Apparently the fashion world needs another fashion show: The Victoria’s Secret fashion show. A few minutes ago, on television, several women were parading about in white undergarments with angelic wings strapped to their backs; one angel was being lowered from the ceiling, flapping her golden wings, spreading her nicely tanned thighs out over the audience. Precious.

Time is getting short. I’m due to take the GRE in two weeks, grad school apps are due 1 January. I haven’t started in on the essay, nor do I have any significantly stunning pieces of fiction to send over to these schools. My workshop at the New School is up next week. What I want to do with my time is make charts and organize my finances, like I did the other night, color coding each section: Visa, Mastercard, bank statements, student loans, unemployment insurance stubs, former payroll stubs, receipts, tax documents.

On WFUV last night, in the car on the way to dinner for my little brother’s fifteenth birthday, a deejay was reporting on the American Airlines flight that had crashed in Queens earlier this week. She said something about it having crashed in “New York City,” which made me think that the rest of the country is imagining plane after plane razing the Manhattan skyline. Do people in other parts of the country remember Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island?

New York Stuff

9:30 in the morning on the Manhattan-bound Q platform, four kids are perched on a square-top cooler like a park bench, sharing fistfuls of barbecue potato chips from a cellophane bag.

Another child of six or seven has one hand draped over her mother?s thigh, the other grasps a bag of Chee-tos.

A Saturday evening, a father hands his stroller-ridden child a snack-size bag of Wise potato chips an her chubby little hands barely grasp the slippery plastic as she shoves each greasy chip into her moist little mouth.

Number 4 train, Brooklyn-bound rush hour, an overweight mother feeds broken bits of Cheez Doodles to her infant child, who, not yet having teeth, gums them up and drools fluorescent orange.

Wall-length glass block window outside the Q is stuffed with rags — extra t-shirts, balled up socks — stuck in place of the blocks that have broken or fallen out.

Bryant Park film festival — after Looney Toons, when we’ve all been sitting there for three hours on sore behinds, we get up and dance — hands in the air, bellies shaking — to the HBO theme song, the feature attraction song, the one-last-wiggle-before-two-long-hours-on-elbows-in-the-grass dance.

Crossing the Manhattan bridge in a piss yellow subway car, the phosphorescence of indoor lighting peering out like so many eye sockets from the blank faces of the tenements, the strung up lights of the bridge like a scientific photograph of dew on a spider’s web. And me, legs crossed, notepad in hand on the gray seat, the color of a Kodak test card, biting the insides of my lip, waiting for one stop, two, counting till Atlantic Avenue. Then, crawling home, it seems, over the cement stoop and into bed, under covers that of course are warmer with you there.