bring in the awkward, bring in the funk

Today I had what I like to call a PNY moment: Perks of life in New York. Those things that can only happen here, in the city that never sleeps or properly deodorizes.

Today's PNY was lunch with my boss at HeadCount (if you're not familiar with the work I'm doing now with HeadCount, head here when you're done reading) and two guys who happen to be pretty important. One of them was Lockhart Steele, who my media-hungry friends will know as former managing editor of this modest little blog and creator of Curbed, a New York neighborhoods and real estate blog. The other was Richard Gehr, a well-known music writer who's contributed to Spin, Rolling Stone, Blender, currently writes for The Village Voice and edits our HeadCount blog.

Clearly with this kind of media and music related fortitude sitting across the lunch table from me, I was bound to bring my Awkward A-Game. I did manage to order one of few things on the menu that probably should've been eaten with a fork -- to be classy and whatnot -- but was easier to eat with my fingers, so I spent the better part of the meal caught in a cycle of awkwardly trying to cut pieces of my battered fish, giving up, picking at it with my fingers, getting tartar sauce on my fingers and wiping it all on the napkin in my lap.

I clearly should've ordered sushi; we were at Lure Fishbar in SoHo, and the sushi did look delectable, but my brain was so focused on ways I could be awkward that I was unable to read a menu and carry on a conversation simultaneously, making it difficult to select a roll.

I need to stop now to tell you that the people in this restaurant not only knew Lockhart, they all but worshipped the very ground he walked on. He seemed like a really cool kid to me, too, but he was clearly very regular clientele at Lure. At a few points during the meal, little appetizers and treats (that I can only assume were on the house) were delivered to our table, because they were some of Lockhart's faves. I felt like I was on VH1's Fab Life, because mostly I eat hot dogs and mac'n'cheese, and they are not prepared specially for me, and no one fawns over me while I eat them.

So I ordered the fish and chips, which were delectable, and naturally had to request more ketchup, which I always feel like is fairly awkward at any eating establishment outside McDonald's. Other than that I also whacked into the table with my knee when I sat down after arriving five minutes late because I managed to walk the wrong way out of the Subway station, get discombobulated and walk in a complete circle before back to the restaurant which was across the street from the station to begin with.

My tardiness was made all the more ironic in my mind by the fact that I'd been overly concerned about being early, because I tend to err on the side of extreme punctuality in all cases, and I had never met two of the people I'd be lunching with -- a recipe for Awkward Soup, right? So I was going to pains to nail it right at 1:30 in hopes that at least Andy would be there before me. Instead, I managed to skip the Awkward Soup of being too early and not knowing who the hell I was meeting and go straight to the Awkward Pie of being late and enjoying the intimidation factor of walking up to these guys all at once.

But despite my Awkward A-Game, I thought I managed to come off like a decently intelligent person with some decently insightful ideas. It's always nice to share an opinion you have about the way things are moving with a particular web site, blog or new media in general, and have a former Gawker editor agree with you. It's like the time I wrote a review of Ashlee Simpson's album Autobiography and saw another critic's online that echoed my sentiments almost exactly. I mean obviously I'd much rather be right about the future of new media than the future of bad pop music, but you catch my drift.


cheers,
elizabeth