Tale of Two Cities

Chicago is big and grand, modern, urban and beautiful - so impressive. But I love New York. The people are nicer.

Meaningful national investments

Education, Infrastructure, Innovation

bag sculpture

Cute video from www.zefrank.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH6xCT2aTSo

grooves in the brain caused by the news

David Foster Wallace died on Friday. Probably by his own hand.
I was recently introduced to his writing while attempting to date online. In preparation for the date I read DFW's essay on usage in the English language (his recommendation).

The first date did not lead to a second but I came out of it with an interest in usage and a great admiration for DFW. The guy's fucking brilliant. He's insightful and a hell of a writer.

I was pointed to his commencement speech at Kenyon College. Reading the line about choosing what you worship and how besides some concept of God or spiritual principle "pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive." felt like getting the wind knocked out of me. The capital-T Truth.

Another piece I was pointed to was this parody of his writing in the Onion. Perhaps I will devote a chunk of my life to reading "Infinite Jest." There may not be a movie out that can kill you through sheer entertainment, but I am starting to think that the time management computer games like "Diner Dash," "Wedding Dash" and "Cake Mania" might be addictive enough that I could see myself playing them to my death, if they had infinite levels.



Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The government would not bail them out. Freddie and Fannie Mac, yes. The Brothers, no. I am the first to admit that I don't understand economics. I am very interested in it of late, but I don't understand it. Near as I can tell, people were worried that The Brothers didn't have the money to back up all the of the wacky financial shenanigans that they (and we the investors whoever and wherever we might be) were involved in. They claimed that they were fine but apparently not. And some folks who lent to them, wanted their money back. The government did not want to cover their asses, and no one wanted to buy them and their mysterious "financial" what's-it-hoozies. No one wanted to know what was behind the curtain.

And now everyone is waiting for my bank to fail. I chose this bank because they sponsored a really amazingly great free Yo La Tengo show two years ago at Prospect Park. And now the money guys are gleefully waiting to hear about a run on the bank. The trouble with marching right over there for your money tomorrow, is of course well described in the movie "It's a Wonderful Life." They claim to be good for it in the long run but the money is not there. The money has been lent to all kinds of folks regular and corporate with the idea that they will pay it back, with interest.

We'll see if they are good for it. Is the trick of it to hang tight and weather this. Or will my fellow depositors rush in a drain my bank into the ground with me left getting my money from the FDIC insurance which must come from us as taxpayers or something.... There is a whole government vs. private sector argument that is screaming for it's own post, along with a screed about how regulation is a good thing. I am suddenly glad that I did not move my saving to a high risk uninsured money market account with a brokerage.

I cannot help but wonder whether before all this is over, Walmart will be nationalized by the US government, only to transform it from within, leading to a dramatic changes in our bureaucracies as they bargain ruthlessly for crazy low prices, streamlined "distribution" and "supply chains," and Elderly greeters in blue vests.

If my bank weathers this, I respectfully would like to request that they sponsor a free Bjork concert at Prospect Park with a river of booze and the Tuba guy as one of the opening acts. Making it to the other side calls for a proper celebration.


There is more news, I am sure but I just read waaaaay too slowly. Someone did something somewhere for some reason.


"This is water.

This is water." - DFW

lesson for the day

I used to be very interested in meeting famous, powerful and influential people.

But after today, I have no interest at all.

It's only worth meeting them if you are in a position to tell them that they can go fuck themselves.

When you are not and they are shady, arrogant, pushy, mean or rude, it pretty much sucks.

Highlight of Saturday night

Saturday evening I tagged along for a pub crawl with the LYM and his friends. During the course of the evening we stopped into Pianos. (My first time there.) Strangely, four different men commented on that fact that I yawned. Is this the new Indie Rock pick up line?

We arrived right in between sets and sat around waiting for the band. Lucky for us, the next act was Wolff, a man with a tuba.

In his own words:

"The concept I'm working with is that all the sounds are generated by, with, and through the tuba itself with the help of numerous guitar pedals and other sundry looping devices. Singing is through the tuba. Percussion is banging on the tuba. I play the tuba and beat box through it as well."

- Brian Wolff

The drummer was closing his shift at a nearby bar so while we were there it was just Brian Wolff with Tuba and effects playing while David Attenborough's "Planet Earth" played silently in the background. It was trippy. The sound in the room was really loud but not so clean, so it was also a little soupy. But I think part of that bleedy watery-ness might have come from the tuba itself.

His myspace.

Official band website.

We left after a few songs. I really would have liked to stay for his set but when you are not the head of the pub crawl, you don't call those shots. If it was my friends I would have offered to catch up to them later. But as it was, I put money in the tip jar and left with the pack.

I am going to plan an outing dedicated to one of his shows.

Vitamins in the morning

I was looking for a cartoon this morning. In this cartoon a little baby chick in a sailor suit keeps showing up in situations and singing "Good Morning to You" to the tune of "Happy Birthday" which is so annoying and yet perhaps in keeping with the original lyrics to the song, at least, according to Wikipedia.


Instead, I found this blast from the past.

Much better.

I remember the first time I saw this as a kid.

The part where Daffy Duck sings, "and on this farm he had an igloo ..." was so unexpected. His reaction is priceless. I laughed so hard as a kid I about pee'd my pants.

Fortunately, this morning I am home where I have a change of clothes.

It's in the transitions

I woke up this morning and thought to myself, "I'd really like to take a yoga class. It's been forever. I wonder if A. is still teaching at Laughing Lotus."

A. is my favorite teacher in NYC. To be fair, I've only interacted with about 11 teachers since moving here. He has great taste in music. He gives great talks and puts together graceful, dancerly, butt kicking, mind boggling, sweat drenching yoga practices. And he has a beautiful holy essence.

I checked the Laughing Lotus site and he is there no more.

Life moves fast, my friends. In New York, especially. When you encounter a magical moment, stop and savor it completely. Because there is no way to know how long you will be there or whether you will encounter it again. If you do, it probably won't be the same. At the very least, you won't be the same.

Ariel Karass, Namaste. Thank you.

Lyric for the day

"And I'm reading more into your words than you have put into them
and that's my problem, but you tied these knots,
now you undo them, you undo them."

- Everything But the Girl, "Troubled Mind"

Apropos of nothing ....

travel by donkey

This is my two wedding weekend. I got up early greeted by CK in a cab from Manhattan then bound for the first in Brooklyn. After the ceremony I had to scurry off, walking several blocks to find a car to take me to the airport to catch a plane to Toronto for the second. I am waiting on a shuttle to take me from the hotel to the airport where I can catch a bus to a subway to downtown Toronto to a rental car place for a car which I will then drive up to the banquet hall.

Good times.

I think the Universe is trying to tell me something

It is a natural tendency to think that the Universe makes sense, that there is an order to it and that things happen for a reason. While some might argue that this is the natural inclination of the religious, it is also a firmly held conviction in science too. The answers to the question: why and how and who might be very different but the underlying belief, that sense can be made of the world around us, is shared.

In the case of religion perhaps, there is a desire to see the Universe as displaying a level of intention, of consciousness. A desire for the Universe to, like each of us, have an identity and a personality. Where in science, there is, perhaps, less of this.

(Although speaking with people in ecology and evolution is fascinating. For some of them, any and all observations, immediately merit speculation as to why and sweeping generalizations about the nature of the nature of life. Large conceptual jumps are made to the point where the conclusions are like "Just So" stories, origin myths, or creation myths. This seems to happen to a much greater extent than their colleagues in more reductionist branches of Biology who are bound by the demands of controlled reproducibility.)

Mind you, I have little success at making sense of it, myself. But I do feel the yearning for some understanding of the world around me and my place in it, a desire for a purpose and a sense of belonging. As a self-confessed superstitious person, I look for signs.

When I stand at the train platform, I think to myself that at that moment the City is either working with me or not. In moments when the subway doors open right in front of me, it is confirmation that the City is working with me. And in moments that it doesn't, clearly, the City is not.

Of course, it is more likely that the City is always uncooperative. Added to that, in actuality the positions along the platform where the subway doors open are pretty consistent. They have to do with the length of each car and the relative position of each door on the car and so on. Fate and the mysterious hand of the Universe have nothing to do with it.

I could figure out exactly where the doors will open for each car of a subway just by lining them up to key landmarks at each stop. And then the City would always appear to be working with me. Or more precisely, I would be working with it.

It is only a sign because I am looking for signs and am too lazy to approximate subway door positions relative to subway platform landmarks at the stops that I frequent.

But I digress. Yesterday, while walking home, I started to think about all my stuff. In particular about things that I have lost, tossed or left behind.

I lose things all the time. Clothes, books, CD's, money, time, boyfriends, friends, memories, documents, umbrellas. I used to lose my keys all the time (knock on wood). Sometimes they are misplaced. Sometimes they are left behind. Sometimes they grow legs and walk away.

In moving away from CU, I got rid of many things. I sold them or just threw them away. There was no time, I had no space. It was what had to happen. It was just heartbreaking.

In moving to New York, I brought two suitcases and a backpack. My parents drove out a few times and brought me things. A winter coat. A TV. Ten boxes of chicken flavored ramen. Twenty cans of creamed corn. And in living here I have accumulated some things - books, skincare products, socks, a CD here and there. There are days, though, that I miss my stuff. I forget the days that I spent in my overstuffed super cluttered place feeling oppressed by all the things that had no place, and me with no time to use them. They all sat around and reminded me of the things that I wasn't doing and the life that I wasn't living. Physical souvenirs of longing and regret. But oh, what a glorious life it would have been.

The other day, I discovered the loss of an entire email account containing ten years of emails from Grad School.

Before that, I had my computer hard drive at work catastrophically crash. Nothing was recovered. And my machine's contents were not backed up anywhere. Over a year of information and templates and archived documents and emails - gone. They were files that represented what I had done and learned in my first year in the corporate world. And the entire email correspondence between me and The South which I am sad to have lost.

I let the LYM use my phone with his SIM card which wiped some aspects of the memory of my phone. So I lost cute text messages from friends and my call record.

The desire to keep everything is combination of a poor memory and sentimentality and while I am loathe to admit it, perhaps a little stinginess too.

I think the Universe is trying to shove me out of dwelling on the past and into moving forward. Out of potential and into action.

What matters in the end is not what you have or how much of it you have. What matters is having what you need and having enough of what you need. The root of that is figuring out what you need, how much is enough, and how to go about getting it.

Not quite what the doctor ordered

I'm feeling a little stressed, a little rushed, a little harried today. It's probably a case of the Mondays or caffeine overload.

I decided that the best thing for stress is, of course, pictures of kittens. I went to Google and typed: "pictures of kittens" and got this:





Yeah, so, I still feel a little stressed but take comfort in knowing that I am not alone.

Yahoo Mail is not data storage

When I left CU, there were emails that I wanted to keep. I couldn't find a way to download them onto my computer and burn to a CD or transfer to an external drive, so I opened a yahoo email account and forwarded all of those emails over.

Do not do this.

If you do not log in to your yahoo email account for 4 months, they inactivate it. They delete everything. Everything. And they bounce any incoming emails.

So 10 years of email in my life are gone. Because while I thought I had read the fine print, apparently I didn't.

I suppose it's all for the best. Did I really want to look back on anything that happened during that time in my life?

That was 10 years of my life. Actually yes. Now I need to look into better data storage methods. Methods better than Yahoo Mail.

Home sweet home

I'm in. The lock out is over. First thing to do, take a shower.

Yay!

Less lucky than some, but more than most

My landlady, her daughter and her son in law all went on vacation together for 10 days. They are the other people who live at my house. J, the guy she hires to do maintenance, came over today to take care of some things. He had a key so I said hello and made a little small talk and then left.

I came home tonight to find that both of the front doors were locked. J had used locks on the doors that we, residents, never use. Locks to which I do not have keys. I suspect that my landlady doesn't have keys to these locks either. I don't understand why he did this. He's worked at the house countless times in the two years that I have lived here. And I have never come home to a situation like this since moving here.

Of course, this being a house in Brooklyn, I can't get into through the back. I can't get into the back. I can't get in through a window (they have bars). I can't climb up to a floor where I could get in through a window. And with all my misspent years, i never learned to pick a lock.

So I am now at the LYM's house for the night for an impromptu sleep over. Meditating on my fears of homelessness, couch surfing.

And tomorrow, I will call a locksmith and wait on the stoop, or in a park or at the library or in a coffee shop until it's time to meet up.

Grrrrrr.

Round round get around, comment on get around

There are obvious things that are different about being in Paris vs. New York. For example, everyone is speaking French and the streets are paved with pastries (in a manner of speaking).

There are surprising differences that, perhaps, should not seem so surprising. The alphabet on a French computer keyboard is laid out differently from a US computer keyboard. The concierge at the hotel I was staying at asked me if he could try something on my laptop when I had trouble accessing the wireless internet. The whole time he kept asking me where the "M" key was. And I didn't understand why. Until I went to an internet cafe later in my trip and found myself asking the exact same question.

Yes, they have buses and we have buses.
Yes, they have cars and we have cars.
Yes, they have the metro and we have the subway.
Yes, they have bikes and we have bikes.

But. They also have the Velolib:




In Paris there are several bike stations at which you can rent a bike with a swipe of your card or a pass. You can ride the bike wherever you want around the city and simply deposit it at another bike station. Like the metro, you can either purchase a pass that allows you to use the bike whenever you want over a set period of days or you can pay as you go. And overall it seems to work. Somehow the bikes get distributed around town.

I very much wanted to try it unfortunately, the stations could not process my US credit card. Damn regional banking! Interestingly, every time I got tired and was not near a bus line or metro stop, there a velolib station would appear. So to my mind, they were excellently placed, at the very least.


They also have the minicar:



Which is indeed a mini car. I tried to get a poodle or a pug to sit still in the shot so that you could get a send of relative scale, but you know how hard it is to get those critters to sit still.


They also have this semi-covered scooter thingy:




I did not see any Pedicabs. But apparently there is a proposal to roll out electric car sharing, the Autolib. I can't wait to go back and see them and have my credit card rejected yet again!

Great deterministic force in history #12

Oh, Michael Lewis, how is it that I keep forgetting how much I love your work.


"Privacy is no longer a right but a wasteful luxury. The Internet has not merely suggested new weapons for the Invasion of Privacy. It has created terrifying economic incentives for people to abandon their charming old attachment to their privacy. Privacy is newly inefficient if the larger social goal is to get the most stuff to the most people at the cheapest prices. And who would deny that the consumer demand for ever more stuff at ever cheaper prices is one of the great deterministic forces in history? Any technology that gives the consumer what he wants, when he wants it, at a better price, is likely to succeed, in spite of a lot of objections from hoary old privacy nuts.

Of course there are cultures on earth famously less enamored of consumer goods and more wedded to privacy than American culture. Too bad for them! Consumerism isn't a luxury; it is the necessary behavior underpinning any successful modern economy. It is one of those horrible American traits that other societies have been adopting because they need to adopt it if they wish to remain competitive."

- Michael Lewis "Next: the future just happened"



Gosh. Who knew?

Just one of those days

The greater half of my brain (my laptop) has decided that the CD burner needs to go on strike and now will not release my most recent reproduction of my album. The disk is trapped in my laptop and today I would trade the sleekness of apple's design for a CD tray and a physical eject button in a heartbeat. I will pay a visit to Tekserve and throw myself at their feet beeing for their help..

I got into work today and promptly knocked over a glass of water, spilling all over my computer keyboard. Lucky thing, I always keep a giant stack of napkins and paper towels at my desk. All of which I used.

My right arm has swollen to the size of a watermelon from two bug bites that I got at a concert at the park on Friday. This has been the summer of insufferable and extreme skin reactions to the bites of bugs. I have thought more about scratching and itching than anything else all summer. The LYM could avert conversations about "us" by asking to see my bug bites and commenting on how itchy they must be.

I lost a library book. For the first time in my life, I lost a book and for the life of me could not find it. And after posting a sign and asking around and looking high and low at the office, I finally went to the main library and confessed to my sin. They entered the book as lost, demanded monetary reparations and slapped me on the wrist. And today, two days later, reception emailed me to let me know that my lost library book was found.

So now I am going to call the library and see if they will accept the book and give me back the money. If it were me I'd say: "Too late for that Solo." But we will see what their take on it is.

Yes, today is a cheese sandwich post kind of day.

Kisses!

GIRLS DO MATH AS WELL AS BOYS

Say it loud and say it proud.

Quote from the NYTimes today July 25, 2008:

Although boys in high school performed better than girls in math 20 years ago, the researchers found, that is no longer the case. The reason, they said, is simple: Girls used to take fewer advanced math courses than boys, but now they are taking just as many.

“Now that enrollment in advanced math courses is equalized, we don’t see gender differences in test performance,” said Marcia C. Linn of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the study. “But people are surprised by these findings, which suggests to me that the stereotypes are still there.”

"Math Scores Show No Gap for Girls, Study Finds" By Tamar Lewin

I could sit here and type out (or cut and paste) the entire NYTimes article but hey, why don't I just give you the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/education/25math.html

And now I'm going to go do the "Yes Ma'am, Girls can do math" dance, all over the room.

Yes we can!

Ganked from Poetryslam

I am breaking the embedding barrier for this one. Hee hee.