one way to sound insane is to complain about "the service"

Guess which neighborhood each of the following menupages reviews is from. Choices are: Park Slope, Williamsburg, Soho, Wall Street, Morningside Heights.

I am thinking I would get better service in a McDonalds! I was there in December and the waitress was possibly new as she got the wine order wrong, gave it to my guest to taste (when I was clearly the host and had ordered it!), bought the entrees out before we had finished our appetisers and it was generally appalling! Topped off by the fact that she gave the check to my guest who was an important business client! I was embarrassed to be there and went to Pastis 2 days later which was just as bad!

I must comment on the rude way the phones are answered to take my order. The phone hangs up and they dont bother calling back. I do calll back, but they dont apologize.

I am no shrinking violet. I love good music and have been known to sit next to speakers at a concert, but this was ridiculous. I asked my waitress, the bartender, and even the manager to turn it down, but they refused.

this resaurant was very cheep for the good food they gave. but i don't like the way the servers gave my drink and the drink wasn't good anyway.

I was sent to a table designed for two. This sent the waiter into a mild panic. "No, no, no,"he called to me, as though I was about to stuff a signed Picasso sketch into my back pocket.

the scariest thing about Park Slope is not the sports utility strollers

The other night I was walking through the park on the road parallel to Prospect Park West. A car passed me, then reversed. I ignored it.

"Hey, get over here," an ugly dude said from the passenger seat. I glanced over and he held something up. A flash. I ran, down the road then off of it and toward 9th Street and PPW. At the sidewalk I turned around. The car had pulled closer down the road and was now running a siren.

I stood still and thought. So these were random plainclothes police officers, not random people. I still didn't want to talk to them. I ran up PPW for a few blocks--against traffic, so they couldn't follow me--then continued walking around my neighbhorhood, where I've been harrassed three times by police officers and zero times by anyone else.

somewhat respectable

This weekend my friend Richard was in town from Chapel Hill. On Saturday we went to Bar Reis in Park Slope and took up about four seats in its colorful garden. That was possible because Park Slope is cool/uncool like that. As Richard's tourguide I taught him things.

Glenna: First of all, everyone is a lawyer.
Richard: Ha, ha. Sometimes I feel like everyone I meet is a doctor.
Girl 10 feet away: Blah BLAH blah law firm blah blah motherfuckers...

She had been heckling us periodically. For example as I'd walked between the table and the bathroom, she suggested to Richard that he break up with me.

Glenna: Hey, what law firm?
New Friend: White and Case. You're a 2L summer? What school?
Glenna: NYU. You?
New Friend: Penn. What law firm?
Glenna: None. I'm just working for a professor.
New Friend: OoooOOOH NYU over here is going to help people! Everyone look at NYU here, she's better than us. She's going to help people!

The people in her party didn't look. I denied that I would ever help anyone and then we played the name game. She invited us to her table and we dragged our chairs over happily.

NF: [places hand in my lap] You're really skinny. You must be the type who doesn't eat when she does coke. [I nod.] Fuck you. [To Richard] You have jagged teeth.
R: Really?

Our new friend pulled a black high heeled flip flop from her bag and replaced her right shoe (a silvery high heeled flip flop) with it.

NF: [to me] This one is not so quick. You are. You're NYU, okay? But like what's this guy, Binghamton?
G: Worse. He doesn't even go to law school.

Her upper lip jerked and the lower one stayed relaxed. By this point New Friend's friends had evaporated. We were finally alone. The waitress moseyed by and New Friend ordered a line of coke.

Waitress: Cooooke
NF: Um HELLO, cocaine, BLOW, fucking, lines, rails, hello anybody home?
W: We don't sell... coke...
NF: What the FUCK, fuck you.
W: A drink...?

I interrupted to ask for a seabreeze. Richard ordered some kind of beer for himself and New Friend settled for the same.

NF: Why are there TV shows about black people? Like, I'm sorry, I'm sick of people being so fucking PC. I am not PC.
Her hand was in my lap again. I moved some hair behind her ear.
R: That's kind of...
NF: What, oh, I'm sorry, you're black aren't you. Yeah you're black, or Jewish, because you have curly hair.
R: No...
NF: It's okay, it means you're good at cunnilingus.
Etc.

New Friend pretended not to hear several invitations back to my apartment, which pissed me off. She was all talk. Talk and touching, anyway. New Friend was not an exciting discovery. She was the same type of person I meet a dozen times a day during the school year: verbally aggressive, worldly, and risk-averse. The only difference was, I happened to meet her at a Brooklyn bar instead of in the vicinity of authority figures.

The next day I shared the story with a friend and classmate of mine.
Old Friend: It's because she goes to Penn. Those second and third tier schools have trouble weeding people out.
G: But Penn is only two spots below NYU.
OF: Doesn't matter. Like there's this guy at my firm who always says weird homophobic stuff to me when no one else is around. And guess where he goes? Duke.
G: Oh, actually you might be right. Duke really sucks.

The last weekend of summer this year is all wet and desperate. If I concentrate I can find omens!

Today my NYU buddy list was heavier than it had been in months. So many people online, not idle, screening each other through dummy away messages. It only took me a minute to realize they were all back at school studying.

Luckily not everyone is in lower Manhattan, in the library. My roommate, a close friend and classmate, is watching a spelling bee movie on her brand new aerobed. THIS is civilization! So is lying prone on my own bed for a half hour or so, face in the wet window, listening to a bongo drummer across the backyards.

So I gave myself the day. I finished a decent book and walked to the nearest two used bookstores to find more by the same author. No luck. There was a ranking of 100 books hanging up, and the first four sucked (Joyce, Nabokov, Joyce, Fitzgerald). I was tempted to look for the fifth on the shelves, since it was ranked so high. I resisted.

It was raining so I ran home, nearly sideswiping some strollers. Here's a secret: most of the time, I don't mind sharing my neighborhood with kids. I can't begrudge them Park Slope because I imagine they're so much happier than kids who grow up in the woods.

Dogs don't chase them. When they do, the rumors that the dogs are actually coyotes are less credible. Roads and restaurants surround the trees, instead of vice versa, so kids have no reason to believe that nature is a threat to civilization. That probably makes summer camp less stressful. And they don't have to drive a half hour just to glimpse a brand name, meaning their carsick little brothers throw up on them less often.

Best of all, their moms have jobs! (I know this because the only young white women in the park on weekdays are dirty grad students like me.) Employed moms are great. I imagine you don't get sick of them around age 19, they don't yell at you for bringing down the win ratio on solitaire, and they have more money.

Anyway, so off-campus life is all heartwarming. But how about this day... I'm going to cap it off with a "mixer" at school. A luscious 25 minutes away. People I don't like will be there. I've convinced myself it's not worth it to crack a book. By the time I check the syllabus and pick out a highlighter, it will be almost time to shower because checking the syllabus takes 2 hours because it hurts so much.

Hey, classes will be better than researching mo-peds for Legal Aid though!