They sent a day trip to Red Hook email yesterday, and I’m loving it - day trip done right. Take a look, Brooklynites and those who wish they could be. (Why don’t more cities do this kind of thing?)

So in the meantime, here’s a bunch of links I’ve been piling up:
• I ordered a few tealights from Dirt on Saturday, because they are $1 apiece and I like variety, and I like to burn soy candles since they don’t release the same kind of harmful things into the air as regular candles. I ordered A Fresh Start, All-Nighter, Nitty Gritty (the impetus for the order), and Apple a Day (made mostly of actual apples!).

• From More Intelligent Life: Meeting Marilynne Robinson. Not your typical author profile.

• Full-length videos from the Slow Food Nation conference, including Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, Carlo Petrini, and Michael Pollan.

• Sorted Books art.

• Saturday is apparently the Second Annual Gowanus Harvest Festival, which looks not only pretty cool but also helps to dispel the myth that city people don’t care about this stuff (and yes, I realize I pointed toward a Wendell Berry video two points earlier).

• Why literary readings are so excruciatingly bad, useful as I’m trying to plan programming for IAM.

• Looks like movie people will have work next year, hurrah!

• Lastly, the University as arts patron.

We spent all of Saturday happily bumming around; I made scrambled eggs with scallions, cheddar grits, and Applewood Farms chicken & sage sausage for brunch and we watched Saturday morning cartoons (i.e., The Simpsons on DVD). We also watched the pilot episode of Fringe, which you can (and should) watch on Hulu. The pilot cost something like $10 million to make and is almost an hour and a half long, and though I don’t watch much TV and haven’t ever watched a J.J. Abrams show except his episode of The Office, I thought it was rather good. Tom said it was kind of like what the X-Files meant to be, but a little better. I think we may try to follow the show on Hulu.

In the evening, we went to a cast & crew screening of Ghost Town, which is coming out this weekend. Tom worked on it last fall. I honestly have no idea what I’m allowed to say about it, but it played at the Toronto Film Festival and did pretty well, and I thought it was rather funny. In fact, it’s a good sign when a room full of people who lived with the movie for six months and can tell you what the weather was like in every shot still laugh at the film. Ricky Gervais is particularly funny in his bumbly, rambly moments.

The most notable thing about yesterday was that we had a “bad movie night”, which is a Tom-and-Alissa Sunday night tradition that we’d abandoned for a while. Fall is the best time, since all the bad movies from the spring that we didn’t see in the theater are now on DVD.

We started with Smart People, which was far worse than I thought it was going to be - dull, depressing, with a very jumpy and disconnected plot but without any kind of stylistic indication that that’s what they were trying to do. Basically, it was a snarky screenplay that just threw up all over itself when the cameras showed up. Do not bother.

The other was Baby Mama, which by comparison was amazing, but in reality was just a cheery, light comedy that somehow had Steve Martin in it. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are great, and it had some serious laugh-out-loud moments. I think it was exactly what it was supposed to be, and so I went to bed happy.

Tonight we are going to “A Celebration of Maurice Sendak with Tony Kushner“, at the 92nd Street Y (which mercifully allows its under-35 patrons to get tickets for $10). Sendak, if you recall, is the author of the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, which is sort-of in production as a feature film, written by Dave Eggers and directed by Spike Jonze (creative differences with the studio are holding it up). Other guests at the event are supposed to include Jonze, Eggers, Meryl Streep, James Gandolfini, Catherine Keener, and a bunch of other people, and yes, that’s a weird combination.

This technically kicks off our crazy fall event calendar, what with the New Yorker festival in October (we have Malcolm Gladwell tickets - woohoo!), the BAM Next Wave Festival, a bunch of Variety/MoMI screenings of the Oscar contenders (Blindness next week), actual press screenings, and whatever other things float our way - plus my various and sundry fundraising efforts. Not to sound like a broken record, but autumn in New York is sublime - not just for the weather, but the opportunities to soak up the best of culture and the arts. I am grateful that this is now my hometown.

I head south tomorrow morning for a long weekend in DC, which will involve festivities of various kinds, none of which are very nailed down. Just having a vacation outside the (well, this) city for a few days should be refreshing.

Lastly, this article on being a writer in Brooklyn is kind of awesome, especially this part:

I have a hard time understanding all the hype. I dig it here and all, but it’s just a place. It does not have magical properties. In interviews, I get asked a lot, “What’s it like to write in Brooklyn?” I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it’s like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan, but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It’s like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French. What do they expect me to say? “Instead of ink, I write in mustard from Nathan’s Famous, a Brooklyn institution since 1916.” “I built my desk out of wooden planks taken from the authentic rubble of Ebbets Field. Have I mentioned how I still haven’t forgiven the Dodgers for moving to Los Angeles?”

Though walking across the Bridge leans toward the touristy side, I had a good reason for wanting to go: the aforementioned Waterfalls in the East River, which “opened” yesterday. They are lovely and fascinating to watch, and at night they’re stunning (see the pictures in that article). If this is the future of public art, I heartily approve.

Tom left early this morning to meet up with his father in New Jersey and head south to Virginia. I’ll join him on Thursday. In the meantime, I am traipsing home to Albany tonight, and will be back in town Sunday night, ready to start learning about the modern British novel. I have a seedling of an idea for my paper for that class, which is more than I can usually say. Maybe that means I am starting to catch onto this humanities stuff.

Have a good weekend, and in the meantime, if you are one of the ten people who haven’t, check out Garfield Minus Garfield.

Well, what a weekend. I was feeling rather under the weather on Friday, so I took a sick day. I pounded out most of a paper as I sat on the couch and drank copious amounts of water. We don’t really have any food at home - no time to shop lately - but thankfully, our neighborhood is full of wonderfully healthy and moderately-priced eateries, so we had brunch at Olea and dinner at Lil’ Pig. We spent the evening watching Hellboy - the first one - and it was, well, awful, though made a bit better because it does not take itself seriously at all. I’m all for movies with very vague plots, but not in that genre. But I try not to demand much from movies based on comic books; that way, I’m delighted with things like Batman Begins and Iron Man. (By the way, I am totally psyched for The Dark Knight. Moving on.)

I was feeling much better on Saturday, and because I got so much done on Friday I was able to tag along to the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island, along with Tom and a few friends who we met up with there. It was everyone’s first time, and it was certainly . . . interesting. On the one hand, I enjoyed the whole borough pride aspect. Brooklyn is proud to be Brooklyn, diverse, nutty, and happy. People from neighborhoods where you can have a house and garage brought out their antique cars, which were really cool. And some of the costumes were fantastic and well thought out. On the other hand, lots of people like to use marching in the parade as an excuse to get tipsy and wear very little clothing, and that’s their (legal) prerogative, but it gets old after a while and isn’t something I feel the need to experience repeatedly. So it was a one-time must-see event, but probably not one that will get any better year to year, and I don’t think we’ll do it again.

After the parade we went back to our apartment and cooked hamburgers for everyone, which was good fun, and watched trailers for scary movies. An excellent end to a Saturday.

After church on Sunday, we went back out to our ‘hood and had brunch at Red Bamboo, a vegan Thai restaurant (you won’t believe it’s not meat, etc.) with friends and ended up at Brooklyn Flea for a bit, where we did not buy anything but admired lots of things, including some imported and salvaged furniture. We wandered over to Smooch, which I immediately adopted as my coffeeshop, because it has really, really good coffee, great decor, eclectic decor, and a relaxed vibe.

We headed uptown shortly afterwards for the “Jesus Hopped the A Train” benefit reading, which was simply remarkable. Original cast plus Stephen Adly Guirgis, who is fast becoming my favorite playwright because he’s so remarkably profound. His plays are messy and profane, but somehow grace and forgiveness always explicitly slip in.

Our seats were good - on the floor, but near the back - and we were serendipitously seated directly across the aisle from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s perch at the soundboard as director. He still laughs, despite having heard this play and these actors a mind-bogglingly enormous number of times, and it was fun to be that close. I could have reached out and tapped him. He’s the most refreshing kind of famous New Yorker - still strolls around outside the theater and smokes before performances (this was the third time I’d seen him doing it), frequents the same random coffeeshops that I do. When we saw “The Little Flower of East Orange” a couple months ago, he got in an elevator with a bunch of the audience as they were going up to the theater on the third floor. They looked a little thunderstruck.

But! Our brush with celebrity was not complete. Yesterday I woke up with one of those stark-raving-mad headaches, and as this is not a week in which I can afford to be sick, I called in sick again and slept in very late. I had a dull headache all day, even after lunch at Pequena down the block, but I worked a little more on my paper and then went to class.

After class I took a few painkillers and dashed across town to met up with Tom at Madison Square Garden for the Coldplay concert. Coldplay gave away all 30,000 tickets for this performance, which was kind of awesome, because it was the first time they’d played through that set, which included a bunch of songs from Viva La Vida as well as some older stuff. They came into the arena seating - three rows behind us!! - and sang “Yellow”. And they didn’t play an encore - vaguely disappointing, but I’m kind of glad. I find encores a little pretentious. Everyone pretends they’re special, but it happens every time. Let’s save the encores for truly spectacular concerts. This one was an experimental concert, they flubbed a bit, but they were good-natured about it and very funny, and everyone enjoyed themselves. The only black mark was the drunken people to our left and in front of us who decided to get into a fight, just short of throwing punches, during “Fix You”, which is probably my favorite song. Oh well.

I’m finally back at work today and swamped, but tonight I’m planning to meet up with our dear friends Sarah and Matt and bring them up to the NY Philharmonic’s free concert in Central Park, as long as it doesn’t get rained out. This is my last week of the Moby-Dick class, and next week starts “Modern British Novel”. I admit that I’m a bit dubious about how I’ll manage to read all eleven novels and write two papers in the six weeks, but they don’t call it a “master’s degree” for nothing, I suppose.

The dark spot on my weekend is that it looks like I won’t get to see Wall-E on its opening night. Alas.

We watched Lars and the Real Girl on Sunday night as well, at long last. There were so many good movies in the theater when it came out that we missed it, and we haven’t had much time for movie-watching so far this year. It was great, as everyone said. Ironically, we’d been eating brunch at Tartine earlier that day when Ryan Gosling, very bearded, walked past with a friend. We continually find that life and art intersect in weird ways when you live here.

Which, by the way, reminds me that next week will mark the end of my third year in New York City. I think that makes me an official New Yorker. I no longer need a subway map to get around pretty much anywhere in Manhattan and a lot of Brooklyn’s “brownstone belt”, I don’t need to hold the pole in the subway anymore, I am completely ignorant of gas prices except when they show up on the news, I know the best place to get falafel for $2.50, I no longer venture above 14th Street unless it’s absolutely necessary and kind of turn up my nose at living in Manhattan, I say things like “the city” and “the Times” and expect people to know what I’m talking about, and I walk around saying things like “that used to be that great French cafe” and grumbling at tourists who walk four-across on the sidewalk. In short, I am some combination of the worst stereotype and the actual reality. Oh well. We are all victims of our locations, and this isn’t a bad one. I am so blessed to live here.

Did anyone else out there who grew up in church watch a movie called “Hoomania”? It was about a kid who got sucked into a board game that taught him about the book of Proverbs. There were some gamepieces called “Sluggards”, and a wise owl, and some other crazy characters, and it was partially live-action and partially claymation. I suddenly remembered this movie the other night and wanted to watch it, but it’s out of “print” and I can’t find any clips on YouTube.

My most notable accomplishment this weekend - besides reading a lot about Zoroastrianism for class - was learning to play Uno last night. It wasn’t that we didn’t play card games when I was a kid (we played a lot of Dutch Blitz), but when we did play games they were usually either educational or something like checkers. So this was fun. I also did well, which is a plus. I still want to take poker back up again.

We had brunch at Lil’ Pig near our apartment. I had a chilled cucumber and avocado soup and a tilapia sandwich with pickled onions on baguette; Tom had gazpacho and I think a cornmeal-encrusted catfish sandwich. Tee-riffic. Not only is the place close, but they serve about fifteen varieties of tea, there’s wine in the evenings, the menu changes daily and is all kinds of local and healthy and innovative, and it’s all pretty reasonably priced. Like Grey Dog, but a little cheaper and with a much more interesting menu.

Tonight, it looks like we’re going to the premiere of the film Tom worked on as first assistant director the summer before we got married. Cool.

What did you do yesterday? We went to Coney Island, and it was wonderful. We took the subway - about half an hour from where we live - oh YEAH. It’s not exactly a highbrow beach, but then, that’s not what you go to Coney Island for. And it was much nicer than we expected. The boardwalk is short, but has a lovely look out over the beach, which is very wide and sandy with little bits of colored rocks and shells in it - and yes, a little bit of broken glass polished smooth. I stuck my toe (singular) into the water and it was frigid, but I think it probably gets warmer in the later summer, in tandem with the Jersey coast. Big waves.

So we walked the length of the boardwalk, laid out on the windy beach for a bit, then got some good boardwalk-y junk food. Fried clams and shrimp and onion rings, oh my. We went to the Coney Island Sideshow, which, as it turns out, is kind of delightful and low budget, but has bona fide fire eaters and snake handlers and sword swallowers, and the host-guy pounds a nail into his nostril, then a power drill. We were a little enthralled. We left and played video games and shooting-range games and scoped out the rides for a future trip we are planning. They are not cheap, but day passes are. Maybe I’ll even overcome my distaste for being jerked around and go on the Cyclone, because, after all, it’s actually got a sign placed there by the Parks Service.

I am coughing today, which I hope is the remnants of my allergies and maybe a little sand, so I stayed home to work to spare the ears and my lungs. Knocking an hour and a half or so out of my commute isn’t shabby either. I’ve gotten the laundry done in between my workings and will soon embark on the rest of my reading. Tom went to set around 6:30 this morning and has been running around all day. The busy part of his shoot is finally commencing, and he has some weekends coming up. Yay to overtime pay; boo to weekends apart. But that’s life in a film biz household!

Of course, the sun comes up pretty early these days, as it’s trudging toward the solstice next month, so it’s been waking us up a bit. No worries - Tom’s needed to be up roughly when the sun is lately, so it works out pretty well.

But I wake up then, too, and I have been completely astonished by how beautiful the sky has been. And it changes color, too - sometimes the sunrise is pink, sometimes it’s red, sometimes blue, occasionally yellow.  It’s beautiful. Almost worth waking up for.

This will be my fourth summer living in New York - oh, my word - but you might be shocked and mildly appalled to know that in all that time, I’ve barely made use of the wonderful free things that go on here in the summertime - just a Philharmonic in the Park concert in 2006, and some of Midsummer Night’s Swing last year in Lincoln Center (which was not free).

So, I’ve put a lot of the more amazing things I’ve found going on around town, from classical music to free film screenings to rock and folk and readings. Highlights include:
• Readings by Richard Price and Junot Diaz
• Several free NY Philharmonic concerts, in Prospect and Central Parks
• Chris “formerly of Nickel Creek” Thile’s amazing band, Punch Brothers
• Lots of great outdoor movies
• The Philip Glass ensemble, Ailey II, and Beth Orton in Prospect Park
• Wilco in McCarren Park (sadly not free)

I’ll be constantly updating, so feel free to bookmark!

I then went to see Made of Honor for a review which should be in WORLD (print!) soon. It was not very good, but it wasn’t painful. That’s about all I can say. Afterwards I headed downtown and jotted down the substance of my review before heading to a ukelele extravaganza at the Bowery Poetry Club, then the Half Pint with a horde. Definitely one of the better Fridays I’ve had lately.

On Saturday our dear Colleen came over; she was in town for a few days after moving home to Anchorage last year, and she’s headed Dublin-ward to Trinity this fall, and I am very excited for her. We had burgers at 67 Burger and then picked up some groceries. Alisa came by later on, and we ate copious waffles and drank rosé and discussed good books before everyone went home.

After church on Sunday, we had a lovely relaxing brunch in the garden behind Palma, and dinner at the Stone Home Wine Bar around the corner from us, all with friends. I also finished Brideshead Revisited and started Saturday, which is amazing.

Today I had one triumph - I convinced the university that I am properly immunized and managed to register for the Moby-Dick class. I’ve already bought the books, so I’m glad there were no snags. I am very excited for this class to start. I’m playing at being a grad student in the English department this summer, what with Moby-Dick and the British novel class, and I have to say, I think it’s a good way to spend the summer.

A relatively open week for me, besides work. I don’t even have class. On Friday I’m going to An Evening with Michel Gondry at the Museum of the Moving Image, and perhaps a tiny féte afterwards, and Saturday brings an Albany-bound train for Mother’s Day. I haven’t been home or seen my mom since January, and I’m very much looking forward to it. She tells me the Tulip Festival is brightening the pretty part of downtown Albany, and maybe we’ll get to see it this year.

Lastly, my review of Harmony Korine’s newest, Mister Lonely, is in this issue of Paste, but it’s also online. I tried, but I wasn’t a huge fan.

I took today off to work on homework; I spent most of the afternoon in the park reading and marking books, then came home and typed up notes wildly till I couldn’t carry on. I’m going to have my hands full this weekend. But I’m finding that research is intoxicating, especially synthesizing ideas into new ones. Am I a nerd?

We had dinner on Friday night at Epoca Ristorante (delicious), and dinner on Saturday at 67 Burger (inexpensive and delicious). We don’t have a full-sized refrigerator yet, so the eating is a bit dicey, but soon! Soon we can buy perishables again.

I spent a little time on Saturday reading about our new neighborhood, which, as it turns out, is rather historically significant; it was a fort during the Revolutionary War (the monument is in the park), a very high-end place for the rich to live, an Irish shantytown, a dangerous place to live and now one of the finest and most ethnically diverse places to live in town. The church near us was significant in the abolitionist movement; the creation of Fort Greene Park was called for by none other than Walt Whitman (and designed in part by Frederick Olmstead, designer of Central Park and Prospect Park). And apparently the neighborhood is a designated historical district. Fascinating.

I miss Prospect Park, but I went for a run in Fort Greene Park this morning, which is much smaller but very cheery, with lots of dogs and their owners congregating in the middle. In fact, people seem downright friendly here, and we met several people in our building just by riding the elevators. I think we’re going to like it here.

In the meantime, however, interesting things were published in Comment:
• An article on the “blog.mode” exhibit that just closed at the Met, or is about to, written by me.
• An interview with our own dear Dan Nayeri, writer of The Cult of Sincerity and various forthcoming things and pastry chef extraordinaire (you think I am kidding, but I’m not).

Ok, that’s enough for now. The two weeks ahead are enormously full of ridiculous amounts of things to do and I need a little rest before that begins.

If you’re still not convinced, here’s the trailer:

In other news, we are definitely moving. Probably next week. Details still to be determined.

And of course, work never slows down - here’s my review of My Blueberry Nights.

I’m sipping Bolero and plotting out my next few weeks of work. I worked three hours at the coop this morning, stocking produce starting at 6:00 am, then came home and threw on the blooper reel for season 3 of The Office while I ate my breakfast and ironed my clothes. How I do love that show.

Speaking of, I also love Battlestar Galactica, but unfortunately I haven’t seen season 3 yet and so I’m not watching the premiere tonight. But! I have caught inadvertent wind of some of the plot developments in 3 and WHOA. Dude. I am dying to get our hands on the DVDs. Not having cable is generally great, but occasionally it’s bad, and this is one of those occasions.

Anyhow, I made my very first venture into the actual book areas of NYU’s Bobst Library at lunchtime in search of some volumes for my term paper, which is (I think) about the specialized arms of big movie studios aimed at evangelical audiences, and more generally, the American evangelical box-office power recognition phenomenon since The Passion of the Christ came out in 2004. Also something in there about aesthetics and critics. Can you tell I haven’t really ever had to write a bona fide research paper in the humanities? I found some interesting-looking scholarly volumes and reveled in the fact that when you check out academic books, you get five months till you have to return them, which can also be a curse when the one book you really want is checked out until the end of June (yep). Yes, interlibrary loan, blah blah blah, but unfortunately I’m late to the game and the paper’s due in a month and I don’t have a NY Public Library card and I applied for one but it could be a month before it gets here. Anyone have a copy of Shaking the World for Jesus by Heather Hendershot that they want to mail me? I’ll pay postage.

This weekend entails a swap at Carey’s (yay for getting rid of old clothes and maybe picking up some new ones), possibly Leatherheads (George Clooney! Renee Zellweger! John Krasinski!!!), lots of reading, maybe some games, hopefully some relaxing.

We are seeing “The Little Flower of East Orange”, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman at the Public Theater tonight (which I’m realizing I must clarify is an actual theater, not a movie theater, and this is not a film, because while PSH is amazing on-screen, he’s kind of a little god in the theater world as far as I’m concerned). I’ve been looking forward to this all week. Also to dinner at Applewood, our own little heaven on earth in Park Slope, tomorrow night.

Now if Bank of America would only SERIOUSLY get their act together and mail us that account confirmation letter (I mean, come on, I know it doesn’t take two weeks for something to get from Charlotte to New York), then we could put our application in for the apartment and start the nail-biting, and everything would be perfect.

I love weekends!

Anthropologie sends me a lot of mail, both of the e and snail varieties, and I don’t mind because it’s pretty, but this “how to make a room your own” site that came in their last email is actually pretty cool. I especially love the library.

Tonight we are going to Alchemy, a local gastropub up the street from us, for Restaurant Week. Also, speaking of Brooklyn, I am crossing fingers, toes, and all other appendages in hopes that the letter from Bank of America which confirms that we do indeed have an account with them (nevermind that we have statements to prove it!) will arrive today, a full two weeks after it was requested, so that we can finally submit our application for the apartment. We are hopeful.

Lastly, Colin, who is awesome, ordered one of my prints from RedBubble. It arrived in Scotland from Australia, and he took a couple pictures of the picture. He claims it looks quite good. So, artists/designers/photographers, get thee to RedBubble.

A couple years ago, my first Easter in New York was also, if I remember correctly, the first time I went out to Tom’s childhood home (and possibly the first time I met my then-future-in-laws, though it does seem kind of late in the game for that, so maybe not). Last year I was in the buzzy-hubbub world of interviewing for new jobs and actually got my present job based loosely on a conversation I had there - long story.

This year, we saw Chop Shop on Good Friday. I can’t recommend this film highly enough. Tom likened it to the work of the Dardennes brothers - he’s completely right - but it’s by an American director of Iranian descent, Ramin Bahrani, whose previous film, Man Push Cart, played at the “New Directors/New Films” festival at Lincoln Center a couple years ago.

Chop Shop is the story of a twelve-year-old boy and his sixteen-year-old sister living in a tiny plywood room above a mechanic’s shop in the sea of car mechanics out beyond Shea Stadium in Queens; however, if it weren’t for the subway footage and the fact that the kids are speaking English, you wouldn’t realize it wasn’t in a third-world Central American village until you see the corner of the stadium peeking into frame twenty minutes into the film. It’s more real than a documentary; this will more than likely end up on my top-ten list this year.

We saw the film because our church doesn’t have a Good Friday service, since we don’t actually have a building (refresher: we rent a great space from a Seventh-Day Adventist church, but only on Sundays). Some day I’d like to go to a Good Friday service at one of the gorgeous cathedrals around here, but I am just not up to braving the tourists right now.

Saturday was a culture-y day; we saw “The 39 Steps” at the Roundabout (amazing), then tripped on up to the Upper East Side for brunch at Mon Petit Cafe (crepes for both of us, mm), and then popped by the segment of the Whitney Biennial at the Armory (very skippable, but it was free, and we only had an hour or so). Then, after coffee and chocolate souffle at Fig and Olive, we headed to the Zoae Series at the Brecht Forum.

And, I wore these shoes all day and was simultaneously flabbergasted and elated that my feet did not hurt. Shoes are the bane of my existence, and I could not believe it that these were almost more comfortable than just regular flats. So comfortable, in fact, that I’m ordering another pair, because when you live in New York and your feet take you everywhere, shoes are more important than almost any part of your wardrobe, even your bag.

Righto. Easter Sunday dawned sunny and chilly, of course, and after church we went to lunch at Smorgaschef with Tom’s parents, and then wandered about the Village a bit before they headed back to Jersey and we went on out to Brooklyn for a quiet evening. And so closed the weekend.

I am pushing to get the magazine into layout and copyedited this week - cross your fingers - and hopefully we’ll be turning in the paperwork for the apartment application by mid-week, and I have class again this week after a couple weeks off, and Tom is scouting office buildings, and we are taking full advantage of Brooklyn Restaurant Week, and we’re seeing Little Flower of East Orange at the Public on Friday, directed by none other than Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose work we tend to trust implicitly. Good ways to do good work during a good week at the start of spring.

Restaurants across the borough are offering three-course meals for $23 per person (not including drinks). That is a steal for places like Blue Ribbon and Applewood - our personal favorite - and it’s a great way to try out restaurants you’d otherwise never frequent.

We tend not to eat out for dinner, so we go all out during restaurant week. We have plans to visit Palo Santo (which I pass every day on my way to the subway), Alchemy (a gastropub we pass on our way to the subway on Sundays), and Applewood (one of the best restaurants we’ve been to in the city). YUM.