV. Her ability to find any toy I had ever lost and her village of winter houses she set up every year that used to light up. Her infinite love for her Grandchildren and children and her collection of diamond rings. Her unflagging patience for people and her genuine love of humanity. While her family lost the most the world in general lost one of the most spirited and kind souls we've ever seen. It's unfortunate, because people like her are what the world needs more of. I cry as I write this because not enough of us were able to be graced with her extraordinarily strong and beautiful nature.

Please go hug the person you love most in this world. Because the moment where you realize you didn't do it enough is a moment that will make your life seem insignificant.