Embracing Chaos

Another Car Saga

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:02:27 GMT

The few hardy souls that have stuck around through vast writing droughts to read my rare blog entries here may recall a previous car saga involving a Monte Carlo in this space. This new car story is considerably shorter and probably a bit less compelling than that one, but worth sharing all the same. The star this time around is a BMW, rather than a Monte Carlo, but, as you will see, it was not your average beemer.

Fresh out of college, my girlfriend S. and I rented a small house together in a town a ways removed from our friends, in an effort to live halfway between our respective workplaces, which were about 50 or so miles apart. We were somewhat isolated from our friends there, in a working class neighborhood, in a very tiny house and in a relationship that was a bit bumpy at the time. Therefore, we were looking for distractions. Ultimately, we found one in the form of a car.

At the time, S. owned a very practical Honda to get back and forth to work. I had an equally practical Toyota and our commuting needs were well covered. However, the cars were a bit too practical. Thus, they were basically boring and totally unsexy. S. and I shared a love of driving too fast and somewhat recklessly. Our practical cars were just no fun for that sort of activity. But we didn't have lots of money to throw around and our jobs weren't particularly high paying. So practical it was.

However, one day on her way to work in the wretched little city, S. was driving on a Connecticut back farm road and she passed a car parked in a front yard with a For Sale sign in the windshield. It was a BMW and for some reason, it struck her fancy. She stopped and peered in the windows and when she got home from work that night, she told me about it. "But you don't need a car." I responded, though as soon as the words left my mouth I knew that was completely beside the point. I agreed to go with her to see the car myself.

We arrived and I saw a blue 300 series style BMW sedan parked at a jaunty angle on the lawn of an old farmhouse. It was a sexy car, for sure. It sported two fat back racing tires and a sunroof. It was buffed to a high shine and looked ready to race. Though taken with it, I was still skeptical. "You really don't need a car" I reminded S. one more time. As we peered in the windows and walked around it in a circle, a tall white haired gentleman exited the farm house and walked towards us. The owner, we correctly surmised.

In a thick German accent, he asked if we liked the car. We nodded somewhat stupidly and a little too enthusiastically. Would you like to take it for a ride? He asked. More stupid nodding. Soon we were off with S. behind the wheel and me riding shotgun. Herr Owner rode in the back seat and spoke at length about the car's history while we drove. The car had been made and purchased originally in Germany. He worked for some big multi-national in Germany that transferred him to the U.S. He insisted he be allowed to take his car with him. In order to do so, he was forced to modify the car's engine to meet U.S. emissions standards. Since that was required anyway, he had decided simply to put a whole new engine in the car. While the original engine was a four cylinder affair, he had replaced it with a six cylinder turbo model. He added the fat tires and the necessary catalytic converter. Thus it was a 'grey market' car - not manufactured for sale in the U.S., then modified in various ways, and then shipped over on a big boat across the Atlantic. Though the car had the body of a 300 series sedan, it had no model number on the back and had been modified sufficiently that it was ultimately its own unique car. Needless to say, this intrigued us all the more.

As Herr Owner expounded on the car's history, S. drove rather sedately on the smooth unlined blacktop of the surrounding rural farm roads of Suffield and Granby, Connecticut. I fiddled with what turned out to be a fabulous Blaupunkt stereo system. We were on narrow roads, just barely wide enough for two cars to pass in opposite directions. As she toodled along at 35 mph, Herr Owner looked increasingly exasperated. Though S. normally would not drive so conservatively, she obviously felt that she needed to be careful driving someone else's car on unfamiliar, windy and narrow roads. While one might think Herr Owner would appreciate such care, it rapidly became clear he did not. Finally he said quite abruptly, 'Why don't you let me drive and I'll show you what she can do.' Uh - sure, fine with us. Seats were swapped though I remained in the front.

Herr Owner tucked his lanky frame behind the wheel and barely gave S. time to buckle her seatbelt before he had thrown it in gear and roared off down the road. As we twisted and turned on the narrow blacktop, he reached 80 mph in well less than 30 seconds. We were on a roller coaster thrill ride, with the most thrilling part being how the car hugged the road like a magnet. We whipped around sharp corners and accelerated so fast we were thrown back against our seats and pinned there like bugs. The car floated and dipped, dived and turned on a dime, its engine roaring like a powerful, angry beast. We passed other drivers on the narrow roads like they were standing still. Herr Driver seemed almost possessed, his shoulders hunched around his head, eyes pinned to the road, lean hands constantly working the gear shift and a tiny smirk on his face.

While it is likely that many women our age would have been terrified by this experience, somehow this guy had pegged us as kindred spirits. OK, so we were terrified, but more than that we were thrilled. Our adrenaline hit the roof and our inner speed demons were dancing jigs of joy in our chests. After 10 minutes on the wild and wooly roller coaster, he screeched abruptly back into his own driveway, leaving us breathless. After a moment to gather our wits, we stepped out of the car, feeling a bit shaky. Herr Owner gave us the look of a hunter who knew he had his prey in his sites. "I'll just go in and let you think about it for a few minutes" he pronounced, and strode purposely back into the farmhouse, leaving S. and I standing there, looking at each other over the roof of the sedan.

"S." I finally managed to croak out, "Buy. This. Car."

She smirked at me. "But I don't need a car." she replied, fliply.

I wasn't playing along.

"You have to buy this car. You have to buy it NOW!"

I was in love with the car. I needed the car and I couldn't buy it myself. Due to a modest inheritance, S. could buy it. Therefore, she had to buy it. I knew she was in love with it also. I really didn't have to do much persuading.

"OK." she said quite simply, "I'm buying the car."

She walked up to the farmhouse door, knocked and was quickly let in. I stayed behind to admire the gleaming beast, which seemed to gloat at me in the sun.

Five minutes later she emerged. She had put down a deposit and would pay the balance on Monday when the banks opened. Then the car would be hers.

We picked up the car early the following week. Immediately upon returning home, we took it out for what would be the first of many joyrides. There were many backroads near us perfect for driving the beemer and I never tired of its ability to accelerate with a power I had never personally experienced in a car before. We could pull up behind a car going 50, swerve into the left lane and pass it so fast they other driver barely had time to see us. The damn thing was fun as hell. We loved it. S. planned to sell her Honda and that would be that.

We instantly became popular with the neighborhood teenage boys. They would wander over and gather around the car. When we let them pop the hood, they would oo and ahh and admire it for ridiculously long periods of time. I know they longed to take it for a spin, but they never were allowed to. But you know you have a sexy car when teenage boys flock to it like flies to honey. They were impressed, and so were we.

However, in a relatively short amount of time, S. realized that as fun as the car was, it was definitely not practical. It used a lot of gas. The engine would get so hot that while you were sitting in the car, you could feel waves of heat streaming over you from the dash, winter or summer. In any kind of bad weather, the car was terrible - sliding all over the road, spinning wheels, downright dangerous. And it attracted a lot of attention. I was convinced it would eventually be stolen and found stripped somewhere.

After months of fence sitting, S. decided she would not sell the Honda. She decided to keep both cars, and only drive the BMW on weekends and for fun. The fact that her mother so did not at all approve of the BMW car purchase may have played a small part in her decision. However, I think the bigger reason was just that we were in love with the car and didn't want to give it up, practical or not.

Time passed, and S. and I broke up for a time. She moved south, I moved north and she took the car with her. It sat barely used in her driveway for years but every now and then she would still take it out. After a couple of years she moved north again and we decided to give things another whirl. She brought the beemer with her and parked it in the driveway of my apartment house, which was right next to her apartment house. There it sat through one very long winter, totally unused. It was becoming obvious that after hanging onto the car for years but barely using it, that something eventually would have to be done about it. But we still clung to it, rather senselessly. It started to feel like an albatross of sorts, hanging around our necks. And S.'s mother reminded us regularly that it had been a foolish purchase. We knew she was right, and that didn't help.

One day in the spring, we were at my apartment and we ordered a pizza for delivery. When the pizza arrived, the deliveryman asked us "Whose BMW is that in the driveway?" While a bit worse for the wear after years of benign neglect, the car could still turn heads, especially of those in the know about cars. "It's mine" S. answered, "Why?" "Well," replied the pizza deliveryman, "I collect BMWs. Would you consider selling that one?"

S. and I looked at each other. A pizza deliveryman who collects BMWs. Allrighty then. Whatever reluctance we might still have been clinging to about giving up the car flew away. "Sure" said S., "I've actually been thinking of selling it for awhile." "Great!" the deliveryman enthused. "Can I take it for a test drive sometime?" "Sure" said S., "It hasn't been on the road for awhile so give me a couple of days to get it ready and then maybe you can come by early next week?" "OK, great!" the deliveryman seemed downright giddy. He passed us his phone number with the pizza. We were bemused by this turn of events, but somehow it seemed like fate and we were upbeat about the prospect of finally resolving the lingering situation.

The next morning we decided to start up the car for the first time in many months, and take it to gas station around the corner to gas it up and have its fluids checked. To our relief, the battery still had a charge and we managed to start it up with little trouble. We drove down the block, with S. driving and me riding shotgun as usual. I was feeling all nostalgic about the car and deciding we would have to take it for at least one more joyride before selling it. I went to fiddle with the stereo but realized it had been removed to prevent theft and was now under the backseat for safe keeping. Oh well, that would add to the value of the car.

We turned left at the end of our street and suddenly white wispy smoke started coming out of the air vents into the car. It was faint at first, and S. insisted it was condensation from the air conditioning system. But the smoke didn't stay faint for long. As we continued down the road, it got whiter and thicker. Soon I was waving my hand in front of my face and saying "That's not condensation, that's smoke!" S. still looked a little on the fence about the matter and was not slowing down to investigate further. Just then I looked down and saw a small flame burst up through the floorboard near my sneakered foot.

"Holy shit!" I exclaimed, "Fire!" I tried stomping out the little flame with my sneaker, an effort that succeeded only in scorching the rubber sole. "The car's on fire! Pull over!" S. saw the floorboard flames and abruptly pulled over. We leaped out of the car and instinctively ran away, to the far side of the street. We then turned around, stood and looked back at it, and I saw a small piece of burning material fall down from the bottom of the car onto the blacktop below and burn itself out. Just as I was thinking maybe that was it - just a bunch of burning wires or something that had quickly burned itself out, we saw an ominous orange glow behind the windshield. I just had enough time to say "Uh oh", when the car suddenly burst into flames. The entire interior of the car became a raging inferno fireball, with flames leaping 20 feet high through the open sunroof. We stood watching in stunned disbelief.

For some reason, after the initial shock sank in, we looked at each other and began to laugh uproariously. As people began to poke their heads out of their house windows in amazement and call 911, we stood on the side of the road laughing like crazed maniacs. It was somehow just such a fitting fate for the car that it would burn up on the side of the road like that.

By the time the fire truck arrived, the fire was starting to burn itself out. Fortunately, the gas tank never exploded and the engine itself never caught fire, but the interior was completely gutted. The fire truck sealed the deal by pouring several thousand gallons of water on it and in the end it was just a smoking, steaming hulk. The inside looked like something out of the movie Terminator 2. As I looked in after the fire was out, it dawned at me that the Blaupunkt under the back seat had gone down with the car as well. Of course, had we taken the time to retrieve it, we might have ended up extra crispy as well.

They towed the car to the junkyard, where S. eventually just gave it to them in exchange for waiving the storage fees (a good scam for them - the car still had an engine and salvageable parts untouched by the fire). The next day I called the pizza deliveryman and broke the news to him. He seemed crushed and did not want to believe it. He wanted to see the car to see if he could salvage it. I explained to him that unfortunately, it was a total goner and he had best just move on. He was beside himself with disappointment. I guess he knew something special when he saw it.

We never did get to take it for a final joyride. But I'm sure wherever old beemers go when they die, that one is still leaving all the others in the dust.

The Will of the People

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:13:41 GMT

This morning on the way to work, I listened to our local yokel radio interview show where the illustrious local host was interviewing the mayor of the next town over, which is the cultural focal point of our little hickville world. The next town over, which shall not remain nameless, is Northampton, MA - a 'burg of 30,000 souls, an inordinate number of whom are lesbians. But lesbians in abundance is only one of Northampton's many quirks. It is a very lefty groovy progressive college town, but also with a touch of working class aging mill town thrown in. It's a rare combination of things and people, and this mix often leads to raging tempests in teapots. I love these little brouhahas, and even though I moved to a smaller, calmer adjacent town about six years ago and am happy to be out of the thick of the fray, I still can't helped but be sucked back occasionally like a moth to a flame.

Current controversies in Northampton are abundant, which is normal, and full of hyperbole and drama, which is also normal. Topics du jour include fury over a proposed 'panhandling' ordinance which would legislate how and where people can hit up others for money on the street, a proposed landfill expansion that might or might not threaten an aquifer, whether or not a 'hookah' bar should be allowed when smoking is banned in public establishments and how exactly to continue an ongoing municipal project to redevelop a former big mental hospital into a business and residential center. A number of issues like these lead to protests with people marching down the street in costumes and signs, interminably long city council and committee meetings where people come to "speak out" in a way that sometimes involves yelling and hand waving, heated editorials and even more heated online comments to those editorials, and just a lot of general fun all the way around.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that in general Northampton residents just love to march down the street en masse on the slightest of excuses. I vividly recall a number of years back when someone organized a "Dada parade" downtown. Why would someone do this, you ask? Does a town need a reason to have a surrealist parade? Northampton certainly does not. The one group I most clearly recall from that parade were the lawn chair drill team, which left my friend and I doubled over with laughter and amazement at what a bunch of people with nothing better to do can learn to do with lawn chairs. In sync.

Anyway, I digress. So the mayor of all this fun is an 'open' lesbian (which, frankly makes her sound really slutty, but in reality, not so much). And though she was considered the big liberal alternative groovy candidate when she was first elected oh - I dunno - a good 8 years or so ago now, there are now lots of "newcomers" in town (read: people who have moved there in the last 6 years), that don't remember or know any of that history, and thus she is often viewed now as the evil establishment. I've heard her referred to as an intractable bully, which is a bit puzzling since her persona is about as low key as you can get. Still, she is a woman of opinions and she has a tendency to form them and hold onto them. What probably infuriates people most of all is that she is not a warm, fuzzy person eager to please in that uniquely lesbian and co-dependent fashion. In fact, though she is capable of and often does listen to what others have to say, if she doesn't agree, she feels little need to broker a compromise, act conciliatory, or change course. She simply keeps on keepin' on and that really makes people apoplectic at times.

So, back to the interview. The interviewer asked her about a comment she had made awhile back in response to a random person who had accused her of being non-responsive to a concern, and her comeback was that people who didn't like her could always vote her out of office. Of course, such an honest and blunt response only served to stir the pot more, and soon accusations of her being uncaring about her constituents began to fly fast and furious. So in this interview she tried to clarify what she had meant, essentially by just repeating herself. But I totally get it, and in this case at least, I am on her side.

This is what I like to call the Barney Frank philosophy of representative democracy, and I am all for it. The vast majority of people in this country do not seem to understand what a representative democracy is. They think a representative is supposed to represent the "will of the people". So basically on any given issue, the rep should have some idea or sense of how the majority of his/her constituents feel about that issue, and is subsequently charged to vote the way the majority of their constituents would.

To me, this is just wrong, wrong, wrong. The whole original point of having representatives at all was to cultivate people who were dedicated to learning about issues in depth and then voting their consciences on those issues. The founders were concerned that Joe Citizen was too busy working to learn about issues in any kind of in-depth fashion, and thus might not vote in an educated way but based more on fear or misinformation. Of course, they also just downright didn't trust the dirty, rotten masses. But even if we try and put aside the inherent classism, we still end up with a darn good point, which is that representatives will be more dedicated to learning more about whatever it is they are voting on and thus might NOT vote the way the majority of his/her constituents would vote if they were in office. And this is OK - in fact, this is GOOD. It ought to help prevent things like "mob rule" and "tyranny of the majority" - not that it always does, but it's at least possible.

So given those precepts, the mayor's philosophy, which I originally heard articulated by Barney Frank years ago, is basically - I don't really care what my constituents want, I care what I want and vote accordingly. If my constituents don't like how I vote, I'm up for re-election in x years, and they can just vote me out then. - Exactly right! The beauty of this philosophy is how it so totally and completely kills the incredibly wearisome arguments about what the people want, with each side claiming to have a lock on the real will of the people. Well guess what - there is no monolithic will of the people and even if there were, representatives are under no obligation to exercise it, nor should they, really, unless they really agree. Whether the majority of people agree with something or not is IRRELEVANT. Because - news flash - history has proven nothing if not that the majority of people are often dead wrong.

If only more people grasped this concept and had the same philosophy as our big old local lesbo mayor, this country would be a lot better place. I swear it would. And I should know because I am one of the people, and that's my will. So there.

The Medium is the Message

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 05:17:18 GMT

Forty five years later, Marshall McLuhan is STILL correct about the medium being the message. This precept holds just as true with new media as old. Today I tried to explain to a friend why you would Twitter as opposed to Blog as opposed to Facebook. This is a friend who has read enough blogs to "get" them and been on Facebook just long enough to grasp the general qualities of that medium. But she hasn't spent any time on Twitter yet, and that puts me a whole nanosecond ahead of her on the learning curve.

But in the world of tech, it is a generally accepted tenet that if you know even a tiny bit more than someone else, well then, you are the expert. Lots of people are eager to adopt that moniker if offered, no matter how ill-deserved it may actually be. Though I like to think I'm not one of those people, and in fact, feel like I spend an inordinate amount of time explaining to people why I am not an expert, I have been known to expound upon things which I'm pretty new at myself. So it is likely my newbie thoughts on these topics will evolve over time and maybe will warrant a new and different post in the future.

Anyway, she, like many who have looked cursorily at Twitter, thought it must be like Facebook status updates, everyone posting what they are doing all day long. But already I've gleaned that while that (maybe?) was the original idea, there is not a lot of value in reading about all the mundane tasks people are doing all day long. It might be fun or amusing at times, but not much bang for the buck there. What seems to make it worthwhile is when people use it to share information and ideas. So posting links to articles, product pages, etc. relevant to a particular topic of shared interest and maybe even more so, asking and answering questions to generate discussion of a topic - these are the ways in which Twitter seems worthwhile.

I'm still not really sure why people are bent on pumping up their following/followed numbers into the stratosphere, though perhaps it's just that good old competitive spirit. But honestly, I'd rather follow and be followed by a reasonable number of good quality, relevant twitterers than a zillion random people just to pat myself on the back about how high my numbers are. With any information source, signal to static ratio has to be reasonable or usefulness quickly diminishes.

Anyway, there is something very interesting about limiting posts to 140 characters that forces not just brevity, but at least some level of pithiness. Something that needs additional expounding upon has different media options for that purpose. Like this journal, for example.

And I'm still waiting for the next big thing to come along. I can't help but think that if the darn iPhone would just open up to better carriers that could actually serve those of us not on the sketchier edges of the cell signal sphere, that it could really become the device that moves us to the next level. But right now it continues to be hamstrung by AT&T's crappy 3G network and that is a real problem. I won't adopt until I can get as good a signal as I can on Verizon - including in Mexico. I guess we'll see.

Knee Deep in Flying Thoughts

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 07:03:13 GMT

My new job, so I'm told, will involve new media. Social networking, web 2.0, blogging, twittering, vlogs, forums, podcasts, facebook, RSS feeds, etc. all in the name of recruiting for the University. The literal explosion of web technology boggles my mind at times. Since I was participating in the granddaddy of social networking back in the early 80's - Usenet and it's zillions of 'newsgroups' full of text art and fellow nerds, which no one without a thick pair of glasses had ever heard of - it's a bit amazing to see how far we've come in the past 25 years since then. I consider myself lucky to have been around to witness it, in the thick of it nearly the whole time. There have been quantum shifts in the development of technology and a lot of incremental baby steps between them and everything in my gut tells me we are on the verge of a new quantum step soon.

I remember the first time I ever saw a real web site - at a networking tech conference in Boston in '94. There were some public terminals set up, running Windows 3.1 and Mosaic, connected to the Internet over PPP or maybe even SLIP (such as it was at the time - really Arpanet then) and displaying a page on the Summer Olympics. It had pictures, scores, and most amazing of all, clickable links. I don't think it is possible for anyone who has grown up with the web to really understand what an amazing leap forward this was for computer technology compared to everything that came before.

Sure the 'net in one form or another had been around for decades by then and had reached a certain mass of interconnected hosts and users that at least was accessible to almost all major colleges and universities and scientists. But information was always text based, traveled almost exclusively over slow dial up links, and depended on BBS bulletin boards and Usenet for any kind of exchange of ideas. It was a bit of a wild west back then mostly because most people hadn't noticed it yet, because all that amber and green colored text on the screen looked about as interesting as watching paint dry.

On campus, we built "gopher" based menu systems to house information - at UMass it was called CWIS (Campus Wide Information System). To this day, all umass.edu websites are housed on the webhosts under a root directory named "CWIS". It's not visible to anyone but those who get under the hood with websites, but I kind of love that it is still there to remind those of us who are older where we came from.

So the introduction of a simple set of protocols and standards that allowed for the display of information in a graphical format across the 'net was huge. For me, it was literally an a-ha! moment. And I was not the only one - I loved introducing newbies to the web for those first few years when people were just waking up to it. There was always this moment, after they were shown the screen, given the mouse and hesitantly clicking around when they would just suddenly "get it" and start to grasp the possibilities for this new technology. That was always a really cool moment - like seeing some whole new world of possibility for the first time.

People's eyes would light up, their mouths would drop open and they'd exclaim something - "Wow!" "This is great!" "How many web sites are there where I can go again?" Then they'd want to know if there was a master directory or table of contents - no Google back then. The whole idea of a theoretically limitless network of information and ideas built from the bottom up rather than the top down was completely new.

Since then we've been full speed ahead. And something is happening. It feels to me that we are no longer in control, really - assuming we ever were. But in the past, media was truly centralized and top down. The decision makers were few and options extremely limited. Accountability was not terribly high because there wasn't much competition among media sources. When it comes to mass media, there still isn't and in fact, with corporate consolidation, there's less media sources than ever. And that's why mass media as we've known it, or I've know it my whole life, is dying. And it's dying faster than most of us think it is. I'm talking newspapers, books, broadcast television, and music on discs. Yeah this is hardly a revelation, but I really believe it now and I don't think I truly did before. I'm convinced books will survive but in a more limited fashion than they have been for hundreds of years now. They will no longer be the primary repository of knowledge. Knowledge will be likely to be stored electronically.

I've always been skeptical of futurists who are eager to denounce anything current as defunct and anything new as the better way or the way that will prevail. People who make ridiculous pronouncements about how personal computers will disappear in five years and we'll all have chips in our clothing instead make me hurt my eyes rolling them. And people have been making pronouncements like this as if they are gospel for as long as I can remember. They are almost never correct. However, sometimes they aren't totally wrong at least in terms of long term trends or the direction we might be generally headed in.

But I'm becoming a believer - a believer in a future that will really look very different than the past when it comes to media and technology. And a believer that it is rushing towards us faster and faster and will be here, very soon. Instead of the casual "interactivity" of clicking on links obsessively until our brains are permanently rewired with the attention span of gnats, we are moving into a truly interactive age and a true convergence of media in a always-accessible, on-demand, electronic format. We now create as well as consume.

I see us having two or three pieces of hardware for computing, communications and entertainment at the most. Flat screen in the living room for television and video at home. Laptop for writing, reading, working on a larger palette for design or work or information gathering. And smartphone for on the go forms of all applications. By far the most frequently used device will be the smartphone because of its portability and our burgeoning desire to be always plugged in, all the time. CD's and DVD's are on the way out. Big fat hard drives that can by synced out to mobile devices for on the go access will hold anything we want to keep accessible copies of and it'll be downloaded over the Internet. I already download on demand programming from my satellite provider over my DSL based Internet connection to my DVR over an IP over powerline device. I watch television shows and movies on my flat screen TV by connecting a video out cable from my laptop to its VGA input and get a great picture over the Internet, through my laptop and out to my TV.

At work, a lot of "older" folks (read: above 35) are skeptical of new media, especially social networking media. Sure they know we need to get into it, that it's important because the kids like it, etc. But give them a facebook page and it's like a race to see who can proclaim first that they don't get it or it does nothing for them. My partner, who is no luddite, is convinced if she gets a facebook page, the whole world will instantly know all about her personal business and hard on the heels of that her identity will surely be stolen. So far no amount of explaining and reasoning has worked to convince her to just try it.

Of course, Facebook is the one social network that is growing among the over 35 set and so I suppose we are not totally hopeless. But there is still a desire, I believe, to distance ourselves from this new fangled stuff for the younger folk. It all seems so teenager-y - so talking on the phone with your friends for hours in high school. Surely we are above that sort of immaturity. We'll just read articles about these things and then try to copy some of what other people are doing.

That, in my opinion, just will not work. The more I get immersed in this ocean of flying thoughts coming from so many people and so many sources, the more I see that it is going somewhere that you have to experience to understand. And it is going somewhere, and I predict, somewhere big. What's cool about the process is how organic it is. Like a big beehive, we're all buzzing with something that's growing bigger and bigger. Pretty soon we're going to bust out of the hive and go on a journey. How or when or where, I certainly do not know. But there's a killer idea out there - or a killer app if you prefer. Something is going to tie all this human energy together over the 'net and it's going to move to the next level. And it's going to be cool.

So yeah, count me as a believer.

All I Want for Christmas

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:01:24 GMT

I've decided this year to ask for one thing for Christmas from everyone that might conceivably buy me something in the form of a gift. That one thing is 20 - 30 minutes of time out of their lives. During that 20 - 30 minutes of time, they don't have to spend any money or do any shopping. All they have to do is watch the Story of Stuff. Here's a short trailer, but the full version is just over 20 minutes long.

As you can see, the Story of Stuff is a Flash presentation that gets people thinking about the price we pay for a consumer-based economy. It's been around online for awhile now, but I think it bears re-watching this time of year, or of course, if you haven't yet seen it, this is a particularly good time of year to catch it for the first time. The catch is, I want people to watch the entire thing and then click on the link at the end for suggestions on what can be done to change how all this works. So please, family and friends, no scarves, gloves, bins of popcorn, kitchen gadgets (love 'em but I already have plenty), gift cards or new books. I appreciate that all those things have been purchased in the past out of love, but I already know you love me and value that. So thanks but no more. If someone has to spend money to feel fulfilled, I'm asking them to give it to those who really need it - to a food bank or a homeless shelter or some organization that helps undocumented workers in their area.

Ultimately I want them to really devote themselves to thinking about these issues for more than five minutes, before rushing out the door to find the best bargain on Christmas gifts and then patting themselves on the back about how they found something so cheap without any thought at all about how or why it came to be so cheap and why they should find such an action (purchasing an underpriced product) so darn rewarding anyway. I'm sick of it.

I've ranted about this topic before, but I'm so over the forced holiday ritual of buying stuff for each other. Not only do I feel ridiculous buying obligatory stuff for others, I feel incredibly frustrated getting stuff I don't need from other people in return. This is not the spirit of giving or whatever misplaced platitude we are being force fed to think of it as. It is the spirit of greed, corruption and wastefulness - of attempting to feel personally fulfilled through the accumulation of products of dubious value. I don't actually need a damn thing and while I continue to grow fat on too much food and drown in piles of stuff I don't have room for or any real need for, people are leading miserable lives in polluted environments working for pennies a day so I can have the latest iPod. This makes me slightly crazy, in no small part because I've contributed more than my fair share to this destructive treadmill.

I'm not asking everyone to cast off all our material goods and wander the countryside like Gandhi. But I am saying we all need to start thinking seriously about what our lack of awareness is doing to other people, the planet and ultimately ourselves and future generations. And for Americans, I truly believe it is about a cultural change. And unfortunately, because we have exported the culture of consumerism around the world, it may be ultimately about a global shift in thinking. However, I firmly believe that we started it, we exported it, and we are by far the worst culprits of it. So in turn we are the ones who need to starting waking up and leading the way off the road to ruin we are currently hurtling down.

I was raised in a family who loves a bargain. My grandparents lived through the depression and they learned to value the acquisition of cheap goods and food. Of course, back in those days, there were good reasons for developing a set of values rooted in thriftiness and getting every last bit of possible use out of a good or product. My grandfather made a regular habit of picking through the dumpster of a local boys club near his house right up until the time he wasn't physically able to continue. All of us grandchildren received goodies from this dumpster from time to time - basketballs - slightly worn, jump ropes missing a handle, partial sets of baseball cards, whatever could be salvaged. The attitude was always, hey, this thing is perfectly good! All it needs is to be cleaned up, fixed up, improvised, etc. and we got it for free! How great is that?

Somehow this culture of depression-era thriftiness devolved over the decades and was corrupted as it was passed down to younger generations. And by "somehow" I mean, corporations with vested monetary interest successfully managed to sell us a bill of goods that thriftiness meant buying cheap goods, and that if buying cheap goods was good, then buying lots of cheap goods was better. Shopping evolved from something people did out of necessity to something people did for sport. And there is no doubt that shopping became a sport for my parents' generation and perhaps even more so for mine.

The way one wins the shopping sport is by procuring the best quality item for the lowest price. There are a myriad of ways to accomplish this, not the least of which is that mass produced goods tend to be underpriced to begin with (watch the Story of Stuff for more info!). But if you clip coupons, watch for the ubiquitous "sales", wait in line at 9 PM for store doors to open at 7 AM the next morning, go to the outlets, the warehouses, the cut rate discount stores, the big lots, and look for the slightly irregulars, the dented box that fell off the back of the truck, the overstocks and the underselling colors, if you devote yourself with laserlike precision at honing in on the best bargain, you can spend hours of your life telling yourself that you are manipulating the system and saving big bucks to procure new clothing, good and materials. You would sooner throw yourself off a cliff than pay full price for anything and getting a "deal" is the ultimate consumer fulfillment. This is how a man is trampled to death at Wal-Mart. He got in the way of winning the sport of shopping.

Never mind that what you bought you don't really need. Never mind that it is a shoddy good made to fall apart as quickly as possible so you'll throw it away and buy a new one. Never mind that it was assembled in sweatshops overseas by exploited children with no health care being paid pennies a day for back-breaking labor. Never mind that the environment is being destroyed to harvest the resources necessary to manufacture the goods and to process them and insert them in excessive, non-recyclable packaging so that you are more likely to buy it. Never mind all of that, because dammit, you got yourself a bargain. Why not reward yourself with a nice mass produced, highly processed, chemical and saturated fat-laden meal that will completely wipe out the savings you incurred at a nearby mall chain restaurant? Mmmm, buffalo chicken fingers!

What I am trying to do these days is just think about - why am I buying this and do I really need to? If so, where is this coming from? How was it made? Is this thing necessary or useful or is it just contributing to the problem? Believe me, as the owner of a 50 inch flat screen TV, several desktop and laptop computers, a few portable music players, countless kitchen gadgets, and far too many pairs of shoes, I am hardly holier than thou when it comes to this topic. However, I don't want to participate blindly as I have been most of my life. I at least want to be more aware, more thoughtful and choose the better way more often than buying into the bad way. I also refuse to participate in the culture of bargain hunting and congratulating those who imagine they have found themselves a great deal. I'm done with that way, and looking for a better one.

Happy Holidays, peeps.

Like a train wreck...

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:48:11 GMT

If you, like me, are feeling a bit overly caught up in Wall Street of late, here's an interesting activity for you. Click the link below. Then refresh the page obsessively every 30 seconds. In the last ten minutes I have watched the market plunge like it is going off a cliff. I have vertigo.

Click me: Wall Street Journal Market Data Center

Wheeeee!!!

Memories of Provincetown

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:12:08 GMT

I was 5. My family was on an annual summer vacation to Cape Cod, where for years we always rented small, rustic wooden cabins at the very crux of the place where the land runs out, where the lower cape pivots abruptly from its steady eastward march, sliding northward to stretch up, up, pulling thin in the middle like a string of sticky candy, finally curving in, in and landing in a wide splat of sand, seagrass and shimmering light known as Provincetown. But we vacationed in Chatham, out as far east and south as you could go without hopping a boat over to the barrier island of Nauset Beach (long since breached these many years now and totally changing the landscape of my memories), or south to the northern tip of long, skinny, Monomoy Island where the birds swarmed like bees and old shipwrecks sometimes stuck out of the water at low tide. To the west lay the lower Cape, to the north the outer Cape. I learned early on that there was no such thing as the upper or the inner Cape.

My early memories there are all images. Seemingly endless expanses of grainy yellow sand, my brother gingerly turning over giant wriggly horseshoe crabs, big as dinner plates with their primeval flat eyes and colonies of barnacles living on their backs, smooth white stones washed up by the sea and collected in a basket by my bed, the feel of dried salt water in my hair, the taffy at the penny candy store that pulled out loose teeth so efficiently. All vivid still, but the narratives from that year, 1969, have mostly faded from reach. One thing I do recall, however, is how that year we piled into my Dad's chocolate brown Buick Electra convertible with the white top down and drove up, up and out, finally curving back in, in and landed splat in Provincetown for a day trip. I remember being excited to go there, because I had a coloring book with pictures of scenes from Cape Cod and seashells to color in, and there was one page with a drawing of a tall, square tower that seemed to me almost like a castle tower, looming over the sand. For some reason that image intrigued me and I only knew as I sat small in the cavernous vinyl back seat of the Electra, my ponytails whipping in the wind, that we were going to see the big tower. I remember as the car crested a hill just before arriving that my Dad pointed out the tower off in the distance, tall and stark on the horizon. I remember only brief images of the town itself from that day - shops and lunch and people. But I clearly remember going to the tower, which I learned was really called the Monument. And I remember climbing up, up, up, up on my little legs until my Dad finally had to carry me the rest of the way till we got to the top. And I remember looking out there at the sandy strip of Cape Cod unfurling in a spiral with the Monument at its center, running away back towards Chatham and then on towards home, a very different place from there. And I remember light, otherworldly and alive, and strangely beautiful, everywhere I looked.

I was 13. My Dad had long since given up the Electra and now drove small compact cars. But in the meantime, he had also taken up with sailboats. Now we sailed up and down the New England coast, a motley few upwardly mobile wannabees pretending we were blueblood sailors. My Dad loved to sail, and at times, I loved it too. He became consumed with it over time and was constantly working on the boat or sailing it. He would go to boat yards and find the one boat that had been sitting a step from the junk heap for years, faded, filthy and rusting but still theoretically seaworthy. He'd buy it for a song and then work morning, noon and night to bring it back. Since my Dad thought of me and my brother at least partially as free labor, we spent many hours sanding dried seaweed and dead barnacles off old fiberglass hulls, oiling ancient, dried and faded teak back to a beautiful rich brown, learning how to wrestle unruly expanses of sail into submission and crawling around in dank, dark holds with toxically strong cleaning supplies. We were always in marine stores looking for obscure tiny metal parts or buying various forms of motor oil, engine lubricants, or cleaning solvents. My father insisted we call everything on the boat by its proper nautical name, and would pretend not to understand if we referred to the kitchen, bathroom, or the front or the back of the boat rather than using the terms galley, head, bow or stern. Even in a crisis when he barked out urgent instructions as we listed in a busy boat channel trying to tack into the wind with a tour boat bearing down on us, he refused to make things easier by using terms we could all understand. "The sheet!" he would bellow, "Grab the sheet!" as he frantically cranked the winch, yanking the sail violently to starboard, the boom flying inches over our heads as we tried desperately to remember what a sheet was. Finally my brother would yell - "The rope! He means the rope!" When the crisis was averted, we would have huge arguments about why he couldn't have just said the rope. In the end, boating became the catalyst that tore my family apart. But back then it still just seemed like an especially obsessive hobby for my Dad.

It was 1976 and in Boston that meant nothing but endless Bicentennial celebrations, people walking around in colonial costume with tri-cornered hats, tall ship parades in the Boston Harbor with throngs of people lining the waterfront for a glimpse, and for us, sailing. That year the boat was kept in Salem Harbor, the small city of my birth, which has always been much more about the sea than about witches. We took a long weekend trip that year, across the bay to Provincetown and tied up there for a night on a small mooring in the constantly pitching water of the little harbor, just inside the breakwater. That was the first time it dawned on me that there was something different about Provincetown other than the beauty of the dunes, water and light. The people were different. While vaguely aware of the cultural revolution from my safe middle class suburban haven, for me it had consisted mostly of new wacky fashions that my mother would flirt with wearing and buying for me, in her endless attempt to stay fashionably hip (a priority that remains high for her even today in her late 60's). So I had some hip hugging bellbottoms, denim jackets with embroidered flower appliques, some groovy looking headbands. But really, we didn't have any real hippies where I lived, or any real radicals either.

But Provincetown did.

I recall sitting on the low curb of Commercial Street while my parents shopped in a store behind me, and watching fascinated at the parade of people flowing by. Wild, colorful clothing and hairdos abounded. The one person I most clearly remember was a black woman, probably in her twenties. She was short, stocky and had a huge afro like a halo around her strong featured, masculine face. She practically marched down the street, swaggering in a dark blue, faded t-shirt imprinted with a large white woman's symbol with an upraised fist inside it. I had no idea what that symbol meant, but I was sure it must be something important and incredibly cool.

I was 16. My Dad practically lived on his boat by then and my parents marriage was showing signs of serious strain. I buried myself in my friends and social life to escape the tension and was rarely home. I had a boyfriend and a group of tight friends and we spent most of our time getting high, listening to music, going to video arcades at the mall and attending rock concerts. My parents decided that since we didn't do enough as a family together anymore, we would take a weekend sailing trip together. My brother balked outright and at 17, he was more immune to parental pressure than me. Since I actually liked sailing at least some of the time, I was easier to persuade and the deal was sealed when they offered to take my boyfriend along as well. So we left Saturday early morning, on my Dad's 38 foot Tartan sloop, the four of us heading for Provincetown. To this day I'm not sure why we chose that as our destination. But over time I came to realize that my Dad had a little love affair with Provincetown as well as I did. Though my Dad is definitely not gay or in any sense a radical, he is intrigued by the world and loves the romance of interesting, exotic places. And so I think that was the appeal for him - Provincetown was nothing if not interesting and exotic.

The morning we left the skinny slot of Marblehead harbor for the open Massachusetts bay, there was not a breath of wind. It was early summer, July 4th weekend. I had never been out on the ocean in dead calm before. To get from the North Shore of Boston to Provincetown, one generally takes an arc through the bay that goes well over 6 miles offshore and thus for a time you are totally out of sight of any land. Because there was no wind at all, we couldn't sail. We had to motor with the boat's tiny 12 HP outboard at a top speed of around 7 or 8 mph. It was disappointing, since the fun of sailing is riding the wind, all pitched over on your side with sun sparkling off leaping waves and salt spray in your face. But this was like gliding along through an endless mirror, almost surreal with the surface of the sea completely still, smooth glass stretching off in every direction to the horizon. It felt eerie, especially when it was just us with no other boats or land in sight. It felt like riding into the void and I think it freaked us all out a little. But we tried to make the best of it, joking and playing music and eating lunch as we putt-putted along through the featureless landscape. After several hours of that however, with still no wind or anything else to look at, we all started to get bored. My boyfriend and I started playing cards in the cockpit while my dad strapped a bungee cord onto the steering wheel to keep us on course and went to sleep in the deck hammock. My Mom read a book and indulged in one of her favorite pasttimes, working on her tan. I was starting to wonder if we would ever get there when a loud, abrupt noise like a firehose going off nearly made me jump out of my seat.

We all swiveled our heads to port where a large column of water spray was just falling back to the sea about 40 feet off to our left side. Suddenly, an enormous expanse of shiny, jet black, smooth flesh rose in an arc to disturb the perfectly flat surface of the water in a beautiful gliding motion, growing larger and larger until fully 40 feet of enormous beast was visible, along with the glimpse of a huge black eye, glinting intelligence and curiosity at us. I leapt to my feet with happiness. The humpback's knobbly head appeared, and she looked old and wise and wonderful. She blew another huff of seawater out her blowhole and smoothly glided back beneath the surface, leaving it with just a few ripples to show she had been there. Then off starboard "pfffffftttt!" another water column shot up seconds later, this one even closer. So there were at least two. Then another came up just off the bow. For the next hour, as we glided over the humpback feeding grounds of Stellwagen Bank, the whales glided with us, many bigger than our boat. Some playfully peeked at us and then dove under us to pop up on the other side. They came amazingly close and I thought a time or two I might be able to reach out and touch one, run my fingers over their bumpy backs, but they never came in quite close enough. Still, there was little doubt they were accompanying us and as the day grew long and the clouds gained an orangeish tint, the mirrored sea reflected back the color and we floated on to Provincetown through a world of orange glass and white cloud, with enormous shiny black whales as our guides. It was beautiful and I'll never forget that afternoon.

As Stellwagen Bank gave out just a few miles north of the upturned wrist of Race Point in Provincetown, the whales dove one by one and disappeared, leaving us to motor the last bit alone. When we arrived at last, my boyfriend Scott and I scrambled up the dock to the wharf, while my Dad sought out the harbormaster for a mooring. Crowds of people filled Commercial St, tourists and gays and lesbians and freaks of various sorts. My boyfriend was a notorious straight arrow, whom I had made it my mission to corrupt. He was a sweet guy and quite handsome, but not the brightest bulb on the tree on even his best day. I never knew quite what he saw in me, since I was no beauty and mostly only had a boyfriend at all so that I could be socially acceptable, not so much because I was terribly interested in boys. But he was good natured and fun and good company and uncomplicated. What I had not counted on was the effect he would have on gay men in Provincetown. He was a year older than me, so 17 at the time, and since I had convinced him to grow out his hair from the military style haircut he had when I met him, he had the shaggy hair and mustache look of a young Tom Selleck. In 1980, that look was all the rage, and the men began circling my boy like sharks the moment we made landfall. Though he really was a boy scout sort by nature, he was not a bigot or close minded, so he simply shrugged the attention off. I, however, found it highly amusing and started answering some of the cat calls he was receiving myself, much to the amusement of those doing the calling. A few times it devolved into a near catfight, but it was all in fun. The "oh honey" and "oh girlfriend''s flew fast and thick.

That night we watched the July 4th fireworks out on the wharf, explored bars we were too young to get into (and were thrown out of a couple for that reason), ate junk food and sat watching people go by in all their fascinating diversity. I decided that weekend that I really loved Provincetown and would come back whenever I could. I still hadn't figured out that I was gay, really, though I had inklings. But regardless of that little detail, Provincetown just felt like my kind of place.

When Monday rolled around, we were heading out again for Marblehead bright and early. In contrast to our trip down, it was a windy day, with some dark clouds as we headed out of the harbor. But the sun peeked out here and there and we were optimistic that conditions would clear up for our sail back. I munched down a plain donut for breakfast while we were still in the relatively safe confines of Provincetown harbor and couldn't help but notice that even there the seas were around two to three feet, definitely higher than usual. As is often the case when one rounds the tip of Provincetown into the open bay, the seas suddenly got much heavier as we came up past Herring Cove beach. Suddenly the seas were swelling up to seven, eight feet and the boat was constantly rising up waves, pausing for a second and then rushing down the other side, up, pause, down, up, pause, down, a roller coaster without end. It took me five minutes before I was hanging over the back, unceremoniously depositing my previously eaten donut back into the ocean. Next up was Scott, then my mother, with only my Dad remaining impervious to the seasickness that rolled over the rest of us like a green wave. Though the sun came out and the day looked bright and beautiful, the wind only picked up, and soon we were in ten foot seas in a 38 foot boat. I gave up the ghost and stumbled into the hold where I lay on a couch with a bucket, moaning and retching for the next four hours. At one point, the seas were so rough that the dinghy strapped to the back of the boat ripped right off and was surely going to be lost at sea, but my Dad and Scott managed to retrieve it and strong arm it back onto the back of the boat. The wind was directly in our faces and we were making almost no forward progress towards Marblehead. Finally, after five hours of sheer hell, my father's famous stubbornness wore down and he tacked to the West, giving up on ever making it home that day. We made our way quickly to Plymouth harbor and upon landing, I literally stumbled onto the beach and kissed the ground. I swore I would never sail again and it took another four hours for the mainland to stop pitching under my feet. Eventually we got a ride back home from a relative and my Dad retrieved his boat alone on another, much calmer day. I didn't sail again after that experience for years.

I was 28. I had long since realized I was gay, and Provincetown became a yearly excursion for me and my partner and lesbian friends. I always insisted on staying right on the water, and we usually ended up at the Bayshore in the East End. We went annually, a tight group of us, and had great fun. We called it being in the Ptown "zone", where all our stress and worry and angst would just melt away. We would relax, cook dinners together and eat out on the beach, walk our dogs, go out to the bars for fun at night, eat amazing food at the restaurants, hit Herring Cove and the shows, bike ride around the dunes, and just love the hell out of it. I loved everything about Ptown - it's tiny windy streets, Cape rose bushes, beach grass, sandy asphalt, honky tonk t-shirt shops, drag queens (later dubbed 'dragon queens' by one of my friend's small children who came along later), the Monument of course, and the people, all the lovely, lovely people.

One night we were sitting on the porch of a house up the street from our inn, where some friends of ours had rented a place. The landlords lived upstairs and were genial sorts, an older man in his 70's and his wife. As we sat drinking margaritas, the sun began to set and we looked out at the small sailboats bobbing in the harbor. They all had different colored hulls, white, red, green, blue. As the sun set, it began glinting off the hulls of the boats until they looked aglow. The landlord saw the sight and yelled up to his wife,
"Carol!" he cried in a gravely voice that carried across the house "The boats, Carol, the boats!"
"What?" Carol called back, distracted by something.
"The boats! Look! They're doing it again!"
"Oh yeah!!" she responded at last. "They sure are."
I didn't have to ask what "doing it" meant and whenever I have seen that sight since, I announce to any and all that "the boats are doing it again". Later on someone told me that the placement of small sailboats in the bay to look picturesque is not totally an accident, but I didn't really care. They still look great, especially when they're doing it.

I was 33. I had just finished a year of grueling cancer treatment for lymphoma, where a softball sized tumor had been filling up my chest cavity and a golfball sized tumor had popped up with a grim "hello there!" on my collarbone. Six months of heavy chemo and five weeks of daily radiation treatments left me with almost no hair, pasty skin and a feeling like I had been run over by several Mack trucks. But I was alive, and the cancer had been declared gone, at least for now. There was no more treatment in my future, just a long road to recovery of my health and strength. I decided, as a first step on that road, to go to Provincetown. I knew it would make me happy, and I needed to be happy just then. My partner drove and when we reached the same spot on the crest of the hill just before arriving in Provincetown, it was sunset. The Monument stood there just as it had when I was five years old, tall and stark against the horizon. The sun was setting as it only can in Ptown, with spectacular clouds and colors, orange, blue, gold and red, all framing the Monument in the distance. It looked beautiful and I was filled at that moment with so much happiness to be there it was overwhelming. It was one of the very happiest moments of my life.

I am 44. I am long since recovered from my illness, over 10 years and still going strong . My life has fallen back into place and I've become consumed with the living of it, with work and family and home. I love all that and I'm grateful for it. But I realized this week while reading Father Tony's posts on Ptown, that I have not been there now in five years. I have not been there, and I need to go, I need to go back soon and see the light.

My endless fascination continues

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 05:14:58 GMT

We are back in Mexico, this time for two weeks, sans niño - first vacation we've taken without him in almost five years and it feels a bit liberating. Our last journey here, he redefined the word "pill" and thus has chosen to attend his first overnight summer camp in the woods at home instead. Fine with us, as pre-adolescence can be a bit wearying for everyone involved.

As punishment for actually saying out loud a time or two that we were happy to be going without him, the powers that be hit us with a big dose of karma on our flight from the Wretched Little City ® to Houston, the first leg of our journey. For four hours, I was seated next to a 9 year old girl named Kyla, traveling alone for the first time. Since I am generally a friendly sort, and felt bad for the kid who seemed nice and a bit scared to be traveling alone, I chatted with her and played a few games with her to pass the time. In short order, she morphed from quiet, somewhat scared kid into hyper out of control bad seed child, pressing the stewardess button no less than five times to go to the bathroom, hitting, poking and climbing on me at regular intervals and generally being a giant A.D.D. pest. Eventually I feigned sleep as a way to check out and though I still had to endure the regular poking, nudging, and attempts to shove unwanted chips and sticks of gum directly into my mouth, eventually her attention turned to the people behind us and she bothered them for awhile. We lived through it all eventually and hightailed it off the plane at the end of the flight, convinced we had brought it on ourselves.

After enduring another travel gremlin in the form of a four hour delay on a flight scheduled to leave Houston at 8:50 PM and arrive in Mexico City at 11:10 PM, which actually left Houston at 12:10 AM and arrived in Mexico city at 2:15 AM (thanks to heavy rain in Baltimore - sheesh!), we finally made it to La Ciudad and crashed for a few hours in the airport hotel. The next day we cabbed it to La Zona Rosa, where we had a penthouse suite reserved for my birthday at the Marco Polo. The hotel was great and in a terrific location on Amberes, near all the hip and cool places including the local sex toy shop and "BoyBar", not the first time I've regretted not being born a gay man. We were particular enamored with the bathroom, with a European style large jacuzzi tub, a veritable jungle of tropical plants, and big windows where one could shower while viewing the city vista on two sides.

This was the first of two bathrooms I would become enamored with on our trip thus far.

After checking in and enjoying the view from the balcony, we decided to try hitting the Frida Kahlo exhibit at La Palacio de las Bellas Artes. We feel incredibly privileged to even have the opportunity to visit this exhibit, which is the largest ever of Frida's works including many previously unshown works from private collections and only on display here for a short time. Portions of it will travel to other countries but nowhere else will it be shown in its entirety. Blog entries from earlier in the week recommended an early start to any attempts to visit due to big crowds and it was already well into the afternoon before we ventured out. But we figured it couldn't hurt to try.

We hit the Mexico City subway, el Metro, and proceeded to attempt to find our way there. After one misguided attempt going a few stops the wrong way on one line, we made our way to the correct station. I found the Mexico City subway quite comparable to the NYC subway both in terms of age and lack of temperature control in the stations. But generally it was fast and easy. One interesting thing is that during certain busy hours, the first two cars of all trains are reserved for women and children only. We gave it a try and rode surrounded by las mujeres de negocios in high heels, tight black clothing and good hair (all people middle class and higher in Mexico City have startling stylish coifs, with the men using even more hair product than the women), viejas straight out of some old silent film about Mexico with long gray hair and impossibly large and heavy loads of goods slung in swaths of fabric over their backs, and many jolly looking nuns. Other than the annoying vendors constantly roaming the cars hawking various goods and being roundly ignored by all, it was not an unpleasant experience.

Upon arrival at Bellas Artes, we found ourselves first overawed by the building and then a bit chagrined by the line for the exhibit. But we decided to give it a try anyway.

As cool as the building was outside, inside it was even more astonishing.

And - many people in line waiting to take it all in...

I took a place in line while V. went to buy tickets. When she returned, she reported that her ticket had been free when the ticket seller discovered she is a professor, and my ticket had cost a whopping $3.50. The line, though long, moved along at a good clip, and within 25 minutes we were inside the exhibit.

Our experience there was one of the many I've had that make me love this country. The overwhelming majority of attendees were clearly Mexicanos, and como siempre, they came in intact familias. All ages were there, from babies through children through teenagers and college kids through adults and grandparents. No one was left out, and all carried themselves with the same composure of hushed reverence at being in the presence of Frida's work. As would never be the case in the US, there was no velvet rope separating viewer from art, only a line of red tape on the floor so close to the wall that anyone including a child could easily have reached out and touched one of these great pieces. There were guards who would occasionally admonish those that stepped over the tape, but that was it. The vast majority of the paintings were unprotected by glass or plexiglass, and I stood in amazement just inches away from original paintings like Los Dos Fridas and Pensando de Diego. Every brush stroke was visible and palpable and whatever you think of Frida's work (I happen to love it), you had to be humbled by the historical and cultural impact of it, especially on the very people that were in attendance.

From there, we were off to celebrate my birthday with a dinner at El Bajío in Polanco, one of DF's swankier vecinidades. We were swayed by the recent NY Times article which referred to it as one of the "best and most distinctive Mexican restaurants in the world". Other than finding it relatively full of gringos, who obviously also read the article, it was delightful experience. The food was wonderful and we indulged without guilt. If you love real Mexican food (not the TexMex that passes for Mexican in the US), this place is a must-visit. To top it all off, the renowned owner is a native of Xalapa, our adopted home away from home, where we headed out on the luxury Uno bus first thing in the AM.

Per usual on this five hour bus trip to Xalapa, though I was suffering from a serious sleep deficit from the previous night, I could not bring myself to catch up on sleep during the bus ride. The country side between DF and Xalapa is just too interesting to sleep through. I also skipped the three movies shown on the bus during the ride, even though one was in English with Spanish subtitles. Instead I attempted to take pictures out the bus window, always an activity fraught with uncertainty. But I enjoyed it just the same.

Upon arrival in Xalapa, where it was not suprisingly raining in the afternoon, (our Mexico City cab driver, upon hearing we were headed to Veracruz, assumed we were off to the city of Veracruz itself on the coast rather than the state and said "Enjoy the heat!". When we corrected him that we were actually headed to the state capital of Xalapa he just grinned and changed his parting shot to "Enjoy the rain!"), we made our way to our friend S.'s house where her granddaughter R. gave us the keys to S.'s daughter and our friend Isabel's house, where we are house sitting while they are in LA for two weeks.

We've been to Isabel and her husband Toma's house before and knew it was nice, but it's been awhile. As we finally swung open the heavy wooden entrance door and rolled our bags into the foyer, we had big silly grins on our faces. Not only is the house gorgeous, but it has a truly spectacular view off the back patio, of the green hills rising up to one of the local extinct volcanoes, El Cofre de Perote. It is my personal opinion that the green hills that rise up along the east side of the central Mexican volcanic ridge from El Cofre to the mighty Pico de Orizaba in the south is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Yes, I'm biased and no, I'm not well traveled enough to have made a truly thorough assessment. But I stand by my opinion all the same.

Have I mentioned the maid who comes every day, cleans, does our laundry and cooks for us? Have I mentioned we are staying here for free?

To be continued, with more next entry on our hosts, their artistic endeavors, our travels in the countryside and another bathroom well worth fixating on.

Hasta pronto. And by the way, click on any picture to see it larger. :-D

® - Registered Trademark, Farmboyz

Prodigal Son on Prairie Home Companion

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 03:32:19 GMT

Word just in that Chris O'Brien, discussed in my last post as the local aspiring young folkie I've known pretty much his whole life - has made it as a finalist in Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion's talent contest for twentysomethings. Since only six acts were chosen out of over 500 entries, we are justifiably proud as punch. The contest will air on Prairie Home Companion on April 21st, and listeners can vote for the winner! So listen in and

VOTE FOR CHRIS!

(I don't care how good the others may be as well!)

C'mon - look at him. Listen to him. How can you resist??

La Musica es Amor

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 02:05:15 GMT

Last Sunday evening, my girl and my best peep Denise and I, all journeyed down via car and train to NYC for a much too brief excursion. The impetus: to see the Colombian band Aterciopelados at S.O.B.'s in Soho.

Aterciopelados (loose English translation: "Velvety Ones") is essentially two people - Andrea Echeverri and Héctor Buitrago, both from Bogotá. They have put out 7 CD's as a group over the past 13 years, and 2 solo CD's. They are touring the US now to promote their latest new CD, "Oye".

I started listening to their music about four years ago, after giving V.'s CD "Gozo Poderoso" a listen, and seeing a few of their videos on MTV Español. Four years later, I count them among my very favorite musicians ever, and cannot understand why they still seem to languish in relative obscurity in the U.S. Beyond the obvious language barrier for English only speaking Americans, they are not nearly as popular among U.S. Latinos as I think they deserve to be. All the same, in a recent interview they pointed out that they sell more CD's here in the U.S. than in any other country. They have been nominated twice for Grammy awards and are internationally successful, and yet I've found very few people in this country who have heard of them. Lest someone point out that I am not exactly living in a hotbed of Latino culture, I'll counter that the show at S.O.B's, which was the band's only stop in New York on this tour, was attended by only several hundred people, maybe 500 tops. I don't believe the club was sold out, but I could be wrong. It didn't feel uncomfortably crowded.

Those of us who did make the effort to turn out were well rewarded. They were all I had expected them to be, and substandard sound quality notwithstanding (hello - isn't S.O.B.'s a music club???), the enthusiasm of the crowd was downright buoyant. Most people there knew almost every word to every song, and there was much singing along con gusto. The average age of attendees was generally a good ten years or so younger than us (OK - or more), but we saw at least a handful of older folk as well.

I would like to articulate fully why I so admire this group - but I'm a terribly inept music critic. Describing music in words is just an effort doomed to failure, I think, though there are those with a talent for it. Trying to say they fit a genre or two is equally wrong. They are not like any traditional Latin group that the U.S. is used to hearing, at the very least. Some call them progressive Latin rock, but that's not accurate either. Their style is often more of the hook-laden rock or pop type variety , for sure. But they mix and meld and borrow from so many Latin and non-Latin styles, using such a wide variety of interesting instruments, rhythms and sounds, that you can learn their entire catalog by heart and still not feel you have a good handle on them. I just come away feeling that I love their music. And you don't need to understand the lyrics to appreciate it either - though their lyrics are so clever and intelligent that it is well worth the time to translate them. They are unabashedly political leftists and tackle numerous controversial topics with wit and depth. The Boston Globe has done a nice piece on them here.

I don't understand why this band is not HUGE, but I suppose I am underestimating the language barrier. It's a shame really, that people are so closed minded as to not even listen to music whose lyrics are not in their native language, when such a huge world of music exists in the world beyond that - and music transcends language so thoroughly that in my opinion it should never be constrained by it. But, hey, does anyone give a hoot what I think? Ha. But really, please, listen to them. You'll be glad you did.

After our very fun late night in NYC clubland, with the only disappointment being that my beloved ACME apparently only serves brunch on the weekends and we didn't have time to go there to eat my favorite mashed potatoes with white gravy (*sob*), we whirlwinded right out of there again back to hickland without even time to grab a decent bagel. But we vowed to come back soon, with more time on our hands. It's really quite ridiculous that we live less than 3 hours from the City and yet visit so rarely. So a belated New Year's resolution for us...

Three nights later, we found ourselves seated front and center at a small table in front of the stage at the famed Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton (it's really not all that famed outside of New England folkie circles but there it is). We had come to see our prodigal son play to a hometown crowd. Our prodigal son is named Chris O'Brien, and OK so he's not really my kid, but I often say Chris is the first person I actually watched grow all the way up.

I met him when he was 5, my best peep Denise was 17, and I was 19. Denise had just started seeing Chris' Mom, who was in her early 20's. They ended up being together for 8 years give or take, and Denise was more often than not the one home taking care of Chris during those years. I spent countless days over at their house, watching football, smoking cigarettes, playing street hockey, devising ridiculous money making schemes (a favorite: combination day care and worm farm), and generally just being young, silly and stupid. It was like kids raising a kid, really. Chris was always along for the ride, or just there playing with toys, laughing at TV shows with us, playing catch in the yard, being hyper and getting into trouble. We went to his hockey and little league games, made him macaroni and cheese, procured rescued kittens for him (a favorite: a tiny orange tabby that grew into a giant lovable lug, dubbed "Tex" by Chris), and did our best to figure out how to help parent a kid when we were barely adults ourselves.

I remember sitting in the stands one time watching him pitch a little league game, and the coaches' wife circulated through the stands handing out flyers for some upcoming team barbeque. When she got to us, four or five dykes lounging in the upper bleachers with tank tops and flip flops, she paused ever so briefly, and then flashed a sunny smile and said "Are you all Chris' Moms?", then she proceeded to give us each a flyer. We took them, smiled and shrugged. We sort of were all his Moms, in a way.

Chris was not always the easiest kid, and we were not always fabulous role models. But we all did the best we could, and in the end when I look back, the most important piece was that we all loved each other and had fun, in between the angst and confusion of course. Yes, little Chris was raised by lesbians, and so what else was there for him to do but become - a folk singer.

Chris first became interested in folk as a young teen. His Mom's ex-gf (pre-Denise) is a music promoter, kind of a big fish in a small pond out here in Western Mass. She often booked women's music shows and since Chris was weaned on a steady diet of so-called women's music and folk, when he got his first guitar, that's what he learned to play. The ex-gf would bring him backstage and for awhile she was Dar Williams roommate before anyone knew who Dar Williams was. Dar helped teach Chris to play, and Chris got to know others women folk greats like Shawn Colvin and the Indigo Girls (I remember a good story of him bringing his guitar backstage to their show and playing with Amy). At the time we all thought it would be a fun hobby, but didn't think it would really turn into his life's work.

Chris is 26 years old now (pause for shake of head in disbelief). He lives in Boston and is part of a thriving music and folk scene there. He is a regular at Club Passim, one of the oldest and most renowned folk clubs in the country. He recently came out with his first CD and swung out this way to promote it. The Iron Horse was packed with enthusiastic family and friends, and boy, could you feel the love. The room was full of that sort of impossibly proud energy that adults feel when kids grow up to do something great. And it's not like he's famous or anything, it's just that he's a contender in a very competitive art form, and he's good. He's really good. And we all have this enormous, proud, fragile hope for him that was just palpable in that room. The fact that Chris has matured into a good-hearted, warm and funny man only makes us all prouder. All in all, it was a very emotional evening and the music was great. There's something about sweet, sincere young men singing folk music that gives me hope for the world, really it does.

When I got home, I spent 10 minutes reading all the liner notes of his new CD "Lighthouse". Near the end, I was immensely pleased to see him thank "Tex".

My musical experiences this past week remind me of a saying that was painted for many years in large script along the wall in the Iron Horse, among many old instruments hanging on the wall. I'm sure someone will be able to tell me where it originated.

The quote said simply

Music Alone Shall Live

Bizarre rural New England rituals

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 04:36:24 GMT

It's late winter in Western Massachusetts. Which means that we're all sick and tired of freezing our asses off and have completely forgotten that the cold weather didn't even begin this year until a good six weeks later than normal, giving us a nice long reprieve that should have taken the edge off enduring the short winter that inevitably did arrive. But we've all thoroughly forgotten about that freakish stretch of Al Gore inspired balminess and settled right into our pissed-off sickofitall grumpy March selves. Earlier this week it was zero degrees with a 35 mph wind, and I feared the chihuahua might freeze solid during her brief outdoor sojourns to do her business. A thick crust of impenetrably solid snow and ice covers any ground that didn't get shoveled during the last snowstorm about two weeks ago. A rime of dirt, road sand and salt covers every outdoor surface and the skies alternate between thick gray blankets of clouds, unbroken from horizon to horizon, and a blinding, crystal clear sun that throws no heat or comfort whatsoever as it only appears when temperatures drop below 10 degrees. The nights that follow these harshly clear days are so cold that stars look like sharp crystals in deep black glass, beautiful but deadly.

So we are looking this time of year - looking for any tiny sign of encouragement, any notion that the end might be near, that the frozen petrified world might come to life, that something besides the wind and the things wind blows around might begin to move on their own. And the first thing that we grasp at here in the rural hinterlands are the trees. Not the leaves of the trees, which won't even begin to show signs of budding for a good four weeks, and will take another two weeks after that to start sprouting. It's not what you see on the outside of the tree that matters, it's what's going on on the inside. On the inside, things are happening, and on the very rare warmer days, sap is starting to flow inside the trees. Because here in Western Massachusetts we still have a good amount of forest around, and because a good portion of that forest consists of maple trees, flowing sap means it is maple sugaring season. And maple sugaring season means it's time to go eat breakfast at a bona fide sugar house.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a sugar house, it's technically any of the small specially constructed barns where maple sugar is traditionally made by boiling enormous amounts of gathered maple tree sap over big wood fires. They dot the hills a short jaunt up into the woods from our home, and range from small mom-and-pop operations that produce a few dozen gallons a year mostly for family and friends, to big business, tapping thousands of trees and shipping the sweet gold result all over the world. However, for those of us not in the business of making the syrup, but definitely interested in consuming it, the sugar houses we really care about are the ones that open to the public this time of year and serve food. Most restaurant-style sugar houses are open at most 6 weeks a year, generally from late February through early April. They are always family-run operations, and it's all about the rustic.

Over the years I've visited enough sugar houses to have developed a laundry list of qualities that make for the quintessential sugar house experience. Since this is New England, and sugar housing is about reaching the end of winter, there is a ritualistic nature to the experience that is almost symbolic of life's greater struggle. A true sugar house experience must reflect this yin/yang of the pleasure and pain of life to be truly worthwhile. So, here is my ultimate list of what a sugar housing experience ought to consist of.

First, the sugar house needs to be located in the ass end of nowhere. It needs to be a lengthy drive from home, into parts of the "hilltowns" as we call them around here, that are deep, dark and somewhat mysterious to those of us living in the valley. Preferably the road they are located on will either be dirt, unnamed, or thoroughly pocked with miles of axle-busting potholes. You will get lost several times on the way and maps will prove useless. Signs will be unreliable or will peter out at crucial junctures. The amount of snow in the surrounding area will be at least triple what it is at home.

Second, once you have at last found the mysterious sugar house location, the parking lot of the sugar house will be a large, unpaved, mud wallow. On warmer days, big boots will be required to walk from your car to the sugar house, and you might lose one in six inches of mud along the way (wear thick socks). On colder days, the previously churned up mud will have frozen solid into a bumpy, grooved, tire tracked mess covered with ice and ankle turning dips. Do not be deterred. Only the weak are deterred. You are a New Englander. You may be dumb as a post, but you are not weak.

Next, despite the impossibility of finding the sugar house and getting through the parking lot from the parked car to the sugar house itself, you will discover that hundreds of people have arrived there before you, mostly from places much further away than you live, such as New York. There will be an enormous line and at least a 45 minute wait to be seated. There will be no indoor waiting area, or only a tiny one, and you will have to stand outdoors in a very long, very slow moving line. It will be 5 degrees outside with a 15 mph steady wind. There will be no coffee. It will be 7 AM in the morning because you came early to avoid the rush. It will actually take over an hour for the line to snake its way into the tiny door of the very low slung old barn that does not even look as if it should still be standing, or as if normal sized people could possibly stand upright inside it.

Once you finally arrived within and your frostbitten limbs and face are slowly beginning to thaw, you will sit at a very long table in a row of very long tables, each seating around 30 people, and made of unfinished wood. Seating will consist of tree stumps. Probably some of you think I am exaggerating or kidding at this point. I'm not. I have actually experienced all this while sugar housing.

Once you are seated on your stump and have a chance to look around, you will see that every one of the 20 people or so working there, either in the dining room or in the kitchen or boiling the sap in big vats behind glass windows so customers can watch, has the exact same nose. Or eyes. Or other distinguishing facial characteristic. These are big hilltown families and everyone works during maple sugaring season.

Finally, after the appropriate amount of stoic suffering, the payoff arrives. Although even dog food would seem delicious in the frozen, starving, coffee-deprived state you have been reduced to, something even better arrives. Stacks of fluffy homemade blueberry pancakes. Bowls of crispy crunchy corn and apple fritters. Big airy waffles. Thick french toast with swirls of cinammon. Tubs of soft, real butter. Fresh fruit. Hot coffee. And, of course, big stainless steel pitchers of fresh maple syrup for no extra charge. The whole experience must be a decadent and guilt-free one and any mention of dieting or weight loss is strictly verboten. Carbo-load away and just expect to while away the remainder of the day in a sugar-crashed haze of lethargy.

Finally, warm and sated, suck down one final cup of coffee and make your way off the tree stump and over to the gift shop. Watch the cheesy video on the cheap 10" TV on how maple syrup is made. Gawk at the men in coveralls feeding wood into the maw of the sap boiler. Stand in the clouds of steam emanating from the boiler and inhale the heavenly mapley smell. Mosey on over to the gift shop and pick up maple candy, maple cream, maple syrup in a bottle shaped like a maple leaf, and some homemade hilltown herbal organic soap. Carefully pick your way back to the car, teetering over ice and mud in your bloated state, and make your way home. Collapse in gluttonous, repulsive heap on the couch and watch bad movies all afternoon, ignoring the dogs' hopeful whimpers for a nice walk that might possibly burn off some of your hard earned calories.

You have officially celebrated the end of winter. Congratulations, you are ready for spring.

Prurient News Story of the Random Time Period, Anne Nicole Smith

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 05:31:09 GMT

The reason behind the "Random Time Period" portion of this feature's "Prurient News Story of the Random Time Period" name should now be obvious. One just never knows when one of these stories will pop up and at times they fly fast and furious.

Story: Anna Nicole Smith, a woman single-handedly responsible for spawning, quite literally, the most astonishing string of luridly prurient news stories of the past decade and beyond, caps off her illustrious PNS career by turning up dead for no readily apparent cause in a hotel room in Florida (well known as the most prurient state within which to croak).

Primary Emotional Response: Train wreck fascination mixed with revulsion plus a side of the smug pity felt by the dysfunctional but not THAT dysfunctional, thank god.

Salient Details: Fresh off a particularly productive year of PNS's, including birth, death and lawsuits galore, Anna Nicole checks into a casino hotel in Florida, is seen by staff behaving in a "plastered" fashion, and is later discovered dead in her hotel room bed by her "personal nurse". Attempts to revive her fail. Vomit may or may not have been involved and present, along with sketchy mixes of prescription drugs and alcohol. She may or may not have been found in bed naked with a sheet over her head, in a last ditch desperate attempt to associate herself once and for all with Marilyn Monroe.

You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up If You Tried:
Her almost-husband's name is Howard Stern. But not THAT Howard Stern. Darn.
A judge has ordered Anna's body be "preserved" to facilitate *paternity* testing. Apparently this makes sense in scientific circles, and does not indicate that someone thinks Anna is in reality the baby's father in some sort of bizarre trans plot twist.
Rumors are now flying that baby Dannielynn is actually the product of an incestous relationship between Anna Nicole and her dead son.
A dispute over the ownership of the mansion she was living in prior to her death with her daughter and not-really her husband and only-tentatively the baby's father (as he is only one of three contenders with a horse in that race at the moment) has already caused the locks on the mansion to be changed twice in the last few days.
Since her billionaire dead first husband's son is also taking the long dirt nap these days, the battle over his fortune will now revert to a five month old infant and those fortunate enough to share sufficient DNA with her, and the widow of the dead son.

The One That Causes Us to Pause Ever So Briefly in the Midst of Our Rabid Prurient Twittering: That poor, innocent little baby girl.

Ultimate Winners: A slew of the worst breed of lawyers imaginable, plus the lucky guy whose boys actually did swim the fastest. And finally, the American public, sure to feast avidly on rumor, innuendo and facts that make them pale in comparison for years to come.

Thanks for the mammaries, Anna.

Prurient News Story of the Random Time Period

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 07:07:59 GMT

Since our national culture seems to move from one prurient news story to another at regular intervals these days, I thought I would start a new feature here at EC so that we can better track and analyze these phenomena. So - here's my first feature post in this exciting new category - PNSOTRTP!

Story: Lady Astronaut Goes all Crystal and Alexis on Lady Engineer's Ass Over Two Timing Toady Astronaut Boyfriend

Primary Emotional Response: Glee at how the mighty have fallen

Salient details: Upstanding shuttle flying lady astronaut dons diapers, packs rubber hosing and pepper spray in duffle, and sets speed driving record from Houston to Orlando to meet incoming flight of romantic rival with nefarious intent. Ultimately botches the job and goes from smiley poster girl to stunningly unattractive psycho bitch in just a few short hours. Hello? Extreme Makeover?

Overlooked casualties: Psycho astro's hapless hubby, home with their kids while wifey was attacking her rival for some entirely other guy.

Ultimate winner: Toady Astronaut Boyfriend, sure to land a Lifetime movie contract, plus gets to keep the non-psycho girl and get his smarmy mug plastered on every news outlet looking studly in his spacesuit. Astronaut? Or Used Car Salesman? You decide.

Long term outcome: NASA scuttles it's plans to create a trip to Mars reality show "The Real Out of This World", plotted to "put seven people in a spaceship to see what happens when astronauts stop being polite and start getting real".

Stay tuned...

We are the deciders.

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:08:42 GMT

We lost another of the great ones today, Molly Ivins. I am sad.

My V. had the great privilege of escorting Molly around town for two days during her last visit to her alma mater, Smith College. V. fit the bill for an escort as the only prof on staff born and bred in Texas. She says Molly was larger than life and just as funny in person as on the written page. She feels honored to have been able to spend even such a short period of time getting to know her in person.

Molly's last column is here. It should be required reading for all Americans today.

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders.

Think about that, and honor Molly any way you can by acting on those words.

Finally, here is a link to one of the funniest stories I've read - one that Molly told after her good friend Anne Richards passed away just this past September. I think it sums up both Molly and Anne quite well.

Falling asleep to the TV

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 05:21:01 GMT

I can't fall asleep without the TV on. I realize this politically incorrect habit is probably hastening the demise of my brain, wasting electricity, and planting subliminal advertising messages in my head causing me to feel strange urges during daylight hours to call my doc immediately if I have an erection lasting over four hours. We spend a ridiculous sum of money on a high end satellite TV package every month and so we have more channels than God (though he probably pays less). However, the old adage that there's a million channels and nothing on is often true and especially so late at night. Usually the pickings are slim for falling asleep options because I am picky about what I will fall asleep listening to. Obviously I am not actually watching it since I have not yet mastered the art of sleeping with my eyes open - (except in Operations meetings at work). Despite the fact that I fall asleep fairly quickly when my requisite idiot box is on, I still cannot just have any old thing on there. Oh no. There are rules. And since the minutiae of my life is so fascinating to everyone else (after all, isn't that premise the foundation of all blogs?), here they are:

- Nothing on Lifetime. Two reasons for this - they do that SO ANNOYING THING where the commercials are THREE TIMES LOUDER than the show itself. If the volume is appropriate to hear just enough dialogue to listen while drifting off, the moment the commercial comes on my entire body will levitate off the bed three feet like some cartoon character suddenly blasted by giant sound waves. I don't find that sort of thing at all restful. Also Lifetime movies often involve screaming and shooting or at least hysterical crying. Also not restful.

- No good comedy. I cannot possibly fall asleep listening to the Colbert Report because I am too busy laughing my ass off. Laughing one's ass off is fun, but not restful.

- Nothing that involves frequent dog barking. Dog barking on the TV prompts real dog barking by the dimwit mutts snoozing on the bed with me and again, just not restful - either the dogs barking or me shouting at them to shut the hell up it's just a TV dog.

- Cheesy supernatural shows are good. We're talking Bigfoot, UFOs, Ancient Astronauts, Loch Ness Monster, Abominable Snowman, etc. Good for falling asleep. Trust me. I don't know why except I suspect that it's because I am slightly interested but not enough to stay awake since ultimately I think it's mostly a bunch of hoo ha.

- Law and Order, any flavor, but preferably SVU, or as I call it TSC (Tight Sweater Chick). There is a small risk of the especial heinousness of the crimes spilling over into nightmares, but the strong confident melodious tones of Mariska Hargitay lull me back to a feeling of safety. Not to mention other more pleasant sorts of dreams involving tight sweaters. And Mariska. 'Nuff said.

- Weather Channel shows. Not the actual Weather Channel weather reports - though that sometimes does in a pinch. But I'm talking about shows like Storm Stories about tornadoes, hurricanes, floods etc. Human suffering of other humans apparently helps reinforce my own comfyness and I am out like a light.

- True crime shows - American Justice, FBI Files, Cold Case Files, plus anything narrated by Bill Kurtis. The voice of Bill Kurtis should be bottled and sold as a mild anti-depressant - better than ativan, really.

Tune in appropriate channel, set TV to turn off in 30 minutes, adjust pillows and dogs accordingly, and ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ...

Aunt Kathy

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 04:11:48 GMT

Growing up, I had my share of aunts. Most were of the biological or married to a biological uncle variety. However, a couple were close friends of my Mom's. One in particular, my Aunt Kathy, was someone my Mom had grown up with, since her childhood home was right across the street from my Mom's.

We spent quite a bit of time visiting her and her family when I was growing up. She had two daughters - Joanne was my age and her younger sister Jackie was a couple years younger than me. Her oldest daughter, the one that was my age, was trouble. She was one of those big-boned working class girls with a daredevil attitude who could outdo the boys at any number of pursuits, but was still attractive to them all the same. She was the type of girl that would threaten to beat up other girls, mean it, and be scary enough to pound you if you dared to cross her. On the other hand she was a hoot to hang out with - always looking for another scrape to get into. I spent all kinds of time being badly influenced by her when we were kids off playing while our Moms gabbed for hours. In the rear view mirror, I realize I had a schoolgirl crush on her, but that went right over my head at the time.

So I always liked visiting Aunt Kathy so I could hang out with Joanne. But Aunt Kathy was cool also. She was funny and sweet and kind to me. Her personality was warm and welcoming. Her signature pile of blond hair was always piled precariously high on her head, spot-able from way across the floor of a large department store (she and my Mom loved to take us tomboy girls on marathon clothes shopping trips). She made us hot chocolate and pastries, and they had a host of fun kids games in the basement rec room for rainy days.

As the years went by and I became more aware of context in the world, I eventually figured out that Aunt Kathy was a bit of an anomaly in her family. Since my grandparents still lived across the street from her parents in the same neighborhood, I came to know her family of origin as well. They were trouble also, as much trouble as Joanne and in numerous cases more so. Many family members had substance abuse problems with alcohol or drugs, a number of them didn't finish high school or were occasionally getting arrested or having other big problems. I often heard the latest gossip on them all when I went over to my grandmother's. My family's life was boring and sedate by comparison but a lot less fraught with drama and trauma.

But Kathy herself, at some point along the line, had become a born-again Christian. This revelation in her life kept her on the straight and narrow. She didn't drink or smoke, kept a nice house and seemed like night and day when compared with her siblings and other family members. So it seemed to me that at the time, being a born-again Christian must be some sort of good thing. I didn't really give it much though, honestly. I was raised Catholic, which meant little to me beyond going through the rituals and attending church events where I would hang out with my friends. At times I tried to believe in God since clearly everyone thought I should, but it never really stuck for me. I faked it to make my Mom happy at times but I was following in my agnostic Dad's footsteps when it came to religion.

As girls will do, Joanne and I grew up. The last time I ever saw her was probably 22 or so years ago, at her wedding. She got married rather hastily at age 20, when her boyfriend got her pregnant. I've heard since that she eventually had three kids, and, much to my surprise, has stayed with her husband all these years. But I doubt I'll ever find out for myself. The last time I saw her before her wedding was when we were about 17. I spent the day driving around her hometown with her and her friends, smoking joints wrapped in opium soaked rolling papers. Needless to say, the details are fuzzy.

A few years after Joanne's wedding, I still saw my Aunt Kathy now and then, mostly over at my Mom's place. I always enjoyed seeing her and she seemed to feel the same way. She had a great sense of humor and we would often end up laughing over some silly thing. She never spent any time trying to proselytize me or really saying anything to me at all about her born-again Christian status, except to occasionally mention god or Jesus in a referential sort of way, never in a heavy handed one. During that time, I finally figured out for sure I was actually a (gasp) real live lesbian. I came out to my Mom and she was great about it, as I was fairly confident she would be (but not totally confident so it took me awhile). Since my Mom has always been a pretty up front and frank person, she told her friends in turn at one point or another. I didn't mind and it seemed as important to her as to me to be "out" about it.

Aunt Kathy seemed to take it in stride, though we never really talked about it much. The last few times I saw her, she kept encouraging me to stop by her home some time. I was driving to her part of the state with some regularity because my new girlfriend was from the next town over and we went there to see her family every couple of months. She knew that and encouraged me to bring my girlfriend with me. At the same time, I also knew that she told my mother that her "faith" did not allow her to "condone homosexuality". So though she never said anything to my face and was always gracious, I also knew she didn't feel OK about it. That knowledge kept me from ever taking her up on her offer to visit.

More time went by, and whenever I asked my Mom about Aunt Kathy, she would indicate that they hadn't seen each other much lately. Eventually she told me they had had a falling out. She said Aunt Kathy had begun to really throw herself into her religion once her youngest daughter had flown from the nest, and that in my Mom's opinion it was becoming almost like an addiction in its own right. She saw Kathy's fervent devotion to her religion as a very similar sort of addiction as suffered by the rest of her family towards illicit substances. But the religion addiction seemed at least for a good long time, like it was less self-destructive than the drug and alcohol based ones. Eventually, however, it seemed to consume her. She started actively avoiding my mother, and I know it hurt her. They had been close friends all their lives, after all. I know my Mom missed her, and frankly, I did too. While the demise of their friendship could not be pinned on any one particular issue, I do know that my mother's acceptance of my own inherent queerness played a part. Kathy ultimately bought into her born again philosophies so much that she could not live and let live. She and my Mom had some disagreements over it, and there were no more relayed invites to come visit her. It was, all in all, a real bummer.

As the battle over gay marriage heated up in Massachusetts, my Aunt Kathy started a "ministry", and called it "Weeping Willows". She began to preach in her own right, and one of her biggest crusades was against gay marriage. She was right in the thick of all the battles outside and inside the Statehouse, where groups of gay activists and born-agains stood across from each other with signs and shouting. I could never bring myself to go to the Statehouse during that time to show my support because I always felt I did not want to run into her, that it would be too painful. Not that I felt it was all about me - just that I felt it would hurt to see someone that I grew up considering family to be fomenting such hateful attitudes about me and others like me. So I never did.

Aunt Kathy's ministry has its own website now, and it's pretty clear to me that she has slipped over into fanaticism (err - not to mention her dire need for a spell-check). Any hope I ever had of reconnecting with her is gone, and I know my Mom has given up as well. If this is what being born-again can do to a person, I'll stay a happy agnostic, thanks.

Prescription for the blues

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 16:38:41 GMT

With a caveat that this may only work effectively for dog lovers like me -

If you are feeling down or blue, here's what to do.

1. Go to Dogster.com.
2. Click on the View Dogs button.
3. Look at the dog picture. Read the dog Nicknames.
4. Click the Next Dog link.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you feel much, much better.

Here's a handy link! - http://www.dogster.com

If you see my dogs there - be sure to leave them a bone!

A preponderance of stuff

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 06:27:24 GMT

I am old. And I am cynical.

Before the likely gentle protest or two that I expect might naysay these statements in the comments (which I'm sure would be few and not very convincing anyway), I will say just that I have had no choice but to come to this conclusion after mulling my experience of this so-called Christmas season thus far.

Every year I try with some reasonable amount of effort not to hate Christmas. I have especially tried to resist the hating since the arrival of semi-regular child in my life over these last four years. Like most children, he loves Christmas. Unlike most children his age (not far off from 11), he still believes in Santa Claus. To the point where for the second year in a row, we had a long discussion recently about how Santa will manage to get into our current home, which is sans fireplace, unlike our last home where Santa's favorite bizarre entrance and egress handily existed. V. nixed my suggestion to tell him that Santa dons scuba gear and comes up through the toilet, (lest this cause unnecessary anxiety related to commode usage) and instead we told him we would just leave the back door unlocked.

Due to the kid and the loving and the believing, the various holiday illusions must be bolstered and the tiny sparks of holiday spirit that occasionally flicker up in me and V. at rare moments must be frantically stoked and fanned so that some measure of holiday spiritness can survive for some discernible length of time in our old, cynical and generally agnostic lesbian household. We do our best, but I fear at the rate we are going, the cold wind of rampant materialism will finally blow out the sparks all together, leaving us hollow shells of bad holiday-spiritless actresses, with fake smiles plastered on our faces like animatronic stepford Moms saying the same inane holiday related phrases over and over in robotic tones. (I know, that is a horribly mangled sentence but I'm not editing it).

While I can't hang all the hating on the materialism hook, it is my most hated aspect of this particular Christmas moment, so I'm focusing on it. The fact is, I already have too much stuff. This is despite several moves over the past few years where I threw out at least half of what I owned each time, and despite my personal rule that whenever bags of newly purchased things are brought into the house, an amount of stuff at least equal in volume to the new things must go out of the house in very short order to maintain my precise "stuff equilibrium", and despite my avowed ability to detach emotionally from "stuff" and toss it out impulsively when required. Despite all that, I still have way too much stuff and not enough space to put it in. Pretty much everyone I know also has too much stuff and no one that I buy presents for actually needs anything that I buy them.

Oh sure, I pride myself on buying thoughtful gifts that people will like and usually they do (or at least fake it well) but they don't actually need the book about Cape Cod history (for my Mom's husband), the Rachel Ray cookbook (for my Dad who has a crush on her and will only look at the pictures of her but never cook any of the recipes), the DVD episodes of Green Acres (for V. who still quotes entire plots and lines from this show and also the Beverly Hillbillies), etc. etc. I don't mind giving them despite the fact that no one needs this stuff, but it seems awfully wasteful, really. And then I have to think up equally wasteful things I don't really need to tell them to buy me as well, lest I be scarred by not receiving my requisite amount of reciprocal stuff.

The kid really only wants a very small number items - two or three at most, and makes a very short Christmas list reflecting this lovely lack of greed on his part. However, he still must be provided with an additional zillion items ensconsed in red and green wrapping paper so that pictures of the tree can be taken with gobs of presents under it and so that he can rip this paper off dozens of items that hold little interest to him and that he may never actually play with ever. It is the ripping off of the paper that really defines Christmas for kids I think. The idea that all that STUFF is yours, no matter how useless the vast majority of it is and that you could literally roll around in all that new stuff should you want to is the ultimate goal of this ritual. Multiply all that stuff by two households and we are talking a tragic waste of natural resources to supply the requisite number of gifts for rolling around in at both houses.

Last year I tried to buy a more reasonable number of gifts after going way overboard the previous year. There is no doubt the kid noticed that though he could still roll around in the amount of stuff he had received, he might not actually be able to bury himself in it. This year I'm thinking of keeping it to the point where he can enjoy at least five minutes of sustained paper ripping but not really enough for actual wallowing. But I fear I will err too much in the dreaded direction of possible CCD (Childhood Christmas Disappointment). It's a well known fact among my generation that subjecting your kid to CCD (not the Catholic after-school catechism kind though it applies equally in this case) is a sure path to needing serious therapy later in life. Christmas must be all joy, all magic, all perfect for kids. And we will deliver that perfection if it is the last goddamn fucking thing we ever do for chrissakes!! Now plug in the annoying blinky lights!

Here's a pic of last year's tree, with the kid's stuff all to the left of center under it. Several people I have shown this picture to admonished me for having so few presents (or just made annoying comments of surprise about it) . They may have partially been influenced by the look of our rather pathetic tree, but I really resent when people imply that obscene amounts of stuff are the only acceptable level of Christmas loot. The kids was happy enough as the following picture also attests.

Yes, I am Scrooge-y. Please no comments about remembering the true meaning of Christmas, which may just send me right over the edge. Thanks so much.

Last hurrah

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 03:44:11 GMT

My two favorite parts of the newspaper have always been the comics and the obituaries. I love the obits for largely the same reason I love reading blogs - they are a window into someone's life, whether mundane or fascinating. From the housewife who loved to knit and do word puzzles to the pioneering scientist who traveled the world, fought in wars and went on to teach for decades, I find everyone's life interesting. We are all universes unto ourselves and when someone dies, not just one person but a whole world they inhabited is gone forever. The obit is a way for us to learn about how unique we all are, and discover a bit about people we have likely never met, and now never will. Other times it tells us things about people we thought we knew, that in fact we didn't know at all until reading their obit.

V. and I have a bit of a contest going to find the obit of the person with the most descendants. Between the elderly French Canadians in the Northern New England woods from whence my family originated and the Mexicans from the Rio Grande valley where she grew up, the procreation rate is somewhat shocking at times. It all started with the obit of my own great aunt, who died in her late 90's in Burlington, Vermont. She left behind over 50 descendants at the time of her death. This impressive feat was quickly overshadowed by the Mexicans, however. The latest entry in this contest had over 120 descendants accounted for in their obituary, including numerous great-great grandchildren. Catholics!

Today, the following obit appeared in our local paper. This man is my new hero, having obviously given this some thought and written his own last hurrah in advance of his demise.

Daniel R. Porter

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. - With trumpets blaring, Zeus, god of gods, called Daniel Reed Porter III to His Heavenly Pantheon on Nov. 21, 2006.

He (Porter, not Zeus) was the second White child born in the new maternity ward of Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton on his father's birthday July 2, 1930. His mother Eleanor (Parsons) needed all the help she could get.

Porter was reared on a small farm with his siblings in Worthington. Sickly as a child, his parents often contemplated drowning him in Watt's Brook that flowed (trickled in summer) behind the house into which (the brook, not the house) they deposited other trash, sewage and cow manure.

After being partially educated in local schools, Porter matriculated in the class of 1952 at UMass, formerly Mass Aggie. Here he failed to distinguish himself in any meaningful way, and managed to alienate a number of his classmates and professors. Upon graduation without honors, Porter was drafted into the Army and served in Korea before and after the armistice. There he learned more than at college - never volunteer, be cowardly to survive, don't circulate petitions and keep away from indigenous females.

Returning home ill-prepared for an occupation, he was strangely accepted by the University of Michigan Graduate School where he tried to prepare for an acceptable if not respectable occupation.

A 35-year career as a museum and historical agency administrator and museum director followed. He moved from state to state five times to keep ahead of his reputation. He completed his career ignominiously in Cooperstown in 1992. On his demise, he was a member of no organization, club or charity.

Porter was not survived by his parents and sister, Janice Leroux. But surviving him are his relict, Joan (Dornfeld); a daughter, Leslie, her husband, Edward Easton III, and their daughters, Erika, Caitlin, and Allison, of Coudersport (God's Country), Pa.; his son, Andrew, and his wife, Amy (Pens), and their heir, Reed; a brother, Edward, and his wife, Shirley (Smith), on Watt's Brook; a brother-in-law, Al Leroux, and his Buick sedan of Northampton; and numbers of nieces and nephews.

There will be no final rites or any mumbo-jumbo. He will not lie in state at the The Farmers' Museum. His cremated remains will be scattered on Watt's Brook. Memorial gifts will not be accepted and cards are a waste of money.

Rest in Peace, Daniel.

Journey of Mankind

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 02:57:31 GMT

This site is totally cool.

Genetics has opened up a whole new universe of scientific inquiry - not just health, but human origins and migration. Wouldn't we all like to trace our own ancestors back to the beginning?

These two books also look like a good read in this same vein. They're on the wish list!! Now I just need more hours in the day to read!!

Travel Purgatory

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:11:46 GMT

I love to go to and explore new places. But it would be erroneous to say I love to travel, because to me, the word travel is not about the destination, but about the journey itself. Life may be all about the journey rather than the destination, but when traveling, the journey usually sucks. The only exceptions I can think of are my few fabled road trips, which were leisurely and involved actual spontaneous exploration and taking my time. Those sorts of journeys are OK. But they are unfortunately all too rare. More often, today's modern journeys involve circumstances that would try the patience of Job, including copious stress, anxiety, exhaustion and in my case, potential motion sickness. OK, so it must be better than the days of covered wagons and horseback, but everything is relative.

My strong distaste for traveling makes it very hard to take short trips, even in these days of fast flights to distant places. I just returned late last night from a whirlwind 5 day trip to and from Los Angeles, and though I'm glad I went, am very happy that I saw good friends and had fun while I was there, and am grateful to have made it there and back reasonably on schedule, I still feel as if I now need a week to recuperate from the traveling part. Fortunately, I do have two days off before I have to return to the totally different stress of my job, but the rest of the week would be even better. All this traveling has left me pooped.

This trip was a business trip for V., who had to do a departmental assessment for Pomona College's political science department along with some other academic types. They put her up in a nice hotel and paid for her plane ticket, so we just had to cover my plane ticket and a rental car cost, plus fun stuff. We have four friends in LA and hoped to have a chance to see them all in the short time we were there.

We flew all day Wednesday to get there, and the trouble began with a very bumpy flight from DC to LAX. I've mostly gotten over my previous urge to run screaming down the aisle on really bumpy flights, and instead just do my best to have an out of body experience or better yet, sleep through the whole thing. I'm pretty good at sleeping just about anywhere and this is a gift that has proven invaluable on many a turbulent flight. However, the sleep thing only works up to a certain level of turbulence - what I call the bumpy Mexican bus ride sort of turbulence. I am able in those circumstances to just pretend I am on a bus on a bad Mexican back road and I'm pretty much all good. However, this turbulence was more of the tossed about like a bottle in the ocean sort and it went on for much longer than I would have preferred (well, I would have preferred none of it, really).

The problem for me is not just the wildly irrational "ohmygodwe'regoingtodie" panic which causes me to sweat, palpitate and tense every muscle in my body, it's the fact that if I open my eyes for even 2 seconds during such turbulence, I will immediately be beset by the worst kind of motion sickness you can imagine. For some reason, if I keep my eyes shut, I only have to contend with the fight or flight syndrome, and not the urge to hurl my $5 snack box lunch syndrome. The whole thing just becomes an endurance test, where I keep trying to tell myself that the speed of travel is worth the suffering I endure to get there, while trying to suppress my inner voice, which insists on chanting "there must be a better way" at regular intervals.

I realize that fear of flying is completely irrational, but this does not help me one iota. I did once get stranded for two days in the Dallas airport and ended up getting an entire behind the scenes tour of the airport one afternoon, complete with riding in a pickup truck down runways while planes took off all around us. How I happened to get such a tour is a story for another day. However, something that impressed me immensely was the sheer number of flights landing and taking off, something like one every 90 seconds or so (no doubt the impressiveness of this was enhanced by the way the pickup vibrated violently as 747's took off several hundred feet away from us). This really made me appreciate the sheer amount of air traffic these hub airports receive, and though it probably should have increased my anxiety about air travel safety, it actually made me feel better when my tour guide told me that they hadn't had an accident of any sort in well over 10 years. Doing the math made me realize just how safe air travel is, from a statistical perspective. So sometimes when I'm in a panic 30,000 feet up, I think of that and it gives me about 3 seconds of slight comfort. But that's about it. This is a gut level thing that the forebrain just cannot talk the brain stem out of, I'm afraid. I've tried, really I have. I should probably just break down and ask the doc to prescribe me something mild for flying, but thus far I've been too proud to resort to that. I come from a long line of suffer in silence types, dammit.

Upon arrival in LA, two of our four friends were there to meet us, Tomas and Isabel, who are from Xalapa, Mexico normally, but are in LA for a couple years while Isabel gets her doctorate in piano at USC. Tomas' mother had also just flown in from Portland and had arrived within half an hour of us, by sheer coincidence. So we piled our luggage in their very small car, and went off to have a late lunch and a drink with them all at the groovy retro LAX restaurant the Encounter. (cue James Bond music) Since our friends' mother is 82, though pretty damn hip and spry for her age, I felt forced to stifle my ongoing observation that the place felt just like a big gay bar. A gay bar with a very "meet George Jetson" sort of 60's aesthetic, anyway. Regardless, the food was tasty and I had a much needed margarita to calm my shaken nerves. Conversation was lively and fun, the weather was Southern Cal lovely, and by the end of lunch I was feeling almost human again.

However, after lunch, we had to rush off because we needed to pick up our rental car and drive a good 40 miles out to Pomona, and they needed to go pick up their son Diego at his after-school program. By the time they dropped us off at the rental car place and we got our car and hit the road, it was getting dark. Though it was just after 5 o'clock LA time, those of us on East Coast time still felt like it was 8 o'clock. After rising at 7 AM that morning to start the traveling day, enduring the nasty flight and sucking down the margarita, I was definitely beginning to feel tired. However, I knew it was up to me to get us to Pomona. I have driven LA freeways before, and I know V. would be nearly unable to do so since she is a timid driver at best and shall we just say not so good with the directions. I pride myself on my ability to drive anywhere, and am usually very good with directions. So I had the freeway combination we had to follow to get where we were going in my head, and we rented a Jeep 4 x 4 so we'd be high enough up off the road to see better while we ran the gauntlet of LA rush hour.

And run it we did. Due to our colossally bad timing, we ran smack dab into heavy traffic almost immediately after leaving the airport. It soon became painfully clear that our 40 mile trip was going to take hours, at best. We were tired and cranky and this was not a nice way to end our trip. Traffic alternated between crawling and short stretches where everyone was going 80 plus for about a mile before screeching on the brakes again. I kept us switching back and forth between the car pool lane and the regular lanes, whenever it seemed like one or the other was moving faster. I nearly killed a motorcylist who was zooming between the two at high speed during one my lane changes. No matter where I drove, people were constantly cutting me off or roaring past me as if I were standing still, only to have to slam on the brakes immediately to stop for more traffic just ahead. I started having the feeling you have when your adrenals are shot and the slightest little thing makes you jump out of your skin in an exaggerated startle-response. But I was determined to get us to Pomona in one piece.

Our first freeway transition was from the 105 to the 605. We had moved recently from the car pool lane to the regular lanes when we saw the signs coming up. I saw at least one sign in the car pool lane indicating a special car pool lane exit for 605, and then the regular lanes came to a screeching halt while the car pool lanes seemed to be sailing along. So I slowly inched my way back over to the left and made it back to the car pool lane. However, the car pool lane ended up depositing us in short order on a local city street, somewhere in Norwalk. I managed to turn around and get back on 105, but in the wrong direction. Since one cannot just exit LA freeways, go over a bridge and turn around like in most normal places, I wasn't sure what the best method for turning around might be. I ended up doing a loop on freeways that took us a good 10 miles and half an hour or more out of our way. Finally, we were on the 605 and made it from the 605 to the 10 and on to Pomona. Well over two hours after leaving the airport, my mouth felt as dry as the Sahara and we had nothing to drink. By the end I felt as if I might start hallucinating at any moment, and when the road from the freeway exit to the hotel stretched on for several miles, I started to feel as if we might never get there. But of course, we did.

When we arrived at the hotel, we were given what I considered a substandard room, one of the only ones in the hotel without either a balcony or a patio, and right beside a hallway entrance door that was constantly being opened and slamming shut. This is a pet peeve of mine, and I'm convinced that women traveling without men are often given the substandard rooms. Either that or I have consistently bad luck with rooms by sheer coincidence. When I called and asked for a different room, the petulant young man at the desk behaved as if every other room in the hotel were booked. I hung up in disgust, but then decided I wasn't going to be put off that easily. I called back and this time got a very friendly, helpful woman, who immediately gave us a lovely room with a patio on the pool. Thankyouverymuch! We moved our luggage one more time and finally fell into an exhausted sleep.

The next day, V. was off on her work mission and I had the day to myself. I took the entire day to relax and recuperate from traveling the day before. I also ended up having to do about half a day's work remotely but mostly I was able to chill, and did some exploring of the area on foot. Typical of Southern Cal, I walked over 3 miles and saw only 3 other pedestrians, two of whom were muttering to themselves and in serious need of a shower. But I enjoyed checking out the Pomona/Claremont area, which I found to be lovely and pleasant, especially when the air was clear and nearby dramatic mountains came into view.

After my day of rest, I was ready to hit the freeways again. While V. continued her work, my friend E. and I were getting together at her home in Highland Park, back in LA proper. The plan was to spend the afternoon wandering the gardens and galleries of the Huntington, in Pasadena. This required that I once again navigate the LA freeways back to the city. After my recent bad freeway experience, I was a bit apprehensive. However, I was driving during daylight this time and the route was fairly straightforward. So I bucked myself up a bit and hit the road after breakfast.

About five minutes into my trip on 210 West, I was traveling in one of the the left lanes, coming up on a tractor trailer in a middle lane to my right. It was still a ways in front of me when I spotted something that looked like a large tree branch on the road in the middle lane in front of the truck. I remember thinking I was glad it wasn't in my lane, but I barely had time to register any additional thoughts about it when the truck ran right over whatever it was. As it did so, it quickly became obvious that it wasn't a tree branch at all, but rather something large and metallic. The truck dragged the thing under itself for a brief moment and then large chunks of the object began flying out from under the truck and across the highway. A big chunk of flat metal, about the size of stove, came flying through the air and bouncing up off the road high enough to slam through my windshield, headed straight for me. Without so much as half a second to check whether there might be another car in the lane to my immediate left, I swerved into that lane and the chunk of metal bounced by me, where my car had just been. By sheer luck, the lane I had swerved into was unoccupied at the time. The flying debris miraculously bounced harmlessly across the road and didn't hit my car or anyone else's. We all just kept speeding along as if this sort of thing was too trivial to notice. Over the next 30 miles, I passed three car accidents on the road, none of which seemed to involve serious injury but all of which involved noticeably smashed up vehicles. None of this was helping me feel better about driving on the LA freeways.

I made it in one piece to E.'s, and we spent a lovely day together, talking non-stop, laughing, enjoying the gorgeous weather and strolling through the amazing Huntington. The library and archives collection helped firm up my recent interest in pursuing my MLS degree. We had many laughs, caught up on gossip, and the day went by in the blink of an eye. Before I knew it, it was time for me to drive back to Pomona one more time. I tried to leave by 4 to beat the worst of the traffic, but that ended up being 4:20 and by then it was too late. Another torturous hour and half trip of frayed nerves later, and I was back in Pomona, but wondering how I was going to deal with driving back to LA yet again the following day. I decided my pride at being able to drive anywhere was starting to take a second seat to my desire to preserve life and limb. That night we ordered room service and relaxed. Neither of us was up for anything more ambitious as V. had also had a very busy day working.

Day four we checked out of the hotel and once again set out for LA on the freeway. I took comfort in knowing I would not have to make the trip back and forth from Pomona again, at least. Also since our first stop was E.'s house, the route was fresh in my mind and I felt a bit more confident about getting there. We made it this time with a minimum of flying debris and stress, finally.

Again we spent the day with E. and this time she drove us all around the city, showing us cool views and houses and neighborhoods, a pasttime we thoroughly enjoy. Since I didn't have to drive, and E.'s car had a very cool GPS system I got to play with, I was a happy camper. Around 5, we drove a short distance to Tomas and Isabel's house together. E. is a friend of their's now as well since we hooked them all up over a year ago. We called our fourth friend C., and he agreed to drive in and meet us at a local Oaxacan restaurant. We hadn't seen C. in nearly 3 years and have missed him since he graduated from our local university and took a job out there so we were excited to see him. I had a chance to show off my limited Spanish skills by translating between E. and the waiter since none of the waiters there speak English, we ate some totally fabulous food, laughed heartily at C.'s stories of his childhood Wonder Woman fixation, and generally had a great time. We stayed overnight with Isabel and Tomas and knew we would have to head out and catch our 11 o'clock flight the next morning to head home.

In the morning, we called Isabel's family in Xalapa and did so much animated phone chatting that our scheduled 9 o'clock departure time stretched to 9:20. When we finally headed out to the airport, I was a bit anxious about our late departure but still optimistic that all would be well. There was little traffic on a Sunday morning and our trip to the airport was smooth and quick. We lost a few minutes taking a wrong turn on the way to drop off the rent a car, but still made it to the rental car place a little over an hour before our flight was scheduled to leave. We made a quick rush to the shuttle bus, hoping to get right out to the terminal.

Then we sat. We sat some more. People trickled on the bus. Baggage was loaded. More people trickled on. Tick, tick, tick. A good 10 minutes ticked by while the bus filled completely full with both people and baggage until it was practically overloaded. Our already cutting it close timeline was now getting desperate. I knew with all these people on the bus, we'd be stopping at every terminal, and the chances of our airline being one of the first was a toss up. I was not happy that the rental place would let so many people get on one bus and wait so long for it to fill. My previous experience with other companies was that they would leave almost immediately once they had even a handful of passengers. Clearly this company, which rhymes with the word collar, was different. I was not pleased when we finally lurched away from the curb and towards the airport.

Sure enough we were one of the last people on the bus, before getting to our terminal, United. An additional 7 minutes had ticked by as we drove around to the other terminals and dropped off the other people. As we drove towards our terminal, we saw the bus driving right past a big sign that said United. Feeling a bit tense, we assumed the driver was missing our terminal. "Hey," we called out, "United! We are on United! Are you going to stop?" The terminal was number six. Irritated, the driver yelled back "United is Terminal 7". The whole thing could have been averted had he just had the common courtesy to acknowledge that there was apparently also some United service at terminal 6, thus the sign, but that this was not the main terminal. But no, he decided he had to be a jerk on top of being someone who waited 10 minutes for the bus to fill up. "But we just saw United on terminal 6!" we called back. Belligerently he hit the brakes and said angrily "Fine! You want me to drop you here? I can drop you here if you want!" No explanation, just attitude. I was pissed. What a jerk. We could now see another United sign on terminal 7 so we waved him on. When the door opened we stormed out without waiting for him to help with the bags or giving him a tip.

As I had feared, there was a huge line at United. I approached a service person towards the back of the line and presented him with our dilemma. Our flight was leaving in 40 minutes. There was no way we would make it through that line and on the plane in time. He told us to try the International line, though he couldn't guarantee they'd take us over there. We charged over and only a handful of people were in line. We were both tense, but V. was approaching full panic mode. She tried to randomly cut in front of the two people in front of us until I persuaded her otherwise. Another service person appeared and was less sympathetic to our plight, demanding to know who had sent us over there. We pled our case and she reluctantly let us approach an agent at an open window. We put our printed computer inventories in front of him and he seemed to be having trouble finding our flight. Finally, he angrily (more unnecessary attitude) whacked the paper with his hand and said "Look! US Airways! You should be at US Airways, Terminal 1" He dismissed us impatiently with a wave of his hand.

"What?!?" We both examined our itineraries. We had flown out on United. The return flights were listed as United flights with United flight number and the airline name clearly listed. However, under the flight listings was a small asterisk and the words "Operated by US Airways". "You have got to be kidding me!" I said "These are listed as United flights! We are supposed to know from that asterisk that they are actually US Airways flights?" "US Airways!" answered the agent, without a shred of sympathy or understanding, "Terminal 1 - down one level and then walk across the road and parking garages." V. started to argue more, but I realized time was ticking. "C'mon!" I said "We have to go - FAST!"

We found our way down to the first level and began to hoof it as fast as we could across two five lane roadways with no traffic lights to help us cross, just crosswalks. V. sprained her ankle about a month ago and cannot move particularly fast but we did the best we could. After the roadways came a big parking garage. We traversed it and found more roadways on the other side. Finally we came across another terminal building and down the end was US Airways. We hustled down to the ticketing area and blessedly there was only a very short line. Our flight was leaving in 25 minutes. I kept saying "We're never going to make it. We're never going to make it." and I meant it. We had two bags to check and we hadn't even checked in yet. I noticed that in addition to live agents, there were computer terminal check in stations that were not being used. I ran over to one and put in my own info, and jumped up and down as boarding passes printed out. Then V. tried. We couldn't get her passes to print. The machine behaved as if she had no reservation. We were forced to go over to a live person. One guy came over and started putting a baggage tag on my bag but I stopped him. "I don't even know if I'm going to make that flight yet!" I told him and he just handed me the tag.

The live person looked up V. and it turns out that in the 30 seconds between my check-in and her attempted check-in, the flight check-in and baggage check had been officially closed. A quick chat with a supervisor yielded a head shake of "no" in response. I slumped in defeat. Finally the agent took sympathy on us. He looked at the two bags we had been planning on checking. Mine was considerably smaller and could conceivably be carried on the plane. Since I hadn't put the tag on it yet, he said "Look, put your baggage tag on the big bag and we'll throw in on the belt now. It'll probably just barely make it on board. Carry on the other bag." He handed V. a slip of paper "Here is a gate pass." he said, "I don't know if this will get you on board the plane or not, but it's worth a try. You'll have to get your boarding pass at the gate." "OK! OK! Great!" We hurled the big bag at him, grabbed the smaller bag, and ran down towards the gate. It was 20 minutes until takeoff.

The security line snaked around 9 or 10 times and there were a good 50 people ahead of us. But, it was moving along at a decent clip. As we got close to the security check, I realized I had all my toiletries in my bag since I had been planning to check it. I knew if I left my liquids and gels in there, they would stop us and it would be an additional delay. We were going to have to sail through security if we expected to make it. As we got up to the table, I pulled open my suitcase on the table and pulled out several bottles of hair care products and dumped them in the handy trashcan nearby. Then I whipped off my shoes, took off my jacket, removed my laptop from its case and threw everything on the belt. I came through quickly and V. did the same. They didn't stop us or even delay us further. I crammed my shoes half on my feet and ran while jamming my laptop back in its case. V. did an exaggerated limping run to get to the gate, which seemed still very far away. When we finally made it, they were already boarding the last passengers. There were 10 minutes until takeoff. The gate agent issued V. a coveted boarding pass, 15 rows ahead of my seat, I gave her my bag so we'd both have two and we got on the plane.

I was sweating profusely and had to pee like you wouldn't believe. I managed to squeeze in a restroom visit and make it back to my seat just as we were about to take off. I feel into an exhausted heap and spent the next 4 and a half hours enduring just enough bumpiness to make me nervous, but not so bad as the trip out to LA. When we arrived in Philly, the captain told us we were ready to land, and then we proceeded to circle for 25 minutes. I hate when this happens and the pilot doesn't bother to tell you what the &*$#(&$# is going on. Finally we came in for a landing.

By the grace of god our departing gate was one gate over from our arrival. However, due to some kind of horrific rainstorms down south, our flight to the wretched little city was delayed. We managed to eat something in the terminal since we had nothing on the flight but a "snack box" consisting of four tiny "snacks". Again we were sitting nowhere near each other, but this was to be just a 40 minute flight. We finally got on the plane an hour and a half after our original scheduled departure time, and then proceeded to sit on the runway for another half an hour. Just as I was mumbling to the pleasant young woman next to me that we could have driven there faster (which she agreed with), we took off. 40 bumpy more minutes later and we were touching down in Hartford and I envisioned doing a little happy dance in the aisle, though I restrained myself from actually doing so.

Nearly an hour's drive later on wet roads, we were home. Again, we collapsed into an exhausted sleep. Sometime during the night, our extra neurotic cat, who was trying to sleep on my head because he had missed me so much, got irritated when I pushed him away suddenly in my sleep and scratched my face right across my upper lip so that I now have a big red scab across my face and it looks as if I have been in a brawl.

Then again, maybe I have been.

One of the great ones

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 18:59:23 GMT

The Inimitable Ann Richards

How much did we love her? How much will we miss her? May she rest in peace. Thanks, Ann.

Off color jokes

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 12:57:43 GMT

Our kid fancies himself a comedian. This fits nicely in with a long tradition in both of our families which essentially boils down to our own individual philosophy that since we amuse our own selves so very much, we must by definition also be amusing to others. As I've learned over the years, this philosophy is unreliable at best in terms of its veracity, but we cling to it with great faith regardless.

Anyway, the kid loves jokes, and one of the few things we can ever persuade him to read is joke books. Often, during the course of any given day, he will suddenly announce "Hey Mama (or Hey L. in my case), I have a joke." All other activity and/or conversation will cease until he tells it. Sometimes he retells jokes he really likes that he's read (a favorite: Why was the ocean embarrassed? answer: Everyone could see its bottom.), but now he also makes up his own jokes. Most of his own jokes consist of word play type jokes, because despite the fact that the kid hates to read, he loves words and spelling, and loves to write. This would normally make little sense, but since he is on the "autism spectrum" it actually does. But I won't go into why here. Suffice it to say, the success of his own jokes have an even more uneven history than those invented by the rest of the family. But we appreciate his creativity and since on occassion he actually makes us laugh, we encourage the whole joke telling activity.

Awhile back, we were eating at a Puerto Rican restaurant in town, which has sadly since closed. It was a low brow sort of place with plastic tables and chairs but some very yummy Puerto Rican and Cuban specialties which are not easy to find in our mostly very white little town (which we often refer to as "Mayberry"). We ordered at the counter and sat at the plastic table waiting for our food to be prepared. As V. and I chatted about mundane things, D. suddenly interrupted with his "Hey, I have a joke" refrain. Indulgently we interrupted our conversation and waited for him to tell it.

In a loud voice, which easily carried across the entire small restaurant, he said,
"Why did the BLACK person live in the BLACK house?"
This was clearly one of his made up jokes and he obviously had some word play in mind. Since he had been totally unaware of race until age 8 or so until we explained it to him one day, with mixed feelings but with a desire to have him not be clueless about the world, we weren't positive he really meant a black person in the sense of a person of African descent. Knowing him, he could have meant a person wearing black clothing. Embarrassed by others having likely overheard is opening line, we stopped him and asked, "Wait a minute, D. - what do you mean a black person?"

He replied, even louder:
"You know a BLACK person! BLACK skin, BLACK hair, BLACK eyes!"
People were now actively turning their heads to behold the young racist boy in the racist family. Never mind that half the family is and looks Mexican. Resisting the urge to crawl under our seats we told him somewhat sternly, "Shhhhh D., you shouldn't make jokes about black people. In fact, you shouldn't joke about the color of anyone's skin." This went in one ear and out the other, as jokes were meant to be completed. "But," D. replied, insistently "Why did the BLACK person live in the BLACK house?"

Finally we just outright shushed him and told him he couldn't tell his joke. We tried to explain that it hurts people when you tell jokes about their skin color, even though it was clear that making a derogatory joke about such a thing wasn't even a concept anywhere on his radar screen. He sulked at being unable to share the punchline with us. Shortly thereafter, I made the situation more confusing to him by referring to the putting on of deodorant as a "French Canadian shower" (I'm of Quebecois descent so please don't indignantly email me). However since he still seems unclear on racist jokes, I figure the ethnic jokes would be OK.

The other day while we were riding in the car without D., we drove past a family of African Americans walking together down the street. Suddenly I turned to V. and said, "Y'know, why DID the black person live in the black house?" We looked wide eyed at each other and realized, we would never know.

Funny kid

Things that make me stupidly happy

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 17:28:10 GMT

I've always been a hedonist, in a largely unapologetic fashion. That tendency has become, if anything, more and more untethered with each passing year. Life just seems too short to waste on doing things I don't wholeheartedly love, especially if the counterbalance of moral or social convention is at all tenuous or questionable. And I've found that it's all questionable, really, under the right circumstances.

Often I am asked by others or myself, for rational explanations of why I would do this thing over that thing, choose this option over that option, when the reason really comes down to, I know what I like. That does not necessarily extend to I know why I like what I like. It does extend to I don't care why I like what I like. I just like it. And that's enough for me now, though in the past I would on occassion let such clear, simple insight get clouded by self-doubt. I cared more then what others thought. I haven't reached the nirvana of not caring at all what others think by a long shot, but I've discarded great chunks of such neuroses over the years, and good riddance.

This all rose to the surface today in a conversation with a friend, where I described two things: the general topic of traveling to and being in Mexico, and the much more specific topic of making an improvised and fortuitously delicious ratatouille composed almost entirely of herbs and vegetables grown in our modest garden this summer. Both things made me stupidly happy to the point of bliss. The problem came in trying to articulate why, which was the only half-serious question posed to me by my friend. The more I tried to articulate why, the less I had to say. While she found this amusing, I at first found it a bit distressing. However, by the time an hour or two had passed, I realized the important thing is having the ability to be stupidly happy, and knowing what it is that makes one so. Not that such things can always be known in advance, but the more you know and accept such things, the more you can cut through the various impediments that might keep that feeling at bay.

Some of the things I've decided make me stupidly happy include the following:

Gardening (see above). Getting dirty, weeding, buying plants, pruning, watering, obsessively checking, enjoying blooms of gorgeous flowers or eating the sweetest, juiciest tomato right off the vine. It can be exhausting and frustrating at times but is also tremendously rewarding.

Cooking (see above). The fact that this can be combined with gardening in the form of cooking with things I have grown in the garden is just double the bliss. The only instruction I've had in the art of cooking was learning how to follow a recipe when I was a teenager due to my Mom's instruction, and living with a couple professional chefs in my late teens and early twenties, who taught me a thing or two. Since then everything I do related to cooking is self taught from browsing the Internet or cookbooks. I aspire to take a cooking class or two for fun in the future, but for now I am relatively happy with my ability and like nothing better than to throw a dinner party for friends and have most of what I prepare come out reasonably well. I do get a lot of compliments so I at least tentatively believe I'm getting good at it.

Being in Mexico (yet again, above). The most I could come up with on this topic for my friend was "I love it because everything is different there." Of course, not only is that not entirely true, but it is also inclusive of many things that are different in a bad way, not a good way. But somehow crushing poverty, environmental destruction, massive government corruption, non-existent mail service, drug trafficking, undrinkable tap water, bad plumbing, a plethora of insects, bad roads, roaming packs of half wild stray dogs and really bad restaurant service just don't get me down. I don't know why. Perhaps if I spent more time there it would bother me more. I don't know. I just have a feeling when I am there like I belong there. I look past all the bad things quite easily and dwell on all the good things - the beauty of the countryside, the art, the warmth of the people, the relaxed culture, the language, the food, the drink, the cultural events, the weather, the flowers, the architecture, the coffee.

Learning Spanish. Sometimes. I've decided learning Spanish is like golfing for me. It's something I basically suck at, but every now and then I hit a great shot and that makes me so happy that it keeps me coming back for more and ignoring the five thousand lousy shots I make in between. It's addicting when you get it right and I seem to get it right just often enough to want more. Over this past summer I finally reached the stage where I can converse in Spanish, albeit on a relatively basic level. But I can converse. I can form sentences on the fly using reasonably correct grammar with a fairly decent command of basic vocabulary. At times in Mexico, I would go into a shop, ask a clerk some questions, buy something and converse briefly with that person. Being able to do this made me astoundingly happy.

Wearing jeans. This may be one of the dumbest things that makes me stupidly happy, and I attribute it wholly to growing up with a mother who my friend describes quite accurately as a "power femme". My Mom dressed me up a like a doll for the first 10 years of my life, liberally making use of materials such as scratchy lace, tight pinchy shoes, hair curlers that pulled my hair while sleeping all night long, pearl necklaces, white gloves, and even those stylish accoutrements of the 60's, the cape and the muff (no, not that kind of muff, this kind. Though now that I think about it, that might explain a lot of my later life. Often she would dress me up this way for school or family events, and I would suffer expotentially through the discomfort of it all. The most blissful moment for me was to come home and be allowed to change into "play clothes", which consisted of jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt. My only regret at the moment is that I have a job in which I can only get away with wearing jeans on Fridays, and then they must be relatively nice jeans with a relatively nice shirt. If I could live in jeans 24x7 I would happily do so, and in fact, I fully plan to do so once I retire.

Getting my hair cut. Now that my hair is long, I don't get my hair cut very often - only every three months or so. But I love getting it cut. I love the whole ritual of having someone else wash my hair, chatting in the chair while having my head tilted around in various directions, and feeling all renewed and good looking afterwards. This latter feeling may be a delusion on my part but who cares? I need a haircut! Yes!

Sitting on a deck, patio, balcony or similar structure, with a drink and a view. I love a good view, and purchased my last two houses with a view as one of my top 2 or 3 priorities (just after must have a roof and plumbing). Views don't have to be spectacular, but if you don't have something nice to look at, how can you relax? V. and I like living on a street with some activity so we can sit out and gossip about people going by. We would never be happy living in the woods.

Dogs. Goofy, smelly, happy, annoying dogs. Cats are OK too, but it's really dogs that make me happy. We all need companions in life, and dogs make the best companions in my opinion. You can take them with you places, have them jumping for joy to see you at the end of the day (never underestimate the psychological effect of having something jump for joy to see you), get exercise with them, they will protect you, they will make housekeeping a challenge, they will cost you ridiculous amounts of money, but they will love you. And you will love them. Dogs are the best.

Driving my 2000 VW Jetta. Jettas are the best cars in the world if you are not rich and have some practical considerations besides just power and performance. However, because mine is a 1.8 turbo, it does have power and performance, not so much on the autobahn next to a BMW, but definitely on the interstate with the minivans and SUVs. Throw in a moonroof, decent stereo, leather seats, 6 CD changer, big trunk and rock solid reliability and you have my little Jetta which make me happy every day as it zips me off wherever I'm going. The fact that I got a great deal on it buying it sight unseen on the Internet is just icing on the cake.

Throwing a good party. I mentioned this recently and it ties in the with cooking theme, but is really more than that. I love to socialize and entertain and doing it reasonably well is something I aspire to in a big way. I'll never be Martha Stewart, and wouldn't want to entertain in such a snooty fashion anyway. But if I can put together the food, the beverages, the music, the setting and the people, and it all comes together, I am one happy woman.

My girl V. What can I say? She lights up my life every second that she is in it.

Cool, sunny weather. Late summer and early fall in New England can be beautiful. Give me anything between 60 and 80 degrees, with dry air and blue skies and life is good. Throw in some colorful foliage, county fairs, pumpkins and apples, and a good wood fire in a little pub somewhere and it's all good.

A good laugh. One thing V., D. and I all share is a good sense of humor that veers frequently toward the lowbrow and goofy. Private jokes are legion, and don't dull at all on the 500th reference to them. We frequently crack ourselves up with our own jokes, even if others think we're a little touched. Irony is everywhere, and everything is fair game, most especially ourselves.

Pop music from the 60's and 70's - especially of the disco or classic rock variety. It's a sure sign you've hit middle age when songs you knew every word of when you were 8 make you stupidly happy to hear on the radio when you're 42. And I'm not talking about the most popular songs that radio never really stopped playing. I'm talking about the more obscure variety that instantly take you back to a place and time when you hear them and make you realize just how friggin' long it's been.

There's more of course but those are the highlights and I'm already sure not nearly as interesting to anyone else as to myself! So I'll spare you more for now. I hope you all get to do things that make you stupidly happy this weekend, and please chime in if you want to share.

La selva

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 05:31:26 GMT

The view from Jim and Esther's

Today we had an afternoon of lively conversation while drinking tequila, lime and sugar over ice with our friends Jim and Esther. We had to talk a bit more loudly than usual since this is the view from their living room and the roar of the falls is a bit deafening.