Plenty o’ Nuttin’ goes to New York!

I am happy to announce that the Plentynuff International Headquarters have relocated to Brooklyn, NY, USA. I started my new life out right by catching this show by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings at a local venue, because I can do that sort of thing now, and should you ask me "Was it funky?", I will assure you "Oh yes it was." Sharon Jones is the baddest soul sister since Lyn Collins and she is even badder than that. Ledisi*, if you’re even still out there, Sharon Jones is who you’d wish you were if you had the good sense to go wishin’. Yeah, so, anyway, it was a great show.

I remember when I first moved to Berkeley, one of my first impressions was Man, this whole place could use a coat of paint. Similarly, my first impression of Brooklyn is Man, this whole place could use a pressure wash. It’s a bit grungey everywhere you look, but I learned to love Berkeley’s weather-worn drabness, so I’m sure I can learn to love Brooklyn’s gritty dingyness.

I’ve been here on and off for a couple of weeks now, shuttling back and forth between here and Hanowhere. Even though I’m not really through with Hanover-bound obligations, I realized it was time to make Brooklyn my home base because I just wasn’t mentally in Hanover anymore, anyway. Too much has happened in the last month to do a play-by-play, but allow me to abstract the experience – with all respect to Merlin Mann’s hilarious 5ives – in the form of a few lists:


Things Learned Too Late to Do Me Any Good
1) New York is warmer than New Hampshire. A little. A very little.
2) The elevator at the medical school labeled prominently with a sign that says “This is the A elevator” is, in fact, the B elevator.
3) There’s a street in Lebanon named “Hough Street.” I don’t know about you, but I can think of only one way to pronounce that.
4) The snow shovel with the grippy handle on the top end was probably worth the extra five dollars.
5) When the physician’s assistant asks about allergies, she really just means allergies to medicines. Not cats.
6) When you’re defending a dissertation, and the defense committee asks you questions, they’re not always trick questions.
7) If you walk around in sub-zero windchill temperatures, getting your exposed parts good and chapped, and then you shave, you’ve got a two-tone face.

Things I’d Prefer Never to Do Again, Which I Stand a Good Chance of Being Able to Avoid.
1) Defending a dissertation. At 4 1/2 hours, I’m told I hold the department record. Nobody told me not to argue, I thought that was the whole idea.
2) Moving during a snowstorm. All of the bad part – that bit where the truck fishtailed – only took up a few seconds. It was the anxiety over what might happen that made it suck.
3) Drive from New York to New Hampshire with no heat in the car.
4) Drive from New Hampshire to New York at night during heavy freezing rain.

Pleasant Surprises
1) I live near a bakery. This is pleasant not only for the obvious reason – the yummy bread-baking smell greeting me in the morning – but also because it’s a blast of nostalgia. When I was in high school, I drove past the Melita factory every morning, and the baking-bread smell was such a welcome incongruence, zooming past on the highway, and a punctuation to an otherwise dreary commute. It’s a two-for-one.
2) Some New Yorkers are indeed cranky and unpleasant. But others are not, and you can’t always predict which way it’s gonna go.
3) The City of New York is quite flexible about the parking laws during and following a snowstorm.
4) Right here in the neighborhood is a French bistro and jazz bar that doesn’t charge a cover, even when they have big-name acts playing.
5) My local grocery store, Tops, while it’s no Co-op, and it’s certainly no Berkeley Bowl, is still really pretty good. And the entire cheese-beer-meat-juice-egg-produce-dairy section is one giant refrigerated room, which is kind of cool.

*Apparently Ledisi IS still around, and she's got herself a website, which I was going to link to, until I saw that it's so bloated with Flash and illegibly funky fonts, and so full of remarks like, "with the chops of Ella Fitzgerald" (I mean, for pity's sake) that there's no way I would send my faithful readers (and they'd have to be faithful, wouldn't they?) there. If you really want to know, there's always Google. Ledisi, baby, the longer you go, the harder you suck.