Before I moved to Brooklyn, I’m not sure if I had ever taken this train; maybe once or twice max. It kind of creeped me out because it is basically a Brooklyn train that makes a U-turn on the east side of Manhattan (it’s the brown line). Essentially, it was useless to me. Plus, it’s pretty ghetto and goes above ground. Trains in Manhattan don’t go above ground. Unless you’re in Harlem. Again, ghetto.

However, when it’s not frigidly cold or pouring rain, waiting for the train on this platform can be quite a pleasure. And the view when you head over the Williamsburg bridge is a damn fine one. It kind of reminds you why New York is the best city in the world. And that is not an opinion. It’s a fact.

After looking at this photo again, actually reading what the hell it says, and digesting it, I’ve decided that maybe I do need to start shopping at - rather than photographing - the Union Square farmers market. I mean, I don’t necessarily need a pound of mushrooms, but a little pint of them usually costs that much in the grocery store! Even at the ghetto mart that I shop at in Brooklyn!! If this is how much mushrooms cost, there must be other great price drops there, too.

My problem is that I need to get past the massive amounts of deliciously over sized cookies and the wine tasting stand so that I might actually have a shot at buying some excellent produce that isn’t ridiculously overpriced. This is what New York does to you: most satisfaction for least amount of money. Drinking your dinner becomes preferable to eating it.

1. Because I feel like a perv taking pictures of random people I don’t know and trying to be sly about it.

2. I don’t want to ask people to take their photograph because A. that’s weird and B. isn’t street photography supposed to capture that good old decisive moment?

3. Other photographers find cool stuff to take pictures of. I find girls in pink hats paying for their bag of apples.

4. It should be black & white and come out of a darkroom. I don’t have a darkroom. But maybe if my friend Natalie decides to move to New York we can both have one… (wink wink, Nat.)

5. I don’t have a #5, but I feel like there should be a 5.

I don’t know why I like farmer’s markets so much. I rarely buy anything except maybe a cookie since they’re always huge and delicious and make me drool just thinking about them. And I always manage to make it to the wine tasting stand. I mean duh, free wine. Other than that, I don’t have much use for all the borderline Amish goodies. Contrary to my upstate country roots, overpriced dried (read: dead) flowers are not really my thing.

I took this over the weekend at the Greenmarket in Union Square. Even though this photo says “autumn” a lot louder than it says “spring” - and let me tell you, I do not want to think about autumn because after that comes winter and I like summer - it reminded me of a board game called Apples to Apples. Though not as well known, the fun factor of this game rivals that of it’s big brothers and sisters including, but not limited to, Pictionary, Outburst, and Cranium.

Here’s to a revival of board game nights everywhere.

Saturday afternoon I found myself in a very crowded Union Square. The farmers’ market appears to be open for the season, and there was a big Pillow Fight drawing in kids young and old.

I took a bunch of lovely photos of the market, but I wanted to post this first because it’s something that has been driving me absolutely nuts since this whole city became hipsterfied. Of these two people in extremely tight jeans, one is a girl and one is a guy. But I bet you can’t guess which is which. Because the jeans are too tight. Again, in case you missed it, you can’t tell the gender of these two because the JEANS ARE TOO TIGHT!! A guy’s jeans should never be as tight as the girl’s he is with.

As my cousin has so eloquently put it, “Guys in New York are like girls with dicks.” This is a notice to all of you guys guilty of this hipster phenomenon: start shopping in your section of the store! When I go looking for my size zero jeans, YOU better not be grabbing the last pair. If we can share jeans, you are more like a gay friend than someone to date. Think about it.

Yesterday I stumbled onto the (annual?!) Pillow Fight in Union Square. I’m pretty sure I got there as it was winding down since the entire square, and crowd, were covered in feathers. I’m not really sure what the point of the whole thing was, but fortunately I had my camera on me.

The feathers were everywhere. They were about a foot deep in some places. Even after I left, they followed me to 3rd avenue.

I didn’t mean to catch these two kissing. You could just see the feathers in their hair really well. And they have the same clown hair which is kind of funny. But that makes it hard to tell if it’s two guys, two girls, or a hetero couple. Only in friggin New York.

They definitely look less clown-like from the front. Kind of a cute hipster-couple-in-training. Check out all the feathers. The stairs were covered.

This guy looks like he might need a bigger pillow.

Glad I wasn’t on clean up duty.

What a random thing. Who was the guy that said, “I have an idea! Let’s have a massive pillow fight in Union Square?” And who were all the people that agreed? Whatever the reason, glad to see New York likes to stay young at heart.

After posting this, I sent an email to the customer service rep at DEX explaining my dissatisfaction and including a link to the post. This is the response I received back:

I am so sorry to hear that you had such a disappointing experience on Tuesday evening!
THINK PINK! A Garden Tea Party was never meant as an event to promote DEX New York or any of its services, but rather as an event to raise money for The Young Survival Coalition (http://www.youngsurvival.org/) and to raise awareness as to how breast cancer affects so many young women - yet they are so seldom recognized.

I think I made that clear in my previous post that I understood this event was for a cause other than having a party. On that note, if you are hosting an event, regardless of the reason, you are promoting your company. End of story. Continuing on…

The women working the door were not employees of DEX New York, but rather a PR firm donating their time to the cause, though the “cute gay guy in a pink shirt” is an employee of DEX New York - probably the only one you encountered if you never made it past the door - and his trying to figure out a way to get you in exemplifies the way we want everyone to be treated here at DEX New York.

Great. Maybe he can teach these PR girls a thing or two about customer service.

There was no particular cut-off time to RSVP, to the best of my knowledge, though once the event list is filled, the people running the list must cut it off to ensure that any event is not over capacity. I am sure you not being able to get in had nothing to do with them being “selective”, just the simple fact that the list was at capacity.

If I was unclear about it before, then I would like to state now that I didn’t feel the girl was being “selective.” She was being a bitch. Her attitude was equivalent to that of the girls who work the doors at clubs. I felt that overall, the situation was handled badly.

I definitely would like to say that it is the policy of DEX New York to give every person who walks through the door the ultimate customer service experience, at all times, no matter who they may be, so I am sorry that was not your experience this time.

Best,

Briana Campbell
Operations Manager

You are correct: that was not my experience. Apparently DEX is not living up to its policy of giving the “ultimate customer service experience.”

About an hour after receiving that email, I received another email. Shockingly enough, it was to DEX from what I imagine to be the PR company that handled the event. This email also had the entire RSVP list attached:

Hi Briana and Dex,

In response to Amy Rollo’s blog, Jeannine and Aja are going to call you in a moment. Please note that Alice An, Event producer for DEX asked us to close the list at 3:36 pm on Tuesday, March 11th. We have checked through all the emails (and you can too) and we do not have an “Amy Rollo” on our list.

Also, I know you received the same RSVP’s as we did. So, I am sure you will see that this person was never on our RSVP list.

In her blog she said Going.com was “confirming” RSVP’s? Please help me understand this – because we knew nothing of it.

Even though Alice An asked us to close the list -

We took LAST MINUTE LAST MINUTE RSVPS

What I would like to address here is the fact that my point is clearly not coming across to these people. I understand I was not on the list. I understand that somehow there are 3 different times in which this list was closed (1. first post: noon. 2. first email: no known time. 3. second email: 3:36 pm with last minute RSVPs).

What I don’t understand is how all of these idiots get up and get dressed in the morning. The point is you will lose business because of some girl’s crappy attitude reflecting badly on DEX. The point is NOT what time the list was closed. The point is how the situation was handled. The point is NOT sending some faceless girl - that has already posted a bad review of you - conflicting emails and the entire RSVP list complete with personal emails (SPAM much?) to prove that she is not on it.

I get it. My RSVP didn’t go through. Why don’t you people get that THAT IS NOT THE POINT?

And so ends my relationship with DEX.

My cousin’s friend has been working on this show for a few months and has been relentlessly bugging us to go. Finally, last Friday we conceded and decided to spend the night doing something other than sitting in a bar.

Let me begin by saying that I was completely blown away by Fuerza Bruta. It is the most creative show that I have ever seen. There is no silly, campy, run-of-the-mill on- or off-Broadway normalcy. In fact, there aren’t even any decipherable words throughout the show.

What the show does consist of is an hour and 10 minutes of insane, feels-like-you’re-tripping-on-acid lights and music. The way in which it’s presented makes the audience part of the show as you are constantly moving around to make room for stages and scenes that are seemingly constructed in a matter of seconds and ripped down in about the same time.

What this show does, which is what I think makes it so unique, is put you into a mental and emotional state of discomfort. You’re never quite sure what is going to happen next or where it’s going to come from. It keeps you intensely alert, similar to how I felt while watching the movie Crank. Like my body might fall apart from all of the adrenaline. Fight or flight, baby.

Best part? Former N’Syncer J.C. Chasez was next to us for the majority of the show. Checking out my cousin. While the chick he was with wouldn’t take her hands off of him. My cousin loved it. I just wanted to ask him for Justin’s phone number.

As much as I love the smell of new books, reading used books not only saves trees, but can be quite interesting when you find receipts, business cards, and markings left behind by previous owners.

In this instance, someone in my building must have cleaned out their bookshelves because there was a whole box to rummage through in the hallway. This particular book, Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, had quite a few things left in it including the card pictured below, a receipt, and a list of names and items that I imagine must be a Christmas list (photograph below).

What I find interesting here (that probably no one else will think is cool at all and that’s ok because I’m a dork and think stupid things are cool) are the names ‘Amy’ and ‘Matt’ next to each other because my name happens to be ‘Amy’ and my brother’s happens to be ‘Matt.’ So there’s another pair out there…

What I’ve decoded from this list is that 1. the person is a good gift giver and 2. the person is a gay man. The reason for 1. is that there are multiple items from Apple listed, along with several ‘wines’ and ‘kiehls,’ which are all quite tasteful gifts. This guy can totally shop for me any day.

The reason that I believe this person to be a gay man is that the longest list of items is under the name of ‘Marcos’ and includes something I can’t decipher, iTrip, guitar lessons, kiehls, and sharp (possibly something electronic?). That alone isn’t enough, obviously a girl could have written this list, but the handwriting is most definitely that of a man.

So you see, a used book is not necessarily just a used book. It’s a little piece of insight into someone else’s life. However, I never borrow books from my long time friend, Julie. Because she picks her nose. And sticks the boogers on whatever page she happens to be on. And that is something that I just don’t need to know.