If I had 600 dollars ...

I got a letter from the IRS today. Says that the government is going to send me a check some time between July 11th and September 5th. Yee Haw.

So what do I do with it?

Years and years ago, I used to run. I ran a little and miserably, mostly to keep BBFK company. Mostly, I thought about how much it hurt, and how much the flesh on my face was jiggling, and wondering how many laps I had left before I could keel over. Sometimes, while I ran I would meditate on the question: "What would I do with a million dollars?"

Give it away? Give how much of it away? Give it to who?

Buy a truck? Buy a house? Buy a condo? Buy a horse? Buy a hybrid? Buy audio and studio equipment? Buy a rickenbocker guitar and a Marshall half stack?

Start a business? Philosophy shop? Poetry nook? Curio store?

Take classes? Intensive martial arts? Pottery? French cooking? Spanish language immersion? Dance? Yoga teacher training?

That's a million. $600 is a different story altogether.

It's enough money that I think twice about spending it on a nice meal and some clunky shoes. But not enough that I feel like I want squirrel it into a Roth IRA or an S&P 500 Index Fund. Which is probably why I am not rich.


Okay - $600.

I could ...

- go see 5 Broadway shows. I haven't seen Spring Awakening, Wicked, Passing Strange, Avenue Q, and ... one more.

- get a 3 day pass to see All Points West and have money left for beer, food and merch.

- go to Madison, Wisconsin for the National Poetry Slam 2008.

- buy a really, really nice acoustic guitar.

- hang out at a fancy spa day and refuse to leave until they make me look like Gong Li.

- see $600 worth of movies or buy $600 worth of music.

- take a lot of yoga classes.

- fly home to see my parents and chill with them.

- donate it to a worthy cause.

- buy someone a heifer.

So many options. Especially for an event junkie like me.

I'll have to mediate on this.

What are you going to do?

so long rest stops, good bye gas station snacks, farewell truck stop souvenirs

The price of gas affects everything. Even indie rock.

At least according to this npr piece.

With the high cost of gas, fewer bands are taking their show on the road. Makes sense. It's a big country and much mileage must be covered to get from show to show. Most bands need a big vehicle to lug all that gear around. Not to mention the merch, the merch girl, the costumes, the grumpy band mates, the fanboy who is tagging along because he "just loves you guys" and has always wanted to see Omaha and other random memorabilia picked up along the way.

As a show goer, this is tragic. But I understand. I know that I'd be breaking out in hives right now if I was planning a tour. Might as well burn money on the street and play songs while skipping around it, this summer. It would cost less.

Since the Mystechs are taking a break, none of this effects me. I don't have to sleep on the floor in the homes of kind strangers. I can sleep on my own floor this summer. But as I sit here, mired in drama of office wage slavery, I feel this urge to put on a costume and run around shoving people while screeching like a demon.

Might have to try out for the roller derby. After I learn to rollerskate.

New Favorite Website

It's a website where you can search for a song or artist and then get a list of tracks that you can play right there on the site. Instant gratification.

http://songza.com/

Now, you can't download the song, they don't have everything and the sound quality is not always so hot But you browse and listen to as much or as little of a song as you want. And you can play the songs for free.

I'm sure that there's more to it, but that's what's got me all happy.

New Jugs?

This the second day I've seen media coverage on these new milk jugs. Big big news. They are apparently, weird but superior in every way imaginable except that people don't like the way they pour.



Here's what I don't get. They already put all that effort into the redesign. Why can't they go through one more design iteration so that the milk is easier to pour in the ways that people are accustomed to pouring it? They could add a lip or a spout to the opening or they could put "chop" the corner opposite the handle and add one of those round spouts that they now have for the juice cartons. I don't see why they can't add ergonomics to the list of great things about this new jug. Someone please explain.

Ze Politics

For whatever reason, I have been mildly obsessed with this ancient youtube video for a few days, "End of Ze World."

The LYM introduced me to it and in a tragic moment of not remembering, I played it for him having forgotten.

Someday, we will reminisce to our grandkids about how we used to gather around the computer to watch youtube videos together, much like people reminisce about gathering around the fire to swap stories, or gather around the television or the radio. The media and the means are different. But the desire to gather and share stories is the same.

He died yesterday

My first year as a grad student I got a free ticket to see George Carlin at Assembly Hall.

He started off with bit where he said, "When you buy a pet, you are bringing home a little piece of death." Because there's no way that your pet will outlive you. You have brought a living thing into your life, into your home to hug and love and hold and play with, to care for and take to the doctor, a cute furry adorable little new member of your family who you know without a doubt is going to die first.

I have often thought about that bit since then. Pretty much whenever someone tells me that they just got a pet.

He went on to touch all manner of topics. Some of them offensive and sharp to the point that S who came to the show with me wanted to leave. But I couldn't. My ass was glued to the seat. And after some rough social satire and commentary he changed gears and spoke seriously and technically about farts. About how you had a choice between letting a fart out all at once and letting it pip out a puff at a time, about the sound of the walking fart.

He was funny, biting, insightful, and kind. His kindness radiated all the way from the stage to my craptastic nosebleed level seat.

I didn't know him, but I miss him. I am so sad that he died. I say it that way because, as is mentioned in the yahoo article, that's how he would have said it, only funny.


Note the day after:

My friend Mythworker has pointed out that being heartfelt is not quite in keeping with the essence of George Carlin. The links on his LJ post are very in keeping with George Carlin.

He's famous for "The Seven Words You Can't on TV."

And I like this.

Listening to a number of his routine on youtube, ... okay, maybe he wasn't always kind. Maybe he wasn't always funny. But listening to him and thinking about what he had to say will wake you up.

That, and chickens are good people.

My own personal chaos

Today while looking for my giant crochet hook under the couch cushions, I found 36 cents and my TV remote which has been missing for months and months. But no crochet hook. Maybe I'll have it by Fall.

Sleepy, thirsty, hungry and itchy

Bugs have been biting me in my sleep. Last night they bit my feet and the itch was so bad, I woke up at 5am.

I hate when that happens.

Pi to thirteen places

Yesterday, I told the LYM that my favorite Stooge was Moe. It's an appalling thing to admit. I have never been proud of this fact. Especially with my lingering suspicion that everyone else's favorite Stooge is Curly. But there it is.

I consider this to be a flaw in my character because, Moe was mean. Moe was a bully. Always pissed off, always hitting or slapping someone, taking joy from cracking someone on the head with a hammer or a mallet. But I always felt bad for Moe. Moe had ambition. Moe had a plan, something that he was trying to accomplish or some catastrophe that he was trying to prevent and there he was, surrounded by Stooges. How could he get anything accomplished under these conditions?

Though I, like everyone who's seen them, have a favorite Stooge, as a child I never liked the Three Stooges. (How can you not have a favorite Stooge?) All that violence and nonsense never appealed to me. I never laughed at their antics. I never thought that they were funny.

And then yesterday, during this conversation the LYM pulled up this movie on youtube.

And in watching it, I must share with you that I have crossed yet another barrier in my life. I actually laughed.

The lion hunter part just kills me. The timing is so sharp.

But you have to wonder, who on earth needs to have that many pies on hand for a dinner party?

Le Blame Game, Le Sigh

I don't like idiot proof systems. When dealing with an idiot proof system you feel like an idiot and are treated like an idiot. When things go wrong, as they often do, you can't adequately express the problem and no one helps you. Instead they treat you like an idiot. But that's the problem to begin with and it's not getting your problem solved, now, is it?

I want my money back.

Tenderize the Night

The heart is a very tough muscle. It has to be. It works very hard for you. It has to keep you going regardless of your preference or intention.

Tenderizing is the process of breaking down collagens in meat (muscle) to make it more tender.

In cooking, there are three common ways in which muscle is tenderized: Mechanical - you can pound it, Temperature - you can cook it, and Chemical - you can add enzymes that will break it down.

In life, there are any number of ways in which to tenderize the heart. Babies, cute little fuzzy creatures, simple acts of kindness, Hallmark cards, certain particularly manipulative TV commercials, crushes and first kisses, unexpected displays of vulnerability, nostalgia, alcohol. Mind you, not all of them are universally or consistently effective.

Yesterday, I was grappling with a song and the Lionel Richie/Diana Ross duet, "Endless Love" came to mind. Nothing will wreck a songwriting session faster than a quick meditation on that tune. In my youth, I expended a lot of energy hating that song. Passionately, hating that song. And in my advanced years, I feel pang in my chest as they sing, well, pretty much every single word.

"'Cause nooooo one can denyyyyyy, this love I have insiiiiiide. And I'll giiiiiive it all to yooooouuuuuu, my love (my love, my love)." -Lionel Richie

And I have to wonder, what the hell happened? Is it the Lionel, finally breaking down the walls of my heart? Have the trials and tribs leading to these middle ages tenderized my heart to the point where I am receptive to every silly and heartfelt declaration of the Lionel? Is it the early flush and then slow burn of interest radiating from making the acquaintance of my new friend, the LYM? Has someone been slipping papaya or pineapple enzyme extracts into my meals?

It might be all of the above. If this is what it means to mellow with age, in the words of CK, "I don't like it."

Or maybe it's just acid reflux.

I take comfort in the fact that the swell of emotion brought on by "Endless Love," led to a meditation on tenderizing meat. I can only hope that this is a phase and that it will pass. That or I am going to blast Lionel Richie songs whenever I cook a steak.

Le Pew

For whatever reason the previous post reminded me of a quote from Pepe Le Pew:

"Ze moon! Ze June! Ze spoon! C'est l'amour!! C'est toujours!" - Pepe Le Pew

Which lead me to a forum with a thread devoted to Pepe Le Pew quotes.

Which in this day and age are pretty much an invitation to a great big sexual harrassment lawsuit or a restraining order. The key to such ardent wooing is the perception of the receiver and the ability of the wooer to correctly interpret his or her reception. What is romantic to a receptive party is harassment, stalking or at the very least an annoyance to the unreceptive.

Back in the day I felt so bad for the poor little kitty. But today in the moments in which I can stand back from the chase, I find these quotes to be pretty hilarious.


"Permit me to introduce myself. I am Pepe Le Pew, your lover."

"She want to play eet zee lover's chase. Eet ees the leetle girl in her. C'est l'amour."

*after getting clubbed by the cat* "The one in zee middle may remain. The rest of you.......... another day."

"Zee cabbage does not run away from zee corn-beef."




The oblivious confidence, the sunny love-drenched optimism, and the irrepressibleness of Pepe Le Pew are so charming on screen as an innocent, disinterested bystander.

But for the sake of my nearest and dearest, I think my advice would be to leave that crap to the cartoons and take all the hints that are given. Especially when she or he hits you over the head with a giant mallet.

I love Paris in June

At the intersection of Paris, New York, the month of June, and making the acquaintance of a lovely young man - I am reminded of one of my favorite movies, "Sabrina."

In particular of her time in Paris at cooking school.

"The souffle, it must be gay. Gay. Like two butterflies dancing the waltz in the summer breeze. Tra la la la la" - Ze Chef

or this meditation on ze egg.

At this particular intersection of time, being, place, and memory - I hope for sunny days with mild weather and picnics in the park with someone really nice.

Thinking inside the bottle

After a meal one might enjoy a glass of Eau de Vie, Poire William (the water of life, a brandy made from bartlett pears).



That's not an optical illusion. That's a real pear in a glass bottle of pear brandy.
It's magic. A wonder to behold. How on earth did they squeeze that thing into a bottle through that tiny opening?

Rest assured that they didn't. As described at www.cookthink.com and www.bkwine.com, the Eau de Vie makers put glass bottles over pear branches with blossoms or tiny growing fruit and leave them there, waiting until the pear grows big enough to harvest.



Low tech but ingenious, imaginative.

I wonder what possessed Jean-Francois or Jean-Henri to try this. What dreams did he have that resulted in such a fanciful thing? How long did it take him to convince his pere and grandpere to let him keep the bottle on the branch and just see what would happen. Or did he just tie up a bottle in a far side of the orchard and come back with it containing a whole fruit to the delight and amazement of his friends and family?

I was off key, a little sharp

I decided after three months not to renew my subscription to one of the very popular paid online dating sites (VPPODS). This is my last week there and today I decided to clean house. I took down most of my pictures. Left a little message on my profile and closed communication in its various stages with some dudes.

It might appear to the outside observer and most of my friends that I was not taking the process seriously. And in a sense this is both true and not. I did sincerely try to think about the questions that were asked of me and answer them honestly. I had considered offering up some of my excruciating attempts at serious, sincere, self-expression but I will spare you the nitty details.

I spent hours and hours pressed up against the computer screen looking for something. Looking for a sign of life, of heart, of humor, of vitality, a spark, recognition of singularity. It's my excuse for not blogging. (as if one was needed)

To begin, I answered the question: what are you most passionate about?

"Learning new things, being exposed to new ideas, making connections. The point at which you gain a deep understanding of a person or an idea or a process. Situations and relationships that liberate and empower people and individuals. Live music."


Pretty vague, eh? As I thought about this, I realized that of late, passion and inspiration have been lacking from my day to day. I don't have an all-consuming passion in my life. It seemed somehow dishonest to leave my profile as it was. So I changed it to:

"I am most passionate about lunch. I get an irrepressible yearning for it every day."

Which is true. Everyday, I think about lunch all morning. I don't stop thinking about it until I have it. And the next day the process begins anew.

I explained myself this way:
"Most of the multiple choice boxes don't seem to express anything that I would say to describe myself or anyone else. My job is the thing that takes up most of my time but it is not who I consider myself to be. Who am I? I am a petal in the palm of the universe. Who are you?"

The profiles on VPPODS, my own included, made me think of that line from the Smiths (this reused from my myspace):

"You shut your mouth
How can you say
I've gone about things the wrong way
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does"
- The Smiths



We all do. And there's nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with the need to love and be loved. There is nothing wrong with feeling lonely and admitting to that fact. Somedays, New York feels like the loneliest of places. But it can happen anywhere, even in a big crowded room.


Today, I spoke with a fella who believes that sex is like glue. Having it binds to people together emotionally. He thought that you needed to be careful about sex because you might get stuck to the wrong kind of person and when the glue wore off you would be really stuck.

Not always, but yes, sex often does facilitate emotional attachment. There are chemicals in the brain that help facilitate this.

Upon later reflection, the glue analogy strikes a chord with me because for months and months I've felt like I am meeting people but they don't make an impression on me. They don't stick. I have become teflon or rubber and someone else in the room has figured out how to be glue. It goes both ways. I'm pretty sure that I am not inspiring all that much gluey-ness in others. When I meet someone I want to get sticky with they can't get away from me fast enough. (Okay maybe my concept of glue is a bit different from his, but you know what I mean, right? Right?)

Sometimes even sex is not enough to make a connection sticky. And in this city, there are so many forces at work to pull two people apart.

To find someone who sticks, would be amazing. To find someone who could be the cheese to my macaroni. Yeah.

So as part of cleaning house today I put up this:

"The course of true love never did run smooth..."
This little black cloud in a dress is letting her subscription run out this week. For the usual reasons: match never responded to my request for communication, I'm taking a break from dating, I'm just not ready to take the next step, I think the distance between us is too great, I think the difference in our ages is too great, the dog ate my homework, I've fallen and I can't get up, I've got an early squash game, I am allergic to the phone, and the ever popular - Other.

Take care of yourself and good luck in your search.

I'm relieved to be off the site. But also sad. It was a hopeful thing to do. And it was fun to get all that email from the VPPODS and the dudes who hang out there.

But here I am again in the regular world. Itching for a reason the throw my heart out ahead of myself, not knowing if I can beat the throw and run fast enough to catch up to it. But maybe it's not about having a reason. Maybe it's about doing it and coming up with that reason as you try to beat the throw.

Maybe the first step is to seek passion and inspiration.

sunday girl talk, out of context

A: "Please don't tell me that he has a small uncircumcised penis."

B: "Oh, I don't know. I never asked him."

Love and looks are not enough

Today I ran across an article about animal shelters that are giving cats and humans personality tests to try to determine compatibility before adoption. When looking for a life companion, looks are not the only thing that matters.

What a great idea. I hope it works better in interspecies relations than it does on certain online dating sites.

If it does, I might start carrying a stopwatch and monitoring a man's noises and blink rate as indicators of sociability.

Meme via MomVee

The instructions: Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, right?)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-5
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Lessons learned from doing this meme?

I have the attention span of an gnat. How is it that I so rarely finish the books that I pick up to read?

I apparently also have the memory of a goldfish. I have this feel that I have actually read a few of the italicized books ... I just can't remember.

And apparently I went to the kind of schools that never assigned books to be read. *blush*

hypnotized by food

me: Oh man, I want fried chicken soooo bad

CK: yeah? HA!!!!

me: I'm getting the shakes over it. *url for Korean fried chicken shack.* The website is for shit but the food looks like chicken

CK: That's always a good thing to say about food: looks like chicken

A Resume Builder

Today, folks at work remarked on the skill with which I uncork champagne bottles.

Remove foil and wire.
Point the bottle away from yourself and other living things.
Grab the cork so that the top of the cork is nestled in the palm of your hand.
Slowly twist it up and out.

It ain't no thang.

What the world needs now

is more synchronized cycling.

May is NYC bike month. Wherever you are, get thee some pedals to push and a helmet and ride ride ride!

Starts and Stops - Seis de Mayo Resolutions

Last night was my first Cinco de Mayo outing. For whatever reason this is the first year that I have gotten around to it. And it was instructional.

I woke up today with a throbbing head and a queasy belly and a list of resolutions:

Start carrying more cash.
Stop hugging random strangers who are smoking outside of bars.
Start learning to calculate tip and what people owe while inebriated.
Stop using my "outside and trapped in a well" voice, outside at night in the city.
Start refusing free tequila shots from drink reps.
Stop drinking without food.
Start improving my pitcher pouring skills.
Stop sharing my intimate details with people who know those associated with them (the details that is).
Stop tipping cab drivers more than the fare to Brooklyn.

It was stupid, glorious and more than a little painful. Bad for the body yet somehow good for the soul.

Oh, and it turns out that when I talk to cute dudes while hungover, I don't sweat or blush. Of course, I am in too much pain to flirt, but hey, it's a start.

There's something about you, that makes me sweat

How does that first spark feel, when you meet someone? Is it a tickle? A tingle? What does it sound like? A bell? A gong? A full orchestra with piano? The sound of a building crashing down?

When I was in high school, it was nausea. My stomach would drop. The more nauseous I was, the more I suffered, the more I liked the guy. SM made me super nauseous.

A couple of years ago it was trembling. The feeling of a quiver. With SE it was a total quiver.

During my first Mystechs tour I would light up like a lantern and smile really really big.
When I first really spoke with BE I did much the same.

And now? I heat up. I blush and sweat. Profusely. My glasses fog up. Happened over beers with B, happened the other day while talking to C and this evening it happened when I smiled at a guy on the train.

Online profiles don't make me sweat. This should be ideal. I could get to know someone without the embarassment and the flopsweat. But so far this process is sparkless.

So I might have to start running this spring and summer. That way when I meet hot men at the park it won't matter that I am blushing and sweating while chatting them up. They will think it's the run.

Inversions

After a very long flu-imposed hiatus, I have been doing a little bit of yoga. I took a three weekend class for beginners who are interested in preparing to take intermediate classes. I have long understood that I am not actually advanced enough to take the crazy yoga flow 2 classes that I am so fond of at Laughing Lotus. I fall a lot. A lot compared to the rest of the class.

After taking the weekend sessions I have a clearer sense of why that is. I had thought that I was not flexible enough and that my gut was getting in my way. These things do factor in. But additionally, as CK pointed out to me, I am not strong enough yet for a lot of this stuff. My core, my back, my legs, my arms.

Strength comes through more practice and maybe a more diverse program of practice with a variety of different teachers and on my own.

Yesterday, I was in a class in which we did handstands. We did a handstand prep in the middle of the floor. Downward dog, walk your feet in, lift one leg and then kick that leg up. And, I had this moment, where I felt it. I was there. Only one leg, but I was there. I think I even squealed a little. At which point I flopped back down. Close but no stand. It felt qualitatively different from all the times that I had huffed and hopped and kicked and kicked. I felt close. So close that a part of me was kicking myself and asking why I didn't just go with it. Why did I have to sabotage myself like that? While the rest of me was captivated by that feeling. It was like I had kicked up my leg and thrown myself into the great unknown. And the great unknown was there to catch me.

Then we did this exercise where we run up to the wall, using the momentum to throw ourselves into handstand. Which again, I could barely do. I threw myself and at one point found that I had the right half of my body pressed right up against the wall and the left side of me hanging out in the air. In trying to pull myself away from the wall, I crumpled into a little mass of me. It was no fluke, I did this twice the second time during an exercise in which we did handstand on blocks. Same thing, I crumpled.

Part of it was being in a panic at being upside down. Part of it was that I was so disoriented in that upside down state that my brain could not figure out which limbs to control to accomplish the handstand proper.

I need to practice more and get stronger so that one of these days when I throw myself into the great unknown, it will catch me, and I will allow it to hold me.

won't live long with it, can't live long without it

Last week at work, there was a day in which I could not distinguish the feeling of love from the feeling of hunger. So I called CK to confer on this phenomena. After a bit of teleconferring, and based on the lack of an object for this emotion, we determined that it was probably hunger.

I went to the Dr the other week for a check up. My Dr is a cutie. He looks a little like John Larroquette during his "Night Court" days, only less greasy. My Dr is a wise guy (by which I mean funny) and doesn't seem to mind that I am one too. So he tells me that I am healthy with the exception of elevated cholesterol. Which led me for one week to try to implement the kind of diet that drives a girl to sneak ice cream and cheeseburgers in between austere meals. I call it salad in a pita with a slice of turkey. Horrendous. Without cheese, food became a lonely place and meals were dire.

So I have decided to embrace my mortality and my love of cheese. What is life without cheese? Culinary death.



Addendum: The Dr suggested that I stop having cream cheese with my bagel. I asked if butter was a reasonable substitute to which he shook his head. But he could offer me no alternative. The one that I have come up with is: peanut butter.

Learning Curve

I've been learning how to play the REM song "Everybody Hurts." Because I am trying to learn how to fingerpick. Developing the muscle memory takes a lot more time than it used to.

Michael Stipe looks deliciously good in the video.

Walking out of a yoga class the other day I overheard some people talking about the other classes and lessons that they are taking and it struck me that in NYC it seems like everyone is taking a class or a lesson in something. Perhaps it is now New York specific but I am struck by the number of people who are learning to play instruments, learning new languages, learning to dance, learning how to walk and sit better, learning how to do the hully gully, learning to cook, and so on.

On one hand I wonder at the money that people are paying to be taught things. On the other I kind of like that fact that so many people are interested in learning new things beyond their school years.

Can't fight this feeling

The onion in my fridge,
despite the cold and the dark, has put out tender green shoots.
Behind the door she can sense a change
and reaches out in search of the sun.

The trouble with online dating

The more I see them,
the more I want you.

I've read the book.
I know how it ends
and I can't help
but read it again.
You never know,
it might end differently this time.

Another Happy New Year

It is the Thai New Year today. I am catching the tail end of it.

To celebrate, I went back to A's yoga class which has become more impossibly hard than it was a few months ago. Murderous. I walked out of it, looked at myself in the mirror and thought, "Look at that happy face. Who the hell is she?" Well apparently, she is me after A's impossibly strenuous yoga class.

And then I had one crunchy taco at Taco Bell because I had a little over a dollar in my purse and because I had a powerful craving for that yummy plastic nonsense.

Which is probably not traditional but it was a good night nonetheless.

It's like this

In life, there are many things that we learn by example. I think among these is how to love. We learn how to love and be loving by doing but also by the examples around us and through the guidance of those that we know and love.

It may be valuable to meet a person's friends to see what kinds of examples they offer and what guidance they give.

I count myself to be very lucky to have great examples and wonderful guides in my life.

:P

There are people in this world who will draw you out, make you think that you share an experience in common and then leave you hanging.

I think those people suck.

Mr. Excitement

I took in this youtube of Jackie Wilson singing "Lonely Teardrops".

I have always loved this song. But the man. Good god, the man. He is lighter than air. I have never seen the like of him.

Astounding.

Saturday's Alright

I step out of the bathroom at CK's house to witness her watching an infomercial on hair replacement products. When asked about this she says, "I haven't watched TV in a month, it's fascinating!"

Overheard on the street

"Why wouldn't my resume be like me? Unfocused and all over the place."

I tell myself that in sum it's mostly good news here

The good news is that I have health insurance.
The good news is that I now have a primary care physician.
The good news is that the doctor says that I do not have pneumonia.
The bad news is that there are no pills to take to make this go away.
I have been sick with one thing or another since February 10th. For most of that time I have tried not to let it stop me.

Firstly, there were things to do, messages to be relayed and people who needed information and files that are apparently under my dominion.

Secondly, it seemed a damn shame to be incubating all of these germs and not share them with the world. But this past weekend I encountered a particularly nasty version of what for me has of late been the usual and I was home for the week.

At first, I did nothing but sleep but later I alternated between sleeping and working from home. Not because I am the dedicated sort, rather because all those reminder emails were not going to write themselves.

The good news is that I am starting to feel better.
The bad news is that every couple hours I feel faint and need to lay down.
The bad news is that when I lay me down to sleep the coughing keeps me up or wakes me up unless I fall asleep to the sound of golf on TV.

The good news is that I tried to go to work today.
The bad news is that my work computer has seen fit to die on me, a virus perhaps?
So I could do no work while at work. I came home where is it chilly and I do not control the thermostat, my arms are always cold as ice cubes, and I have a big stack of fleece blankets.

I know it is flammable, pills up easily, and does not breathe or temperature regulate but I still consider the inventor of the fluffy fleece blanket to be my own personal savior.

the other day

A staunch republican, catholic, neo-con, true believer emailed me to ask whether I was in the "Old School Sisters United" pro-Hillary Camp or in the "Feel Good New Age-y Yes We Can" pro-Barack camp.

I did not reply because I have been in the throes of dying.

He then wrote me again to apologize for being flippant and to say that he honestly did want to know what I thought.

To which I replied, "I am in the 'Why didn't Senator Russ Feingold run for President?' camp."

He has not replied to my reply. And the more I think about it, the less I expect him to.

For the love of Bob Mould

The frequency with which I get to a show has severely lessened. But that does not lessen the degree to which it does a heart good.

Today, I went to see the Bob Mould Band. I will confess that I have not listened to that much Husker Du. But I am an enormous Sugar fan. I bought "File Under Easy Listening" and held on to it for years before falling in love with it. That album and "Copper Blue" were the soundtrack to months and months of grad school. They were catchy and crunchy and delicious. By the time I embraced the album, Sugar was no longer a band and I read that Bob Mould had put down the guitar and was making electronic music.

Which made me all kinds of sad but, y'know, "Copper Blue" came out in 1992 (the year I graduated from college) and "File Under Easy Listening" came out in 1994. People got to move on with their lives, right?

So you cannot imagine my delight to hear that Bob Mould had picked up the guitar again.

There I was. Surrounded by a crowd of mostly my age group with a smattering of youngsters. Someone made a joke that this was a crowd of people who couldn't wait to see an old gay man play the guitar. My reply to this would have to be "Hells yeah!"

He opened with a Sugar song. Yeee! Coming down from my fan girl place I will say that the guitar work was not what it was on the album and the vocals weren't either. But being there in the presence of these beloved songs and their creator was still a thrill. Despite the toll of time, the songs have good bones. They hold up through it all. And he holds up too.

He's a tall man with neatly trimmed beard, bald (shaved?) head. He is composed and somehow unassuming, all things considered. No crazy kicks or windmills. In contrast, his supercute bass player was a powder keg all over the stage.

My favorite songs from the night were not songs that I knew. I fell in love with them right there as he was singing them. They were more downtempo. They were the songs of a person who has lived. Songs that a grown up would write for a grown up to sing. The rasp of his voice weaving the line was vivid and intimate. His voice was not in top condition but he worked around whatever condition and issues he was having to create something musical and beautiful and real. It was rough. It was present. No effects, no gloss, just his voice. It was powerful. And I was awed to be there.

At the end a little mosh pit attempted to happen it consisted of tall older men who couldn't find enough people who wanted to crash back into them. One of them rapped me in the head with his arm. It was on accident, I'm sure. But I wanted to do my part so I shoved him and bumped my shoulder into a few of them, bracing myself to get knocked over. The pit did not happen. Perhaps they should have brought their kids to demonstrate that in these times and this part of the country if you were not ready to just crash into people you needed to start dancing out a circle to signal to others what was about to happen both as warning and invitation.

It was mostly a night to be a fan girl swathed in nostalgia and puppy wriggles. But there were moments of something really really fine and elevating.

It was as Tess Gallager said:

You can sing sweet
and get the song sung
but to get to the third
dimension you have to sing it
rough, hurt the tune a little. Put
enough strength to it
that the notes slip. Then
something else happens. The song
gets large. (Gallagher, 1986)

Rates of Change

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." -Ferris Bueller's Day Off

The problem with having a favorite little place in New York is that you have no way of knowing how long it will be around. There are some establishments that appear to be here for the long haul. Bloomingdales, the Metropolitan Museum, the Statue of Liberty - I think they are pretty safe for now. It really depends on how desperately Manhattan needs more luxury condos and corporate office space.

But for the charming little places that give a neighborhood character, the ones that make you feel like "you are here" there are no such guarantees. Landlords change their minds. Developers gobble up the land from beneath you. Rents rise. Leases are not renewed.

So, Cafe Palacinka closes and the Moondance Diner does too. Sin-e closes for the second time, who knows where or if it will resurface? 7th Avenue Books and next door neighbor Park Slope Books close as well. And how can I forget to mention Sauce?

It doesn't just happen to the little places. It hits chain stores as well: the Barnes and Noble near Astor Place, the Hollywood Video store three blocks from me.

People take these changes in stride. What else is there to do? The world spins fast and ever faster. It's best that you stay in motion with it, loving what you love but always ready to embrace and seek the new.

The Poet Rumi has a line that I do not precisely recall but paraphrase in this way:
"Look long at the face of the one you love whether approaching or departing."

re-entry

This is week four since the bug first hit me. I feel a lot better which is great. But for whatever reason I also feel disoriented, as if the reset button was hit on my life and I am trying to piece together where and what I was before being laid low.

It reminds me of a short story I read in which a virus is going around with symptoms that are cold/flu-like but when people recover their personalities are significantly transformed. Dog lovers become pet averse. People give up careers they love and drop hobbies they used to be obsessed with in favor of different ones. They fall out of love with their partners and become estranged from their friends and family who don't understand what is going on. But they themselves don't realize that anything has changed. And as more and more people are felled by the virus, the healthy people start to feel more and more alienated.

Hmmmmm ... if you start to seeing different things here, you'll know why. The flu altered my brain.

What PBS told me last weekend

-The polar bear is not doing so well. According to the nature program bears apparently have a very long memory for what to eat, where to eat it and when it is available. And this knowledge is passed on from mother to cub. Grizzly bears know about salmon, and eating berries, and shellfish and squirrels because they learn from their moms. Polar bear moms and cubs take advantage of what they can in new environments, but so far, miss out on lots of food because they have no one to show them what to eat.

-The State of Texas now has a $50 lotto scratch game which is proving to be an extremely effective way to tap into the meager earnings of their poor and their people on welfare. It's working so well that they are talking about putting out a $100 lotto scratch game. Who needs taxes?

-Mining companies are lousy about safety regulations and protecting their workers and many of the mining deaths that we heard of and don't hear of didn't have to happen.

-We have a $9 trillion Federal debt. Maybe we should all get a second job.

-Over half of Americans don't believe in evolution.

-Freelancers get screwed out of small amounts of money. Client will refuse to pay figuring that the freelancer cannot afford the legal proceedings required to collect that $200.

-If you are a Freelancer in some states you can join the Freelancers Union and get Health, Dental, Disability, and Term Life Insurance.

a silent period punctuated by coughing

"I'm sick"
"I was home sick"
"I was so sick last week"
"I've been home sick for two weeks"
"Cough"
"Coff"
"Cough cough"

I have heard these things from people I know. The information was taken in but did not register significantly until now when I am sick myself. It has been a week.

I am certainly not the only one battling virus in the City, on the train earlier this week I observed the phenomenon of the sympathetic cough. Everyone wants to cough but is stifling it until one person lets out a big old hack which causes other people to let out a cough in seemingly timed sequence in response.

I tell myself that it would be so much worse had I not had my flu shot. Of course, if it were much worse, I might die. It is hard to keep in mind while in the midst of it that this will all pass that I will eventually regain the power of speech and song, that I will be able to taste things, and stop coughing, that I will feel better. I have been housebound, basically bedridden, and silent for four days which is not how I had hoped to spend this long weekend. I am not even muttering to myself because I physically can't.

I lay around and urgently urge my immune system to kick this thing already and wish that I had spent more time studying immunology so that I could individually cheer on each cell type and immune strategy. While my Macrophage and T-cells are going to bat for me, I'd like to be able to offer them my sincere thanks and give them much encouragement.

The flu is not going to help me lose any weight. I've been through a bag of licorice Twizzlers, a bag of parmesan flavored goldfish, two cans of chicken noodle soup, a two liter of ginger ale, several pots of chamomile tea, a pot of sleepytime (didn't work), and a pot of wild berry zinger, four cans of peaches, a bag of frozen raspberries, two plates of melted cheese, a tuna sandwich, a fried egg sandwich, a chicken sandwich, half a pot of badly made fettucine alfredo (not enough cheese), and some toast with apricot preserves. Clearly, we are feeding this fever. Yet, in the midst of all of this glorious consumption, I did not remember to buy myself a bottle of Nyquil.

Chicken noodle soup has undergone some kind of transformation since my youth. Used to be the pieces of chicken in the soup can were tiny, two little bitty cubes tossed in grudgingly to demonstrate that chickens were used on the making of the soup. Now there are three pieces that are the size of my thumb. So it would seem that sometimes new and improved is actually improved in the world of food science.

I've recently had a similar experience with a can of pork and beans. All through my youth I would stir the beans around looking for the pork to no avail. And recently I spied a big old piece of fat in a can of beans. Not as happy to see this as I thought I would be. It was not as good as the chicken thing.

In this downtime, besides tucking into my canned goods, I have caught up on episodes of "One Tree Hill" (Bad Nanny! Bad Bad Nanny!) and "Reaper" (Sam is so dreamy.). I have heard good things about "Ugly Betty" from a few friends so I watched a bunch of episodes. The one that I really liked was the one in which Betty and Henry go to see "Wicked" although the poisoned perfume one was good too. Gio is a delightful guy. But overall I was not knocked out.

I watched episodes of "Lipstick Jungle" and "Cashmere Mafia." Andrew McCarthy's character has been morphed into the kind of delightful imaginary man that will be used as a measuring stick by women to make real male humans miserable. Much in the same way Lloyd Dobbler made life much more difficult for men of a certain age in their youth. Each series is described as a dramedy. So far, "Lipstick Jungle" edges closer to Drama (soap opera) and "Cashmere Mafia" closer to Comedy (and "Sex in the City"). I watched some Sunday PBS programming which did what it always does, entertain, inform, and freak me out about the state of the world.

It's been hard to concentrate on reading or communicating. But I did read an online version of Eric S. Raymond's essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which is an "ancient" account of how Raymond used the Linux / open source model to develop a mail program. I come to it as a latecomer as I do with so many things. It's a pretty interesting read. The roots of internet culture are curious indeed espousing ideas and values not generally in line with the mainstream. We shall see how much of it will survive the the efforts of Corporations to grab grasp and control the nets.

Did you know that 48 million internet users who have posted content, such as blogs or photos, to the Internet. That's you and me.

It was the D of the V, y'all

My two favorite holidays are Halloween and Thanksgiving. One holiday that requires costumes and candy and one in which you stuff yourself silly with your nearest and dearest.

My two least favorite holidays are New Years and Valentine's Day.

One year, I bought the man I loved the soundtrack from the movie, "The Piano" and he gave me a speech about how much he hated stupid holidays popularized by Hallmark that suggested that you only express your love on one day rather than all year around. Years later after we broke up, he admitted that this was a really stupid and shitty thing to say to your girlfriend.

The best Valentine's Day of my life was spent with BBFK. We were each dating some lame-o who didn't want to do anything for Valentine's Day so we went out together and saw a college production of "The Vagina Monologues." We did invite our sig o's along but they politely declined.

This evening was a super close second. I woke up sicker than sick. I was coughing up things, strange things, unspeakable things. On the plus, my UPS delivery came *yay!*, on the minus, the light bulb in my bedroom blew out, leaving me sitting in the dark *wah!*

And I thought I would not make it to the VD is Nasty festivities. I went as far to tell everyone this. But upon hearing that AN was also sick but planning to power through the party, I decided to do the same.

The staff had informed the lovely hostesses that they did not have Karoake in English and there was an ensuing panic that we would all be inventing words and melodies to accompany the greatest pop hits of China. CK practiced in the ways of the Jedi dispensed with this problem. The force is strong with that one.

The second point of concern was in that fact that getting a private room for Karaoke and food would require a $500 minimum. Being that the food was plentiful and inexpensive as was the booze, we kept ordering dish after dish,wine and more wine, and beers by the six pack. We each left with a booze party favor tucked in our bags, a bottle of Tsingtao or a bottle of wine. But after a ton of food, much booze, and six hours of Karaoke we all felt that we got our money's worth. The staff was certainly ready to send us on our way...

The rooms was gorgeous and mostly soundproof unless you were in the ladies room where one could hear everything except the karaoke backing tracks. And we almost had our chance to corrupt the youth when a little 7 year old boy pressed his face up to the glass door. A opened it and tried to coax him into our scary den of song, "sin" and sea cucumber but the boy hesitated and eventually ran into the sheltering arms of his concerned father.

Thankfully, they did not have the Depeche Mode song "Somebody" in their Karaoke library. So I was spared laughing while peeing and barfing trifecta. MomVee, we did sing "I can't fight this feeling any more" in your honor. And Radiohead's "Creep" was a surprisingly excellent Karaoke tune appealing to both genders.

I sang myself hoarse which brought back memories of a sweet sweet piece of hell from college we commonly referred to as Call Backs.

At the end of the night I even got a flower passed to me third hand from a cab driver who got it from a cab rider who got it during what must have been a not very good Valentine's date. After all, people on good dates don't give their flowers to cab drivers.

I hope this gift comes around to that person in the form of a best or second best Valentine's next year. C'mon Universe, what do you say?

And if even I can't speak for a month or die tomorrow, I wouldn't trade tonight for anything.

It was a good night. Better than a room full of flowers and chocolate covered candy hearts.

VDay alternatives

If I didn't alreayd have plans for the VDay I might check out this madness:

PUNK ROCK PILLOW FIGHT is a Sixteen Person pillow fighting tournament that truly decides who is the MASTER and THE MISTRESS OF THE MATTRESS. There will be an Open Tournament up to sixteen people separated by gender. Men Vs Men, Women Vs Women. The winner from each gender tournament will receive a custom made CHAMPIONCHIP BELT among another prizes!!

In addition to the tournament there will be THE SWINGERS PARTY! A match that pits up to FOUR INTER-GENDER tag teams against each other until ONE PERSON is left standing. The winner will be declared THE 1 SWINGER.

Here are the Rules:
1. One knee down you're still around, Two knees down you're out.
2. Off the mattress. You're out.
3. If a match goes the time limit, the Ref with help of the audience will decide the winner.
4. No offensive shoving. (Offensive shoving looks like a Sumo Wrestler pushing someone off the mattress, while defensive shoving happens naturally as pillows get tangled and must be separated)
5. You can not "load up" your pillow. (no rocks, no spikes, no salt, etc. in your pillow) Regulation pillows will be provided, but you can bring your own.
6. No punching, kicking, headbutting, etc. (this is a PILLOW FIGHT, not a real fight.)

Violations of 4-6 will get you disqualified.

Teeth guards are suggested.
Costumes are MANDATORY. (If you don't bring your own costume, there will be a costume grab bag to choose your outfit)

Between rounds there will be "face melting bands." And this is all happening at someone's house. I am overcome.

Other Synonyms for Happiness

I guess there are those among us who are looking for a synonym for happiness that is not a Hall and Oates song.

According to Wikipedia, synonyms are words that have an identical or similar meaning. If you are looking a synonym, a blog called "Things to Do" is probably not your best bet.

I don't know that many synonyms for Happiness. In the process of listing them I find that I deviate from the word pretty quickly:

Bliss - Contentment - Joy - Delight - Peace - Laughter - Ecstacy - Full (as in full stomach)- Rest - Quiet - Hugs - Warm - Dance - Bounce - Friendship - Gimlet - Ink - Action - Thought - Learning - Cheese - Love - Discovery - Understanding - Puppies - Kitties - Chocolate - Ice Cream - Longing - Desire - Sunshine - Fresh from the Dryer - fruit flavored - Connection

Right. So I went to thesaurus.com and shook out the following:
Felicity - Glee - Satisfaction - Cheer - Enjoyment - Euphoria - Success - Well-being - Prosperity - Ardor - Rapture - Accomplishment - Serenity - Relief - Gratification - Fullfillment - Cheerfulness - Amusement - Jubliation - Exhilaration - Elation - Buoyancy - Gladness - Gaiety - Diversion - Exuberance - Tranquility - Calmness - Mirth - Hilarity - Joviality -Joyousness - Giddiness - Jubilance - Exultation - Relish - Ebullience - Exuberance - Joyfulness - Peacefulness

I don't include the entire daisy chain of words like Happiness here.

There are a few words I came across that are new to me: beatitude, delectation, ataraxia, gladsomeness.

When trying to list synonyms for happiness it's easy to fall into listing what makes me happy rather than words that represent the state of happiness. It's not just me, the question of whether prosperity, success and accomplishment are actual synonyms for happiness is likely to be one worth some discussion. They certainly can contribute but they cannot be said to be the whole of it.

My father believes that good health is a synonym for happiness. And some would argue that security is another.

In looking at different words for happiness there are differences in quality to consider as well, contentment and jubilation are not mutually exclusive but they are also not identical.

One trick to happy might be understanding that happiness is not necessarily one size fits all in path or destination. And it's okay if your happiness is different from someone else's. That's kind of the whole point.

Today, I am finding it through a bar of dark chocolate and a jar of peanut butter. Tomorrow, I hope to find it through steamed vegetables and brown rice. I am not holding my breath on that one.

button up your overcoat

I am not sure which children's book it was but I think it was "Little Women." There is a passage in which the author describes how the winter is bitterly cold and each of the girls holds a hot baked potato in their mittened hands to keep them warm on their way to school. And then have a baked potato for lunch, I guess.

Today is that kind of cold.

more cheese please

This weekend TBW turned 30. In honor of this he invited some of his nearest and dearest out for some dinner and dancing. Dinner was at a Swiss restaurant. The whole place smelled potently of cheese. The place is well known for its fondue.

While I did have chocolate fondue with Toblerone for dessert, which was just lovely, I did not have cheese fondue. No one at my table was really in the mood for it, I guess.

But I did order Raclette as an appetizer. Raclette is a salty swiss cheese. It was served as a big melted mass of cheese dusted with paprika on a warm plate with some potatoes and gerkins pickles. And Friends, let me tell you, it's delicious. All I can think about is melted cheese on a plate now.

Afterwards we went to the Beauty Bar and danced until 4am. Because that was the plan. I slept until 6pm today and woke up sore and hungover with a powerful craving for more Raclette.

Surviving Exposure

C-belle and I went to the erotic love letter writing workshop at Babeland last month. The lesson learned from it was: read more James Joyce, his letters to his wife Nora were perverse, filthy, passionate and loving all at once. The workshop was in some ways like any writing workshop and much of the advice given was good advice for any writer. Except that some people were reading passages with graphic personal sexual content and we were sitting in room surrounded by dildos, vibrators, and whips.

It was the close of a three part tour I took attending three events having to do with sex and words. Interestingly, they were all organized by the same woman, Rachel Kramer Bussel.

All of this went down in January and I have put off writing about it. Because I came to no clear thoughts or conclusions about it. The readings, while all being about sex, were diverse in topic and presentation and treatment, at turns funny, embarrassing, surprising, informative, thought-provoking, boring, trite, disturbing, sexy, unsexy, etc and so on. And my reactions to them were far ranging as well.

Clearly, I did not die of embarrassment. But I am not sure that my comfort level with public discourse on the topic has increased, at least not by much.

At the point in the workshop where we were asked to turn from writing a love letter to writing something erotic, I totally blanked. I just sat there and blinked while everyone around me was furiously writing.

I keep flip flopping back and forth on whether to post my letter. The letter itself is really tame, PG at best. But it's about a real person. And as much as I try to edit it, and change details, and scrub it to protect them that needs protecting, for now I can't bring myself to post it. Even with every single detail changed it feels naked.

Which is the thing about sex reading and writing. The graphic stuff and the funny stuff and the shocking stuff is what you expect and on some level or another it will always deliver.

But it's the intimate and revealing stuff where the writer is vulnerable and naked that feels really dangerous.

The Scale of Passion

I am going to spend Valentine's Day this year with a bunch of single people. In case you were wondering what kind of outing this will be, the invite for this party has the tagline: "VD is nasty." I had suggested a number of anti-romantic activities for it which were vetoed in favor of Karaoke. Which means there is a good chance that by the end of the night we will all be drunk and hollering along to Air Supply, some of us with tears running down our faces.

Now where was I?

Right, so you know how Elizabeth Barrett Browning said "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Well, Friends, you can now take a step back from having to memorize that poem or enumerate all the things about Pookie that make you tingle and express your passion in a quantitative way.

Let me offer you a crack at the Passionate Love Scale Questionnaire. This is a real questionnaire created by Elaine Hatfield (psychologist) and Susan Sprecher (sociologist) that is still used by professionals today.

Please don't ask me what kind of professionals, the mind reels at the thought. And I will do a follow up to this at some point, I promise. For an added layer of legitimacy (illegitimacy?) I will confess that this questionaire is ganked from a Time magazine article sent to me by CK. I will also confess that typing out these statements, even referring to a blank line, is mortifyingly embarassing, but not quite as nauseating as thinking about the Depeche Mode song, "Somebody." Although, if ANYONE sings that song at Karaoke next week I will probably pee my pants from laughing and then barf on the person next to me.

But I digress.

On to the Scale:


For each of the sentences below insert the name of your beloved in the blank and pick a number from 1 (not at all true) to 9 (definitely true). 5 is moderately true.


1. I would feel deep despair if ____ left me.
2. Sometimes I feel I can't control my thoughts; they are obsessively about ____.
3. I feel happy when I am doing something to make ____ happy.
4. I would rather be with ____ than anyone else.
5. I'd get jealous if I thought ____ were falling in love with someone else.
6. I yearn to know all about ____.
7. I want ____ physically, emotionally, mentally.
8. I have an endless appatite for affection from ____.
9. For me, ____ is the perfect romantic partner.
10. I sense my body responding when ____ touches me.
11. ____ always seems to be on my mind.
12. I want ____ to know me - my thoughts, fears and hopes.
13. I eagerly look for signs indicating ____'s desire for me.
14. I possess a powerful attraction for ____.
15. I get extremely depressed when things don't go right in my relationship with ____.

You then add up your total which will range from 15 to 135.

Elaine Hatfield has a pdf on her site which breaks the scores down into 5 categories. I am going to try to slightly reduce the bias by not including it here.

And don't worry, if your love is constant but not so intense, make that card and compose that poem, bring bottle of booze, a little gift - Pookie will be putty in your hands.

Book love

I was stuffing my face in the lunch room just now and realized that one thing that rocks about books (there are so many) is that there are no ads. You buy it, you own it, you take it home, you read it and no one bugs you to send them more money. No one threatens to cut off your access. No one is shoving ads or surveys at you and there are no annoying flashing animations or noises.

Just you, the pages, and some light.

about the world we live in and life in general

On Monday at the end of a very nice party I was singing along to the song "Somebody" by Depeche Mode with BY and CK.

When I was a sophomore in high school I liked this song a lot. But since then I have developed an active dislike of it. The song makes me want to barf. Just thinking back to the memory of singing that song on Monday makes me cringe.

Oh man, those lyrics.

They rhymed support with support. What about comfort? Report? Retort? Car port?

But reflecting on them leads me to wonder if each member of Depeche Mode found - somebody who will put their arms around him and kiss him tenderly?

I am torn between bitter cynical groans and a sincere hope that they did.

when your relatives are relatively famous

This evening I had the notion to look up a Ring Lardner story called, "I can't Breathe." It's the one Lardner story I have read. The narrator is a character that I am slightly fixated on.

During this search I came across a NYTimes article by his grandson James Lardner in 1985.

"My grandfather has been described as a bitter writer, and I was afraid he might prove too bitter for me. Instead, I discovered that he had changed too, keeping pace with my change. The delusions and posturings of his comic characters brought as much delight as ever but also a sadness I hadn't felt before. My emotions expanded into the vacuum created by an unfeeling narration - just as, I now realize, the author intended."

Which I find to be a very interesting observation about the active and participatory nature of reading.

I had to read this next passage twice before I got it. It was worth the second try.

"Rereading ''You Know Me Al,'' I laughed again at Jack Keefe's performance in verbal battle. ''I got a notion to take a punch at you,'' he announces. ''Oh you have have you?'' says one of his fellow ballplayers. ''Yes I have have I?'' Jack replies triumphantly. I laughed, but the laughter was suffused with the memory of errant comebacks of my own."

Someone made a comment at the event to the question of why RL didn't write a novel that he was not sure of RL's ability to write a good one.

"If he means a novel in which the author or his hero searches for fundamental meaning and asks deep questions en route, I'm also doubtful. The characters my grandfather focused his attention on spent much of their mental energy in the pursuit of money, power, respect and other short-term gains. Self-awareness was not their strong suit. Nor was awareness of other people and their feelings. His protagonists didn't learn much from life, and that was frequently the point of his stories and the source of their humor. His themes may have been more suited to the short story than the novel. So, perhaps, is a good deal of life as most people live it."

I might have to pick up an anthology and spend a little time with this Ring Lardner Fella.

six of one, half dozen of the other

MomVee tagged me for this meme:

1) Link to the person that tagged you.
2) Post the rules on your blog.
3) Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
4) Tag at least three people at the end of your post and link to their blogs.
5) Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
6) Let the fun begin!



1) I think my clothes fit me better when I am wearing eyeliner.
2) I love educated men with East Coast accents.
3) I cannot walk by a box of free books on the street without stopping to pick through them.
4) When I eat healthy I find myself craving a slice of cheese pizza, a cheeseburger, a basket of zucchini sticks, and a chocolate milkshake.
5) I consider my chin to be disproportionately big. How do I know? My orthodontist told me. So it must be true.
6) A good Vodka Gimlet makes me happy.

The Bloggers I tag are: Kat E (who really has more important things on her mind right now!), Ldbug, and BeckyBumbleFuck.

Worst thing for a hangover

No matter how delicious and tempting they look do not eat Sour Patch Kids while hungover. Wreaks havoc on your digestive system. Waaaaay too sour.

aspirations in the clouds

This morning it snowed big fuzzy fluffy happy flakes.
Although by the time I got to the Island Manhattan, it was more rainy than snowy.

For whatever reason I am recalling a lovely movie called "Waitress." At one point in the movie they play a cover of the Howard Jones song "No One Ever Is to Blame."

The Emile Millar cover in conjunction with this scene in the movie and the story of this waitress is exquisitely heartbreaking from the opening line:

"You can look at the menu but you just can't eat
You can feel the cushions but you can't have a seat."
-Howard Jones

It might be the kind of thing that hits you differently at 37 than at 15.

re-visions of history

At the bookstore yesterday I literally tripped into a book called "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place" by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman.

Someone wrote a book in defense of the way I live.


I opened it up and read the following passage:

"Of all the jazz artists and jam-banders who might spring to mind when it comes to improvisation, the superstar musician who may be the greatest improvisationalist of all time is well known to the public for everything except his improvisation. Yet so intense was this performer's dedication to jumping beyond the music as written that otherwise adoring audiences and backup musicians sometimes became annoyed at the length and off-the-wall intricacy of his extemporaneous musical wanderings, and he lost gigs over it. Even when sitting in with other musicians, he couldn't resist changing their compositions on the fly.

The irrepressible improviser was Johann Sebastian Bach."

- Abrahamson and Freedman

I was practically on the floor from pure surprise, laughing my ass off.

They go on to say that while improvisation was important in serious music back in the day, J.S. Bach was "infamous for the extent and boldness of it."

Apparently, Johann was a wild and crazy guy.

It does explain why the cadenzas on some solo violin pieces were written so small. They were suggestions but way back when, soloists were supposed to go off and play the hell out of those measures as they saw fit showing off their mad skills to the nth degree.

I have to say that if my violin teachers had encouraged me play my own cadenzas, I might have practiced more than I did. I would have had a reason besides fear of the wrath of my Mother.

Stick out your chin, and grin and say ... one scoop in a cup please

It was one of those days.
It was raining.

I got up on the wrong side of the futon.
It was a day full of tiny little disappointments.

I tore a hole in my purse. I left the office building for lunch without my wallet and had to go back and get it. I made suggestions that people at work disliked. I missed a deadline that I had set for myself. I did not do any of the things that I was sort of thinking about and kind of looking forward to this evening. The concert I wanted to see was sold out. And so on and so on. Minor minor little things that meant nothing except that one followed another all day today. The only free seat on the train was wet. And then I decided to make a gloomy day a little greyer. I had time to ponder past mistakes and missteps and missed opportunities. The rather large number of entirely futile things that I do on a daily basis. Lost love. The lack of love. The death of love and the novel and the decline of civilization, the inherent horribleness of man and the imperfection of everything in existence and my mortality and the mortality of those that I love and those that I admire. The death of my sad and much neglected office plants. (Be kind to plants, do not give them to me. You are better off liberating them in the forest.)

My interior dialogue as I walked home was something like this:

"I am gloomy."
-"You got no cause to be gloomy."

"I am gloomy."
-"What would make you feel better?"

"Ice cream!"
-"Ice cream? That will make you fat and do all kinds of terrible things to your health. Have you taken a look at your belly lately? How about a nice bowl of beans?"

"Beans?"
-"You'll have beans and then clean the apartment. That'll be good. It will make you feel good about yourself."

"Beans and cleaning. Could my life get any gloomier."
-" ... okay let's get ice cream."

I get a scoop of chocolate ice cream from Baskin Robbins and head home.

-"Feel better?"

"No. I'm still gloomy."
-"Oh for God's sake! I bought you chocolate ice cream. What more could you want?!"

At which point I laughed out loud. After all, I had a point. And I sat down on my floor and had me some ice cream. It was delicious.

A night at the opera

"This is my Jerry Springer moment. / I don't want this moment to die. / So dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians. / I don't want this moment to die. "- Baby Jane

This evening, I finally got to Carnegie Hall for the very first time. VR and I saw "Jerry Springer: The Opera." This is not a family show. But then, again neither is the Springer Show. The first act is Jerry Springer as an opera. The second half gets much more fanciful and tries to reach into the heart of a show like his. In the opera, Jerry Springer himself admits that he does not resolve conflict or solve problems for the people who come on his show. Mostly, he gives them a place in which to expose themselves to each other and the world.

The format is a live reality with no author to give the whole experience context or shape or meaning, no editor to cut meaning into the sequence of images and events. There is no clear unified moral to these stories, although Jerry Springer does close each show with comments.

"... it's been a hell of a day. I've learned that there are no absolutes of good and evil and we all live in a glorious state of flux [...] for better or for worse, history defines us by what we do, and what we choose not to do." - Jerry Springer of the opera

It's a pity that Broadway would not give it a home. They get an "L" for Lame.

Dreamgirl pre-view fixation

A Gentleman asked me at Splash which Dreamgirl I was. I said that I was Jennifer. The reply surprised him, after all, didn't we all want to be Beyonce? He's got a point there, who wouldn't want to be Beyonce? I went with this reply because, Jennifer sings "And I am telling you that I'm not going," the only song I know from the show.

As we bellowed and gestured along to the song, emoting, sweating, huffing, raising our arms and faking our own vocal vamps, he started to laugh and for the rest of the night he would periodically point at me and say, "Girl, you are Jennifer."

The problem with this moment is that I have not seen Dreamgirls so how could I possibly know?


Exhibit A: Jennifer Hudson

Exhibit B: Jennifer Holiday

Exhibit C: Von Smith

This kid is second coming of Sam Harris. I don't know how I feel about the gender pronoun swaps but strange as that is, you cannot deny that he is a Jennifer (an Effie White?)

On further consideration I might not be Jennifer. The part needs a power soprano.

But blessings be to youtube in the privacy of our own homes, with the door firmly closed, we can each have our own Jennifer Karaoke moment.

Feet on the ground

On leaving Splash this evening I hugged CK and started to weave home. CK and WC asked if I was okay to which I replied that I was and promptly tripped on the hem of my floor length skirt and fell.

For whatever reason as I picked myself up and continued on my way, I felt pretty good about it. After any fall you get back up and carry on. Mostly, falling is not so bad as you fear it will be. Mostly, falling is not so bad that you cannot recover.

I find this prospect very cheering.

Discoveries from the second morning after

The question yesterday afternoon was: Yow! Why does my right knee hurt so much?

This morning I realized that the answer to this question was: I tried to demonstrate the dance move known as "The Sprinkler" at CK's birthday party on Saturday and knocked my right knee against one of her dining room chairs.

a late night in good company

Last weekend at the end of a night out, around 3am I had a serious craving for a waffle. I meandered to the diner down the street and around the corner and had a Belgian waffle with strawberries and whipped cream and a tall glass of milk. Sitting there munching away it occurred to me that in that moment, I was enjoying my own company and life was good.

paper gowns and politics

I had this dream last night that I went to the gynecologist's office and my gynecologist was Rudy Guiliani. I am sitting in my paper gown and instead of examining me he is giving his campaign speech about healthcare and the nation and homeland security. I interrupt him from time to time to ask his opinion about the pill vs. the patch vs. the ring. He looks at me, ignores the question and goes back to his speechifying.

1. I have a zit on the top of my index finger. In the 37 years that I have been alive I will confess that I have had zits on parts of my body that are not the face. But the finger? Good Lord! *sigh*

2. My latest train game is more of a constant state of uncertainty I like to call: "Is that awful smell coming from me?" To date I am pleased to report that it's not me. But I am considering carrying a small bottle of perfume along with my travel size deodorant in my voluminous purse of Tardis-like dimensions, just in case. That and a clothespin for my nose in case it's the other guy.

CK recently warned me that smells (bad smells) can jump from one person to another. And now I am in terror of physical contact folks who are that kind of funky.

3. This past weekend I made a pan of cherry fudge brownies. Cherry brownies have been preying on my imagination for weeks now. I had one in the office which was a-mazing - a rich, tart, moist, chewy, chocolatey delight dusted in powdered sugar. I have wanted to try to replicate it on my own because I haven't been able to stop thinking about them.. So I thawed a bag of frozen cherries and folded them into a brownie mix from the box. It was not quite the experience that I had been hoping for. The whole thing was a delicious oozy chocolately cherry mess straight out of the oven, lacking only for a big scoop of vanilla ice cream. After cooling down, it was more a soggy mass of cherry and chocolate. which when heated up in the microwave is again, a delicious oozy chocolately cherry mess begging for a big scoop of vanilla ice cream. And if I manage to remember to get a pint before I eat my way through this pan, a mini state of melty chocolate cherry a la mode bliss will be achieved.

4. Yesterday, while sitting at dinner with WC we discussed Krispy Kreme donuts with the intensity that one might recount falling in love for the first time.

5. You can now buy a solar powered MP3/Video Player. Very exciting. Look out iPod, your days are numbered.

6. Okay folks, how are you planning to stimulate the economy when you get your tax rebate? There should be a website where some very smart microeconomist has a spending guide that lets us know which kinds of expenditures will create the most jobs, educate the most kids, reduce our debt the most, support innovation, help repair and improve our infractructure, retrain the most workers, stimulate the creation of more small businesses, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, our carbon footprints and create world peace and global justice. That's where I want my up to $600 to go. There or into a new guitar and a haircut.

a scientist turned assistant walks into a bar ...

I was walking along on my way home when a man on the street entreated me to come in and see a "free" comedy show. And being in a wandering aimless no plans on a Friday night out-of-towner state of mind I agreed to check it out.

It was one of those two drink minimum shows where they only listed the expensive drinks.

I have always heard that comedy is hard. And I have never doubted that this is true. Mostly because while life puts me in many situations that I find hilarious and I find the antics, theories, and stories of many of my friends to be hilarious, the incidents in which a stranger or a professional comedian make me laugh are rare. Very rare.

There were six comedians and one MC. They got worse and worse as the show progressed and didn't really start out all that funny. There were some laughs, though. I laughed at all the science jokes. Because, if you think about it, science is pretty damn funny.

The first comedian told a story in which a crazy person was shouting at him and another person while brandishing a plastic dinosaur. He said that he and the other person were afraid of the harm that the plastic dinosaur might do them until he realized that it was a brachiosaurus, which is a herbivore - they really had nothing to fear.

The third comedian, a young man from Tennessee, had two science jokes. The first was about how they are now using dogs to detect cancer and this was the clearest of signs of how busy doctors are and how much worse it must be to find out from a dog that you have cancer.

His other joke was about how he didn't believe in evolution because if he did he'd have to believe that our DNA sequence is 98% the same as monkeys. He said the 2% of his DNA that was different was his favorite piece of DNA. (and up until now it had never occurred to him that he had a favorite piece of DNA!) If he ever has to go in for DNA surgery, he would beg the doctor not to touch that 2% of his DNA.

DNA surgery! OMG! DNA Surgery! He was my favorite comedian of the evening. He had the most jokes. They were smart and observant and funny. But he needs to work on his delivery and timing.

Many of the other comedians had the delivery of a person about to say something funny but no jokes. Or, no funny jokes.

The MC came up and gave me a hard time for not buying his DVD after the show. He had a routine about how we were all the lucky sperm that made it and then described the misfortunes of the sperm that did not. And so when he got up in my grill I laughed and said, "I am not sperm! I am the union of an egg and sperm and so are you!!!"

I was just reading about this kind of thinking in the Promiscuity book. Long ago scientists believed that each sperm was a little human being. And that they fused with the egg to get nutrition and protection. But really, the sperm was where the action was, the soul, the mind, the person. Ah, that men could be so self-centered.

If this was true, the next realization was that there were millions of little people who died with every ejaculation which was morally unsettling.

A man could not justify ejaculation without reproduction. How could you justify spanking off, if it meant that each orgasm led to the death of millions? If that was the case a man of good conscience would have to give it up and "other" activities to prevent mass murder. Who could live like that? So in the interest of pursuing higher truth (among other things) further research was done on this question. And eventually the sperm-is-human theory was refuted.

Is it too much for me to ask that a comic on Friday night in the Village be well informed enough to also refute this? Perhaps.

The MC observed at the outset that it's really hard to get up in front of a crowd of people and make strangers laugh.

I imagine that it can be downright terrifying and thrilling at the same time.

I liked the quote of the day yesterday

"Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well."
-Josh Billings

The big shoes or the red noses?

I have never liked clowns. Every clown related gift that I have ever gotten has been put into a box and shoved as far back in the closet as possible.
They creep me out way more than bugs.

So I am relieved to find this yahoo news item about how kids feel about clowns.

It is a comfort to know that I am not alone in this. Even if I am not a kid anymore.

The distraction of the day

I rented the movie "Once" this weekend. It's the story of a broken hearted street musician in Ireland who meets a Czech woman. The two become friends and decide to record a demo together. That is a formula waiting to happen but in this case it's not what you think. It's a story about two people who meet and help each other move forward with their lives.

I was pretty ho-hum about it. It's a quiet, very low key kind of movie. But today I find that the soundtrack stuck to me. If you could plug earphones into my head you would hear the songs blasting super super loud with the cresendos filling my chest, pressing outwards.

It would appear that I was of two minds and the movie kinda got around me.



Yesterday, I went to a new place to get lunch and picked up a granola snack there called Granzoti. And today whilst I am stuffed to the gills from lunch, I can't stop eating it. I have a few bits and put the bag away. I start wanting more. I pull the bag back out and have a few more bits. Rinse lather, repeat. Which is fine except that I am starting to feel very full, uncomfortably so.

Come to think of it, maybe I don't like the soundtrack to "Once" as much as I think I do. Maybe it's compounded by my physical reaction to eating too much Granzoti!

As the band Asia would say: "Only time will tell."

This quote is a gift from Zemblan

"We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow
And make our garden grow"
-Richard Wilbur

This quote is a gift given on a sad occasion. A memorial for tenor Jerry Hadley.

It expresses the wisdom of living.
You can read the words.
You can hear them.
But you don't know it until you live it.

PBS rocks my socks

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former" -Einstein

"Universe is made up mostly of hydrogen and ignorance." -John Dobson

"...John Dobson, once described the Universe as 'mostly hydrogen and ignorance', but he was wrong. In fact it's mostly dark matter and dark energy — and ignorance. " -Fred Watson

a great line from yahoo astrology

"The fantastic and the horrible often look similar until you get close enough to unravel them."

Edit: That Friends, is why we date.

Synonym for happiness

I realized that my life is lacking in a certain bounce of late.
In an effort to remedy this I bought a Hall & Oates Greatest Hits collection.

"I see you, you see me
Watch you blowing the lines
when you're making a scene
Oh girl" - Hall & Oates "Private Eyes"

Paul Young had a single in the 80's called "Every Time You Go Away" which I always assumed was a cover of an old time Motown R&B hit. I knew that Hall & Oates also did a version of the song. I did not know that Darryl Hall had actually written the song! And I am very much impressed to discover this fact.

If only Marvin Gaye had recorded a version of it, it would have been the soundtrack to many many couples falling in love (and many more getting busy).


*edit: for those of you who seek actual synonyms, I did a second post.*

walk this way

I was walking up the stairs out of the metro station behind a guy who had the cutest walk. He was not a hottie. He looked kind of regular. At first I thought he was dancing up the stairs. But he wasn't wearing headphones and he was walking and talking to a friend who was not walking cute. This is the first time I have ever noticed a fella for his walk. The wiggle in his walk made me smile.

movie madness (potential spoilers ahead)

1. VR and I met up and saw "The Orphanage" a scary movie en Español last weekend. 'twas good. I don't know if the next part is a spoiler or not. I'd advise you to stop reading if you haven't seen the thing.

What I liked the most about the movie is there are at least two explanations for what is going on. One in which you "believe." One in which you do not. And they are both scary. For me the explanation in which you don't believe, the one that you reason out in flashback along with the mother is so much more horrifying. As I type this I am getting distressed. I may never walk into a closet again.

2. On New Year's Day CK and I met up with WC and saw "Sweeney Todd." Which was a whole lot of dark and a whole lot of blood. And probably the best movie musical that I have ever seen. And I love musicals. It's not a warm movie. At any given moment I felt a little bit of sympathy for one or another character but for the most part they are so unsavory and corrupted that I was not on anyone's side, except for the boy. WC was disappointed that there was not breakout hit. For my part, the song "Joanna" was stuck in my head and I think in CK's as well. The song chased all the others out of my head. But last night EH pointed out the song "Not While I'm Around." A song which in the context of the story is touching, heartbreaking, frightening, and so unfortunate.

On Breaking the Sock Barrier

Just about everyone says that communication is crucial in a relationship. Heck, it's important in any relating context.

Relating in small groups, in big groups, one on one, professional relations, adversarial relations, cooperative relations, er ... sexual relations.

It seems like a good idea in the bedroom. Although, the most I generally contribute as far as communication is: "Ow, you're on my hair." I am so bashful that I generally don't ask a fella what he likes in bed. The rare times in which I have, generally, the reply is something I find utterly baffling and find that I am unable to do.

Once the response was: "Vegetables. I like vegetables." Somehow, I don't think he meant that he likes to keep a healthy snack on the nightstand. After this revelation I could not bring myself to open his fridge.

Beyond the basics of communicating about the task at hand. *cough* Steamy talk can be a part of the experience as well.

More recently, I was in a situation in which the fella was fairly adept at it on his end. After a very long pause (It was my turn) I said something like, "Oh. Uh ... um ... well I guess I would **** you."

And with that I was done. Yup. That was the best I could come up with. That was as sexy as a dirty gym sock. I was not up to the challenge. (If you're into dirty socks, please, don't share.)

Another time, a different fella said that he likes girls who talk dirty in bed, my reply was, "Oh." And then complete silence.

Now, I am what I am. And what I am is uptight and uncomfortable when it comes to sexy sex talk. Which kind of goes with my suspicion that I am lousy lay.

But when I sit and think about it, I don't know what the big deal is. It's kind of silly really, I mean, I'm a 37 year old woman. There are so many things that I can do, so many things that I have done. What is my block on this in particular?

Perhaps I just don't know how it's done. Perhaps it's just not my thing. Perhaps I don't see the point of talking about the thing you are doing while you do it.

After all, I sit here typing a post. I am not sitting here typing a post about how I am typing a post and how it feels to type and what else I want to be typing about and how I can't wait to type the next thing that I am thinking of typing.

Still, I feel this bears further exploration, some investigation. And so I am considering going with CK to some events in which people talk about sex out loud in public, or read out loud about sex, or try to teach you how to talk or write about sex.

I am convinced that I will die of embarrassment at one of these things. And if I do please don't tell my mother how it happened.

"don't know much about geography"

If one was to give you a blank map with the outline of a continent, would you be able to place the states, cities, or countries correctly therein?

More importantly, if you met a person who could, would you buy him/her drinks? Is knowledge of geography sexy?

Behold, I come bearing geography games (via Daily Candy).

50 States of the USA
Harder version of the same game
US State Capitals


Countries in Africa

Countries in Europe

Countries in the Middle East and South Asia

Educational games are so not fun. But these games in their ability to showcase my ignorance drive me to play again and again in the hopes that with practice and repetition, I will progress up that learning curve.

I sit and mutter to myself about how Ethiopia and Eritrea are in the Northeast while Mali is in the Northwest and how difficult it is to locate Lesotho before placing South Africa.

They don't seem to have a game for South America, Canada, or the rest of Asia. Yet.
But when they do, I will be muttering in front of them as well.

Like Sam Cooke, "I don't claim to be an "A" student" but I'd like to know some basic things about this crazy world.