When trying to decide what to eat, eat what you believe Charles Bukowski would have been most likely to eat. Eat kielbasa on rye with mustard. Wash it down with beer. Eat eggs scrambled with fried, nearly burnt onions and salami. Wash it down with gin. For snack, eat the rest of the kielbasa, handed to you wordlessly in individual slices by a man who cuts the kielbasa with a knife, using his index finger to push the knife through the sausage, toward his flexed thumb.

The rest of the weekend, eat impossibly fluffy French foods prepared by talented foodies. Wash them down with mimosas. Attend brother's graduation in a fizzy daytime drunk. Eat graduation dinner prepared by talented foodie brother to the specifications of carb- and dairy-intolerant mother. Grilled shrimp, chicken, sausage and asparagus. Salmon delicately broiled with garlic and dill. Mixed greens with delicious vinagrette whisked by foodie brother's girlfriend. Break all carb and dairy taboos with homemade brownie sundaes. Fail to buy wine by six o'clock on Sunday, feel gourmet brunch daytime drunk give way to gourmet dinner sobriety. You have broken the Bukowski diet.

I know I have no right to complain. I know this neighborhood is gentrifying, and I am part of the problem, not part of the solution. I know that no matter where I move to get away from yuppies and hipsters, I will never be able to escape them, because I will be there. To paraphrase both Jonathan Kabat-Zinn and Woody Allen at the same time, wherever you go, there your Long- Island-Jewish-Left-Wing-Liberal-Intellectual-Expensive-University with the Socialist Summer Camps and the mother with the Native American art ass is.

I know that the nuances of being or not being a yuppie, a hipster, an art school type, a fratboy, a nonprofiteer, a banker, a bohemian, a bougeois bohemian, a lesbian, a person with "lesbian tendancies," a non-practicing Jew, an organic farming Jew, a pro-choice lapsed Catholic who ironcially uses Catholic iconography as art etc. mean nothing to displaced working people who see their former tenaments crappily renovated and renting for $2000 a month. I know that it's disingenuous to complain about a neighborhood not being genuine enough when you happily buy the $6.00 fresh mozzarella and would also complain if you could not get espresso. I know that mooning over the beauty of industrial ruin and silently thrilling at the sight of kids playing in fire hydrants is fetishizing the urban aesthetic and treating the people who populate it as if they are objects in a Potemkin tableau. I know that if I had the $1,000,000 the non-brownstone townhouses in this neighborhood are selling for I'd buy one in a heartbeat, refinish the floors and fill it with large-format digital prints of water towers and grain silos.

I know all of this, and yet I really fucking hate the yuppies who are moving in next door.

The yuppies moving in next door have two dogs. Bark! Yip! Scold! They have a team of Latin American landscape artists elaborately replanting their backyard. They have a baby, which they keep in the same $700 stroller Gwyneth Paltrow keeps her baby in. I know this because I read US Weekly magazine.

I know all of this because I am watching the yuppies. From across the eight foot wide alley that separates us, I have been watching the yuppies turn their yard from a North Brooklyn Concrete Patio Paradise into a kind of "wild English garden thing." I watch them exercise and scold their yippy dogs. I am watching the yuppies all the time. I can't help it. They are right outside my window, like characters in a boring real-time reality television show about re doing your yard.

Sometimes I hide benath my windowsill and photograph the yuppies without their knowledge or consent.



We are watching the yuppies, but there is some paranoia that the yuppies are watching us. Did the yuppies see us walking around naked? Can the yuppies hear us talking about them and their annoying dogs and expensive stroller? Did the yuppies hear us having sex?

Be quiet! Put your shirt on! Duck! The yuppies can see you! The yuppies might hear!

I never used to worry about these kinds of things. Our previous across-the-alley neighbors never went in their yard. I used to walk around naked the entire day without fear of anyone seeing me, because I never saw anyone. I slept happily until the middle of the day, awakened only intermittently by the faint scraping of garbage can lids in the alley. My friends and I once built a refrigerator-box fort on our building's roof, and then pushed the box off the roof when we were done. It landed loudly in the neighbors' yard and they didn't notice it was there until spring. If we did that now, it would land in the "English garden" the yuppies are building, clanging on their newly painted wrought iron garden furniture.

Fucking yuppies.

Sometimes it seems as if I am the only person I know who is neither in grad school nor a rock and roll band, who has never been to grad school nor in a rock and roll band. Even my mom is in grad school. Even the ten-year-old I tutor is in a rock and roll band.

Not being in either grad school or a rock and roll band means that I have to do all my reading and debauching without the benefit of deadlines or European tour dates. Only the spidery tethers of email keep me situated in any external schedule of thought, action, creation, destruction, rock or roll.

In response to the request I made via email of my friend on tour in Europe to

>bring me back some absinthe wouldja? xoxo, emily

I received the following reply:

>i was going to buy tons of absinthe in prague but then i drank a bunch and took a handful of ecstasy and stayed up all night instead. see you soon...

How ironic. The very people who have the opportunity to pick up liquors full of illegal drugs are too high on liquor and illegal drugs to do it.

In response to an email to everyone I know requesting that one of them sublet my apartment this summer so that I, too, can ignore my friends' outlandish requests to smuggle foreign liquors for them, Mr. Oliver Griswold, who writes here and here, took time out from his end-of-semester schedule to write this ode to final paper-writing:

I overuse commas. I listen to early REM. I answer emails as soon as they come in. I eat hummus.

I..................................................................................................................procrastinate.

Bereft of seminars, discussion gropus, internet posting boards (besides this one) and reading lists, I prefer to use email correspondance to tease out the finer points of my arguments. On procrastination, and the overuse of commas:

Procrastination is an art that works partly in the medium of hummus. The taste of hummus is the taste of procrastination.

I also use so many commas, and have to go back and take them out, except I can't decide sometimes whether they should be there or not, or whether I should break all the comma-delinated fragments up into short sentences like Hemingway, and then I think of how Holly hates Hemingway, and maybe I should call her, or read some Hemingway, or maybe I should go to Paris, to be like Hemingway, but a female Hemingway, and is that an oxymoron or a good idea, and did Hemingway procrastinate, and did Hemingway eat hummus, and would Hemingway have been able to focus on his contreversial short sentences if he had the internet to read, and maybe I should Google Hemingway to see how I can be more like him, and maybe I have ADD, and Hemingway was so much more decisive, did it come from being in the war, and he was such an egomaniacal bastard, but so are all great male novelists, Kundera too, and Holly hates Kundera, Holly loves Pynchon, Pynchon writes complex sentences, I doubt Pynchon has ADD, and all of these men wrote about wars, I hate war but I love war novels and war movies and fictional war television, without war there would be no war movies, no war novels, no war television, without everything terrible in life there would be nothing beautiful written about it, is it inhuman to think that suffering has a purpose and its purpose is to be the raw material of art? Is it trite?

I'd love to ramble on, kids. But it's the first truly gorgeous Tuesday afternoon, and you know what that means. Miss Anger and I are due for a picnic.

Today is a special holiday for those of us in the test preparation industry. Today the May SATs are administered to the youth of America. Today my little darlings attempt to put into effect my new-agey techniques for stress reduction while remembering my militaristic plan for attack for coordinate geometry diagrams. Today, one can only hope, thousands, or at least several little New Yorkers failed to get their goal scores on this exam and will be convinced at some point in the near future that SuperLefty's mild-mannered alter-ego is the solution to their test-taking problems.

Right now the errant answers in which SuperLefty's financial future lies are freshly penciled onto nswer sheets which themselves are en route to an evaluation center where SuperLefty's fall earnings can be quantified and projected along with Jane Student's current higher education options. Come on, Joe and Jane Students of the Greater New York Area! Let's see some scores that need improvement, scores that will send your monied and neuortic parents into paroxysms of fear! Fear that if you do not learn the word "paroxysm" you will! Never! Attend! Princeton! The cost of living is going up and SuperLefty quite literally needs a new pair of shoes. SuperLefty has also discovered that wine that costs $20 a bottle tastes significantly better than wine that costs $10, and SuperLefty's delicate and evolving palate does not want to go back.

SuperLefty has been very quiet lately. Has she been bested by some right-handed nemesis? Finally found that fatal combination of illegal substances and dangerous kitchen equipment? Has she, as some of you have asked, hung up her cape? Does SuperLefty even have a cape? Is SuperLefty a even real superhero?

Is the Pope a former Nazi youth?

Of course SuperLefty is real, and you should definately leave a plate of special treats out for her every year on the Autumnal Equinox, which is SuperLefty's birthday and National SuperLefty Day. SuperLefty never forgets the LittleLefties who leave her a plate of special treats, and when the Massive Revolution comes and SuperLefty is Supreme Benevolent Dictator, she will give special treats to all the LittleLefties who remembered her.

To answer your questions, SuperLefty has a cape. It may look like a red satin muumuu doctored with tempra paint, but it is, in fact, the cape of a real live superhero. SuperLefty may hang up her cape sometimes, but that's only because she has borderline OCD. SuperLefty will never hang up her cape for good--or for evil.