A Running List of Things I've Lost in the Last Two Weeks

1. Wool jacket - left at a family friend's house in Madison

2. Sunglasses - left at my parents' cabin in northern Wisconsin

3. Moleskin notebook - no idea where this went, but it would have been much easier to get to the Brooklyn Brewery on Friday night if I had known where it was. Though, despite getting very lost on the way, I did make it to the BB BEFORE the spontaneous hipster-led Michael Jackson dance-off, so I suppose I can survive.

4. dental floss - apparently lost behind my bed, since that's where I found it today, after looking more than once

5. summer weight exercise pants - again, no idea. Laundromat, perhaps?

6. This is the big one - blue silk dress in black garment bag - left on the bus back from DC on Sunday night, after the "4.5 hour" trip in the "extra large personal space" bus turned into a cramped hell 6 hours in front of a Vanderbilt graduate who insisted on telling everyone she knew the minute details of her weekend - "and then we went to Starbucks again, and I was so had he had his Vespa so we didn't have to drive" -though I did learn that there is a sailboat called a "420" (for the first two phone calls, I thought she was talking about something else) - who then started chatting with a guy in a Lehman Brothers cap about how there is no good way to get between DC and New York, except the shuttle - but "then I can't take my hair products" blah blah blah - and I just wanted to get off the bus, so I ran off the bus, leaving the dress behind in an overhead compartment. However, several phone calls, a mis-set alarm clock, and 45 minutes on 8th avenue later, I got it back this morning. PHEW.

And also - obviously, there's more - I was in DC for a single night over the weekend - to attend a former coworker's wedding, where I . . . networked in the pews - somewhat unwittingly, and perhaps not to come to anything, but how very DC. The wedding itself was a combination Buddhist/semi-Catholic affair in a chapel at Georgetown, followed by a wine tasting and a quick descent into moderate intoxication for pretty much everyone, since, clearly, no one was doing the old swirl/spit thing and the food came one piece at a time. The bride sang some jazz standards, the groom led everyone in singing for her birthday, and my wedding-going team of current/former colleagues left before the moderate intoxication took a turn for the worse. Otherwise, I got my hair cut short, which my stylist really enjoyed, listened to old Supreme Court arguments on the radio (I didn't know they were ever recorded? Maybe Nina Totenberg has been monopolizing the reenactment market without cause?) in a taxi driven by a man who swears that Manhattan is calming, did a little bit of friend-whirlwhind visiting (come to New York, please - I don't want to go back to DC until the humidity declines in September) and managed to go ALMOST 24 hours without losing anything at all - let alone anything important.

Two Hits and a Near-Miss

Last night, the un-anchored nature of the shelves in my kitchen cabinet joined forces with the weight of my sweet potatoes to knock an unopened jar of tomato sauce to the floor - I cleaned it up, and thought I had done a pretty good job with the glass shards. So good that I didn't wear shoes in the kitchen this afternoon and managed to get a crumb of glass stuck in my foot. So I took it out and threw it away- easy - except that it then cut my left index finger - looong after I thought I had rid myself of it entirely. Then, not 10 minutes later, I went to retrieve a baking sheet of said sweet potatoes from the oven, using a folded over towel in lieu of the potholders I couldn't find, and promptly burned my right thumb. Then, because I still had all of my fingers, I decided to go running - not such a great move, since, instead of the cold and rain, it was now somewhat sunny (alternating with exceedingly menacing clouds), and very humid. And I, of course, was wearing my heaviest exercise pants - which felt like they weighed about 30 pounds. So I went to the gym, and somehow managed to either pick the treadmill that times itself out every two minutes or hit the pause or emergency stop button with my headphones cord - the sudden slowing was both startling and nearly enough to make me fall off of the machine all together. So I switched machines and things got better. When I got home, I still wasn't up to the task of facing my statistics midterm, so I decided to go shoe or, more aptly, zaatar-bread and tabouli shopping. On my way down my block, I passed a pair of old men arguing. One was waving his cane at the other as I passed, and just as I got to them, I heard this metal on metal clanging sound and looked down to see a hollow metal tube leaning against the railing of the building they were in front of -if I had been perhaps one second earlier, I surely would have blocked its trajectory as it flew from the inside of the raised cane across the sidewalk, and I dare say the both the potential physical and social aftermath would have been more . . . interesting? than my solitary minor calamities, but I'm pretty glad I didn't have to find out.

Semi-Information and Iran

I think after this I'll be relatively caught up on long posts and maybe big issues (just in time to take a stastics test and update press lists so I get caught up in other parts of my life) -but I spent a lot of time in the Minneapolis airport on Saturday morning, watching CNN - and hoping to get an update on Iran, and the experience has played back, on repeat, in my mind, like the theme from Rocky, for days now.

So here goes - I watched the same 7ish minutes of material repeat ad nauseum, over a "Breaking News" banner for two hours:

-There are protests, here is what we have from YouTube and Twitter (also - the device of an anchor pushing "play" on YouTube on a screen behind him/her might be the most obvious "we don't know how to deal with this crazy newfangled technology yet" that I can think of - and when they read tweets out loud, it kind of reminds me of Colbert's "The Word" and I kind of wish it didn't)

-We can't cover anything live. Look: here is our attempt to get a credential - waves paper at the camera - so we're going to rely on YouTube and Twitter. Repeat.

- Brief interview with an Iranian in America, generally asking for unfounded speculation on what will happen next, and how is this like 1979 and how is this changing geopolitics for ever? (even though we can't see what's going on and we keep talking about how we can't confirm any of the information we're asking you too interpret, so let's hope you have something ELSE to say, shall we?)

-Some form of the lines "Republicans have criticized President Obama's response as being too weak" and "President Obama says we shouldn't be seen as meddling," followed by an outline of the criticisms, a one-line summary of Obama's 3 paragraph statement (even though this is 24 hour news and there isn't much in the way of confirmable information) and no interpretation in light of historical precedent and the U.S.'s symbolic and actual role in 20th century Iranian history or in light of - more primary source material - like remarks by, oh, Khamenei that do blame the US, the UK, or The West or the Western Media for starting the whole unrest thing in the first place. Also - implying that Europe is saying tougher things than Obama - then saying that, actually, they're all kind of singing the same cautious tune together - 5 minutes later - about more single-line versions of not especially lengthy statements.

And then back to talking about how little you have to cover. Then maybe man on the street protest footage in the US somewhere.

I don't mean to be excessively harsh on CNN - and, in fact, without Youtube access of my own, I could see the point in rebroadcasting, and a lot of the people they had on were able to cut through some of the "Either Iran and the U.S. are finally going to be doubles partners when the league of democracies starts sponsoring a benefit tennis tournament, or McCain is right and we're going to have to go in and liberate them too!" forecasting in a way that suggests that CNN knows better. But still. Come on, guys. I know we can't talk about how American power actually has limits, but surely we could acknowledge that the meanings of words can be twisted, that there is a reason for incessently pointing out that you can't verify important details to video footage or individuals' declarations - even a self-righteous talk about what a crackdown on the press means in this context could have some value here . . .

When I got home to free wireless, my Facebook feed had, predictably, a very different picture - some of the news I could see was from a friend whose updates were as much for people there as for those of us outside (where to donate blood in Tehran, for example, or contact information for embassies to either go to if you were wounded or to ask, from abroad, to make doctors available) - which placed the whole situation in this strange middle distance that I still can't quite see clearly enough to articulate.

Foresight of Sorts and 70 Year Old Bullet Holes

These are bullet holes from a shootout in 1936. If you look closely, you can see that the inner and outer windows were installed around the shattered glass - presumably not long after the damage was done, since it seems difficult to believe that anyone would toy with the possibility of already broken glass going completely to pieces during a Wisconsin winter.

I've posted on this before - as it turns out, my favorite German restaurant in a pine forest/site of a 30's FBI/bank robber shootout was, indeed, used as a location for the new Johnny Depp/Christian Bale movie. This means that there is a longer account of the shootout online than I remember being on the placemats - and granting me many nights of worry about .45's in the woods - and it makes the story more complicated than I remember it being, with the inn-keeper taking a huge amount of money to house the gang, and then, double-crossing them and telling the feds - who, apparently, didn't question his story (maybe they appreciated that 1936 was a bad year for inn-keeping?).

Even though the whole event was a pretty awful scene - two people died because the FBI mistook them for bank robbers - before the actual robbers got away (though they left their womenfolk to face the feds), and the proprietor himself ended up sitting in the lodge while law enforcement shot it to bits, the preserved broken glass and the glass case full of the personal effects that the gangsters left behind seems to show an adept appreciation for the kind of draw he had on his hands. By the time that we started going there, this was all a long time ago - I only knew who John Dillinger was because of the placemats - and the whole display - bulletholes included, had a kind of moth-eaten, campy film noir quality, even though it derives its entire meaning from fact, not pure invention - it's a quite a set of decisions and motives to think about with dinner, in what, with more perspective than my deeply impressionable, imaginative 9 year old self's ease in imagining tommy guns in the woods, I now understand is a pretty peaceful setting (red pines, serene lake, cream-based soups).

UPDATE: My parents think this may be a fake bullet hole, but a real leftover from the filming. There's really no way to know, since there are definitely real ones still there. And my mom sent me to this - clearly the Times is more on top of this story than I am. But the most disturbing thing I learned, I think, is the size of a full-grown sturgeon. 6-8 feet. Yikes.

A Mystery in the Woods

I was in Wisconsin for most of last week - minus a 3+ hour delay on the runway at La Guardia which neared the limits for many things and, briefly, seemed to jeopardize my whole trip. For most of the non-airport portion of the week, I was at the family cabin in the northern part of the state. My stay started with the surprise of a taxidermied duck (a gift from my mom's cousin that I long ago demanded be hidden from view) rolling out of its storage box onto my foot when I was looking for bedding, and continued with a new episode in a long-standing mystery: someone has been leaving various "decorations" on our walls over the years. One year we arrived to discover four deer hoofs mounted next to our "animal tracks of north woods wildlife" poster, which were quickly vanquished to another undisclosed location (probably the same box as the duck). Others, we have found a series of game fish:
Exhibit A - which is small enough that it hardly seems like it was a fair fight (it's also where the deer feet were - clearly showing that whoever is doing this doesn't take a hint).
Exhibit B - Admittedly, more vicious looking, but still.

There's a third fish on another wall, and some antlers elsewhere - presumably related to the hoofs, but, frankly, I'm not the kind of detective who wants to connect those dots. For a few years, the once-alive wall ornaments stopped - perhaps because the culprit found another cabin interior decoration job.

And then, this year,


Exhibit C arrived. We don't know exactly where it came from, but the most likely story seems to be a gentleman named Rockin' Ron's woodshed. Rockin' Ron confirmed that, at one point, he had taken in a sign like this - which goes with a sign for a "Deer Trail" sign at the entrance of a nearby condo development - prominently displayed next to the "Private Drive" sign that has kept my parents and I from so much as setting foot inside in the 24 years that we have been going to the woods - my mom once made me trespass in the Wisconsin state capitol, so the sign clearly carries an abnormal weight of "keep out"-ness. However, he hadn't seen the sign in a while, and he wasn't entirely sure what had happened to it. My mom suggested that, somehow, maybe the sign had gotten outside and into the water and washed up somewhere - only to be "rescued" by whoever our fisherman is. This seems improbable. So, we are at a bit of a dead-end - so many unanswered questions -if it is the same sign, was it in a third location before being liberated to our porch? If not, how did the thief know to look in Rockin' Ron's woodshed? Has he/she wearied of hunting game, perhaps converting to vegetarianism and replacing the thrill of the hunt with cat burglary? If it's a new sign and there is no foul play, why would anyone have a sign made so closely matching the other one?

Is the culprit trying to attract bears? If so, I hope the bears in the neighborhood remain illiterate.

Real Marriage, Sham Wedding Part 2 - The Non-Wedding Parts

Really, this is about airline travel, the wedding was only a vehicle for it (if you will).

I had to leave EARLY on Friday to get to the 7:30 am flight that I awesomely waited about 5 minutes to book (I had a seat on a 9:30 clicked, but by the time I went to pay for it, it was gone), which meant getting up at 4. I was so worried about missing it that I a) didn't fall asleep until 5 on Wednesday night and b) didn't fall asleep until about 12:30 on Thursday night. So I was a little tired when I left at 4:30. Remarkably, however, everything went smoothly - I made it to the Newark bus and onto the plane and everything, I even found a fair trade coffee place that sold bunuelos - mmm.

Then, the flight: I was seated on an aisle in the back - aisle seats scare me, but clearly, I deserved it for waiting so long to book. And I was seated next to an Orthodox family with 7 children in matching shirts. The children were pretty adorable and astonishingly well-behaved and the parents probably not much older than me - but yikes. The plane didn't seem quite full, so I offered to reshuffle if needed (I was next to three kids, their mother was seated in front of them, the father a row behind with two more, while at least one was always standing) I was seated next to their youngest - who was maybe a year old? (I can't tell baby ages, or, in this case, gender, but this one could sit, and pull itself up on the seat in front of it, but walking didn't seem like a priority) and, when I took my newspaper out, proceeded to pick up the skymall catalog and "read," clearly - I was instantly won over. As, it seemed, was the woman who was seated in the window seat next to mine - we made a couple of "wow that's a lot of kids - I guess they're cute enough, so I'm not at all annoyed but I'm glad I don't have to take care of them all day" looks and she told me in Spanish that her bag was heavy. So, then a couple in their late 30s sat down on the same row as the children's mother - with looks of abject horror. Luckily, the plane didn't seem to be full, so I went to switch places with the children's mother -thereby, at least, in theory, relieving the horrified couple of some of their misery - but they not only didn't look at me, but took some prompting to move a computer bag off of the seat that would be mine. Then the official announcement that the flight wasn't full and it was ok to move came and they didn't even wait for me to stand up to RUN for the front of the plane.

Oh well.

The flight was early, but it took an hour and a 30 second conversation about how I was assuming $14000 in liability for my rental car by not getting insurance to get the car (a Hyundai, which I was told was a 2-door but turned out to be a 4-door - yay!) - and then 45 minutes to get downtown to meet my godmother at the train station. We went to the Art Institute - which was always one of my favorite museums and has a new addition - designed by the fantastically named Renzo Piano - that really works with the old building, although it does seem to be a bit more susceptible to overheating than the old stone parts. We drove to Princeton, where she lives, an which is normally 2 hours from downtown, but, which, thanks to 3 miles of construction, took 3 hours to reach. At that point, my lack of sleep and long day started to catch up to me, and I'm still not entirely sure that I really spent a night in rural Illinois last week. . .

Saturday, getting to the airport was easy enough, except that I had to take the toll road - where tolls are either $.30 or $.80, collected every 3 miles or so, and almost all only take change. Had I known, I would have brought my change purse from home, but noooo. So I was a little worried, and, increasingly, annoyed with the whole thing. Then I picked up Bruns at the airport and promptly went 15 minutes - and 3 toll booths - the wrong way - before getting on the right path to the wedding. She paid, I was grateful.

From there, things were pretty smooth sailing, though I did have to wake up at 7 post-wedding- moderately painful, but there was free coffee in the lobby, and, miraculously, no tolls between where I got on the highway and the airport. The only complication: I only checked my departure gate once pre-security, and by the time I was reassembled on the other side, I wasn't entirely sure which concourse to go to. So I checked the screens conveniently placed right by security. And there was nothing about my flight, because my flight was not a United flight. Someone who worked at the airport saw me looking flustered and told me to go halfway down the next concourse to where the general screens were. So I did. Except they weren't working. So I turned around, fairly certain I needed to be in concourse B, even though it, like everything else, seemed to be entirely United. So I went to concourse B, passing a huge, modern, flatscreen version of the departure/arrival schedule: all United, yet again. Growing increasingly despondent, I walked up and down the B concourse for about 15 minutes. United and nothing else, and the information kiosk was unmanned. Just as I was about to give up, I did a quick jaunt down to the end of the concourse and found, miraculously, my gate. Except that there was no way I would have known that - unlike United, Continental gates didn't even have flight information on the signs in the concourse with the gate numbers on them. It would seem that, for all of the evidence that the airport's motion-sensor-activated plastic seat covers, obeying my hand motions, would provide to the contrary, if you are at O'Hare, and you aren't flying United, YOU DON'T EXIST.

Real Marriage, Sham Wedding Part 1

Before things get away from me again - a quick recap of the main event of my weekend: I went to Chicago (the going part merits its own post) for my friend Sarah's wedding, which took place in a suburb north of O'Hare.

It was a weekend of firsts for many of us - for me, a first peer wedding, and first rental car, first ring-bearer requiring a police note for anyone I've ever known (the ring-bearer was the bride's family's St. Bernard who required permission to be allowed a brief parole from house arrest since he allegedly bit - but did not injure - a child at some point in the recent past), but, as it happens, not so much a first wedding for the bride and groom. They got married for the first, legal time, at the US embassy in Ghana three(?) years ago, a fact which they didn't really make public until recently, though many of us knew slightly ahead of time. This eased things in terms of the ceremony, which was a "officiated" by Eli, the bride's college roommate and probably the most organized person I know. It was, really, lovely, if a little chilly - very personal, a little improvised, a little Ghanaian, a little Quaker, and there was a lot of crying.

A. Lot. Of. Crying.

Then the reception involved a great deal of champagne, spanakopita, not quite enough crab cakes and, in lieu of cake, homemade brownies (which the bride and groom served, personally, to each of us) and bite-sized tartlets of many kinds. And then the dancing.

A. Lot. Of. Dancing.

Tony, the groom, proved early on to be the ruler of the dance floor, with a brief challenge from the bride's brother in law's mother, who met his repeated splits with a fairly extensive repertoire of Russian folk dancing. As far as music, first up was a reggae band that the bride found on Craigslist, which played "Stir it Up" at least twice, and, apart from the vaguely skeezy manager who hit on one of my friends by complimenting her calves, was pretty fun, then we switched to an ipod and had a little almost-choreographed group "Single Ladies" dance.

As the night progressed, there was some more crying, a balloon-flower headdress that escapes description, and, finally, a shuttle ride back to the hotel that somehow devolved into a great deal of Amy Poehler-as-Hillary-Clinton-style cackling.

Weather, Neglect, Ferris Fear

Though it's pouring right now, and has been on and off since a big, and deeply cathartic thunderstorm at 4 this morning, the weather was nice last weekend. Really nice - except for the part where huge clouds rolled in over Coney Island in the middle of Sunday's biking excursion. I got behind on everything that I needed to be doing - except for growing anxious about work stuff - that, I'm exactly on time with . . . maybe even a little ahead? - and that backed up into writing, and now I'm way out of touch, even though I have started to keep opaque, writerly notes in a cute notebook(for example, "1A= Time Out?" - which was a reference to sitting in the bulkhead seat on a little tiny plane, with neither overhead nor "under the seat in front of you" storage), so I might even write a real essay one of these days. Or, more likely, more lists.

Anyway - above is an illustration of a scene from the scary movie I would make, were I one to make scary movies: a ferris wheel against sinister sky. I'm shivering just thinking about it. The one at Coney Island has compartments that rock back and forth: I find this completely terrifying. It isn't a fear of heights thing, it's a fear of rickety construction and an unsteady floor thing. No one I was with seemed to get it - though they don't wear bike helmets either.

And, I admit, I inherited this specific fear from my mom.


Luckily, she also shared her VHS of Annie Hall with me, so the Cyclone makes me think of Alvie's family home and the joke about the old ladies and the small portions, rather than the nausea and peril of the looming ferris wheel. And this is a relief.