Seeworthy

This weekend has been unusually eventful.
Friday I went to a benefit for the AIDS walk, which I really enjoyed. It was a little bit like vaudeville with music and comedy and readings. I always thought vaudeville must have been really kitschy and schmaltzy, but this was quite sophisticated. Everyone who performed was really talented, too . And to cap it off, I won something in the raffle. It's a box set of music from the '90s called Whatever and includes Social Distortion's Ball and Chain, Spacehog's In the Meantime, and Pavement's Cut Your Hair. I love the '90s.
Saturday I went to to look at the apartment I'm moving into. Looks like I won't be homeless after all. I can't believe that I'm going to be living in a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood after my experience living with a leaking roof in the ghetto. I mean, the other night I was going to sleep and realized that I sleep in the same room as my refrigerator, which is the same room that I do my work in, which is the same room that I watch tv in. But in 3 weeks I will have different rooms to do all those things in! I think it's a little sad though that I'm excited that my new bathroom will have a toilet paper holder and a towel rack. The only downside is that it is in a coop building, and I need to get them all kinds of documentation that is proving rather difficult to gather.
I think my new job and my new apartment mean that on the Brooklyn food chain, I have moved from despised hipster to loathed yuppie. I'm not sure if its an upgrade or not, but I did feel that my new status meant I should travel to the mecca, Fairway, which only opened this week. Conveniently located in Red Hook, it is innaccessible by subway, poorly serviced by bus routes and almost impossible to be found by the average New York cabbie. Luckily half of Park Slope was there with their Jeeps and Subarus. I on the other hand had to hike from the Smith-9th Street stop of the G train.
Red Hook was not what I had expected. I'm beginning to think that Bushwick is indeed the shittiest shit hole in Brooklyn. I had heard all about Red Hooks reputation, but it's a picturesque, if picaresque, neighborhood. Brick tenements huddIe together in the shadow of crumbling factories and warehouses while closer to the waterfront the rusted vestiges of Brooklyn's seafaring past are still visible. I passed art galleries and antique stores and yes, even strollers. Just as I saw the distant form of Fairway on Van Brunt Street, I began to smell the sea. The one form of transportation that is easily accessibly from Fairway is the Water Taxi.
I hadn't been planning on buying much, but when I walked up to the cheese case and saw they had Brie de Meaux, I couldn't resist. The employees had obviously been vigourously coached to be friendly and helpful, but I still had a pretty genuine conversation with the cheese guy about the supierority of brie de meaux. (Whole Foods and many cheese shops refuse to carry it, because it is made from raw milk.) After the cheese, I quickly went into what I can only describe as the foodie trance, that weird stupor that people go into when they walk into gourmet supermarkets and lose the ability to walk. Thankfully, the aisles are wide and the store is big enough that customers can walk around like extras from Dawn of the Dead without creating chaos. There were still some kinks to be worked out, though. The credit card machines were on the fritz and didn't accept the first card I tried. I also would have appreciated if some proper bagging instruction had accompanied the customer service training. My container of watermelon opened all over the bag it was placed in and the cheese was crushed by the apples. My mother always rearranges the groceries after they're packed, and I thought she was crazy, but today it made sense. They were only single bagged and one of the bags split on my way home.
The trek home involved a bus, a subway, and a 20 minute walk. All told it took two hours to get back home. If I have another free Sunday afternoon, I might go back for certain things like cheese and fresh fish that I can't get from Fresh Direct, but I won't be making that hike for stuff like apples and pasta.