Hooray for New York

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO PEOPLE. PEOPLE. I have a cute girl's phone number and she writes plays and she's taking me to see the Marie Antoinette movie because I was like, "I really like it when people take old, well-known stories and retell them with a deliberately modern twist and I'm very interested in seeing how they portray her as a sympathetic character when she's so well-known as the spoiled aristocrat, and I want to see how they work in an 80's music soundtrack" and she was like "Me too!" And then we were talking about Halloween and she was like "I was thinking about dressing up as one of the three musketeers because I have a costume from this production of it I put on" and I was like "OMG no way! I'm in the middle of reading the novel right now (because people, after I read Swordspoint five times in a row I had it pretty much memorized and yet needed more swordfights), and I was thinking about dressing up as Milady!" and she was like "No way! You totally should, and then I'll be your D'Artagan!"

WHOOOOO. ♥ ♥ ♥

Also, people. People. I am drunk now. Because clearly I am such a dork that I will debate literary theory even when I can't walk straight. Also, I will probably delete this post in the morning when I recover my sense of shame.

And it's only a few weeks into fall

It's gotten cold here the last few days, and accordingly the heat has been turned on in the building. I could hear the pipes knocking the other night when it first came on. Apparently you don't get your own thermostat here; you trust the building owners to keep it warm enough. Which is distressing. I mean, I'm sure it's because of the cost of heating, but I'd much rather have a personal heater than a personal air-conditioner, so why is the first not available and the second common?

Also, announcing that it will always be "at least 65" does not reassure me. The hell kind of temperature is 65? A terrible one, I say.

But actually it's rather warm in here at the moment, so I can't complain (well, I've just spent two paragraphs complaining, but those didn't count). I've got one of those big metal radiators in my room, directly below the window that has a sill wide enough to sit on. This makes three years in a row that I've had windowsills useable as seats, by the way. It must be the new trend in, um, sixty year old buildings. It reminds me of my grandmother's house when I was little, where the warm air came out of long metal grates that ran along the edges of the room. I used to hole up in the corner between an easy chair and the side of the TV, where I was effectively hidden from sight from anyone who would walk by, and put my feet on them. There was always a risk: if you did it in bare feet, you were taking a chance that you'd end up burning your skin. But doing it with socks on never had quite the same sear of heat.

It's a lovely arrangement here, too; if I put my legs up on the wall, I can lie down on the windowsill and tuck my feet under the radiator's pipe and get the heat from the grate against my side. Very nice, at least until I fall asleep, fall off, and nearly kill myself on a nearby open drawer.