"ubiquitous platforms"
wednesday 21 november
solas

who was there
betsy, cliff, deborah b, the other deborah b, druce, joanna, jonathan, monica, scott, druce's friend ted

what we talked about
abcnews.com layoffs, the couple at the table we were supposed to sit at who were so into each other we expected their clothes to come off any second, thanksgiving plans, moving home with mom, 9/11, flying small planes, fidelity, political awakenings, broadband, parenthood, looking for work, absent friends, beauty, ethnic heritage, fidelity

I was late getting to solas that night, for the usual reasons--overambitious to-do list, the last-minute phone calls and im's (I'm just an im slut, what can I say), fooling with my hair. when I got there I headed to the back only to find that the corner table was occupied by two people who really should have been at home.

the bar was the most crowded I have EVER seen it. there were actually more than 5 people there.

deborah showed up right after I didand we decided to stand at the back of the bar and wait for the 2 to get tired of having sex in public and go home and do it in private. in the meantime, people started showing up.

cliff came. yay! he hired me for my last job and has been very kindly trying to help me find another one. thank you cliff.

the other deborah, who is an artist and dancer, also came, and showed us pictures of her halloween parade float, inspired by her newly awakened political consciousness. it portrayed skeletons coming out of the american foreign policy closet. I think she had a lot of fun cutting out those skeletons. she and I talked about the improv class where we met . she said "you are verbally very flexible but a physical stiff" which just about sums it up I guess.

we kept an eye on the couple for about 30 minutes. they provided the inspiration for many amusing remarks. no doubt we were just jealous. finally we saw they were putting their clothes--oops, jackets--on and rushed over to lay claim. cliff and I happened to be discussing a friend of his who is editing a book on jeff buckley and the table-dancing guy spoke up and said he was a big jeff buckley fan and wanted to know all about it. so it was a friendly encounter in the end, despite all our snide remarks.

everyone kindly kept buying me drinks with the inevitable result of course that I was pretty drunk by 9 pm ("u/p" ALWAYS goes beyond the end time, in case you were wondering). I finally sloshed back to brooklyn around 11 or so.

I remember a long conversation about ethnic origins, in which everyone weighed in with the story of their heritage. I don't know why this always comes up. for the record, my background is entirely northern european, about equal parts english, welsh, scots and german.

that wednesday was my day to receive compliments, which I guess I should be happy to get. I can save them up for days when I'm not feeling so pleased with myself. in the face of what's happened lately, does it really matter? but it still feels good.

posted by Joanna Wissinger on Wednesday, November 28, 2001

well, it's been a rough few weeks. And we all know why. It's like I said to the poor customer service guy from discover card who called to find out why I neglected to make a payment in September: "well, um, I live in New York City and there was this terrorist attack ..." Actually I felt kind of lame using 9/11 as an excuse for not paying a bill, but the truth is I forgot to do lots of things in the weeks following th WTC attack, and that was not the least of it.
Which is all a long-winded lead-in to noting that the most recent "ubiquitous platforms" [v 10] was on 10/10/01 and I am only just now getting around to writing the contact report.

here goes:
I was kind of in a bad mood (so what else is new) when I left home to meet my friend deborah prior to venturing down to the otheroom. (trying to make a long story short: she had a copy of "cryptonomicon" given to me by a friend who left town at the beginning of september, and this was to be the final successfull attempt to transfer the goods). That afternoon I had received the email containing the final details of the memorial service for d, a long-time friend, who had been killed on 9/11. I had known about his death since soon after the event (his was one of the first bodies found and identified) and had known in general about the memorial service and when and where is was to be, but somehow having it all confirmed was kind of depressing. I guess it was like all those mornings I'd awoken post-9/11 and the first thing I'd think was it all had to be a mistake.
Then when I got to the otheroom I discovered that the new manager had booked a party in the back room without telling patrick. I was already feeling kind of feeble and fatalistic, so this didn't seem to matter. I was kinda thinking there would be something of a low turnout, since I had managed to fuck up the url on not one but TWO messages to the "u/p" mailing list. Plus most of the people who have been regulars sent email saying they weren't going to make it that night, for whatever reason. Sometimes it's just karma, right?

who was there
betsy, deb, joanna, kim m.

topics
what would you expect? "the day the shit went down," as deb put it, dominated discourse. Anthrax. Terrorism. Afghanistan. The same stuff we're all taking about every day.The first to arrive was kim, who lives in florida most of the time but has family in nyc. We exchanged tales of where we were when we heard, what we heard, what our reaction had been, who we knew who had been close, etc. Then after an hour kim left and I was sitting at the bar wondering if I should hang around waiting for my sister to show up or if I should just get a clue and go home. Next to me was a cute girl who pulled out a silver flip phone and was talking about some party she was supposed to go to uptown. I thought, ugh, I hate girls like that. Patrick came over to chat with her and she said, where's the girlfriend? He said, she's supposed to be here any minute, this is her sister. Joanna, this is deb. So then she and I started to chat and of course, she turned out to be really nice and cool and interesting and funny, proving once more than I should just give up on the snap character judgments. Then my sister walked it and from there on in the evening dissolves into a wine-blurred gossip fest, but I do remember that I had a really fun time which these days, tough times for party givers, must count for *something*.
next "ubiquitous platforms": november sometime. I'll let you know.
posted by Joanna Wissinger on Sunday, October 21, 2001

the early part of 8.29 was not such a great day for me. I spent most of the day worrying about money and not coming up with any good solutions to my cash flow problems. I also found a copy of "Ghost World" and read it. I totally recommend it. It's so funny and so true, although there was a sort of boomerang effect: I started thinking about how great I was at 17 and what a loser I am now. More depressive madness. Mercury must have been in retrograde.

Wednesday night at the otheroom is definitely quieter than Thursday. Less smoke, too. I got to sit around in the back room with a posse of other depressed jobhunters, talk about whatever came into my brain and observe the ecology of the neighborhood bar as it unfolded before me. Plus I saw my sister.

who was there
amita, bj, betsy, celia, charlyn, chris k, deborah b, debbie, jim, joanna, jl, laurie, otto, rimone, susan

topics
of course I went on and on about Ghost World and what a bad mood I was in. There were several moments of deep mac geekiness (though nobody could tell me how to restore my draggable finder palette). Also landlords, grad school, money and its lack, what to read besides Ghost World, what we did on our summer vacations, photography, where to sell things besides eBay, Brooklyn (who's up for a u/p in Brooklyn?), alternative careers such as street preacher, visionary, knocking over liquor stores, hot-wiring cars and becoming a hermit in the wilderness. Whether being romantically involved makes this whole unemployment thing any easier. Every time I glanced up from my deep self-involvement, though, people seemed to be enjoying themselves.

next
"ubiquitous platforms" goes daytime!
posted by Joanna Wissinger on Thursday, August 30, 2001