Infamous.

Tonight I was coming up out of the subway at Grand Army Plaza. I think I had a very confused look on my face because the girl in front of me had one of those red string Kabbalah bracelets on her wrist and I was thinking, "Wait, we're still doing that?" And also, I sneezed so hard I peed a little. When I got above ground I encountered a man in a Canadian tuxedo pushing a bicycle with bike chain padlocked around his neck who sang to me, "Hey gorgeous girl in the pretty red, can this fine prince have a word with you?" The look on my face only registered more incredulity and I continued walking.

Last week I went to Duane Reade to pick up a prescription. I wasn't anticipating it to be a giant clusterfuck because by benefits administrator has not yet enrolled me in COBRA, so technically I don't have any health care at the moment, which has caused me to make several increasingly frantic calls to the slow pokes at Benefit Concepts from my very unprivate desk at work. I should just yell into the phone, "But my insulin!" and then fake a seizure during the slow four o'clock hour. Anyway, I was fretting so much about how much my prescription would retail for, I totally forget that the last time I was in that Duane Reade, I threw up all over the floor.

I approached the counter. BoogerBunny was working. "Hey," she said.

"Hi," I said anticipating the struggle that lay ahead of me.

"How you doing?"

"I'm good, thanks."

She looked at me knowingly. "You feeling better?"

Oh. Right. The last time we were face to face, I bent double and proceeded to puke my guts up. That. "Oh, I guess you remember me. I, uh, guess you're going to remember me for a long time."

"Uh-huh."

"Yeah, with the kitty litter and ... I'm really sorry about that."

"It's okay. I'm glad you're feeling better." The thing about BoogerBunny is that she is the totally antithetical Duane Reade employee. She is always cheerful even when she is telling me how she can't wait for her shift to end. She sings, raps and dances while she waits on customers. Not during a pause in the action, she's just behind the counter bustin' out while the line of customers grows. It's cute and playful and she is always nice to the customers, when she is not singing to them. I guess what I'm saying is, if I have to keep returning to the scene of the crime, I'm glad she's the chief witness. I can imagine a future where someday we both regale the customers in line with the story about how I puked all over the pharmacy counter.

Here's some more buzz from the 'hood, my beloved Prospect Heights was the profiled neighborhood in New York Magazine's last issue, the Best and Worst of 2006 issue. Here's the neighborhood map; I'll reproduce the intro here:

Wedged between Park Slope and Fort Greene, Prospect Heights has always been the forgotten neighborhood at the heart of Brooklyn's brownstone revival, quietly evolving from seventies poverty to small-scale gentrification—until Frank Gehry's gargantuan Atlantic Yards project last year. Now, this diverse triangle-populated by Caribbean immigrants, African-Americans, and, increasingly, come-lately families priced out of Park Slope—is a battleground for the meaning of Brooklyn. And it's a perfect illustration of the busts and boons of development: from Flatbush Avenue's invading chain stores to Eastern Parkway's beautifully renovated civic institutions, to the Richard Meier rising above Grand Army Plaza.

From "The Heights Report" by Logan Hill


That's my home. Check it out.