Persona Non Grata

A Good Day For Everyone

2010-07-29T21:15:00.000-04:00

I just sold my air conditioner to a woman on Craigslist - her boyfriend came to pick it up because she works nights. The boyfriend brought a friend - who made this movie which got this review in the New York Times. Everyone was really excited - I got rid of a really heavy a/c and made enough money to pay for my moving van, the boyfriend and the original purchaser got an air conditioner and the friend only had to put down his phone from all of the jumping up and down for about 2 minutes to carry the thing. I know CL is risky and all - it's so trust-based, and so much can go so wrong, but when it works - as it also did earlier this week when I bought two tickets from two different people 5 hours apart (both in public places, Mom) and everyone was positively jolly - after just enough suspense to make it interesting. Thanks, Craigslist.

Keep It Down

2010-05-30T00:38:00.000-04:00

I've been away. It's been because of work: there was not enough, now there is far too much. And it's all writing. So my hands hurt.

Right now, however, a more important matter: my neighbors' outdoor music choices.

Last weekend:

Around 10 in the morning, someone down the block started blasting came-out-of-the-box-stale (sorry, but it's true) slow jams of the late 90s, early 00s. And apparently remixing it with a chainsaw. Someone else was not cool with that and shouted, several times "KEEP IT DOWN." Unclear: whether that was about the music or the saw. But in any case, it was soon drowned out. . .

By the longest party ever. Next door. If anyone doubted that wood, 60s/70s-vintage speakers could still annoy the neighbors, rest assured: not only possible, but really REALLY possible. 11 am until at least 3 (I gave up at 10:30. My roommate, whose window faces directly over the speakers, had to put a pillow over his head. I doubt this made much difference. The music was a range of "really? are they really playing the hustle?" And Rappers Delight. And at least people were being yelled at to dance. So the DJ was invested. And that's something.

Then today: neighbors across the alley. I always thought they seemed nice - and they have little kids and dogs and apart from little kid/dog noises, don't usually make their presence well-known. Until, of course, today. When they played jangly guitars and screeching men for 10 hours. As a result, I can say, with utter certainty: I am not a fan of Led Zeppelin. Or how, even as you wind down to the intense conversation over candlelight portion of the evening, you want to hear "More Than a Feeling?" OK. Maybe you do. But I don't.

And I am now the grouchy old lady who hates fun. You're welcome, neighbors.

Very Clever

2010-04-22T17:16:00.000-04:00

Today I was in line at Trader Joe's, and more or less immediately after joining the line, I was asked by the woman ahead of me if I would mind if she went and picked up something she had forgotten. "Sure," I said, thinking she's be right back. But then she didn't come back fora solid 5 minutes - and a substantial shuffle along the line. When she same back, she had 3 new items -thereby doubling her collection of snacks - and a whole lot less line to wait in. It is hard to believe these things were completely coincidental - if it turns out otherwise, I'm intrigued - does she doe this often? Does it always work? Is she more forgetful or hate the line more?

A Conspiracy Theory

2010-04-05T10:43:00.000-04:00

It seems awfully convenient that electronics - phones and ipods, and now, even more harrowingly, Kindles and iPads, should become so prevalent at the same time as water bottles (reusable and otherwise). I'm not sure if this is a conspiracy meant to get us to replace the electronics more often, to perpetually shop for bags that will hold everything, not look ridiculous, and still keep the liquids and the digital media apart, or if the tendency of reusable bottles to open themselves and leak all over everything is somehow orchestrated by the ghosts of the newspaper, record and rotary phone industries and the thriving, destructive spirit of the bottled water industry. My guess is that the last one is the most powerful, so probably the most responsible. But who's to say, really?

Smashing Properly

2010-03-30T21:50:00.000-04:00

Good job, Hadron Collider. The first day of both of our grownup careers was supposed to coincide in early September 2008 - my last day of my internship in Geneva- which was going to be my last internship ever, and your first day of, well, smashing - and I've always felt some sense of loyalty to you. From time to time, I've even wondered if your failure to get smashing then was some kind of foreboding for the gigantic economic collapse that more or less happened around the same time By the time I got to London a week later, Lehman's offices were being vacated and my debit card hilariously didn't belong to the same bank anymore, the stock market hit the skids, etc. etc. - and a year and a half later, I still don't have a full-time gig, though the economy as a whole seems to be doing a little better. The collider, meanwhile, hit a rough patch too - instead of creating a black hole that could swallow Switzerland, it just didn't do so well on the atom-smashing. So I feel like this is a good sign. As long as that black hole isn't on the way.

The Cold Snap And The Burning Question

2010-03-27T00:19:00.000-04:00

So the temperature dropped 20 degrees overnight. Which was awesome enough on its own (I am supremely pleased with having spent some of the end of that outside) - a quality which doubled when it became clear, around late afternoon, that the heat wasn't working. I should point out that there are many issues with my apartment: the building is mildly creepily under-occupied, the rent checks go to an address that may not exist, the never-read gas meter, the fact that whole place was supposedly renovated in 1998, but the plumbing dates back to - according to the super (when he came to fix my leaky bathtub faucet after 7 or 8 calls to the office) - at least 40 years. Maybe 60. Because of course it does. Then there was the whole half-power out. It turned out not to be any of our fault, but the responsibility of the electric company, but to fix it, the electric company needed basement access - something which didn't go so well . . .etc. We have many theories for why things seem so fishy (beyond the usual NY fishiness - it's really all about the un-rented apartments) - maybe the building is in foreclosure, maybe its some kind of drug front, maybe the landlord is just bad at the job. . .

So when it became apparent that the heat had gone off, it was really lucky that someone was looking at an apartment upstairs - it meant that the landlord was in the building - after establishing that the thermostat was, in fact, on and the heaters were in fact cold, he said he'd get it fixed and promptly disappeared. When I went to dinner three hours later, it was still 63 degrees and there was no sign of help - not terribly surprising.

But then I came home from dinner (after facing off with an SUV from Texas that decided to take the sidewalk as its own) and found the super and the landlord standing in the main hallway, smoking what smelled like Black & Milds but looked like regular cigarettes (this may have something to do with the new ban on flavored cigarettes but I'm not exactly sure what that would be. Regardless, it made the whole stupid building smell like the basement tunnels we had to run through during high school gym class) and apparently rather pissed that I hadn't picked up the phone the three times they had called me while I was facing down the SUV.

So then I showed the super how my thermostat was on and the heaters were still cold (presumably, this was a very important FIRST step to getting the boiler checked). The super said he'd be 10 minutes. So the landlord and I stood in the hallway and talked for 25. I learned the following information: he is working on a screenplay about rental properties, he has been to Romania for business, the apartment-seeker from earlier in the evening wanted the space to work on his motorcycles, so the landlord turned him down, the landlord has many business dealings - including as a contractor (maybe also an owner?) on properties in all boroughs except Staten Island . . . and a garbage company, possibly in the Bronx. He once worked for a rich woman who saw cracks in the ceiling that weren't there and kept a dagger on her bed for show. The garbage company makes me wonder a little, the last one is um a little strange, not renting to motorcycles - I'm ok with that. The screenplay sounded pretty good.

So it's been an educational evening. My heaters are making noise. They may or may not be warming up the apartment enough to lure the resident mouse into one of the 6 traps I have set up (2 are kill traps - I really wish he would go for the others), but they at least make it SEEM like something is happening. And I want to know as little as possible about the outer borough garbage business.

Too Much TV?

2010-03-24T00:09:00.001-04:00

I watched 5 minutes of The View today. It made me wish I had a day job - almost as much as the anti-pot PSA masquerading as a soap opera made me wish the same when I accidentally watched half an hour at the doctor's office (I'd like to think there's a special soap opera channel for health-related themes that doctors offices can tune in to, much like the truly atrocious CNN Health channel I caught on my last, less successful health care outing, but I don't think this is the case).

But then there was the signing ceremony - which I delayed a trip to the laundromat for - and Biden was so very right: big fucking deal. Also: a nice break from the rest of the noise. I liked the part where Obama said it was improbable. That's an element that doesn't get talked about enough - pretty much everything I believe in, political change-wise especially - is improbable. Not impossible, but certainly not the most obvious next step, even when it seems so obvious.

So then there was a break and I did some useful things and didn't even stick around the laundromat long enough to watch the telenovela that was playing there, and didn't watch tv again until my roommate put on American Idol - which I haven't watched a full episode of ever (including tonight - I got there about halfway through), and then Lost which I have watched even less of. Apparently the premise is more complicated? In any case, my roommate filled me in on the fact - though not necessarily the substance - of the philosophy - apparently much of the Enligthenment is represented (Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau if I recall correctly) - not my favorites or exactly the focus of the gender/postcolonial/generally late 20th century stuff that has made up most of my education, but, you know, not nothing.. Then we switched to RuPaul's Drag Race, which most obviously gets into gender performativity. And so many more possibilities opened up. This made me think that maybe TV isn't so bad for you after all. Even though I really hope that I get to do something more with my days and remove all temptation to reduce both philosophy and television in the way that I'm starting to think I might start - and blog - without the outdoor space - or even south-facing windows - I need to start growing beets in my apartment (and blog about). And, admittedly, I more or less have two degrees in the politics of representation, so the temptation is always there, but today. Look Out. The gender and The Wire speech I've been working on for 2 years might show up. And never. go. away.

Anyway - at least I know that making my own cheese is higher on the to-do list. And yay progress on healthcare. I only hope the waiting room viewing choices improve as coverage does.

Funderemployment in the Naanery

2010-03-05T19:24:00.000-05:00

I made naan on Wednesday afternoon. I should have predicted that frying bread in butter for 45 minutes would eventually set off the smoke alarm. I didn't do the former, so the latter happened. At least I know it works. The belated peace of mind that it provided was almost worth it after I spent the early part of the week overloading the few sockets that worked when half of our power inexplicably went out on Saturday night and didn't return until after my roommate and I tried to get the the landlord and the electric company to work together to solve our problem (the people who worked for the electric company were unfailingly nice, even the ones who weren't particularly helpful - if the same were true of the landlord, many things would be different) - i.e. Monday afternoon at about 4:30.

So the naan turned out all right for a first attempt. I know because I had 4 pieces right then - of varying textures (rolling too thin: bad idea) but generally good flavor (what with the frying in butter, this may not have been much of a feat).Then I went to a gay bar for cucumber martinis, followed by a fancy salad (and half a roll, which was a surprisingly good roll with truly bad timing) - and another bar for a talent show hosted by a drag queen - where the contestents included one other drag queen actually performed - and she was lip synching (to a bit from Dreamgirls); a woman with fun shoes sang, incongruously, "Hallelujah" and some theater kids won for singing a song I really should know, but don't (thanks, childhood choices, for never including Little Shop of Horrors or the fact that it was a musical). My roommate, who goes more often, called it a C+/B- on the whole - at least in part because the regular hostess was in Australia. But I definitely liked the whole thing - and if I were one to sing in public, I think I'd probably debut there - where the audience claps for everyone - but claps MORE for their favorite.

If more days are like Wednesday, I might not look so hard for a new job. Also: if I got to stand an awkward 5 feet from Spike Lee and Ethan Hawke while eating free ravioli and drinking free wine - which I did on Tuesday after a friend won tickets to the Brooklyn's Finest premiere, I might be even more ok with the whole thing even if I would have preferred to be an awkward 5 feet from Don Cheadle or Michael K. Williams (Omar on The Wire)

On the other hand, if more are like yesterday, which started with a panel discussion on gender and the response to the economic crisis and postconflict situations - a topic which should be compelling (for those of us who already care about gender and macroeconomic policy, at least) - was, instead, about as interesting as watching people talk about paint drying. Except for the part where a professor who was introduced as "the face of gender-responsive budgeting" talked about received wisdom being a not so great thing and was all "yay deficit spending!" which made me and the small part of my heart that understands enough of this to be a bit of a neo-Keynesian - leap. Later, I tried to go to a talk I was really interested in - which was cancelled. Then tried to make a doctor's appointment, was told to show up in 45 minutes (because obviously that's normal for dealing with new patients) only to have my insurance claim no knowledge of me while an old man hit me with a cane to assure me that the staff of the doctor's office were keeping him alive and CNN medical stories played on a blaring loop on a tv in the waiting room. That was not how I would like the rest of this period to proceed. Even if I did get an uncrowded walk across the bridge in the middle. And a tour of downtown Brooklyn (do we REALLY need so many condos? I heard earlier in the day that there's been a bit of an economic crisis, and I'm pretty sure it's true. . . )

A Walk in the Park

2010-02-27T22:56:00.001-05:00

So there was this snowstorm. It started Thursday night. I was wearing a skirt with heeled boots for work- an outfit chosen not taking the impending weather as seriously as the meeting/event combo scheduled for the afternoon. Much later, I found myself running on the balls of my feet to avoid sinking (I'm not going to claim this decision was made in the most lucid of states, but I'm also not going to say I wouldn't do it again). However, my mode of transport made it to a dry place Thursday night and were usable again by midday Friday (not that I was going to make that mistake again). Wearing more sensible hiking boots, I set out for Prospect Park on Friday afternoon and discovered that these cars in Park Slope: not as lucky as my heels: totally sunk. And next to a pretty clear sidewalk, even. I only hope their owners knew where they parked them pre-snow - or aren't the type to freak out about losing track of their cars in the snow (I'm guessing both? clearly, these were not urgently needed).

Then there was Prospect Park. Which was full of more intentional snow figures/structures. I'm a big fan of the snowman in the foreground (so welcoming) and the large crowd at work on what I can only imagine was some kind of snow Burj Brooklyn in the background. Progress on that structure proceeded quickly:

I'm pretty sure this is it at full height. And about 15 minutes later. In the meantime, the rest of the park looked like this (and that's a punk rock snowman, not a Statue of Liberty snowman . . . obviously):

And this kid is really lucked out on the dad front- although since this was not, by any means, the only example of a parent-propelled sled, I wonder if parent-harnesses are now widely available, or if the savvy parents of South Brooklyn have figured out a way of manipulating umm . . . bungee harnesses into a more practical tool for kid/hamstring management.

They Say Bread is Life?

2010-02-21T23:28:00.000-05:00

I went to a concert the other night with a large-ish group, so naturally the first part of the conversation was about all of the weddings that everyone is going to this spring. I was a little late (naturally), so I missed the beginning of the conversation - and I'm not going to any (that I know of), so I didn't have anything to throw in, and instead stood there rather dumbly with nothing but the swift passage of days and a lack of plane tickets to think about. And the thoughts went like this this: a coworker has had an interesting potential engagement situation in recent weeks, so it's not like the topic has been far away - but with one notable exception, all of the work elders said more or less "what's the rush?" (The notable exception said, precisely: "tick tock.") just in a different way, and to a different conclusion - the kind that inspires the old "are we really old enough to be having this conversation?" thought.
Today I learned that a college friend (who is, granted, a couple of years older than I) is running for elected office - and I'm pretty sure he is old enough for that. Which is a rather odder - and much more specific - class, educational background, etc. etc. - measure for age and maturity. And he's not pulling a Kucinich and running for mayor or anything - it's a totally reasonable office, so I feel like it's a kind of exciting milestone in the trek toward adulthood that so many people around me seem to be on.

While I was reading the announcement of the candidacy, I was in the middle of making pita - using the dough hook attachment on my mixer for the first time ever - and had just committed to the purchase of a new big bag of flour. The pita turned out well - and I have every confidence that the flour, the dough hook and I will have a happy, long-ish-term relationship, free of fund-raising calls but very heavy on the gluten. Are these all leading to the same place? Of course not. Bread, as it turns out, is an unsatisfying measure of maturity or claims on adulthood. But it isn't nothing.

Don't Chase Me - I'm Full of Chocolate

2010-02-18T22:49:00.000-05:00

With the help of Mark Bittman, my new (half price! thanks Macy's/federal government/ Lincoln and Washington parents) double-boiler, a slightly less than accurate (i.e. the numbers didn't quite go low enough) candy thermometer, a lot of chopped chocolate, and some friends, I ventured into the no longer intimidating world of chocolate-dipping on Sunday. And have been snacking on chocolate covered everything ever since. So now, obviously, time for the proselytizing:

I took a great deal of this stuff to work this week, and have concluded, based on very unscientific survey results: candy thermometers are the kind of thing that make baking/sweet-making intimidating. They seem to suggest that there is a level of precision that you'll have to plan ahead for and not be able to go back on once the mistakes are made. But the truth is: this one - not so much. Getting to the right temperature is easier than it first appears, the temperature is not especially hot for a stovetop, and changing the temperature is pretty easy if you stray (more heat or more chocolate/stirring), and disaster is something you more or less have to seek out to achieve. It can be a little messy, but stovetops are bound to acquire their share of splatter in normal life, and isn't it nice to mix that congealed tomato sauce with dessert every once in a while?

Also: once you hit the 91ish degree groove, it's rather relaxing. Meditative, even. But in a way that mixes with sparkling wine in non-disastrous ways. Which, naturally, makes you equally insightful on matters of the heart/human condition, but wittier (at least in your own mind). This can be very useful on certain occasions.

I'm Not Sure If This Is Ironic

2010-02-11T10:16:00.000-05:00

But I spent two days walking around, proclaiming that I was going to spend a paycheck - when it came - entirely on perfume. It was going to be a pretty big paycheck, so this would not be all together responsible, but seemed appropriate given the circumstances that surrounded the check - frivolity and irresponsibility and smelling nice seemed like things I could really use.

So then the check came, and I promptly - and literally - threw it away. I have no idea how I managed to do this - other than that I was throwing away envelopes that had once held other checks and bank statements and such enclosed, and somehow conflated the container with the contents? Or I have a stronger, more subconscious, need to do something irresponsible and that was pretty much the most irresponsible thing I could ever do. Much worse than the perfume. And it smells much worse.

Luckily, I figured this out before it was too late, and the check is now sitting somewhere where it can be deposited from. It managed to avoid getting egged or covered in butter - even though I was baking cookies at the time, but that isn't to say that it smells nice. So, once work is done, I think I'm going to take a nice long trip to ohhhhh. . . Barneys? Bergdorf? I don't even know how I would go about this.

Serenity Now/Yoga Class Is Not For Pushing

2010-02-07T23:22:00.000-05:00

I've had a rough few days - mostly work-wise, but I have also been pushed toward a door to yoga class and cut in line for pilates. This feels pretty antithetical to the spirit of the thing - I'm not all power of the goddess blah blah blah, but it's hard to listen to my breathe when the car alarm of unnecessary pushiness is blaring so loud.

Also: a confused and perhaps off-balance (non-pigeon) bird flew into my chest on Thursday. I'm still not sure quite what to do with that.

Life Lessons

2010-02-01T23:50:00.000-05:00

You can't fight city hall, There is no such thing as a free lunch, politicians, whores and ugly buildings all get respectable if they last long enough, and your "self-cleaning" oven does not think about the quality of life it is imposing on you, your roommate, or, especially your parakeet. Instead, it will make everyone a little woozy for 4 and a half hours. On the first evening of February, there is pretty much no way to pretend that this is the soundtrack/general lightheadedness that you were looking for. Supplementing it with wine may help a little, but who are we kidding: it's going to be unpleasant. The end result, meanwhile, should be a really clean oven. Even if your moderate worrier of a roommate decides to turn the damn thing off after 3.5 hours instead of 4.5 so that she can go to sleep without fear of an oven explosion.

There Are Many Musicians in This Fine Bureau

2010-01-31T00:01:00.001-05:00

I won concert tickets today - to Rain Machine, a concert I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to go to, seeing as how it hasn't been above 20 degrees in 3 days and, after getting a late start on the Lower East Side last night and an even later end, I've been barely alert all day. Also, I admit, I wasn't entirely sold on the gig - I haven't listened to much of the music - or more aptly, connected with it to the point of many consecutive repeat plays as I did to this TV on the Radio side project (which is part of a pretty good movie so "side project" might be broader here than in other musical endeavors. ps., if anyone can find this for me without having to buy the whole album, I might bake you a cake, pps., as a kid, the Neil Young version merged with this James Taylor song in my head, and I'm quite sure I knew all of the words to both. Later I studied gender and labor in grad school - I'm not going to say this was a total coincidence) or anything from the whole band's Dear Science.

So I had a little bit of a Marxian dilemma - in the Groucho sense. To go or not to go? Did I want to be part of this group of die-hards? This isn't the midwest - I'm sure many stayed home. But, on the other hand, it was also part of a club that I think I like being part of: Brooklyn - both because it was in the borough and because it was part of a BK-celebratory (and oh yes, the announcer at the theater addressed us as "BK") concert series at BAM.

Eventually, when it became clear that I was going to get little work done at home, as I could not feel my fingertips (thanks, shady BK landlord and your window choices), and a growing suspicion that it would be bad contest karma to skip it, I went.

First I had to go the wrong way to the wrong hall at BAM. Turns out, if you're going to the auxiliary building, you should take Nevins, not Third Ave, and the "opera house" is really the main buildling anyway. In which case you probably should take Third Ave.

So I had learned (or relearned) some important geography lessons before I got there. BK lessons, even.

With the aid of an usher, who scolded me for sitting down too soon (I thought I was following her flashlight directions at about Row M - I was mistaken, she came back for me), I, arrived, humbled, at my seat - a much better one than any ticket I have actually paid for for a concert in my life (except maybe when my brother and I - and about 20 other people - saw P-Funk in my college auditorium). Unfortunately, it meant displacing a grouchy 40ish woman to the other side of the aisle. I'm not sure where she was really assigned to sit, since she seemed to be with a bunch of people in a bunch of places. At the break between sets, proceeded to try to include her childless, job-hunting (and legitimately seated next to me - which meant the conversation had to take place over my head) friend in her Princeton-and-my-eccentric-husband-Igor-and-my-amazing-child narrative by asking the friend about where she thought she would be in the coming weeks: "I don't know - I could be there, I could be here, or none of these jobs could work out . . ." - an all too familiar sentence,

and about her nephew:"he must be three and a half by now?" the reply: "No, he's 6." This child, apparently, likes to cheat at all games, so his aunt doesn't let him win, though her friend thinks that that's what you should do with children.

Later she (the displaced squatter in my seat) revealed that her own child was on video learning to poop. I don't think she was kidding. She also shared that old eccentric Igor doesn't like to wear pants.

So - still not totally sold on the club that would have me as a member - I wonder if the friend was having a similar dilemma with parenthood/academia/New Jersey, since she left about 20 minutes into the headliners' set. I may have just seen my future, but I'm not sure. I, for one, decided that, poop tapes and pantsless professors aside, it was at least nice to be out of the cold and also nice that it was a sitting concert. Though, it dawned on me, I would not be able to read during the actual music.

Once the headliners started, however, I forgot about the reading I would have liked to be doing. The music was all right - like TVOTR, but without the same depth of field. However, given the chance, I would probably hang out with the deeper part of Kyp Malone's register for hours. Also, after about 2 minutes of his performance - and knee-bendy dancing, I really really wanted to like the whole thing. Which only became more true when he started talking - he seemed like a nice guy - who referred to Brooklyn a "bureau," and I think it might have been because he was nervous - (he later almost admitted to said nervousness about BAM, then didn't quite but said he was especially excited - which might be kind of the same thing?). A couple of songs in, he declared that "we" reached "the point in the concert where I tell you I'm looking for an apartment," and asked for leads on point, "a spacious apartment in a safe neighborhood." Later, he thanked the audience for showing up and coming out in the cold, "because it would be kind of weird for me to be doing this thing now, in this place, without you all here." Which made me want to take back every reluctant thought I had had. And also to tell him about the multiple open units in my building.

So I guess I'm ok with being in this club after all - both the Brooklyn club and the concert in the cold club . . . and, for that matter, maybe the contest winner club.

Deep Thoughts in The Shallow End

2010-01-28T22:55:00.000-05:00

My friend Kenisha is a first-year associate at a law firm in DC. She dislikes the new show about people in her situation immensely. After about 15 minutes of the pilot, so do I. It isn't just the utter lack of realism that she finds objectionable (i.e. a law firm where people are either just starting or partners), but also the terrible writing, flimsy characters and odd repeats of "scary boss" classifications from Grey's Anatomy. For the record, the scary boss here will never live up to Bailey.

So anyway, we're working on a TV version of nonprofit work. We decided that the hour on ABC would just not fly - way too much room for error - but maybe a cross between the Office and 30 Rock, with a bit of idealism, a whole lot of eccentricity, and maybe a little kickball.

I think we've decided it should be in DC (hence the kickball - and also maybe why I don't live in DC anymore) - she keeps pointing out that a show about a nonprofit would open up to a whole diverse range of characters. I like this idea, and it's making me think about how much of a divide there is in the real world between people who work in liberal advocacy or international NGOs (which are the kinds of nonprofits I've always worked for) because they care about an issue and people who somehow land there - either because they know someone or they're umm good with money or computers, cool with the cause, and not interested in making the big bucks. Or something like that. In any case. It would also be nice to have something to watch that treated liberals as excessively earnest or boring. Plus, it might spiff up the DC dress code a little. . .

Team CoCo

2010-01-27T01:22:00.000-05:00

This is late, but I'm watching the last Tonight show with Conan O'Brien. I like where he says young people shouldn't be cynical; should work hard and be kind. I really want to believe him because it seems like good advice. Also: having a farewell show after 7 months is exactly the kind of nostalgic escapade that gets me - a little angry, a little nostalgic, a little unfinished. Except for Freebird, I'm cool with all of that. And I think short projects that end unexpectedly or on a bitter note should have more such events - rituals, even. Maybe without getting Tom Hanks drunk, but, you know, something like that would be cathartic.

Reasonable Worries and The Bees

2010-01-26T11:05:00.000-05:00

I went to California last weekend (maybe more on that later). It rained a lot, and I spent more time in cars than I have in a long time, leading me to the conclusion: I'm a little afraid of cars. I think I might need to relearn how to ride in them. I'm ok as a driver . . . more or less . . . but as a freeway passenger: mildly terrified all the time. This may have had something to do with the rain and many opportunities for hydroplaning, and it may just be because I no longer live in California, so am using cars as a safe repository for other anxieties.

Apart from riding in cars, I saw many things that had to do with bees. First, the Museum of Jurassic technology used bees to raise questions about truth and authority and myths (you'll have to go there, I don't want to explain it too much, it'll ruin it for you). Then there was the above sign - on a path in Santa Barbara. It was the first warning I've ever seen regarding the mere presence of bees - I always assume that they are a possibility until proven otherwise. But I wonder if, say, I had worse allergies, this would be a bit more troubling. As it was: kind of a heads up: nothing too urgent, but, you know, take it seriously because it's attached to caution tape.As warnings go: not bad.

Not So Fast

2010-01-11T12:54:00.000-05:00

I fedexed my computer off to dell-land (texas?) today. I'm not entirely confident it will come back, or that, if it does, it will recover from its amnesia regarding the AC adapter. If it were a person, I would swear it was faking - amnesia isn't usually intermittent. But it isn't a person. Even though it sure feels that way today. I fear I am much too attached - the sending away for repairs was something I really wanted to avoid, even though I now have free use of my relatively functional - and admittedly much lighter - work computer, my relationship is really with the red Dell that saved freelancing round one from my perpetually grouchy HP after that computer decided to start shutting itself down on a variety of not very nice whims. It has all of my music, my podcast updates, and Word 2007 or whatever the most recent version is - it took some getting used to, but it makes the work computer's 2003 version look both frumpy and inefficient (paste text and then change font - ugh. so much more work for the media summarizer!), and I feel bound to spend the next few days in a perpetual recreation of going through airport security in hiking boots - which I did on my last trip home, after giving up on my snazzy velcro all-purpose shoes for good thanks to the gigantic holes over the pinkie toes/outer feet, or, more precisely, being instructed to give up on those shoes by my mother.

Tonics and Dance Cures

2010-01-10T23:14:00.000-05:00

From about Thursday evening/early Friday, I felt a terrible terrible cold coming on - sore/tight throat, exhaustion, grouchiness. . . and, looking ahead to a full weekend of work, I was not thrilled. But then, after doing all of the necessary anxiety dance, and, I thought, the trying to get the work to come dance, it didn't. So I went out and drank whiskey with Beth, emergen-c by myself, and ate a whole bunch of roasted garlic cloves - not because I was trying to avoid getting sick, but because roasted garlic is delicious, easy to make, and smells nice. Also, I've been on a little homemade pizza kick lately, and it's a really easy topping.

Anyway.

I woke up on Saturday, felt worse, and suspected that my plans to go to a birthday potluck were doomed. But I had already made a cake, and wanted to try a second recipe - the friend whose birthday it was has some food limitations, and the challenge was exciting. So I did. And I went to the party - which began at a regular dinner hour, not a fancy New York dinner hour, and I stayed much longer than planned, drank a pisco sour, danced in my wool socks, and ate a great deal of dessert (the first cake was a little dry). And then I walked home 25 minutes in the cold. And woke up feeling . . . a bit better. Today, I've had more garlic, some quality sitting around at home time, and a lot of wondering if I've stumbled onto some mysterious cold cure . . . or at least delay . . . in this particular combination of booze, vitamins, and garlic.

Clearly, this is the most reasonable explanation.

Resolutions - Late, Yes, But Better Now Than Not?

2010-01-09T16:40:00.000-05:00

Some of these are directly blog-related, some are not, but they all should be written somewhere.

a) Be on time more. Clearly, I've failed at this one already where resolving goes, though I met my friend Beth for drinks last night, and, for the 3rd time in as many months, managed to beat her to the bar by about 5 minutes - 2 minutes early. And yes, I was counting. I think this would also be good at work. Especially the office, though making it pre-9 to do work at the coffee shop makes me feel like a much better adult than showing up at the 9:45 rush. It also makes finding a seat easier.

b) Appreciate things when they work - particularly computer-related things. Often, these things do not work so well (like a certain website blog that will go unnamed), or they suddenly stop working (like my ac adapter, which has been replaced - leaving me free to work on battery power alone, untethered from wall outlets for up to 3 hours at a time). Interpersonal relationships might also fall into this category.

c) Blog more regularly, about more stuff. I'm thinking about even adding tags and doing more food-feature-y stuff, which would go in a few directions:

1. mid-day dining in the un-neighborhooded corner of midtown where I work 3 days a week (the new tandoori restaurant around the corner from my office recently added dosas, I think it may be adding some not necessarily welcome competition for the mediterranean deli next door - intrigue surely abounds).

2. expectations and execution - I have some ideas for experiments in staple-making - making my own cheese, yogurt, maybe even some croissants - not because I want to do that on the regular, but because I think it would be a good challenge - and could help me figure out more about reasonable expectations for homemade things of all kinds - perhaps resolving a little bit of the tension between ambitious plans and poor execution - for halloween costumes, multi-course meals, home repairs and . . . umm . . . graduate school . . . that has led to much mess-making in the past. And I think it would be helpful for resolution b).

3. Grocery shopping. New York lacks a Borough Market. I have accepted this and moved on. However, it also has a lot of complicated food issues. And I went shopping for molasses in the West Village the other day because I needed molasses and I had time to kill before book club.

d) Participate in my book club. I've been once. I should go more. This also means reading more books that aren't about demand-generation for reproductive health services. I suspect this is a good thing, since everything I read in my field is starting to look the same, which is not a good thing.

e) Write more down in general. I'm not ready to go back to journaling, but putting more on paper would be a good idea.

f) Have a life. I'm working on this, but I think I might need to get a regular job first. A regular schedule would mean I can make plans in many areas that are not work. This would be good. At least I think it would. It would be different, anyway. Of course, I have relatively little say in this matter, but I'm working on it.

g) Take the GRE. I don't want to face GRE math again, but I feel it must be done.

Hold On

2010-01-05T23:59:00.000-05:00

As an update - an hour and a half, and a rather uncomfortably intimate handing over of control of my computer to tech support later, I seem to be on my way to a new adapter. High five. It's a good thing I had my book, and the Egyptian winters in the '50s imagery to get me through. Because oh boy did I need that distraction.

Letting someone else run your computer while you can see them mistyping URLs and they can see how messy your computer life is - like inviting a stranger in to help find something I've lost to my perpetually messy room. Sure, the contents of the detritus don't matter much, and there's nothing REALLY embarrassing, beyond 10 years worth of International Family Planning Perspectives or, but I wasn't really ready to share that, guy. And I don't know if you were ready to see it. Actually - I want to think that he kind of did - that seeing wallpaper photos or the weather in Brooklyn (thanks, automatic icon that I actually kind of like), or the occasional (ok, probably frequent) potentially embarrassing link from the drop-down gives him fodder to make up back stories about the people whose BIOS he updates and then spend half an hour breathing into the phone and doing dishes whilst on hold or in some not really on hold but kind of on hold purgatory (I could have started talking and he would have heard me but I couldn't hear him), then being mildly indignant about all of the things that they tried fixing on their own, following the online instructions, but he now has to do again anyway.

I certainly had a story for him -a little bit of a hothead and a smooth talker elsewhere, and it's hard for him to play by the tech support rules of decorum (which are bullshit anyway - so stilted, so formal, so many thank yous) when he knows he could fix everything tech-wise and smooth things over with the petulant customer in no time, he also probably a decent but underappreciated sense of humor (there were phrases he seemed to draw out in a way that suggested he likes language - which I think is pretty important to being funny). I doubt he likes his boss much.

support dot dell dot com

2010-01-05T22:34:00.000-05:00

I'm on hold with tech support, as my recent error message claiming that my computer doesn't recognize the ac adaptor it came with has escalated into the power not always flowing. This is bad. I've had a chirpy woman tell me maybe 400 times that I may have to wait more than 10 minutes, I can also visit the website for tech support, and, crucially, "you may think it's a simply problem" but many problems can be fixed by just restarting the computer. And she seems to think Windows 7 is trouble, since there's a place you can go to deal with your missing installation discs, etc., etc. Wireless is also bad news.

I've tried the online stuff - I got a message saying I should call. I feel a little trapped. But also rather relieved that I don't rely on my computer as my sole means of contact with the outside world anymore (when the error message first appeared, my phone was lost).

And, between the book I'm rereading - which is partly about growing up in Egypt in the '50s, the multiple news stories I've stumbled onto on the country, an acquaintances pictures of Sinai, and the promo for something about the pharaoh's boat that was on PBS when I walked in the door tonight . . . and the freezing freezing cold, I'm starting to wonder if I should go back. Not that customer service would be awesome there.

Unseasonable Greeting

2010-01-03T16:43:00.000-05:00

I got an extended - and, I must say, rather overdone - catcall today - while bundled up to the point where I was wearing perhaps 4 layers and maybe an inch of my face was showing. It was deeply, deeply disconcerting. I wonder if the gentleman responsible was feeling the strain of winter on his whistling and female-body related commenting skills - perhaps a way of expressing his longing for a summer that, in the midst of a 40 mph wind and probably 5 degree wind chill, seems nearly hopelessly far? In any case, I was pleased to discover that my ability to act like I don't notice such comments is still very much intact, despite the element of surprise.

09ers No More, Shoulder to the Wheel?

2009-12-31T15:30:00.001-05:00

I remember New Years, 1999 like it was not so much yesterday, but maybe a couple of days ago. I was a junior in high school, and worked at a movie theater then - I'm pretty sure I worked a double shift that day, and also scored some big tips - maybe a couple of fivers (which were really big tips for concession stand attendance), and went home, exhausted. I think I watched about 10 minutes of Times Square before falling asleep. It was not an especially thrilling way to start a decade.

Today, I'm working again, but from home, and on a paper about The War on Terror - which, of course, would have seemed an impossibility in 1999. I wrote the paper for my gender theory class in grad school - almost 2 years ago. It's going to be published in March in an obscure British women's studies journal and is by far the best thing I wrote in grad school (which isn't saying much - I wrote a total of 4 papers in grad school), but, reading it today, it also feels pretty dated - sure, discourse isn't everything, and the actual conflicts and their human toll haven't exactly turned around. But, compared to where we were even 2 years ago - some really important things have changed - some things that, in 1999, were inconceivable then seemed, by early 2008, intractable, if wrong-headed, realities, and, by late 2009, were, as the kids said in the 90s, played out.

So there's that.

Personally, of course, the decade was a lot bigger - I was 17 in 1999, I'm 27 now. I went to college (the right one), I worked in offices, I went to grad school (probably not the right one), I moved about 700 times, I spilled a lot of wine on myself, I learned to make soup and poach eggs without cups, I did not learn how to keep my room clean, deal with authority, manage my time make a relationship work or figure out what I want to be when I grow up (though I came close at least once), I did learn some Arabic - then forgot most of it, and that it takes at least a year to feel at home anywhere - then forgot that too, I listened to the Garden State soundtrack and Norah Jones' first album many many times - on purpose in 2003 or 2004, then, without planning for it, continued to hear them in coffee shops at at least 1/3 of the coffee shops where I spent a lot of time trying to write from 2006 on, and I eavesdropped, unrepetently, in - let's round it off to say, 3 languages (English, Spanish, 1/2 Arabic, 1/2 French -though I'm not sure if it counts as eavesdropping if you're only absorbing the subject of the discussion) - in many such establishments.

So there's that too.

It feels like it was a lot of work, but because 1999 still feels so close, I'm not sure if that's really true. In any case, I know now, more than I did then, that there is much much more to do. But I think I'm going to try to take the night off.

The Bulldog Delay

2009-12-23T19:19:00.000-05:00

When I checked my flight home last night, it was set to be an hour and a half late - after delays other people I know were experiencing (2 days to indefinite), I knew I was fairly lucky, but after the not enough sleep/too much work combo that has made up my last month, it wasn't exactly encouraging. So I leisurely made my way to Newark from Penn station, on a mildly delayed (but pre-electric issues, so I guess not so bad), where I made a very smooth - graceful, even - pass through security and in and out of the hiking boots that have proven utterly necessary for scaling wet subway station staircases; failed to buy a slice of pizza (as, after a longer than necessary conversation revealed, the guy who actually makes the pizza hadn't shown up for this shift yet); succeeded in buying something else - but only after not having small enough bills to please the woman at the counter; and bought a newspaper for the first time in probably 4 months. Maybe 45 minutes later, the people at the gate announced that the plane would, in fact, be only an hour late - not the hour and a half previously planned. Very exciting. So when the time came, they herded us on 12 rows at a time.

And then somehow someone was late or something, but it emerged, at the last minute, that there were 2 more people than seats.

Interesting.

And then there was a 5 minute negotiation process to figure out how that had happened.

And at some point an older woman, carrying the bulldog that had been on her lap was persuaded to leave the plane with her husband, while someone else took the disputed seat.

And more time passed. Maybe 10 minutes?

And then we got word from the flight attendant that a passenger had somehow made it down the ramp and up the stairs into the plane without a seat assignment - and that "security is working wiht her." The visual still doesn't completely make sense, but the very nice - and very amused - elderly Eastern European-accented couple next to me and I tried to sort it out (in English to me, half in English, half in a language I don't speak between them), and eventually that it meant she somehow made it onto the tarmac and up the stairs - dog and giant suitcase in hand - so that she wouldn't have to have her ticket checked at the gate.

So we left the gate at the originally rescheduled hour and a half late time, and were in the air45 minutes later. And I got home at 11:30 and I am still tired.

While I wouldn't say that this incident makes me feel secure or confident in the ticket-checking system - it cleary doesn't quite account for the element of surpriset touched with potential mental instability so well - I was warm and fed, and didn't even have to break out the emergency protein bar supply (I now seem to have 4 in my bag), I feel like I got in right between the more boring, infuriating causes of delays (electricity and weather), so at least a little bit lucky.

Passive Recreation Only

2009-12-21T01:44:00.003-05:00

DSCN1785
Originally uploaded by sckaeserblake

I've been staking out these signs, which designate the area around the war ships memorial for "passive recreation only" for weeks. Clearly, the rule does not apply in the snow.Unfortunately, the sign doesn't show up that well here, but trust me - it's funny.

In other news: I'm really glad I didn't have to fly this weekend and got to instead use my lunch break (there are no snow days for consultants who work from home 4/7 of the week), to scramble over/through snowdrifts. Later, after picking up dinner, I crossed paths with a band of carollers, many of whom were carrying paper snowflakes. After my earlier (and 2nd in a month) lost cell phone recovery (I left it in a taxi on Friday) yielded a reunion with my nearly vintage (and soon to be replaced) Nokia, I feel like I did ok by the city's guardian spirits. I know it can't last but it's been a pretty good couple of days, I must say.

The Rhythm Of The Hot Dog

2009-12-10T17:06:00.000-05:00

I just watched two girls - sisters, I think - let's say 9 and 7 (though I have no conficence in my kid age estimation skills) practicing what I'm pretty sure are called hand claps, but are, in fact, a combination of coordinated songs, hand slapping and dance moves - i.e. Rockin Robin, and Down Down Baby. These are things I once knew completely by heart - or thought I did - after watching them ad-lib (and get some scolding from the older relative who was taking care of them), I wonder if that was totally true, or if it was more improvisational than I remember. Now I want to think it was like jazz for little girls, but that probably isn't the case. Anyway - I swear that all the little birdies loved to hear the robin go tweet tweet tweet on jaybird street, but the girls said something else that I didn't catch, and the caretaker swore that it was Chambers street. So who even knows. Although maybe it is Chambers Street in New York?

A Storm A'Brewin

2009-12-09T00:21:00.000-05:00

I started the day with work/laundromat wind sprints in anticipation of a whole lot of freezing rain. As it turned out, the only freezing rain in the rest of the day was metaphorical and work-related, though it was late in the day, the same way the storm that we're all still waiting for was supposed to be. It was, however, chilly. And, based on the gusts in my room, maybe a little breezy. I ran an idea about asking the landlord for storm windows past my ever-tolerant, though moderately unwell roommate at 8 am. My stance was such: there are tracks on the window areas already and, like I said: it's breezy in my room.

His stance was: "what is a storm window?" And therein lies the difference between childhood in Califorina and childhood in Ohio. He mentioned having done some sealing thing last year - this is something I never heard of before I moved to New York. Perhaps because Great Lakes winters are a little more serious than blow-dried plastic? Perhaps because I just never had a reason to question the institution before. But, considering the hassle of the storm window as institution, I find it hard to believe that the less difficult option really works. Though I find it easy to believe that the ritual of storm window installation provides people with winter with some moderate sense of accomplishment, and, thus, a little warmth? In any case, I hope he learned from my brief, barely coherent explanation (it was still early after all.

However, I have no idea if this is something landlords generally provide. I left a message with ours - also mentioning some interesting postmodern art fountain action in our shower, and heard nothing back. This is not suprising.

Fishing, Not Cutting Bait

2009-12-06T21:16:00.000-05:00

It's Sunday night at 9. I'm working. Or trying, anyway, to pull together some coherent sentences and well-cited arguments (thanks, British grad school, for scaring the hell out of me about plagiarism), and really, I don't want to do this anymore tonight - it should have been done long ago, but deadlines have been set and missed, promises made and unfulfilled, articles read, underlined to death, and set aside. I have been paid, and I have felt guilty, because I work for a nonprofit, my process has gone poorly, and my product will not be up to par. I have obsessed, I have distracted myself, I have taken on a third gig, and felt vaguely unfaithful, and I have considered walking away. But here I am. Not finished with the first half - not even close - and I have to put together another half of this draft next week. I am running on chocolate covered espresso beans, spite, and a very small sliver of hope that the work was not for naught and the end report will not be an embarrassment to me or my employers, that it will not end in my being blackballed within the field, or having my claims of being a good researcher or writer dismissed. Even though I am increasingly aware that not all of what has gone wrong is my fault, I am the only one involved who currently lacks employer-paid health insurance. Even though the Senate, too, may be working late on this supposed day of rest to make such things slightly less important, I'm not taking a whole lot of comfort in that.

My mom, claims that other people's relationships end, but, more than once, I have shown up right when men meet their future ex-wives, rather than future ex-girlfriends, and I can't help but think if I'm holding onto this report a little too tightly just in case the next job goes to someone else, nearby, very much like me, but a little less grouchy, a little more compliant, a little more polished, a little more organized. . .

Even if there will be other fish in the sea, or this is, ultimately, just a bad match. In any case, there is work to do, and I need to get back to it. I love it, but it's bringing me down, just a little.

Did We Just Cross A Bridge?

2009-12-05T18:32:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, at the coffee shop, I got a free refill on my coffee from my favorite waiter. On Friday, again, the same - and I spent way less money (though not any less time) then. Perhaps I am enough a regular that I get a few perks? Or perhaps he merely approved of my Thursday lunch date - a college friend. The waiter, whose name I know but can't think of a good alias for, but who may or may not know my name, asked Friday, "was that your significant other?" Alas, he is not, but, we both agreed he was both decent-looking and a "nice boy." Perhaps he finally provided the social capital I needed to get a touch of special treatment? Or maybe it was the conversation about my personal life? Or maybe they just stopped charging for refills.

In any case, I was pretty excited about those $2 that I saved, and I like to think that some blend of Amelie and Cheers-style regular status is on the way. Maybe I'll get a tab? Or entrance into some world of whimsical intrigue? Feeling inspired by the morning's combination of late fall light and early fall temperature, I postponed work to spend the afternoon with the same friend - who heckled a hawk in Ft. Greene Park - and I like to think the bulbs of whimsy have at least been planted in my life generally, but I also know expectations must be managed. In any case, I have always known that these things happen over time, but have never really been a regular among regulars before, and I'm more excited about the possibility than I thought I would be.

Hairography And Snakeskin

2009-11-30T22:27:00.001-05:00

Perhaps I should have been skeptical of the python-print leggings, or the two separate belly dance scarves (one all cymbal, the other all curtain), or the teacher's intense southern accent, but, when it comes to belly dance, ridiculous outfits tend to signify little - sure, they might mean that the wearer is trying to hard, but they might also mean that they've finally FINALLY found that art form that best suits their personal style. In London, after all, I attended truly amazing classes taught by a woman who frequently wore an ensemble involving a great deal of magenta crushed velvet, sometimes with another layer of scarf atop the fishtailing skirt, which was offset by a crushed velvet and, I believe, sequin, sports bra-ish top. And, furthermore, who am I to judge an accent?

But then there was the hair.

20 minutes into an increasingly awkward and hand and foot oriented series of steps, counted in rigid 8's, regardless of the speed or rhythm of the music, there was only hair: sure, I know it's an asset when you're dancing - an asset that I currently lack, but a whole sequence built around whipping your head down and up in a sort of whole body "yes" nod. Because that "really gets the crowd going," - sure, maybe when it's waist-length, but certainly not when it barely goes past your ears. Then you look like you're dodging a line drive or something. I know, because I saw myself in the mirror, and it was not pretty. And, as I learned last week on Glee - hairography is probably asking for trouble (sure, that was about singing, but I think the lesson transfers here).

And that was when I knew that I need to find a good class - maybe even pay for it. The music was there - snake arms and hip drops were there, but the constant exhortations to play to the audience when doing arabesque upon arabesque- really, the most awkward of all steps - all knee-bend, no shmmy, dull arms - fine for a transition, but after 20, no one looks sexy or in control anymore, even if you're all finally moving together and allowed to move on - and the hair, oh, the hair. Of course, none of this is actually the teacher's fault - she made a piece of a very complicated art rather accessible, and maybe introducing the awkward bits at the beginning is a good strategy for equipping dancers for later challenges to their grace; and she sees it as something you perform in front of people, so people-pleasing was a big part of the act - and I have a feeling the reasons I like it (i.e. community, posture, maybe a little bit of physicality to offset all of the time that my movement is limited to typing) aren't hers. Or maybe they are, but she keeps them to herself? In any case, time to think about investing in a different teaching style, with or without the snakeskin.

I Had A Whole Thing About Newark

2009-11-29T23:05:00.001-05:00

But never got that far (though I did get to Newark - and beyond - and back). Though I have been taking mental notes over the last few days -

I had a short diatribe about premium seating on airplanes, and how I suspect that letting people on through the "elite access" side of the velvet rope ultimately slows everyone down - in addition to making class distinctions wholly unnecessarily - which might say something about class in a more general sense, but who's to say?

Back in town, with one day to get things together on the life front before the work one starts going crazy again, (actually, it turned out, less than a day), I did what laundry I had left from the load I took home, went running in the park, bought groceries, and trashbags (where does Key Food hide their trashbags? plain sight, no doubt, but it took me visiting 3 stores to find them), bought lavender/grey/pink 70s-style running shoes (well, let's just say they're 70s-style - I have no idea if this is really true) closed not one, but two coffee shops that, apparently, think Sunday after thanksgiving belongs to the weekend, rather than the coming week (ha!), made enchiladas, another batch of cran-apple sauce (it's as much process as product - thanks in no small part to the popping noise the cranberries make), and some sweet potato fry-ish things, and to did some work (though, of course, not nearly enough).

So now Newark of last week is a distant memory. Newark of last night, and the near-miss with the 7:30 train back to town: fading fast.

Where I really spent time - Cleveland - is more indelible, and was, as ever, full of the kind of conversations about urban farming and schools and all kinds of things that are normal in a way that I sometimes think I make up when I'm away. There was also a late birthday cake and a great deal of pie.

Perhaps I would have written more, but I also spent 3 days drinking decaf because I mistakenly assumed my mom never buys it, and may not have been fully awake for much of the time I was there.

Convection Ovens Are The Wave Of The Future

2009-11-20T19:33:00.000-05:00

There is no microwave in my apartment.

Under normal circumstances (i.e. pre-job that I go to, when it was summer), this isn't really a problem - the toaster oven does far more work than I would ask of the microwave anyway, and in less space, and to much greater snacking enjoyment. Ever make an open face sandwich in a microwave? Yeah. Me neither. It also isn't that necessary when reheating is optional and your main warm course is egg-based, and therefore must be prepared atop the stove anyway.

Since starting going to work, however, I've been trying to take lunch at least 2 of the 3 days when I'm at the office, and it's really expanded my microwaving horizons. On Monday, I stood around in the kitchen for the full two minutes it took to reheat my food, half annoyed with having such an awkard amount of time to stand around in a kitchen, half truly amazed by the prospect of reheating food to a dangerously high temperature in so little time. It was kind of the way I feel every time a plane takes off - but with only a residual "this might not be that good for me" feeling, rather than the dip into the pool of sheer terror that I inevitably take on every trip.

Then I came home and lost microwave access for the rest of the week, but still had food that really needed to be reheated to be in any way enjoyable.

After my recent discovery that the small round pan I bought in Switzerland to deal with a similar dilemma (though there was only a toaster oven there - the regular oven lacked a door, perhaps because the kitchen was too narrow to open it without melting something) is too big for my toaster oven - a fact which leaves only the smaller, flimsier, not totally up to the task pan that came with the oven, I decided to do things the old fashioned way: in a square nonstick baking pan in the regular oven. Sure, it takes 20 minutes, and the nonstick part evokes the same "this might not be good for me" as the microwave, but the food heats pretty evenly through, there aren't any burns, and I generally find the dining experience to be quite enjoyable. But still: 20 minutes!

I shared this information with my friend Claire, and she reminded me of the truly marvelous invention: the convection oven. Sure, it's far too expensive for my current station in life, but oh, it's so amazing. The principles of regular reheating - and further cooking, rather than soggy-ing or dehydrating like the microwave - but so much faster! Someday, oh, someday. . .

In Other News

2009-11-19T18:16:00.001-05:00

Still in my neighborhood, but a bit different - I worked from the coffee place that I like so much this morning, and a neighborhood literary celebrity was there. I know for a fact that the regular who was sitting at the table next to mine knows who he is, because I saw him at a reading by said writer, but I'm not sure if he saw the writer. In any case, neither of us acted like we knew who the writer was, and neither did anyone else. Anyway - I've been waiting for this day for some time, since the writer both lives and has written about the neighborhood (including a book I happened to be reading when I first visited the neighborhood in person 2 years ago, long before the geography made any sense, and thus, long before the landmarks mentioned meant anything at all). But it was an exciting side for my veggie burger, 3 cups of coffee and 10,000 stories about population and climate that I was compiling for work, and the one really good case study I found for other work. Anyway - it was a good day for the coffee place as office, especially in the morning. Though I wonder if the writer had been there to work, if we all would have been more productive? As it was, he was having lunch in the front part of the restaurant, perhaps giving an interview? Perhaps being a well-adjusted writer who actually interacts with others during daylight hours?

Shortly after he left, 3 screaming babies took over the area where I was sitting. They distracted me from my work on maternal health - which is actually rather fitting, considering the struggle to address pregnant women's health, rather than just children's in the "MNCH" field. And: as an advance warning - this metaphor is likely a sign of things to come. All of my jobs have big stuff going on for probably the whole month of December, but definitely the next few days. I'm going to be more or less breathing reproductive health statistics, theories and strategies in the coming weeks.

Some News - Not Good, But Could Be Worse News

2009-11-18T18:58:00.000-05:00

I ran into a neighbor who lives in the building next door this morning on my way to work, and asked if he knew what happened - apparently someone was shot in the leg, down the block, closer to the projects, and somehow staggered all the way to our end (I do not live on an especially short block). Still pretty awful, no doubt, and without more information about the circumstances, who knows what will happen next, if whoever did it was caught, and on and on.

Then I got an update from the internet and kind of lost my shit. Reading the comments: probably not the best way to gain a perspective - on something scary that happens on your block. Luckily, Bruns ignored my warning about reading the comments and we spent some time gchat ranting about some of the more egregious threads - lock up juveniles who are caught with guns forever! these people have no values! it's the video games! and then, of course, this block isn't in Boerum Hill, it's Gowanus! Maybe kind of Park Slope! Gowanus! my sister! my daughter!

There was some decent pushback on the arguments about cause/proper response to gun violence, and one of the commenters, who I think would be my friend if I knew him/her in person, called bullshit on the neighborhood definition thread - worrying about your property values when you don't know the more immediate, human consequences of the incident: a little tacky. And, while many pointed out the "too many guns" part, without knee-jerk punitive solutions, the whole argument spun so far away from what really happened and to whom, exactly, so quickly that it felt like something big and important and immediate got lost, and I continue to regret reading so much of it, though I do not regret talking to my neighbor.

Is No News Good News?

2009-11-17T23:15:00.000-05:00

I came home tonight to a whole lot of police tape, 4 cops, and either an arrest in progress or someone freaking out and being sent to the back of a police car to calm down. A neighbor was walking her dog, and had clearly left after whatever happened had happened, so when she said into her phone earpiece "someone got shot next door" I was inclined to believe her. Which building, exactly, was hard to tell, the cop that let us through the tape didn't seem like he was ready to give a press conference, and the people on the stoop next door said they didn't know what was going on either. So, I went home and checked NY1, and the Gothamist news map - nothing on NY1, and Gothamist confirmed an address (next door to mine) and that there had, in fact, been a shooting. I haven't been able to find out any more, and I hope that is something of a good sign, but it's hard to tell, and there are a lot of kids in the building; and a month or so ago, a (mildly sleazy) detective came looking - to my building, which was the wrong building (whether he went looking for the right building after that - hard to say) - after a woman reported her boyfriend threatening to kill her. I have no idea how comprehensive the media is when it comes to covering shootings inside lower income buildings in the middle of gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn (my guess is not very, but I feel like there would have been some upset over a fatality or kid-involvement, right?), but there was quite an information vacuum on the ground. Anyway: I think there are too many guns, I hope everyone is all right and stays that way.

Detour

2009-11-17T00:42:00.001-05:00

After leaving brunch with a visiting cousin and a New Yorker cousin a bit early, I stopped on the way home to sit down and be busy and important, I stopped in Brooklyn Heights for some long-delayed work clothes shopping yesterday (there was a sale, it was almost over). Because I don't really like shopping, but like buying clothes that don't really fit even less, it took half an hour to buy . . .a sweater and a skirt. BUT, it meant that I left the store just as the sun was going down, so I took a walk down to the Promenade at perfect promenading hour. And decided I was ready for deep thoughts and lots of concentration.

So obviously, after that, I had to take the long way home - through the Syrian bakery - for several days worth of garlic paste and new friend, muhamarra, and cheap pitas, and then to core and peel and braise a pumpkin with cranberries and onions and orange juice, which sounds weird, but is actually pretty good - though I think I'm set for peeling winter squash for a while, and, obviously, boil some (red) lentils. And it wasn't quite as pretty as industrial loaders or big old houses at dusk, but, I realize now, it was all the same set of colors. Maybe it isn't a coincidence that they weren't at all the same colors as the work I needed to do. Maybe the sunset tomorrow - which, I will probably be able to see over 9th Avenue and a little bit of New Jersey (my internship involves a window- no real desk, but a window - it's pretty amazing), will be?

The Battery Buying Escapade of Aught-9

2009-11-12T17:38:00.004-05:00

On Monday, I had to get my picture taken for a work website, but the camera that had been hanging out with my project may have gone to a conference in Ethiopia (or possibly Tanzania, but I think Ethiopia), with one of my coworkers, and our temp's much nicer camera was out of (Lithium) battery, so it fell to my AA powered wonder to do the job. But the batteries were, to use its term, "exhausted," so my co-intern and I went to the big camera store down the block, thinking "hey, this will take just a minute." That was before we got in trouble for trying to go in the exit; before I spent a solid minute trying to get the battery-keeper guy to give me $2 worth of batteries without leaving all of my contact information - I was paying with cash and no, you are not allowed to pick, or even point convincingly at your own - merely describe them while he picks up one $8 package after another until you say "I only have $6 and I just need two;" before it turned out that the battery keeper didn't even give me the batteries themselves, but instead gave me a piece of paper with their description (one would think that someone who spends so much time with descriptions would be more exacting on the visual end) to turn in at the checkout; before we waited for the system to go into effect and my batteries to materialize out of one of the many plastic bins that were moving at a steady (and one might wonder, not so safe for electronics) clip on overhead conveyer belts, in a manner more befitting a children's movie about a camera store than a real life camera store.

I dare say, had I been 8, or, maybe, buying more fun stuff - for example, they have film developing supplies, and if I had free time, space, or access to an enlarger, I'm sure I could fill one of those bins. Or, perhaps, it would be more exciting if I were awaiting the delivery of a really snazzy new digital camera (with aforementioned lithium batteries and maybe less than a 3 second delay between hitting the shudder and the picture being taken) . . . Anyway, it was the kind of disconcerting shopping experience that I have learned to expect in foreign countries (minus the added fun of the metric system and maybe plus a whole lot of american big city worry about theft), but seldom come across here, and, which, on a different kind of day, for a different kind of errand, I might actively seek for the sake of whimsy or sense of moment, but in this case, found completely annoying and uneccesarily bureaucratic.

The Buttermilk Called My Name

2009-11-09T23:22:00.002-05:00

About a week ago, I was standing in a long line at Trader Joe's, passing the dairy case veeeery slowly, and I was overcome with an impulse to buy the pint of lowfat buttermilk next to me. I just KNEW I needed it for something. Then it took three days to figure out what I needed it for: hypothetical cider donuts, which I had considered making before my roommate went on vacation 3 weeks ago, leaving behind a bit of cider (it turned out for the best, I heated and drank it and enjoyed it very much), just as real fall and Smitten Kitchen made me want to invest in the day-long project and more donuts than I could ever hope to enjoy on my own - even with the homemade ones, I have trouble really enjoying them after the first. With the exception of a canoe trip when I was probably 14 - where we boiled dough from a can over an open flame in a pot of boiling Crisco, (awesome fire safety lesson, ps) - then somehow managed to cover it in sugar, pretty much can't move after the 3nd (I know I made it into the canoe and was able to use a paddle afterward that time - things might have been different had I been asked to walk).

However, I lacked both the buttermilk and a donut-cutter, at the moment I was willing to throw caution and good sense to the wind. So I didn't do it then. But the spirit of the donuts was clearly at work last week. After figuring out what it was for, realizing I lacked the time, patience and audience to pull it off, I started looking for another use. Not so easy.

But then.

Artichoke/onion/spinache quiche. It had to be done.

And I may never go back.

Really - probably the best quiche I've ever made. At least in terms of egg/milk/crust proportion (it needed more spinach), and texture. And I will do it again. And it will be even better.

Now, though, I have rapidly aging buttermilk, and no idea what to do with it. Another quiche is probably not in the offing, pancakes seem a bit bold, and I'm so used to cooking without regular milk, that I may have adapted to go without it. Hm.

If Only I Liked The Yankees. . .

2009-11-06T20:41:00.002-05:00

I turned 27 on the 4th. The Yankees won their 27th World Series on the same day. As a Cleveland fan, I cannot see this as a good omen for the year to come, but I'd sure like to.

Then again, I guess, after last year, it was bound to be anti-climactic. Even though there was whiskey this year (last year, it was champagne and, I won't lie, a whole pizza - coincidentally, I don't remember the last time I had cake - maybe in college?)

Also - I volunteered on a campaign on election day - which, even when they don't go together, I might like a little more than my birthday - and, while the council-member elect gave a pretty good speech, and we had a conversation about beets - something I have never spoken to the President about (though I hear he doesn't like them I don't know why not); and, in the two hours I stood outside a polling place, trying to get grouchy people to take flyers, I noticed the mildly intriguing fact that a LOT of people move their mouths to while their walking - either singing along to the music in their ears or replying to the voices in their heads - it lacked some of the suspense of last year . . or the same campaign 6 weeks ago (he's the Democrat, it's a Democratic district). So that celebration was fairly low-key too - which, I suppose, was fitting, given my advancing years.

Creature Fear

2009-10-22T23:08:00.005-04:00

This morning, a squirrel tried to get into my room. My startled yelping did nothing to dissuade it from pawing at the windowsill, the glass, then the other window. It paced back and forth for a solid 30 seconds - glowering, sauntering, even. And I must say - I was genuinely afraid. This squirrel did NOT want to be friends. It did, for some reason, want to have a wander around my squirrel-unfriendly apartment - maybe it wanted to steal my cashews? Maybe reassert ownership of property? Maybe it sensed how shoddily constructed/designed/generally imagined my windows are, and knew that it was going for an easy target. There's really not telling. But it seemed pretty adamant. If it's back tomorrow, I'm not sure what I'll do, but I'm really glad this encounter never took place on one of the days when I left the window open a few inches without the half-screen that I use to keep the bugs out - I only hope the squirrel finds better things to do before next spring -or considers the screen perplexing in a way that intimidates it from testing its resilience, because I'm pretty sure I'll end up with a new roommate.

Williamsburg, I Have Some Questions

2009-10-10T21:46:00.003-04:00

Why is it darker where you are than in South Brooklyn? I know, the BK in general is nowhere near Manhattan when it comes to lighting, but I swear, it's dimmer by a mile up North. Also - the Chabad House on Bedford is right above a used record store, while, a few blocks away, there is a fancy-looking gym above a big vintage clothing store. These details seem so appropriate that they almost seem made up. How did this come to pass? I can imagine, but I'm a little curious nonetheless. Also - why don't any of your bourgie bodegas sell the seltzer I like? 15 flavors of kombucha, but I might be less prone to go all judgy on your drunk, legginged citizens making out between sips of $6 coconut water at 8pm if you would affirm this element of my newly mature tastebuds (I don't claim that any mature reaction to the lack of seltzer was in the offing, however).

No Small Caterpiller

2009-10-07T11:05:00.005-04:00

My plan for the rest of the week got a bit shuffled around this afternoon by some unexpectedly urgent work stuff - which coincided with a lot of wind. I was wearing a skirt, which only added to the chaos. I handled it not fantastically, and very much in public - after deciding that 2 pm is awfully late in the day to have not uttered a single word - and then proceeded to make a lot of animated scowly faces at my computer. I'm pretty sure the waiter, who calls me "darling," and who I like very much, may have been a little alarmed. I called my parents , ate some banana bread, and tried to figure out a good way to get to the end of the project without losing my job or throwing a tantrum, and then I really missed having coworkers. Oh, the coffee breaks I once took so for granted. . .

Anyway.

I went to see Sufjan Stevens last night with my friend Beth - I'm not sure if it's a sign of my age or just the fact that it had been a while (for me - she had been to two big arena shows in the past couple of weeks - but that's a whole different ballgame. . . so to speak), but I had no idea how to plan for the show - sure, the doors open at 7:30, but when does the show start? Once upon a time, I would have been able to guess, but not anymore. So we met at 8:45 because that seemed reasonable - Sufjan wasn't going on until 10, so we went to a bar for an hour. Partly so that we could sit down. Because standing through an opener seemed like, well, a lot of standing, and we needed to do some jabbering first. So everything worked out in the end, and the show itself was really good. I saw him maybe 4 years ago -when the Illinois album came out and it was really peppy - I think there were even cheerleaders. Last night was a bit more subdued - in a good way - though it had plenty of the kind of momentary excitement that makes the listening to live music in a big crowd where you have to move around a little to see the stage worthwhile. And really - it was Tuesday and none of us are getting any younger, so that was juuuuust about right.

Crossing A Seasonal Border

2009-10-06T12:08:00.005-04:00

On Sunday, there was a big street fair in the neighborhood that The New York Times has given me license to call my own (on their map, my street is a border, but a decidedly inclusive one, unlike the "historic district" ones in the neighborhood itself, which put the borders narrower and, I exclusive of the housing projects that take up most of my corner of it), and, after two weeks of official fall and a whole lot of season-less unpleasant rain, I'm pretty sure it was also the last day of summer - warm enough for a summer dress and the sandals that I fear I must replace before the next time summer comes around, since they are both completely worn out underfoot and may be responsible for the mysterious bruise that made pointing my toes a touch unpleasant since Sunday. Anyway - I digress - Sunday was summer - frozen, chocolate-covered key lime pie on a stick . . . free whiskey/ginger (and horrible raspberry/vodka stuff, but we won't talk about that) . . . and the requisite international variations on fried food. And then, yesterday, it wasn't anymore. The temperature dropped a solid 10 degrees, the humidity of the days before lifted and the light changed - or changed just that much more that I finally noticed it - clearer, deeper, maybe yellower? And the trees in Ft. Greene Park were edging toward changing colors - more splotchy reds and sickly oranges than fancy northeastern foliage - but definitely changing. Had the change in pressure or the ghosts in the apartment above me or whatever it was that kept me up the night before not been quite so relentless, I might have been a little better-rested and, I like to think, more focused, less grouchy, etc., but maybe the realization that this is a short season will help me take better advantage of the crisp air to form crisp thoughts, and crisp work habits soon. That could happen, right?

The Paradox of Purple Food

2009-10-03T18:35:00.002-04:00

In many scenerios, it adds a bit of color - a splash of adventure, even, to the usual greens and beiges that make up so much of the food world. But sometimes, when, say, you want to make broth to use up your old carrots and mushrooms, and you have extra purple potatoes because you thought they were beets when you bought them - or you really want to make tortilla and you COULD use those purple potatoes - along with the red onions you always buy because they're prettier in everything but omelets - they can give you pause. Purple soup can work, but purple-ish soup - hmm. Purple eggs? Even if there's a perfectly good reason, it can be tough to pull off. So the purple foods may run you more than you run them. Or they might just languish in the fridge, taunting you and your suddenly very prudish color palatte.

Ah, Democracy

2009-09-16T12:57:00.003-04:00

I've spent a fair amount of the past couple of weeks as a late-comer to a volunteer party, and, though I realize I may have been a bit more than fashionably late, I'm glad I showed up. The volunteering was for a candidate for City Council in Brooklyn - the candidate of choice for young urban planners, in fact, and, though I had a few run-ins with people who resent canvassers or didn't like my guy or were just plain grouchy, it was a pretty good experience on the whole, and unquestionably a worthwhile one for the city. On election day, I faced off against a campaigner for another campaign for one woman's vote - on the spot debating isn't really my favorite thing, but I feel like I did pretty well- and his arguments are all slime-ing my guy and making his guy seem pure as the driven snow. I don't know which of us won. I also canvassed in a neighborhood that was mostly Bengali and orthodox Jewish. All of the neighborhood's children were around, zipping around on bikes and scooters, and, many many kinds of wheels - a couple of little boys helped me find houses on my list, and sort of trailed me for a bit.

Still, other than the other campaigns, there weren't that many people out, though, later, I think I helped persuade someone who was going to sit out the election to go to the polls. Which was pretty exciting. And, even though it turned out to be the lowest turnout in something like 20 years, it still seemed like a little bit of a holiday.

Real Time and Kid Time

2009-09-05T01:23:00.005-04:00

I went to the US Open a couple of days ago. Some of it was exciting (see above), some of it was soothing, some of it was scrambling from my seat out of the stadium in the 90 seconds between games to wait in line for 20 minutes to use the loo, then, because your seat isn't guranteed to be there when you get back, giving up on the 45 minute food line before the Williamses were set to start. The enforcement of audience discipline is pretty amazing - sure, there are still a ton of delays when people amble to and from their seats, but they don't tend to last SO long, and when they do, it's clear that it's the fans who are at fault, not the ridiculous stadium setup that makes for the endless waits and adds safety concerns to the scrambling vs. ambling choice. In general, the matches that are held in the smaller stadium seem to be the opposite of a professional basketball game, which has so much else going on that it can be hard to follow the game (in Cleveland, flames shoot out of the scoreboard at tipoff) - although there are also a lot of timeouts in other sports - not so much in tennis. Anyway - I found this truly remarkable, and was almost disappointed to discover the much more relaxed nature of spectating in the big stadium (close-by concessions and bathrooms, no restrictions on the movement of those in the cheap seats) - although that was still pretty subdued in terms of non-match distractions.

After having been away from all things tennis for a looong time, I was pretty much going on memories of a) trying to become a tennis prodigy despite my weak wrists and poor depth perception, b) waiting in the sun for my parents and/or brother to finish playing a set. I don't think they ever played more than 2 at a time. But it always seemed endless. Also, finally, c) waiting for my matches on tv to finish so that we could have some form of dinner on the grill. Again: always. Endless. And deeply repetitive.

Now, having sat through 6 hours of play, I can safely say that my kid perception wasn't so off base. Tennis is endless. Short matches are at least an hour and a half. Long ones (for men, of course), must be what, 4 hours? However, in person, and especially with doubles, it's way less repetitive than I thought - volleys are rare - which is something of a relief to a childhood failure at sustaining anything past, say, 7 hits in a row. These realizations make me feel ever so slightly more vindicated for my 7 year old self's whining about being hungry/hot/thirsty/ready to go home/ready to go swimming/ready to give up on tennis forever. Though I can imagine that I didn't earn any points for style. But I might not be giving up on tennis forever anymore. Not that I'm rushing out to pick up a racket, but I might not mind watching the pros in person - in much the same way that I've acquired a taste for tomato juice - not all the time, but occasionally, I get why other people go for it, and will partake myself if it's in a professionally mixed bloody maria - extra spicy, and with extra olives.

The Importance of Knowing Your Audience

2009-08-30T23:47:00.003-04:00

I'm pretty sure that the dog-eye-level part is, in fact, also meant for humans, but I like to think that there was some thought about how if it turns out that dogs CAN read after all, they're way more likely to follow a sign that asks them nicely and is in they don't have to crane their heads up to see.

Incidentally, I didn't know what "curb your dog" meant until putting 2 and 2 together with this sign. Live and learn, I suppose.

Women's Health and A Jog in the Park

2009-08-26T17:30:00.004-04:00

I've been immersed in news coverage on women's health for the last three days, and trying to get my act together on research on sexual and reproductive health stuff otherwise. This has led me to the following conclusions: Americans really need to pay more attention. Not way more attention, but just a little. It would make a big difference. We love oppositional arguments, but paying just a little bit of attention - and starting from giving women credit as whole people, who think about the consequences of their actions and are capable of weighing costs and benefits, and also assume that accurate information is generally useful for informing decisions, those arguments look ridiculous. There are just too many other problems. Ugh. On the other hand, I did learn that women are generally willing to travel pretty far for health services, and to put up with a lot in order to look out for their own health - more than I would have assumed otherwise. So go, women.

Anyway - that aside, because the heat broke a bit, I took a break last night to go running in the park for the first time in about 3 weeks, and it was chaos. First, there was a lot more two-way traffic than usual - and no one was staying in their lanes. Then, I happened onto the beginning of a 5K or something - there were HUNDREDS of runners, and I passed the starting line just as they did. Or, rather, after watching a confrontation between an asshole on a bike and one of the run's organizers (admittedly, it MIGHT have been averted by better signage for the run), I passed just ahead of the run and was immediately overtaken, and decided I was a jogger. I ended up veering off to do a lap around the softball field - where I returned a foul ball, passed - but, because of orange cones and a big crowd, did not get to cross, the finish line for the race - and then went along on my merry, slow, way - only to jog along with a labradoodle and his/her? owner, stop for a bunch of horses to cross the road, was nearly outrun by an 8 year old (whose mother was struggling to keep up with her), and passed what I think was marching band practice - I could hear the snare, but couldn't see any members- and oh, did I look. And then raced the sun down the hill. Pretty good day back, but I ran a little over an hour - which I had definitely not planned on. . .

Then I went home and scrubbed every surface in my kitchen. I can't lie: it was deeply satisfying. Though it would have been more so if I had either a fresh set of dish towels or a washing machine. But, alas. No.

Daring to a Point

2009-08-24T23:17:00.002-04:00

So it's my mom's birthday (happy birthday again, Mom - I hope you get to learn flipcup) . . . and I meant to post this earlier anyway, so here we go:

I'm kind of cautious, and when I was growing up I was really shy. However, I don't have a huge problem with bridges (except when the Innerbelt Bridge in Cleveland looks like it's ready to go any day - then, it's not worth crossing town - even though that's where the airport is). Neither of these things is true about anyone on my mother's side of the family (and the extended friends who are close enough that they might as well be) when it comes to a couple of things.

One of them is architectural tourism. Mixed with trespassing.

I don't know how many times my mom has said "well, it's open, let's go see. Come onn Sarah. Don't you want to see what it looks like from that angle?" - this usually involves already public-ish buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (though we've never been to Oak Park, where most of the houses are still lived in) maybe mixed with some loitering on the outside of Louis Sullivan banks and buildings designed by her uncle the architect.

It's a pretty midwestern nonconfrontational kind of trespassing - really, it's just lurking - and if we ever get caught, maybe some good-natured questioning about ephemera like, say, "when the building is actually open and how long has this wing been private? Do you know what kind of tree that is? Or when that sculpture was built? How do you like your job? Do you have a lot of trouble-makers?" Or maybe some (and this is what I generally use, though I understand the appeal of the other one - which can turn a scolding into a friendly chat) - "Oh, so sorry, didn't know will be going now" style diffusion. So, when I was told not to take pictures immediately after this one, I did as told. Even though the French tourists at the top of the dome were blatantly photographing each other IN FRONT of the sign with the camera x'd out, I resisted the urge to join. And I think that's a pretty good metaphor for a lot of my upbringing - push a little, but once you've explicitly been forbidden, back off. Until next time the Unitarian Meeting House door is ajar.

Any Resulting Elevated Bacteria Count: Probably Worth It

2009-08-18T16:45:00.002-04:00

I just washed my yoga mat. It was very much like washing my dog. Only not as cute or nice after. A little smelly before, sure, but just as I would be after an attempt to improve the scent of an ill-behaved airedale with a fondness for mulch-rolls, I am soaked. And only somewhat pleased with the results. The mat is drying on my fire escape. The dog, too, would be out looking for ways to ruin the cleanliness. . . All of the soap may not have washed out anyway. It still doesn't look entirely clean.

While I'm chalking up the original dirt to a) a drop in the mud and b) the fact that people at my gym are not ruled by elementary and middle school gym teachers with strong anti-scuffing footwear policy-implementation. The ingrained dirt: probably due to a structural flaw. Maybe the mat has character now?

I was inspired to clean the mat partly out of sublimated bourgeois guilt about yoga - which doesn't usually hit me so hard but, following this morning teacher's shavasana-interrupting soliloquoy about how what "we yogis" try to do is have positive thoughts so that our inner selves - which determine what we get in life - know to go after positive things and banish the negative - and blah blah blah - which sounded suspiciously like The Secret and, to me, wreaked of New Age disengaged bullshit. I couldn't help but feel a bit grossed out. And annoyed: shavasana is the whole reason I stick around for chair pose, and it is impossible to feel immanence and transcendance when someone is blathering on about how you should regulate on your thoughts, lest your inner self end up wiht an overdeveloped death drive (ok - she didn't say anything about that).

So now my mat is wet, a little soapy, not particularly clean, and completely unlikely to ask me for a walk. And my inner self wants a puppy.

Mystery Resolved. But Not Solved.

2009-08-18T15:38:00.002-04:00

My wayward mail returned yesterday - my checking account no longer looks the way it did when I was right out of college and spent all of my paychecks on happy hour; I sent an original copy of a contract and a W-9 to a second consulting client; and I got a bank statement that I did not open. And I didn't even have to call post office customer service. Also - the lost check showed up at the office in DC with a cryptic "return to sender" stamp. But there has been woefully little explanation. Perhaps, time will tell. Most likely not. In any case, I hope it keeps coming.

Also - my graduation present - a "vintage red" Kitchen Aid mixer came by UPS yesterday (ohhh I could talk about the public and private competition element of all of this, but I'm not going to). It's beautiful. No really. I love the design. The splash guard that goes over the bowl is kind of ugly, but everything else is as elegant as it is useful. Now, I'm trying to figure out what to make first - I'm thinking pie. And I'm thinking lemon meringue. If only I had friends to share it with (I have friends, but I have a feeling the ones I spend the most time with won't be a good match - one only eats chocolate dessert, one is on a ridiculous diet, one is lactose intolerant, etc.), all would be well.

A Mystery in the City

2009-08-16T22:55:00.004-04:00

I pledge that, this week, maybe even tomorrow afternoon, I will get to the bottom of the mystery of why my last paycheck never came. I haven't gotten mail in 2 weeks, but that was the only thing I was waiting for . . . until last week. Now, I'm starting to suspect there may be a hold placed on my mail. I am not looking forward to the public relations experience that awaits if it turns out to be something more complicated. Or sinister. I'm hoping neither identity-theft nor spite on behalf of my mail carrier is involved. I'm really hoping those things didn't converge. Maybe there was some sort of mix-up and someone with my name put her mail on hold- except not really - and now she's going to come home to a whole vacation's worth in her overstuffed mailbox? It can't be that the mailman stopped delivering to my building - or even my apartment - since my roommate keeps getting mail (which I'm growing to resent).

Another mystery - I'm pretty sure there's a new person living in my building, and that they a) are a talented cook (sometimes part of the hallway smells really nice, sometimes the aroma somehow finds its way into my apartment) and b) they have a cat (I KNOW there is a cat living in my building, there's pretty much nothing else that can be responsible for the scent that often occupies the downstairs hallway). Yet, I never saw anyone moving in and there's no new name on any of the mailboxes. Maybe it's someone who was there all along and decided to wait until the heat of summer to start making stews?

Who Knew?

2009-08-09T17:00:00.005-04:00

The whole waiting to find out if I really have the consulting gig I thought I had more or less for sure a week ago and what exactly the work is going to look like is driving me to distraction in the most literal of senses. On Thursday, I gave up on trying to do the work I may or may not be getting paid for and may or may not be researching in the right way and went to the Met. Actually, I tried to go to the Guggenheim, but it turns out that it's closed on Thursdays - which I'm quite sure I knew already, but had selectively forgotten - and went to the Met because it's nearby and you don't HAVE to pay the $20 admission (it is merely "suggested" - I said I was a student, paid $10, and still felt kind of guilty, even though I felt like that was a good monetary value to put on the amount of museuming I had in me). I ended up on the roof deck - a fact I shared with many people - no one knew about it. Except, of course, the ubiquotus, photo-taking French and Spanish tourists who were wandering around, drinking Coronas, eating plastic-boxed sandwiches (between snaps, of course) - while I was there.

The roofdeck itself was pretty exciting - the current installation looks like a fallen tree made out of steel, and there are hedges around the edges that make it look, from some angles, like there is a whole blanket of green about halfway up the sides of the surrounding buildings. Which was both oddly calming and vaguely disconcerting, in a most satisfying way.

Cat Tats

2009-08-01T22:30:00.002-04:00

Today I saw two women with images of cats tattooed on their respective right shoulders. One was grey, and the face of a kitten, the other was black and a silhouette of an archetypal cat. They both made me wonder about their owners' motives - are they hanging on to images of particular, beloved cats? In the case of the former, it seemed possible. Or are they making some kind of statement about their status as cat ladies? If so, do they have "tramp stamps" of Jane Austen book covers too? I certainly hope so.

Laundering Without Malice

2009-07-29T23:37:00.003-04:00

Of late, I've been doing laundry about once a week - if I still lived in a building with its own laundry room, this would probably not be a big deal, but since I live in New York now - and in an 8-unit non-condo building at that - I have to walk a ways. The laundromat I usually patronize is about 2 blocks away, across a busy street, but - and these are two crucial points - it's usually relatively quiet, and it's a mere block from both a good coffee place and the grocery store, so I can usually combine my trips with other errands. Which is all probably worth the 25 cents I save on each load by not going to the laundromat that I can reach without crossing 4 lanes of traffic (or any street at all), but which is a) crowded and b) not convenient for other errands.

SO.

Last week I lost $3.50 after one of the washers somehow forgot that I had just fed it a full load's worth of quarters and the woman working said, somewhat disbelievingly, "what do you want me to do? give you $3.50?" and proceeded to show me that it was impossible that what had just happen was even possible (because I put my own $3.50 into the same machine under similar conditions - the door was open - in retrospect, I'm SURE that the problem was, in fact, that I didn't notice that the door was open for a solid 2 minutes after inserting my money and having the washer not start - though at the time, I just felt defeated - not that I had any chance of winning to begin with) - her reply to everything I said was "impossible. impossible." I know that the profit margin is low, no one really has that much control over a washer unless they're a licensed plumber, and that her English isn't fantastic, so I didn't throw a tantrum, though I did feel extra frustrated for feeling like I was being accused of trying to rip her off - which seems like the least lucrative scam I can think of, particularly given the low likelihood of anyone giving you money back (this happened to me in London with a broken machine and 3 pounds and a machine that wouldn't start. I ended up reporting the problem over the phone to American kid at the service call center but never did get my money - and that was in a building with a large maintenance staff and some sort of corporate overseers in charge of washer upkeep).

But maybe it's been tried before?

There was that DC judge who sued the dry cleaner over those pants. . .

Anyway - today, I went back - things were fine - except the guy with the beard who was eating pizza in one of the chairs by the door - I had yet to eat anything substantial and it was probably 85 with 90% humidity so the beard looked pretty amazingly uncomfortable. It also took him a solid 10 minutes to eat a slice. The mixed horror - tomato sauce, melted cheese, major humidity, laundry detergent, facial hair - and reminder of the breakfast I was waiting to eat until I went home post-washer to put my non-dryer items on the drying rack was almost too much. Luckily, however, I had coffee to dull both my thoughts on mixing scents and my hunger pangs.

So then I went home and had some food and was ok. I hugged my air conditioner for a while to cool off, did some mild puttering, hung up the clothes, decided against cup of coffee #3, made my bed, and went to retrieve the dryer loads - with, I might add, perfect timing, as both ended within 1 minute of my stepping into the laundromat. (There are a lot of signs warning you not to leave your clothes unattended, but I have trouble imagining anyone glimpsing my torn, stained wardrobe or circa 2005 Ikea sheets and finding anything worth stealing. That said, after what happened next, I may have incured enough loathing on the part of the laundromat staff to sit around next time, just in case they're vindictive, since I already know they have bleach access).

After unloading my clothes, I did a second round of checking for lost socks and tapped closed each door. One closed. The other fell off of its top hinge and the force of the weight bent the bottom screw. A guy who looked eerily like someone I knew of, but did not know personally, in high school was pulling his own cart full of clothes past the machine at the time and picked up the screw whose act of liberation from its duties as a hinge-holder, and tried to tell the same woman from the previous incident what had happened and why her efforts to re-affix the door were futile (the bent bottom screw, which substantially displaced the door's alignment). She and another of the laundromat employees tried to fix the door. It clearly wasn't going anywhere. They didn't have a screwdrive. I stood there, helplessly trying to offer any kind of assistance or apology while they ignored me - except for the one withering glance that made me quite sure that I was remembered from last time - and, feeling completely useless and frustrated once more with my inability to communicate anything remotely helpful to anyone (including myself), took my laundry home.

I'm not sure if I can ever go back.

On one hand: I know it isn't really my fault - I didn't ask the door to do anything that isn't in its job description this week, and I didn't ask the washer to do anything extra - and in the end, at least on that one, I sucked it up and took the $3.50 hit. But, particularly with this incident, I felt responsible for making someone's job harder -and partly because of the frustration of being unable to communicate (it does seem reasonable that if you don't understand when you feel like you should, you end up being extra-defensive), and partly because of the involvement of often fickle machinery, and that's never a good feeling. Even when I know it isn't entirely reasonable (and that I may make this woman's day by giving myself as a scapegoat on top of the rolls and rolls of quarters I feed the machines every week). . .

A Sign from the Other Side?

2009-07-26T19:47:00.002-04:00

I just saw a thunderstorm come and go - from blue sky to roiling clouds and back - all in the course of "Wanna be Starting Something" by Michael Jackson. Which I think was a coincidence, but you never know. . .

Learning a New Language Takes a While

2009-07-21T00:36:00.003-04:00

I think this is New York traffic for "Park" since it is nearish to an entrance to Prospect Park, but I remain a bit unclear on what it is trying to convey to drivers, since the teeter-totters are not, as far as I can tell, either on wheels - though one can imagine how nicely parallel-parked they might end up - nor anywhere near the road. Much more useful would be lane markings on the sidewalk so double-wide strollers can find a place of their own and not end up right in the middle of the sidewalk although if I had a double-wide, that's probably where I'd end up too -at least, on my way to send my children to play in traffic/on the teeter totter.

Lost in Translation?

2009-07-17T14:11:00.003-04:00

My journalism class interviewe the guy who wrote the Hipster Handbook last night. Since a good portion of the class is foreign, and also unfamiliar with Williamsburg - neither by reputation nor experience, we spent a bit of the time ahead of his arrival talking about what a hipster is. Which, of course, brought out only the most sketchy shorthand - skinny jeans, cool but not cool in the brand name way - a classmate asked me if they were like David Beckham and I could only say that they're kind of the opposite of David Beckham. Except that Beckham has a child named Brooklyn, so maybe this isn't true.

On one level, there was something illustrative about this - and maybe even something that will be useful for the 800 words I write about this guy for our assignment for Tuesday - hipsters, for as much as a certain segment of society (that I unquestionably belong to) has thought about them, felt familiar enough with what they are to use hipster in moderately derogatory terms, the definition - like so many categories of people (like, as I learned in grad school, "women") - is slippery, inexact and pretty tied to a certain cultural moment and perhaps, a few geographic places. Though I can't say that there aren't hipsters in, say, Brazil or France.

On another level - I wondered if maybe no one had done the research to find out what this guy wrote about - he did literally write the book on the topic - so it isn't too hard to find more information about what he is known for writing about by . . . reading what he's written. But, assuming that people tried to do research, but were still kind of baffled - I think we get to the point that always comes up when you do anything in the social sciences - it's hard to know anything about cultural phenomenon that are so obviously outside of your daily experience. And seeking out more information doesn't necessarily mean you win some thorough understanding - if anything, knowing only a little means that you get a full opinion about whether something - and this I think is particularly true of cultural markers that you can wear - is good or bad - whether it's neon spandex or the hijab - and then it's hard to dislodge, even if you realize that you're really interested in whatever you're learning about and try to do the hard work of getting a fuller, more complicated understanding. And for this, I was extremely grateful to the writer, since he was really clear about his own opinion - and about his perspective - which is sort of gently amused with a little bit of a class-conscious bite.

In the end, I have no idea if this translated to people who weren't familiar to begin with, but I think there was a chance that he did. And maybe a chance that social science - even (or maybe particularly) jokey, made up social science - has some value for daily life after all. . .

Haunted by the Vegetable Albatross

2009-07-16T13:58:00.002-04:00

I couldn't sleep last night - I think I was haunted by the second, less than well-advised beer I had at 10:30 - because, apparently, I've become my mother. Or maybe it was the rise in humidity that started around 11. But it wasn't pretty. I read a lot. I realized that I needed to revise something in the summary I had sent out at 4. I did a little anxious spin around my life choices. Somehow, none of these things were relaxing. So I gave up on trying to sleep at 6 and went to spinning class - which, because of some sort of short in the cd player/speakers that had to do with all of the rain we had in June - ended up being to a soundtrack of Play by Moby - a cd I haven't listened to since probably my first year in college and, though I once knew it well, I have long since forgotten almost entirely (except for the track that I choreographed a synchronized swimming return to - that one I remember all too well). Then I did some grocery shopping because I was out of yogurt. I ended up going to 3 stores and buying 3 different white cheeses. And getting a lecture about how the coming bad weather is due to the hole that the space shuttle poked in the ozone. And how I should smile more. I replied with a couple of "hmm"s.

Moving on - I came home, thinking maybe I could finally get some sleep. Except that I couldn't - for some reason the only comfortable position I could find was with my head on my hands - which, amazingly, made my hands fall asleep. It wasn't pretty. I strategized about what to do with my fridge full of ingredients - vegetables, fresh herbs and now, dairy products. After about an hour, I decided I couldn't take it anymore and had to make some bok choy with garlic scapes, lemon thyme and lentils. I feel a little better now, but I still have a whole lot of the herbs left - plus parsley, broccoli and a zucchini. I know there's a stir fry in my future. I have a feeling it will be over-seasoned. I only hope I get a nap in before I feel compelled to work on it.

No Way Out

2009-07-08T00:10:00.002-04:00

I went to a party on Friday that was based around an all you can eat/drink sushi/sake, wine and beer deal, accompanied by karaoke - all in a rented, single-party room. It was the kind of situation that one knows, going in, is headed for disaster - going in, I assumed that one drinks too much, makes a fool out of his/herself at karaoke and regrets the inadequacy of the sushi as a sponge. I didn't eat dinner before I went to the party, so when the warm sake appeared in clear, cafeteria-style jugs in the over-air conditioned room, I ended up overcompensating on the sushi front. Equally poor choice, but in a totally different, delayed way. And I learned a valuable lesson: 2 hours of karaoke is actually not that much when you arrive from the still daylit-world at 7 pm with a sense that poor combinations are bound to happen, only to have your guard worn down by col tempura sweet potatoes, pre-opened bottles of Saporro (that you feel guilty wasting) and the sudden, late discovery of "Let's Go Crazy" by Prince among the listed songs.

That said, I think this trifecta of inevitable poor choices and I are done for a good while to come.

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

2009-06-30T22:29:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-23T23:41:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-23T00:07:00.004-04:00

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

2009-06-22T22:53:00.006-04:00

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

2009-06-21T20:34:00.004-04:00

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

2009-06-09T13:03:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-09T11:43:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-03T23:44:00.007-04:00

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.

Ojives, Tour Guide Royalty and Respect for the Dead

2009-05-24T21:16:00.004-04:00

I think each of these should be its own post, but, thanks to all of the beautiful weather, I didn't spend much time inside or focused this weekend, and if I try to recoup my losses, I'll be sitting here all day and fail to make it to the NYU bookstore in time to return my overpriced book (I have a replacement, cheaper version coming - slowly - since it will get to my parents' house first)

I started Stats class on Wednesday - in the first few minutes of "get to know your classmates" time, I ended up in a group one woman who is about my age and going to business school in the fall and a guy a bit older who was thinking about B-school. Neither of them had any quantitative background, so we bonded easily, though the guy was a huge name-dropper - he seemed nice, but he only spoke about friends' B-school experiences in proper nouns (Columbia, Chicago, Kellogg. . . ) and his own education was at "Cal" which I know means Berkeley but find irritating anyway since there are so many possible "Cals." As the rest of the room was introduced, he didn't seem so far out of the norm - though there were also a number of people in fields like "engineering" and "public health" who, like me and my "international development," (which is only kind of descrptive anyway) didn't use proper nouns at all. And then we had a lecture that turned into a totally different language of sigmas and denominators and n subohmygods, which I think I followed . . . sort of. I did take this stuff 8 years ago, and I swear there are at least some bad stats jokes in my memory bank. And the word version of the language is quite appealing: standard deviation? yes please.

Saturday, Sears delievered my box spring (5 minutes before the start of the 2 hour window they had given me to expect the delivery), and my roommate took me to a barbeque with a bunch of his nonprofit/government employee friends (and a city council candidate!) in South Slope. It had a southern theme, many kinds of devilled eggs (including bloody mary-flavored - which I tried and enjoyed and french toast-flavored, which I did not), and more food than I've seen in one place in a very long time. The boyfriend of the hostess was part of a family of tour guides - and pointed out to me as "tour guide royalty" - who, along with his brother, proceeded to regale many with their encyclopedic knowledge of Brooklyn bridge trivia (after discovering - and I have no idea how they saw this because it was on her head, behind her earlobe - the tattoo that the woman standing next to me had of the last name of the bridge builders- Roebling and the year it was named - 1867- which, it turns out, is well before when it was actually built). Very impressive.

Yesterday, I joined Jon, a family friend from way-back/very hip New York DJ and two of his friends for an organized bike ride (so us and 50 other people) from Canal Street and, we were led to believe, through Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which is normally closed to cars. The ride from Canal to the Cemetery took an hour and a half - it's MAYBE 5 miles. I think I turned my pedals thrice. But the route took us along the Brooklyn waterfront - which was, admittedly, pretty cool, and raised all sorts of hopes about the long-overdue future version of Brooklyn Bridge Park it has a sign saying "expected completion winter 2009" - but doesn't look like it's even been started), and that was nice, even if one of the other riders - an overzealous signaller - cut me off, perhaps after he heard Jon and my remarks on his overzealous signalling, but weird nonetheless. So we finally got to the cemetery and the ride leader told everyone to lock up their bikes and go walk into the cemetery. Except that the ride had been promoted under the pretense that just this once, we were going to be allowed to join the cars and the pedestrians. So Jon talked to the ride leader, who didn't so much as acknowledge that that had been part of the billing, while Elizabeth, another of our group members, asked to the security guard for the cemetery why bikes weren't allowed - he said a) because it's a conservative organization and b) bike-riding is disrespectful to the dead. I think b) proceeds from a), but this premise seems a little absurd - particularly for a cemetery that's billed as being all pretty and wildernessy in its own right. The ride's false pretenses were perhaps more irksome than the cemetery's definition of respect for the dead. So, we took off and did a little loop around Prospect Park - which was full of barbequers, friendly geese and at least one wedding party.

Later, I came home and bought the biggest window air conditioner I've ever seen from Craigslist (I failed to realize that it was 3 feet deep until the previous owner delivered it). I have a feeling this will be fodder for future posts.

Settling In

2009-05-18T00:19:00.002-04:00

Last night, around 2, I got a call from my roommate asking me to let his sister in after she lost her keys to our apartment. I had been home for about 20 minutes, after a somewhat mishap-infused night of my own, happy to oblige, and also glad that, thanks to the timing, the lost keys were unfortunate, but not catstrophic. I also felt like things evened out ever so slightly from my early morning departure to see historical family sites in Bay Ridge when I tried to keep quiet, but ended up waking the whole apartment up.

So anyway - first, I did some adventuring with my dad -lunch in Little Italy, Tenement Museum tour (which, aside from everything else, has a fantastic bookstore), the Staten Island ferry (which is free!) and a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on Friday (and my mom is the one in my family with the reputation for ambitious site-seeing and long walks), plus the moving and the stressing, so was pretty tired when I started the day on Saturday.

I didn't really want to go out Saturday night and instead decided to go to a movie on the early side, but left open the possibility of meeting up for a friend of Lillian's birthday party in the East Village. So I went to the gym, got some coffee, walked around Ft. Greene Park and went to BAM to see a movie. The person at the box office said to go upstairs, so I went upstairs, in walking in to the theater (about 10 minutes before the show was set to start), I somehow managed to lose the ticket stub so, when I went to the bathroom right before the show was supposed to start, but the usher said he would remember me so I could come back in. So then the theater filled up, but people were still skipping seats, and I, being alone, took it upon myself to fill in one in the middle of a middle row (i.e. a really good seat). I did some looking around and noticed that there were a few seats saved on one end, and that Sarah Vowell seemed to be sitting in one of the reserved seats.

Huh.

I thought, well, maybe she likes Jim Jarmusch a lot? (the movie I was there to see was a Jim Jarmusch one)

And there were stools and microphones and bottles of water at the front.

Huh.

And I think Jeffery Wright was sitting on my aisle too.

I checked the calendar that I had picked up on the way in - no mention of an event today, so maybe something was after?

Then someone used one of the microphones to say that thanks for coming to our benefit and some of the filmmakers will be here after.

Interesting.

Then the movie started and it was, of course, not the movie I had come to see. But what it was was a movie that isn't out yet and was written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. I hadn't been planning to see it, so I thought well, too late now - you're sitting in the middle of the middle row. And then I thought: "Dave Eggers is going to be here!"

Partly because I liked the movie and partly because of the kind of movie it was, I then laid to rest my 19 year old self's envy for Vendela Vida, who married Dave Eggers shortly after I read AHWOSG and decided that I wanted to marry Dave Eggers, but knew, even then that such envy was really misguided and that it must be rough to be a writer and be known by a big chunk of your potential audience as the woman who married Dave Eggers and thus put the lie to so many a daydream.

And sure enough, they both were, along with one of the stars (who referred to himself as The guy from the Office) and one of the supporting actresses (who turned out to be British) and Sarah Vowell turned out to be the moderator of the Q and A, and the whole thing turned out to be a fundraiser for 826, and I left happy and also looked to the left as I was leaving and discovered the door to the theater I was meant to have entered in the first place, and was extremely pleased with my mistake.

Then I went to Manhattan and walked 10 minutes in the wrong direction as soon as I got out of the subway. That was less the kind of mistake that I wanted to be making, since it got me to the bar right after they started charging cover ($5 but still!), although I did see a woman wearing men's tighty whitey's (though not so tight since they were probably 4 sizes too big) as pants (shorts?) at the same time as the guys at the door (one to check id, one to take your money, one to stamp your hand), who all concluded that she didn't get enough attention from her parents when she was a child. I would have rather saved the $5, but not I know that New York doormen aren't entirely overcome by blase attitudes toward questionable fashion choices.

Stood Up

2009-05-14T23:25:00.005-04:00

I was stood up twice today: once by someone who stood me up in exactly the same manner three weeks ago and once by an entire course. The first of these incidents was entirely professional and the other entirely about, well, writing, which is sort of professional but also not really. Not that "professional" should imply "bloodless" but my reaction involved a lot of wondering what I could do (I concluded: very little - the ball is in their court, and if I think of something, I'm pretty sure I don't get to say that I don't like being stood up), and what I did wrong and whether they even want me in the first place. I'm starting to wonder if they're breaking up with me, or if fate is somehow keeping us apart and we're really a perfect match. In Spanish, the word for "appointment" and "date" is the same word. Now I see why that makes so much sense. Luckily, I was busy enough to resist sitting at home refreshing my email every 2 seconds . . . after 11:30.

Then on the class thing - I finally got my nerve up to take a class fin something that I find both interesting and intimidating (talking to people to get the story first-hand) and, a week before it's supposed to start, it turns out that not enough other people came to the same conclusion, so it isn't happening.

So now I have to go back through the spin cycle of my thought process that finally led me to sign up for the stupid thing in the first place while riding out a similar one about what I should do about buying a box spring or a bed frame for an apartment that I may not be able to afford after July, and, particularly because I just moved to a new city (yesterday), all I want to do, metaphorically speaking, is leave the laundromat and sweat with reckless abandon, without hordeing quarters or predicting whether I'll be happier if I wear that shirt today or if I save it for another, more worthy day in the future. But it seems that there are quite a few minutes left in the cycle and some of this stuff is going to need to go through the dryer.

Lessons Learned

2009-05-10T23:28:00.003-04:00

My whirlwind of moving out went preeetty well. Tweaks wouldn't hug me because she refused to acknowledge that I was leaving, I got a little bit of a sunburn from wandering around in the fantastic weather, and discovered the true merits of homemade (or bar-made?) soda (in this case grapefruit/cinnamon). . . that is, until this morning, when I went to the Dupont farmers market and a bird pooped on my shoulder. I'm not sure what it meant, but it was gross. On the bright side - I don't remember the last time this happened to me. And I knew the area well enough to know where to go to clean off (Kramer's has those bathroom tokens out on the host stand for a reason)

Later I learned that, at the remodeled reststops on the Pennsylvania turnpike, you get priority parking if you drive a more efficient car.

A Dilemma of Capitalism and Departments

2009-05-06T17:21:00.005-04:00

This afternoon, I made a first go at shopping in-person for a dress to wear to the two tentatively scheduled weddings I may or may not be attending in June, depending on a number of factors related to the U.S. State Department (different factors, same federal agency for each wedding). And I immediately ran smack into a series of dilemmas that, I feel, reflect both the lack of coherence in lived social norms and the categories of outfits available, and the many challenges presented by late capitalism.

I started at J. Crew because I had already checked out their pretty silk dresses online. The only problem was that, in the store: no pretty silk dresses. In fact, no dresses for anything other than a drab office job - and I have that dress and the matching blazer already - or an afternoon of croquet and passive aggressive drunkenness in a world where the financial crisis never happened, so spills on fine fabrics are a-ok - and I don't know anyone with a croquet set.

I tried on a little strapless cotton number that could do the job, but decided to keep looking: strapless + wedding invitation that demands guest bring their A Game to the dance floor don't seem like the most practical match.

Nordstrom's shoe department came through for me on the summer weight shoes/arch support - and only slightly clunkier than my platonic ideal of casual summer shoes made to fit low arches and narrow heels.

Nordstrom's dress department didn't, admittedly, have much of a chance, since the spritzing of dresses on the shoe floor was pretty uninspiring.

Then back into the mall: Banana Republic - my hopes had already been dashed the last time I went in and tried on an almost-perfect looking shiny drapy thing last time I looked in DC, only to discover visible stitches at the waist. This led to a realization that there are three dress styles for this season: tent with sassy bodice, in BRIGHT YELLOW (I capitalize because that's how bright it is), the standby dreary shift (which, as noted above, I already own) and shiny knit - which is profoundly unflattering. And also far too hot for either DC or Chicago in June.

The Gap. Ha. There was one strapless thing that my mom liked, but which had a weird off-center texture and seemed to be cut on the bias - so would, inevitably, look like it was falling off even when it wasn't.

Then Dillards. Oh. Dillards. Which is just like Macy's except that Dillard's didn't buy up every local chain of department stores in the country, so it doesn't sell Frango mints. And this is where the difference between retail categories and real life come most into focus. The fragmentation of women's clothing more or less breaks down to "designer," "middle-aged women's" and "16-year-olds." This means that the formal wear, particularly in the spring, is either "mother of the bride" or "prom." In between, there are white linen pants and matching sailor tops for a yachting party that happened in 1988 and some formal suits that the Secretary of State could wear to push for a two-state solution, but nothing. And I mean NOTHING. For the only kind of wedding I've ever been to: afternoon/early evening, not too churchy, not too formal, not too big - that is, what I presume is a fairly typical middle class American wedding in the early 21st century. I dare say that part of what has made department stores so subject to financial hardship is the adherence to ideas of womanhood and occasion-appropriate attire that don't quite match up with women's ideas of themselves. I half-suspect that the right clothes are there, just miscategorized as "sportswear" or the "Misses" section, but because of their categorization, we'll never find each other. And I'll end up dressed for that croquet match after all.

Incidentally - I don't recall this being quite as much of a problem in European department stores. I have no idea if they're doing any better financially, but both British and Swiss department stores have a) excellent food and writing paper sections, which, particularly in Switzerland, were enough to draw me in in the first place and b) better organization of clothes for adult women with different budgets. My favorite Swiss store sequestered the teenager clothes in one little corner, and then had various degrees of formal - from exercise to matronly operawear - it was all too expensive for me, but for the average, fully employed or financially stable Suisse dame, I can imagine that it was a fairly unstressful shopping experience. Maybe that's just a grass is greener impression, but then again, I never had to shop for a semi-formal occasion there.

Not for Naught

2009-05-06T13:56:00.002-04:00

My perpetual Craiglist search for jobs comes to some good.

Huh

2009-05-05T20:46:00.002-04:00

I'm watching basketball and TNT, for some reason, thinks I also need to hear banter between the refs and coaches. It's a little weird and makes me wonder if they know they're being bugged. I think that what this really means is that NBA coaches and officials have real potential as reality TV stars. As long as it's on a show about process - like Project Runway - rather than disproportionate outcomes - like the real housewives (who already had an NBA player as a minor "husband" character anyway).

Don't Say Cheese

2009-05-05T17:13:00.003-04:00

I have to get my passport renewed if I ever want to leave the country again (and I do). This wouldn't be such a big deal if I didn't have to get my picture taken - and hadn't, on five separate occasions in the last three years, gone for passport pictures. In the past, they were for exciting things like my UN id card and my Egyptian visa. I mention those because they were pictures I didn't have to get until I was abroad. And in all of the other countries I've visited, the booth is where it's at. In the US, however, it seems that we've settled on a system that involves a real live person taking your picture - which would seem to be improved by digital but in fact has not been. Last time I did this, the guy kept trying to get a good picture - and I kept clenching my jaw. It took 45 minutes. I know he was trying to do me a favor, but really, after the third round, there was no way my face was going to do anything but look annoyed.

So now the place where I would have gone in Cleveland no longer exists. I'm pretty sure I could go to the drug store, but the last time I did that, it turned out so poorly in so many ways - least of all the fact that the camera was turned the wrong way and had to be redone - that I don't particularly want to repeat. So I'm going to hold out for a camera store for this particular trauma. Maybe I'll go before I go to DC, maybe once I get there. I haven't decided yet. Either way, I'm going to wish that the old train station photo booth so popular in Europe were an option.

In the Land of Cleves

2009-05-04T23:43:00.003-04:00

My dog won't eat dinner unless she has rice mixed in with her food, my parents go on vacation to Buffalo for the architecture (they also went to Niagara Falls but that was kind of tacked on), and the living room couch may be giving me asthma (as it already did to my mom).

Also - there is cable. And beet cake (which is really the best chocolate cake I've ever had). And the weather is shockingly nice for now - mid-60s, a little breeze, but nothing like DC. And the trees are still flowering. And the local news is all excited about how "humble" Lebron has been as MVP so far.

It's a strange place.

So Very Meta

2009-04-28T16:38:00.002-04:00

I just saw State of Play. In the theater in Chinatown in DC. At one point, a car in the movie DRIVES PAST the theater.

Woah.

In terms of the DC on film part - I was happy that they made the weather so unattractive - though it could have been windier. And the season clearer. But it showed both Mt. Pleasant and Adams Morgan as residential neighborhoods. And it made Crystal City vaguely sinister- which I've always found to be true. In terms of the day's lesson in the death of newspapers, it was all too real (in the most obvious ways). In terms of liberal anticorporate diatribe - so-so. In terms of choices for a way to spend a hot afternoon - pretty good. It makes DC look good in that it makes DC look dramatic, even if there's a little bit heavy-handed, and I only spent about 10 minutes hiding my face in my hands - it's PG-13. Yeah, I know.

Also - there's a preview for a movie about John Dillinger that's coming out in July - Johnny Depp plays Dillinger, Christian Bale is an FBI agent. There may or may not be a re-creation of a shootout between Dillinger's gang and the FBI that took place at Little Bohemia (and Bohemia as in region, not as in free love or beat poetry), which is a restaurant in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin, which has a) preserved the bulletholes and b) has the tale spelled out in pulpy detail on the placemats. From the preview, it appears that this IS the case, but since Dillinger got into trouble all over the midwest, who knows if it's the serene lake and pine forest where I've eaten so many helpings of wild rice soup (or at least - half-helpings - it's made with cream, and a touch heavy). The only part that I'm not that excited about: it appears to have been shot on video. If ever there were a time period or subject matter worthy of film stock, I feel like gangster movies set in the 20s and 30s were it. Men in hats deserve more color saturation than video can provide.

The Syncopation of the Trucks in Reverse

2009-04-28T09:51:00.003-04:00

I had planned to write about how I went to a really good talk last night that made me think I should work harder at reading and writing, perhaps going back to the Middle East and maybe give up on my current career wheel-spinning, though left little hope that I will ever overcome my newfound jealousy of Angelina Jolie. Walking home from the talk, I had some deep thoughts about master narratives and academics who try to steer the question period into a discussion of the books he's been reading and are happy to talk about alternatives to the contemporary nuclear nonproliferation apparatus instead, and to gracefully handle a declaration that a young questioner's friend converted to Islam after reading his first book (for the record - you should read No god but God -if you're at all interested in Islam or good writing - if it makes you want to convert, at least you know now that you have company) by taking 5 minutes to talk about another element of her question. Then I had some shallower thoughts about how hip professors probably own both orange leather jackets wtih lots of zippers (like 70s singer songwriters) and tweed blazers with leather elbow patches (like 70s academics) and comparisons between hip professors and actual rock stars (it's cool to be seen reading the professor's book before his reading, less so to be seen listening to the rock star's cd, but, on the other hand, even if the professor is a fictional anthropologist, it isn't really cool to show your huge fan status by, say, subtley writing "I love you" on your eyelids, but such professions are entirely acceptable where rock stars are concerned).

This was all going to lead somewhere. Really it was.

But then I woke up this morning. Early. To the sound of construction nearby and the sinking feeling that the temperature was on its way up. And I had work to do. So then I did my work, to the beeps of the backing up trucks and the banging of earth movers interspersed with the dulcet sounds of NPR reporting on swine flu. Around 9, a new element was added: the lawn mower at the Cuban interests section. Directly under my open (by necessity of the fact that I have neither an air conditioner nor a fan) window. And that is to say: loudly. Loudly enough that I could just barely make out the sounds of the two trucks at the construction site backing up at slightly different times (beep beep beepbeep beepbeep beep beep beepbeep beep beep).

On the bright side, it made the construction noises - which now seem to involve some sort of drilling or welding -seem dimmer, more pleasant, more background-y. But that doesn't exactly put me in a good or a focused state of mind for any of the writing I want to do, press lists I need to do or gymming I probably should do (I keep thinking about how, when tired, my right foot gets sort of lazy and I risk tripping - ok on the sidewalk, not so ok on the treadmill), I instead want to throw things, whine, swear or, when thoughts of packing and my pending, ungraceful exit from town, cry.

So I'm going to the movies.

UPDATE: I just fixed the link under the Angelina Jolie reference. I realized that it was wrong halfway downtown. oops.

Keeping Moving

2009-04-27T15:15:00.004-04:00

I got back to DC last night, and I sent a check this morning, so, if all goes according to plan and we don't all end up quarantined, I'm moving in a couple of weeks to the borderlands between Boerum Hill and Park Slope and, I guess, Gowanus. And undoubtedly reading The Fortress of Solitude shortly thereafter. My commitment at this point is only through the end of July (though could extend a whole year after that), so I'm retaining the same one foot out the door stance (admittedly, an awkward way to stand), at least for a little while longer. After a weekend of Craiglist-induced hiking around Brooklyn in sandals (because I wanted to look cool even if they made my feet hurt), it feels satisfying, even if I remain somewhat ambivalent on so many levels.

Among the other places I looked at, however, were what I thought would be the top-contender, but turned out to be a co-op with borderline creepy old-person-decor (there were framed photographs from probably the turn of the 20th century), a twin bed inexplicably propped up on cinderblocks, and a word about how they usually keep the kitchen "spotless;" another place with a falsely advertised "beautiful" room in a really nice part of Cobble Hill . . . with 5 19-20 year olds and windows that faced walls; and an 8-foot wide walk-through where one clearly paid (and oh, how one would pay) for the "Prime Park Slope" location. There were a couple of others that were less obviously wrong, but ever so slightly too expensive or commitment-heavy (i.e. would have involved buying a couch), and a final one that required a credit check and then didn't end up showing me the room and now has me worried about identity theft (even though I'm pretty sure that that's difficult to do with only a credit report to go on). Also - at almost all of them, it seemed like the people renting the rooms were willing to give them to me on the spot if I had a check - this is very unlike any craigslist search I've done before, and, having just read an article in the Times about how Americans are not relocating at the moment, I might have been alarmed.

One More from the Road

2009-04-23T12:04:00.002-04:00

The driver started the ride off with a lecture about how we're all married for four hours, then get to part ways, so just be polite and don't make too much noise on your cell phone. He also assured us that he was not, in fact, the driver of the car, but that God was, in fact, the one to call with any objections. We just stopped for a quick break and he went back to the marriage trope - "I'm a divorcee. The reason I bring this off is I have no problem leaving people. So make sure you're on the bus in 15 minutes." I wonder if he's been practicing his shtick? Since Jim Lehrer, who was the speaker at my brother's college graduation, graced us all with his calling out of a bus schedule from Midland (I think), Texas in the mid-60s (his first broadcasting job), I've often wondered about the relationship between bus transit and other forms of creative, captive-audience necessitating, expression . . .

Dance Class, Theory, Practice

2009-04-23T10:39:00.002-04:00

My gym has this deal for the 22nd of every month - "member appreciation" which means a) free guest passes and b) free breakfast, but there's pretty much no way that I'm ever at the gym in time for that. This month, they got kind of smart about the chronic overcrowding in dance classes - which is only heightened by visitors - and did a 2 hour block of bhangra and zumba on the basketball court. The dudes who come for the hoops were none too pleased, since they clearly failed to notice the 10 signs posted around the gym saying that there would be no basketball on Wednesday evening. I did the exact same thing with the signs about the water being shut off on Tuesday in my building, so I sympathize. Anyway - when it became evident that they weren't going to get what they wanted, a couple of them (who must have been about 18) joined the class - giggling. They even stuck around for the second hour. Anyway - as an experience, it was half horrible 7th grade gym flashback (what with the non-basketball on a basketball court) and the snickering girl who works in the membership office and stayed to watch for most of the first hour, drinking coffee through a straw (I'm pretty sure she was there to laugh at the other staffers but really - how unnecessary) and the poorly ventilated room (clearly not designed for the body heat generated by maybe 100 people dancing) and half almost-fulfillment of my long-standing fantasy of walking into the last scene of a dance movie. Also - probably the most diverse gym class I've ever been to - sure, still mostly women, but more than a token few dudes, and among the women, a real range in both age and race. It even supplied an answer to a question I've long-wondered - what do hipsters do for exercise clothes (because some hipsters, clearly, must exercise)? Answer: American apparel leotards and leggings, with yellow running shorts over them. Half-ironic, but the 70s-style leotard pattern was far too flattering and enviable to have been purchased for the its retro-appeal/statement on the ridiculosity of the gym as plebeian institution alone.

I'm writing this on the bus to New York. And that's almost completely amazing and fantastic, except that balancing a laptop on one's knee at 65 mph is a challenge both to the combined forces of heels of my hands/top of my lap and my digestive system. It's way better this time - the first time I took this particular bus, I had my old computer, which managed to freeze 20 minutes into the trip, never to fully recover - but still - if there's one thing that enhances the bumpiness and vague sense of lack of control that goes with the average bus, it's trying to balance an expensive piece of electronic equipment on your knees while also coming up with coherent sentences about a moment of large-group grace and coordination.

Also

2009-04-21T23:07:00.002-04:00

I like tulips. This one is called "Olympic Flame" - it's at the national botanical garden (that's what the greenhouse downtown is called, yes?) - which has many markers, most of which elicit the response "oh, hmm, I can see that." Which is part of why I like tulips -they're accessible.

Some Pictures

2009-04-21T22:55:00.004-04:00

I'm transfering pictures from my camera into the world, and I like these. They're from the Dupont farmer's market. Also - I spent 2 weeks debating buying peach blossoms and ultimately decided that I liked other people's peach blossoms and the opportunity to take pictures of them. Although I'm holding out hope that one day I'll live close enough to a farmers market to make carrying a 3 foot long stick of flowers seem like a nice flourish, rather than trouble in the making. This is not how I feel about salad greens.

Sunday Night Allergy

2009-04-20T12:52:00.003-04:00

I have always always always had trouble getting to sleep on Sunday nights - except maybe when I was in Egypt and the weekend was Friday-Saturday - then Saturday nights were surely a bear. The reasons for this are not too complicated - stay up later on the weekend, anxiety/anticipation for the week, etc, and thanks to sleepless Sunday nights in high school and the cable-less tv in my room, I discovered Tom Waits Austin City Limits appearance from the late 70s - an experience that led me both to a greater appreciation of pork-pie hats and, as a shared reference, helped catalyze my friendship with my best Christopher during our first year of college. However, last night, Waits-less and full of adrenaline (and, admittedly, some caffeine from the latte I had at 4 to offset the sangria I had between 2 and 3:30), I found company in the form of one loud, utterly confused bird who had taken up residence amidst the floodlights of my Cuban neighbors. The lights are on all night - and I can imagine that, to a young bird from the country, they make it seem like city dawn lasts from 9pm until actual dawn. And I certainly feel empathy for that - but really, so much chirping? It started around maybe 11 and, when I finally dozed off close to 4, and it was still going strong. I hope that the rain is providing enough darkness for the little guy to get some rest, but more than that, I hope it, like me, decides that this particular lot isn't really a long-term solution, and finds another tree to lay its head and call home tonight.

Overhearing . . .

2009-04-18T20:41:00.003-04:00

At the moment, I live behind the Cuban interests section of the Swiss embassy - i.e. the Cuban embassy-ish. What with all the news about US/Cuban relations these days, this seems particularly timely. Anyway - I have a view of a bust of Jose Marti, which I often contemplate as I consider what form my next few years should take . . . and a whole bunch of lights that are on all night. Also, there is some playground equipment.

Now that the weather is nice (at least for today), I keep my window open, so I've overheard the following in the past two days:

- kids playing - one says "no one is in charge of anyone else" - really. Equal power in whatever combat game they're playing. I don't know if the other kids went along with it, but so fitting. . .

- a kickin sound system - admittedly, this could be from a different nearby building - but hours of salsa recently switched to . . . The Police. I'm trying not to read anything into "Every Move You Make" which seems to have repeated at least once as I've been writing this.

Electronic Immaturity

2009-04-15T22:21:00.006-04:00

So first, my computer, Aloysius, has been on the way out for some time -i.e. maybe 4 months after I got it, when some power struggle between the battery and ac adaptor meant that it would short out and not turn back on without maybe 20 minutes of coaxing, swearing and pushing the power button over and over with the battery out and the power unplugged - then there was the motherboard mishap of 2008, which is in my archives, but painful enough of a memory that I don't really want to go dredging it up again now. At around the same time, the cd drive got stuck open and, when the hinge was fixed, started making a noise like a plane trying to take off every time I tried to burn a cd onto my hard drive (which usually leads to a few tracks transfering intact, and the rest saying they're 700 minutes long or something). Then half of the power cord had to be replaced - so I had a British plug for the last year - which was awesome there, less so since I left in June and became committed to slightly bulky adaptors. Also - it liked to crash my friends' Sara and Sabrina's network, so when I went to their flat, I was uncharacteristically productive - usually more productive than anyone else - because, without internet access, I had no choice but to write. It also fell off of my desk in Switzerland when the power cord got caught up in the power cord for the vacuum - and only seemed to chip a corner - aesthetic damage - a battle scar even.

Since I've been home, Aloysius has caused more trouble - first, crashing my parents' wireless in much the same manner as the one in London- only in Cleveland, it was worth getting fixed - and eventually it did - the tech told me it was somehow failing to connect to the wireless, then trying to set up its own network - and hence, confusing everyone else. He turned off whatever the thing was that was doing that, and since then, I've only been unable to connect to the wireless at Tweaks' house, the wireless at my most recent house (although that seemed to be more of a weak signal issue for one of the networks and an Apple network/PC arm wrestling match for the other), and the wireless in my current house - which it claims to connect to, and then to find "limited or no connectivity" - like it's the network's fault. . . Then there's the part where, ever since I got a new ac adaptor (after witnessing a fist fight at Micro Center), it turns itself off - it does this with the adaptor plugged in, on battery, when I turn it on in the morning, after it's been on all day - i.e. completely unpredictably. Two days at the laptop repair place and several frustrating conversations with the leader of the laptop repair team later (where she says over and over that it works perfectly and there's nothing wrong with it -means that it has the intelligence of, at the very least, a manipulative 12 year old), I decided to give up and get a new one. So I did - only that doesn't come until at least next week. So now I'm using it (per the advice of a family friend whose computer opinions I trust far more than my laptop fixers'), trying to rely only on battery power. And it's been mostly better - except just now when it freaked out and shut itself down twice while on battery - which I think is only a reminder that it knows I still need it.

But now, my iPod, which is named Simon, is going all crazy and a) the computer doesn't always notice it's there when it is, in fact, tethered to the USB drive. and b) it keeps refusing to power off - it isn't freezing exactly (I know how to fix that) - it will play, it will pause, it will even let me pick what I want to listen to, but it won't turn off until the battery dies. Also, c) sometimes the battery only lasts an hour - sometimes it lasts 5. I'll admit - it's taken its share of tumbles due to my active lifestyle and general dislike for gym music (how much Nickleback does anyone really need to hear - even if it's so clearly made for a caricatured masculinity that dwells on the weight floor and likes its pop music growly), and the fact that my jacket's pockets are not that secure; and it IS 3 years old - and in Apple years, I'm pretty sure that's getting up there. However, I can't help but wonder if, when Aloysius is claiming that Simon, isn't plugged in when Simon so clearly is plugged in, it is really whispering secrets and recruiting Simon to its hijinks. It feels a little like 8th grade, except, instead of dreaming of high school, when everyone will grow up a little and there will be more people to become friends with anyway, it's going to cost way more to deal with these guys.

Easter Recap

2009-04-14T15:28:00.004-04:00

I used my Easter quiche-making adventure as a reason to buy whole unpasteurized milk at the farmers market on Sunday - it felt decadent in a vaguely French way - though I suspect that many French people go to church on Easter, so perhaps that feeling only went as far as my cuisine. Anyway - of all holidays, Easter really highlights the limits of my cultural Christianity. I like the bunnies and egg dishes, and chocolate (though I admit - I still feel kind of guilty eating chocolate in animal form), but I don't think I've really dressed up for the holiday since my grandparents were alive - and even then I don't think we went to Mass (though I could be wrong about that). A couple of years ago, my mom sent me an email on Easter saying that it was really the most important Christian holiday, but she and my dad had failed to give us any experience of that, so instead of going to church, I should just go outside. This year, when I told my dad about my six hour brunch, which I stuck with despite looming deadlines and an ongoing waywardness of the soul, he said that that was exactly what the holiday was for, and informed me that he had been "watching the grass grow" and switching between golf and baseball on TV. Which leads me back to the solid ground of not just my cultural Christianity but my specifically not quite Catholic background: guilt abounds and absolution is pretty nice.

Then yesterday I went downtown during the egg roll festivities and, between seeing the Presidential motorcade in person for the first time in this presidency and all of the dressed up children (there was a girl in a purple tutu who reminded me very much of my younger self - stubborn and with an unconventional fashion sense and prone to sidewalk gymnastics), and happy looking parents (I heard more than one parent on the phone with someone somewhere else saying that they had a lot to say about the day and it was just a great time, and so on), that I was almost giddy - a difficult feat for a Monday morning. And also mystified -between the cherry and other blossoms and the festivities and Tweaks' sod centerpieces, DC seems to be uniquely and suprisingly well-suited to the churchiest of holidays.

Yogurt Snobbery on a Budget

2009-04-09T18:33:00.005-04:00

I went shopping for Puffins cereal, the only thing that is cheaper at Whole Foods than the regular grocery store this afternoon.

While there, and, admittedly, dragging my feet a little before going back to my scattered work at home (applying for jobs + compiling clips + reading Tom Waits talking to himself while realizing that what I thought was his upcoming tour because it happened a year ago + doing laundry + trying to get Cragislist to deliver me a Neko Case ticket for tonight), I had reason to contemplate the following yogurt dilemma:

Skyr - maybe not technically yogurt (if not, someone needs to explain why, because really - it walks like a duck and probiotics like a duck as far as I'm concerned), but it is both very high in protein/low in fat and perfect in texture and flavor. It also costs $1.99 a serving. And only comes in single servings - although, helpfully, they have a folding spoon in the lid. This adds to the special occasion feeling, but also the excessive plastics.

Greek yogurt - the trend yogurt before Skyr - Nordstrom to the Icelandic Saks Fifth Avenue or Lord and Taylor, perhaps (though the east side of Cleveland doesn't have that many department stores, so I may be stretching this metaphor a little) - is slightly less exclusive, but the nonfat version has many of the same benefits - high protein, good texture (though not as good as Skyr), and still pretty pricey - though you can buy it in larger containers, so you have more say over how much each portion costs in both monetary and environmental terms. And it has multiple brands - and if you know what you're doing (i.e. going to Trader Joe's for the generic), you can actually get it for less than $1 a serving.

Kefir - this is really a drink, and the Vampire Weekend "spill kefir on your kuffiya" line is totally fitting - this is a fancy yogurt for Columbia students who are still trying to find their way through both political fashion and bourgie dairy products. However, beyond the purview of college radicals, it has its place too. In fact, it's quite refreshing and nourishing in DC July, when more solid yogurt becomes kind of repulsive and anything sweeter seems bound to slow you down even more.

Brand-name American organic yogurt: This is what I usually eat - it's consistently cheaper than the internationals, but consistently more expensive than Dannon (which used to be my staple, since it's like $2 a quart, but which I now have trouble eating because it's just not as good as the others and as long as I have my consulting job, I can afford to pay a little more). The texture is decent, it mixes well with the cereal, berries and granola that I inflict on it. This is, normally, Macy's. Except today, I couldn't buy it - my brand was recalled and the cashier was not about to let me go find another one (also, I had a bad experience last time I tried a different brand).

Farmer's Market yogurt: Really good, but again, really expensive - 4 days worth for $6 - i.e. the same as Skyr, but trading protein and texture for the feeling that you are supporting a local farmer.

As with so many other things, I know this situation has more than a fleeting connection to economic globalization, I can't helpe but wonder if there's either a parable or, perhaps, an opportunity for economic recovery in mass Skyr production? Or, from another angle - it's good that these are all still on the shelves, and, in terms of my own finances, I can still afford a relatively high-end regular choice (even if it gets recalled - but that just makes it American, right?) while semi-regularly going for the even fancier ones. But I worry a little - how long will this last?

For Quesadillas It's $1, But It's a Lot of Cheese

2009-04-08T23:23:00.002-04:00

Such is the explanation for California Tortilla's extra charge for low-fat cheese. Everything else, it only costs $.30 - something about the explanation got at a much larger truth. If you're willing to pay an extra dollar for less fat, are you also willing to pay less for a taco that naturally comes with less cheese? Or maybe you could just ask them to go light on the cheese? Of course not - contrary to the spirit - you want a LOT of cheese. You just want to feel slightly less guilty about it. And of course, not many people really do this - otherwise they'd buy enough low fat cheese for it not to cost so much extra. Right?

Almost-Whitecaps on the Tidal Basin

2009-04-06T17:55:00.002-04:00

OK - I thought that this was going to be more dramatic - but maybe you can tell - it was really windy on Saturday. Windy enough to almost turn my run down to to the cherry blossoms and parade and back into a very grouchy walk. But I did manage to make it both ways - and even passed a guy on a bike who was taking up a whole lot of sidewalk space on the 16th Street hill. Which leads me to a question - why is there no bike lane on 16th Street? . . . or 14th or 18th? Hills are a good place for bike lanes, since bikes on hills are so out of whack with the flow of both pedestrian and car traffic, right? As much as I like the confidence boost that running past a bike gives me, even that was shortlived, since he sped past me at the top of the hill. And really, what other benefits are there to this awkward space-sharing?

A Quick Recap

2009-04-02T22:13:00.003-04:00

I got back to DC yesterday after a week in The Cleve for a) my dad's retirement parties and b) my interlude between sublets.

My dad retired officially on Tuesday, but the parties were both last week. So there was plenty of time to learn new details about his career - which he likes to say has been 58 years long, without a sabbatical. I know he has been a paper carrier (from age 10), worked for a smoked meat stand at the West Side Market (high school, college?), priest (after that), licensed clinical counselor (or something like that - essentially a psychologist, but without the letters -for most of my childhood), child welfare administrator, and something like a child welfare administrator but with a more specific title (he was supposed to retire three years ago - allegedly- but stayed on for a project to make systems of care work better for the kids they serve).

Of the places where he has worked, I know the smoked meat stand still exists, although with a different name, but both of the parishes where he worked as a priest are supposed to close in the upcoming consolidation of churches by the diocese (along with a lot of other liberal parishes), and the county government isn't going anywhere (though it is trying to get 800 people to retire so it can shrink without any layoffs). I'm not sure what this means - ,maybe it has to do with longevity or totally switching careers at the right time? Or, in relation to the global economy - even the jobs with the most security (i.e. the Church) don't have the longevity that they once did (or the Latin)? Anyway - it was good to be home for, and I'm glad I went, but I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up . . . or where I'm going to live in May.

Cover Letter Mad Libs

2009-04-02T21:33:00.003-04:00

I know this seems like a bad idea - everyone always says that you should make each cover letter individual and unique. Like a snowflake, but way less enjoyable for everyone involved (you know clouds just loove birthing snowflakes). But really inspired cover letters do not come from starting from scratch. I feel like there's a better way to break the boilerplate boredom of saying all of the things you're supposed to say. And I think it involves filling in the blanks - freeing oneself from making whole paragraphs that proclaim "hire me, I'm thoroughly competent at balancing real responsibilities with keeping my Google Reader count under control" - in oblique wording and confident tones and succinct, properly punctuated sentences - by narrowing the creativity down to occasional nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

I want to test this as a game, but I just tried writing a generic cover letter and the task immediately got the better of me. It was way too much like writing a real one. And that's what I should be doing right now.

I guess it's best to go with a generic one from a cover resume guide? Anyone want to find a good one and take out selected words?

Auto Immune System? Plus the Circus

2009-03-22T21:50:00.002-04:00

My car is fixed! The glass place came through as promised - and half an hour early. I was then instructed to leave on the tape that was covering the broken window's edges - bandages? - for 24 hours, then to avoid car washes (ha!) and opening any of the windows while driving for a week - very much like healing?

On my way home from downtown on Friday night (where I also discovered TangySweet and exactly the kind of dessert I would need to get through another summer in DC -not too sweet, not too heavy, and with lots of toppings - and, of course, cold. . . ), I ran into the post-circus crowd on the metro and ended up walking home - and also discovering that K Street has become surprisingly hopping on Fridays. Hmm. Anyway - the post-circus crowd - so rowdy! And so. many. strollers. Earlier, we passed them lined up at stroller check - wow.

Then I woke up at approximately 6:45 Saturday morning to my neighbors' marathon party - cheering ahead of the runners. I really don't know how they kept up the cheering until 9ish when the last runner passed, but I had to admire the stamina, if not exactly enjoy the wakeup call, which made me more or less useless- awake but immobile -for a solid 4 hours. I'm starting to think that things like this might be why I a) keep getting sick and b) seem to be going through an awfully large amount of coffee beans.

Today I went to the farmer's market in Dupont Circle and saw Carla from Top Chef - it's always odd running into famous people, but reality stars in their natural environment off-camera doesn't seem so crazy - and she seemed to be happy to talk to people, while simultaneously, actually shopping. My mom told me later that she saw Dennis Kucinich at Trader Joe's in Cleveland today (which is on the opposite side of the city from where he lives - though it is on the freeway) - I think she won.

Vandalized

2009-03-19T14:55:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I had this nagging feeling that my car had been stolen. I can't explain it, but it was the same feeling I had a couple of years ago when my bike was stolen from the locked bike room in my apartment building - something just felt wrong, but I wrote it off as guilt from not having used the bike enough - and sure enough, the next time I went to use it, there was no bike. So this morning time I ducked out into the alley where I park and my car was still there. So I figured - hey, you're just being paranoid.

But then this afternoon, all set to use it for what it's good for - some errands and a swing by a museum on a rainy day, I got around the drivers side and up-close realized what my sleep-addled brain either overlooked or what wasn't there before - the rear side window was completely smashed in, with broken glass all over the trunk.

Well, shit.

I'm pretty sure they didn't take anything - at the most, a box full of old tapes is missing - but I may have left that in Cleveland anyway. . . they didn't even take the ice-scrapers on the other side of the trunk. It was this kind of half-window by the trunk - really, the least useful of all the windows in my car to break, since it doesn't ease access to the door or - as I just said, anything useful.

So then I called the cops - starting with the non-emergency number since, no one was hurt and nothing was burning and I wasn't sure if my out of town number would work with 911 anyway. Except that the non-emergency number connects you to a switchboard where you can press 1 for sanitation and 2 for the DMV but can only talk to the operator about the police who, apparently, will not return calls to out of town area codes. So she gave me the number for the precinct - and I called it, and talked to someone who told me that he couldn't take the report over the phone and I would have to call 911 or walk down to the station. So, remembering the bike incident, where I walked down to the station and then was told to go home and wait because they would have to inspect the break-in part, I explained the out of town thing and he gave me a nice little lecture about how I need a landline. At this point, I kind of started to lose my composure. And then he asked if I had tried 911. I hadn't. So I did. And it worked (alhamdulillah). And I made the report and they said someone would call me - AT MY OUT OF TOWN AREA CODED NUMBER.. . . sometime in the next two hours. But only 10 minutes passed, so that was pretty good. And I got the report #, so I had everything I needed for my brief, and apparently very efficient (though I won't be able to verify that until the glass is replaced tomorrow - inshallah) exchange with my insurance company, the special glass insurance people and the glass replacement company they connected me with.

Less satisfying - talking to the voicemail of the guy I rent the parking space from - I'm a little curious if my car was targeted because someone thought the stupid chain that "protects" the space was overkill or paranoia. Or if they tried to unlock the busted up old lock and were so annoyed that they wanted to smash something. Because I feel that way every other time I try to relock it.

Pluses and Minuses

2009-03-14T17:50:00.002-04:00

A while back, I concluded that I made a bad decision on the grad school front - I couldn't have known that ahead of time, and it seems conceivable that it could have turned out differently - but on some level, I always felt like I was cheating the system a little bit with a one-year degree, and that there had to be a catch. However, that's the choice I made, and I have no way of knowing if my feeling that it set me back - personally, professionally, academically, intellectually (financially seems fairly certain) - though I suspect it may have. So I'm trying to think about lessons learned and other benefits. Because the teachable moment is only worth having if you learn something, right?

So here's my list:

-I made a few friends who I feel very lucky to know. I could not have made it through without an understanding that wise, thoughtful, nice, interesting, funny people were not in it with me.

-Two of those friends convinced me to go to Madeira - which was a place I never would have gone on my own, and the kind of good company and memorable fruit (8 kinds of passionfruit - yes please) that make the institution of vacation something I want to defend

-There's this hot ginger drink at Borough Market that I want right now. I can't have it, and that makes me sad. The ginger tea I'm drinking in a likely failed attempt to make my congestion go away has nothing on it. It's really the best response to the 40 degrees and a sustained light rain that I've ever encountered. Really. Warm and soothing and kind of sweet, but with the kind of bite that makes you feel like it's fixing something.

-I kind of know what it's like to date a banker. Or more aptly - I definitely know what it's like to be me and kind of date a banker. This is an experience that I am pretty sure stems entirely from the fact that I lived near the City. While it seems likely that my alternative experience of staying the US could have been a happier one on the grownup relationship front, this much is useful to know, and should I ever find myself in said grownup relationship, I will never have to wonder what my life could have been like had I let a wiseass with expensive shoes complain about his job to me.

-I appreciate the electric kettle. I still consider it a bit of a luxury - since I read somewhere that they waste energy, but oh, how it has improved my quality of life. And increased my consumption of hot beverages.

-I did learn a little - vocabulary words like"reproductive labor," "the informal economy," the significance of the 1994 Cairo ICPD, and many things about Judith Butler and the global economy. And I know some of the troubles with neoliberalism - and why it isn't going away.

-Many of the things I learned - or at least kind of learned - are things that add to my perspective on life now, in the economic crisis - both the experience of semi-employment and reading about what is really going on and why it's such a mess and who it will really affect. And I know a little about neoliberalism and its spotty track record when it comes to both economic and social development, and why structural adjustment policies are bad news (and bad news we wouldn't be getting anyway since the US kind of controls the IMF and they're finally out of favor anyway). Could I know more? No doubt. But I know a little.

-I saw both Butler and Antonin Scalia speak in the same room (at different times) in the space of a couple of months. If only they had been a double bill, maybe the year would have been worth it. Well maybe not. And I don't know why Scalia is as sarcastic and nasty as he is (well, thanks to all of the theory, I kind of do - white male privilege residing in a position of power while staring at the abyss that you imagine awaits any loss of that privilege - and I guess imagining that anyone can have full agency and subjectivity without that privilege is a terrifying thought), but I do know that he comes off that way in person. I've seen it. It almost made me want to be a lawyer. Butler moved so fast that I wished I'd recorded her so I could think more later.

-I appreciate the vast superiority of American tin foil to any in Europe. David Sedaris talked about this when I saw him in the fall, and I just now remembered it when I was standing in my kitchen - so true.

-Geneva wouldn't have happened without London. The job part wasn't so much of a plus, but the living in Switzerland part was.

-I will be more careful the next time I make a decision like this one.

The Great Hamentaschen Hunt of 2009

2009-03-11T10:53:00.002-04:00

First: DC really needs a good kosher bakery. I told Tweaks yesterday that I think we could easily sacrifice a cupcake place for a real one. She told me "this isn't Cleveland." She's right - in Cleveland, there are no cupcake places. The streets are, however, paved with hamantaschen and russian tea biscuits.

Second: My irrational craving was brought on by a series of events - beginning with a pictures of hamantashen on Tastespotting, continuing through an invitation to a Purim-themed happy hour that I could not attend, and probably solidifying around the fact that I didn't find any when I went casually browsing my (broadly defined) neighborhood bakeries while pondering how much staying in DC I can commit to and whether I should just move to New York (where the hamantaschen is surely more abundant), and try to sort out my employment destiny there.

Third: I planned to go to Tweaks' for dinner and Veronica Mars last night, and my nebulous cookie goal became much more specific.

So I set out on a looong tour of Mt. Pleasant, Columbia Hts., U Street, Adams Morgan and Dupont -no dice. Well, that's not entirely true - there were two dark jelly-filled hamantaschen at Tryst, but I'm just picky enough for that to be not quite what I wanted. After Firehook didn't have any, I walked up Connecticut to Open City (because they share a bakery with Tryst, and if Tryst has two of one flavor, maybe they have a better selection). No luck. Though there were some pretty tasty looking apple roll things. . . I limited myself to a coffee and headed for the last stop - So's Your Mom - the greatest deli in the world, which happens to be about a block from my old apartment. And, of course, had both poppy and apricot. Which I should have figured out an hour earlier, but no matter - Tweaks and I had them for dessert. And they were fantastic. Perfect texture - crispy, neither too greasy nor too doughy, a good amount of filling - I am completely satisfied. But still completely unsure about what to do about what city I want to live in.

Bolting Back and Forth

2009-03-02T00:57:00.004-05:00

So I'm in this life location where I can't make plans beyond March 25/26, but I CAN decide at noon to get on a bus at 3 to go to New York for two days. And somehow I managed to push around Lill, my taller, plan-enthusiast friend whose place I decided to crash at on Thursday - so I got on the bus and had a place to sleep ahead of time and everything. I took the Bolt bus, which is one of several new companies that have emerged since I left in 2007 - its primary perks are price (cheap - and sliding, so depending on when you buy, it can be REALLY cheap, or just, you know, totally reasonable for a 4-6 hour bus ride - i.e. $25), and that it has free wifi and electrical outlets. And I guess the seats are leather too, but I feel kind of "eh" about that one.

The trip up was fine, except that it took 5 hours instead of 4, and half of one of those hours was spent at a rest stop in Maryland - which was both a long stop and kind of built the illusion that we were farther along than we were - and the guys behind me complained a WHOLE lot about the ticket-taker at the beginning and the fact that the wifi went down somewhere in Delaware or New Jersey. I was reading a story about football hooligans, and there's a part about how a guy smashing a window really gets the riot going - i.e. how other people's rage rubs off. I kind of understood that. . . Anyway - I got to New York, picked up the keys to my lodging and met my cousin for dinner, where I ate a great deal of pizza and maybe even more onions. My only long-sleeve layer smelled like onions for the rest of the weekend and I was full well into Friday. Oh, was it worthwhile.

On Friday I went to the Brooklyn Museum and decided that a) I wanted to be like Toni Morrison and forget about the white man's gaze on my writing (I'm not kidding - see her interview for the Black List. It's great for creative encouragement), b) I maybe want to go back to Egypt and c) I definitely want to go to Iran for the color blue.

After that I went to the NYU documentary film-screening that was the ostensible purpose of my trip -although it turns out that "I needed to get out of town because sitting around and waiting for other people to make decisions that will have direct bearing on what city I live in in April and how much rent I can afford is driving me crazy" is perfectly legit. It turns out that it was a good cover story, since it was definitely worth the viewing.

Then Beth and I had sushi and beer and a little bit of talk on the passage of time and she let me sleep on her couch. Friday morning, I spent 40 minutes looking for coffee - Starbucks was somehow out, as was the first deli I went to, there was a long line at the bagel place - etc. But about halfway through the quest, I decided that I really wanted hazelnut coffee from Dunkin Donuts. It took me a while to figure out that there was one 2 blocks from Beth's apartment. However, thanks to Michael Bloomberg, I learned that a medium has 15 calories - I always thought coffee had none. I can imagine a few explanations, but I'm not sure if I'm settled on any of them. Especially since flavored and regular have the same number of calories. Then again, maybe my lifelong assumption that coffee is caffeine, flavor and water was misguided.

Lill and I had brunch downtown - there were potato waffles. And more onions. But this time they were in a sauce.

The ride back was way better - the driver was both nice and speedy, and I got back to town early and happy.

And then the metro was all kinds of delayed. But I wasn't reading about riots any more. So - se la vie.

There's another part, about how this group of guys (I think military by their hair, but I don't know - definitely out of town, definitely southern), decided to talk to me on the metro after my big bag and the train's jerky stops and starts colluded in almost knocking me back three rows of seats and onto the floor, and how it turned into exactly the kind of talking to strangers that generally makes me avoid all interaction beyond "excuse me" on the metro, and how that contrasted with two conversations with strangers I had today, which were exactly the kind that make me feel like sometimes it's good to talk to strangers, but that's a story for another post.