The seven-year-old on Court St plucks a parking ticket off the windshield. “Thirty bucks,” she says, “Not bad, Dad.” Then: “I dibs the window seat!”

Now that this hemisphere has tipped towards spring, a few rays of sun angle into the shaftway and light my cave on Atlantic Avenue, like Stonehenge. It’s a good little place, and though I scour craigslist for new apartments every day, I’ll miss it when the sublet runs out. The hum of Björn’s private server rack is comforting, and he is open-hearted enough to share his Linux root password with a strange sublessee. From the roof I can watch the ferries passing the Statue of Liberty.

Consuela lives downstairs. She is in her eighties, and though she was born and raised here, she speaks fluent Spanish. Even in English, she has a Veracruzeña accent. I find this very peculiar. Could my Brooklyn-raised sprogs speak a Limerick creole in 2090? I can barely maintain my own accent.

Consuela is the self-appointed building superintendent, and she likes to pop out in her nightie to scold passing residents. She squawks at me for carrying my bike up the broken stairs.
    “Be careful! You’ll ruin da walls!” It is not possible to damage to these rice-pudding walls aesthetically, but to oblige her (and avoid her) I now lock my bike to the parking meter downstairs. Two chains, front and back wheels, though Atlantic is safer than Limerick.

She runs some kind of numbers game, we think, because there is stream of visitors bearing slips of paper and dollar bills. When she gets bored, she screeches up the stairs.
    “Ana! Aaaaaa-na!” It sounds as though she has fallen and is horribly injured, especially late at night, but she just wants a chat. Eventually Ana shuffles out and leans over the bannister, and they gossip rapidly. The day I moved in (and Bjorn moved out) Ana was worried. “El guapo se fue?” she asked Tim. Yes, he told her, the cute guy was gone. She would have to make do with him now.

Also downstairs, directly below, is a mean and crazy pregnant lady, who has sent her sheepish husband up twice to complain about noise. I am not noisy, unless you count my CBC radio habit, and I go to bed early. She is four months from producing a creature that will howl endlessly, which is not a wise time to rile your neighbors with empty complaints. Nevertheless, the husband appears with embarrassed requests to maybe reduce the number of, uh, footfalls, because his wife is, you know, pregant and emotional. (I wear socks in the house as it is.) Poor fellow. I listen to Mario’s life upstairs through the thin floorboards, as he walks around, plays his video games, and chats to his girlfriend. Though his bathroom sometimes leaks into mine, I send him interfloor waves of neighborly love. For the mean and crazy pregnant lady below, though, I wish a thirty-six hour labor and a vacationing anesthesiologist. Latin Brooklyn turns my thoughts to revenge.

“We think of it as technology facilitating serendipity. As to whether anyone is going to get laid from it, all I can say is that our engineers are working day and night to make this happen.”

Beep beep
11.45pm
Dodgeball Alert:
Dens @
Bowery Bar
555 Bowery

Four years ago, my cell phone partied every night, thanks to Dennis Crowley. Dens worked with me at Vindigo, and was truly excited about the possibilities when people could communicate on the go. He is rare: a gadget freak with a genius for people.
“I just want to call up his mother and tell her what a good job she did,” said a senior colleague not given to overpraise.

He made Dodgeball for his friends. If Orkut is what you build when you’d like to collect people like stamps, early Dodgeball was for the real, beer-on-the-floor world. Clouds of people floated around Dennis, and for fun he built them tools to get more Best Days Ever™ out of life.

The idea was simple. Make a list of your friends’ phone numbers, or join someone else’s list. “Check in” when you get to a bar or a club. If they’ve agreed to it, they get a quick text message saying you’re there. The service supplies the address. Dodgeball kids didn’t talk pompous talk about Virtual Social Networks four years ago; they just used it to make real ones. In New York City we pay fat rents to live near good stories, but people shoot around the place like pinballs. Dodgeball made sure friends—and now friends of friends—collided once in a while. It’s not a lot to ask, and the geeks and phone company apparatchiks will pick it up eventually.

Seems Dens has been working hard since I last checked in to his Dodgeball Circle. He went back to college, and turned a hobby into an NYU Interactive Technology Program project. Now Clay Shirky, his NYU professor (and my favorite technology essayist), says Dodgeball is ready for the big time. Duck.

Since his friend Rosalinda last buzzed it in Toronto, Tim’s hair had grown in fluffy as an Easter chick. It looked more William Hurt than Bruce Willis. I had found a Conair clippers in storage, and volunteered to butchify him again. How hard could it be?

But the blade was spotted with rust, and the batteries almost dead. I raked his scalp over and over, trying to even out the patches I’d mowed. At last Tim said “I think you should stop now.” We looked in the mirror together, and I was glad he couldn’t see the back.
“That’s the worst haircut I’ve ever had,” he said slowly.
“You look like you have mange,” I said. I tried to look regretful, like this wasn’t a sabotage attempt before he heads back to the cute rangerettes on Lake Superior. It was important not to laugh before he did.
“I think we should take the bikes up to Harlem and find a barber and some soul food,” he said.

I love it when a plan comes together.

We crossed the Manhattan Bridge and skimmed up the Bowery, and on up Third Avenue. Six weeks back as a bike hippie has made me practised enough not to stop at most traffic lights. I slow to peer down side streets for oncoming taxis, then shoot ahead three or four car-free blocks. It sounds reckless, but I feel safer out in front of the cars rather than squeezing alongside the unpredictable left-turners and the passenger doors that swing murderously.

My sister was down from Ottawa for a one-day stop on her way to Ireland for Easter, and I’d arranged to meet her in her boyfriend’s uptown neighborhood on the way.
“We’ll meet you outside Serafina’s after brunch,” she’d said, and as we chained our bikes to a street sign I could see why we were considered outdoor pets around here. Outer-boroughs scruffs, with a mangy homemade haircut and clanking bikes, we did not belong with the hardened Barbies milling outside Barney’s. I played a private game of Gay or Eurotrash? all the way to the only café that would seat us (after a kind but firm warning that we would have to give up the the second two-person table if a better prospect came in).

After coffee we retrieved the bikes and headed for Central Park, which swarmed on this first half-decent spring Saturday. When I moved to New York this park was my back garden. I loved it then, but I’d hardly bothered to vist since I moved away. Now it felt full of strangers. I suppose it always was.

At 110th St, we escaped the canned wilderness out into Harlem. There is no more graceful neighborhood in Manhattan. Harlem’s brownstones and wide streets are built for humans, and like the best parts of Brooklyn, the people who live here are from here. I am a foreigner myself, but I find the presence of natives comforting in both places. Neighborhoods have stores of knowledge to be passed on, and neither a rental broker or a travel guide can fill the gaps.

On 125th Street I joined a long queue for cash. At the busiest corner of the busiest shopping street in Harlem, there were only two ATM machines to flick out twenties. On sleepy Court St. and First Place, in my old Italian neighborhood, I’ve never once stood in line for the six machines, even on a Saturday afternoon. I guess Citibank thinks Harlem can wait.

Cashed up, we continued up to Charles’s restaurant on 151st Street. Charles’s weekend soul food buffet calls for a bike ride from Brooklyn to sharpen your hunger. It costs $11.95, including unlimited lemonade or ice tea and three kinds of pie. You must pay the cashier before you take a plate. Signs warn you to check the selection in advance: there are NO REFUNDS. But who could be disappointed by pig knuckles, barbecued chicken, fried chicken, ribs, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, potato salad, cornbread, rice, and blackeyed peas? In the celebrity photos, Whoopi Goldberg looks happy. I remembered my Kentucky friend Joe telling how his hometown buffet restaurant was forced to rewrite their signs as “All You Care to Eat”. “All You Can Eat” had been taken as a challenge for too long.

Tim nodded to two big guys with small mobile phones. They’d been in last time he was there in February; Saturday afternoon regulars. They were so regular they didn’t even have to pay the cashier before they stacked their plates high. It was clear from their portions that I wasn’t going to be the customer to bankrupt Charles’s. The rules require you take a clean plate for each visit to the buffet, like those conveyor-belt sushi places where they tot up your empty dishes. I cleaned two plates, then had to lean back and rest while Tim took a third helping of knuckles and followed it with banana pie.

The motherly cashier chatted while she topped up the lemonade. Her niece wanted to go to a museum when she got off shift.
“But I got five kids, and I’d have to pay for her, too. Twenty bucks each, that’s a hundred and forty dollars, then you got all the soda and snacks. And that’s to have ‘em bored in a museum! I told her, uh uh. We’re going bowling.”

Charles’s ribs had hardly left room for my own when we headed out in search of a barber. Barbering is a serious business in Harlem, and my patchy amateur efforts did not impress our guy. With a few smooth strokes he buzzed a clean Number Two, and then sprayed a mist of olive oil on Tim’s scalp. Olive oil, we decided, makes white men look sweaty. Otherwise the operation was a success, and the haircut had made a complete recovery.

Back on the bikes we crawled up the steepest hill in the city to Spanish Harlem, lemonade and barbecue sloshing dangerously in our bellies. At Highbridge Park we looked down into the Harlem River, where Tim had paddled a few weeks back. How odd the little red inflatable kayak must have looked from here, a bath toy threading between Harlem and the Bronx.

The old High Bridge, built in 1842, was once part of the water system that carried water in to the city from the Croton Aqueduct over forty miles north. The water was piped to two Manhattan reservoirs: one on the site of Central Park’s Great Lawn and another at 42nd Street, where the New York Public Library now stands. This marvel of engineering was more significant than the Brooklyn Bridge in the city’s history. Until it was built, dirty water, drought, fires, and cholera epidemics had girdled the city’s growth. The first regular supply of clean drinking water made it possible for New York to become itself. Magazine plates from the mid-nineteeth century show swells and servants alike promenading on the High Bridge, which joins Manhattan and the Bronx. There’s talk of opening the bridge again as a foot- and bike-path connecting the two boroughs and continuing all the way out on the trail of the old water system. I’d like to follow it some day.

At a Dominican-run bike shop in the 170s, Luis replaced my clanking, slipping gear shift while I watched the action on Broadway, where big-assed girls in tight pants walked to the music. What bliss to do your Saturday chores in another country, and then bike home as the sun sets on the Hudson.

Ranger Tim is back from Canada, and his weekend expeditions have kept me away from the laptop yet again. In compensation, I asked him for a guest post to make up for my neglect. Seems he’s been taking another masterclass in tree-felling:

A shout-out to Halley and friends, who launched Worthwhile, a new blog/magazine today.

The tagline is ‘Work with Purpose, Passion, Profit’. May she find all three in this new and timely gig.

Bernie Goldbach on the new smoking ban in Ireland:

“It seems that smoking has given way to a festival-style mood that mixes outdoor smokers with door staff, tourists, and regulars in search of a good party.”

I don’t get games. The few times I played Scrabble with my husband—we were student flatmates then, not even going out together—he tiled the board while I sulked. He is brighter than me, and understood that Scrabble is a game of numbers, not words. I would frown and shuffle my seven letters, looking for greatness and finding ‘GOOD’. He would look thoughtful for a moment, then lay four letters so they sucked the juice out of my vowels and tupped both triple-letter and triple-word scores. 74 points.
    “‘Zo’ isn’t a word! Bollocks!”
    “It is.” Mildly, he would wave the rules leaflet. It felt like cheating, this nebbishy memorizing of short words to map to the pink and red tiles.

This is why I still write error message copy, while he runs a profitable company. It’s also why I don’t get business parties. I forget it’s a game of numbers, not words.

On Thursday, I went to my first internet party since the days when VC(venture capital) money launched companies like Helen launched ships. I had used the product that morning, and had plenty to say about it. And compellingly, the party was on my route home. I chained my bike up under the changing guard of the smokers outside.

Little had changed but the smoking ban. These parties are theater, a stage-managed peek at the booty this little warship/enterprise might bring back. The SoHo loft setting is borrowed. The waiters are actors (and the handsomest men in the room, by too far). The champagne is on the never-never. Last time there were internet parties, the piñata might have held a SoHo loft conversion for everyone, and they fizzed with that promise. Now people look glad to get a free drink.

I didn’t know anyone but the host, whom I’d met once. I knew several names on the ostentatiously accidentally open To: line of the email invitation, but would recognize only their words. Still, a woman alone can cuddle a drink until someone says hello. I reminded myself to hold the champagne flute in the paw not smeared with chain grease. This was SoHo, not Brooklyn, I thought, so I should make an effort. The room was a mixture of meeja and web types; friendly enough.

Various nice men stopped to chat. I kept a straight face as they ‘fessed up to founding or abetting the silly companies of five years ago. (Their between-year stories were fuzzier.) I said what I did in fifteen words or fewer, though I have no talent for elevator-pitching my life. A slick and toothy fellow—New York raised—told me he’d tried to resist the temptation to start another company, but couldn’t.
    “The entrepreneur is a serial monogamist,” I said, as the bubbles came up my nose. His eyes widened at this profundity. Then he excused himself to go to another party.

In Manhattan, most parties are business (and that’s why I do my living across the bridge). It’s an island of transactions, of Getting Needs Met, as Rageboy would say. You circulate, extract information, and move on. You’re allowed to look over a person’s shoulder in mid-sentence, scanning for better prospects. What can you do for me? I know these rules but in the wrong mood they make me as sulky as Scrabble. I can’t do the graceful, gotta-go-freshen-my-drink exit, for fear of hurting feelings, and I can’t shake the primitive desire to feel, rather than collect, connections. So this time I made no excuses, and left—remembering that it’s hard to look Sex and the City when you carry a bike helmet everywhere.

SHEEPISH UPDATE: Nick Denton, Kinja Big Cheese, tells me that was his own apartment. And that he provided indoor ashtrays (though New Yorker smokers are now programmed to use the street). His manners are much better than mine.

From The Dubliner magazine, a rant on why foreigners are starting to think Irish suck, which overlooks our tendency to rant on why foreigners think we suck.

10 Great myths about the Irish

“We” do self-hatred pretty well though, it seems.