My favorite thing about working at a company like R. is the absolutely-positively-necessary pretense of being one of those healthily-anorexic (I eat a meal a day!), caffeine-free, vegan-only, marathon-running do-gooders. For the first two weeks I worked here, I skipped lunch because no one left their desks between noon and two o'clock to eat anything. Were the Sunchips in the kitchen really enough? I wondered. It turns out they were (if you had like four bags a day), but then at week 3, I retaliated and started frequenting my beloved 39th Street Au Bon Pain again. God love those chocolate-covered macaroons.

As if the bare-bones organic kitchen were not a fun place already, it only gets better when visiting advertisers meet with the publishing staff. Platters of lunches briefly grace the soy-laden fridge--delicious cheese and (red!) meat-filled lunches, succulent chocolate-covered strawberry lunches, mouth-watering cookie and fudge-toffee lunches. When the leftovers hit the kitchen counter (and let's face it, nobody's eating at these meetings anyway, so these platters are usually still stacked with mountains cheddar), word spreads quietly and quickly, like mono in high school. Within moments, the goods are gone. Disappointed, emaciated women in skinny, fair-trade jeans wander the halls, knowing that if their cubicles were only a couple yards closer to the kitchen, they too would have had a square of cheese or almond cookie.

I once walked into the R. kitchen to find two women standing awkwardly, looking confused and as if their kitchen had somehow changed in ways incomprehensible to them. That's when I saw it--two twenty-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola. They weren't even Diet! There they were, two veritably, sugarily, 180-calorie proof bottles of the pure stuff, black and bubbly. The women stared.

'Where do you think it came from?' the first one asked.

'I've never seen something like that here before,' responded the second.

The first woman picked one of the bottles up and turned it around, making sure it really was what she thought. Apparently she figured it out because she put it down quickly and stepped away as if it were a caffeinated bomb, ready to go off if you held it for too long.

'Well, that's strange,' she concluded.

I grabbed a cookie and trotted back to my cubicle, realizing half-way back that I had forgotten to grab a fresh bottle of Poland Spring. When I returned to the kitchen, the Cokes were gone, and so were the women.

More embarassing still is when the ad and pub execs don't have the decency to stash the leftovers in a discrete place and instead leave them sitting in an open conference room. (Let me quickly add that these conference rooms are without walls and tout big glass windows on all sides in some bizarre Brady-Bunch's-vision-of-the-future design that I'm sure looked good fifteen years ago.) So, all of us on the outside can clearly see that mound of macademia nuts and fudge on display, just beyond the museum-like glass walls.

And that's how R. reduces grown men and women to children with their noses pressed against the window, mouths watering and hearts breaking. Red-faced, editors young and old quickly shuffle into the empty conference room, grab a cookie and run out with their heads down. Yes, I did see you, and no, I won't tell anyone.

Perhaps R. is just trying to compensate for the unhealthy habits of other publishing companies where the caffeinated dregs of coffee are happily slurped and extra-buttery popcorn happily jumps about in a running microwave while an editor munches on Doritos. After all, these were the companies of men who ordered their 3 o'clock scotch and sodas on Fridays from the beverage cart as it tooled around the offices and whose secretaries ordered lunches were Salisbury steaks and not edamame. Then again, R. isn't the company selling off chunks of their properties so maybe they've got a good thing going. Either way, I'll be the intern hawking the kitchen until the next meeting is done.

New York anger has surpassed all bounds which I once previously thought existed. Granted, I've become quite the angry New Yorker, but I would have never expected what happened to me on Sunday to happen.

After an argument-ridden/stress-filled/LSAT-studying/suck-festing weekend, I (genuinely) looked forward to taking another practice LSAT on Sunday evening to get the weekend over with. Unfortunately, because Kaplan is a bunch of half-asses, their Brooklyn center is in The Middle of Nowhere, Coney Island. Why the hell would anyone put a study center meant for an entire borough at the fucking tip of Brooklyn? I know--because Kaplan, as I may have previously mentioned, is a bunch of half-asses.

That said, I ordered a car at 3:45 PM to arrive on time (and with at least twenty minutes to spare!) before my 4:30 PM test. 4 o'clock rolled around, then 4:05... I started to anxiously watch my one-block street, jumping every time I heard a car coming down the road and then sadly plopping back down in front of the window to wait more. I tried to call the car service (Arecibo Car Service in BK--never, ever use them), but no surprise--their line was busy. This is al ways a bad sign as it means that not only is there someone already ordering a car and on the line, but at least a dozen people are listening to bad elevator music with Spanish lyrics while they wait on hold. Finally, at 4:20 PM, I got someone on the line and griped, 'THERE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A CAR HERE 25 MINUTES AGO.' 'Yes, one minute,' the same monotone dude who always answers the phone said.

Yeah, about five minutes later a beige van pulls up. At this point, I have five minutes to get to the fucking tip of Brooklyn (a 15 minute car ride at its shortest). I've neglected to mention why this test was so important. Let me tangentially tirade on another topic, Kaplan.

I signed up for this LSAT course, knowing I'd be on my TM, knowing I wouldn't necessarily have a big social life (I was wrong about that), and knowing I want to, at some point in the next five years, apply for law school. Why NOT do it now that I'm working a day job that's only an internship, right?

Unfortunately for me, the problems started right away. I signed up for an eight-week course that was cancelled and had to switch into a six-week class instead. On day one, I realized that my teacher sucked balls. Big time. And she cancelled classes, randomly, and rescheduled them for inconvenient times (like this coming Sunday from 6-10-- I am not going). Then, after ten of thirteen sessions, she decided to quit and didn't offer up an explanation for her sudden departure. Nick, my new teacher, introduced himself and realized quite quickly that our class had become utterly remedial thanks to former teacher, Marion's efforts. We did some crash-course catch-up when Nick taught us, and many of us realized we hadn't even received all of the benefits of Kaplan we're supposed to. For example, practice test scores have yet to be posted. Our finished homework doesn't show online. Marion wouldn't bring back explanations of tests. Then, after one class with Nick, a new kid who looks like he may or may not be seventeen showed up to teach us.

My Kaplan experience has been so terrible that I've decided to take their "Higher Score Guarantee" and take the course again in the winter (praying for a better teacher) and then take the LSAT again after that. In the meantime, I'm doing all I can to catch up to where I should be AND doing all of my homework required to cash in on my "Higher Score Guarantee." Which takes me back to this Sunday afternoon, where I absolutely needed to attend this test in order to get my guarantee and if I did not get there in time for it to be proctored, I would not get to take it, would not get a score for it, and thus, would not be allowed (despite all of Kaplan's failings) to either get a refund or more classes.

So there I am on Sunday afternoon, oscillating between cursing the driver, his company and the traffic under my breath and practicing yoga-meditation techniques to calm myself down. This, I can assure you, is counterproductive. As I begin to feel less worried (I had called Kaplan and they said I'd have until 4:45 to get there to take the test), my driver misses the turn and plunges bumper first into worse traffic. I'm irate and quietly keeping it to myself.

I will not, I vow, pay this guy. And I will never, ever, ever take Arecibo fucking Car Service again.

Another tanget for my Midwest friends out there--if you're not familiar with car services in the greater New York metropolitan area, there are two kinds of car service--the good kind and the bad kind. The good kind usually is expensive and will generally get you to places on time. The bad kind doesn't always get you places on time, but it is cheaper, and I always call the shots with how much I pay them. I do not, for example, ask, 'How much will that be?' I learned this after my first experience where I got charged twice the price for a ride. Since then, I've made Arecibo pay for their erring ways and give the drivers what they get. I tip really well when drivers are 1) Nice, 2) Don't swerve at other cars and/or pedestrians, 3) Don't play Hispanarap super-fucking loud, 4) Don't drive patched-together ghetto vans with stickers all over the windshield to the point where you can't see out of it.

So as we pull up to the Kaplan Center at 4:50, I ask my driver (who had been listening to Ricky Martin the entire.fu.cking. ride) if he has a ten.
'Why?' he asks.
I only have a twenty, I tell him.
'THIS,' he says, 'is a FIFTEEN dollar ride, MISS.'
Yeah, I say, and I am MORE than TWENTY minutes late because you and your company didn't get me here on time.
'I,' he says, 'am ONLY a driver.' (Here, I see his point, but all these drivers have two things in common: 1) They suck, 2) They work for the same company. So, no deal.)
And? I ask him, You are the driver and you also got lost and you're making me more late for something I don't have time to miss.
'It's fifteen dollars and I'm just a driver, MISS,' he repeats snottily.
Well, I can give you ten or I can get out of the car and never use your service again, I say. (Now, in the moment, I knew haggling for five dollars is not a huge deal, but was more concerned about getting to my test than anything and was not willing to give up even a buck to someone who had made me more than a half hour late.)
'NO,' he said, picking up his little radio as if he's going to tattle on me to HQ.
Well, I'm never calling your service again, I say and move to open the sliding van door.

As I start to step out of the van, Mr. Crazy-Ricky-Martin-Lovin'-Motherfucker starts TO DRIVE THE VAN!!

Here I am--half-out the van and it's moving! Cars honk and he swerves me toward the next parked car. I hop out and as the momentum of the stopping van thrusts forward, the van door SLIDES SHUT ON MY ARM.

'Are you crazy, MISS?' he yells at me.
Am I crazy!? I half-gasp back. YOU just drove with me OUT OF THE CAR.

At this point, I settled on the idea of either reporting him or suing his ass and threw him the twenty and yelled, GIVE ME FIVE AND EXPECT TO BE REPORTED. I HOPE THAT'S WORTH FIVE DOLLARS TO YOU!

I ran into the Kaplan test, where I took my test (I was late), totally frazzled, and shook out of anger the entire three and a half hours. (As a side note as to Kaplan's terrible standards, the proctor had decided to administer both the LSAT and SAT at the same time, so time calls were given sporadically and incorrectly through most of the night. She also refused to call times in terms of minutes for the LSAT's final section. Instead, she called it the New York Marathon and named where we were 'You're in Fort Greene now!' 'OK, everybody, you're approaching Central Park! This is it!!' Does she realize the marathon happened weeks ago and nobody knows the direct proportion for minutes to New York locations??)

---

When I related this story to my mom, she said it's not worth haggling and "engaging with strangers." Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that's just how New York works. I love my mom, but Duluth, Minnesota and hell, even Chicago, pales in comparison to the seething, dirty anger of New Yorkers. I saw a middle-aged woman claw a teenager in the face just the other day in Grand Central as the teenager pulled the woman's hair. Somehow, as I passed the two women, I figured the middle-aged woman was justified in her anger even if not her actions. The teenager looked like a touristy yip-yap type that says 'crunchy' and likes Ricky Martin. She maybe even drives a beige van for Arecibo Car Service.

Hey Dude With the Cellphone Camera!

Do you think I didn't see you take that picture of me, you creepy motherfucker? Aside from the fact that you weren't even slick about your dirty-perv ways, you also bumped into someone after taking it. At least watch where you're going, smut-face. We don't want your fucking perv germs rubbing off on us. The subway is bad enough.

Here's a tip, you fucking novice. Next time, don't stare back and forth from the screen of the camera to me while you try to frame the shot right. This is perversion, not art. Don't waste your time on aesthetics. Also, turn the sound effect off your cameraphone. The chk-chkahh! of your fancy ass phone's "shutter" is something of a giveaway. Get a clue, fucking cleverless cockface.

Oh, and if it looks like I'm reaching for my bag in your picture, it's only because you barely escaped a macing followed by a middle finger through your eye. Take that and get off on it. Fucker.

MTA MONKEYS

How is it that if I harass an MTA employee, I could spend up to seven years in jail, but it's okay for MTA employees to make monkey-jerk faces at me?

Granted, this mocking doesn't happen all the time, but it's happened enough for me to be pissed.

It started this summer on one occassion when I ran for the B train at 116th. I swiped my card as the doors began to close and hurled myself toward the first car. I met the eyes of the first car conductor who stared me down as I went face-first into the closed doors. I stepped back and he continued to stare at me, dead-eyed and unforgiving. Like that, he started the B back up and took off toward 110th, making me ten minutes late for work.

Then there was the time at 15th Street/Prospect Park while I waited for a Manhattan-bound F. While I leaned against a pole toward the middle of the platform, a Coney Island-bound F pulled into the station. Already feeling irked and personally affronted by the arrival of this beach-bound fun train, I glanced over at the conductor in the sixth car to direct my anger toward the individual driving this enemy train. To my horror, he gave me the overly-exaggerated up-and-down and then grinned toothlessly at me. I cursed myself for having spent time on my make-up that morning and skulked behind the pole to avoid his gaze. Unfortunately, I couldn't hide my whole self behind the pole and as the conductor from oogling hell set his train in motion once more, he leered at me the whole way out of the station, head hanging out of the window and tongue lolling out of his mouth like some rabid dog.

So that's why this morning I was wholly prepared to flick off the next offender. This time, it was at Broadway/Lafayette--again on the F train, which is apparently a haven for sex offenders and lunatics. I had put down my book once the train had crossed into Manhattan, having had my morning's fill of contrived John Grisham drivel. Staring out the window and preparing myself for the upcoming eight hours of cubicle-bound boredom, I tried to think positively about my morning. I wasn't running late today; My mom's blazer from the 80s looks great with these patent leather mary-janes; my benchmate was not holding a Smirnoff this morning nor was he passing out on me. Things were generally going well. Until I looked up into the face of an MTA employee who, quite literally, pressed his face up against the window, crossed his eyes and made a monkey face at me. A veritable, ugly-ass monkey face--one I had not seen the likes of since second grade when the facial expression fell out of fashion. I was torn out of my blissful, half-awake morning state. I should say something! Get up and give the MTA Monkey a piece of my mind. Dammit, I will not take it anymore!

As usual, I spent the duration of the "Doors Open" plotting so desperately that by the time I had resolved on placing a choicely-worded complaint (the civil-New-Yorker thing to do), the doors were closing and we were on our way to West 4th. That's fine. When I see a Monkey Face, I remember it, and justice will be mine.