Both human but not the same sort of animal

The quote was "I was already drunk before I met you."

He may have assumed that this was said by me as a prelude to sleeping with someone new.  He replied with his own quote: "Most people start new sexual relationships while they're completely drunk. But you wouldn't shop for a toaster that way."

If that was his assumption, he was mistaken.  It was a comment made by a very charming new acquaintance met at a very enjoyable dinner outing.

My reply was that I would probably have bought a much prettier and nicer toaster had I bought my toaster while drunk.

I did not say, "If you are suggesting that something lurid happened, enough with your stupid, insulting assumptions and insinuations, you judgmental ill-informed prick."

When I finally build that time machine, I will be ever so busy.

Besides which, were it not for drunken sex, some of us would have no sex at all.  I suspect that human race would have gone extinct eons ago.

Rarely also potatoes

There are things and behaviors in the world that should have a name beyond their description.  They linger blurring and elusive under the layers of your mind until someone gives it a name.  They tell you about it as a recurring thing that they too have encountered and it comes into sharp focus.

There is a thing called the Irish Good-bye.  An Irish good-bye is where you get up from a social situation and walk out without telling anyone where you are going.

Good-bye can be a long and involved process.  Good-bye can be a painful process.  Or a lovely one.  Certain things won't get expressed until you are leaving.  They don't occur to a person to say or the timing just isn't right until then.  Parting can be in its way inspirational and motivational.

But sometimes you just want to leave.  You need to and without ceremony.  I have had a few such occasions recently and now I know what to call them.


The Irish Good-bye.  It does not involve leprechauns, whiskey or potatoes ... well ... maybe sometimes leprechauns and whiskey but rarely also potatoes.

Days gone by

There were nights when we were lying in bed and I was so tired but also so eager to talk to you.  I would fall asleep in mid sentence and then wake myself trying unsuccessfully to figure out where I dropped off and what I had been wanting to say.

Ping Me

AZD asked on the Facebook what it means to "ping" someone.  She said that many people over the age of 35 seemed to be asking her to do so, of late.  To which I replied that her old friends were nerds and posted the link to a wikipedia article without any further explanation.  It was an overly curt response making me come off as an insulting jackass.

Some were embarassed.  Some thought I was rude.  One person disagreed with me, saying that pinging is the same as IM'ing.  That it's a term from the dialup days and that traders use it too.

Rather than explain myself further there, I started to unpacking the whole concept.

First, it's not a terrible thing to be old and a nerd.  If you are enough of a nerd to remember the "ping" utility by firsthand experience, you have come by your internet access by authentic and legitimate means.  Massive cool points to you.

Second, it's possible that for a lot of people pinging is IM'ing.  For this kind of person to ping someone is just to speak to them by text over IM or other device.  Communication received not through speech.

This does not begin to unpack the feeling, the flavor, or the intention of the request when I make it.

Obvious Disclaimer: this is not the exact truth, only my take on it.

Essay: What Ping Means To Me

Back in the day, if you wanted to send something from one machine (computer) to another, you needed confirm that there was a live connection and that the other machine was on, functioning and able to receive what you wanted to send.  It would be a shame, a waste to send it all only to have it be lost because you did not check first.  Perhaps a tragedy.

Ping is a very small program written to send the smallest message from one machine to another.  It asks, "Hey, are you there?", waits for a given amount of time for an answer, and then let's you know.  With a positive response, you have a level of confidence that your next message will get through and be safely received.

Ping acknowledges that in communication the attention and receptivity of the receiver is essential.  That listening matters and is an active part of the equation.  That responding matters.  That this shared agreement matters.  That communication requires an active channel in both directions.

It is pragmatic.  It is courteous.

Sometimes people get mad at me for not knowing something because they sent it to me by text or email or chat. Sometimes I get mad at people for the same reason.  But the thing is.  We cannot assume that everyone on the planet lives their life waiting to hear from us.  Sometimes they are.  Especially now that so many of us carry so many networked devices with us.  But carrying it doesn't mean that the other person is or should be glued to it.  They might be eating a strawberry or making love or watching a movie.  They might be taking a much needed nap or working or savoring a moment of silence.  They might be talking to other people, face to face.  They might be basking in sunlight.

Ping them.  Make sure that they are there and can pay attention.  Make sure that they are in a state where they are receptive to communication and can respond.  Establish that agreement and then proceed.

Note to Self

I forget that people who tell you their problems are rarely interested in solutions.

And there are lots of people who get more pleasure from shooting down your ideas and making you out to be an idiot for daring to try to understand and help.  Best to stay home with a book.

Dietary needs

I have eaten corn tortilla chips for dinner two nights in a row.  The second night with industrial nacho cheese.  This cannot be good.

An oversimplification for all of us lonely people.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be loved.  Nothing.  It's perfectly natural.  Everyone wants to be loved.

But it's not simple.

The problem is that you can't just whip up a plan of action for how you are going to get that to happen.  It often seems that the more effort you put forward in trying to get specific people to love you, the weirder things get.

Perhaps the best approach is to focus on loving the people in your life and who you meet.  Perhaps the best approach is to not get overly fixated on figuring out how to be loved by a particular person.

Even then, that is not the whole story.

You might need to recognize not just that you want to be loved but also that you are, in fact, lovable and that it is possible for others to love you.  It's possible for you to have this thing that you want.

Easier said than done.  Consider it a challenge.

You might need to recognize when someone is not being loving to you.  In your desire to be loved you will be vulnerable and might encounter people who will not be careful and respectful.  You have options.   You could draw their attention to this and ask them to stop or you could leave.  Recognize that staying in such a situation might cause you injury and scarring.  This will make it that much harder for you to love and receive the love of others.


Part of the challenge is recognizing that you perceive the love of others in a specific way, perhaps unique to you and won't always recognize love if it is not expressed to you on your terms.  Someone might be expressing love to you now.


Even if you do recognize that love is being expressed, if it's not in a way that fills that space in you, it might not be enough.  You might have to translate it for yourself.  Or you might have to ask for  what you need and recognizing that they might not be willing or able to give it to you.  Are you okay with accepting love as they express it or do you need for it to be expressed your way?

There is no right or wrong in this.  It might even be context dependent.  It's just useful to understand.

Love, we all want it and we all do it, surely at some point we can get what we want from the person we give it to.

Or you could get a dog.  By "you", I mean me and you and him and her and all of us.

Then again, what do I know?

Square 1 - NYer Quote

"You would think that by then I would have developed some confidence in  writing a new story, but I hadn't, and never would.  To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me.  It doesn't matter that something you've done before worked out well.  Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.  Square 1 does not become Square 2, just Square 1 squared and cubed."

John McPhee, The New Yorker, January 14, 2013
The Writing Life
Structure
Beyond the picnic-table crisis

Danish TV - NYerQuotes

Excessively charming quotes from a New Yorker article on Danish TV, taken out of context to be savored:

The second thing that revolutionized Danish television was a trip to America.  In the mid-nineties, DR [Denmark's public-service broadcaster] sent several of its top executives and producers to Los Angeles,where they visited the sets of "N.Y.P.D. Blue," "L.A. Law," and "24."  They returned to Denmark with new concepts: writers' rooms, showrunners, multi-episode series ... Gjervig Gram [writer for "Borgen"] explained, "We said, 'We're going to do it the American way,' but it took some year to find the Danish way to do it the American way." 

Lauren Collins, The New Yorker, January 7, 2013
LETTER FROM COPENHAGEN
Danish Postmodern
Why Scandinavian TV has so many fans

"... I think we sometimes have to look in the mirror and think, We're not always cozy, we're not always Hans Christian Andersen," [Soren] Sveistrup [writer for "The Killing"] said.  "Lego, Tivoli - that's our P.R., that's how we lure you to come here, but we're just as corrupt and power-sick as everyone else." 

Lauren Collins, The New Yorker, January 7, 2013
LETTER FROM COPENHAGEN
Danish Postmodern
Why Scandinavian TV has so many fans

On the benefits of being married to a youthful looking woman

People ask me if your Mom is my daughter.  I tell them, 'No, she's my third wife.'
- My Dad

Lincoln in the House

Dear Republican Party,

I saw the movie "Lincoln" over the holiday.  Once upon a time you guys were AWESOME.

What the hell happened?

Sincerely,

Ergo

Paying for content

My parents bought me a gift subscription to the New Yorker.  The whole paying for the written word - it's unheard of.

I find that despite my best efforts and intentions, I cannot keep up with this subscription.  No matter how diligently I plow through an issue, another one crops up waaaay before I am done with the one that I have been slogging around.

There are stacks of them everywhere.  I tell myself that it's okay to throw them away, but it's not.  Trees have died.  My parents spent part of their hard earned retirement to give me access to the kind of writing that they feel their daughter, the aspiring New Yorker, should have access to.

I tell myself that it's okay to start skimming them.  Skipping the articles that don't grab my interest.  This is not working either.  Because there are a lot of things in this world that I don't know a thing about.  More often than not, I run across something that does grab my interest there.  Often in a piece that I would not ordinarily force myself to read.  At one point I was reading a book review which I found very difficult.  When I complained to my mother about this she said, "Those are the ones that you have to finish.  They do the most for you."  Lo and behold she was right.

With the New Year, I am trying to read current and past issues of the magazine.  I was telling SO about this and he made a comment about how the New Yorker is very dense.  I hadn't thought about this, but it's true. I recently bought an issue of Mental Floss and read it really, really quickly.  Back in the day, I never had a problem zipping through an issue of Entertainment Weekly.  The New Yorker is another animal entirely.

It could be worse.  Many, many years ago my parents got me a subscription to the New York Review of Books.  The NYRB can be pretty damn amazing but I am grateful to have been spared that agony this year.

It's a word eating race and I am really not holding up my end.  But I will press on.

Shilla on a Saturday

Step out of the F train at the 34th street stop and head to the exit at 32nd to the North East.  When you get out and cross the street you will find yourself in Korea Town (K-Town).  It's one block of 32nd street, between Broadway and 5th Ave.  It's mostly Korean restaurants and Karaoke joints, a Korean book store, a Korean grocery store.  This block of 32nd is the epicenter, there is a spill over of places in a 2 block radius of it.

Yesterday, JK was in the mood for Korean, so we met at Shilla, 37 West 32nd Street (shillanyc.com), near the corner of Broadway and 32nd on the north side.  The facade is glass with two doors.  Three people will greet you as you enter the restaurant.  One of them is a gentleman in a suit who, if he sees you standing outside the restaurant, will wave and beckon you in.  He might come outside to talk with you about the menu and the very excellent food as his restaurant.

It was raining yesterday and they have this contraption that will wrap your umbrella in a skinny plastic bag so that you can carry it with you into the restaurant without tracking water all over the place.  Brilliant.

We were seated in the back and had immediate opinions on what to get.  JK wanted Pork Belly BBQ.  And I wanted Pajun, a giant pancake.  In addition we after much discussion settled on getting Kalbi Tang a beef soup.  The waitress persuaded us to upgrade to the Spicy Marinated Pork Belly.

They brought out many banchan, impressive in number, mostly just okay.  The notable exception to this was a seaweed kimchi made from miyeok, which was excellent, spicy, a la dente, with a hint of the ocean.  Their kimchi was serviceable but pretty mild.  JK asked for an order of Radish Kimchi, Kkakdugi, which was a significant improvement, crunchy and spicy.

The pajun was greasy, crispy, and filling.  We ate half and I took the other half home.  Today it's a whole different animal.  Possibly because I generally like food the day after but also perhaps because I was hungover this morning.  Pajun is the perfect hangover food.  It has carbs, grease, squid and it's crispy with a soft center.  I think the day after the oil has more time to seep in.  It's not as light.  It's heartier with appropriate substance.

They kindly offered to cook the Pork Belly for us.  We didn't want to smell of cooked meat, but of course everyone around us was bbq'ing at the table so we ended up smelling like cooked meat anyway.  Getting it spicy marinated was an excellent suggestion.  It was thinly sliced, tender, fatty, meaty, spicy, and a little bit sweet, especially at the points where the slices charred a little.

The Kalbi Tang was a big bowl of comfort.  The broth was clear and fatty but not too fatty, salty but not too salty, with enormous tender hunks of beef the size of a fist and some thinly sliced daikon radish.

They brought us three bowls of rice.  A nice touch for a table of two people.

The restaurant offered up a bonus round for their diners.  At some point they brought out a big tray of small panfried whole fishes.  Everyone in the restaurant got one.   It was lightly battered and fried to a crisp, the length of my hand.  I was too full to eat it yesterday but reheated it and had it today.  Bony but satisfying, just salty enough, firm fleshed and while oily, not too fishy.  And the tail and fins had an excellent crunch.

As I was reducing it to a pile of tiny bones, I realized that I am not a big fan of fish in filet form.  But if you pass me a plate with the whole fish, head to tail, it's a real delight.  Even if navigating the bones is perilous.

My father told me that as a kid, when the family had fish, his brother got the tail and he got the head.  He said that the head was delicious.  The best part.  I always laughed at a child at my silly father.  I doubted him but I had no way of knowing.  How does the head of a fish taste?  Today, having eaten as much of the head as I could discern to be digestible, I would agree that a lightly battered, pan fried fish head is indeed delicious.

Not a pixie

Last Saturday I got a pretty drastic haircut.  10 inches of hair were separated from my head.  I did this despite much concern from loved ones and a comment from a guy who said, "No man wants to be with a girl with really short hair."

I wanted it short.  What I mean by short is this:

But no, I did not end up with this haircut.  I went with a short round bob sort of like the fabricant hairdo from Cloud Atlas.  Except without the bangs.

It's only been two weeks.  The jury is out on whether a man wants to be with a girl with short hair.  It could be the short hair.  Or the fact I have been sick and grumpy.  Or the fact that I rarely go out and mostly hang out with lady people at wine bars.

If it does turn out to be true, I am okay with that.  I am in a seahorse phase right now, sort of bobbing along in the ocean alone, as described in the "Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing."  It hasn't really changed the way that I interact with the world in a noticeable way.  I like the idea that it will narrow the field down to the one single guy in NYC who likes 40 something, short, goofy, round faced, apple shaped chicks with short hair who wear glasses.  Whoever he is, I'll bet he's the coolest.

"Some enchanted evening
 You may see a stranger
 You may see him standing
 Across a crowded room"
      -Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific

Done

I was feeling blue today.  While chatting with CK, I jokingly listed out what I have accomplished today:

-I have almost finished a bottle conditioner
-I finished the other half of a peanut butter cookie
-I bought an intro to Spanish CD set
-I brushed my teeth this morning.

This cheered me up.  Immensely.  I have no idea why.

Telling stories: Why I will probably never be invited to give a TED talk

I was waiting in line for a drink with AD and I said, "I started drinking whiskey recently.  It makes me taciturn, angry and unable to sleep, so I will probably stop."

He paused and then started laughing at me for telling the shortest story in the world.  X. Y. Z.

Totally fair.

As a child I wanted to grow up to be so many things.  A ballerina.  A janitor.  A school teacher.  An archaeologist.  A historian.  A doctor.  A biologist.  An activist.  A mountain climber.  A jockey.  A pioneer.  A vet.  A mother.  A rockstar.  An actress.  A member of G-Force.  A figure skater.  Eliza Bennet.  Laura Ingalls Wilder.  The list goes on and on.  A writer.

I wanted to write stories.  Didn't write any.  I just wanted to.  Much later in life, I tried my hand at Nanowrimo and discovered that I suck at fiction.  In much the same way I cannot tell a joke to save my life, there was a reason that I never wrote stories, I don't know how.

I would go to write-ins where other people would talk about their plot and how the characters were taking on a life of their own and how much they enjoyed it.  This did not happen to me.  I found myself desperately trying to either figure out how ducks quack so that I could write about quacking ducks convincingly or stealing observations and ideas and snippets and thoughts and conversations from the day to day of my life as it was happening.  If I had a tuna sandwich, so did the characters in my novel.

It was devastating.

Even so, I sign up for Nanowrimo almost every year and I have never finished.  The first time, I finished the word count but not the story.  Since then it's been a boulevard of abandoned word documents.  I considered reading about tropes to see if I could use a bunch of tropes to choke out a story.  They apparently only come in a few flavors.  November is right around the corner and I will try yet again this year.

Maybe I will string together a series of uninteresting and very, very short stories like:

He was going to go to the movies but then felt a sore throat coming on and decided to stay home.  The End.

She wanted a milkshake really badly so she went to McDonald's and got one.  The End.

Again and again for 50,000 words.  An uninteresting book that even I would not read but I will try to write.

The line that keeps coming back to me from Mansion Con

This is a paraphase/misquote: 

"She decided to take awkward lemons and make awkward lemonade."

-Alex Edelman

Professional Charm

If the men of New York were as charming as her waiters and bartenders, I would fall in love and have my heart broken, every second of every day.