Exhaust(ion) Pipe

 

I have a sausage-shaped welt on my right leg thanks to a careless dismount Saturday night.  Everyone knows when you rev the engine, the exhuast pipe burns.  And so does my wound.  It's red, it's blistery, and it's kind of poetic -- because this weekend, finally, exhaustion caught up with me.

(I had it coming.)

1.  I just finished creating styleframes and characters for a great creative project my LA friends are pitching to Dairy Queen, but to pull it off took a couple of way-too-late night escapades.

2.  Meanwhile, friends have been visiting in waves and, naturally, I want in on everything.

Tim Bedwell in town!

Orion, Olivia, and French Food.

Crazy Jonas is back!  And the flash is on.

3.  I'm continuing to design for the Comic Con/ Headsmash team -- and now they're tossing me a packaging job for their new energy drink.  It could lead to a lot of work so I hope to show them something they love early this week.  I've also been tossing together giant press walls for a company that does luxury brand events for the likes of L'Oreal and Clinique.


4.  I'm making a slew of new friends, some of them weird, and I honestly don't even have time to get to know these people right now.  Because...


5.  Time is compressing as I look forward to my next big adventure, which'll take me Off The L in a whole different way.  So, there's a lot of planning to do in the next month and boxes to pack.  More on that later.  I can't even think about it right now!


Now back to the BURN.

Painter's tape and gauze does the trick.  
I haven't ventured out in public wearing 
shorts because I'd rather not explain.

This past week flew by as usual, and Friday I ended up working late rushing through pitch artwork for Dick's Sporting Goods.  It's the classiest they've ever looked, just trust me on that.  Or google their logo and realize how low the bar was previously set.  Anyway, I was ready for a cocktail, so I headed to Amanda's house and we spun up some cucumber rosemary martinis (per my mom's recipe) and moscow mules as a couple of other friends drifted in.  Megan M. joined us after she got out of a 12-course molecular gastronomy dinner (freeze-dried, spun, inverted food masterpieces) and then it was a fight with the A train to get home and asleep for my Saturday morning Smorgasburg meetup with Allison and crew.

I love Smorgasburg.  In particular, I love strawberry pie milkshakes made with rhubarb ginger icecream.  I love People's Pops - cherry plum spice.  I love the view.  I love the ridiculousness of  it all -- a hundred foodie vendors with enough tasty bait to make your head spin.  So with that dizzied-up head I walked back to my house and napped my milkshake off.

Smorgasburg grass liedown.  Not pictured:  milkshake.

In the evening, I met up with Megan, Amandrew, Megan's brother Jeff, and his two friends for a Baths concert at Webster Hall. Baths is this electro scenester named Will and his sound is an intriguing mix between showtunes, early emo, and dubstep with plenty of piano runs and looping effects.  I realize this makes him sound horrible, but the concert was far from that.  Afterwards we dodged down to SoHo and met up with Kyle Eaton(!).  I hadn't seen him since maybe 2007, which is wild, but he's another Montana State film kid and it was great catching up with him.  We wound up at the scrummiest pub in all of SoHo I'm sure, with me losing the shuffleboard game by a split hair at the very end.  But that wasn't my only yowch of the night, as we bring it full-circle here:  Stumpe gave me a ride home over the bridge on his motorcycle, and while I'd been warned not to put my feet on the exhaust pipe because it gets extremely hot, I hadn't practiced my dismount technique and tapped my right leg lightly against that metal smoker as I popped off at the curb.  So now I'm fairly certain I'll be sporting this gash all summer long, but the upside is I still have Silver Oxide burn cream from the last time I tried to put skin to flame.

Sunday morning made up for all of that in an instant.  Megan had invited us to her mom's suite at the Mandarin Oriental at Columbus Circle for brunch.  Talk about luxe... This suite had three bathrooms, three bedrooms, and a corner covered in glass windows that gave you a floor to ceiling show of New York City from 45 floors high.  All we could do was stare, and move our chairs toward the light.  We eventually peeled ourselves from that view to go swimming on the 36th floor (with another fantastic angle).  Something about a place like that makes you feel incredibly lucky to have eyes.

Columbus Circle

Pre-swim softshoe

Tyra says, "know your angles"...  pfffft.

Prom!

That evening, I sauntered over to Northeast Kingdom for dinner with Kyle.  He'd asked me to name my favorite BK restaurant, and I have to say the Kingdom takes it.  We were joined afterwards at Surf Bar by Stumpe, fresh out of a New Kids On The Block reunion concert (wahtttt!) and Thane Lund, who I'd known of while in Bozeman but was happy to finally meet.  Frozen drinks, mosquito bites, and the best ridiculous 80's boyband stories rounded out my weekend so perfectly.

But there you have them -- the reasons I'm so exhausted are halfway amazingly great and halfway just my own fault for working too much.  I really am hoping to catch a breather soon so I can do things like ... my laundry.  But the fact that I got around to writing this is hopeful!  And really, who needs rest when you can have the sweet burn of adventure?