Monday, November 29, 2004
JOURNAL ENTRY
"Let's stop in at Myers of Keswick, ...I swear, every time I go there, there's always at least one absolutely beautiful girl there"
I said this to Matt as we walked up Hudson, checking out the Hudson neighborhood more thoroughly and just generally walking to walk and explore.
Myers of Keswick is an everything-British store for homesick Englanders and those who appreciate the few delectable treats among their admitedly, not-so-envied cuisine. Pasties, pork pies, bangers, rashers, Scotch eggs, Penguin chocolates, wine gummies, a dozen variations of malt vinegar, you name it, they've got it, mate. I love going in there mostly because it is so quintissentially English and damn it if the product names aren't often hilarious (Morton's Mushy Peas, Baxter's Cock-a-Leekie soup, etc). Truth be told though, the store seems to be a magnet for beautiful ladies. It might just be a magnet for beautiful people in general. I wouldn't know because I'm always distracted by the stunning lasses and the food shelves I then try to refocus on so as not to stare at said lovelies. I'm not just talking "hey, look, a beautiful girl"... if it were that easy, I wouldn't be mentioning it. No, I'm talking a-choir-of-angels-singing-in-harmony beautiful, the kind where nouns and verbs fall away to leave you fumbling naked with a bunch of adverbs and adjectives.
Ok, so they're not always This beautiful, but on Saturday, the lovely lady was none other than Ms Liv Tyler. And if you think she might not be as beautiful in person as she appears on film .... fuggetabowtit. she's more. Even with (or possibly because of) very little make-up and a big ol' pregnant belly, waddling around the store.
- ab-so-lute-ly stunning. The common public refrain of "how is she a product of Aerosmith-A*hole Steven Tyler??" rang loud... there was no discernable sign I saw in person that they're related, nothing that isn't there on tv or film.
She's just stunning, perfect. ridiculously so. He looks like an ass's ass looking into an ass-mirror of infinity.
Soo... needless to say, I forgot what I was thinking about buying from the store and ended up leaving.
The End.
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
BLOG ENTRY
Hi, I'm John Stewart and welcome to the Daily Show....!
On Tuesday! I will hear those words LIVE. finally! Matt & I called in for tickets 5 or 6 months ago and it's finally time to go!
I feel like I'm getting to see Santa Claus appear on the Easter Bunny show with additional guests, the Tooth Fairy and Godzilla. music by Mr T.
As if that wasn't good enough, we Also have tickets for Dec 7th..! HA!~
I still need to arrange tickets for Saturday Night Live, Conan O'Brien and the John MacEnroe Show (before it gets nixed). While I was in calif. I'd entertained the notion of going to / taking my mom to the Ellen Degeneres show though it ended up not working out, time-wise. too bad, 'cause Ellen is funnier'n all'get'up. If anyone knows what that phrase means or where it comes from, please tell me 'cause I keep using it.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
BLOG ENTRY
The injuries pile higher.....
or ..things, that suck - a lot:
- The Raiders season is officially over. so sad. so very very sad.
- my home laptop is on it's last legs, it seems. Not even Tron could save its fizzling, sketchy video chip.
- speaking of which, my Tron DVD is glitching at one spot in the movie. Grr!
- people still think office building bathroom stalls are fair game for talking to me or placing phone calls. Hi, are you not aware that You're On The Toilet?!
- Ending new friendships is hard even when all signs and friends point to it being absolutely necessary. Sometimes you really -shouldn't- look past the bad.
- being woken up at 2:47am by kitten ruckus.
- being woken up at 4:36am by kitten ruckus.
- being woken up at 5:36am by kitten ruckus.
- being woken up at 6:51am by kitten ruckus.
- not having health insurance.
- not being able to sit in a warm Washington Square Park for hours on end.
- the next four years. politically speaking.
- vaccuum cleaners, ant eaters, pool filters.
Saturday, November 20, 2004
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
Ok already. fine,... I get it, yes - I'm ready for a girlfriend. or ... casual dating. or 'whatever'. I prefer blondes, redheads and brunettes. I'd like it if they were tall or short or of medium height. Really, I'm not picky, so long as they're perfect. Deliveries can be made to: ♦♦♦ Washington Place Apt 14 (rear bedroom) - NY, NY 10014. Please provide air holes and food in your shipping container.
Thursday, November 18, 2004
JOURNAL ENTRY
Another week, another shock....
First off, I should apologize for basically subjecting you to reading what amounts to 'my diary' - obviously or not, the journals didn't start out this way. Perhaps I should be less candid with the details of my mom's deteriorating condition. And then I remember that when it comes down to it, I've been writing for a historical record of this part of my life, to look back on later and hopefully process in mentally healthy ways that I cant seem to do right now.
Sooo.. this is for me. If you're curious and voyeuristic (aren't we all?) - read on. this being said of course, to those of you I haven't lost already with tales of gloom and impending death. Not really sunshine and lollipop bedtime reading, I know.
Yesterday, I got a call from my dad, his voice low and reserved in an all too familiar 'harbinger of bad news' way. I paddled through the small talk which seems understandably necessary in some way but is also a frustrating formality that only heightens the anxiety of not knowing what is behind door number one. It seems that behind door number one, my mom fell the night before. Fell. Sounds benign, right? It would be, if she had been able to lift herself off of the ground. Or if my 72 year old, 5'10", 130lb dad were able to. The fall occured trying to transfer my mom from wheelchair to couch, a distance of... 8 inches. My mom stood from the wheelchair but ... for lack of a better way to put it... then didn't know how to turn around and sit down. What followed was a heart wrenching story of them struggling to drag and pull her along the floor to get to the two recessed steps of the living room, so that they might get leverage and get her to her feet. There have been other falls, mostly in the bedroom or kitchen - a problem that for a few weeks now has greatly increased the importance of getting hospice help.
Yesterday, my dad's call was to inform me that he was going to have to move her into the hospice home that her mother had lived her last days in (alzheimers). The level of care my mom needed was beyond my dad's physical capabilities and even a live-in helper wouldn't, as far as my dad knew, be able to handle all the various tasks that needed to get done or physicality required to lift my 6'2" mom. Long story, short: my mom Very Much did Not like that idea. My brother said he would take an unpaid leave from his job for 3 months to come up there and help, I was against the hospice home idea for a number of reasons but... I'm not there, so I sort of feel I have less right to imput on the topic. Friends and family friends supported my dad in his decision, knowing that he is going to end up hurting himself if he continues being her caretaker. Still, I felt I would regret it if I didn't suggest in no uncertain terms that I thought mom would really suffer emotionally from the stigma of being placed in a home, the same home her mother had been sent to, a home, obviously, to die. I gently explained / suggested that there are live-in hospice workers that Will do it all, from cooking and cleaning to helping with physical tasks like lifting, helping with showers, etc. He said he would seriously give it a lot of thought over the night but that the hospice home had a rare spot open now so.... that's probably what they would do.
A call from my dad, this morning - reprieve. No hospice home. Again, nearly in tears, my dad told me that this really needs to be about her and her last days, her happiness and well being. She deserves better, he said. Funny.... I listened and agreed with a detatched sense of relief when he told me - now, that brings me to tears. Ok, maybe that's not so funny. but maybe That's funny that it's not funny? me thinks I do digress......
She Does deserve better. Of course, she deserves to not have brain cancer at all. Most people, falling short of evil, dont deserve sickness - not that it's my place to dole out sickness or determine who deserves what, good or bad.
Does it really just come down to life's roulette spin and that little white ball that plinks across the numbers of the different fates your life could land on? There is something both reassuring and deathly scary in the blind randomness of that.
Monday, November 29, 2004
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
NY Journal # 18
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
excerpt from overheard cubical chatter:
coworker # 1 - oh crap
coworker # 2 - "oh crap". that seems to be a popular curse these days
coworker # 1 - ya, isn't it..?
coworker # 2 - i wonder where that started
coworker # 1 - you know what? i think Raymond's father started that...
coworker # 2 - Raymond's father?
coworker # 1 - ya, from Everybody Loves Raymond. I've been watching it for years and he always says "oh crap"
- my tiny apartment with it's tiny tiny bathroom.
- the internet for keeping me from finding out if 'bored to death' is just a saying or not.
- the East coast, for it's weather and folliage, it's accents and neighborhoods.
- my neighborhood, for it's proximity to everything.... or a train to everything.
- each different country-cuisine of food i try almost daily.
- the human Frogger game played whilst navigating people and car traffic.
- excercise... though lethargy and the recent cold try to keep me from it.
- friends and family. ok, some friends, ..all family.
- the subway system.
- the fact that the above is now on this list and not the one below.
Still NOT loving........
- Monday Night Football starting at 9pm Eastern, ending after midnight.
- anything that occurs before 8am. anything.
- 51% of the American public and 'their' next four years.
- crazy people.
- mean people.
- crazy mean people.
- the self important.
- the self deluded.
- the self obsessed.
- the self referential.
- the self sabotaging.
- the self absorbed.
Friday, November 12, 2004
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
Today's math work.....
38° + light rain / umbrella = no problem
38° + light rain + any-amount-of-wind / ±umbrella = kill me.
Flapjack + bathmat = issues.
Flapjack + (bathmat+issues) / kory-annoyed = Flapjack-bathmat-issues-continue.
Flapjack + (bathmat+issues) / kory-amused = Flapjack-bathmat-issues-cease.
so far at least.
weekly work paycheck = $60 > unemployment insurance weekly check
working with music = 1000% > working with NO musicworking with no music = kill me.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
Flapjack-vs.-Bathmat-Watch-2004
-11/09/04 6:23pm - bathmat found lying just outside of bathroom
-11/09/04 9:49pm - bathmat found lying just outside of bathroom
-11/10/04 4:36am - bathmat found lying just outside of bathroom
BLOG ENTRY
Excerpt rom the illustrious Onion.com:
Nation's Poor Win Election for Nation's Rich"The Republican party—the party of industrial mega-capitalists, corporate financiers, power brokers, and the moneyed elite—would like to thank the undereducated rural poor, the struggling blue-collar workers in Middle America, and the God-fearing underpriviledged minorities who voted George W. Bush back into office," Karl Rove, senior advisor to Bush, told reporters at a press conference Monday. "You have selflessly sacrificed your well-being and voted against your own economic interest. For this, we humbly thank you." Added Rove: "You have acted beyond the call of duty—or, for that matter, good sense."--------full story here
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
Cold.... so very cold. somewhere between 33° and 40°. - I'd almost forgotten what that felt like. I still love the cold, mind you, but cold -and- wind together... when it was just 60something° two days ago is a bit of a shocker. to the leaves of trees as well, it seems. within one week, i'd say all trees have lost at least half their yellowed leaves. quite lovely- though it's so cold, it feels like no one is noticing.Not much else to report, really. my hair is getting too long, already. thanksgiving approaches, planless-ly so.OH, i Do have news... we have a new bathmat. ok, contain yourselves, as excited as you are right now, there's more to the story. And that is that my dear, lovely Flapjack does not seem to like this bath-mat inhabiting the bath-room. Over a dozen times now, I've gone down the hallway to find that the bathmat has been dragged out of the bathroom... as if I had served him with a dog scented eviction notice he didn't want to acknowledge. I've tried to reason with him, I've shown him Pro's & Con's lists oh having a bathmat in... oh... say... the bath room, I've even tried bribes. He seems to agree, but then, the next day, there it is again. The first time it happened, I thought it was funny. The second through... let's say seventh time it happened, I was kind of annoyed. Now, I think I look forward to finding it in the hallway because it is... well,... Daaamn funny. It's a crucial battle of will's at this point. If I lose, he will own me. I can not let that happen. Victory will be mine.
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
excerpt from overheard cubical chatter:
coworker # 1 - oh crap
coworker # 2 - "oh crap". that seems to be a popular curse these days
coworker # 1 - ya, isn't it..?
coworker # 2 - i wonder where that started
coworker # 1 - you know what? i think Raymond's father started that...
coworker # 2 - Raymond's father?
coworker # 1 - ya, from Everybody Loves Raymond. I've been watching it for years and he always says "oh crap"
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
Still loving.......
- this city for a dozen nameable reasons and ten dozen unnameable reasons.
- my tiny apartment with it's tiny tiny bathroom.
- the internet for keeping me from finding out if 'bored to death' is just a saying or not.
- the East coast, for it's weather and folliage, it's accents and neighborhoods.
- my neighborhood, for it's proximity to everything.... or a train to everything.
- each different country-cuisine of food i try almost daily.
- the human Frogger game played whilst navigating people and car traffic.
- excercise... though lethargy and the recent cold try to keep me from it.
- friends and family. ok, some friends, ..all family.
- the subway system.
- the fact that the above is now on this list and not the one below.
Still NOT loving........
- Monday Night Football starting at 9pm Eastern, ending after midnight.
- anything that occurs before 8am. anything.
- 51% of the American public and 'their' next four years.
- crazy people.
- mean people.
- crazy mean people.
- the self important.
- the self deluded.
- the self obsessed.
- the self referential.
- the self sabotaging.
- the self absorbed.
Friday, November 12, 2004
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
Today's math work.....
38° + light rain / umbrella = no problem
38° + light rain + any-amount-of-wind / ±umbrella = kill me.
Flapjack + bathmat = issues.
Flapjack + (bathmat+issues) / kory-annoyed = Flapjack-bathmat-issues-continue.
Flapjack + (bathmat+issues) / kory-amused = Flapjack-bathmat-issues-cease.
so far at least.
weekly work paycheck = $60 > unemployment insurance weekly check
working with music = 1000% > working with NO musicworking with no music = kill me.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
Flapjack-vs.-Bathmat-Watch-2004
-11/09/04 6:23pm - bathmat found lying just outside of bathroom
-11/09/04 9:49pm - bathmat found lying just outside of bathroom
-11/10/04 4:36am - bathmat found lying just outside of bathroom
BLOG ENTRY
Excerpt rom the illustrious Onion.com:
Nation's Poor Win Election for Nation's Rich"The Republican party—the party of industrial mega-capitalists, corporate financiers, power brokers, and the moneyed elite—would like to thank the undereducated rural poor, the struggling blue-collar workers in Middle America, and the God-fearing underpriviledged minorities who voted George W. Bush back into office," Karl Rove, senior advisor to Bush, told reporters at a press conference Monday. "You have selflessly sacrificed your well-being and voted against your own economic interest. For this, we humbly thank you." Added Rove: "You have acted beyond the call of duty—or, for that matter, good sense."--------full story here
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
Cold.... so very cold. somewhere between 33° and 40°. - I'd almost forgotten what that felt like. I still love the cold, mind you, but cold -and- wind together... when it was just 60something° two days ago is a bit of a shocker. to the leaves of trees as well, it seems. within one week, i'd say all trees have lost at least half their yellowed leaves. quite lovely- though it's so cold, it feels like no one is noticing.Not much else to report, really. my hair is getting too long, already. thanksgiving approaches, planless-ly so.OH, i Do have news... we have a new bathmat. ok, contain yourselves, as excited as you are right now, there's more to the story. And that is that my dear, lovely Flapjack does not seem to like this bath-mat inhabiting the bath-room. Over a dozen times now, I've gone down the hallway to find that the bathmat has been dragged out of the bathroom... as if I had served him with a dog scented eviction notice he didn't want to acknowledge. I've tried to reason with him, I've shown him Pro's & Con's lists oh having a bathmat in... oh... say... the bath room, I've even tried bribes. He seems to agree, but then, the next day, there it is again. The first time it happened, I thought it was funny. The second through... let's say seventh time it happened, I was kind of annoyed. Now, I think I look forward to finding it in the hallway because it is... well,... Daaamn funny. It's a crucial battle of will's at this point. If I lose, he will own me. I can not let that happen. Victory will be mine.
Saturday, October 30, 2004
NY Journal # 16
JOURNAL ENTRY
Saturday, October 30, 2004
Ahhhh, Irvine. what to say, what to say? nothing really. about Irvine at least. My mom is perpetually a few words short of full sentences and gets frustrated by it. Over and over. My dad is doing ... far more than i thought him capable of, far more than i'd think anyone capable of in fact. It's pretty amazing. I dont think i ever would have thought of him as a caregiver. Very nice to see. Also nice to see is demonstrative love. Outward caring. Visible compassion. Me? I seem to be pretending that nothing is all that wrong. Or that it's temporary. or a minor illness. or... i dont know. more later.
Friday, October 29, 2004
I dont want to talk about it.... which is maybe why I should.
The only constant in the universe is that everyone, everything... dies. The great stage mananger of the universe seems to be in the process of directing my mom off stage. Exit... stage left. No, not now... wait for it... wait.... on my cue........ keep holding.....
Glioblastoma Multiform, grade IV brain cancer, the least survivable cancer, cells multiplying out of control. cells. this is all about cells. sure on some level it's all about atoms but here, with cancer, it's all about cells. you cant see cells. how often are life's problems determined by things so small you cant see? so small. death isn't small.
A year and a half ago, my parents visited New York. We walked and walked and walked all over the city on a typical out-of-towners whirlwind tour of NY. We saw everything, ate pizza, took pictures. took pictures in Central Park. the Ramble.
1 month later, sitting in the small room at home, computer chair creaking as I rocked slightly, the feel of my cell phone headset wire taut from ear to pinched fingers as I held it, I listened to the description of the "eye stroke" my mom had.
Eye stroke?
4 days later. more tests.
Not a stroke. no.
3 days later. more tests.
no. please no.
crying. in the shower.
again, so vivid a memory.
the first release.
first of many.
many firsts.
each bad news received is a first.
2 weeks later.
everyone present.
the hospital, the waiting room.
surgery.
then hope.
medication. then hope.
wait. repeat.
then wait.
more
hope.
repeat.
where did hope go?
wait.
still there, we all say loudly.
a stranger lurks in the corner.
then the call.
the recent call.
so small.
the phone.
the voice.
no longer
operable.
treatment ceased.
the stranger stepping forward.
no. but what if,
or....
the strangers hand on my shoulder..
but.. all those survival stories..
c'mon,
..you cant....
but you have.
given up.
but why.
this stranger,
this truth or acceptance or reality,
take your pick..
he doesn't need to say why.
(pardon the prose.... i haven't written a poem since... high school? not sure why i just did, but it let me both focus on and be distracted by what's going on)
AND SOOoooo.........I dont want to talk about it. Although I just did. I dont want condolences. though i've already received them... I dont want anything from anyone who 'wouldn't' if my situation were happy roses and rainbows. I have no time or energy for it. The falseness of un-fair-weather help just magnifies it's own falseness. These mental pathways that I hardly ever use: depression, anger, neediness, panic - are on fire.. So active are my synapses firings, i fear i'll get taken down in the battlefield crossfire. Every three minutes or so I have to consciously un-tense my back muscles. Every 10 to 15 minutes, I snap out of a cross eyed stare at my computer screen. Every 30 mins to an hour, waves of panic, some small, some massive, crash over me. Every few hours, I am fine, and able to cope completely. And then not. AND Every Damn Day for 17 months, my mom has been dying. And then not. And then, and then.....I fly out West this afternoon...
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
BLOG ENTRY
FOR those of you that dont know about craigslist.com, it's an online (really?) bulletin board where people can: buy stuff, sell stuff, find apartments for sale/rent, list apts for sale/rent, meet guys, meet girls, meet others. you can trade stuff, offer stuff for free, you can rant and make wildly ridiculous claims to the gods of cyberspace.AND OhMyGoodGod - i seriously think the funniest people in the world have access to and use craigslist to purge themselves of pent up comedy, lest they explode:
http://newyork.craigslist.org/about/best/sdo/41872611.html
----- and that The Best of Craigslist is better reading than... well... everything: http://newyork.craigslist.org/about/best/
this one's awesome too:http://newyork.craigslist.org/about/best/por/41661987.html
oh and this one:http://newyork.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/40254801.html
OH and the absolute best being: http://newyork.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/40606332.html
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
Why does it always take someone else saying something to get me to realize it's something I already believe myself..? How is it possible I can know and believe something but still actively try to produce results opposite to that end? Over and Over, I do this. what am I talking about? I'm not sure, but I think it involved pursuing the wrong girl. oh, and enjoying kissing and intimacy. A lot. and the conflict those two things will invariably create. for me at least. I guess I should start off with saying that I met a girl. She is quite awesome in so many ways: SuperIntelligent, SuperWitty, (which means) SuperFunny, she loves football, she reads ravenously, she loves bad tv, and I'm sure a dozen other things I could cite if I felt like it. There were, however, so many red flags that went from waving in front of my face to swatting furiously at me to trying to take my head off. And somehow, as always, i chose to Not see them... chose to believe they wouldn't matter. I thought that maybe ... given time or understanding, they wouldn't bother me or would go away. The old "Am I being too picky? Is anybody really perfect for anyone?" The flip side of that slippery slope is the futility of entering into, or staying in a relationship with the expectation that a person could change fundamental things about themselves... and that it would make everything ok. All of that aside.... here's a question: when did I become an intimacy whore? I mean, really. wait, Am I really one? I dont even.. objectively.. know! have I always been touchy-feely? is it just that it was something new that made me want to be so close to her? Seriously - Just this little recent taste of it made me realize I am more intimacy bound than I ever could have thought I was. touching hands, kissing, gentle touches... an arm around a back even... has been enough to pump adreneline and bring that heightened reality feeling we all..... that i thought we all craved. and yet, she doesn't. says she never has. i dont..... i just .... i dont understand. I knew, and know, that it wouldn't work... or that it shouldn't work. And yet, some part of me still wanted to pursue it. is it just the kissing and intimacy? seriously, i think it might be.... i miss dating and/or having-a-girlfriend and/or being-loved.... that part is not abnormal. maybe I'm just suprised by how Much i missed it. why am i typing this? because i'm pained by this situation. I admit it. frustrated. Stupid circumstance. I find what I think may be a perfect girl & then she turns out to not be perfect. And YES I want perfect (for me) so Dont Even Say It. And dont say "get back out there! date a bunch of girls!" Yeah, like I hadn't thought of doing that, Thanks...! I realized ... no, i admited to myself today, that the problem is that I am shy, and a chickenshit when it comes to starting conversations with girls. with strangers, I mean. i stayed out of the dating game too long. having a girlfriend all through college didn't help the ol' dating skills either. Could this recent nymph have just been any-ol'-girl to produce my current angsty state? Maybe, I dont know. Maybe any girl as smart, witty and attractive could have me in this much flux. I never realized how much I craved 'smart' and 'witty'. There is Absolutely Nothing sexier to me. It gives me goosebumps to be around single, smart girls with a quick wit. Attractive is nice and all but when the lights are out, attractive doesn't make you think or make you laugh.SOoooooooo... We're going the friends route. Which I'm really happy about now 'cause.. well... she's way cool. just not for dating. different peas in the same peapod field. (huh? ok, how'bout this instead) She's a bright burning candle and I'm an environmentally-friendly 65 watt soft-lite halogen bulb. And Yes, I'm girl crazy and Yes I think too much and Yes I need to get out there and Yes I really really think too much and Yes I need to play it cool and Yes a lot of things.I just miss ... so many things. ....about so many things.
Friday, October 22, 2004
BLOG ENTRY
Steve McCroskey : And I can sum it all up in just one word: courage, dedication, daring, pride, pluck, spirit, grit, mettle, and G-U-T-S, *guts*. Why, Ted Striker's got more guts in his little finger than most of us have in our large intestine, including the colon!
Steve McCroskey : Jacobs, I want to know absolutely everything that's happened up till now. Jacobs : Well, let's see. First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes. I couldn't believe it.
Pilot: And that's when we lost Bill.
Prosecutor : Over Macho Grande?
Pilot: No. I don't think I'll ever get over Macho Grande.
Boy: Can I ask you a question?
Striker : What is it?
Boy: It's an interrogative form of sentence, used to test knowledge. But that's not important right now.
and .. if this isn't the best song in the universe, you're wrong, 'cause it is:
http://home.graffiti.net/maxsommers:graffiti.net/BnS_IF.mp3
Belle and Sebastian - If She Wants Me
Monday, October 18, 2004
NY Journal # 13 & 14 & 15 - hair no more
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
NY JOURNAL # 13
---------------------------------------
or
Lucky 13 Journal ?
or
The Last Journal of Sampson
or
The Last Day and The First Day of the Rest of My Days
Yes... if you caught the biblical reference, you've guessed it: My long hair will be no more, as of tonight. All of it. Gone. 7 years in the making, now 4 days planning, and .. I'll guess it'll be 15 minutes in the offing. Why? I'll get to why. Needless to say, I've been operating under a somewhat heightened sense of reality these past 4 days as I count down to what is both a trivial change of a so very not-important physical appearance change and... at times, seems to be the beginning and end of everything I know...
Yielding to Delilah's requests, Sampson revealed his secret: "if my hair is cut off, then my strength will go away." - Judges 16:17
- Sampson took himself Way Too Seriously.
Hair as a symbol of identity: psychologists say that hair, before skin color and race even, is the first thing people notice. More than height or weight, facial features, all of it. Why? Well... it's right there, on top of your dome. Can you even avoid noticing someone's hair? Probably not.
Yeah, but why? Seriously, I don't know, stop asking. Whether or not we understand why it's so appearance-defining, there is both reason for attachment to your hallmark of identity - and also reason to be aware of this faux identity, rise above it, and not play the game.
And so I'll list that as # 1 on my list of Why's:
1. I'm sick of the 'game'. my hair does not define me. if it did for some people, fine, it's gone as of tonight. Now what?
2. No more morning 'hassle'. huge amounts of conditioner, leave-in conditioners, gel for broken, frizzy, split ended hairs. No more 15-20 minutes brushing, re-brushing, putting in a pony tail and often braiding. even after years of this, my arms get sore near the end of brushing and braiding. ridiculous.
3. No more ponytail. if I never wear my hair down, why have it? this has often been my # 1 reason for wanting to get rid of it. seriously, it does not look good down, it goes everywhere when down and gets bushy and ridiculous. Only when it's wet has it looked good down and seeing as how I don't live underwater, wet only lasts so long.
4. No more pulling hair out accidentally, breaking hair, getting hair caught in.... EveryThing possible, ..no more split ends or uneven length due to breakage.
5. No more kitties walking on my hair at night.
6. No more not being able to wear hooded sweatshirts, comfortably at least.
7. No more relaxing the hair, straightening it, dying it and/or whatever else I've done to it over the years.
8. There is the practical, dating factor as well: Some girls really like guys with long hair... that's fine. It would have been nice to meet more of them while I had the hair. On the flip side: the -majority- of girls will not even consider dating guys with long hair. Would this ever be reason alone to cut my hair - hell no. Is it a fortunate bonus I'll enjoy - hell yes.
9. It stopped loo... no, -I- stopped considering it as 'looking good' -the majority of the time- a long time ago. Years maybe. the length of the pony tail and/or braid has always been a nice thing, but everything that comes in front of the ponytail is spotted w/ frizzy, broken pieces that -I've felt- has always made 'my hair' looked unkempt.
.... given more time, I'm sure I'd come up with a dozen or more reasons why it should go. It's taken an ever increasing level of bravery, of a detached awareness of the none-importance of hair (I should maybe blame this on that damn yoga and Zen theory) to take the leap and start again at Hair Square One.
AND SOoooooo... tonight, we are having a cut-all-my-hair-off party among our poker party friends, with, yes ... pictures to be taken at various stages of de-hair-ing. We are going to try to fit in as many different hair styles as possible in between full hair and no hair... I'll upload a slideshow once I get the pictures back.
I'll probably also post another journal in a few days, detailing the event and my adjustment to my new non-hair state.
Ok, I'm late to meet friends for football watching...
Long-Hair-Kory, signing off......
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
NY JOURNAL # 14
----------------------------------------
[I wrote the below on Monday since haircutting got delayed and in hindsight, i think i needed to keep proving to myself that it was the right idea. My home cable connection was down until today so I didn't have access to email addresses, or I would have sent this sooner]
-----------------------------------------------
Wellll... aint it just the way the hairball bounces. I open my mouth and out come lies, LIES i tell you! Hair cutting did not happen last night. It has been delayed a day or two due to.... well, I'm still not sure what happened. I was ready, my friends were not. It turned out to be a mild relief though - another day's reprieve for the condemned man standing at the gallows... uhh ...so to speak. I was going to just do it myself, or have Matt do it but it was getting late & i figured 'screw it, it can wait a day or two'. A different friend will be on shearing duty tonight or tomorrow at the latest. I'm hoping it's tonight now 'cause I just want it over with at this point. [said 'friend' flaked... both days. what the F? ok, maybe it WAS just me who'd pay to be present for a friend's head shearing]
And as predicted, there are other reasons for cutting my hair that I remembered after sending the last journal: 1. No more hair ties, no more hair to be found all about the apartment, no more brushes full of hair, no more bathtub drain full of hair. no more immediate guilty-verdict when it's questionable 'who's hair that is' - a factor that will also help greatly in my future career as high society criminal. 2. no more being mistaken for random strangers friend with long hair. 3. no more having it be assumed that i know where to "score" illicit substances for people.4. Ah - no more dirty-fighting-liability; No, i most certainly am not planning on getting into any fights, but if it happens, I'll be happy to not have a nice ready, handle to be grabbed. 5. And my personal favorite reason: I -may- have a treasure map on my head. seriously, how will I know unless I cut my hair? Ridiculous you say? Fine. You shall not share in my pirate's booty! 6. Last but certainly not least, my hair is being donated to a group that makes wigs for children undergoing chemotherapy. I figure with the amount of hair I have, I've got a whole hospital wing covered.
THINGS I MIGHT MISS ABOUT LONG HAIR: 1. Annoying all of the various corporate overlords, directors, managers, fellow employees. Anyone who's ever thought "how did that guy get hired?". I love it. If you cant see past someone's hair, .. I'm not even going to finish that sentence.. it would have ended with the mention of a good, swift kick in the groin being needed. Oops. i guess I just finished that sentence. 2. Braiding. Believe it or not, I taught myself to braid my own hair only after Elizabeth moved back West. Elizabeth had always done it for me prior to her move. Sure. Braiding is easy, braiding your -own- hair... not so easy. at first. Over the course of a week of practice, I gained the physical memory with my fingers to know how it should feel as it's done so that it's almost easier to do it Without watching what you're doing. It was... well, kind of exciting to learn something like that. It felt like learning to juggle... if you can juggle, you know what I mean.3. Warmth. Yes. I am picking the wrong end of our celestial swing around the sun to be going warmth-insulation-less. 4. My official membership in the Long Hair's Club: yes, it's sad. They make you turn in your gun and badge the day you leave the club. What? wrong c.. ..Ok, I'm being told that's a different club.5. The rare occasion when a girl would gush over my hair being "sooo beautiful" or jealous of it's length. The grass always being greener on the other side, my response was almost always "I'll gladly trade you" (they laugh and agree we should but always run when i actually bring out the scissors.. what the hell?!?)
AND ON THAT NOTE.... no more hair talk. at least not until it's actually gone and I'm crying like a safety-blanket-less baby.
JOURNAL ENTRY
SO.. ya, hey! I'm working a temp job! exciting, isn't it? No. the answer is: No. it is Not exciting. It is quite possibly award winning in it's capacity to bore. As in "a hole through my skull". As in "I have read every page on the internet with all of the free time I have, now what?". As in "I fall asleep on weekends just thinking about my job". As in "How is this worth $60 more than unemployment?". The job is at a telecom company that my roommate Matt was temping at before he got a permanent gig at the company his girlfriend works at. I'm doing almost the same thing I was at MCI and yet I never really thought of MCI as boring. Go figure. That's the work itself, the rest of it is somehow kinda cool. It's far downtown, 3 blocks from Wall Street, right at the southwest tip of Manhattan (across from Battery Park and right in front of South Street Ferry station if that means anything to ya) It's nice to be in the thick of an actual working "work" environment. Every place else I've worked has been too sparesly populated to feel like an actual "high traffic work neighborhood". Our building being so close to the water, I can take my lunch back to the office and eat lunch with a 180 degree view from New Jersey to Brooklyn, Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, Grovernors Island, etc included. It's pretty impressive. Even more impressive is the selection of food choices down here. Restaraunts, sure, but I'm talking about food carts and food trucks. Everything from Middle Eastern food to Indian to West Indies to Pizza to dumplings to BBQ to Fried Chicken to fruit shakes to American-diner fare. Most people would never even consider getting food from a food truck serving ethnic food... I'd hazzard to say that most New Yorkers thrive on it. Cute little old Jewish ladies getting jerk chicken, Suit&Tie businessmen closing a deal on their cell phones while in line for lamb over rice, construction workers queueing up for Indian. And all at least 30%-40% cheaper than the local restaraunts. The neighborhood itself is pretty fun to walk around in as well... of course ENDLESS upon endless historical sites (that's a lot of endlessness, eh?) in the area, Wall St a few blocks away, WTC 2 blocks from that, South Street Seaport 5 blocks, Bowling Green park and the Indian Heritage Museum, Battery Park.. it's all right here. I guess that means this was a part of town I hadn't previously explored all that much. Should I be suprised that I'm still discovering new parts of town? HA! right. I'd guess I've seen 1/1000th of this city so far, if that. OK - enough for now... Kory-with-hair signing off For REAL this time.
[P.S. we cut my hair last night. details and pictures to follow, in the next journal.]
JOURNAL ENTRY
NY Journal # 15
---------------------------
Ya. hey. it's cut. my hair, that is.I am happier than you could imagine. Sure, the hair looks good, I will admit, but mostly I am happy that I somehow wasn't overcome by paralyzing apprehension prior to the event or nervous tension during or panic after - like what I experienced 7 years ago when I last cut it. Seriously, I remember asking myself why I did it for months after that cut. This cut was much more 'my choice' which of course, being planned by me, involves an intentional lack of planning - something that understandably frustrates those around me but which -I- always really enjoy. So... my roommate Matt, my friend Chris and I prepared -as best we could- for the event: champagne, beer, buzz clippers and a tiny make-up mirror left by Elizabeth. Oh Ya. We then readied ourselves (ok, myself) for the event by watching a documentary the Trio channel had recently aired - American Mullet. If you couldn't guess, it's about Mullets... aka Sh-Longs, aka Sho-Lo's (for short/long) aka (said the documentary) "Mexican Gangbanger Cut" .... ?? ya, i dont get that one either. So, I figured, if anything could get me to shed my remaining attachments to something some people took so seriously and yet just made them look ridiculous anyway... this show had to be it. It turned out to not be Thee answer, but it helped. As the cutting hour drew closer, I had occasional thoughts that this was my last moment doing this or that with long hair... totally ridiculous, totally sentimental, totally counterproductive to severing a tie you intend to... well... cut. The movie ended, we moved to the kitchen and.. god bless 'em, Matt and Chris both looked at me with a look that said "no, ask Him to do it". I actually wanted to do the first few swipes of the buzz cutter so I was fine with starting. The plan was for a mullet cut on one side, a Mr T cut on the other and eventually, a long mohawk from front to back before it all came off. And more or less, as the pictures hopefully will show, that's what happened. Sadly, by the time we got to the mohawk, "time" itself had become an issue. We'd spent what felt like an hour getting to that point and we were all sick of it, so... the mohawk was a laying-down-mohawk, but some other crazy photo opportunities got set up, although I fear that they may have produced Fright-House-levels of scary pictures. So.... ya, it's done. cut. I haven't actually measured but I'd guess all of the hair on my head (facial hair included) is 1/8th of an inch long. Minus my eyebrows of course - ... no, i did not feel compelled to shave my eyebrows to match.
OTHER OBSERVATIONS:
1. I still reach behind me to pull my pony tail out of newly put-on shirts.
2. My scalp is fun-durfully squishy!
3. I can fit into hats and wear hooded sweatshirts.
4. No matter how they try, Flapjack and Hambone can not step on my hair.
5. My head doesn't get nearly as cold as I thought it would.
6. No treasure map.
7. There are 3 really small spots where no hair grows, two of them I can trace to getting hit in the head with rocks as a kid. the other may be the alien probe insertion point.
8. 34 years of not having a shaved head makes your head very pale.
9. 7 years of long hair always in a pony tail is not good for your scalp.
ya... ok. pending-pictures aside, THAT now, really is enough hair talk.
OK. pictures are up. good to go. like my hair. Was:
http://www.t-mobilepictures.com/dayani
RANT:
And so on to other things: Have I mentioned how much I hate daylight savings [sic] time? I do, it's true. I know I'm not alone in this so where are the petitions and letter writing campaigns and mass demonstrations and chaos and anarchy? A great history of and commentary on Daylight Saving Time: http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/b.html
The highlight for me was: A writer in 1947 wrote, "I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." (Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947, XIX, Sunday.)
BLOG ENTRY
- Not my kind of yoga, but I love that he's doing it AT Fisherman's Wharf:
SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters)
-- Nudists, grab your yoga mats and head for San Francisco.
City prosecutors Wednesday said it was not illegal to perform naked yoga in the city -- even at the crowded tourist destination of Fisherman's Wharf.
Prosecutors dropped charges against a limber nudist, known locally as the "Naked Yoga Guy," who made a habit of striking yoga poses in the buff in order to promote a book and his lifestyle.
The Naked Yoga Guy, whose name is George Monty Davis, had stripped to stretch nearby Fisherman's Wharf, prompting a public complaint. But prosecutors decided they had a weak public nuisance case against him because local laws do not bar public nudity.
"Simply being naked on the street is not a crime in San Francisco," said Debbie Mesloh, a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office.
"To bring a case, a person would have to exhibit lewd behavior, block traffic or impede pedestrians on a sidewalk, something along those lines."
In another case involving a Los Angeles teenager who dropped his pants to expose his bottom, or "moon," passing motorists from a nearby sidewalk, a California appellate court ruled nudity itself is not a crime, Mesloh said.
Davis could not immediately be reached for comment.
NY JOURNAL # 13
---------------------------------------
or
Lucky 13 Journal ?
or
The Last Journal of Sampson
or
The Last Day and The First Day of the Rest of My Days
Yes... if you caught the biblical reference, you've guessed it: My long hair will be no more, as of tonight. All of it. Gone. 7 years in the making, now 4 days planning, and .. I'll guess it'll be 15 minutes in the offing. Why? I'll get to why. Needless to say, I've been operating under a somewhat heightened sense of reality these past 4 days as I count down to what is both a trivial change of a so very not-important physical appearance change and... at times, seems to be the beginning and end of everything I know...
Yielding to Delilah's requests, Sampson revealed his secret: "if my hair is cut off, then my strength will go away." - Judges 16:17
- Sampson took himself Way Too Seriously.
Hair as a symbol of identity: psychologists say that hair, before skin color and race even, is the first thing people notice. More than height or weight, facial features, all of it. Why? Well... it's right there, on top of your dome. Can you even avoid noticing someone's hair? Probably not.
Yeah, but why? Seriously, I don't know, stop asking. Whether or not we understand why it's so appearance-defining, there is both reason for attachment to your hallmark of identity - and also reason to be aware of this faux identity, rise above it, and not play the game.
And so I'll list that as # 1 on my list of Why's:
1. I'm sick of the 'game'. my hair does not define me. if it did for some people, fine, it's gone as of tonight. Now what?
2. No more morning 'hassle'. huge amounts of conditioner, leave-in conditioners, gel for broken, frizzy, split ended hairs. No more 15-20 minutes brushing, re-brushing, putting in a pony tail and often braiding. even after years of this, my arms get sore near the end of brushing and braiding. ridiculous.
3. No more ponytail. if I never wear my hair down, why have it? this has often been my # 1 reason for wanting to get rid of it. seriously, it does not look good down, it goes everywhere when down and gets bushy and ridiculous. Only when it's wet has it looked good down and seeing as how I don't live underwater, wet only lasts so long.
4. No more pulling hair out accidentally, breaking hair, getting hair caught in.... EveryThing possible, ..no more split ends or uneven length due to breakage.
5. No more kitties walking on my hair at night.
6. No more not being able to wear hooded sweatshirts, comfortably at least.
7. No more relaxing the hair, straightening it, dying it and/or whatever else I've done to it over the years.
8. There is the practical, dating factor as well: Some girls really like guys with long hair... that's fine. It would have been nice to meet more of them while I had the hair. On the flip side: the -majority- of girls will not even consider dating guys with long hair. Would this ever be reason alone to cut my hair - hell no. Is it a fortunate bonus I'll enjoy - hell yes.
9. It stopped loo... no, -I- stopped considering it as 'looking good' -the majority of the time- a long time ago. Years maybe. the length of the pony tail and/or braid has always been a nice thing, but everything that comes in front of the ponytail is spotted w/ frizzy, broken pieces that -I've felt- has always made 'my hair' looked unkempt.
.... given more time, I'm sure I'd come up with a dozen or more reasons why it should go. It's taken an ever increasing level of bravery, of a detached awareness of the none-importance of hair (I should maybe blame this on that damn yoga and Zen theory) to take the leap and start again at Hair Square One.
AND SOoooooo... tonight, we are having a cut-all-my-hair-off party among our poker party friends, with, yes ... pictures to be taken at various stages of de-hair-ing. We are going to try to fit in as many different hair styles as possible in between full hair and no hair... I'll upload a slideshow once I get the pictures back.
I'll probably also post another journal in a few days, detailing the event and my adjustment to my new non-hair state.
Ok, I'm late to meet friends for football watching...
Long-Hair-Kory, signing off......
JOURNAL / BLOG ENTRY
NY JOURNAL # 14
----------------------------------------
[I wrote the below on Monday since haircutting got delayed and in hindsight, i think i needed to keep proving to myself that it was the right idea. My home cable connection was down until today so I didn't have access to email addresses, or I would have sent this sooner]
-----------------------------------------------
Wellll... aint it just the way the hairball bounces. I open my mouth and out come lies, LIES i tell you! Hair cutting did not happen last night. It has been delayed a day or two due to.... well, I'm still not sure what happened. I was ready, my friends were not. It turned out to be a mild relief though - another day's reprieve for the condemned man standing at the gallows... uhh ...so to speak. I was going to just do it myself, or have Matt do it but it was getting late & i figured 'screw it, it can wait a day or two'. A different friend will be on shearing duty tonight or tomorrow at the latest. I'm hoping it's tonight now 'cause I just want it over with at this point. [said 'friend' flaked... both days. what the F? ok, maybe it WAS just me who'd pay to be present for a friend's head shearing]
And as predicted, there are other reasons for cutting my hair that I remembered after sending the last journal: 1. No more hair ties, no more hair to be found all about the apartment, no more brushes full of hair, no more bathtub drain full of hair. no more immediate guilty-verdict when it's questionable 'who's hair that is' - a factor that will also help greatly in my future career as high society criminal. 2. no more being mistaken for random strangers friend with long hair. 3. no more having it be assumed that i know where to "score" illicit substances for people.4. Ah - no more dirty-fighting-liability; No, i most certainly am not planning on getting into any fights, but if it happens, I'll be happy to not have a nice ready, handle to be grabbed. 5. And my personal favorite reason: I -may- have a treasure map on my head. seriously, how will I know unless I cut my hair? Ridiculous you say? Fine. You shall not share in my pirate's booty! 6. Last but certainly not least, my hair is being donated to a group that makes wigs for children undergoing chemotherapy. I figure with the amount of hair I have, I've got a whole hospital wing covered.
THINGS I MIGHT MISS ABOUT LONG HAIR: 1. Annoying all of the various corporate overlords, directors, managers, fellow employees. Anyone who's ever thought "how did that guy get hired?". I love it. If you cant see past someone's hair, .. I'm not even going to finish that sentence.. it would have ended with the mention of a good, swift kick in the groin being needed. Oops. i guess I just finished that sentence. 2. Braiding. Believe it or not, I taught myself to braid my own hair only after Elizabeth moved back West. Elizabeth had always done it for me prior to her move. Sure. Braiding is easy, braiding your -own- hair... not so easy. at first. Over the course of a week of practice, I gained the physical memory with my fingers to know how it should feel as it's done so that it's almost easier to do it Without watching what you're doing. It was... well, kind of exciting to learn something like that. It felt like learning to juggle... if you can juggle, you know what I mean.3. Warmth. Yes. I am picking the wrong end of our celestial swing around the sun to be going warmth-insulation-less. 4. My official membership in the Long Hair's Club: yes, it's sad. They make you turn in your gun and badge the day you leave the club. What? wrong c.. ..Ok, I'm being told that's a different club.5. The rare occasion when a girl would gush over my hair being "sooo beautiful" or jealous of it's length. The grass always being greener on the other side, my response was almost always "I'll gladly trade you" (they laugh and agree we should but always run when i actually bring out the scissors.. what the hell?!?)
AND ON THAT NOTE.... no more hair talk. at least not until it's actually gone and I'm crying like a safety-blanket-less baby.
JOURNAL ENTRY
SO.. ya, hey! I'm working a temp job! exciting, isn't it? No. the answer is: No. it is Not exciting. It is quite possibly award winning in it's capacity to bore. As in "a hole through my skull". As in "I have read every page on the internet with all of the free time I have, now what?". As in "I fall asleep on weekends just thinking about my job". As in "How is this worth $60 more than unemployment?". The job is at a telecom company that my roommate Matt was temping at before he got a permanent gig at the company his girlfriend works at. I'm doing almost the same thing I was at MCI and yet I never really thought of MCI as boring. Go figure. That's the work itself, the rest of it is somehow kinda cool. It's far downtown, 3 blocks from Wall Street, right at the southwest tip of Manhattan (across from Battery Park and right in front of South Street Ferry station if that means anything to ya) It's nice to be in the thick of an actual working "work" environment. Every place else I've worked has been too sparesly populated to feel like an actual "high traffic work neighborhood". Our building being so close to the water, I can take my lunch back to the office and eat lunch with a 180 degree view from New Jersey to Brooklyn, Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, Grovernors Island, etc included. It's pretty impressive. Even more impressive is the selection of food choices down here. Restaraunts, sure, but I'm talking about food carts and food trucks. Everything from Middle Eastern food to Indian to West Indies to Pizza to dumplings to BBQ to Fried Chicken to fruit shakes to American-diner fare. Most people would never even consider getting food from a food truck serving ethnic food... I'd hazzard to say that most New Yorkers thrive on it. Cute little old Jewish ladies getting jerk chicken, Suit&Tie businessmen closing a deal on their cell phones while in line for lamb over rice, construction workers queueing up for Indian. And all at least 30%-40% cheaper than the local restaraunts. The neighborhood itself is pretty fun to walk around in as well... of course ENDLESS upon endless historical sites (that's a lot of endlessness, eh?) in the area, Wall St a few blocks away, WTC 2 blocks from that, South Street Seaport 5 blocks, Bowling Green park and the Indian Heritage Museum, Battery Park.. it's all right here. I guess that means this was a part of town I hadn't previously explored all that much. Should I be suprised that I'm still discovering new parts of town? HA! right. I'd guess I've seen 1/1000th of this city so far, if that. OK - enough for now... Kory-with-hair signing off For REAL this time.
[P.S. we cut my hair last night. details and pictures to follow, in the next journal.]
JOURNAL ENTRY
NY Journal # 15
---------------------------
Ya. hey. it's cut. my hair, that is.I am happier than you could imagine. Sure, the hair looks good, I will admit, but mostly I am happy that I somehow wasn't overcome by paralyzing apprehension prior to the event or nervous tension during or panic after - like what I experienced 7 years ago when I last cut it. Seriously, I remember asking myself why I did it for months after that cut. This cut was much more 'my choice' which of course, being planned by me, involves an intentional lack of planning - something that understandably frustrates those around me but which -I- always really enjoy. So... my roommate Matt, my friend Chris and I prepared -as best we could- for the event: champagne, beer, buzz clippers and a tiny make-up mirror left by Elizabeth. Oh Ya. We then readied ourselves (ok, myself) for the event by watching a documentary the Trio channel had recently aired - American Mullet. If you couldn't guess, it's about Mullets... aka Sh-Longs, aka Sho-Lo's (for short/long) aka (said the documentary) "Mexican Gangbanger Cut" .... ?? ya, i dont get that one either. So, I figured, if anything could get me to shed my remaining attachments to something some people took so seriously and yet just made them look ridiculous anyway... this show had to be it. It turned out to not be Thee answer, but it helped. As the cutting hour drew closer, I had occasional thoughts that this was my last moment doing this or that with long hair... totally ridiculous, totally sentimental, totally counterproductive to severing a tie you intend to... well... cut. The movie ended, we moved to the kitchen and.. god bless 'em, Matt and Chris both looked at me with a look that said "no, ask Him to do it". I actually wanted to do the first few swipes of the buzz cutter so I was fine with starting. The plan was for a mullet cut on one side, a Mr T cut on the other and eventually, a long mohawk from front to back before it all came off. And more or less, as the pictures hopefully will show, that's what happened. Sadly, by the time we got to the mohawk, "time" itself had become an issue. We'd spent what felt like an hour getting to that point and we were all sick of it, so... the mohawk was a laying-down-mohawk, but some other crazy photo opportunities got set up, although I fear that they may have produced Fright-House-levels of scary pictures. So.... ya, it's done. cut. I haven't actually measured but I'd guess all of the hair on my head (facial hair included) is 1/8th of an inch long. Minus my eyebrows of course - ... no, i did not feel compelled to shave my eyebrows to match.
OTHER OBSERVATIONS:
1. I still reach behind me to pull my pony tail out of newly put-on shirts.
2. My scalp is fun-durfully squishy!
3. I can fit into hats and wear hooded sweatshirts.
4. No matter how they try, Flapjack and Hambone can not step on my hair.
5. My head doesn't get nearly as cold as I thought it would.
6. No treasure map.
7. There are 3 really small spots where no hair grows, two of them I can trace to getting hit in the head with rocks as a kid. the other may be the alien probe insertion point.
8. 34 years of not having a shaved head makes your head very pale.
9. 7 years of long hair always in a pony tail is not good for your scalp.
ya... ok. pending-pictures aside, THAT now, really is enough hair talk.
OK. pictures are up. good to go. like my hair. Was:
http://www.t-mobilepictures.com/dayani
RANT:
And so on to other things: Have I mentioned how much I hate daylight savings [sic] time? I do, it's true. I know I'm not alone in this so where are the petitions and letter writing campaigns and mass demonstrations and chaos and anarchy? A great history of and commentary on Daylight Saving Time: http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/b.html
The highlight for me was: A writer in 1947 wrote, "I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." (Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947, XIX, Sunday.)
BLOG ENTRY
- Not my kind of yoga, but I love that he's doing it AT Fisherman's Wharf:
SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters)
-- Nudists, grab your yoga mats and head for San Francisco.
City prosecutors Wednesday said it was not illegal to perform naked yoga in the city -- even at the crowded tourist destination of Fisherman's Wharf.
Prosecutors dropped charges against a limber nudist, known locally as the "Naked Yoga Guy," who made a habit of striking yoga poses in the buff in order to promote a book and his lifestyle.
The Naked Yoga Guy, whose name is George Monty Davis, had stripped to stretch nearby Fisherman's Wharf, prompting a public complaint. But prosecutors decided they had a weak public nuisance case against him because local laws do not bar public nudity.
"Simply being naked on the street is not a crime in San Francisco," said Debbie Mesloh, a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office.
"To bring a case, a person would have to exhibit lewd behavior, block traffic or impede pedestrians on a sidewalk, something along those lines."
In another case involving a Los Angeles teenager who dropped his pants to expose his bottom, or "moon," passing motorists from a nearby sidewalk, a California appellate court ruled nudity itself is not a crime, Mesloh said.
Davis could not immediately be reached for comment.
Sunday, July 25, 2004
NY Journal # 11 & 12
NY JOURNAL # 11
---------------------------------------
BLOG ENTRY
- be patient. it may take a few seconds to load.
John Facenda could read a lunch menu and make it sound better than Shakespeare. With this Kipling piece, he almost overwhelms the poem, so listen closely to the lyrics.. err.. poem.
There's a lot of recognizable nuggets of concisely constructed, sagely wisdom. With Facenda reading it, it comes off almost as scripture.
JOURNAL ENTRY
The Republican National Convention .... PROTESTS:
First off - as directed by Marshall Law directive GWB0015, I have avoided the Madison Square Garden area and all subways that pass beneath the area so I cant really comment on what's going on there first hand. What I have witnessed are the dozens of helicopters (and Fuji blimp) circling around, police teams in SWAT and riot gear stationed on seemingly random corners (waiting for protests to come to them?) and the occasional set of three to five police cars, sirens ablaze, racing off to the next donut store fire ... I mean... homeland security emergency. As for what I have seen - Lordy, people do not like this George Bush guy, myself included. This has to be the best politically-related protest turn out (both organized protests and general street presence) that I've witnessed in any city. Protests in SF have a distinct visual advantage in assessing the size of the crowd, being that you can usually pop your head over the crowd and see the continuous mass of people lined up down a linear Market Street. The protest we attended on Sunday snaked through the city in a somewhat confusing pattern that seemed like it was designed to pick up the most people along the way. Only helicopter aerial shots on tv could piece together the relative size of the crowds.
BLOG ENTRY
PROTEST T-SHIRTS:
Is this the Chinese calendar Year of the Protest T-Shirt..? Jeeeez Louise. I'm not sure if I'm more impressed by the percentage of protest attendees wearing their hearts on their ... well, shirt fronts or if it's a statement of capitalist consumerism Against capitalist consumerism. Either way, I'm enjoying seeing such a strong presence of liberal visibility amidst the inconspicuous Republican invasion that the news stations swear has taken over our city.
JOURNAL ENTRY
FLAPJACK and HAMBONE:
Ohhhh, my kitty boys are getting bigger, their personalities becoming more individual, day by day. They are very much like anyone's cats in two ways: If you walk near their food, they will assume that you are going to feed them. If you look at them, they will assume you are dying to pet them. Aside from that, I'm pretty convinced that they are actually dogs. Flapjack plays fetch. Hambone sits up on his hind legs and paws at the air. They would both sooner be near people than away from them. They bark at passing cars. Ok, they don't bark.
JOURNAL ENTRY
WSPk Characters:
Singing Scotty is still singing away. Has he added any songs to his repertoire? No. Oh, but I did forget to mention that "Ol' Man River" is another of his favorites. Does it make for a ridiculously awkward situation when black people are in the circle? take a wild guess. My favorite Singing Scotty moment of the last few weeks came when two hippie guys with guitars came and sat in the fountain circle area and began strumming out some songs together and then singing along with them. This type of thing Does normally annoy the hell out of me, but it's usually short lived so I just wait for them to move on. This day, Singing Scotty had the floor and I guess he didn't take too nicely to them trying to upstage him so about half way into one of their songs, Scotty began belting out The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow even Louder than I'd ever heard him sing. He sang a few lines and then turned to the two hippie guitarists and said "oh! sorry, sorry guys! didn't know I was messing up your time there, sorry about that". Now, you'd assume that Scotty was giving up the stage and apologizing for stepping on their good time.... or at least, that's what I'd assumed. So the guys start up their song again and five seconds in to it I hear "BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR, THAT TOMORROW....... THERE'LL BE SUNNNNN!!!!!!!!" .... Again, Scotty said "ohhh! sorry, sorry guys!!" like he just realized that he accidentally did it again. A few more times of this and the hippies got up and left. Don't mess with Singing Scotty. He WILL win.
BLOG ENTRY
BOOKS:
I'm still on the road to reading all of the books I've been meaning to read for years now and/or books from authors I've read everything of except for the ones they've made movies out of. From the first category, I finally read Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy - very entertaining... read it if you haven't. From the books-to-movies category, (not bragging, just explaining) I've previously read all of Vonnegut except for Slaughterhouse 5, all of Chuck Pahluniuk except for Fight Club, all Tom Robbins except for Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (and Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates which I'm reading now and highly recommend) so I feel like I'm finally tackling all of the dark horses I'd put off for so long, always telling myself I'd get to them eventually. Fight Club was quite good. Kind of amazing how closely the movie followed the book and how much of the book they actually were able to fit into the movie. Still, if you're going to read any of his books, I cant recommend 'Survivor' strongly enough - no, it has Absolutely Nothing to do with that god-awful reality-tv-show dreck so get that association out of your head and go buy Survivor today. If you aren't thanking me by the time you're done with it, I'll buy it off of you 'cause I seem to have misplaced my copy.
BLOG ENTRY
YOGA:
Yoga is one of the more self-confidentially, self-imagely, self-awarenessly rewarding (hey, my journals, I get to make up words if I want) aspects of my life these days. I'm still going thrice a week and am losing weight again, toning musculature and increasing flexibility beyond what I could have hoped I would have reached at this point (I finally crossed the not-at-all-really-important-barrier I'd been trying to reach since I started, I can now get my palms fully on the ground from a standing, straight-legged position).
BLOG ENTRY
REPLAYTV:
I've recently explored the tv-show-file-sharing capability of my ReplayTV (replayTV is Tivo's competitor). It has, in a sense, added the functions of Napster to the shows available to me. Oakland Raider games aren't shown on network tv locally out here of course so now, I can put in a request on a replay web page and people out West can send me the game via an internet transfer to my replayTV unit. I'm thinking about getting rid of HBO and just requesting the shows I want to see from people who do have HBO. Cheating? yes. But aside from The Sopranos, Da Ali G Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm (all in extended hiatus), I don't watch any HBO movies so I'm basically paying for the channel for nothing.
BLOG ENTRY
AHH, THE OLYMPICS:
With the replayTV, I was able to record only the sports that I wanted to see (court volleyball, table tennis, high jump and women's field hockey (ahem... if you saw the US team, you'd know why)) and then skip through the commercials and interstitial rah-rah human interest stories about individual athletes -and- the award ceremonies. In hindsight, I truly felt like I missed nothing by skipping all of that.
BLOG ENTRY
PICTURE UPDATE:
I've added some pictures and descriptions to my camera-phone-pics page:
http://www.t-mobilepictures.com/dayani
BLOG ENTRY
NY JOURNAL # 12
-------------------------------------------
RNC Poker Party: So, my roommate's... [unauthorized use of the following term] "girlfriend" Karen's sister Kathleen has been a caterer/chef in the city for years and as such, got a job to cater for the Republican National Convention. Stories of catering the convention mostly included ridiculous amounts of secret service security lurking all around, background checks and every caterer secretly giving various republicans the bird, with everyone in the kitchen sharing mutual... let's call it ... dislike for those they were serving. As many large catering jobs end with large amounts of left over food for the taking, Kathleen banked (I'm guessing here) 30 pounds of food. What would you logically do with all that food? Poker party! Yes! dumplings, stinky cheese, seafood tacos/burritos, a ridiculously-good blueberry compote thingy that ..... MmMMmMmmm.... that's all I can say. Amazing, all of it. AS if all that wasn't good enough, I won $14 (Karen won $70 or $80!) and Matt and I were given 6 or 7 pounds of leftovers to take home.
BLOG ENTRY
HEARTS CLUB:
A few Sundays, now, have been spent at pier 24 and 22 - kayaking and playing hearts (card game) to FM radio, cheap BBQ and optional miniature-golf, free ping pong, batting cages and as previously mentioned, unrivaled view of New Jersey. Sitting at a picnic table with friends, table-umbrella casting delicious shade, a nice river breeze, sipping lemonade and playing cards. Seriously, honestly, truly - it does not get much better.
JOURNAL ENTRY
WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK:
Have I mentioned the fountain itself? How it's used as a sneaky weapon of humor by park employees? At it's highest level (30 feet?), it's a beautiful co-icon of the park (shared by the WashSq Arch) and when ANY sort of wind breezes through the park, bends the fountain stream and breaks off a good portion of it into a spray that somehow, through wind chill factor, reaches a temperature approaching freezing by the time it thickly showers unsuspecting sun-bathers sitting in the circle. It is absolutely amazing to me, how quickly I have gone from thinking "damn it's hot today!" to "Oh-My-God-it-is-So-cold-I-want-to-Die---literally!" How do I know it's a weapon of humor? Because I've seen the employee charged with turning on/off/up/down the fountain try to suppress laughter with that nearly cracking smile that uses all 156 facial muscles, when the shrieks of "AAAAHHH!" ring out from a section of the circle.
Lately, thankfully... possibly due to complaints... they've lowered the height of the fountain by half.
Unfortunately, that had no bearing on -another- crazy man's need to drink the DAMN WATER. again. what the hell?!?! This guy, we'll call him rainbow toe-socks, wore tight black bicycle shorts, no shirt and knee-high rainbow colored socks that had individual toes sewn in. He was a loveable character until he reached for that floating plastic cup and..........
Another character has resurfaced as well.
- Fight-Me-Drunk, I'll call him. About 3 or so months ago, I sat in the circle reading, when up came a slurring, 40 something, dirty drunk guy hell bent on interrupting the reading of a girl in another part of the circle, somewhat near me (a slightly overcast day, there were maybe 5 or 6 people there). Sooo... he starts calling her bitch-this, rich-girl-that, who does she think she is, she's nothing but a ____, etc, etc, etc. When I noticed that he hadn't stopped after 5 minutes of this, I shot him a mean stare that I hoped said "ok arsehole, move on, leave her and everyone alone". Instead, I guess the look said "come do your drunken rant at me and say I look like Hitler". 'cause, yes, that's what happened. I ignored a good five minutes of it myself, hoping he'd tire or move on... no such luck. So I told him to shut the F up. Ohhhh the futility of that demand (does that Ever work?). I sat through another 3 minutes of rant (mostly 'cause it was actually pretty funny, some of the ridiculous stuff coming out of his mouth) and then I got up and left.
So that was 3 months ago, I hadn't seen him since then but about a week ago, he showed up and has been in WSPk every time I pass through or sit. He doesn't recognize or remember me (imagine that) and continues playing out his Fight-Me-Drunk role to great effect. Recent targets have been subjected to being splashed by water, being sprayed by his ranting spittle, regaled with word-changed-songs about their sexual preference and... pretty much anything else offensive he can think of. How long would you have to be forced to spend with this guy before you found a redeeming quality? How long will it be before he pushes the wrong person and invites upon himself an other-worldly ass kicking? Stay tuned.
- Pants Cutter: Pants cutter is back. Now, new and improved! He acquired a set of roller blades and seems to wear them without exception. The past few times I've seen him, he's been sporting roller blades, cut pants, no shirt and a broomstick.
- Singing Scotty: Two twenty-something travelers (American I think) tried to engage Scotty in an interview-like conversation about what he sings and why he sings and why so loud and was that gin on his breath, and so on. Scotty, through body language alone, made these guys cower and back down from their let's-talk-to-the-crazy-guy bravado. How? invaded personal bubble space. He simply stood 6 to 10 inches away from them, never letting them back up without advancing, and gave them big crazy eyes as he, instead of answering their questions, asked them questions.
BLOG ENTRY
MUSIC:Nelly's two-album release
Nelly again topped the competition Tuesday by releasing two, yes two, albums. One album of his smooooth-as-silk-to-have-sex-on songs & the other of faster, more rap'ish, dance-able (like "hot in herrre") songs. You either like the Nelly or ... you don't. If you don't because you don't like rap, I recommend resizing the acreage of your musical boundaries to make exception for Nelly. If Nelly doesn't go down as another danny-elfman, david-byrne, vinny-reilly like virtuoso music master of multiple mediums and styles -hall of fame style- I will be sick to my stomach with disgust at whoever determines who's a music god and who's not.
BLOG ENTRY
READING: My hero worship of Tom Robbins continues. I finally finished (457 small type pages, jeeesh) Tom Robbin's Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates the other day and, if it were the last book he wrote (which it isn't), I'd have to say he recently underwent some secret transformation or alien intervention that finely tuned his skills to a previously unknown clarity. Good lordy... it's as good if not better than anything else he's written.... And from it, I have to share two gems of uber-Tom-Robbins-ish Tom-Robbins-ness. There would be more than two but it seems that I didn't dog ear all the pages I thought I had. ..... The cross-country migraine was neither milder nor more severe than the short-distance on. In both cases, there was the sense that in the space behind his eyes a porcupine and a lobster were fighting to the death in front of a strobe light.
JOURNAL ENTRY
a quote he included: Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly - because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to God and there's always a chance that a folly will. - Erasmus
----mostly, I wanted to include this one below, I hope to read it every month or so.
from Harper's Sept 2004 issue
In Defiance of Gravity (and on 'crazy wisdom') - Tom Robbins [he's speaking of contemporary writing, but applies almost -more- to life in general]
When will our literati - in many cases, an erudite, superbly talented lot - evolve to the degree that they accord buoyancy and mirth a dime's worth of the respect they bestow so lavishly on gravity and misfortune?
Norman N Holland asked a similar question in Laughing: A Psychology of Humor, concluding that comedy is deemed inferior to tragedy primarily because of the social prevalence of narcissistic pathology. In other words, people who are too self-important to laugh at their own frequently ridiculous behavior have a vested interest in gravity because it supports their illusions of grandiosity. According to Professor Donald Kuspit, many people are unable to function without such illusions.
"Capitalism," wrote Kuspit, "encourages the pathologically grandiose self because it encourages the conspicuous consumption of possessions, which symbolizes one's grandiosity." I would add that rigid, unquestioning allegiance to a particular religious or political affiliation is in much the same way also symptomatic of disease.
Ironically, it's this same malignant narcissism, revealing itself through arrogance, avarice, pique, anxiety, severity, defensive cynicism, and aggressive ambition, that is keeping the vainglorious out of their paradise. Among our egocentric sad sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation. Taken out on others, depression becomes a weapon. But for those willing to reduce and permeate their ego, to laugh - or meow - into submission, heaven on earth is a distinct psychological possibility.
.....................
.. Freud said that wit is the denial of suffering. As I interpret it, he wasn't implying that the witty among us deny the existence of suffering - all of us suffer to one degree or another - but rather that, armed with a playful attitude, a comic sensibility, we can deny suffering dominion over our lives, we can refrain from buying shares in the company. Funnel that defiant humor onto the page, add a bracing shot of Zen awareness, and hey, pretty soon life has some justification for imitating art. ..........
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BLOG ENTRY
- be patient. it may take a few seconds to load.
John Facenda could read a lunch menu and make it sound better than Shakespeare. With this Kipling piece, he almost overwhelms the poem, so listen closely to the lyrics.. err.. poem.
There's a lot of recognizable nuggets of concisely constructed, sagely wisdom. With Facenda reading it, it comes off almost as scripture.
JOURNAL ENTRY
The Republican National Convention .... PROTESTS:
First off - as directed by Marshall Law directive GWB0015, I have avoided the Madison Square Garden area and all subways that pass beneath the area so I cant really comment on what's going on there first hand. What I have witnessed are the dozens of helicopters (and Fuji blimp) circling around, police teams in SWAT and riot gear stationed on seemingly random corners (waiting for protests to come to them?) and the occasional set of three to five police cars, sirens ablaze, racing off to the next donut store fire ... I mean... homeland security emergency. As for what I have seen - Lordy, people do not like this George Bush guy, myself included. This has to be the best politically-related protest turn out (both organized protests and general street presence) that I've witnessed in any city. Protests in SF have a distinct visual advantage in assessing the size of the crowd, being that you can usually pop your head over the crowd and see the continuous mass of people lined up down a linear Market Street. The protest we attended on Sunday snaked through the city in a somewhat confusing pattern that seemed like it was designed to pick up the most people along the way. Only helicopter aerial shots on tv could piece together the relative size of the crowds.
BLOG ENTRY
PROTEST T-SHIRTS:
Is this the Chinese calendar Year of the Protest T-Shirt..? Jeeeez Louise. I'm not sure if I'm more impressed by the percentage of protest attendees wearing their hearts on their ... well, shirt fronts or if it's a statement of capitalist consumerism Against capitalist consumerism. Either way, I'm enjoying seeing such a strong presence of liberal visibility amidst the inconspicuous Republican invasion that the news stations swear has taken over our city.
JOURNAL ENTRY
FLAPJACK and HAMBONE:
Ohhhh, my kitty boys are getting bigger, their personalities becoming more individual, day by day. They are very much like anyone's cats in two ways: If you walk near their food, they will assume that you are going to feed them. If you look at them, they will assume you are dying to pet them. Aside from that, I'm pretty convinced that they are actually dogs. Flapjack plays fetch. Hambone sits up on his hind legs and paws at the air. They would both sooner be near people than away from them. They bark at passing cars. Ok, they don't bark.
JOURNAL ENTRY
WSPk Characters:
Singing Scotty is still singing away. Has he added any songs to his repertoire? No. Oh, but I did forget to mention that "Ol' Man River" is another of his favorites. Does it make for a ridiculously awkward situation when black people are in the circle? take a wild guess. My favorite Singing Scotty moment of the last few weeks came when two hippie guys with guitars came and sat in the fountain circle area and began strumming out some songs together and then singing along with them. This type of thing Does normally annoy the hell out of me, but it's usually short lived so I just wait for them to move on. This day, Singing Scotty had the floor and I guess he didn't take too nicely to them trying to upstage him so about half way into one of their songs, Scotty began belting out The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow even Louder than I'd ever heard him sing. He sang a few lines and then turned to the two hippie guitarists and said "oh! sorry, sorry guys! didn't know I was messing up your time there, sorry about that". Now, you'd assume that Scotty was giving up the stage and apologizing for stepping on their good time.... or at least, that's what I'd assumed. So the guys start up their song again and five seconds in to it I hear "BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR, THAT TOMORROW....... THERE'LL BE SUNNNNN!!!!!!!!" .... Again, Scotty said "ohhh! sorry, sorry guys!!" like he just realized that he accidentally did it again. A few more times of this and the hippies got up and left. Don't mess with Singing Scotty. He WILL win.
BLOG ENTRY
BOOKS:
I'm still on the road to reading all of the books I've been meaning to read for years now and/or books from authors I've read everything of except for the ones they've made movies out of. From the first category, I finally read Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy - very entertaining... read it if you haven't. From the books-to-movies category, (not bragging, just explaining) I've previously read all of Vonnegut except for Slaughterhouse 5, all of Chuck Pahluniuk except for Fight Club, all Tom Robbins except for Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (and Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates which I'm reading now and highly recommend) so I feel like I'm finally tackling all of the dark horses I'd put off for so long, always telling myself I'd get to them eventually. Fight Club was quite good. Kind of amazing how closely the movie followed the book and how much of the book they actually were able to fit into the movie. Still, if you're going to read any of his books, I cant recommend 'Survivor' strongly enough - no, it has Absolutely Nothing to do with that god-awful reality-tv-show dreck so get that association out of your head and go buy Survivor today. If you aren't thanking me by the time you're done with it, I'll buy it off of you 'cause I seem to have misplaced my copy.
BLOG ENTRY
YOGA:
Yoga is one of the more self-confidentially, self-imagely, self-awarenessly rewarding (hey, my journals, I get to make up words if I want) aspects of my life these days. I'm still going thrice a week and am losing weight again, toning musculature and increasing flexibility beyond what I could have hoped I would have reached at this point (I finally crossed the not-at-all-really-important-barrier I'd been trying to reach since I started, I can now get my palms fully on the ground from a standing, straight-legged position).
BLOG ENTRY
REPLAYTV:
I've recently explored the tv-show-file-sharing capability of my ReplayTV (replayTV is Tivo's competitor). It has, in a sense, added the functions of Napster to the shows available to me. Oakland Raider games aren't shown on network tv locally out here of course so now, I can put in a request on a replay web page and people out West can send me the game via an internet transfer to my replayTV unit. I'm thinking about getting rid of HBO and just requesting the shows I want to see from people who do have HBO. Cheating? yes. But aside from The Sopranos, Da Ali G Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm (all in extended hiatus), I don't watch any HBO movies so I'm basically paying for the channel for nothing.
BLOG ENTRY
AHH, THE OLYMPICS:
With the replayTV, I was able to record only the sports that I wanted to see (court volleyball, table tennis, high jump and women's field hockey (ahem... if you saw the US team, you'd know why)) and then skip through the commercials and interstitial rah-rah human interest stories about individual athletes -and- the award ceremonies. In hindsight, I truly felt like I missed nothing by skipping all of that.
BLOG ENTRY
PICTURE UPDATE:
I've added some pictures and descriptions to my camera-phone-pics page:
http://www.t-mobilepictures.com/dayani
BLOG ENTRY
NY JOURNAL # 12
-------------------------------------------
RNC Poker Party: So, my roommate's... [unauthorized use of the following term] "girlfriend" Karen's sister Kathleen has been a caterer/chef in the city for years and as such, got a job to cater for the Republican National Convention. Stories of catering the convention mostly included ridiculous amounts of secret service security lurking all around, background checks and every caterer secretly giving various republicans the bird, with everyone in the kitchen sharing mutual... let's call it ... dislike for those they were serving. As many large catering jobs end with large amounts of left over food for the taking, Kathleen banked (I'm guessing here) 30 pounds of food. What would you logically do with all that food? Poker party! Yes! dumplings, stinky cheese, seafood tacos/burritos, a ridiculously-good blueberry compote thingy that ..... MmMMmMmmm.... that's all I can say. Amazing, all of it. AS if all that wasn't good enough, I won $14 (Karen won $70 or $80!) and Matt and I were given 6 or 7 pounds of leftovers to take home.
BLOG ENTRY
HEARTS CLUB:
A few Sundays, now, have been spent at pier 24 and 22 - kayaking and playing hearts (card game) to FM radio, cheap BBQ and optional miniature-golf, free ping pong, batting cages and as previously mentioned, unrivaled view of New Jersey. Sitting at a picnic table with friends, table-umbrella casting delicious shade, a nice river breeze, sipping lemonade and playing cards. Seriously, honestly, truly - it does not get much better.
JOURNAL ENTRY
WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK:
Have I mentioned the fountain itself? How it's used as a sneaky weapon of humor by park employees? At it's highest level (30 feet?), it's a beautiful co-icon of the park (shared by the WashSq Arch) and when ANY sort of wind breezes through the park, bends the fountain stream and breaks off a good portion of it into a spray that somehow, through wind chill factor, reaches a temperature approaching freezing by the time it thickly showers unsuspecting sun-bathers sitting in the circle. It is absolutely amazing to me, how quickly I have gone from thinking "damn it's hot today!" to "Oh-My-God-it-is-So-cold-I-want-to-Die---literally!" How do I know it's a weapon of humor? Because I've seen the employee charged with turning on/off/up/down the fountain try to suppress laughter with that nearly cracking smile that uses all 156 facial muscles, when the shrieks of "AAAAHHH!" ring out from a section of the circle.
Lately, thankfully... possibly due to complaints... they've lowered the height of the fountain by half.
Unfortunately, that had no bearing on -another- crazy man's need to drink the DAMN WATER. again. what the hell?!?! This guy, we'll call him rainbow toe-socks, wore tight black bicycle shorts, no shirt and knee-high rainbow colored socks that had individual toes sewn in. He was a loveable character until he reached for that floating plastic cup and..........
Another character has resurfaced as well.
- Fight-Me-Drunk, I'll call him. About 3 or so months ago, I sat in the circle reading, when up came a slurring, 40 something, dirty drunk guy hell bent on interrupting the reading of a girl in another part of the circle, somewhat near me (a slightly overcast day, there were maybe 5 or 6 people there). Sooo... he starts calling her bitch-this, rich-girl-that, who does she think she is, she's nothing but a ____, etc, etc, etc. When I noticed that he hadn't stopped after 5 minutes of this, I shot him a mean stare that I hoped said "ok arsehole, move on, leave her and everyone alone". Instead, I guess the look said "come do your drunken rant at me and say I look like Hitler". 'cause, yes, that's what happened. I ignored a good five minutes of it myself, hoping he'd tire or move on... no such luck. So I told him to shut the F up. Ohhhh the futility of that demand (does that Ever work?). I sat through another 3 minutes of rant (mostly 'cause it was actually pretty funny, some of the ridiculous stuff coming out of his mouth) and then I got up and left.
So that was 3 months ago, I hadn't seen him since then but about a week ago, he showed up and has been in WSPk every time I pass through or sit. He doesn't recognize or remember me (imagine that) and continues playing out his Fight-Me-Drunk role to great effect. Recent targets have been subjected to being splashed by water, being sprayed by his ranting spittle, regaled with word-changed-songs about their sexual preference and... pretty much anything else offensive he can think of. How long would you have to be forced to spend with this guy before you found a redeeming quality? How long will it be before he pushes the wrong person and invites upon himself an other-worldly ass kicking? Stay tuned.
- Pants Cutter: Pants cutter is back. Now, new and improved! He acquired a set of roller blades and seems to wear them without exception. The past few times I've seen him, he's been sporting roller blades, cut pants, no shirt and a broomstick.
- Singing Scotty: Two twenty-something travelers (American I think) tried to engage Scotty in an interview-like conversation about what he sings and why he sings and why so loud and was that gin on his breath, and so on. Scotty, through body language alone, made these guys cower and back down from their let's-talk-to-the-crazy-guy bravado. How? invaded personal bubble space. He simply stood 6 to 10 inches away from them, never letting them back up without advancing, and gave them big crazy eyes as he, instead of answering their questions, asked them questions.
BLOG ENTRY
MUSIC:Nelly's two-album release
Nelly again topped the competition Tuesday by releasing two, yes two, albums. One album of his smooooth-as-silk-to-have-sex-on songs & the other of faster, more rap'ish, dance-able (like "hot in herrre") songs. You either like the Nelly or ... you don't. If you don't because you don't like rap, I recommend resizing the acreage of your musical boundaries to make exception for Nelly. If Nelly doesn't go down as another danny-elfman, david-byrne, vinny-reilly like virtuoso music master of multiple mediums and styles -hall of fame style- I will be sick to my stomach with disgust at whoever determines who's a music god and who's not.
BLOG ENTRY
READING: My hero worship of Tom Robbins continues. I finally finished (457 small type pages, jeeesh) Tom Robbin's Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates the other day and, if it were the last book he wrote (which it isn't), I'd have to say he recently underwent some secret transformation or alien intervention that finely tuned his skills to a previously unknown clarity. Good lordy... it's as good if not better than anything else he's written.... And from it, I have to share two gems of uber-Tom-Robbins-ish Tom-Robbins-ness. There would be more than two but it seems that I didn't dog ear all the pages I thought I had. ..... The cross-country migraine was neither milder nor more severe than the short-distance on. In both cases, there was the sense that in the space behind his eyes a porcupine and a lobster were fighting to the death in front of a strobe light.
JOURNAL ENTRY
a quote he included: Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly - because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to God and there's always a chance that a folly will. - Erasmus
----mostly, I wanted to include this one below, I hope to read it every month or so.
from Harper's Sept 2004 issue
In Defiance of Gravity (and on 'crazy wisdom') - Tom Robbins [he's speaking of contemporary writing, but applies almost -more- to life in general]
When will our literati - in many cases, an erudite, superbly talented lot - evolve to the degree that they accord buoyancy and mirth a dime's worth of the respect they bestow so lavishly on gravity and misfortune?
Norman N Holland asked a similar question in Laughing: A Psychology of Humor, concluding that comedy is deemed inferior to tragedy primarily because of the social prevalence of narcissistic pathology. In other words, people who are too self-important to laugh at their own frequently ridiculous behavior have a vested interest in gravity because it supports their illusions of grandiosity. According to Professor Donald Kuspit, many people are unable to function without such illusions.
"Capitalism," wrote Kuspit, "encourages the pathologically grandiose self because it encourages the conspicuous consumption of possessions, which symbolizes one's grandiosity." I would add that rigid, unquestioning allegiance to a particular religious or political affiliation is in much the same way also symptomatic of disease.
Ironically, it's this same malignant narcissism, revealing itself through arrogance, avarice, pique, anxiety, severity, defensive cynicism, and aggressive ambition, that is keeping the vainglorious out of their paradise. Among our egocentric sad sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation. Taken out on others, depression becomes a weapon. But for those willing to reduce and permeate their ego, to laugh - or meow - into submission, heaven on earth is a distinct psychological possibility.
.....................
.. Freud said that wit is the denial of suffering. As I interpret it, he wasn't implying that the witty among us deny the existence of suffering - all of us suffer to one degree or another - but rather that, armed with a playful attitude, a comic sensibility, we can deny suffering dominion over our lives, we can refrain from buying shares in the company. Funnel that defiant humor onto the page, add a bracing shot of Zen awareness, and hey, pretty soon life has some justification for imitating art. ..........
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
NY Journal # 9 & 10
New York Journal # 9
--------------------------------------
BLOG ENTRY
Ok, a few things more I really meant to mention in the last journal, so hopefully, this will be a short one -SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE TICKETS:I need help getting tickets! Or you need to come to NYC and see SNL! or both! or... please, a humble, favor-request? - This Month ONLY! can you send an email to snltickets@nbc.com and ask for tickets? If you cant come to NYC to use them, I'd love to take 'em off your hands if you win. I have a few emails in to them myself but the more (tickets for more shows) the merrier.To enter the ticket lottery for the 2004-2005 season, send one email to snltickets@nbc.com in the month of August only.
JOURNAL ENTRY
WASHINGTON SQ PARK update: An infrequently recurring WSPk character resurfaced yesterday to shock me into literal jaw dropping horror at the sight of... well, some:
*Background: 30something black male, hip hop style, facial hair that runs from sideburn to sideburn under his chin, giving him a slightly Cowardly Lion appearance
*Mental state = imbalanced but seemingly harmlessly so.
*Quirks: fascination with things floating in the WSPk fountain and/or throwing objects that lie around IN TO the fountain. - I saw the shocker yesterday out of the corner of my eye, my brain not actually comprehending at first - no, not wanting to BELIEVE - what I had just seen. The guy had found a small, clear plastic cup lying around the fountain or in the fountain and... began to scoop water out of the fountain and as you may have guessed by now, yes... drink it.
*More Background: WSPk's fountain water - while being a historical mainstay and icon of the West Village, being calming and refreshing to sit by on hot summer days and being a requisite photo opportunity for those passing through with cameras - is home to dogs on leashes cooling off by laying in the water, the occasional dog peeing in the water, children, of course playing in and .. of course also peeing in the water, homeless guys cleaning themselves in and of course, probably peeing in the water and naive tourists, sunbathers and locals cooling themselves off in and.. who knows, maybe also peeing in the water. Needless to say, .... REALLY really needless to say - Dont Drink the Damn Water. Jesus. I wasn't the only one in shock of course. I've never seen so many other people around the circle look at each other in horror to confirm they were all seeing the same ghastly site.
FREE KAYAKING: From water you shouldn't drink to water you shouldn't drink - A few weeks ago we kayaked for free on the Hudson through: http://www.downtownboathouse.org "is an all-volunteer organization that is dedicated to providing access to the Hudson River for everyone. The Boathouse is located in the Hudson River Park.. [and].. run[s] the following free programs: walk-up public kayaking, kayak trips on the harbor, evening classes, and a youth sailing program. T'was most awesome. Out on the water, paddling about, looking at the NY skyline, watching amateur trapeze enthusiasts learning the ropes (Ha! ha. umm.. ha. get it?) at the trapeze school adjacent to the boathouse. Monstrous carnival cruise ships passing by a few hundred yards away, heck, even New Jersey looks beautiful from the water. Witnessing all of this, I said the phrase I have said on average of once a week since I moved here: "God I love this city".
GOD, I LOVE THIS CITY: This has to be another category I visit from time to time. I really DO say it about once a week, for the various giggle or goosebump inducing cool aspects of the city. Yesterday for example, just before leaving the park after seeing Water Drinker's coup de grace, storm clouds had gathered, thunderstorms had been predicted, but I wanted to believe that the arms of the weater pattern would miss us in some force field twist of good fortune. No such luck. But the beauty of the situation was, whereas in San Francisco, when rain starts, you have from 2 to 7 minutes to get under cover before it goes from sprinkling to raining. Yesterday, it went from sprinkling to cherry-sized plops of rain, thunder and lightning in no more than 3 minutes total. Twenty minutes later, it was sunny with the ground drying. An hour later, it did the same thing. Now, granted, it's never nice to unexpectedly get soaked in the rain (not that we did, we found shelter) - what IS nice is weather. real weather. There's a verse in the Bible that says: you take the good, you take the bad, you take them all and there you have the facts of life. the facts of life. Wait.. whu..? not from the.. ? ok, I'm being told that's not from the Bible. well, wherever that prophetically profound tome originated, it rings true. The facts of life, here, seem to be about extremes and/or excess, and a rapid changing through them. The weather, the number of people, buildings, subway lines, parks, neighborhoods, the plethora of food and entertainment choices. And on and on and on. Not that all other cities aren't as good but... all other cities just aren't as good.
Ok. I'm kidding...
no, I'm not.
HA! ok, really, I'm kidding.
Actually. I'm not.: )
BLOG ENTRY
NY JOURNAL # 10
------------------------------------------------
I seem to be on a writing-motivated roll here soo... read this or save it for later or... ask me to take you off of my list. No offense will be taken, no curses will be placed on you and yours.
ANOTHER REQUEST:
I have the below program on my laptop, running only when I'm not using the computer and... well, I'll copy & paste their schpiel in a sec. I highly recommend it because, well... how many chances do you get to actually help make a difference in a cure or treatment? unless you're a doctor, not much, sad to say. so here's our chance:
http://www.grid.org/download/gold/download.htm
---The United Devices Cancer Research Project is asking you to volunteer your PC to help process molecular research being conducted by the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford in England and the National Foundation for Cancer Research. To participate, you simply download a very small, no cost, non-invasive software program that works like a screensaver: it runs when your computer isn't being used, and processes research until you need your machine. Your computer never leaves your desk, and the project never interrupts your usual PC use.
---It's safe and easy
There is no cost to participate and no impact on your computer use. The project software cannot detect or transfer anything on your machine but project-specific information. It just allows your computer to screen molecules that may be developed into drugs to fight cancer. Each individual computer analyzes a few molecules and then sends the results back over the Internet for further research. This project is anticipated to be the largest computational chemistry project ever undertaken and represents a genuine hope to find a better way to fight cancer.
---The computational power to perform research of this scale is only available through the generosity of individuals like you.
THE WEATHER:
All it took was for me to talk about the extreme and excessive weather for it to completely contradict my naive generalization. Yesterday, it sprinkled lightly and consistently, for nearly the entire day. Always just hard enough to almost need an umbrella.
LITTLE STEVEN'S UNDERGROUND GARAGE concert:
http://www.littlestevensundergroundgarage.com/festival/
A friend who works in the area couldn't use her tickets to this massive concert on Randall's Island and gave them to me and Matt. - Randall's Island is a smallish island housing a criminal psych center, an open air concert arena and sports facilities (those go together, right?) It's accessible by footbridge at 103rd Street, Harlem but since we'd never been there, we didn't realize it was a good 40 minute walk to the concert area once on the island. Although it's only a couple hundred yards across the East River from Manhattan, crickets are all you hear once you get on the Randall's Island side. We timed our arrival (half by design, half by opportune accident) to coincide perfectly with the only band we wanted to see, Iggy Pop and the Stooges. Have Mercy, that old man puts on one damn fine, energetic concert. Matt aptly said after the show that it's exhausting just watching him perform - with his impossibly-skinny-body-meets-ultra-defined-musculature, leathery skin and 14-year-old-girl-jeans, as a physical specimen, it bordered on the grotesque to watch him except that pretty much everyone at the show was undoubtedly hoping they'll look half that healthy when they're as old as Iggy is now. Looks aside, he sounds just as good as he does on any of his early albums and quite possibly has more concert energy than he did back then.
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE TICKETS:
No seriously, can you email them? : ) Act now and I will even Pay You if you win and cant use your tickets! I'm 100% serious. This month only! - snltickets@nbc.com ask for four tickets please! (always ask for 4 tickets for whatever tv show you're trying to see. If you cant use the extras, stand-by's get them, so they're not going to waste)
--------------------------------------
BLOG ENTRY
Ok, a few things more I really meant to mention in the last journal, so hopefully, this will be a short one -SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE TICKETS:I need help getting tickets! Or you need to come to NYC and see SNL! or both! or... please, a humble, favor-request? - This Month ONLY! can you send an email to snltickets@nbc.com and ask for tickets? If you cant come to NYC to use them, I'd love to take 'em off your hands if you win. I have a few emails in to them myself but the more (tickets for more shows) the merrier.To enter the ticket lottery for the 2004-2005 season, send one email to snltickets@nbc.com in the month of August only.
JOURNAL ENTRY
WASHINGTON SQ PARK update: An infrequently recurring WSPk character resurfaced yesterday to shock me into literal jaw dropping horror at the sight of... well, some:
*Background: 30something black male, hip hop style, facial hair that runs from sideburn to sideburn under his chin, giving him a slightly Cowardly Lion appearance
*Mental state = imbalanced but seemingly harmlessly so.
*Quirks: fascination with things floating in the WSPk fountain and/or throwing objects that lie around IN TO the fountain. - I saw the shocker yesterday out of the corner of my eye, my brain not actually comprehending at first - no, not wanting to BELIEVE - what I had just seen. The guy had found a small, clear plastic cup lying around the fountain or in the fountain and... began to scoop water out of the fountain and as you may have guessed by now, yes... drink it.
*More Background: WSPk's fountain water - while being a historical mainstay and icon of the West Village, being calming and refreshing to sit by on hot summer days and being a requisite photo opportunity for those passing through with cameras - is home to dogs on leashes cooling off by laying in the water, the occasional dog peeing in the water, children, of course playing in and .. of course also peeing in the water, homeless guys cleaning themselves in and of course, probably peeing in the water and naive tourists, sunbathers and locals cooling themselves off in and.. who knows, maybe also peeing in the water. Needless to say, .... REALLY really needless to say - Dont Drink the Damn Water. Jesus. I wasn't the only one in shock of course. I've never seen so many other people around the circle look at each other in horror to confirm they were all seeing the same ghastly site.
FREE KAYAKING: From water you shouldn't drink to water you shouldn't drink - A few weeks ago we kayaked for free on the Hudson through: http://www.downtownboathouse.org "is an all-volunteer organization that is dedicated to providing access to the Hudson River for everyone. The Boathouse is located in the Hudson River Park.. [and].. run[s] the following free programs: walk-up public kayaking, kayak trips on the harbor, evening classes, and a youth sailing program. T'was most awesome. Out on the water, paddling about, looking at the NY skyline, watching amateur trapeze enthusiasts learning the ropes (Ha! ha. umm.. ha. get it?) at the trapeze school adjacent to the boathouse. Monstrous carnival cruise ships passing by a few hundred yards away, heck, even New Jersey looks beautiful from the water. Witnessing all of this, I said the phrase I have said on average of once a week since I moved here: "God I love this city".
GOD, I LOVE THIS CITY: This has to be another category I visit from time to time. I really DO say it about once a week, for the various giggle or goosebump inducing cool aspects of the city. Yesterday for example, just before leaving the park after seeing Water Drinker's coup de grace, storm clouds had gathered, thunderstorms had been predicted, but I wanted to believe that the arms of the weater pattern would miss us in some force field twist of good fortune. No such luck. But the beauty of the situation was, whereas in San Francisco, when rain starts, you have from 2 to 7 minutes to get under cover before it goes from sprinkling to raining. Yesterday, it went from sprinkling to cherry-sized plops of rain, thunder and lightning in no more than 3 minutes total. Twenty minutes later, it was sunny with the ground drying. An hour later, it did the same thing. Now, granted, it's never nice to unexpectedly get soaked in the rain (not that we did, we found shelter) - what IS nice is weather. real weather. There's a verse in the Bible that says: you take the good, you take the bad, you take them all and there you have the facts of life. the facts of life. Wait.. whu..? not from the.. ? ok, I'm being told that's not from the Bible. well, wherever that prophetically profound tome originated, it rings true. The facts of life, here, seem to be about extremes and/or excess, and a rapid changing through them. The weather, the number of people, buildings, subway lines, parks, neighborhoods, the plethora of food and entertainment choices. And on and on and on. Not that all other cities aren't as good but... all other cities just aren't as good.
Ok. I'm kidding...
no, I'm not.
HA! ok, really, I'm kidding.
Actually. I'm not.: )
BLOG ENTRY
NY JOURNAL # 10
------------------------------------------------
I seem to be on a writing-motivated roll here soo... read this or save it for later or... ask me to take you off of my list. No offense will be taken, no curses will be placed on you and yours.
ANOTHER REQUEST:
I have the below program on my laptop, running only when I'm not using the computer and... well, I'll copy & paste their schpiel in a sec. I highly recommend it because, well... how many chances do you get to actually help make a difference in a cure or treatment? unless you're a doctor, not much, sad to say. so here's our chance:
http://www.grid.org/download/gold/download.htm
---The United Devices Cancer Research Project is asking you to volunteer your PC to help process molecular research being conducted by the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford in England and the National Foundation for Cancer Research. To participate, you simply download a very small, no cost, non-invasive software program that works like a screensaver: it runs when your computer isn't being used, and processes research until you need your machine. Your computer never leaves your desk, and the project never interrupts your usual PC use.
---It's safe and easy
There is no cost to participate and no impact on your computer use. The project software cannot detect or transfer anything on your machine but project-specific information. It just allows your computer to screen molecules that may be developed into drugs to fight cancer. Each individual computer analyzes a few molecules and then sends the results back over the Internet for further research. This project is anticipated to be the largest computational chemistry project ever undertaken and represents a genuine hope to find a better way to fight cancer.
---The computational power to perform research of this scale is only available through the generosity of individuals like you.
THE WEATHER:
All it took was for me to talk about the extreme and excessive weather for it to completely contradict my naive generalization. Yesterday, it sprinkled lightly and consistently, for nearly the entire day. Always just hard enough to almost need an umbrella.
LITTLE STEVEN'S UNDERGROUND GARAGE concert:
http://www.littlestevensundergroundgarage.com/festival/
A friend who works in the area couldn't use her tickets to this massive concert on Randall's Island and gave them to me and Matt. - Randall's Island is a smallish island housing a criminal psych center, an open air concert arena and sports facilities (those go together, right?) It's accessible by footbridge at 103rd Street, Harlem but since we'd never been there, we didn't realize it was a good 40 minute walk to the concert area once on the island. Although it's only a couple hundred yards across the East River from Manhattan, crickets are all you hear once you get on the Randall's Island side. We timed our arrival (half by design, half by opportune accident) to coincide perfectly with the only band we wanted to see, Iggy Pop and the Stooges. Have Mercy, that old man puts on one damn fine, energetic concert. Matt aptly said after the show that it's exhausting just watching him perform - with his impossibly-skinny-body-meets-ultra-defined-musculature, leathery skin and 14-year-old-girl-jeans, as a physical specimen, it bordered on the grotesque to watch him except that pretty much everyone at the show was undoubtedly hoping they'll look half that healthy when they're as old as Iggy is now. Looks aside, he sounds just as good as he does on any of his early albums and quite possibly has more concert energy than he did back then.
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE TICKETS:
No seriously, can you email them? : ) Act now and I will even Pay You if you win and cant use your tickets! I'm 100% serious. This month only! - snltickets@nbc.com ask for four tickets please! (always ask for 4 tickets for whatever tv show you're trying to see. If you cant use the extras, stand-by's get them, so they're not going to waste)
Sunday, February 15, 2004
NY Journal # 8
JOURNAL ENTRY
NY Journal # 8
------------------------------
Ok. So as to avoid my usual 2-to-3-month-interval between Journals, I'm going to start tackling different topics and then revisiting them as need be to cover aspects I forgot to mention or updates to situations, characters, events, etc...
MY LIFE, THESE DAYS
My life, these days consists of waking to alarm-clock-like kittens walking on my head or sprinting around the apartment until I get up, then coffee and cereal while scouring the internet job search boards, listings, online newspaper job boards and the like, sending resumes & cover letters and phone calls when numbers are available. Since I am still moderately comfortable taking a break between jobs, the relative lack of employer response is not too troubling. Having spent 6 1/2 years at MCI (with 3 1/2yrs at MediaTel leading into MCI) I am trying to fully appreciate the mental health aspects of joblessness while suppressing the inherent guilt whose force I had underestimated.
WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK
Being as how I have probably logged a full month in this park, time tolled since the layoff, it seems most appropriate to lead off with thoughts on the park.
Granted, nothing helps you fully get a feel for a place like spending most of your afternoons in it, but even aside from that, Washington Square Park (WSPk going forward) has grown on me, or I on it to a point where I'm comfortable with thinking of it as 'my park'. Not mine alone of course, that would kind of cut down on the fun of people watching.
The majority of park time is spent reading and people watching with football-tossing, bocci and eating coming a close second. or 3rd, 4th & 5th if you prefer.
READING: Five novels in two months is not a lot for some people I know, but for me, having read maybe five novels in the five YEARS prior to this, it's significant. Since resuming enthusiasm for reading is a cumulative process, sci-fi has been the easiest avenue of interest to reach that place where when you ask yourself what you want to do now, "reading" comes to mind first.
::::What I've Been Reading: Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan... best book I've read in 7 years or more.. since the William Gibson trilogies- good lord it's amazing. Seriously, I cant recommend Altered Carbon enough. Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin... I've had this multi-award-winning novel among my books for probably 16 years- if it was wine I'd say it was worth the wait. Sadly (or not) I could have enjoyed it's goodness years ago. Excellent, captivating. Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins... Ok, not sci-fi but it IS Tom Robbins so I figured it would be as spellbinding as his other novels- not so unfortunately. After The Quake by Haruki Murakami... again, not sci-fi and sadly again, not his best by any means- check out Wind Up Bird Chronicles for excellent Murakami goodness. Lies, Inc by Philip K Dick... one of the best first 100 pages of any book I've read, the middle portion is not always coherent, the ending closes nicely enough - well worth it for the beginning of the book alone.
PEOPLE WATCHING: Needless to say, parks in New York provide quite the opportunity for people watching of the good looking, the, umm.. not-so good, the hip, the square, young, old, sane, crazy-out-of-their-f#@%-gourds, tourist, local. It's a fairly even blend of all of the above and with the amount of time Matt and I spend in the park, we've seen a lot of each. The ones that stand out of course are the crazier of the bunch, the
RECURRING CHARACTERS: Crazy Headphones Boy... is a mid-20's somewhat-mentally-imbalanced homeless lad who, to his walkman accompaniment, has performed the hand & arm gestures of a rap artist on stage to the WSPk fountain-circle-sitters. As with most of the park characters, everyone ignores his antics... everyone except for those who get a kick out of his performances. When not 'on stage', he stares at girls with a crazy-man's crazy-smile and if they smoke, he bums a cigarette and then crazy-talks them into leaving the circle. Pants Cutter... is your average shirtless talk-to-selfer with the occasional erratic hand and head movements of borderline turrets syndrome and.. as you might guess, likes to 'tailor' his pants in the fountain circle with a dull knife, turning them into ragged shorts. Singing Scotty... is the spitting image of James Doohan who played Scotty on the original Star Trek. He... guess... guess..? Yep. sings. Loudly. The same half dozen songs. Over and Over. did I mention loudly? You don't like his singing? I'd advise against telling him so unless you like being yelled at for up to half an hour or more as he informs you how you are in a park that loves singing. His songs include the same four lines he knows from The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow from Annie, a few Neil Diamond songs and the National Anthem. Ricky/Noah(?)... is a 9 year old Latino boy who has a million questions to ask of anyone he feels like approaching. I happened to be next to one of his targets one day and got drawn in to the conversation that included questions to the girl like "what's your dogs name - how old is he - do you live here - do you have a boyfriend - do you have a husband - why not - are you a lesbian - why don't you date people - can I pet your dog - do you want a sour gummy bear - I'll go get some - I'll bet you don't know my name - it's Ricky!". Priceless. I was crying with laughter. A few days later he was back, talking to two guys next to me. He was obviously cracking them up to so I told them about Ricky and the girl from the day before. "Ricky? he told us his name was Noah" they said. They then got him to take a jokingly-junior-high-style note that said "if you like me check the YES box" over to some girls on the opposite side of the circle, which Ricky/Noah did without any qualms of embarrassment at all.
FOOTBALL-TOSSING: there's 5 excellent fields to chose from, though a few are better for people watching in between tosses. Mainly, throwing around the football IS just a device for people watching but it's of course also good for exercise, it's good for getting outside and enjoying the park and it's ..well... fun. Throwing a perfect spiral or making a one handed catch is a satisfying reward beyond description.
BOCCI: yep. A bocci court.. two actually, sit on the southern side of WSPk and are only used by true Bocci fans on the weekends, leaving it wide open for our use during the week.
EATING: Ahhh, the plethora of different types of food available in New York, especially around the park. A Sri Lankan/Indian food cart operator serves up Sri Lankan and Indian vegetarian food that is cheap and good beyond belief. There's pizza of course and $2 falafels and shwarmas, there's $3.50 jerk chicken sandwiches and other Caribbean goodies, there's chicken parmesan sandwiches, paninis, pierogies and piroshkis - you name it, it's within 2 or 3 blocks of the park and all gets taken to go, to be eaten in the park.
OK, that's enough for now. More later.
If anyone has any topic requests, let me know.
NY Journal # 8
------------------------------
Ok. So as to avoid my usual 2-to-3-month-interval between Journals, I'm going to start tackling different topics and then revisiting them as need be to cover aspects I forgot to mention or updates to situations, characters, events, etc...
MY LIFE, THESE DAYS
My life, these days consists of waking to alarm-clock-like kittens walking on my head or sprinting around the apartment until I get up, then coffee and cereal while scouring the internet job search boards, listings, online newspaper job boards and the like, sending resumes & cover letters and phone calls when numbers are available. Since I am still moderately comfortable taking a break between jobs, the relative lack of employer response is not too troubling. Having spent 6 1/2 years at MCI (with 3 1/2yrs at MediaTel leading into MCI) I am trying to fully appreciate the mental health aspects of joblessness while suppressing the inherent guilt whose force I had underestimated.
WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK
Being as how I have probably logged a full month in this park, time tolled since the layoff, it seems most appropriate to lead off with thoughts on the park.
Granted, nothing helps you fully get a feel for a place like spending most of your afternoons in it, but even aside from that, Washington Square Park (WSPk going forward) has grown on me, or I on it to a point where I'm comfortable with thinking of it as 'my park'. Not mine alone of course, that would kind of cut down on the fun of people watching.
The majority of park time is spent reading and people watching with football-tossing, bocci and eating coming a close second. or 3rd, 4th & 5th if you prefer.
READING: Five novels in two months is not a lot for some people I know, but for me, having read maybe five novels in the five YEARS prior to this, it's significant. Since resuming enthusiasm for reading is a cumulative process, sci-fi has been the easiest avenue of interest to reach that place where when you ask yourself what you want to do now, "reading" comes to mind first.
::::What I've Been Reading: Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan... best book I've read in 7 years or more.. since the William Gibson trilogies- good lord it's amazing. Seriously, I cant recommend Altered Carbon enough. Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin... I've had this multi-award-winning novel among my books for probably 16 years- if it was wine I'd say it was worth the wait. Sadly (or not) I could have enjoyed it's goodness years ago. Excellent, captivating. Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins... Ok, not sci-fi but it IS Tom Robbins so I figured it would be as spellbinding as his other novels- not so unfortunately. After The Quake by Haruki Murakami... again, not sci-fi and sadly again, not his best by any means- check out Wind Up Bird Chronicles for excellent Murakami goodness. Lies, Inc by Philip K Dick... one of the best first 100 pages of any book I've read, the middle portion is not always coherent, the ending closes nicely enough - well worth it for the beginning of the book alone.
PEOPLE WATCHING: Needless to say, parks in New York provide quite the opportunity for people watching of the good looking, the, umm.. not-so good, the hip, the square, young, old, sane, crazy-out-of-their-f#@%-gourds, tourist, local. It's a fairly even blend of all of the above and with the amount of time Matt and I spend in the park, we've seen a lot of each. The ones that stand out of course are the crazier of the bunch, the
RECURRING CHARACTERS: Crazy Headphones Boy... is a mid-20's somewhat-mentally-imbalanced homeless lad who, to his walkman accompaniment, has performed the hand & arm gestures of a rap artist on stage to the WSPk fountain-circle-sitters. As with most of the park characters, everyone ignores his antics... everyone except for those who get a kick out of his performances. When not 'on stage', he stares at girls with a crazy-man's crazy-smile and if they smoke, he bums a cigarette and then crazy-talks them into leaving the circle. Pants Cutter... is your average shirtless talk-to-selfer with the occasional erratic hand and head movements of borderline turrets syndrome and.. as you might guess, likes to 'tailor' his pants in the fountain circle with a dull knife, turning them into ragged shorts. Singing Scotty... is the spitting image of James Doohan who played Scotty on the original Star Trek. He... guess... guess..? Yep. sings. Loudly. The same half dozen songs. Over and Over. did I mention loudly? You don't like his singing? I'd advise against telling him so unless you like being yelled at for up to half an hour or more as he informs you how you are in a park that loves singing. His songs include the same four lines he knows from The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow from Annie, a few Neil Diamond songs and the National Anthem. Ricky/Noah(?)... is a 9 year old Latino boy who has a million questions to ask of anyone he feels like approaching. I happened to be next to one of his targets one day and got drawn in to the conversation that included questions to the girl like "what's your dogs name - how old is he - do you live here - do you have a boyfriend - do you have a husband - why not - are you a lesbian - why don't you date people - can I pet your dog - do you want a sour gummy bear - I'll go get some - I'll bet you don't know my name - it's Ricky!". Priceless. I was crying with laughter. A few days later he was back, talking to two guys next to me. He was obviously cracking them up to so I told them about Ricky and the girl from the day before. "Ricky? he told us his name was Noah" they said. They then got him to take a jokingly-junior-high-style note that said "if you like me check the YES box" over to some girls on the opposite side of the circle, which Ricky/Noah did without any qualms of embarrassment at all.
FOOTBALL-TOSSING: there's 5 excellent fields to chose from, though a few are better for people watching in between tosses. Mainly, throwing around the football IS just a device for people watching but it's of course also good for exercise, it's good for getting outside and enjoying the park and it's ..well... fun. Throwing a perfect spiral or making a one handed catch is a satisfying reward beyond description.
BOCCI: yep. A bocci court.. two actually, sit on the southern side of WSPk and are only used by true Bocci fans on the weekends, leaving it wide open for our use during the week.
EATING: Ahhh, the plethora of different types of food available in New York, especially around the park. A Sri Lankan/Indian food cart operator serves up Sri Lankan and Indian vegetarian food that is cheap and good beyond belief. There's pizza of course and $2 falafels and shwarmas, there's $3.50 jerk chicken sandwiches and other Caribbean goodies, there's chicken parmesan sandwiches, paninis, pierogies and piroshkis - you name it, it's within 2 or 3 blocks of the park and all gets taken to go, to be eaten in the park.
OK, that's enough for now. More later.
If anyone has any topic requests, let me know.
Monday, June 30, 2003
NY Journal # 7
JOURNAL ENTRY
NY Journal # 7 (now with photographically picturical photo album!!)
------------------------------------------------------
My lawyers tell me that contractually, I need to say this:"So it's been a long time since I've written and a lot of things have happened." Too much has happened, so much that I ... well... don't really want to talk about it. So I'm writing about it to tell you that I'm not going to write about it. Not really. I'll summarize: Elizabeth and I separated, she moved back to SF, I'm staying here. My longtime friend from SF, Matt moved up from Florida and took the office/bedroom. I lost my almost 7 year job with MCI and am not breaking my back looking for a new one. I am getting a "wicked-awesome" tan from a lot of reading in Washington Square Park. I have taken up yoga since E and I split, going to 3-4 classes per week. Am loving all aspects of it minus a few teachers' love of "fire breathing" (more on that later). My mom is doing really well after her 3rd surgery, cancer free again and sounding great. My parents moved again: 33 times in 35 years. My brother is buying a house in San Diego, or looking at least... Yes, that Does make me feel old, thank you for asking.
I've started an album of pictures I've taken w/ my camera phone:
http://www.t-mobilepictures.com/dayani
All of the pics are currently in one folder, making it a slight pain to navigate through. I'll soon be migrating them to separate named folders and then going forward put new photos in dated folders.
Soooooo - let's see, some recent happenings:
- classical music in Washington Square Park every Tuesday at 8, for the next many weeks. A thermos of wine, people watching and fireflies, it doesn't get anymore 'summer' than this.
- Opera in central park: same as above but way, way more people.
- took a bus to Atlantic City. good god what a hellhole. 90% slots, 99% depressing. no offense to Atlantic City lovers.
- Went to the Queens Museum of Art (see picture album). Amazing.
- Turkish food in Queens: friends of Matt visited who knew the cook at the place... a decadent spread of deliciousness. MmMmMmMmmm...
- Saw Letterman last month (Antonio Banderas/Alanis Morisette)
- scheduled tickets for the Daily Show, Conan O'Brien and soon, Saturday Night Live (fingers crossed).
- Am hoping to open or collaborate with investors on The Bionic Bar idea: basically, my six million dollar man/bionic woman collection, in a bar setting. If anyone knows of potential investors or bar owners, let me know...
- fighting off & on summer heat (and rain). heat is ok, humidity suuuuuucks. when will it snow again? not soon enough.
- finished my tattooing. basically, took the design on my right arm over to my left arm, minus what existed on my left arm. not so strangely, I actually -feel- more balanced. a sense of completion, I reckon.
- we had an Amazing fireworks show, seen from our roof, a week before the 4th of July. yep, a week before. t'was gay pride weekend. They were firing off from New Jersey about a mile & a half away - stunning. on the 4th, we saw half of two different sets of fireworks from the East River side - not so spectacular.
- star sightings: geneane garaffolo (I know I butchered the spelling of her name) on 7th Ave. Scarlett Johanson (thrice) filming a movie ("Synergy") at NYU. Mario Batali (Mario Eats Italy, Ciao America w/ Mario Batali, etc)
So, on a more serious note... When are you visiting? Ya, I'm talkin' to you. all of you.
Seriously. No really... come.
it's fun. ask anyone.
NY Journal # 7 (now with photographically picturical photo album!!)
------------------------------------------------------
My lawyers tell me that contractually, I need to say this:"So it's been a long time since I've written and a lot of things have happened." Too much has happened, so much that I ... well... don't really want to talk about it. So I'm writing about it to tell you that I'm not going to write about it. Not really. I'll summarize: Elizabeth and I separated, she moved back to SF, I'm staying here. My longtime friend from SF, Matt moved up from Florida and took the office/bedroom. I lost my almost 7 year job with MCI and am not breaking my back looking for a new one. I am getting a "wicked-awesome" tan from a lot of reading in Washington Square Park. I have taken up yoga since E and I split, going to 3-4 classes per week. Am loving all aspects of it minus a few teachers' love of "fire breathing" (more on that later). My mom is doing really well after her 3rd surgery, cancer free again and sounding great. My parents moved again: 33 times in 35 years. My brother is buying a house in San Diego, or looking at least... Yes, that Does make me feel old, thank you for asking.
I've started an album of pictures I've taken w/ my camera phone:
http://www.t-mobilepictures.com/dayani
All of the pics are currently in one folder, making it a slight pain to navigate through. I'll soon be migrating them to separate named folders and then going forward put new photos in dated folders.
Soooooo - let's see, some recent happenings:
- classical music in Washington Square Park every Tuesday at 8, for the next many weeks. A thermos of wine, people watching and fireflies, it doesn't get anymore 'summer' than this.
- Opera in central park: same as above but way, way more people.
- took a bus to Atlantic City. good god what a hellhole. 90% slots, 99% depressing. no offense to Atlantic City lovers.
- Went to the Queens Museum of Art (see picture album). Amazing.
- Turkish food in Queens: friends of Matt visited who knew the cook at the place... a decadent spread of deliciousness. MmMmMmMmmm...
- Saw Letterman last month (Antonio Banderas/Alanis Morisette)
- scheduled tickets for the Daily Show, Conan O'Brien and soon, Saturday Night Live (fingers crossed).
- Am hoping to open or collaborate with investors on The Bionic Bar idea: basically, my six million dollar man/bionic woman collection, in a bar setting. If anyone knows of potential investors or bar owners, let me know...
- fighting off & on summer heat (and rain). heat is ok, humidity suuuuuucks. when will it snow again? not soon enough.
- finished my tattooing. basically, took the design on my right arm over to my left arm, minus what existed on my left arm. not so strangely, I actually -feel- more balanced. a sense of completion, I reckon.
- we had an Amazing fireworks show, seen from our roof, a week before the 4th of July. yep, a week before. t'was gay pride weekend. They were firing off from New Jersey about a mile & a half away - stunning. on the 4th, we saw half of two different sets of fireworks from the East River side - not so spectacular.
- star sightings: geneane garaffolo (I know I butchered the spelling of her name) on 7th Ave. Scarlett Johanson (thrice) filming a movie ("Synergy") at NYU. Mario Batali (Mario Eats Italy, Ciao America w/ Mario Batali, etc)
So, on a more serious note... When are you visiting? Ya, I'm talkin' to you. all of you.
Seriously. No really... come.
it's fun. ask anyone.
Friday, June 20, 2003
NY Journal # 3 (4-6 missing)
NY JOURNALS 4-6 ......... missing.
---------------------
so sad. so very f'n sad.
JOURNAL ENTRY
NY Journal # 3 - ... a shorter update
-----------------------------------------------------------------
NY is still treating us ... well.
We, are sore, but well, as well.
We moved out of our sublet and into our permanent place this extended weekend (we took tues & wednesday off to help w/ the move) ... The past two days has been a Tetris-like game of trying to move boxes around & around to get things out of the way so we can put a small handful of things away to make room for other things which will free up space for more things. In addition to organization & re-organization, we had to deal w/ the process of movers (3 crazy russians with superhuman strength), the phone guy, the cable & internet guy, delivery guys for a bed & the plasma/flatscreen (yes, an admittedly extravagant purchase, ... but space saving and.. ..ok, fine, there's little justification for the purchase... namely: 1) I've wanted one for years and the price was finally right 2) we no longer have my old video projector for movie watching 3) it really Does save space (5" deep, in our NY-small living room) 4) that's all you get... trust me, I'm still experiencing guilt and self-doubt over the purchase)... the tv, so far at least, is gloriously beautimus... We haven't put it up on the wall yet, we'll be doing that tonight most likely. last night, I had found some very long screws that I'd had in my toolbox from the loft bed I used to have.. I was going to use those to support the tv which Sounded like a great idea... except... I quickly realized that if we used them... the tips of the screws would probably end up in our next door neighbor's appt (maybe not, I'm not sure how thick the walls are, but I could just see it... getting a knock on the door.. "uhhh excuse me but...") Hmmm, what else... we've painted - - the kitchen a red ... or technically "Dressage"... the living room a happy yellow... or.. "mango gold"... the bedroom will be a nice lavender or "enchanted" if you really prefer the formal names - yes, it's a lot of color, but this is for people who've lived w/ white walls their whole lives.... oh and rounding out the technicolor rainbow; the comically small bathroom will be transformed into a tropical micro-retreat, with exposed pipes hidden beneath bamboo, the walls colored in "tequila lime".
As if work and moving wasn't enough, Elizabeth continues w/ classes as Univ of Phoenix and I study Farsi (Persian language) at NYU. As of today... we're mostly just dreading unpacking the boxes upon boxes of who-knows-what that might or might not be damaged from the move... luckily, we've only seen a few things broken so far (that we've seen yet) At this point, it could all go in the trash and we probably wouldn't miss even a quarter of it... and probably not remember owning another quarter of it. In hindsight, we really could have moved here with half a closet full of clothes, 2 pairs of shoes and our toothbrushes. It's pretty amazing how much stuff you can unconsciously amass when you live in a large place (in SF) and have endless room for 'stuff'.
other than that... well, currently, there IS nothing other than that. just moving in, set up, all that good stuff.
NY itself, the city, it's people, being here, is still all too exhilarating... in all aspects that I could describe... it's awe inspiring in it's magnitude, breathtaking for it's scenery and history, and yet, when I write these Journals, I often feel like I'm being overly dramatic... that I'm somehow discounting the experience by over describing how amazing it is here. "yeah, yeah, you think it's amazing, We Get It" is what I sometimes feel people might think reading these things I write.. Yesterday we had to go to a paint store for rollers. Affixed to the side of the paint store (as with many bldgs in NY) was a NY historical plaque, this one saying basically "within this building, George Washington set up temporary headquarters for the US Govt after the revolutionary war .... later Alexander Hamilton used the building ... later, Aaron Burr used it, etc" - ... So how do I explain the feeling of walking around in a building that Washington worked in..? I mean "worked in", every day - for a little under a year's time, his shadow passed over the same ground I was walking on. It's those kinds of things that make me feel at a loss for words. To me, a thesaurus open to every word that implied 'exciting' and 'inspiring' would better describe being here... It's not for lack of effort or interest, it's truly because words cant ever accurately describe feelings ...or even a sense of place. You'll have to pardon the catharsis here.. I'm not sure where I'm going with these Journals... I'm not sure if I'm fulfilling what I'm intending to accomplish or meeting your expectations of what you want to know about or if anyone makes it past the first two paragraphs before work call them back to their duties.
Sooooo.... let me know... if there's something you want to know about. I obviously know how to talk at length, so give me a topic. : ) I apologize that you're bcc:'d on this Journal, there's honestly not all that many people on it, but in the interest of your own security and fears of spam, etc, I kept everyone private. I guess what I'm saying is, don't let that keep ya from responding, I'd love to hear from all'y'all....
I... and we... miss y'all....
shoot me/us an email when you get a chance...
---------------------
so sad. so very f'n sad.
JOURNAL ENTRY
NY Journal # 3 - ... a shorter update
-----------------------------------------------------------------
NY is still treating us ... well.
We, are sore, but well, as well.
We moved out of our sublet and into our permanent place this extended weekend (we took tues & wednesday off to help w/ the move) ... The past two days has been a Tetris-like game of trying to move boxes around & around to get things out of the way so we can put a small handful of things away to make room for other things which will free up space for more things. In addition to organization & re-organization, we had to deal w/ the process of movers (3 crazy russians with superhuman strength), the phone guy, the cable & internet guy, delivery guys for a bed & the plasma/flatscreen (yes, an admittedly extravagant purchase, ... but space saving and.. ..ok, fine, there's little justification for the purchase... namely: 1) I've wanted one for years and the price was finally right 2) we no longer have my old video projector for movie watching 3) it really Does save space (5" deep, in our NY-small living room) 4) that's all you get... trust me, I'm still experiencing guilt and self-doubt over the purchase)... the tv, so far at least, is gloriously beautimus... We haven't put it up on the wall yet, we'll be doing that tonight most likely. last night, I had found some very long screws that I'd had in my toolbox from the loft bed I used to have.. I was going to use those to support the tv which Sounded like a great idea... except... I quickly realized that if we used them... the tips of the screws would probably end up in our next door neighbor's appt (maybe not, I'm not sure how thick the walls are, but I could just see it... getting a knock on the door.. "uhhh excuse me but...") Hmmm, what else... we've painted - - the kitchen a red ... or technically "Dressage"... the living room a happy yellow... or.. "mango gold"... the bedroom will be a nice lavender or "enchanted" if you really prefer the formal names - yes, it's a lot of color, but this is for people who've lived w/ white walls their whole lives.... oh and rounding out the technicolor rainbow; the comically small bathroom will be transformed into a tropical micro-retreat, with exposed pipes hidden beneath bamboo, the walls colored in "tequila lime".
As if work and moving wasn't enough, Elizabeth continues w/ classes as Univ of Phoenix and I study Farsi (Persian language) at NYU. As of today... we're mostly just dreading unpacking the boxes upon boxes of who-knows-what that might or might not be damaged from the move... luckily, we've only seen a few things broken so far (that we've seen yet) At this point, it could all go in the trash and we probably wouldn't miss even a quarter of it... and probably not remember owning another quarter of it. In hindsight, we really could have moved here with half a closet full of clothes, 2 pairs of shoes and our toothbrushes. It's pretty amazing how much stuff you can unconsciously amass when you live in a large place (in SF) and have endless room for 'stuff'.
other than that... well, currently, there IS nothing other than that. just moving in, set up, all that good stuff.
NY itself, the city, it's people, being here, is still all too exhilarating... in all aspects that I could describe... it's awe inspiring in it's magnitude, breathtaking for it's scenery and history, and yet, when I write these Journals, I often feel like I'm being overly dramatic... that I'm somehow discounting the experience by over describing how amazing it is here. "yeah, yeah, you think it's amazing, We Get It" is what I sometimes feel people might think reading these things I write.. Yesterday we had to go to a paint store for rollers. Affixed to the side of the paint store (as with many bldgs in NY) was a NY historical plaque, this one saying basically "within this building, George Washington set up temporary headquarters for the US Govt after the revolutionary war .... later Alexander Hamilton used the building ... later, Aaron Burr used it, etc" - ... So how do I explain the feeling of walking around in a building that Washington worked in..? I mean "worked in", every day - for a little under a year's time, his shadow passed over the same ground I was walking on. It's those kinds of things that make me feel at a loss for words. To me, a thesaurus open to every word that implied 'exciting' and 'inspiring' would better describe being here... It's not for lack of effort or interest, it's truly because words cant ever accurately describe feelings ...or even a sense of place. You'll have to pardon the catharsis here.. I'm not sure where I'm going with these Journals... I'm not sure if I'm fulfilling what I'm intending to accomplish or meeting your expectations of what you want to know about or if anyone makes it past the first two paragraphs before work call them back to their duties.
Sooooo.... let me know... if there's something you want to know about. I obviously know how to talk at length, so give me a topic. : ) I apologize that you're bcc:'d on this Journal, there's honestly not all that many people on it, but in the interest of your own security and fears of spam, etc, I kept everyone private. I guess what I'm saying is, don't let that keep ya from responding, I'd love to hear from all'y'all....
I... and we... miss y'all....
shoot me/us an email when you get a chance...
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
NY Journal # 2
JOURNAL ENTRY
AND SO FINALLY BEGINS PART 2,....
but before we begin, I should say that many topics below could and maybe should belong in other topical sections below, I may misspell words and I certainly admit to making up words. I am also prone to exaggerations ranging from wild to mild. Sometimes I outright lie for no reason other than it amuses me... At other times, I may actually be jeopardizing National Security by disclosing the classified whereabouts of undercover operatives...but unless I'm going to be graded or arrested, and unless those grades (or lawsuits) translate into fabulous vacations or cash prizes, I'm not going to sweat it. Also... all things expressed below are my subjective opinions and observations. I don't speak on behalf of New York or it's peoples, I am one out of 8 million fish in a very busy sea. (yes, just kidding about the lying and national security issues. Everything else you will read is true. Names have not been changed to protect anyone)
PRELUDE: They're going to be shooting Spiderman II in our neighborhood starting this weekend. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing if Spidey will be flying from rooftop to rooftop or if Peter Parker will be entering and exiting a Leroy Street apartment. Either way, I'll get myself into a shot, watch for me when it comes out. I'll wear my Raider beanie. The other night, they were shooting some other movie on 7th Ave in front of our place, "Raising Helen" or some other movie name-ish movie name... The entire street was lined with production trucks, the sidewalks packed with people and lights and cameras and food tables and wardrobes and somewhere in that mess, I found out later, was Heather Graham. They had completely restylized the exterior of a restaurant to make it look like a hip-happening bar named "Random" - I know... ALSO very movie name-ish, isn't it..? The best part of the whole event was that by midnight, everything and everyone had vanished like it had never happened. The city has very strict rules about when film crews have to be out of a neighborhood.
THE CITY (itself): It's big. A big sea of a city. We've seen only the smallest fraction of the relatively small area of Manhattan below the park, it's kind of ridiculous how little we've seen, actually. Not that we haven't been trying... Every days it seems like we're both coming just short of blisters, leg cramps, outright muscle fatigue, the whole nine yards. You'd think we were avoiding subways and walking everywhere. Judging distance is part of the problem: avenues here are 900 feet long, streets are 100 feet long. To walk from the NY Public Library to the Empire State building for example (42nd St to 34th St), takes roughly the same amount of time as getting from one avenue to the next. It would be a cruel trick to tell people "I'm just the next block over" when you mean "avenue".
THE BUILDINGS (upon buildings, etc): As I flew in to JFK airport four years ago for my first visit here, I likened the look of Manhattan to 60 or more downtown San Francisco's, stacked back to back. I think that still holds. From the ground, (depending on the neighborhood) the effect is not much different. It is a concrete forest, the 'flora' seem as varied as a real forest, the sky is always visible, and there's certainly a lot of shade to be found. Because we're still in tourist-mode, we still look up a lot. New Yorkers we've talked to say they still do that, I'm not sure that ever changes. So long as you're not looking up when you step off a curb, or ONLY looking up, ..it's ok to look up.
THE SUBWAY: Ohhhhh, the subway. There's volumes that could be said about the subway system here. To summarize: it is incredibly efficient, incredibly old, incredibly complicated (until you understand the basics), incredibly bouncy in almost frightening way, incredibly diverse, and incredibly fascinating in how much it is taken for granted. Or maybe it's not taken for granted.... I don't know, I haven't asked everyone here yet, .... I guess until people start shouting "this subway system is AMAZING!" or start looking at everything with the same info-hungry eyes that I have for everything here, I'll assume people are taking it for granted. Maybe it's just in comparison to SF's transit system that I find it so amazing. SF being a city in which public transit is supposed to be a beacon unto... well, the West Coast at least
THE SNOW/weather: Any discussion of the weather should start with mention of the fact that it went from furiously snowing, to small flurries, to rain, to mist, to..... summertime heat... in the span of no more than 4 or 5 days. Yesterday it was 83, today it is 40 degrees cooler. That being said, the snow [ - and people who do not LIKE snow should keep in mind the fact that I have not lived in snow since I was 8 years old] .... was absolutely glorious, transcendently yearned for, like being reunited with a childhood friend after decades of separation. There is a term some people use... I believe it is "sh!t eating grin". Yeah... I had one of those. Uh-huh, a big one. Yeah, the whole time it snowed. Unfortunately... it only actively snowed for one day, three days later it was completely gone from the streets. I have to admit that some of the romance wore off the first time I had to side step yellow snow. Warm weather on the other hand, cause many interesting things to happen. This happens in all cities of course, but in NY it seems they happen quite spontaneously, before you've even left your house. The best part of this weather metamorphosis, or.. "weathermorphosis" as I like to call it (ok, so it probably wont catch on), is that restaurants become 'convertible', their entire street facing facades accordion open as tables and chairs are rolled out and before you know it, entire sidewalks are chattering away with a typical weekend restaurant buzz. This happens in Europe, you say..? Sure... true. NY is a lot closer to you. Decent weather also more accurately shows you just how many people there really are in this city. It is really almost indescribable how many people appear out of nowhere. And yet I will try [see THE MASSES section] Everyone springs into summer clothes, with the emphasis on "shorter" and "less of", which is mostly a good thing. Lord knows, there are droves of beautiful people here, with more perfect skin, bone structure and bodies than you'd find in a glossy fashion magazine. It can however, quickly becomes unpleasant when... hmmm... how does one say this delicately..? certain unsavory and/or unshapely characters display a level of unintentional exhibitionism that causes rapid eye-aversion and in extreme cases, nightmares and the loss of appetite. This unpleasantness is not, like in other cities, limited to parks, the beach or ones backyard. No, this happens on the streets, on subways and in stores. Call it a 'refreshing lack of self-consciousness'. I guess I'm still mildly traumatized by one particular person we saw.
THE MASSES: You may not have heard this, but there are a lot of people here. 8 million is a lot, in my opinion. It seems like a lot, sometimes it feels like a lot... and yet it never really seems to reach "too much". Everyone knows the "street fair" effect with the sideways walking, constant bumping of shoulders, wall to wall people.. At it's very worst, New York seems just short of that, like it would only take another 1/3rd of the people around you in any given area to make you feel somewhat claustrophobic and/or agoraphobic. At it's best, you have whole blocks to yourself. At it's average... well... there's just a lot of people out. This city, I'm sure, weeds out people who cant take it, people who find a steady stream of people uncomfortable, people who feel intimidated by a stranger bumping into them. Walking in the masses, I am always aware of how this Could 'get' to people, and yet I am always detached enough to know that it does not bother me, personally. There is something strangely comforting in being enveloped by a city's people.
THE PEOPLE: Not to insult the people of other cities, but the people here are without question, the nicest people I have ever met. Conversely, there are also thee most charming displays of finely crafted rudeness you will ever see. A dozen or more strangers have started up conversations with us, out of the blue, in the two weeks we've been here. And conversely again, we've also seen a lady curse the smirk off of an escalator slowpoke, followed immediately by seeing an office worker shoulder-bump a lady almost to the ground and keep on going like it didn't happen. Many people confuse the NY no-nonsense, determined, directioned, me-bother-me attitude for rudeness or disinterest in helping people, etc. I've heard it described, or thought of it, a lot of different ways recently... here's a few of my favorites: #1) people will not look you in the eye, they will shove past you for a train without a second thought, they will steal your cab... but ask them directions or to recommend a good restaurant and you will receive more animated, helpful information than you could have ever hoped for. #2) bodies in motion tend to stay in motion: nothing annoys New Yorkers more than people who get in their way while they are walking somewhere. It is a sense of "don't disrupt my life and I wont disrupt yours" that translates to many levels of life here, not just street walking. #3) Everyone's level of not-taking-conflict-personally and not-holding-on-to-momentary-anger is set for a casually restrained, professional functionality that seems almost comical. It is the opposite of road rage.. or perhaps, it's merely a quick verbal venting to deal with the emotions and move on. It may be that people visiting NY see a lot of these moments of 'anger purging' but don't notice that the person has moved on. Again, this is probably a wild generalization, but I think has a lot of truth to it.
PIZZA: There are two types of food in NY. Pizza, and the other crap people eat occasionally. The analogy of 'pizza is to NY what burritos is to SF' is not quite accurate. More accurate is 'pizza is to New Yorkers, what drinking water is to human survival'. If anyone can locate the actual number of pizza places in NY, I will.... ... I'll give you a piece of pizza. Seriously, it's only a matter of time before it becomes currency.
NON-PIZZA FOODS: Coincidentally, there are two types of non-pizza food in NY. Ridiculously expensive and ridiculously cheap. $9.25 for a sandwich is not unheard of. A "poor boy" sandwich, I kid you not, was $6.75 in the dining concourse of Grand Central Station. Conversely, budget choices are available, hot dogs and such, if you eat that sort of thing, which I haven't (yet). Soups, salads, bagels, breakfast places.... all cheap. My favorite so far is Mahmoun's $2 falafels on MacDougal @ Bleeker and of course.... ever present pizza.
HERCULES: Our closest neighborhood liquor store is called Hercules Fancy Groceries. It's owned & operated by (again) a slightly portly man of maybe 50-55... this time Greek (as you may have been able to infer from a name like Hercules). He has one glass eye, has the same gift of gab as Walter, and plays a bouzouki, an instrument that, upon some quick research, I found that both Greeks and Irish play.... go figure. Hercules' store has many many many beers. Almost exclusively beer, in fact. He doesn't carry anything other than beer in fact because it seems that in NY, stores can only get a beer license, hard alcohol license, or wine license, but rarely a combination (if it's even legal to have a combo, I'm not sure). Hercules' history with beer is such: he found a book about beer in the trash outside his store one day. He read it. He began importing beers from around the world (he's credited with importing the first Belgian beer into the US in 1960something) and to this day, "has paid for no advertising", instead reaping the rewards of newspaper articles and reviews written about him and his store. Let's get back to his gift for gab, though. It is truly unbelievable how skillful he is (Walter as well) with weaving different topics together into a finely formed net from which you cannot escape. There are no pauses where you might say "well, ok... we'll see you around then" or even "hey, I've gotta run, talk to you later" ... without seeming rude. Literally, the moments of pause are impossibly brief and through some unknown superpower yet to be properly tapped for the forces of good, they always appear to be right in the middle of making a point.. Truly though, they are very good people with very interesting stories .... upon stories .... upon stories.THE
WORK ENVIRONMENT: We work in the MetLife building, directly behind Grand Central Station (see GRAND CENTRAL STATION section). The 'corporate dress code' is a lot more valued here than in SF, which brings me a fairly consistent level of mild frustration. Cube space is a lot more dense, handfuls of different conversations can be heard all at once, about 2/3rds of them are not work related. The office has a few characters of it's own; there is the lady near me who sounds like she's always on the verge of crying and has conversations about the renovations she's doing to her house which is probably more of a mansion than a house from the sounds of it. There is the guy who sits next to our workmate Fortune, who on Monday and Tuesday, makes calls to friends, gabbing about his weekend, on Wednesday he's fairly silent & then on Thursday and Friday, he's making plans for the upcoming weekend. Then there are the sports fans. Much to my baseball-hating-dismay, I am surrounded by baseball fans who find no end of excuses to gather in one person's cube for a rousing 30 minute conversation about so&so's style of hitting or catching or .... well, at the 2 minute mark, I am bored straight into a coma so I'm not sure what they talk about after that. Then there are the Giants & Jets fans, of which I am looking forward to many spirited conversations involving the phrases "no, [YOUR team] sucks!" or "soooo, how'bout [your team] losing so bad on Sunday????" - (this last phrase, by it's very nature of course, doesn't even HAVE the potential of involving the Raiders, so... well... there you have it.. : ) ((We have yet to get a permanent cubicles, so I haven't been able to display my various Raider related items - I KNOW, how can I pit the whole office against me until I do that?!?! I'm working on it...))
GRAND CENTRAL STATION: Look up the words "massive" and "beautiful" in a thesaurus. Then branch out to each of their related words. Take it five generations out. Gather all the words together and read them. That will begin to do justice to Grand Central Station. People upon people upon shops upon restaurants upon bars upon... oh, right... trains. I sometimes forget that it IS a train station. We walk through the station to work, to lunch and to home. I absolutely can not think of a better ingredient to a daily commute. It awes and humbles me, Every Single Day,.... how lucky we are.
AND SO ENDS Episode 1 - PART 2.... Future episodes will be a lot shorter, I'm sure. Episode 1 had a lot to cover, a lot of initial observations that attempted to cover the entire spectrum of our experience here so far. I'm sure I cheated some sections and overemphasized others. I probably complete forgot to cover certain things which I'll only remember once I hit SEND. Such is life and the nature of journals. I am actually very much looking forward to rereading some of this a year or two from now, to see what ideas have changed and to recapture a bit of the feeling of slack jawed awe we are still feeling so early into our move here. All of our experiences seem to have an intense weight to them, they seem more 'real', concentrated, more in-the-moment... That feeling will surely subside over time, I'm sure. It's incredibly exciting to be living it now though.
AND SO FINALLY BEGINS PART 2,....
but before we begin, I should say that many topics below could and maybe should belong in other topical sections below, I may misspell words and I certainly admit to making up words. I am also prone to exaggerations ranging from wild to mild. Sometimes I outright lie for no reason other than it amuses me... At other times, I may actually be jeopardizing National Security by disclosing the classified whereabouts of undercover operatives...but unless I'm going to be graded or arrested, and unless those grades (or lawsuits) translate into fabulous vacations or cash prizes, I'm not going to sweat it. Also... all things expressed below are my subjective opinions and observations. I don't speak on behalf of New York or it's peoples, I am one out of 8 million fish in a very busy sea. (yes, just kidding about the lying and national security issues. Everything else you will read is true. Names have not been changed to protect anyone)
PRELUDE: They're going to be shooting Spiderman II in our neighborhood starting this weekend. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing if Spidey will be flying from rooftop to rooftop or if Peter Parker will be entering and exiting a Leroy Street apartment. Either way, I'll get myself into a shot, watch for me when it comes out. I'll wear my Raider beanie. The other night, they were shooting some other movie on 7th Ave in front of our place, "Raising Helen" or some other movie name-ish movie name... The entire street was lined with production trucks, the sidewalks packed with people and lights and cameras and food tables and wardrobes and somewhere in that mess, I found out later, was Heather Graham. They had completely restylized the exterior of a restaurant to make it look like a hip-happening bar named "Random" - I know... ALSO very movie name-ish, isn't it..? The best part of the whole event was that by midnight, everything and everyone had vanished like it had never happened. The city has very strict rules about when film crews have to be out of a neighborhood.
THE CITY (itself): It's big. A big sea of a city. We've seen only the smallest fraction of the relatively small area of Manhattan below the park, it's kind of ridiculous how little we've seen, actually. Not that we haven't been trying... Every days it seems like we're both coming just short of blisters, leg cramps, outright muscle fatigue, the whole nine yards. You'd think we were avoiding subways and walking everywhere. Judging distance is part of the problem: avenues here are 900 feet long, streets are 100 feet long. To walk from the NY Public Library to the Empire State building for example (42nd St to 34th St), takes roughly the same amount of time as getting from one avenue to the next. It would be a cruel trick to tell people "I'm just the next block over" when you mean "avenue".
THE BUILDINGS (upon buildings, etc): As I flew in to JFK airport four years ago for my first visit here, I likened the look of Manhattan to 60 or more downtown San Francisco's, stacked back to back. I think that still holds. From the ground, (depending on the neighborhood) the effect is not much different. It is a concrete forest, the 'flora' seem as varied as a real forest, the sky is always visible, and there's certainly a lot of shade to be found. Because we're still in tourist-mode, we still look up a lot. New Yorkers we've talked to say they still do that, I'm not sure that ever changes. So long as you're not looking up when you step off a curb, or ONLY looking up, ..it's ok to look up.
THE SUBWAY: Ohhhhh, the subway. There's volumes that could be said about the subway system here. To summarize: it is incredibly efficient, incredibly old, incredibly complicated (until you understand the basics), incredibly bouncy in almost frightening way, incredibly diverse, and incredibly fascinating in how much it is taken for granted. Or maybe it's not taken for granted.... I don't know, I haven't asked everyone here yet, .... I guess until people start shouting "this subway system is AMAZING!" or start looking at everything with the same info-hungry eyes that I have for everything here, I'll assume people are taking it for granted. Maybe it's just in comparison to SF's transit system that I find it so amazing. SF being a city in which public transit is supposed to be a beacon unto... well, the West Coast at least
THE SNOW/weather: Any discussion of the weather should start with mention of the fact that it went from furiously snowing, to small flurries, to rain, to mist, to..... summertime heat... in the span of no more than 4 or 5 days. Yesterday it was 83, today it is 40 degrees cooler. That being said, the snow [ - and people who do not LIKE snow should keep in mind the fact that I have not lived in snow since I was 8 years old] .... was absolutely glorious, transcendently yearned for, like being reunited with a childhood friend after decades of separation. There is a term some people use... I believe it is "sh!t eating grin". Yeah... I had one of those. Uh-huh, a big one. Yeah, the whole time it snowed. Unfortunately... it only actively snowed for one day, three days later it was completely gone from the streets. I have to admit that some of the romance wore off the first time I had to side step yellow snow. Warm weather on the other hand, cause many interesting things to happen. This happens in all cities of course, but in NY it seems they happen quite spontaneously, before you've even left your house. The best part of this weather metamorphosis, or.. "weathermorphosis" as I like to call it (ok, so it probably wont catch on), is that restaurants become 'convertible', their entire street facing facades accordion open as tables and chairs are rolled out and before you know it, entire sidewalks are chattering away with a typical weekend restaurant buzz. This happens in Europe, you say..? Sure... true. NY is a lot closer to you. Decent weather also more accurately shows you just how many people there really are in this city. It is really almost indescribable how many people appear out of nowhere. And yet I will try [see THE MASSES section] Everyone springs into summer clothes, with the emphasis on "shorter" and "less of", which is mostly a good thing. Lord knows, there are droves of beautiful people here, with more perfect skin, bone structure and bodies than you'd find in a glossy fashion magazine. It can however, quickly becomes unpleasant when... hmmm... how does one say this delicately..? certain unsavory and/or unshapely characters display a level of unintentional exhibitionism that causes rapid eye-aversion and in extreme cases, nightmares and the loss of appetite. This unpleasantness is not, like in other cities, limited to parks, the beach or ones backyard. No, this happens on the streets, on subways and in stores. Call it a 'refreshing lack of self-consciousness'. I guess I'm still mildly traumatized by one particular person we saw.
THE MASSES: You may not have heard this, but there are a lot of people here. 8 million is a lot, in my opinion. It seems like a lot, sometimes it feels like a lot... and yet it never really seems to reach "too much". Everyone knows the "street fair" effect with the sideways walking, constant bumping of shoulders, wall to wall people.. At it's very worst, New York seems just short of that, like it would only take another 1/3rd of the people around you in any given area to make you feel somewhat claustrophobic and/or agoraphobic. At it's best, you have whole blocks to yourself. At it's average... well... there's just a lot of people out. This city, I'm sure, weeds out people who cant take it, people who find a steady stream of people uncomfortable, people who feel intimidated by a stranger bumping into them. Walking in the masses, I am always aware of how this Could 'get' to people, and yet I am always detached enough to know that it does not bother me, personally. There is something strangely comforting in being enveloped by a city's people.
THE PEOPLE: Not to insult the people of other cities, but the people here are without question, the nicest people I have ever met. Conversely, there are also thee most charming displays of finely crafted rudeness you will ever see. A dozen or more strangers have started up conversations with us, out of the blue, in the two weeks we've been here. And conversely again, we've also seen a lady curse the smirk off of an escalator slowpoke, followed immediately by seeing an office worker shoulder-bump a lady almost to the ground and keep on going like it didn't happen. Many people confuse the NY no-nonsense, determined, directioned, me-bother-me attitude for rudeness or disinterest in helping people, etc. I've heard it described, or thought of it, a lot of different ways recently... here's a few of my favorites: #1) people will not look you in the eye, they will shove past you for a train without a second thought, they will steal your cab... but ask them directions or to recommend a good restaurant and you will receive more animated, helpful information than you could have ever hoped for. #2) bodies in motion tend to stay in motion: nothing annoys New Yorkers more than people who get in their way while they are walking somewhere. It is a sense of "don't disrupt my life and I wont disrupt yours" that translates to many levels of life here, not just street walking. #3) Everyone's level of not-taking-conflict-personally and not-holding-on-to-momentary-anger is set for a casually restrained, professional functionality that seems almost comical. It is the opposite of road rage.. or perhaps, it's merely a quick verbal venting to deal with the emotions and move on. It may be that people visiting NY see a lot of these moments of 'anger purging' but don't notice that the person has moved on. Again, this is probably a wild generalization, but I think has a lot of truth to it.
PIZZA: There are two types of food in NY. Pizza, and the other crap people eat occasionally. The analogy of 'pizza is to NY what burritos is to SF' is not quite accurate. More accurate is 'pizza is to New Yorkers, what drinking water is to human survival'. If anyone can locate the actual number of pizza places in NY, I will.... ... I'll give you a piece of pizza. Seriously, it's only a matter of time before it becomes currency.
NON-PIZZA FOODS: Coincidentally, there are two types of non-pizza food in NY. Ridiculously expensive and ridiculously cheap. $9.25 for a sandwich is not unheard of. A "poor boy" sandwich, I kid you not, was $6.75 in the dining concourse of Grand Central Station. Conversely, budget choices are available, hot dogs and such, if you eat that sort of thing, which I haven't (yet). Soups, salads, bagels, breakfast places.... all cheap. My favorite so far is Mahmoun's $2 falafels on MacDougal @ Bleeker and of course.... ever present pizza.
HERCULES: Our closest neighborhood liquor store is called Hercules Fancy Groceries. It's owned & operated by (again) a slightly portly man of maybe 50-55... this time Greek (as you may have been able to infer from a name like Hercules). He has one glass eye, has the same gift of gab as Walter, and plays a bouzouki, an instrument that, upon some quick research, I found that both Greeks and Irish play.... go figure. Hercules' store has many many many beers. Almost exclusively beer, in fact. He doesn't carry anything other than beer in fact because it seems that in NY, stores can only get a beer license, hard alcohol license, or wine license, but rarely a combination (if it's even legal to have a combo, I'm not sure). Hercules' history with beer is such: he found a book about beer in the trash outside his store one day. He read it. He began importing beers from around the world (he's credited with importing the first Belgian beer into the US in 1960something) and to this day, "has paid for no advertising", instead reaping the rewards of newspaper articles and reviews written about him and his store. Let's get back to his gift for gab, though. It is truly unbelievable how skillful he is (Walter as well) with weaving different topics together into a finely formed net from which you cannot escape. There are no pauses where you might say "well, ok... we'll see you around then" or even "hey, I've gotta run, talk to you later" ... without seeming rude. Literally, the moments of pause are impossibly brief and through some unknown superpower yet to be properly tapped for the forces of good, they always appear to be right in the middle of making a point.. Truly though, they are very good people with very interesting stories .... upon stories .... upon stories.THE
WORK ENVIRONMENT: We work in the MetLife building, directly behind Grand Central Station (see GRAND CENTRAL STATION section). The 'corporate dress code' is a lot more valued here than in SF, which brings me a fairly consistent level of mild frustration. Cube space is a lot more dense, handfuls of different conversations can be heard all at once, about 2/3rds of them are not work related. The office has a few characters of it's own; there is the lady near me who sounds like she's always on the verge of crying and has conversations about the renovations she's doing to her house which is probably more of a mansion than a house from the sounds of it. There is the guy who sits next to our workmate Fortune, who on Monday and Tuesday, makes calls to friends, gabbing about his weekend, on Wednesday he's fairly silent & then on Thursday and Friday, he's making plans for the upcoming weekend. Then there are the sports fans. Much to my baseball-hating-dismay, I am surrounded by baseball fans who find no end of excuses to gather in one person's cube for a rousing 30 minute conversation about so&so's style of hitting or catching or .... well, at the 2 minute mark, I am bored straight into a coma so I'm not sure what they talk about after that. Then there are the Giants & Jets fans, of which I am looking forward to many spirited conversations involving the phrases "no, [YOUR team] sucks!" or "soooo, how'bout [your team] losing so bad on Sunday????" - (this last phrase, by it's very nature of course, doesn't even HAVE the potential of involving the Raiders, so... well... there you have it.. : ) ((We have yet to get a permanent cubicles, so I haven't been able to display my various Raider related items - I KNOW, how can I pit the whole office against me until I do that?!?! I'm working on it...))
GRAND CENTRAL STATION: Look up the words "massive" and "beautiful" in a thesaurus. Then branch out to each of their related words. Take it five generations out. Gather all the words together and read them. That will begin to do justice to Grand Central Station. People upon people upon shops upon restaurants upon bars upon... oh, right... trains. I sometimes forget that it IS a train station. We walk through the station to work, to lunch and to home. I absolutely can not think of a better ingredient to a daily commute. It awes and humbles me, Every Single Day,.... how lucky we are.
AND SO ENDS Episode 1 - PART 2.... Future episodes will be a lot shorter, I'm sure. Episode 1 had a lot to cover, a lot of initial observations that attempted to cover the entire spectrum of our experience here so far. I'm sure I cheated some sections and overemphasized others. I probably complete forgot to cover certain things which I'll only remember once I hit SEND. Such is life and the nature of journals. I am actually very much looking forward to rereading some of this a year or two from now, to see what ideas have changed and to recapture a bit of the feeling of slack jawed awe we are still feeling so early into our move here. All of our experiences seem to have an intense weight to them, they seem more 'real', concentrated, more in-the-moment... That feeling will surely subside over time, I'm sure. It's incredibly exciting to be living it now though.
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