raging out at... unacceptable locking doors

So I suppose there comes a time in every blogger's life where you have to give up a little too much personal information in order to properly make your point. And I suppose that time for me has come now.

Being back home in New York for the holidays should be a time for friends, family, warmth, love and giving. For me, it is a time to be trapped on a rooftop in TriBeCa at 4:30 in the morning. I'm slowly developing hypothermia as I write this, and drinking the half a beer that I had to pretty much channel my inner Jet Li to obtain, so please excuse my normally impeccable rationality as it slowly spirals into psychosis. God, I feel like the guy from The Mist slowly writing his way towards his impending doom. If the last of my memoirs is this tale, I suppose it is only appropriate that this be the legacy I leave.

One of my very favorite people in the whole world (although he is losing points by the minute as he taunts me with his full beer and the other one I KNOW he's got in his pocket; Either that or I chose the absolute right person to be trapped with) lives in this beautiful apartment in downtown Manhattan. I decided to bundle up like an Appalachian hunter and trek in to spend the night playing cards and drinking beers with this lovely man. Fast forward to a few hours later, we are both long past a light buzz and someone is wearing a feather boa and someone else has donned both elbow and knee pads. I will leave it up to you to determine which one is my outfit of choice. Both are very good guesses.

So in our not at all inebriated states of mind, we decide that we should go have a few drinks on the roof to enjoy the view. Now packing for the roof was an episode in and of itself. We could (and should) have gone to Tahiti for a week with what we took up here. We made sure we were plentiful on brews, blankets, Tostitos and for reasons I'm still unclear on, a laptop. Someone's a workaholic and if you guess me, well then you haven't been paying attention.

So let's fast forward to a little later. More drinks in the hole and we're downing them cuddled under a fuzzy blanket. It's sort of sweet, actually. But then comes the Stars catastrophe. Being that my quitting smoking went swimmingly, I panic when my lighter falls over the edge of the roof (even more so than I panicked when a hoodie I lived in for a while went down). I get up and walk over to the stairwell where my purse had dumped over on our way up, praying some matches went renegade and were laying abandoned on a stair somewhere. No luck, of course. On my way back up, I successfully drop my cigarettes behind me and go to pick them up without moving my legs. Why? I don't know. I truly wish I did but I do not and am sure I shall regret it for a long time to come. On my super graceful return, the door slams shut and locks on its own by virtue of nothing I've done wrong whatsoever. (Popular retelling of this tale will tell you that I kicked the door shut then slammed against it and laughed uncontrollably for 10 minutes, but this is why I'm clearing it up now.)

So after 20 MORE minutes, the doormen arrive to rescue my drunken companion and me. But now the door is jammed. So I sit here writing my blog, nursing what may be my last beer ever and I'm still laughing through my rage.

Why do the doors have to lock from the outside? We are a million damn flights up. If someone's spidey skills have enabled them to make it on top of this building, let them on in, I say. They earned it. And to be perfectly frank, I'm sure If they can scale 26-story Manhattan buildings to land on the rooftop, I have no doubt in their skills to pick a lock to get into the building. Have you ever known a criminal to concoct a lever and pulley system to soar through the air and perform professional level acrobatics to land unharmed upon a rooftop to then look at a door and be like, "Oh crap, it's locked. F this." Yeah, neither have I.

Please use the comments section to send prayers for my blue extremities and to share tales of your own follies with things that lock when they aren't supposed to. Fingers crossed that someone has a chastity belt story.

-stars