After weeks and weeks of rain, the New York skies are once again a clear and (relatively) bright blue, with temperatures soaring to the mid-nineties. Meaning that, throughout the city, New Yorkers are busy wandering the sweltering streets in their favorite pairs of blue jeans.

Sure, anywhere else in the country, pulling out your trusty dungarees as the mercury pushed 100 would seem (at best) somewhat suicidal. But in New York, it’s a way of life. To many New Yorkers, there is no temperature so high, no air so thickly humid, that it might justify the sartorial holocaust of baring their knobby knees, nearly translucent from a winter of nothing but sickly yellow indoor lighting.

But don’t cry for us; we knew what we were getting into when we moved here. After all, New York has always been a city of form before function, a world fashion capital (vying only Paris and Milan) collectively obsessed with haute couture. Which, consequently, dictates a remarkably small number of acceptable summer alternatives to the denim standard: for young women, the classic a-line skirt; for gay men (or displaced Europeans), slides and capris; and for straight men such as myself, khakis, khakis and more khakis, as far as the eye can see (though only with flat-front and straight-leg; certainly never the pleated business-casual monstrosities filling your father’s closet).

But what about shorts? I hear you say. Not bloody likely. You might as well strap on a fanny pack and a pair of Tevas (worn with socks, naturally), emblazoning “clueless Midwestern tourist” on your forehead and resigning to pitying looks of “why don’t you just go back to your fly-over state, you mouth-breathing, NASCAR-watching troglodyte?”

With trucker hats on the out and out, however, and blue-collar chic in general on the decline, Williamsburg hipsters are busy searching for new ironic fashion trends, and I’d put even money on faux-tourist becoming the next big thing. So perhaps it is time to forget the NYC jeans tradition; it’s the jean shorts that may be on the cutting edge.

And at the end of the day, of course, it doesn’t really much matter what you wear, because we New Yorkers don’t really have a clue what we’re talking about. For all its veneer of cool, New York is a slightly desperate city: Millions of people wanting to be different, though only in the same way as everyone else. A horde of reluctant fashionistas, following trends not because we actually give a shit, but because we’re terrified of looking like outsiders. Sheeplike followers desperately yet surreptitiously eyeing each other to make sure we haven’t missed new and ever more cutting-edge trends.

So wear whatever the hell you want. But do it like you mean it. Exude confidence and a steely-eyed glint that says “if you don’t realize how much better dressed than you this outfit makes me, you clearly need to renew your subscriptions to Paper, Nylon, Flaunt and Ocean Drive.” Or just wear jeans; no matter how fashion-backwards you may feel, in New York City, a good pair of 501s will never steer you wrong.

Though by now I’m rarely shocked by my roommates’ prodigious abilities to destroy our apartment and its contents, I was still somewhat dismayed to return to New York to find our wi-fi mysteriously no longer working. Being without web access at home is a scarily impotent feeling, and one I’m glad to say I’ve finally redressed. With bits and bytes once again flying through the ether, I should be able to reply to my backlog of emails and return to the usual (nearly) daily posting schedule. Try to at least feign excitement.

This morning I re-installed my air conditioners; summer has officially begun.

Directly across the street from my window, there is a very fat man smoking naked on his fire escape.

Escapades apparently occurring in my bed during the last few months (all during weeks when I was thousands of miles away from that bed):

• roommate one & his girlfriend
• roommate two & an exceedingly ugly girl
• roommate two & a much more attractive girl
• a girl I once hooked up with & some random other girl

Consequently, I’m buying new sheets.

The purchased set (courtesy of overstock.com: 310 thread-count cotton in subtle olive/khaki stripe pattern) should arrive by the end of the week, well in time to lend an ideal mise-en-sc

My roommates are, as I write this, engaged in a shouting match (one that could conceivably degenerate to fisticuffs) over Bartleby the Scrivener. We have now officially reached the highest level of dorkdom.

Jay-Z is currently shooting his next music video directly outside my window. I’m fairly sure that makes me officially ghetto fabulous.

Despite a scarily slow start, yesterday’s Derby party surpassed any of our expectations, pulling more than eighty revelers, a fair number of whom stayed until we finally kicked them out at five in the morning. The mix was exceedingly eclectic, from Ivy Leaguers to Knicks dancers, with musicians, actors, investment bankers, med school students, an MTV VJ and a slew of filmmakers in between.

Still, we woke this morning to find our apartment covered in a thick layer of Boones, juleps and Old Milwaukee, and spent much of the day scrubbing the remnants away. As a result, our apartment is now the cleanest we’ve seen it – better even than its relatively pristine state when we moved in mid-November, and certainly better than it stood on Friday, considering we’d not actually cleaned the place in the intervening six months since the move (as evidenced particularly by the state of our bathroom, christened by at least one previously overnighting female as “absolutely, disgustingly unusable”). In the whirlwind clean-a-thon, we even went so far as to remove the windows from their frames for a thorough inside and out Windexing – with them transparent rather than the previous opaque, we’ve now discovered we overlook a busy street in front and a small park in back.

Stunned by the beauty of our apartment in its newly washed down state, we’ve vowed to clean the place regularly, a sentiment that should last until slightly before whenever we next had intended to clean. Consequently, we’re preemptively planning another party for later this summer as a sort of backup plan. The next post-party cleanup should bring us back to pristine, no matter how bad the inevitable downhill slide in the months between.