One Of Us

Quote of the Day (as of 4:47pm):

"I'm also in the middle of the sixth century - this is so different for me!" -- Living it up at Avery.


For the past five weeks now, I have been seeing someone else. It is serious. Not better, but different. Engaging. Exploratory. Physical, very, very physical, sweaty and exhausting. I come home rejuvenated, not lethargic, with endorphins that I never even knew I had. It's true - Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I work as the Manual Collector for MenuPages.

In case you have been living under a rock or below Delancey, MenuPages is a website owned by New York Magazine that features the menus of over 8,000 restaurants in the city or some crazy number like that. Every once in a while, they have a manual collector go around and gather menus from restaurants/bars/cafés that they do not already have the menus of, and I take pictures of the places as well. This summer, thanks to a dear friend who already works for the company, that person is me. So for 20 - 25 other hours a week I am thrust out of the Avery vacuum and into The City Of Lights and Sunstroke. I get the job done, but sometimes this job requires me to walk down streets that I am already familiar with due to a quaint and outrageously overpriced boutique I like, or a Starbucks, "The Public Toilet of NY," as my roommate calls it. In this case, it happened to be E. 9th St. So I took ten minutes out of my 30-minute coffee break and did it - I went and got Thick, Square Glasses Frames at Fabulous Fanny's.

That adorable patron HS from the school year was the one who introduced me to the place - she got her round-framed, normal-on-a-grandfather-but-sexy-on-this-facial-bone-structure specs at Fabulous Fanny's on the LES (very much NOT the LES but merely the East Village - a common Columbia mistake, similar to saying "I'm downtown" when you are at 72nd St). "Everyone gets them there," she had told me, and I picked up that "everyone" referred to GSAPP (Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, the only place in the world where you can write a dissertation on Tschumi AND have Jacques Herzog as your studio instructor!). Since the GSAPP table is the one I aspire to eat lunch at one day, or at least the one I want to marry into, I'd scoped out FF's weeks before to decide which Look I wanted. With a legit East Village friend, I prodded her: wiry frames that are barely there, or thick ones? And then opaque or translucent? Should they swallow my face like my sunglasses do, a la Rachel Zoe, or be clear, like someone who is terrified of how his/her faces looks in glasses? Would men's frames be too Randian, or women's frames too Barnard? Do square frames scream ARCHITECTURE! and round ones ART HISTORY!? The round frames made me look identical to an owl with a bit of Cyclops blood in him, but was I permitted the square frames even though I don't spend my days drafting or working in the Apple Store?

After running into three Columbia graduates (one a former Art History major, one Comp Lit, and the last Film Studies) I found a pair of square-ish ones from the back, part of the Spectaculars line, named Rusty, in Tan. I think this they are American Apparel Unisex style; originally I had wanted Dolce & Gabbana frames like Michael Douglas' in Wonderboys, but these will have to do. I only need to use them for staring at the computer and reading so that my eyes don't "strain." What a milquetoast condition.

Now when my regulars enter the library, surely they must think I am a poseur. And I kind of am. I am representing what the library stands for, and that, first and foremost, is pretentious, faux-LES, all-hail-Corbu, appropriated NYU look. My boss likes them, at least, and he should be in Fashion.

http://store.fabulousfannys.com/node/249

Yours,
GA (now with a 0.75 prescription)