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breakingupwithbrooklyn.com

She's far from complete - but I'd like to invite you all over to my new 'home' on the Internets:

http://www.breakingupwithbrooklyn.com

There will be changes made from time to time - but I figure it's time to herd the traffic toward the new site. I do hope you'll all be patient with me as I learn the ins and outs of wordpress and play with themes from time to time. I welcome your feedback - and any tips, tricks, and/or general knowledge you'd like to share with me as it pertains to maintaining a site using wordpress.

Please familiarize yourself with the various different 'categories' which include Kitty's Story, Brooklydoscope, and BK Events.

Kitty's Story is the continuation of the story you have been reading up to date. Don't you worry one bit because I have every intention of continuing to post my thoughts, my fears, my confusion as it pertains to Daniel, and to just simply share my general insanity with you all.

Brooklydoscope is a little something different that I'm introducing to the site and I hope you all share this with any friends or acquaintances that you think would be interested. Through Breaking up With Brooklyn, Brooklydoscope will serve up interesting and distinctive photographs of Mother Brooklyn. The only common characteristic for all of Brooklydoscope’s featured photos is that the main theme directly relates to the mindset of traditional Brooklyn. What does this look like? I’m not sure there’s an answer to that question but I can guarantee you I’ll know it when I see it. Some of the photographs shared will be taken by yours truly (you'll recognize them by their crappy quality and general blah-ness) but I am hoping to solicit submissions from artists interested in having their work shared by means of the blog. Spread the word!


BK Events is exactly what it sounds like. As I mentioned in my Brooklyn: Unite! post a few weeks back, I want to try to serve as a sort of aggregator for events that are of interest to the Brooklyn native who shares with me the desire to get out and enjoy this borough a bit more, sans hipsters. Summer of 2010 has started off on a serious note and I plan on continuing to enjoy it as much as possible. I will share the skinny on various events, cool locations, and general happenings as they pertain to the real Brooklynite.

So, folks - I hope you like the new set-up. From here on I will be posting any blog-entires, photos, etc on the new site so please re-bookmark or re-subscribe to me via RSS once you click the link.

Coming soon: subscribe via e-mail... Just as soon as I learn how to add that function, Jesus I'm a noob!


PS - I am working on a follow up to my hipsters are fake artists and this is why piece. I realize that my random spewing of thoughts came off as a pretty unsupported argument as to why I am so anti-hipster and as such I'm going to put together a little something that will be better structured, a bit more coherent and all around awesome. Keep a look out!

Hodgepodge: A Move, Test Scores, & Fleet Week!

Sorry for the delay in updating the blog but I've been super busy prepping Breaking Up With Brooklyn's new abode on its very own domain of which I am now the proud owner.

Seeing as I am brand spanking new to the world of WordPress and its innumerable functions, the content is not completely moved over just yet but pretty soon this blog will be re-directed to a much cooler space. As a result of this transfer, I will be editing some of the current content to downplay some of the more questionable admissions. The last thing I want is for people to be hurt by way of my words - and the truth is that although I change all names for the purposes of anonymity, there are many many identifying features that can easily be pointed back to my real identity should somebody I know stumble upon these stories. I'm not so much concerned with folks learning about my exploits as I am them learning secrets of my loved ones, current or past, without their consent. That said, get your last fixins of smut in while you still can - cause the filters are coming soon.

I'm pretty proud of myself with the shift over to WordPress. I've been playing with various themes and editing them to make them a bit more to my liking. In only a week or so I've picked up a lot of the basics with respect to editing the php files and the likes. Through the help of a great friend who is a master-of-all-things-wordpress (and then some), I'm starting to get a feel for the user interface, too. Blogger is cool and all, but the functionality is super-limited and if I'm going to take this Breaking Up With Brooklyn idea any further than where it is now I need to step into the current-times and rock out with my .. fucking filters!

Aside from all the computery stuff I'm trying to make work for me right now, I finally received the test results for my entrance exam to the Radiology program I tested for weeks ago. I PASSED!! Had I not already decided, through various research and just a general gut instinct, that RN is actually the route I'm going to take, the next steps in my admission process to the Radiology program would've been an observation and then general admission board interview. I have no doubt that I'd have done wonderfully in both. The entrance exam was my biggest hurdle. When I began taking the practice tests I was scoring in the '4' percentile for the math sections (3 being lowest and 7 highest)- and the required passing percentile was a 5. My results told me that I passed the math sections in the high 6's. I damn near harassed everyone I knew to help me with the various math problems that I just couldn't grasp - and come test day I walked into the classroom with much more confidence than I'd had only a few weeks earlier... And, it paid off. I'm so proud of myself for not only following through with the exam, but ROCKING THAT SHIT!

I have a bunch of new posts to finish and will be releasing them shortly. Lots happening this weekend:

1. I would have been going to a wedding with Daniel and his family out in PA. Knowing where he is/what he's doing fucks with my head and I wish it didn't. I wonder whether or not he'll think of me, even once, during the ceremony or any of the romanticized portions of the evening... Probably not.

2. It's FLEET WEEK! God, I love a man in uniform - especially uniforms with white pants in which you can see just every lovely curve of that male body. F-i-l-t-e-r-i-n-g N-o-w!


Til later!

60 Minutes -

I am officially registered for fall semester 2010 as a matriculated college student.


Wow. Wow. I’m so excited, and proud of myself. This is going to be a long road ahead but it’s one I am actually honored to say I’ve worked hard to get on.


I went over to the school to finalize the actions this evening and the woman who helped me with my academic advisement was kind enough to push up my available registration date so that I had a better chance of obtaining the classes that worked best with my daytime work schedule. I rushed home and completed the necessary clicking-arounds to ensure that I be officially registered for two of the six pre-requisite courses I need to complete prior to entering my nursing curriculum elsewhere. Done deal, readers. Classes start September 11, 2010.


The bus ride home was an interesting one. My iphone battery went kaput after about 30 minutes of listening to music via the Pandora application. This made it impossible for me to drown out the sound of the two valley-girl like teeny bopping, squeaky voiced, bad-make up applied girls who were sitting behind me discussing some boy who was 31 and still a virgin. I will not enjoy the commute home from school each evening if this is what it is normally like. Car, now – please. Anyway, I was able to filter their squawking out while I looked out the window and I realized that this particular bus runs a route that could easily be associated to my entire life. It’s really rather unsettling when I sit down and think about it.

The timeline I was running in my mind in fact started prior to getting on the bus at all. As I entered the campus I looked around at all the youngish faces and remembered myself in this very same place at their age. I was enrolled here right out of High School. At the time of my first semester I was dating a boy named John. I wondered whether or not the bench in which we carved our names was still around. I didn’t check –and instead I walked the halls of the institution and took note of the other handful of ‘adults’ who looked like they were students and not professors. The number was small – and for a minute or so it fucked with my head but I reminded myself that there is no time like the present and what is important is that I am HERE.


The ride home brought me past not only my High School but my Junior High and my Public School as well. We rolled by the giant High School – no students outside hanging about the way they did during my tenure. I thought about the time I’d kissed Charlie, the hottest bad-ass in the school, right on that bench that was outside my bus window. The memory brought on countless other thoughts of boys I’d kissed and girls I’d had fights with. I thought about this one time that I was waiting for the bus at the very stop we were picking up passengers from and some older kids threw a rock out the back-emergency exit flappable windows that are a NYC MTA bus feature. The rock hit me square on the bridge of my nose and cut my face open.




We rolled through Gravesend. This is where the memories are most plentiful. The small stretch of area that this particular route covers in Gravesend somehow managed to cover two previous residences, my public school, the library I did my homework in every night as a child, and a stretch of concrete that was the coolest place in the world to hang out when I was a tween. The first apartment we passed on my way back home was actually the last apartment I lived in with my mother prior to moving out on my own. I remembered the time I walked in and found strangers in the house, and the time I came home to find my niece hysterical crying over a fight my mother and sister had gotten into over their drugs. This was definitely not a good period of my life. The second apartment we passed was the one I grew up in. We had a two bedroom walk-in, with brown shaggy carpet, an eat-in kitchen and a bathroom that was as pink as pink could be. Being that we were on the ground level, we had access to the back yard as well. There were two kids standing outside my old home – and they were playing some sort of ball. I remembered how my sister and I would play stoop ball on those steps – or box ball, a Brooklyn original, in the three concrete slabs outside of our front-door. A lot happened there in the 18 years I occupied that space. There were countless drug-riddled arguments and dramatized events, robberies, assaults, and the most vivid of all the memories, overdoses.


I clearly remember coming home from school one afternoon and walking through our long narrow living room to find the paramedics working on my mother. White foam fell down the sides of her mouth as she seized. I couldn’t have been older than 6. My mother would overdose a few more times throughout her opiate run – and then she graduated to crack.


I was lucky to have family members on my street. Two houses to my right lived my great – grandmother, a woman like no woman I’ve ever met. She was the rock on which I lay my head at night and know that all was going to be alright. Across the street and a few doors down was my maternal grandmother; a woman that never really accepted me because she didn’t like my father – and because I had a father and my sister didn’t. She died some years ago – and we never did really become fast-friends before that happened. Aunts, uncles, and cousins were never sparse growing up in Gravesend – and I thank god for that!


Driving down the main Avenue on which I spent many a night hanging out on street-corners and being a little asshole was a welcomed reprieve from the memories of a gloomy home life. The hang-out scene in Brooklyn back in the early 90’s was fierce. There were literally never less than 20 kids hanging out back then. We all knew each other and we all looked out for one and other. Fights were never real – and if two guys wound up getting into a tiff over some bullshit, they’d have a chance to settle it with the insurance that no one there would let anything truly BAD happen to each other. I miss those days – eating sunflower seeds and drinking Snapple iced teas while listening to old-school hip-hop out of one of the older kid’s car radios. Us girls would hang in little cliques. We’d flirtatiously look at the boys we were crushing on – and give the other girl-cliques dirty looks if we thought there may be an overlapping of admiration. It was a great time to be a kid in Brooklyn.


Public school memories are few and far between – and the bulk of them are bad enough that I’d rather not even get into them at this point. Let’s leave it at this: I was the daughter of known drug-addicts who wore hand-me-down clothes and had a problem with my eyes that resulted in my having to wear a patch half of the time…. Yes, I was a poor dirty pirate girl up until the age of 8 or so…..


We passed the neighborhood projects. Building 15, 14, 12 – and I was reminded of Louie Alonzo – I was his first kiss in Junior High. He lived in building 6 with his parents and 3 brothers. Our torrid love affair lasted three hours until I found out he tried to kiss another girl before kissing me. Fucking Latinos are players even at twelve years old… Damn them and their sexy boriquenness.


Onward we moved - my getting closer and closer to where I now call home. We drove through the neighborhood in which I lived prior to moving in with Daniel. It has only been around 9 months or so since I’ve been gone from there but the area looks even worse than it did when I was initially becoming disgusted with it. It’s a completely different world than what it was back in the day. Fully populated by an immigrant mainland Chinese population, the area is filthy. Store signs are half falling off of their canopies – and garbage is strewn all over the streets. Empty store after empty store passed by my window – and I felt a tinge of happiness to be gone from there even considering the circumstances under which I parted. My new area, although not too far from the old, feels much more like the good old days of Brooklyn.


My bus finally took its turn onto the Avenue I currently reside - and by this time I was less engaged in the memories of yesterday – The time-line was an interesting one. It was one that brought up feelings of sadness, shame, happiness, and confusion. It also allowed me to identify the fact that my drive to move up and out of this southern-Brooklyn territory is not at all unrealistic. My entire life was just chronologically recounted on a one-hour bus ride. If that doesn’t scream sheltered I don’t know what does.


Brooklyn… I love you, baby – but this break up is going to happen whether you like it or not.

Temptation is a bitch

Have you ever rode the train and noticed someone looking your way just a minute too long? What thoughts does this invoke in you?

For me it's usually one of two things: do I have some toilet paper sticking out of my pants or some other weird thing on my body? Or, is this person having sexual thoughts about me? The latter is only true of male commuters.

I've been told by a number of folks that the train is a huge breeding ground for sexual fantasy. I can see that. It's totally an uninterrupted vantage point of bodies gyrating in sync with the cars bounces and thrusts. Muscles move and curves accentuate. The train can be a pretty hot place if you allow it to be, in your mind. Or in reality if you're ballsy enough... It's fun, try it ;) -

Tonight I am riding the car to school for academic advisement and registration. Yay This is so exciting.

Exciting, too, is the man that is sitting across from me, unable to take his eyes off of my nude calves as they travel down into my chunky red heels. Summer in the city -

I see him watching me - and whenever I look over his way, his eye slightly wanders in an attempt to hide what he's doing. I move my calves, cross my legs and the likes. I want him to keep looking.

He does.

Does he know what I am doing? Mind-fuking him? Slowly and carefully with each soft movement I make, I am dancing with what I imagine to be his erect penis underneath that Brooklyn Industries messenger bag on his lap. Keep looking, baby... Keep looking.

A few seats away I see the largest pair of mens feet ever.

I am out of control today - And, a taste was all it took.

There may be something to this sexual addiction shit after all....

Fuck!

Death Trinity

Every day when I wake and check my e-mails and social networking accounts, I’m either met with happy thoughts, annoyances, or tragic news. Yesterday it was tragedy times two.

I noticed my father had posted a Rest in Peace onto our mutual friend Francois’ page. Some years ago Francois was diagnosed with Cirrhosis, a disease my father, too, suffers from. Like my dad, he underwent various treatment options which included holistic medicine, dietary restrictions and finally pharmaceutical intervention by means of a drug called Interferon, an extremely potent anti-viral agent that is known to rip you to shreds prior to making a smidgen of a difference for the better. Patients who undergo Interferon treatment are often on their last legs and it is through the administration of this intravenous drug that they seek solace. There are various psychiatric and physical side effects that come along with its implementation – and it is not all that uncommon to hear of suicide attempts or addiction relapse while on treatment.

Francois didn’t go by either of these means. He was on a transplant list and time ran out. My father’s interferon treatment proved successful some years ago. He was being treated not for the later stages of Cirrhosis like Francois, but for Hepatitis C, which both he and my mother have as a result of intravenous drug-use – and/or possible intercourse. It’s hard to tell when you’re sharing needles AND having sex.

Later in the day I called my father to check in and see how he was feeling in the wake of his buddy’s death. They were a close knit team he and Francois. They’d often hang out together, go to dinners and do things boys like to do, like play racquetball and things of this nature. It’s never easy to lose a friend. “Bad day, Kitty… Bad day… Just got another call that Greg died this morning, too.” – I was a little confused. Greg who? Greg from our old block in Gravesend?? My father clarified it for me,“Greg – the guy that helped me move you out of the apartment with Daniel”

I’d only met Greg once – he seemed like a nice enough guy and he was there to help me during a time that I felt pretty alone in the grand scheme of things. He and my father joked around a bunch about breaking Daniel’s giant flat screen TV as a little going away present and at the time it really annoyed me. I believe in a lady making a graceful exit. Looking back, though – I can see where it comes from. My father’s little girl was hurting and where else aside from a punch to the nose could a man hurt another man but their expensive lavish electronics cache. Thanks, pop!

Greg’s body was found in a basement of a housing project in Brooklyn. Overdose. Everyone in the meetings he attended with my father up until his demise knew him to be a recovering heroin addict but this particular housing project he was found in is notorious for crack so who the hell knows. It’s just a sad scene all around.

I told my father that I’m sure he didn’t want to hear it but these events should have him stepping back and taking a look at the choices he’s made recently that have allowed him to be here another day. “Da, I know we could all go at a moments notice but I think this is sort of a spiritual way of the world letting you know you’re supposed to be here. Both of those kinds of death could have easily been yours” –

“I know, Kitty. I know”.

I’m truly happy my father has decided to move onward with his life in a positive manner. I hope – and I do guess I sort of pray that he continues on to uphold a drug-free life. It makes a world of difference for me. A girl needs her dad. A girl needs her mom, too – but I’ve always had a tighter relationship with my father if for no other reason than the fact that I inherited his intellect and sarcastic nature.

They say death comes in threes – and aside from hearing the news of a member of Slipknot passing on, I’m yet to hear of the final part to this trinity. On the train last night, however, I did sit next to a dude who was wearing the same cologne as my ex boyfriend who has been gone from this world since 2003.

I miss him.

When I took my seat against the window and facing the direction the train was traveling in, the bouquet didn’t immediately hit me. It wasn’t until a minute or two later when I was already engrossed in my novel that I caught the whiff. ¬I felt the sides of my mouth curl up into a sweet smile reminiscent of waking up and falling asleep next to that same scent for the better part of five years on an intermittent basis. Perhaps in an attempt to intoxicate myself once more with the heady scent of what once represented mad passion, I took a deep breath in, swallowing every possible particle of air around me.

I miss him.

Workin Nine to Five...