pinkpelvis

Been down so long...

2007-01-15T19:37:00.000-08:00

Video stills from "Imitation of a Sound"

It's now 2007 and I'm looking at my last post from the mid-section of 2006. My life is about 180 degrees different now, I am a midwesterner, or atleast I spend most of my weeks in the belly of the states. I am a student again, so I work late at night, I quell my mind with bad TV, and sleep in past the 9-5ers. I am in a relationship which conveniently began in New York a month or so before I moved. So I long and pine.

I'm in San Francisco with my boyfriend before my second semester starts. I've had five weeks off, which is approximately equivalent to the vacation I had in New York the last four years. I often wake up and begin to feel on edge that I have nothing concrete to accomplish during the next 24 hour period and then I begin to relax with some coffee and a slow breakfast. I've picked up some freelance jobs here and there and have begun mapping out a plan to try to put my art into the world. It's a slow process.

Yesterday I took the train to Berkeley to meet my childhood friend, John, for lunch. We were friends when we were twelve and thirteen and then we lived in different places until we were friends again in New York, almost a decade later. Sometimes continuity is amazing medicine. As a former East-Coasters and former members of the New York work force we have more in common at this point in our lives than I realized. I began to hear myself, my worries and stresses and melodramatic thoughts in John as we talked about navigating through the gates of academia in unfamiliar stretches of the country. I guess we had a lot to complain about—the overwhelming exhaust of car culture, how long it takes to get a cup of coffee, trying to make new friends years after high school lunch table politics, shopping in stripmalls, trying not to scoff at idealistic undergrads, getting out of bed. But it wasn't really complaining, it was rich conversation, and in the end I think we both admitted some form of "I know I'm in the right place."

Now that it's a new year and I am settled into my new life in Chicago, though still unsure which states border on either side, I realize how much I miss writing. I am planning to get back to it, and revisit this blog once a week now. I hope some one might still be around to read.

The In-Between

2006-05-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

In this city I often think about the hundreds of thousands of people tucked away in their jobs—in cubicles or construction sites or underground. I think to myself, "Who was assigned the job of stuffing the men's waist-down underwear mannequins in the window around the corner?" or "What poor soul is going to clean up the mess that led my entire subway car to file to the front end this morning?" or "How did that woman become a sea-lion trainer in the middle of Prospect Park?" All these thoughts have crossed my mind this week in the middle of my own work. Some points in time feel definitively liminal and this has been one for me.

The school where I work is between semesters. There are no students in the building and no art being made. Instead we are expanding our print shop across the hall to fill up the entire floor. Walls are coming down left and right. The men punch a row of hammer-holes in the sheet rock and then reach in and pull body-sized pieces down to reveal pink insulation and hollow metal framework. The walls come down in less than ten minutes each, and then they spend a day or so building a new wall in a new place.

I still need a paycheck so I'm here finding once-a-decade-jobs with my coworkers. Last week, my coworker and I pushed a cart with two hundred, seventy-six pounds of copper, aluminum, and zinc to a recycling center between tenth and eleventh. The entry to the center was sqeezed in between a white-walled gallery and a walled-up recording studio. Just inside the garage door a view opened up to a massive lot with piles of metal, stories high, and men driving bulldozers to build the piles higher. I don't think a woman had entered the facilities in a couple of years, so all the workers wandered over to help us. And everyone asked why on earth we wanted to recycle the beautiful drawings on the plates—self portraits with eyes set mid-forehead and landscapes with butterflies. We made one hundred, twenty-six dollars on our trashed metals and got cupcakes on the way back to work.

In the middle of this literal tear-down I continually lapse into thoughts about my upcoming move to the midwest. The thought of my new city is very abstract and I am nervous. It has been my experience that I do not enjoy living with the anticipation of change, but it is mostly the anticipation which shakes me up. Once transplated I am calm and adaptable and enjoy the newness of everything. I've moved a lot in my life with and without my family, so the anxiety is familiar, but the knowledge of the energy of a new phase still isn't quite enough to teach me to be optimistic. I'm still enjoying living in my current life and moving in the same circles I've known for several years. But things are changing here too.

My friend J is going to become a mother in a few weeks. I've watched her belly grow for over nine months yet it is still a very foreign idea that she will have a daughter or son in a matter of days—she'll be a parent. At the same time, one of my oldest friends has just separated from her husband. I met her outside her new apartment on Monday. She was locked out and looked small sitting in the hallway waiting for a locksmith. I sat down next to her new mattress pad and shower curtain and we talked for a while about the usual things even though everything about the situation was unusual, her new door just to our left.

With things changing in every room, it's comforting to realize that even if I am going far from what I know the people close to me are taking leaps as well—that makes it seem not so far at all. For now though I have odd jobs to keep busy and people that I care about to find good conversation with—more than enough.

Coincidence is another word for

2006-04-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

I am moving to Chicago in August. How strange to put those letters together. I am moving to Chicago to start an MFA program, to make art full-time for 21 months.

Last fall I applied to a number of schools aiming, like the rest of the visual art-inclined 20-something spectrum, at a range of 3 or 4 institutions. At the time I was optimistic, I had worked hard. I put things in a row— jobs, references, images lined up like dominos in a slide carousel that I spent two days tracking down from photo store to photo store. Then the skinny transluscent envelopes began to arrive seeming to tell me that I had been insane to think that I was ever cut out for becoming an artist. I had a moment where all I could think was that I spent the last 3 years making an hourly wage roughly equivalent to my high school lifeguarding paycheck, with inflation. And now I am a 28 year-old adult with credit card debt, callused palms, and a phenomenal child care and Xerox maintenance resume.

The Art Institute of Chicago sent a big envelope but I was still sour on rejection. I wanted to shake myself into optimism but the printed reality of school loans and leaving home left me foggy. I kept thinking of the Groucho Marx quote at the beginning of Annie Hall—I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members. I knew I needed to see things in a different light but I was having trouble getting there.

I took a plane a few weeks ago to try to envision a new life at the Art Institute and in the streets and buses and trains of the grid. One of my closest friends, Caroline, lives in Chicago, so it was a warm visit. She took me in, drove me from neighborhood to neighborhood to try to get my bearings. I walked over to a train stop which was an elevated wooden platform. It felt like a boardwalk, but it was windy and grey and caught up between streets. I took the train downtown to the tall buildings and tried to imagine myself spending days on these platforms instead of underground. I visited the printshop which was expansive, there were huge windows circling the presses, looking out at the lake. An undergraduate critique was in progress and the work looked pretty spread out on large wood tables. I met several professors and some graduate students. I began to feel more at home.

Caroline, my friend of 14 years, works in the music industry. On Saturday night we went to see a band in her management list. I had never heard of the band and directly on entrance I realized the mean age of the audience was fourteen or fifteen. I was given a backstage sticker for my jacket and we climbed up to a pocket of seats on stage right. Below us a blanket of teens swayed a little waiting for the show to start. The lights were on and I felt mesmerized overlooking the crowd of heads, people pushing slightly to edge to the front. Then the band hit its first note and there was screaming that filled up the entire theatre. I wanted ear plugs. The band came out wearing black, with hair standing up. The keyboardist spasmed behind his keyboard stand. The teens screamed and jumped and then began crowd surfing. I watched girls in belly-baring shirts being sent forward over dozens of hands toward the stage. At the front, a row of bouncers picked off the surfers one by one in WWF grips. Then the surfers would run around to the back of the theatre to try to squeeze up again.

The next day Caroline and I went to brunch in another neighborhood. We were walking into the restaurant and someone said my name, but I kept talking to Caroline assuming my anonymity in this new city. He said my name again and I looked up to recognize one of the professors from the print department at the Art Institute. He was kind and seemed honestly happy to run into me. I thought of some graffiti I spotted in Berlin which said Coincidence is another word for synchronicity. Then I wondered if my thought patterns were beginning to be shaped like a hippie granola mom.

Chicago is a foreign city to me. It spreads out because there are no boundaries. Restaurants give space between tables, bars sink back into buildings football-field deep, room after room. The houses aren't connected, they just brush up close to eachother. The ocean isn't in view.

When I think about leaving New York I am scared and I want to cry and crawl back into my life here. I know I am going to miss so many tiny things, and the bigger shape and sound of the city. But I've made the decision to hand myself over to this new place and find my niche, and see where I find myself at the other end.

Seventy-two Hours

2006-03-27T14:56:00.000-08:00

I recently acquired health insurance after a two and a half year hiatus. During the uninsured years I didn't often think about my inability to see a doctor. I am healthy, I take care of myself, and though I can be a little bit of klutz, the most drastic result is usually a pint spilled in a friend's lap.

I didn't often think about it until a year ago at work, when I pushed an industrial paper-cutter blade down on my left thumb. I had somehow circumvented the safety guard in an attempt to reduce the number of fingers on my left hand. It was such a deep cut that I didn't initially feel any pain. A few gasps from students in the room and my first response was "I don't have health insurance." Followed by—at a higher octave—"Will they be able to sew it back on?"

At the St. Vincent's emergency room they removed the majority of my nail, which I had cut through, and drilled holes in the remaining nail sliver to reattach my thumb tip in only five stitches. I left looking like a cartoon version of myself with an enormous white bandage wrapped around and around and ballooning from my left hand. My boss gave me the afternoon off.

Eventually, after a number of months, sensation returned to my thumb and I sorted through the workman's compensation papers. In the end this is a lucky story of studio stupidity. I did not have to eulogize a piece of myself and I was able to renew respect for the motto Safety First.

Since I was reinvited to the health insurance party I've tried to make the most of my stay. I am paying a bit out of pocket for the priveledge, so I've got to make it worthwhile and I'm not sure how long I'll be able to stay. Last week, I went to the eye doctor for the first time in five years. My vision is fine but I've been wearing hard lenses for over a decade and after losing my glasses two summers ago, placing molded plastic in my eyes for 16 hours a day has become a bit painful. Not to mention the pricetag of $50 per lens, which in the recent past has caused me to demand my brother to deconstruct his bathroom sink at 2 a.m., the night before a grad school interview in search of a quarter inch clear disc. I decided to check in on the scientific advances in eyewear and was informed that yes! I may wear soft disposable lenses.

My eye doctor then explained that hard lenses change the shape of your cornea, so before she could give me an accurate prescription I would have to abstain from wearing them for atleast 72 hours. Without glasses, my waiting period introduced a new blurred version of my day-to-day. I immediately noticed that eavesdropping on the subway was more interesting. Without the ability to size up my fellow New Yorkers due to their fashion sense or book titles, my mind ran wild with the relevance of overheard conversations. I went into work and was able to tune out—or legitimately ignore—the general chaos of the studio. Even when I saw a blurred version of a friend from the length of the hallway I was usually able to ascertain their identity due to the way their shape moved. It's amazing how our minds record posture and step.

On Sunday night of my unfocused quarantine I went to "see" Jenny Lewis at Irving Plaza. From what I could make out, the opening band was a group of long haired seated men who wanted to their spoken word style to work. When Jenny came on stage I asked Matt to describe her outfit, which he did eloquently and then because it wasn't a rowdy rock-and-roll show the quietness of her songs became so comfortable and full of space. I felt calm and happy.

I returned to my eye doctor and she checked my newly shaped corneas. She handed me two tiny foil-wrapped packets with my new sight enclosed. I walked out of the office with the cool comfort of bendable lenses floating above my irises. Everything was in focus again, but I had been reaquainted with an introspective blurry existence. It made me think that like a meditation routine, maybe I'll retreat to it more often.

The Road to...Somewhere

2006-02-25T12:13:00.000-08:00

I spent a night last week driving up-and-over inside the lines of New York State for a grad school interview. After a long day of work I made my way to Hertz and met the disappointment of "fine print" from my online quote. My car was going to cost twice as much as expected but it was too late to do much about it. Someone pulled up in a white compact and I got in, light-headed and cloudy-eyed. I began to work my way through the one-ways.

Eventually the George Washington Bridge was in view and I could see the long road ahead, reeling out of the city. I spent the five-hour drive singing, singing, and singing some more, wavering between lanes as I flipped through my CD case. There weren't many cars on the road and I used my bright-lights often, though everything still seemed so dark. It occured to me on my third album that I rarely, almost never, spend time in a space alone. I've adapted my life to the city and I am constantly surrounded by strangers, friends, aquaintances and students. In fact the only time I'm actually alone is in my room with the door shut, heading to bed. Even then my roommate, Mimia, is usually pecking on her sewing machine outside my door or watching Japanese cartoons.

I've also not driven a car for longer than fifteen minutes, save a Niagra Falls wedding excursion with a car full of friends last summer, for the last five years. My body remembered the motions from college years of road trips and long distance relationships. It wasn't until I finally stopped for a snack and nearly backed into a McDonalds that I noticed I was driving a bright new Mustang featuring curves of years past. The entire experience had the makings of another life— the Mustang, the McDonalds, the crumbled and greasy road map.

I'm not sure exactly what will happen with that particular quest for higher education. My interview happened. I felt exhausted and somewhat outside of my own body. But the trip certainly allowed me to some space to think. The last few weekends I've had disparate fun in my hometown. Three weekends ago I was unexpectedly transported back to 1985 by the Pyramid Club's near perfect 80's night, dancing with an old coworker until 3 a.m. Last weekend I went to the Russian and Turkish baths on 10th Street. I hunkered down in the 150 degree "Ambient Heat" room watching people being beaten with soapy oak leaves and stepping out every half hour for a dip in the 50 degree plunge pool. The bath crowd was one part Eastern European, one part hippie, and one part where the fuck am I?

Then last night I went to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Bowery Ballroom. Karen O wore what I think was a rejected gold encrusted figure skating costume from the Nagano Olympics. During the second song she pulled some long feathers out of her bodice and began chewing on one. She spent the rest of the night picking feather pieces out of her teeth. During the encore Karen dedicated a song muttering into the mic—This is a love song and it's for all you motherfuckers....and It's for you too, Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad waved from upstairs.

I'm not saying that my entire life is rock'n roll and girls gone wild in Russian spas. In fact, tonight I have a date with a bottle of wine, my futon and some knitting needles. Somedays just seem entirely too foggy. I guess we all have the tendency to hatch escape routes, to imagine running far and fast away from our lives when things feel difficult, mismatched, and half-empty. I like surrounding myself with people, and seeing different scenes and hearing different sounds. We are social animals after all, not designed to live in the interior of a Ford or a parking garage or closed office. I guess in part I'm relieved that I realize I have the ability to change things from the inside out. I can thank the Mustang's smooth ride for that temporary piece of clarity.

When I Grow Up

2006-02-14T11:11:00.001-08:00

I received my first grad school form-rejection letter yesterday. Three or four people most likely sat in metal folding chairs and watched light projected behind a reproduction of my drawings. If one blinked, she might have missed the image. Then they moved on.

It's amazing how this minor nod makes one feel so completely unsettled. It's as if my brain isn't connected to the motions my hands make, and the ideas that pass in and out are foreign to others. If I tried to speak to the panel, it would sound like Swedish, or a metaphor from high school creative writing class. Then again, I've been told I'm too sensitive.

I'm thinking that if this whole starving artist thing doesn't work out, I might give competitive eating a try. Did you hear that a 100-pound woman ate 26 grilled cheese sandwiches in 10 minutes last week? She was thereby declared winner of the World Grilled Cheese Eating Championship. Atleast that career move would solve the whole hunger issue.

It's All in the Details

2006-02-04T09:09:00.000-08:00

This week I spent a morning in postal hell. I work during evening classes on Tuesdays so I usually make a long list of things-to-do for my morning and then end up snoozing 17 or 19 times until I finally drag myself out from under the comforter for some eggs and email before work. Tuesday morning however, I woke at 7.30 a.m. to pack up and arrive at the Atlantic Avenue USPS as they unlocked their doors. I had a bag with about 10 pounds of mail including—my last three grad school applications, an application for a summer residency, 40 handmade invitations for my cousin's wedding in Poland, and a thank you gift for a recent weekend getaway.

I've spent approximately 6 hours of my life over the last month in post office lines waiting for that all-important postmark date stamp, and delivery confirmation slip on each and every application packet. Some days as I rushed to the line, I noticed others fingering through slide sheets and wrapping carousels ahead of me. Maybe there really is a large concentration of artists in Brooklyn, or maybe I'm shit out of luck because 10% of the entire population is applying to the same programs I aim for.

As I arrived upon opening on Tuesday there were somehow already five people in line ahead of me. I waited for ten minutes until one of the two postal worker's light went off. I approached her with a smile and then noticed a NO DEBIT CARDS AT THIS REGISTER hand scrawled sign. I was sent back to the line. On my second turn I asked for the postal worker to weigh my slide carousel so I could estimate postage for the return envelope. I requested delivery confirmation for all my applications. I hadn't filled out the international contents form ahead of time. I asked to see his selection of stamps for my pretty wedding invitations. He became less and less accommodating and began to slam the bullet-proof glass door on his side of the counter. Then he lost it and began screaming at me for "not being prepared for posting."

I talked back. It went something like this "I am prepared, it seems that you aren't willing to do your job, I have several things to mail but as far as I know that isn't a crime." He began mumbling something behind the bullet-proof plexi and promptly tossed my slide carousel which hit the edge of the big mail laundry cart and toppled in. This felt like seeing my baby thrown across the room and landing head first in a pile of sharp edges. Something switched in me and I asked to see his manager. The manager came out with his fly down and I began to explain the situation. His eyes glazed over and he mumbled something about his employee following instructions. A growing line of people stared at me watching as my face became red, hovering somewhere between anger and tears, as I sweat in January heat. It was humiliating. The icing on the Atlantic Avenue USPS cake was that their void of LOVE stamps or anything beyond some leftover Disney Christmas stamps for the wedding invitations. I re-wrapped my wedding invites in their tissue paper and huffed my way out to a subway.

I still had a few hours before work began so I decided to visit another post office in Chelsea in search of the LOVE stamps. After another half hour line I arrived to the window to find they had only American flag or Stop Family Violence stamps to offer. The Stop Family Violence stamps had a picture drawn by a child of a stick figure crying; I decided this would not be the best omen for the wedding invitations. The post man directed me to the mothership of all New York post offices at 42nd Street. On the subway I scowled to myself wondering if I would ever find the goddamn LOVE stamps and if anyone receiving the invitations would even notice. I often find myself at the bottom of an avalanche of life-altering details only to realize that it is my own tunnel vision and mild OCD that has put me there.

The 42nd Street post office was like a futuristic machine with 100 windows for service, automated post-machines, an enormous spread of stamp designs; yet only two people were working at the front of the wind-around line. I waited for another 45 minutes, salivating over the prize— yellow stamps with two blue birds nuzzling each other so that the negative space between their necks made a heart. After my arduous wait I bought the "True Blue" bird LOVE stamps, caressed them for a minute and then pasted each envelope with a stamp at the perfect right angle a few millimeters from the corners' edge. I posted each envelope in a big swinging mailbox and left empty handed but satisfied.

My cousin's wedding is in one month in Poland, it will take a seven hour flight, navigating Polish roads in a rented car, purchasing another bridesmaid dress with money I don't have, and most likely having my hair formed to an unbecoming shape with a bottle of hairspray. All this seems par for the course, but the True Blue stamp expedition— if that is not LOVE then I don't know what is.

Hometown, USA

2006-01-23T09:12:00.000-08:00

This weekend I took the LIRR nearly to its end with my friend Kristen to visit her parents. I love accompanying friends to their homes and sneaking a glimpse into their small years. My family moved around the eastern seaboard when I was growing up so I am both intrigued and a little jealous of friends who can return to houses that hold their entire lives.

When someone asks where I am from, I usually have a hard time answering. I often say "Baltimore" since it is both where I was born and where I went to high school, but sometimes I just explain that I've moved a lot. Inevitably then a person asks "Military brat?" and I say, "Oh no, gynecology brat."

The field of Ob/Gyn is somewhat of a family business on my dad's side of the family. I was born in Baltimore into rat-ridden residents' housing. All I really remember is very hot and wet summers and my brother's arrival two years later. Not long after that we packed up for West Virginia, a small "city" called Beckley where the coal mines were closed. We spent eight years in WVa— I came to see hiking, white water canoeing, and endless forests of rhododendrons as well as discarded toilets in the front yard, driving pick-ups at age 7, and beauty contests for my first grade classmates whose mothers carried cans of hairspray as tall as their daughters as the norm in life. Perhaps it was my thickening West Virginia accent or the fear of bible-belt high school cirriculum, but we returned to Baltimore for my middle school and high school careers. My parents now live in Western New York so both Baltimore and West Virginia have blurry and warm places in my past.

I was lucky enough to meet K a couple of years ago in one of those happy collisions of friends and acquaintances. I have a handful of friendships with women that now feel like sisters—and most of them I've been lucky enough to know for over ten years. When I first met Kristen we were often out late at bars with her boyfriend and my close boy friend. She seemed quiet at first but then everytime she opened her mouth she threw something either hilarious or insanely observant into the conversation. Lucky for me she was able to see past my disturbingly loud laugh and wanted to talk.

There are many reasons that I love K now, and I have to admit that a big slice of it is that she is somehow able to make the people around her feel wholly cared for. I haven't quite put my finger on it, but another part of our friendship is our slight difference in years and K's uniquely positive outlook about different facets of making mistakes and growing-up. She imparts some of the most insightful advice and has a sense of humor about almost everything—a trait I would love to emulate.

K is from a small town on the North Fork and by small town I mean main street, porches with paint-peeling, "How are your kids?" at the dime store, and coffee and a plate piled with biscotti and scones from the bakery where the owner waves away my cash. I lived in what could be considered a "small town" in West Virginia but as non-natives and a family who lived by and for women's health and choice in the middle of Jesusland, we were always outsiders.

The first night, we stepped off the LIRR and into K's family kitchen. Her dad poured glasses of wine and asked where I was from immediately lauding John Waters—I felt right at home. Even K's, "Daaad, too much information!" comments could have come straight from my mouth at my family's table. I giggled a lot over the weekend, able to see the frustrations of relationships with parents from the outsider bird's eye, able to see a tiny bit of K's teenage self— and then a bigger bit via home videos.

We went shopping with her mom on Saturday, who often waited in the car patiently while we ran from outlet entrance to entrance under the veil of Carpenters' songs spilling over the parking lot. We became absorbed by the couches in PJs, watched TV with her parents, had a delicious dinner out "on the town," and walked around the shops on the waterfront in the chilly January sun.

We climbed back on the LIRR Sunday and I took away a bigger piece of K's history, I had been able to identify some of her mannerisms and humor from her generous parents inside the rooms of a house where they had spent all their years. In the end, for my family, I am happy that my parents moved us several times. I am now made up of varied states, subtly different, and it's allowed my mother and father to find happiness in their life's work—one of the most important lesson of my life. I guess another part of all this moving around is a deep appreciation for finding friends somewhere in between where they're from and where there going, and trying to understand both ends. I had an amazing weekend outside of Brooklyn with hundreds of stars, so powerful and varied without light pollution, a grown-up warm kitchen with endless utensils, conversation, and pets, sleeping in, staying up, and getting to know and love my friend just a little bit more.

Fine Lines and Wrinkles

2005-12-26T15:25:00.000-08:00

Five recent episodes indicating sure signs of aging*:

1. On my way home from work I buy a single tall can of Sapporo and I am carded. The Bodega owner remarks that I "look good for my age."
2. My roommates and I host a party with ample whiskey and wine—Two guests arrive who are intentionally pregnant, they compare bellies next to the do-it-yourself-Manhattans. We offer the mommies-to-be water or tonic. I think about revising future invites to say "Feel free to bring friends and fetuses alike."
3. On a recent Saturday night a mixed gender group of friends gathers in a living room. We settle on watching The Sound of Music on TNT, singing along with zero objections.
4. Several nights later I go over to a friend's house (he shall remain unamed). We buy two bottles of wine and turn to Jeopardy, shouting the answers at eachother. Later, half-way through a rented a movie, my twenty-something friend starts snoring on the couch next to me. It is 9:05 p.m.
5. I arrive home for the holidays to see that the parents have neglected to buy a Christmas tree. In its place is a 3 inch tall bonsai with a paper angel on top.

*It's tough to get the blog muscles back in shape, but I do promise more frequent entries in 06.

A Step Outside

2005-11-25T12:42:00.000-08:00

I've walked out of the bubble for a weekend of rest and minor contemplation. Wednesday I took the train down to Philadelphia running into a friend, a printmaking colleague and 3 aquaintances in the Penn Station rumble. As the train pulled me into New Jersey, I realized that I hadn't left the city or my current state of mind for several months. It is always a bit jarring to match the thought of a breath of fresh air, a break from New York hustle in a greener and cozier place, with the reality of suburbia's lack of sidewalks and feeling like the one dressed a little bit like a mismatched thriftstore enthusiast at each and every family meal.

My brother introduced his new girlfriend to the extended family, a welcome addition. She is smart, lively, willing to interject comments and questions at any point. They glossed their new collaborative project which researches some aspect of lasers and chips and physics and electrical engineering—though I listened to details on the research this is all I can really repeat—a match made in heaven. At this point I also realized that though I am the oldest grandchild on my mother's side of my family I am also the only one currently unattached—New York, luck, timing, choice, oddities in personality? I'm not sure if an answer exists but as questions were fielded about a cousin relocated to London with her boyfriend, another cousin dropped comments about a possible proposal this summer, and my brother's girlfriend circled the kitchen and living room with confidence, I initiated the removal of corks and caps from half a dozen bottles of booze.

My aunt and I encouraged the second annual family single-malt tasting, cleaning a dozen glasses and passing them around. After the first round of tasting, a game of touch football came together and we headed out back. My grandmother lives on the remains of a farm. In the large field behind the house there are 4 bee houses from her beekeeping days and the fall remains of a beautiful tomato garden. I know nothing of football rules or traditions but wanted to get some fresh air, and joined a team with my cousins Alex and Will and a warm belly of scotch.

Alex is tall and fast and intercepted most passes while I ran after a high school freshmen in new Adidas that I hadn't intended to get dirty. My skills did improve however, my brother told me to hold the ball further back because my hands are small, and Alex explained that I should pull my left arm across my chest when lobbying the passes. We took water (read booze) breaks and during a second-half huddle Alex had some words of wisdom for the team, "Alright, so after this, we go inside, drink a lot of beer and criticize our parents, BREAK." We won after my brother was picked off by a grape vine post.

Thanksgiving dinner was delicious, and I ate too much, and slept for a very very long night. This morning, to continue to meld traditions with the rest of America I went to a mall to find a new pair of jeans for my cousin, Will. This was like entering a foriegn and yet bizarrely familiar planet. I remembered stores such as Deb and Claire's Boutique from my middle school years. The entire population of South Jersey had decided to pour into the Cherry Hill Mall...some parents apparently thought it was a good place to allow their toddlers to learn how to walk, anorexic high school girls balanced enormous heads on top of nonexistent frames and Ugg boots, and chubby poof-haired moms filtered into a temporary new store called "A Christmas to Remember." I was ready to run screaming as soon as I saw a boy my age wearing a shirt that said "Jersey Girls Aren't Trash (trash gets picked up)." When we returned to the house I decided to rake some leaves in a meditation to cleanse myself of the mall experience.

I'll spend the rest of the weekend doing some more shopping, driving to and from airports, talking with my parents. And then I'll head back to the bubble and back into round-the-clock studio hours. The thought of returning to the smell of etching hot plates and ink is quite comforting, the way I was longing for suburban simplicity last week. My New York bubble might be a bit anxious, sleepless, and laced with mental gridlock right now, but I'll take it over lunch at Bertucci's, Hollywood Tans and parking lot gridlock anyday—flying over the punched-out rectangle of Central Park at night, back into long walks to the train and flourescent lit cars.

Singalong

2005-11-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

The Artist formerly known as

This morning Ava and I went to a singalong. On Wednesdays at 10 a.m. Park Slope’s original 7th Avenue Tea Lounge turns off its rambling Grateful Dead and allows approximately 800 nannies, moms, and babies to congregate on the sofas to sing about alligators and body parts. Ava was not entirely vocal but seemed to enjoy herself. The half dozen aspiring novelists parked since early morning with French press coffee pots however, did not. They tripped over folded double-strollers, nearly losing their black rim glasses, on the way to the toilet while Good morning to you was repeated around the room.

I love Ava and certainly think that music is very important to toddler education but I really felt like a fraud this morning. I simply didn’t have the energy to jazzercise through Head-shoulders-knees-and-toes or the extra verse of Wheels-on-the-bus added for the “nannies on the bus.” It’s a strange mashing of worlds—the stroller-pushers, usually relegated to tucking their vehicles in corners and hushing their kids into “indoor voices,” break through to say “Goddamit, this is our coffee shop too, I will order my decaf-skim latte and my child will clap loudly through BINGO and you will not complain, because there are more of us than you.”

Ava sat on my lap, happy to observe and lick a key lime cookie. And I attempted to learn a song about catching a taxi...something like “it’s easier than a walk crosstown.” Eventually the nannies filed out, with irritated glances from the writers. I started wondering what it might be like if grown-ups regularly gathered for sing-alongs, and then I realized that I guess this is the phenomenon we call karaoke. Maybe most of us find joy sitting in a 4 by 6 foot room singing along to highlighted words on a screen because it reminds us of when we learned the new verse of Row row row your boat and slumped on a lap, drooling as we gazed across the room at future finance guys, writers, stay-at-home moms, starving artists, bar flys, teachers, and socialites before any of those barriers were built.

Friends don't let friends blog drunk

2005-10-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

On Monday night I trotted home after a long day of work, including last minute execution of a freelance project with unfamiliar materials. Ali was generous enough to invite me to dinner with her boyfriend. While she was preparing some amazing bacon-wrapped shrimp, I concentrated on peeling Catskill apples in rotary fashion without letting the skin break, for a seasonal crisp. We opened a bottle of wine.

An hour later we opened another bottle, and I sat down to catch up on my blog since I'd received a few emails checking that I was alive in my absence of publishing. Below is the evidence of that evening's decision. I am not going to delete my entry in order to persuade others not to blog while drunk—like those smashed up cars displayed in front of public high schools by MADD.

I am not sure what I was trying to communicate below except that I think I've been living in my own head for the last month or so and I feel like I've started having conversations with myself. This is not an attractive social trait. Yet, despite the fact that I've felt like a bit of a social mutant I've been having some nice nights with friends lately, talking about creative process, or about Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, whatever seems appropriate.

Two weeks ago I went to see "Falstaff" at the Metropolitan Opera with David and I met a very nice boy. This may seem like an unusual place to meet someone, but I assure you it is actually an excellent venue as the ratio of people under 40 years to over 60 is approximately 1 to 10. The opera was amazing, the set in the third act actually convinced me of a depth of about 40 feet, there was a unicorn involved and each and every voice was so full of personality. I'm pretty much a philistine when it comes to choosing words about opera or theatre, so there you have it.

I usually opt out of writing about dating in my little corner of the internets here, but I'm becoming more and more aware, that that means leaving out a lot of the good stuff. After all it's often the most relatable if not comical. I'm realizing after my disastrous diarrhea of thought below, I'd like to say that in the thick of what feels like a creative-mid-life crisis I am really happy that I live in this city and get to spend the time I find with friends, seeing opera, or painting watercolor postcards, or cooking after too many glasses of wine. I am happy at the thought of stumbling on new people along the way even in endless rain and looming deadlines.

A word is elegy to what it signifies

2005-10-24T17:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve had no time to think about words lately. I’ve been spending every waking minute, and the majority of my sleeping minutes thinking about my drawings. The creative process is a strange animal, and one that I still can’t really wrap my mind around. I have been waiting for weeks, making drawings, greasing lithography plates and wiping down etchings, just waiting to turn a corner in the body of work I am putting together. In my mind I knew that I had to keep making bad drawings to get to the good ones, but I haven’t tried to wrestle and pin a conceptual idea down to paper since my BFA thesis. The ambiguity was beginning to weigh me down.

I’ve had a hard time translating words lately because I’ve been so invested in the weight of the lines I am making and figuring out why I am committed to a certain color palette, why I want to keep drawing the same shapes, and when it is a good time to stop asking questions and just put it down. The effort of stringing words together as they chase after experience is something that I’ve been obsessed with for quite a while. When I first read Robert Hass’s Meditation at Lagunitas I was struck by the clarity of his words—the way he articulated and made shape of something that had always been slightly out of reach for me—
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.

I’ve been able to take a few deep breaths lately, because I think I’ve turned that corner. Suddenly my marks are making sense, and while I certainly don’t think I’m going to change the world with my drawings, and I’m not even sure other people should be spending time with them, I’m happy that I’ve found a familiar yet ambiguous visual vocabulary again.

On my train ride home from work today I reread a Dave Hickey essay, and I found myself again happily in the middle of this dialog; feeling the inadequacy of words—
…even though a visible artifact must necessarily predate the language that described it, the artifact itself, as we stand before it, is always newer and more extensive than any word every written about it—newer and more extensive, even, than the visual codes incorporated into it, because whether we like it or not, we always confront works of art as part of that selfless, otherless, unwrittable instant of ordinary experience.

Right now, I am living for this unwrittable ambiguity.

iJoined the iPod army

2005-10-08T08:56:00.000-07:00

Last week I inherited an iPod. After a few quick operation lessons from my coworker, I was off to join the iPod army of the five boroughs of New York City. On my first commute I became absorbed in turning the "wheel" and browsing through the extensive music collection at my fingertips— Everything from Justin Timberlake to Philip Glass oh my! Suddenly I realized that I had accidentally boarded a G train and was sucked 4 stops down the line into the bowels of Brooklyn. I was 45 minutes late to work.

On my evening maiden commute the same day I learned the art of navigating the subway platform with a personalized soundtrack following me at every step. For the first time, I noticed all the like-minded, white-earbudded individuals in every nook of the F train. It was like an initiation into a not-so-secret soundtrack-of-life society. I left my work behind at 23rd street with The Album Leaf escorting me home. Everything began to fit into the beats in my ears— the woman nodding to sleep across from me, people bumping off eachother as they streamed out of the train, a three-year-old getting spanked at the corner of the Gowanus Houses and my block.

The last few days my iPod has turned into a portable M. Ward player. I've become completely obsessed with his latest album, Transistor Radio. Sometimes it seems that albums are like mini-relationships. Often the most affecting ones don't catch your attention at first. Then suddenly you are thinking about them all the time and humming the intro to your favorite track at work. They make you see moments of your day in a completely new light and accompany you right before you go to sleep. Then eventually the tracks that don't seem as sympathetic begin to get under your skin and you realize you've overplayed the album, longing for the days when you first gleaned the lyrics from a new chorus.

For now, M. Ward is coming with me everywhere in this city. As Pitchfork wrote—"Heaven knows you don't build cred or a reputation as a trend-breaker boosting a guy like M. Ward to the rafters with acclaim, because he's not one of those musicians who bothers with belonging to a movement or a trend. He's just going on with that beautifully flawed voice of his (a high, hollow tenor with a fringe of grit) spinning melodies that remind you that, though you're weary of the world, you're not alone."

For now I'm still in the honeymoon period.

I don't like science fiction

2005-09-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

In fact, I might go as far as saying that I hate science fiction. The mere mention of a Hobbit sends me into a semi-catatonic haze. Oh yes, I can anticipate, some of you will argue, this is fantasy not science fiction. However, I know this much—the Hobbit book and its offspring involve many new species from an unknown planet searching for some ring that makes its wearer all-powerful with a hint of evil. This is a literary and film genre in which I cannot personally invest time. Though I will say that I have nothing against lovers of sci-fi/fantasy, in fact I find its followers endearing—my father and brother trained me that well.

Lately reading certain mainstream journalism has been giving me chills, heightening my daily anxiety level and sending me toward the familiar Hobbit-coma-state. To be more specific, I am trying to understand how the theory of "Intelligent Design" seems to be making enough news to find a home in The New York Times almost daily.

I was raised in the Church of Science. When I was small, my family lived in West Virginia. We had a huge yard on all sides of the house and a long driveway that my dad re-tarred every other year. One summer he took two rolls of computer paper from the old dot-matrix printers (the kind with the pages linked together with perforated seams and the edges lined with hole-punches.) We stretched the paper out the length of our very-long driveway and made a time-line of well, time, as we know it. I spent the day drawing shelled animals from a book on fossils and at the very distant end of the dot-matrix scroll, my brother and I began to understand how little time humans had spent on earth.

This week The Times began to cover the lawsuit in progress in Pennsylvania; a debate about whether introducing I.D. in public school science classes simultaneously introduces religion. The article summarized that Professor Kenneth Miller of Brown University "projected slides that he said contradicted the core of design theory: that organisms are irreducibly complex. He also denigrated intelligent design as 'a negative argument against evolution,' in which there is no 'positive argument' to test whether an intelligent designer actually exists. If the theory is not testable, he said, it is not science."

It is this simple, Intelligent Design, is not science. I'm not sure if it is even science fiction. Well maybe on a good day it's science fiction with a really shitty underdeveloped plot-line. I suppose in some sense I'm beginning to understand what it feels like for government to make decisions that completely undermine my religious grounding...in the Church of Science. I can't even imagine the confusion that will breed if all glosses of Darwin are preceded with a "keep in mind, you might just go to hell if you support this guy." Maybe we should all just give up and form mini expedition parties in search of Frodo's ring to meld the future of the human race to our own personal whims.

"I'm an...ahem....artist"

2005-09-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

During a conversation the other night, knowing my area of work, a man asked "Well what is it you want to do really?" and I paused and said, "Beyond making ends meet I want to be an artist." He bounced back immediately with "You and 750,000 other people." I thought to myself that this comment was quite possibly the most obnoxious conversation dead-end and also wondered how he decided on that number. His phone rang simultaneously and with that, our "conversation" was indeed over.

It's taken me a long time to be comfortable with that statement, "I want to be an artist," simply because it does conjure up images involving unwashed greasy hair, an ashtray piled with cigarette butts, big 80's dresses in Soho gallery openings, becoming an old lady with "funky" glasses, a pottery wheel in your living room and 80 cats, not to mention that it seems so inaccessible to many people that it becomes its own conversation stopper. But I am getting older and I think I need to be honest with myself about what I want to do with my life.

I know I will be happy if I am able to work in the visual arts—in visual communication. I am beginning to be more comfortable with the idea of not making much money, with the unknown, and with finding work in obscure areas. I certainly do not assume that I will ever be able to make an entire living on creating my own images. But I want to work really hard and see if I get there someday.

Perceptions and reactions are indeed funny when you come to terms with wanting "to be an artist." When I participated in a yogurt focus group a few weeks ago (i.e. finding work in obscure areas) they provided a table full of stickers and markers to make name tags. I chose a funny looking chicken sticker and wrote my name with a blue marker while some of the other ladies spent about 20 minutes perfecting the union of balloon stickers and magic marker polka-dots around their name. One of the brainstorming leaders approached me and said "That's not a very fancy name tag for an artist." I wanted to reply with "Right, because that's what I do for a living, I collect stickers and make name tags." But instead I just said I wanted to keep the focus on my chicken.

Some days it's easier to just say I am an "odd-jobist" for a living and avoid the images of a black wardrobe, performance art sequences in the nude, and selling small oil paintings on street corners. But this is exactly the reason I am so lucky, because I have the choice. I had the choice to take the risk of walking away from office life and health insurance after two college degrees, the choice to dress like a teenager when I go to work, and the choice to choose uncertainty and figure out how to be happy in it.

Go away blogger spammers

2005-09-07T11:17:00.000-07:00

Thank you Blogger for posting a note about using “word verification” to block spam comments. I do so hope this technology works. The animal that is spam seems to have wormed its way into every corner of internet publishing and communication. Sometimes it feels like wading through raw sewage to find that email from your friend’s new work address. Personally I’d like to read some statistics on exactly how many bottles of sugar pills have been sold as a result of the ENLARGE YOUR PENIS IN JUST 48 HOURS emails we all find in our inbox every morning. The most humorous spam comment so far was the following remark after my musings on Divine’s big bush from that eloquent blogger, Handbag—

Handbag said...
Miss America leaves Atlantic City
Jiminy Christmas, I can't keep track of all these pageants. Okay, I mentioned earlier that John O'Hurley is hosting the Mrs.
Terrific Gifts for Spring and Summer. Many Styles! Shop from our VAST COLLECTION of Handbags today! discount louis vuitton handbag
10:06 PM

Thanks, Handbag, I was just thinking about finding a fake Louis Vuitton bag so I can blend into every other woman on the subway. The Scrabble It’s your word against mine canvas tote that K gifted me is looking rather shabby. Thanks for the tip.

Open Season

2005-09-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

September 1st was a beautiful day at the Jersey Shore. I sat on the beach reading for almost 8 hours. At one point I became absorbed in watching a three-on-three tag football game. The game was made up of boys from two families in three sizes—small, medium, and beer gut. The Smalls were fast and eager, overcompensating a bit, veering off in the wrong direction, Mediums were graceful in receiving the ball and made their juts back and forth look fairly effortless, and the Beer-Guts were vocal and a little lethargic.

I was throwing a football in Central Park a few weeks ago which led me to yell “Ugggh, I throw like a girl.” So, after observing the beach game for a few minutes I estimated that my skills could be improved by focusing on the 6-year-old Smalls’ technique. After a few plays, a Small was hit in the chest during an attempted catch and crumbled to the ground to pout. His Beer-Gut counterpart yelled “Oh come on, you’re OK, get up.” And after a couple minutes, he turned to his daughter “Megan, wanna play?” A bean-pole 10-year-old ran over to the “field” lunging and clapping her hands, ready for the game, but also followed by a toddler and four-year-old who skipped around the playing area. The Beer-Guts looked at each other with slight frustration and at the threat of his place being taken, the injured Small rose, ready to play again.

I found myself in a strange moment sitting there alone, surrounded by young families, half-way into a book, with most of my New York anxieties buried at the back of my brain. This week of nearly perfect end-of-summer weather makes me a little sad in general. I love August and I’m not sure where it went. Right now merging back into the day-to-day my mind is racked with the things I want to aim for this Fall; overarching to-dos that quieted in the end of summer heat and travel. There’s a lot in my head and it’s been keeping me up at night. So I am making lists in a new notebook— I have graduate school applications to begin, some gallery shows to apply for, a new work schedule, at least a dozen images that I need to get down on paper, a friends’ wedding to look forward to, and apple pie season, I’d like to write more often, work on my headstand balance, and I don’t know, maybe improve my football throw.

Nice girls don't wear cha-cha heels

2005-08-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

The other night some friends and I watched John Waters' 1974 classic Female Trouble. Most people find comfort in their roots, the place they came from. For me watching Divine run by seedy Baltimore row houses in her two-tone beehive hair and sequence animal print one-armed dress is familiar, it's comfortable. I'm lucky to say that I share my Towson High School diploma with both John Waters and Divine, fellow alums. Besides this, the John Waters vintage of bad taste was welcome in my house and often introduced by my dad. I remember watching Hairspray in middle school—which compared to the 70's Xrated classics seems like a Disney film— and loving the asthetic immediately.

As soon as someone got a driver's license in high school we migrated to
Fell's Point to scrounge through thrift stores and comtemplate what we would get pierced when we turned 18. Inevitably John Waters would be sitting with a friend, smoking a cigar, and selling vinyl records and ceramic figurines at a table on the pier. During sophomore year, Mr. Waters filmed Serial Mom in the halls of our high school, and all classes virtually stopped. Our faces were pressed to the windows watching Kathleen Turner's suburban mom run over a teacher, post parent-teacher conference, in her sedan.

I'm taking the "Lucky Streak" Greyhound bus to Atlantic City tomorrow for our annual family vacation at the Jersey Shore. My family moved several times when I was growing up, leaving and then returning to Baltimore, but I've spent every summer at the Jersey Shore; swimming, reading, napping, eating Jersey tomatoes and peaches and every kind of seafood, playing Hearts, and falling asleep in a room that faces the ocean on the land my great-grandparents bought. I can't wait to spend the week with a book in the sand. It's one of the most comforting rituals in my life. Comforting, just like Harris Glenn Milstead's obese Divine walking down the aisle in drag in a see-through wedding dress, no underwear, big bush exposed—It's just like a bedtime story, just like home.

Accessible Luxury

2005-08-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

Polaroid of Roommates

This Thursday I’m participating in an advertising "ideation" on the topic of pleasure. When my employment was thin a couple of years ago I signed on to the focus-group circuit, making my way through tedious arguments and repetitive catch-phrases while trying not to roll my eyes every other minute. It’s amazing how some people actually find a large supplement to their income participating in the round table medium.

One of the more lucrative focus-groups I landed was called the “Dove Manifesto” which eventually contributed to those happy ladies posing for skin firming ads that everyone seems to be talking about this month. I found the Dove discussion via word-of-mouth and pimped myself as a “beauty expert” due to my experience with the visual arts. Midway through the session I found myself arguing with Amanda Lepore about whether or not the size of a woman’s lips directly corresponds to her beauty quotient.

This week I’ll be discussing “pleasure” as a visual artist and member of the “accessible luxury” division of the group. I'll also probably eat too many complimentary croissants. We’ve been asked to bring in something that “pleases us,” as part of an ice-breaker activity, and so I feel the pressure of anticipating show-and-tell for the first time in about 22 years.

Last week JennyJ posted a challenge which falls somewhere between a self-help exercise and stream of consciousness brainstorming. I became absorbed in her list of “100 things you like in no particular order.” It’s quite nice to find you have a lot in common with someone who lives across an ocean, who you’ve only met in the blog realm. I’m not sure how this week's focus-group will play out, but I’d like to remind myself of my own version of accessible luxury, without thinking too hard, just letting 100 things that make me happy fall out of my head, no editing—It can’t be too hard—

1. Polaroid camera
2. fat seagulls
3. walking a new block in New York
4. reading recipes
5. previews
6. a never-ending cup of coffee on the weekend
7. making lists
8. Baltimore
9. coarse salt
10. sleeping in
11. eye contact
12. John Denver
13. running in the street in Brooklyn
14. walking fast
15. cell phone etiquette
16. thank yous
17. canoeing
18. tequila
19. saying "fuck"
20. cars that wait for pedestrians
21. private karaoke rooms
22. deep breaths
23. sweating
24. looking at the tops of brownstones
25. eavesdropping on public trains and in public spaces
26. calling a long-distance friend
27. people who move away from the subway doors
28. cooking dinner for a group
29. meat markets and cheese stores
30. playing charades
31. laughing too long at a stupid joke
32. the tick of a sewing machine
33. missing a character from a book
34. nailing a Q and U in SCRABBLE
35. biking home at night from a friend’s house
36. talking about Rome with Caitlin
37. cracking lobsters
38. the painted steel elf that sits next to my grandmother’s fireplace
39. holding hands
40. a picture of my brother at age 3 wearing Mr. Potato Head glasses
41. thinking about my brother
42. bocce ball
43. the day a new season is evident
44. packing for a trip
45. washing dishes
46. walking around my neighborhood alone
47. night bugs that make sounds
48. drunk giggling
49. small world coincidences and aquaintances
50. dogsitting and catsitting
51. an unopened bottle of wine
52. a bottle of wine with one friend
53. forearms
54. sleeping dogs
55. cigars
56. making pie crust
57. looking out windows at people below, unaware of you
58. creative license
59. learning something new about politics
60. fixing my computer
61. napping with the windows open
62. Jersey tomatoes
63. remembering a word in Italian
64. tofu
65. hands on backs or shoulders
66. my parents visiting New York
67. recharging batteries
68. agreeing to disagree
69. rehearsal dinners
70. sleeping outside
71. jumping off high places into lakes
72. saying goodnight to roommates
73. teaching someone a new skill with words and example
74. curiosity
75. optimists
76. black humor
77. pessimists
78. hammocks
79. going to the movies alone
80. spending long Sundays with friends and their dogs, on a blanket with snacks in Prospect Park
81. exhaustion after a long day of work
82. Ithaca, New York
83. itchy grass in a big field
84. piles of books
85. knowing all the words
86. friends of different generations
87. anticipation
88. wrapping presents
89. mixing ink and water
90. older couples walking together
91. The Great Gatsby
92. talking about our family with my cousin Caroline
93. photosynthesis
94. epilogues
95. spell check
96. admitting a vice
97. apologizing
98. visiting the house a friend grew up in
99. road trips
100. August

The Gap

2005-08-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

I spend the greater part of my work week teaching and interacting with college students. There are a handful of undergrads in the studio whose commitment to their work is motivating. There are some with an extraordinary handle on color and some whose line is intuitive and beautiful. It is good to be surrounded by people making art. It’s also frustrating, as I spend most of my time in the shop teaching, assisting and cleaning rather than drawing.

My job is certainly social, between demos on resists, etching, exposure and one-on-one critiques there is conversation, and music. The students entertain me by recounting their idiocy when they were drunk or high the night before or gossiping about professors. They make me CDs and t-shirts and bring in comics that I’d definitely never read on my own. It’s a funny match, I’m only slightly older by years and I think that is invisible to many of them. While I really enjoy the friendships, it’s my own vision that is colored by years in the working world. Sometimes however, I give myself away.

This month two students asked me to go to Critical Mass where they planned to sell their freshly printed “Fuck the MTA” t-shirts. I said I’d think about it, but by Friday I had plans for a dinner party at my house. The boys approached me at the end of class and I said, “Well I would but I’m having a dinner party...I just bought two pounds of mussels and I need to go home and soak and scrub them, and you know, I’d like to clean the bathroom before my guests arrive.” They looked at me blankly.

Later the next week during our “pre-college” program one of the high school seniors asked me for advice:
“Rebecca, I reeeeeally want to go to this show tonight and I don’t know how to get in, what should I do?”
“Well it’s been a while since I was underage, do you have a fake ID?”
“Ughhh, no, here’s my license how can I try to alter it??”
I took the license and tried to recall how people would re-mark the birthdate, until I noticed the little number and responded in shock, “You were born in 1988!?!”

I’m happy where I am, here in my late twenties, figuring things out. I’m happy that the mistakes I made in college and patchy confusion are behind me. It’s good to be reminded of this, even while I wear my new “Fuck the MTA” t-shirt home on my bike after work, over the Brooklyn Bridge.

A Moveable Feast

2005-08-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

Last night I had one of the top ten meals of my life with part of my Brooklyn "family." I wanted to jot down the details so I wouldn't forget any of the courses, which were laced with little sidenotes, but I was too deeply involved in conversation and tasting to think about archives. Writing about a meal the next day is kind of like recounting a vacation when you are back in the office, chilled by AC and slurping down water cooler H20. But I'd like to rethink the delicious tastes regardless.

My Brooklyn friends have formed a club of sorts. We've known eachother for years some friendships emerging from college, and most of the time we spend together we do family-like things, cooking, picnicking, hanging out at home. Having this kind of base makes everything feel stable in the big city. We call our new club "Team Takeout"— we all enjoy running and eating, which is the simple basis for our organization. Having a "team" to run the Prospect Park loop in 90 degree evenings makes it far more likely that you'll finish. We meet on Wednesday nights at J's house and run the loop, catch up on the anecdotes of our past week, whine about our aging bodies, and about half way through, discuss what we will order for dinner. After the run, we clean up, order takeout, uncork the first of several bottles of wine and settle into the couch.

This week Team Takeout really cleaned up, and we went out to dinner at J's husband's Brooklyn restaurant. There were a few couples dining when we arrived. We orderd a Piedmont white, and started talking. J's husband, E, emerged from the kitchen and asked "Do you want me to cook for you guys? I don't think you even need menus." This was quite frankly, one of the best lines I can imagine; Not having to labor over twelve equally delicious menu items, avoiding entree envy, giving the chef complete creative liscence— all the makings of an exquisite evening and a perfect August meal.

We started with a yellow tomato gazpacho and heirloom tomato panzanella with mild goat cheese and peaches. Next arrived rainbow trout over sweet corn and chanterelle mushrooms with a grilled peach, a perfect sweet and savory balance. We ordered a bottle of Pinot Blanc from the North Fork and moved onto an Intermezzo of buttermilk peach sorbet with currants. The meal proceeded: olive oil seared tuna and grouper over sweet red peppers and a bitter but flavorful lemon jam, followed by veal with roasted beets and onions, crispy yellow squash, eggplant caponata and ramps. The portions were all perfectly satisfying without being overindulgent. Finally, we stuffed ourselves with a sample of four desserts-- a warm chocolate cake with olives and ice cream, panacotta, homemade mint and bittersweet chocolate ice cream with cherries, and a summer berry crisp. Uffa, era buonissimo.

We talked about families, work, bosses, sex. Periodically E came out to check on us, giddy with his last creation. The restaurant was fairly quiet so he was able to spend time creating our meal and I imagined that this kind of off-menu tasting experience might be similar to how I approach making an etching—keeping in mind the number of processes I've learned, acquiring a new vocabulary for subject matter, planning the production with flexibility for new marks and change and then trying to separate my mind from my well trained hands and let them do the work.

I love the process of putting ingrediants together and venturing away from a recipe. I know I'm forgetting half of the accents E so delicately served us. The meal was phenomenal and unexpected, sensory-loaded. And the company, of course, restorative, hilarious, comforting. I never want to stop appreciating friends who have known you long enough that you don't need to explain much about your thought process or mood or humor. It just is.

E works harder than most people I know with longer hours and less free time, but he is damn good at what he does, I think he's one of the best. Though the field seems a bit cutthroat, I suppose it is rewarded with social prestige, as it should be. Of course I am slightly partial to people who get their hands dirty, and spend their time making things. But regardless it is just so positive to see someone who has found the work they are meant to do. After dinner I biked home through Gowanus, the neighborhood pool was closed, reflecting, the streets quiet beyond 3rd Avenue and finally the heat had settled a bit. I slept well for the first time in weeks.

Negotiations

2005-08-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

This morning A, the two-year-old I take care of several days a week, asked me for a bite of my bagel, I handed it over to her and watched as she ate all the cream cheese off the top. Then she gave it back and I spread a new layer and dug in to my breakfast, tasty though a little soggy. A is not a big fan of clothing lately so after a couple screaming fits as I came after her with a shirt, I dressed her for the park in a diaper, hat and shoes and then covered her little body with a thick layer of 50 SPF sunscreen which sat on top of her skin as a slimy coating for nearly an hour. When we arrived at the park a greasy imprint of her torso remained soaked in my shirt. Later on the edge of the sandbox, with sweat dripping down my back and sun scorching into the part in my hair, I allowed A to cover my legs with the Brooklyn grade A sand (past sandbox excavations have unearthed used condoms, broken glass, and rat poop). I’ve now returned to the house, whipped up some mac and cheese, only for A to ask me for oatmeal, and finally settled her into her nap. I am officially wilted.

I’ve always taken care of children, somehow it’s been the kind of extra cash that fits in, and makes sense, and I guess I’m pretty good at it, maybe because my sense of humor is just bizarre enough to appeal to them. When I lost my job two years ago, a good friend’s father simultaneously had a new baby with his second wife, and I signed myself up for more lessons in the language of baby negotiations. Overall I’ve learned much about human beings, we are extremely complex and intuitive creatures and the tiniest event at an age of just a handful of months can make impressions that might sit below the surface but never quite fade away. The way we acquire language is fascinating, mimicking words, then stringing them together, putting the first person off till a later date. Babies are underestimated, they read adult emotion very well and they react, their personalities are intact from day one and then gently melded by surroundings. And overall I think that we slump into this world as kind creatures, selfish but social. We want to know others and learn from them and human touch is very important. Then I’m not sure what happens…

I love the girl I take care of now. I’ve fed and talked to her since she was 5 months so I feel we do have a very specific friendship. And though sometimes this job does seem in direct contrast to my career, I’ll often think, maybe it’s not. Most of the visual imagery I work with relates to human emotion and the processes of communication and relationships, and bodies we move around in. When you take a minute to de-focus, there isn’t much of a distance between 3 and 30. Somedays though, I’m selfish too, I just want my own bagel, straight from the toaster, with smooth cream cheese, no finger prints, no stray crumbs.

Manufacturing Zs

2005-07-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

I haven’t been sleeping well. I assume that most people go through phases of insomnia and restlessness and many times it’s a direct reflection of the curve of anxiety in their daily lives. I’ve been feeling a bit of stress lately; mainly in relation to the next step in the grand-but-sketchy career plan I’ve laid out. I routinely find myself waking to look in the mirror after 12-15 snoozes, looking ten years older than before I went to bed, with no time to shower.

Everyone, of course, has quirks in sleeping routines. My college roommate and close friend, Caroline, used to triangulate blankets around her face so that only her nose and mouth were exposed. I’ve been made aware of some habits as well—most recently by Amy, my bedmate for an upstate wedding, who let me in on some of the conversations I was having with myself in the wee morning hours. Once, during high school I had a dream that the boys I babysat regularly, had locked me in their hall closet. My dad was watching a movie downstairs and heard my pleas for release, as I had walked into my own bedroom closet and was banging my fists again the wall.

The answer for me is simple. I sleep best with weight. A friend once told me that W.H. Auden was known for taking pictures off the wall and putting them on top of his comforter when he was a guest in someone’s home. It would be a dream for me to fashion a blanket out of those torso X-Ray vests that dentists make you wear when they photograph molars. In this summer heat, however with or without AC, I simply cannot pile on the fleece and down. It is just too goddamn hot.

This week in reaction to my broken habits I’ve had a series of insane dreams. This morning, in fact, I awoke from my very first wedding dream. I’ve never quite imagined the act of getting married in a big white dress. I’m always a bit jarred when a woman says she’s been thinking of her wedding since she was six, or seems to react to someone else’s wedding story with an overabundance of her own preferences. I was certainly a girly girl—my mother was tolerant enough to indulge me from ages 4 to 10 when I refused to wear anything but dresses, with ruffles and tulle please—but I’ve never really imagined myself in a long white gown and longer aisle.

This morning however, in the midst of my Zs, I was a very angry bride. I was yelling because one of my hypothetical and unrecognizable bridesmaids had decided to go swimming in a river in my wedding dress. She claimed she didn’t realize it was mine. “Of course it’s mine, it’s the poofy white one!” I yelled. Meanwhile my hypothetical and unrecognizable husband was lounging at the end of the buffet table eating some grapes in the nude.

I’m half tempted to march to the closest book store and buy a book on dream analysis in order to deconstruct the seething bride I became just before the alarm this morning. Regardless, I think tonight I’ll pull up the living room rug, futon mattress, and maybe even the coffee table and try to balance them on top of my covers.

A Clean Getaway

2005-07-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

I endured a bad date last night. I wasn’t looking forward to the night, I hadn’t really even thought about it ahead of time—All pre-date interaction led me to think that he was a very nice person, intelligent, and well-intentioned. So I agreed.

I made the mistake of running after work in the 90 degree heat. My standard four mile route took over 45 minutes, leaving me only 20 minutes to shower, stick some clothing to my sweaty torso, and hustle to the bar. I arrived with a red face and mop of hair, sweating like I’d just finished a series of interval sprints. Outside the bar, one of my acquaintances from the Brooklyn Inn pool table was having a beer, a man named Claude who is quite attractive despite a dead front tooth. We exchanged hellos and I resigned myself to head into the trenches.

The conversation was just fine, pleasant enough for a bar exchange. The discomfort creeped in when ten minutes into our beers he said, “So I hope you like this bar, I was hoping for somewhere romantic.” I cleared my throat, “Yeah sure, it’s very air conditioned.” I excused myself to the bathroom and when I returned my date had resettled himself in the corner of the couch where I had been sitting, his feet elevated on the chair he had formerly occupied, and his arm stretched over the top of the couch leaving me no place to sit but under it.

Simultaneously the bar’s “Singer/Songwriter” open mike began. A man started strumming and singing a song about a condom breaking. I attempted to hunch my back so that there was no chance of touching my date’s arm. To my right at the bar, a man was playing one of those nudie matching games where you have two photographs of semi-naked women side-by-side and you have to identify the small differences between the images by touching the screen. The nudie game blipped every once and a while and the singer held a long note “Laaaa-aaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaatex.” My date turned to me and muttered “So how do think this date is going so far.” I could see Claude outside talking to some people in a convertible. I wanted to sprint past him and hop in, Dukes of Hazard style, screaming “Let’s make a clean getaway.”

I managed to finally wiggle out of the evening at 11 pm when it was still about 115 degrees, and my date wanted to hit another bar and “maybe play a game of pool.” I thought to myself “no way, not at my Brooklyn Inn, what would all the contractors, ex navy-guys, alcoholic teachers, and aging hipsters think?” Instead I trotted home and collapsed on the couch.

All-in-all I really hadn’t felt like an interesting or pleasant date. My energy for conversation slowly leaked out, deflated by the heat, surroundings, and attention. I wasn’t sure why my companion wanted to continue the evening, to me it was clear that the thing called “chemistry” was buzzing no where near the air between us. As so many songs preach and women’s magazines try to advise, chemistry is indeed unexplainable. I suppose part of that unknown is quite exhilarating at times. Other times, I kind of wish we could devise a system where we hold up a score card like a figure skating judge. Earlier in the night, when my date was playing the air-drum to the condom song, I would have held up a 2 and he would have known that things were going downhill. He could have protected himself a little.

Maybe next time I’ll just perform the gesture of a knife cutting my throat and the boy will get the picture. Though on the other hand, maybe next time I’ll be the pushy romantic attempting to impress with a candlelit bar, big vocabulary, and experiments in performing arts. I guess you never know when you’ll pop up on one end of the see-saw or the other.

Buy Me Some Peanuts and Crackerjacks®

2005-07-06T13:20:00.000-07:00

On Friday night I hopped a train to watch the Phillies in their new home with my cousin and her boyfriend. It was my first baseball game of the summer, and I was excited to wash down a hot dog with some watery beer and feel the breeze off the field, under the bright lights.

I love baseball. I remember the first time I walked onto the upper deck of Memorial Stadium and what a brilliant display the diamond seemed from above. It was nothing like the foreshortened pitcher-batter relationship on TV. At that time the Orioles teambase was a Ripken family operation. Two brothers on the field and a father coaching felt comfortable, it felt like something close to small town little league, it even felt heroic. Of course I was only 10 years old at the time.

There is no doubt that Veterans' Stadium needed to be updated from its one-size fits all, seats and cement as far as the eye can see image. And I guess someone decided the war veterans would continue to be honored by the parking lot that now hosts Hummers, BMWs, and pick-up trucks. I now realize I simply wasn’t prepared for the glory that awaited me in Citizens Bank Park—” Philadelphia's spectacular new ballpark.”

The stadium is indeed comfortable, I believe the seats are wider to accommodate the growing size of the average American. I satisfied my hot dog and beer craving and tried to nestle into the game. The first unfamiliar stadium feature I noticed was the neverending row of TVs placed approximately every 5 feet, and mounted to the mezzanine overhang. I suppose that having the actual game in direct view as well as several massive screens for replays and advertisements isn’t enough to accommodate today’s baseball fans.

A few moments later the true focus of this stadium hit me like an F train at midnight. First an onslaught of Independence Blue Cross replays, then a segment of theTurkey Hill Fan Cam, followed by several CocaCola jingles on the big screens and a Fuji Film game recap. The enormous fluorescent Liberty-shaped bell sitting atop the Citzens Bank Park logo began to feel like it was boring a hole into my head and when “Take me out to the ballgame” was curtailed in the seventh inning stretch in lieu of a Turkey Hill Kiss Cam I began to feel truly antsy.

The game came to a close. Atlanta pounded the Phillies with three homers and more than a handful of runs. But the 45,000 red white and blue clad fans still had a fireworks show to look forward to. Advertisements for various other sponsors flew by on the big screens and then finally the bright lights were dimmed for a celebration of good ol’ America. I’ll admit the stadium looked lovely in the low light and the fireworks held my attention for a few big booms while Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown” played (familiar to the public at large as "that song from the Beef commercials"). Then I realized that the hundreds of small TVs hung from the mezzanine overhang were featuring an episode of Dr. Phil.

The music heigtened into Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and Dr. Phil shook his finger at a woman who had an obsession with Brad Pitt, a woman who had cut pictures of Brad Pitt out of magazines and put them in frames next to her bed.

At the next “Cuz there ain’t no doubt I love this land,” I had to leave; I needed some fresh non-patriotic air. My cousin and I wandered out into the acres of parking lot and searched for her car, while most of the redwhiteandblue families cuddled up to eachother under the warm lights of fireworks and Dr. Phil.

We managed to find our car before most of the crowd, yet we sat in traffic waiting to exit the parking lot for nearly an hour and a half. I closed my eyes in the backseat while my cousin explained more of the rules of baseball to her Polish boyfriend. Thirty mintues later I announced that I was officially writing a letter to the city to request more Turkey Hill exits and atleast a dozen Independence Blue Cross cops to guide traffic after the games.

I wish I could articulate the specific sadness that one experiences when you realize that childhood perceptions were either completely naïve or inspired by a very specific and archaic era. In many ways it seems natural that cities change, business ebbs and flows, and money continues to drive many aspects of human life. On Friday night the ebb and flow began to give me a headache, but I tried not to wallow in it. In fact I sat in the backseat of my cousin’s Isuzu Trooper, thought about Dr. Phil’s advice and drank a Coke.

Overheard

2005-06-30T11:53:00.000-07:00

While sandwiched between two business casuals in line for a burrito today:

Pleated in Pink Polo: (gazing longingly behind me)
Pleated in Blue Polo: (digging into yellow Best Buy bag)
Pleated in Pink: Dude is that a PSP game?!?
PIB: Oh Yeah
PIP: How much do those run?
PIB: Oh 35-50 bucks, but totally worth it. If you're still usin' a
gameboy, dude, make the jump. The graphics are amazing, and the
color...sahweet.
PIP: Sweet. And what's that?
PIB: Oh an extra battery, long trip, thought I should invest.
PIP: Of course man, you thought of everything.
PIB: Yeah I'm stoked.

Who says its hard to meet people in New York? Forget the "improves
hand-eye coordination" pro-video game argument; Here's an update for
the new millenium and an addendum to the official Sony slogan—The Play Station Portable: "Entertainment Without Boundaries," improving heterosexual corporate male relations, world-wide.

A Smith Street Story

2005-06-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took a walk up my neighborhood strip, Smith Street, to visit my favorite cobbler. Smith Street is called "Brooklyn's Restaurant Row" by some but I sometimes wonder if it is where good dining venues go to die. Walking west I noticed four new restaurants, and while massive renovations led me to forget what exactly had been in the locations before, I couldn't believe I had missed all those closings.

The new venues include yet another Italian restaurant, as if 25 in a half mile radius wasn't enough. I never understand exactly what makes a restaurant succeed in our neck of the woods. An Italian venue up the street (which does offer delicious pizzas and fairly authentic pasta) not only survived but expanded to become twice its original size. What puzzles me is that the ambiance in this particular restaurant can best be described as Eurotrash meets Olive Garden rustic. The brothers who opened the place are 100% Sicilian— Last year while dining with one of my best friends, a waiter accidentally tipped a candle over into her lap, spilling hot wax all over her leg. He comped us with glasses of red wine filled to the lip but also asked if she'd like him to do it again. The restaurant usually blares loud eighties music or LiteFM tunes and the large wooden tables are crammed with heavy "Italian" china found in the home aisle of TJMax.

There are indeed fewer and fewer places I'd like to eat in my neighborhood. But standard establishments still hold cache—Esposito's on Court makes the most delicious proscuitto bread and extra-sharp provolone, Zaytoon's has mastered the art of schwarma, and my Armenian cobber must be the most talented leather-worker this side of the state. I love my cobbler because he always compliments me on my choice of shoes that I've won off Ebay for the quality of the leather and the unique styles. He can transform a $5.00 pair of vintage shoes into shiny and solid new pumps.

As I approached my cobbler's storefront I noticed newspaper covering the windows and peering through a rip I witnessed the standard woodworking and lighting of a new Smith Street restaurant. I wanted to cry. My cobbler had not been appreciated for his amazing skill, he had been outbid or lost his lease and was wandering the streets looking for employment. Then I noticed a shiny new Shoe Repair sign, two doors to the right. My cobbler had survived! I stepped into his new shop with bright white walls and air conditioning. I wanted to give him a hug but instead I just handed over my Bruno Magli pumps circa 1975 and asked for new soles and heel tips.

Outside Looking In

2005-06-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks I have discovered the luxury of my extra-large, 4’ x 6’ fire escape. By fire escape standards this feels expansive, and easy to access via a small step-up from my bathroom window. Our backyard is private but hums during the weekends with long narrow gardens backed up to each other—hammocks, grills, umbrellas, benches, flowers, vegetables, dogs, babies, drunks, some distant bocce ball. None of the neighboring houses rise above four stories so the sky still feels close.

I’ve been imagining the infinite possibilities for my fire escape—grilling station, happy hour venue with roommates, lawn chair platform, book-reading corner, clothesline for bleaching white laundry, a breezy seat for a beer with a friend. Last night I climbed onto my metal deck to escape the slighty-above-my-head Spanish chatter in the living room and I looked into my two bedroom windows. The room looked warm with the white curtains my best friend made in college, the closet doors splayed open with clothing falling out, my students’ work propped on the mantel, various IKEA light fixtures— and I thought to myself, “Hmm, I wouldn’t mind living there.”

Crowbar

2005-06-02T16:23:00.000-07:00

I spent an hour today dismantling a formica-covered wood cabinet using a crowbar and hammer. I’ve never held a crowbar in my hand and it felt surprisingly good—the substantial weight and observing its elegant S curve. I don’t feel particularly frustrated or angry this week so I was surprised at the satisfaction I found in taking apart the large piece of furniture. Perhaps I enjoyed feeling productive having physically removed a large object from the hallway at work. And I’m beginning to think everyone should own a crowbar, simply for its multi-purpose function and heavy presence in your tool box or shed.

Recipe for a Bruised Heart

2005-05-25T11:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been very adept at watching people shuffle in and then step out of life. This is probably because when I’ve learned something from someone I prefer to keep them around to keep learning. The act of losing a person is too physical, and the absence is heavy no matter how natural or positive it might be. I’m allotting myself only twenty-four hours to worry over the person who most recently stepped out of my life. And I think I’ll put into play the practice of using someone else’s words to cover up—

Application for a Driving License
Michael Ondaatje

Two birds loved
in a flurry of red feathers
like a burst cottonball,
continuing while I drove over them.

I am a good driver, nothing shocks me.

Dueling Perspectives

2005-05-16T07:19:00.000-07:00

I was talking about blogging recently and a friend responded with "Don't you think self-referential writing, is kind of, well, over?" I didn't answer but later I thought to myself —How can anybody go through their days without thinking that others might share some slice of their perspective, or look at things through a similar lens, or atleast have the desire to learn from the way others perceive the world? Also what exactly did people do at their desks before having half a dozen blogs to hit each day?

Outlook-seeking is essential to memoirs as well. You are able to find yourself inside someone's life that is so far geographically, historically, or factually from your own and still relate those words to your experience walking down a block in your home city on any given day.

My boss gave me a book for my birthday, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy by Dave Hickey. I should use my thesaurus to find alternatives to the word "dense" to describe Mr. Hickey's writing. I think he used "quotidian" atleast 4 times in the introduction. I am mining my way through the first few essays and most will require second or third readings; But I've already found some gems.

Hickey often addresses the issue of perpendicular and parallel perspectives. In the first essay he describes his former career as a rock critic, and how he used to wonder why there are so many love songs yet "ninety percent of rock criticism was written about the other ten percent." To simplify things, Hickey comes to the conclusion that we need love songs to aid procreation, "perpetuation of the species."

But later he also says, "...it's hard to find someone you love, who loves you—but you can begin, at least, by finding some one who loves your love song."

I can't help but agree—since I suppose, self-referential writing is never over and we are all narcissists at heart.

Fresh from the Farm

2005-05-10T22:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve always said that since walking away from office life, I’ve loved the fact that each day is different from the next. It’s not an entirely true statement of course, many days teaching blend into each other—helping students mix ink, make silkscreen separations, listening to complaints about stress over homework. This week, however, has truly run the gamut of expectations.

Yesterday I was knee deep in an industrial sink, cleaning small pieces of marble to replace a nitric-acid neutralizer tank. Today I was asked to mail a “Pump in Style” breastpump at the local UPS.

This particular breastpump was top quality including such tempting features as: Adjustable speed and vacuum control for maximum comfort. And a Stylish black shoulder bag to discreetly carry your pump. Not to mention Exclusive Personal-Fit Breastshields for maximum comfort. And finally, a picture frame for a photograph of your baby to slide in above machine for inspiration.

I swallowed my pride as I placed the box on the scale and asked the UPS employee, Anoosh, if he would mind packaging my goods.

Conversations

2005-05-05T14:03:00.000-07:00

Ali wrote her last blog entry on the subject of relationships—how it’s more than common to overhear people discussing the ups and downs of communication with significant or not-so-significant others.

I’ve experienced this phenomena in the last week alone: Overheard in the supermarket, No there is nothing wrong with you, it’s him, it’s him...in the gym …and then I told him that if he couldn’t commit to not seeing his ex-girlfriend for the next few months that we are o-v-e-r... and in the subway I can’t believe he’s fucking that whore again.

This morning my cousin sent me some theatre options for a trip we are planning this July. I was asked to choose between—

Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde
Determined not to trust her husband when circumstances suggest he’s been unfaithful, the effortlessly desirable Lady Margaret Windermere – modern, independent and deliciously free of self-doubt – resolves to leave him flat. But the true nature of her husband’s relationship with the “other woman” is very different from what young Margaret assumes it to be.

or

Create Fate by Etan Frankel
Love can be a brutal game. When the deck is stacked against him, Nathan does the only thing he can to get the love of his life to notice him: he calls in the professionals. When is true love a product of fate, and when is it just a set of well-choreographed accidents?

Doesn’t anyone want to talk about dinosaurs, or outer space or just play a game of Scrabble?

The Pariah on the Playground

2005-05-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

This morning my friend, Ali, sent me a link to an article in New York Magazine, The Bitch on the Playground— An Amy Sohn piece about the ins and outs of mommy social circles. I’ve been dabbling in childcare for almost two years; since I left my desk job and needed some padding to fill out the teaching, sewing and printing jobs.

When I first became immersed in the Park Slope baby scene, most of the kids I took care of were under one-year. This placed us at the “tot lot,” an extra-mini playground at the Garfield entrance to Prospect Park for babies who enjoy pulling themselves up (otherwise known as “cruising”) and gazing at images of themselves in mirrors.

During my first few visits with either Ava or Jeremy, I tried to chat with the other moms who I was sitting in such close proximity to—literally hip to hip, balancing drooling tots on the metal bars. Most of the moms were naturally drawn to discussing their baby’s development, Oh he just loves to point! or She prefers Cheerios over Goldfish. And because there are very few Caucasian women in the child-care industry, it was usually assumed that I was a mom as well.

Inevitably a question would come up such as, How do you get her to sit still to cut her nails? and I would say Oh she’s not mine….. and immediately the mom would look me up and down, and the conversation would draw to a close. One might think my status as a narc in a high school locker room had just been discovered.

The next few visits I found that my status as non-mom had come into rapid acknowledgment. Pleasantries might be exchanged but in-depth conversations on the subject of teething were avoided. And then I discovered another social arena: the stay-at-home dad. The SAH dads were certainly fewer in number but much bigger in conversation. None of them took the time to notice the lack of a diamond on my hand or ask me if Ava’s shirt was Baby Gap or Gymboree. I struck up a nice friendship with one SAH dad who was a filmmaker and would roll in with his tot strapped to the back of his road bike.

We talked about post-war documentary for a few days, as I had one class on the subject during college. And then the following week, my SAH dad entered the tot-lot with baby and wife in tow. I happily introduced myself and the wife unhappily observed my acquaintance with her husband. I’m not sure what directions were given but right there my grown-up playground friendships ended, and I officially resigned myself to make friends with babies, not mommies or daddies.

Refilling the Glass

2005-05-03T08:54:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I was running late for a Passover dinner at my cousin’s apartment in Harlem. Lately I’ve had the satisfying feeling that wheels are turning in my “career” and “life” arenas— like a new pencil mark has been made on a growth chart in an unused closet. It’s probably a result of the season, as much as thoughts I’ve had trying to map out the next few years.

However, last Saturday afternoon I was not experiencing the warmth of optimism. I was running late because I left my wallet at the Brooklyn Inn the night before during a night-cap pool game, and then lost 30 minutes looking for it in my apartment. I guess the "Inn" is as close to a living-room establishment as I’ll find and so I was extremely lucky that my money and plastic were all intact. I then clip-clopped over to the F train picking up two bundles of deli gerbera daisies on the way and stood, waiting for the train, taking several breaths.

As I rebalanced my bags, flowers, and book a G train pulled up and I made eye contact with a couple sitting in the window directly in front of me. I stood, still breathing and as the door closed and the train starting pulling away, the girlfriend offered me her middle finger and mouthed “Fuck you, fuck you.” I blankly followed her motions, turning my head to watch the couple and the train edging away.

The scene was like something out of a bad romantic comedy set in crazy New York City. Yet, had I been in even a slightly more pessimistic mood, I might have felt the urge to cry. Perhaps after living in Brooklyn for nearly four years I should be immune to such bizarre insults. It did feel more random than direct, but I kept thinking about the “communication” on my hour long subway ride and I felt a little poisoned by it.

At the other end, still fuming a bit, I buzzed my cousin’s apartment building and a man shouted out “Hey Barbie, are those flowers for me?” For whatever reason the randomness of that communication shook me out of my mood. I arrived to the dinner party welcomed by a room full of the warmth of friends, who feel closer to family. And the most beautiful food, and conversation— I was able to refill my glass.

Steps and Paths

2005-04-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I met up with my old friend John for dinner and drinks. John and I used to swim together in adolescence; and by “swim together” I mean the kind of training that pushed homework and puberty to the side. We were in the pool for at least 3 hours a day, seven days a week and a 4-foot Michael Phelps was slapping people with a towel on the pool deck and giggling. At that time all eyes were on other teammates aiming for the Olympics or Nationals at the ripe age of 14.

John and I liked to compare our German vocabularies during interval breaks and make mix tapes with cursive handwriting. One New Year’s Eve my mom let me go over to his house with my friend Susie. We watched a movie in his parents' bed and ate fried wontons. Halloween 1992, John was Ross Perot and I was a flapper. During high school I gave up swimming in search of something closer to “normal.” And then it was off to college.

I hadn’t seen John in about 10 years but learned he was living in New York and somehow knew that those 10 years could easily be ignored. We met for drinks and it was if everything was exactly the same, plus alcohol. On our second date we had a burger at the Corner Bistro and then went to the bar where his boyfriend works.

It seems too often that I’m able to reconnect with people in this city, and too soon I lose them to another place. John is leaving to pursue a PhD on the west coast in the fall. And so, while talking it’s as if I want to fit in another 10 years. As his boyfriend poured me whiskey after whiskey I asked John if he reads any poetry and he remarked, only Baudelaire and Frank O’Hara. I had barely said the name of my favorite O’Hara poem, Steps, when John was responding with—

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

An hour later we were singing along to Wilson Phillips with the rest of the lingering Monday crowd and a dance party followed until the wee morning hours. Though I was cursing myself on the subway the next morning, dehydrated and lightheaded, I simultaneously looked forward to making John a new mix tape.

Being Green

2005-04-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

This morning facing the late shift of classes at SVA I was able to indulge in slow coffee and breakfast, while I tried to channel a blog at the kitchen table. Half-hour later my roommate, Mimia, a talkative and generous girl from Bogota, stumbled down the steps moaning with half of her back covered in saran wrap and fluorescent green tape.

Flash backward 16 hours, I got home from work with a bottle of Riesling to mark the first day of real New York Spring heat and all its glorious and disgusting smells—as well as to ease my nerves for an impending “date.” Mimia and I chilled and split the bottle, she described her newest assignment in patternmaking and started cutting out some metallic leather to sew a clutch purse. “How do you say???” She motioned to the top of the purse where a clasp might be. I racked my brain for the official Mimia thesaurus, which always makes me question my own hold on the English language. I was half-listening half processing thoughts about that week at work.

Then I left the apartment headed to a neighborhood restaurant—one of the revolving-door establishments that seems to focus on a new kind of cuisine—Peruvian, Vietnamese, Italian, every few months. Somewhere between the wine last night and coffee this morning Mimia got a little bored, took herself out to a hipster establishment on the LES for PBRs, and then tried to find a tattoo parlor she visited last year while also drunk.

“I said, I think this is the street, but if it is not, it’s a sign that I should not get new tattoos.” This statement is completely rational. She moaned on about how the outline wasn’t thick enough and the new star on her shoulder blade wasn’t straight, and I felt as if I was displaced a few decades away wondering how I managed to hit my late twenties without a stab of ink on any part of my body. And how, perhaps luckily none of the capricious decisions I made years ago, left any visible marks.

More Cowbell

2005-04-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

As I left my apartment on Friday morning at trot pace, both to postmark my taxes 4/15 and make up the 10 minutes I would be late to work, I approached the corner to the sound of a bell in rhythm. Turning, I noticed the musician—a man standing at his open window, no screen, directly above a bodega, proudly pummeling his cowbell. He looked as if he had gotten out of bed that morning naturally expecting a crowd gathered outside for his traditional cowbell symphony, a weekly rehersal for the Carnegie Hall gigs. As I looked around the others were trotting in time on their own paths to the subway, and I thought “Ok, Why not?”

Time Travel

2005-04-12T07:07:00.000-07:00

Remember those Coed-Naked sports shirts that everyone had in high school with the really bad puns? Yesterday one of my silk-screen students was wearing a threadbare Coed-Naked Skateboarding shirt; “Life is slick on the stick.” I was immediately transported back to Towson High School, 1994, milling down the hallway en-route to “Art in Business and Industry” class to rehash last night’s episode of My So-Called Life, cut out drawings with an exacto knife, and attach them to a poster board with rubber cement to advertise The Pirates of Penzance.

Needle and Thread

2005-04-03T22:19:00.000-07:00

I spent the better part of last year working on an edition of an artist’s book by Louise Bourgeois called Ode a l'Oubli, loosely translated as Homage to Forgetting. I found such contentment in this job every day—spending 8 hours embroidering dots in a specific but random scattering, drawing and cutting out patterns, and quilting checkered cotton. On a bad day I would run over my thumb with a rotary blade while cutting shapes out of silk. On a good day all of 32 stripes, individually sewn, would line up perfectly to form concentric squares.

I suppose I am attracted to repetitious, mind numbing work of some sorts. Or maybe most of the satisfaction from this job came from leaving the studio at the end of the day having made something beautiful, even if it wasn’t my own.

Today I spent the afternoon at a work-related gathering at Lakeside Lounge and my boss from the Bourgeois project was in attendance. After the usual pleasantries she asked if my life was “still in flux.” Wouldn’t most people say "yes"? She then outlined a production she is undertaking with a new artist, and asked if I might be interested in more freelance sewing work; however this time the thread will be the artist’s own hair.

I couldn’t help picturing myself over the next few months, hunched over yards of linen reminding myself not to lick the thread while sliding it through the needle. Regardless, it’s always good to know you have marketable skills—maybe hair-stitching is the new painting.

Dancing

2005-03-31T19:44:00.000-08:00

Today I had one of those days where it seemed like every other face I passed was familiar. My friend David likes to say “There are 100 people in New York and you’ll see them everywhere.”

On my way to work, I sat on the train across from a man who I’ve seen shopping, walking, dining, drinking in the neighborhood for the last four years. His hair has gone grey. I noticed just a few when I first recognized him. Now it's become an appealing silver, solid grey collecting above the ears.

During my lunch break, I passed a girl who was a fixture in the fraternity circuit in college. I think I often saw pictures of her with her tongue out, or grabbing her own boob. She was a friend-of-a-friend and I smiled but I don’t think she remembered me.

After work I trotted back to the subway, passing the barber who smokes outside the Style and Smile salon atleast 10 blocks from his shop. And when hiking up the 8th avenue subway steps back in Park Slope, I noticed the woman who I stood dangerously close to last week on a crowded F, while she updated her friend on her business school interviews and wedding plans. She’s getting married in Vermont, they haven’t found a decent indoor-outdoor option yet.

Sometimes I like to picture the city full of couples and singles, dancing in big and small circles, around and through and around each other, and maybe there’s a big chandelier hanging above.

Resolutions

2005-03-28T23:14:00.000-08:00

This winter I decided to write down some New Year’s resolutions during a slow afternoon at work. I’m not a resolution addict but having started a new job and moved into a new home last August, I spent a few months just catching my breath. Jan. 1 seemed as good a time as any to set some new goals.

I’m attracted to the structure of goals, the pining, checking of boxes and pats on the back. A few years ago I applied to run the New York Marathon and finished in minimal pain, check. Likewise, if I set my sights on a bottle of wine on any given night to accompany a movie or a friend, I’ll be sure to finish that bottle, check. The word goal carries positive overtones, but the term can be applied to varied aspects of life—consumption and ambition alike.

Before I knew it my “resolutions” were divided into several categories covering three pages, and I had writer’s cramp. I was surprised at my productivity level and felt a little light-headed.

One of the first resolutions in my "health" category was to go to a yoga class at least once a week. I certainly don’t consider myself to lead a yogic lifestyle, but it’s a good place to find some quiet every once and a while. I made it to yoga twice. The second class canceled out the yoga=quiet equation. The instructor filled up all that quiet space with words using yoga ideals as her springboard. She focused her mini-sermon on my favorite new topic: resolutions. She suggested that it might be unhealthy to focus on continually trying to perfect ourselves. She repeated a new mantra—You are already what you seek. Just ten minutes later the instructor dipped into humored self-deprecation saying that she wanted to hunt down the urban-legend taxicab matchmaker to solve her single blues.

The next day I ran a few miles on the west side highway after work, picked up some wine, sausage, and chocolate for a dinner party, and accidentally lost my resolutions packet somewhere between home and the studio.

Face Lift

2005-03-28T10:48:00.000-08:00

You, my six readers, may have noticed that pinkpelvis was gifted a makeover courtesy of the design superhero, Khoi. Stay tuned for more frequent musings, a broader vocabulary, more delicate observations, longer lashes and a whiter smile.

Top 10 Reasons to Visit the Jersey Shore in March

2005-03-15T09:21:00.000-08:00

Lovely Sea Isle City
10. Without heat or water in the beach house you can cuddle with your friends and a dozen gallons of Wawa fresh spring water.
9. SPF 5 will suffice.
8. You can skip the Borgata casino and find watery margaritas in the middle of an Atlantic City outlet mall.
7. Avoid menu dilemmas as restaurants along the entire coast are devoid of anything but cheesesteak ingredients.
6. The grease supplements from daily cheesesteak meals will warm your bones.
5. Your options for love are simplified to a choice between the crossword-puzzle cop at the corner, the toll-taker en route into the island, and the strapping young man at the only year-round fish market.
4. At the Ocean Drive Bar everyone always parties like it’s the fourth of July.
3. A local band named Slippery will experiment with some Gwen Stefani covers instead of sticking to the Bruce Springsteen favorites.
2. Jello shots are only a dollar each at the OD. Optional whipped cream topping is free and warmed in the barboy’s back pocket (a gent named Angelo with the girth of a Mac truck).
1. No need to fight for beach blanket space, and plenty of time to discuss the merits of In Touch magazine.

wee glimpses

2005-03-06T13:38:00.000-08:00

Sometimes acts of kindness really stir me up all the way down to my feet. Yesterday after a long long Saturday of work, helping college students with various silkscreen projects, managing chaos, nearly removing one of my uninsured fingers on a lithography press bed, I tried to squeeze in a last minute freelance project to make the month a little more comfortable. I felt like every hair on my head was standing on end and swiftly ruined four overpriced American Apparel t-shirts due to a pinhole in my screen and bright red ink trailing around on my shirt cuff. I was fighting off tears, due to this closing of what seemed a neverending week, and my complete lack of craftmanship in the medium I like to call my own.

One of the continuing education students who I consider a friend after chatting over the last semester had stuck around to help me clean the silkscreen studio; a truly generous person. As I debated whether to sob or throw a temper tantrum over my defaced shirts--both quite attractive options--he pointed me in the direction of a Chelsea odd shop that sells about 100 different styles of tighty whities and some very affordable Fruit of the Loom Ts. He then helped me reprint all my new shirts front and back as I regained my composure and began to act my 26 years again.

I had to drop off my now near-perfect shirts near the apartment he shares with his wife and as we walked downtown he described his siblings who all still live in Brazil, and I thought about how insanely comforting new conversations can be.

My date with Neil, or something like that

2005-02-28T18:32:00.000-08:00

A few weekends ago I went to see the Neil Diamond tribute band known as Super Diamond. I’ve always had a soft spot for Neil due to his popularity with both my grandmothers, and recently my love has surged during late night karaoke sessions.

Irving Plaza was transformed into a glittery Neil love fest. We spent over 20 minutes inching forward in the block and a half long line to the entrance. The coat check was filled to capacity and shutters closed. Women were shouting obscenities from the quarter-mile long restroom line as a bouncer pushed to the front to pull apart a catfight over the last roll of TP. A fan in a twisted tube top was already passed out on one the velvet couches outside the bathroom, using her cell phone as a pillow. This was a show to end all shows.

The set was much as expected slowly tracing the Neil canon. Fake Neil was breaking hearts, and all the band members took his namesake literally in shiny synthetic suits with sequence. The platform shoes lifted the entire band up half a foot. Most of the women in jean jackets with airbrushed Neils were leaning over the balcony railing, while the hipsters and crush-party-goers were located front and center, with me swaying in their midst. Occasionally a crush-party girl would hop on stage and scream hands above her head for a photo op, then continue to bop slightly embarassed while Fake Neil stepped around, and a bouncer tiptoed up from behind and escort her away.

The crowd really knew they were part of something. During the encore, Super Diamond concluded with a raucous "Coming to America," one of the guitarists started waiving an enormous American flag and then turned it around to a machine-gun grip, shooting confetti out of the top. The fake Neil took his bows among flittering paper bits and grabbed the ladies hands in the front row. I haven’t washed mine since.

nicknames and affiliations

2005-02-16T10:55:00.000-08:00

Having decided to dip into the blog community, I asked a friend this morning if she thought I had outgrown my alter-identity, pinkpelvis. She replied that in fact, she felt pinkpelvis had grown with me. Perhaps it helps that she was present for the birth of my favorite invented alliteration.

Really the story is more common than titillating but I'll give a brief synopsis just to clear the air--During my visual art thesis in college I spent over a year drawing pelvises. A standard art student, not yet bored by Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer, and where else to turn, feeling that life experience is limiting the medium, but gender identity? And well, beyond that pink is for girls. The space is shaped like a heart, we all came from it, a lot of us want to get back there, so maybe there is much to discuss.

I still find myself doodling pelvis outlines now and then but beyond that I've given up the region most recently drawing figures from adolescent "cliff-jumping" websites; when I'm not refilling ink bottles at my lab tech job or changing the diapers of toddler clients in Park Slope (where babies really come from).