Everything I See Is Red

Today is not a good day for my sister to be a controlling bitch.

Stretch A Band Between His Toes

On Saturday, Pete had a delightful encounter at the toy store.

Pete: I looked up and there was this little girl, about nine or ten. She looked like your niece.
Tata: Which one? Lois?
Pete: Lois! Light blond hair, blue eyes, skinny. She was wearing a little girl t-shirt, a little girl sweater, jeans and sneakers. And a big fake mustache like that movie critic -
Tata: Gene Shalit?
Pete: Yeah! She was completely serious, so I said, "Can I help you, sir?" She cleared her throat and said in a deep voice, "Yes."
Tata: GET OUT!
Pete: I didn't smile or anything, I just kept going. "Would you like me to gift wrap this for you, sir?" and she said, "[deep voice] That would be nice." She was alone in the store but her mom kept peeking her head in from outside.
Tata: I'm so happy! Did you recognize the little girl?
Pete: How could I recognize her? She was in disguise!
Tata: Omigod, you should have taken a picture!
Pete: I wanted to but I would've had to let on I knew she wasn't a grown man.
Tata: Then what happened?
Pete: She got into a van with her parents and her sister and they took off.
Tata: I'm so jealous! I wish I'd seen her. Oooh, you know who are going to be mad they missed that? Anya and Corinne! My sisters are going to be steamed!
Pete: She's my favorite customer ever. "[deep voice] That would be nice."
Tata: I love that you didn't tell her to take off the mustache or pretend it wasn't there. That's the most fun: seeing something coming and letting the adventure unfold.
Pete: And it was way better than my other idea: there's a man wearing a little girl suit and forgot to cover his mustache.
Tata: Hmm, suddenly this has gone all Cinemax.

Or I'm Still Alive And There's Nothing I Want

First thing yesterday morning, the genteel older gentleman who sits next to me smiled sweetly and said something so bitchy all I could do was stare at him until my eyeballs parched. Thus, I was discombobulated by 7:35 A.M. At lunchtime, I could not find my strawberry banana yogurt in the refrigerator no matter how many times I searched, but there was a vanilla yogurt of the same brand on a different shelf. I stared at the contents of the refrigerator. Once again, until my eyeballs parched. So I ate that other yogurt, because obviously one of my co-workers must've innocently eaten mine.

While he made dinner last night, I mentioned this odd occurrence to Pete, who has had run-ins with guilty co-workers. Pete growled. Pete gnashed his teeth. It was like Where the Wild Things Are with julienned radishes. Dinner was pretty good, too, with cute little meatballs rolled like the heads of his enemies. So imagine my chagrin when I emptied my messenger bag and found the salad I never ate and the strawberry banana yogurt I never put in the fridge.

This morning, I put a vanilla yogurt back where I found it. I am torn between writing a note of apology and wiping clean my fingerprints. I will say this: it was a very tasty yogurt, and I truly enjoyed it, but I recall it even more fondly, knowing it was pilfered. Yes, delicious, delicious stolen yogurt. I can't wait until someone comes to my desk and tells me a story.

With the Scenery Flying By

Saturday morning, Pete and I climbed the long flight of concrete stairs to the train platform and walked a long way to an empty space against the wall. I heard an accordian and took the camera out of my bookbag. "Pete," I said, "it is totally crucial that you take a picture because nobody believes that everywhere I go there's theme music. If we're very lucky, you'll also capture the back up dancers." Of course, you may be inclined to say, "Ta darling, those are people having their own lives. Your presence is a coincidence. Stop being so Center Of the Universe about it." Shaaaa. Have you met me?

This is the only picture Pete took all day of something that wasn't moving so obviously that's the one out of focus. But it is important! All hail the bowl of Veselka's borscht, the bowl of soup so sublime it must be experienced to be believed, and no shimmering verbiage approaches its epic yumminess. The ordinary bowl cannot contain it! The challah must sop its brothy goodness. Behold the borscht - and know that when you stare into the borscht, it stares into you!

The coffee was also pretty good.

The Bad Times Are Clean Washed

On the advice of the physical therapist, I started slowly.

Wednesday, I Pete drove me to work and I walked home. My steps were smooth and even. I had no pain to speak of, and I climbed the long, steep hill into town with surprising ease. This small triumph inspired a new goal; today I walked to and from work. This morning, sunlight bathed the streets in ways I'd never noticed before. Not far from my house, I turned back to look for cars and saw rays of light form a huge, coursing stream coming straight at me. I half-heartedly fumbled for the camera, knowing I'm not the kind of photographer who could capture that. I'm not much of a photographer at all. When I took this picture of dew on the lawn in front of Johnson & Johnson's Interplanetary Headquarters, I knew it was silly, and naive, and cliched, but I couldn't not do it. I could not contain my joy.

But Really, I'm Not Actually Your Friend

The physically delicate older gentleman seated eight feet behind me in my office at the unnamed university has been experiencing gastic dismay on a daily basis. At 1:30 each afternoon, I email Lupe.

Tata: PU! Again! It can't be a surprise. Why doesn't he Beano so there'll be no gas?
Lupe: I can't breathe!
Tata: YOU can't breathe?! Ellen just walked by, and in accordance with Smelt It vs. Dealt It, she didn't look at me but plainly thinks I have the stomach funk!
Lupe: You're killing me!
Tata: Do you know how much havoc I could wreak in the library with a cigarette lighter right now?

I hate to kick a sick guy when he's down, but after a week and a half of sitting in someone else's toxic cloud I've had enough. And when I say that, I live downwind of a garbage dump visible from space, and I've had enough! Today, I brought in a Glade air freshener so my office doesn't smell like farts, it smells like apples, cinnamon and farts.

Tomorrow, I'm spraying him with Oust.

To Get Back Home Sleep Pretty

Outside, we have fog and mist this morning. My hair is angry and rebels against the bond of the ponytail holder. A barrette gave up long ago. It writes when it can but its letters are filled with regret.

Last night, we shopped for groceries while outside a downpour carved new paths in tentative landscapes to the creeks and down to the river. We brought in our grocery bags as lightning flashed and thunder rumbled distantly. Soon after, the downpour turned torrential, so we counted ourselves lucky to be home and snug indoors. I examined the register tape like tea leaves for portents of success or failure. It was only then I noticed I'd forgotten, alas, orange juice.

The News I Need From the Weather Report

Outside, the day is bright, clear and warm. The avenue has been by turns thronged and empty. Decorative pear trees began today to shed their blossoms, so everywhere fragrant petals drift through open doors. Fortunately, last night, the family stores cleaned their carpets. Some people who resemble my sisters are going to have conniptions tomorrow.

The sunlight on my skin feels like my reward for surviving the winter. Last night, I told Pete that when one day I can't climb stairs anymore I want the stair lift to play the Bewitched! theme. Today, sunlight alone makes me blissfully happy.

Sina Mali, Sina Deni

Sometimes, you watch and listen for a very long time, then suddenly you know how to fix exactly what's wrong, and how to do it. Watch this:

...the Obama administration is shaping up to be robot-friendly. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates released yesterday his proposed cuts to a variety of military technology programs, and it looks like good news for unmanned systems.

While some high-profile programs like the F-22 Raptor are being scaled back, and the manned vehicles that are part of the Army's Future Combat Systems program are going to be re-bid, Gates specifically left funding for "robotic sensors" and unmanned vehicles like the Predator. He also suggested increasing the initial fleet of Littoral Combat Ships - the LCS is designed to carry a number of mission modules to be deployed in the littoral area of the ocean (relatively shallow water, near shore, where most mines are deployed), and among those modules are AUV systems.

Okay okay okay, now take this trip down Recent Memory Lane:

This is an ingredient-driven outbreak; that is, potentially contaminated ingredients affected many different products that were distributed through various channels and consumed in various settings. The recalled products made by PCA, such as peanut butter and peanut paste, are common ingredients in cookies, crackers, cereal, candy, ice cream, pet treats, and other foods. Consumers are advised to discard and not eat products that have been recalled. To help consumers identify affected products, FDA has initiated a searchable database of recalled products that is updated daily or as additional recalls are identified. To date, more than 2,100 products in 17 categories have been voluntarily recalled by more than 200 companies, and the list continues to grow.

In January, the recall list was expanded to include some pet-food products that contain peanut paste made by PCA. Salmonella can affect animals, and humans who handle contaminated pet-food products also are at risk. It is important for people to wash their hands – and to make sure children wash their hands – with hot water and soap before and, especially, after handling pet-food products and utensils.

Any management consultant will tell you you should never tailor a job to the employee, and I fear we've tailored our governing to the governors. No, no, no. Maybe that worked during the cold war, but after a while everything gets stuffy and our needs as a people and employers have changed. So here is my brilliant idea: let's put the American Wehrmacht in the hands of the scientists, social workers and bureaucrats. What? you ask. Isn't it? It is not. Obviously, underfunded environmental nerds will wage eco-friendly war, when they're done eating their free-range tofu pops, and social workers know how to wring $1.50 out of a buck. They're old hands with compassion and bake sales. This, I truly believe, is the way to wage war: cheaply or not at all. Scientists are used to having their funding yanked the moment they discover something promising, which would really motivate them to either commit genocide economically or force them to quit it and invent something useful. And that would be good for everyone.

The really brilliant part of my brilliant plan: put the Pentagon in change of Healthcare, the EPA and Education. The generals have proven they can deliver - um - something. We need little children trained to read? Send in the Army Corps of Engineers. Those children will be reading in no time. We need healthcare for everyone, shore to shore, in America? Dude, who sees the big picture like the Pentagon! What do we need like a global war on polluters? The Pentagon has proven it can handle the gazillions of dollars we're dumping into it at a rate that year after year exceeds the military budgets of the whole rest of the planet combined. Let the Pentagon keep its literally unimaginably ginormous budget and give us what we as employers really need: laser-like focus. Think of it: Pentagon hospitals, nursing homes, organic co-ops and animal shelters. Suddenly mission creep might mean sexay-sexay expanded Social Security, Unemployment and Welfare. I'm telling you it's a match made in Heaven, and it would be brilliantly good for everyone.

I'd Be Running Up That Hill

NEW JERSEY (AP) - Local woman Tata LongItalianName had nothing to say Monday night in what friends, relatives and acquaintances declared was a near miracle.

"Holy crap! Pour some adult beverages and put an APB out on missing bass players!" exclaimed Siobhan Pseudonym, a long-time "associate" of Ms. LongItalianName. "Those bass players didn't just get up and walk away!"

"My sister Domenica? Has nothing to say? Was she conscious?" asked Daria MarriedSomeDude. "Was she eating - because sometimes that's the only way to tell."

Ms. LongItalianName touched up paint in the attic, worked on website construction and scratched her three cats for two hours Monday night without uttering a word. Those who've known her longest expressed surprise.

"She what?" asked Kim LongItalianName, Tata's mother. "Hallelujah!"

Ms. Pseudonym hurried to assure the public there was no cause for concern. "She can't help herself. She'll be complaining again by breakfasttime."

Out With An Honest Tongue Now

If there's anything amusing about New Year's it's the phone calls.

Siobhan: GUESS WHERE I AM!
Tata: Saskatoon?
Siobhan: DAD CAME OFF THE VENTILATOR TODAY AND SAID I SHOULD GO TO THE PARTY. I'VE BEEN DRINKING SINCE 5:30!
Tata: That's great news! You should hang up and I'll leave a message with instructions for how to hide a body and elude capture. Which you will need tomorrow.
Siobhan: THANKS! I CAN ALWAYS COUNT ON YOU! HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Tata: Have your lawyer call me at home - just like last time. Happy New Year!

The phone - jeez, the phone! Daria's house is 15 miles west of mine. We should have walkie talkies.

Tata: A light snow is falling here so I called to hear about your frozen monsoon.
Tyler: It's sunny here. At least I think it is. Do you want to speak to your sister?
Tata: Nah. The storm is coming from the north so it's going to blizzard where you are any minute now.
Tyler: Really?
Tata: Yup. Tell her to call me back in ten minutes so I can mock her high-heeled snow shoes.

I may need one of those head sets that usually tells me someone's a colossal dick.

Daria: Darla's coming in tonight. I'm standing in a liquor store. She wants a box of wine.
Tata: Get the pink stuff. She likes it and it goes with your downstairs bathroom.

Skywriting? Bat signal?

Daria: Todd called an hour ago. He and Bette went to the Hentons' for New Year's. He said they invited Todd and Bette for spaghetti and meatballs. I said, "Spaghetti and meatballs? That's not New Year's food."
Tata: That's Tuesday food.
Daria: I mean, what's that? Spaghetti and meatballs. Last night, we had sushi and three kinds of fondue. It's a party. You might eat spaghetti and meatballs on New Year's Day to nurse your hangover maybe.
Tata: Yeah, but only if the meatballs are quiet.

If everyone's this interesting I might quit hanging up randomly.

Sharkey: Hello?

Tata: The number you have dialed is out of order.

Sharkey: I know it's you. 

Tata: Press 1 for English, press 2 for Pig Latin...

Or In A Suit And A Tie

My brother Todd's wife Bette, as photographed by Daria last summer in the Cape house. Plainly, Bette benefits from the black and white setting on the camera and a surfeit of grapefruit.

Why She Was Totally Chenille

I can't contain myself even a moment longer. Don't try to stop me! I have to say it! Neil DeGrasse Tyson is completely, totally, undeniably, hilariously, 100% scrumptious.

That is all.

With Diamond Eyes

What could be sillier than Adam Ant?



How about when the secret toy surprise is the brass ring?

Und I Did

From the New York Times.

About Dick Cavett: The host of “The Dick Cavett Show” — which aired on ABC from 1968 to 1975 and on public television from 1977 to 1982 — Dick Cavett is also the coauthor of two books, “Cavett” (1974) and “Eye on Cavett” (1983). He has appeared on Broadway in “Otherwise Engaged” “Into the Woods” and as narrator in “The Rocky Horror Show,” and has made guest appearances in movies and on TV shows including “Forrest Gump” and “The Simpsons.” Mr. Cavett lives in New York City and Montauk, N.Y.

Apropos of nothing, I would totally pay anything to hear Dick Cavett shout, "HE WAS A LOW-DOWN, CHEAP LITTLE PUNK."

Or Study Anthropology So What

My cousin Sandy's whirlwind wedding is midday Saturday. Three members of my horrified family have called and asked the same ominous question.

Terrified relatives: What are you wearing?

It didn't sound dirty when they said it, either. I've said all along I'll wear emerald satin pajamas because I am an uncaring bitch but also because I have the shoes and pizzazz to carry it off. Two days ago, as temperatures sank, I started feeling a bit more tropical. Though I wouldn't go as far as Carmen Miranda's fruit turban for an afternoon wedding, I'm going to try on every samba-related halter dress I can find tonight. Perhaps because I hate trying on clothing and dislike mediocre mall shopping in general, this dress on Katy Perry fills me with glee.

I've done meaner things to bridemaids.

You will be pleased to hear I scoured Sandy's registry at Target over a week ago for wedding gifts from Pete and me. Pete took one look at the list and waved a white hanky. Then he muttered something about plumbing and skulked around the basement tool bench for an hour, leaving me to assemble something like a gift to be delivered wherever Sandy lives now. I don't know where. It starts with a U. Anyhow, I picked out a sewing kit, a waterproof mattress pad and weights. The shipping charges were hilarious, because shipping weights is heavy, if you didn't know, so when I got to filling out the online gift card, I was, let's admit it, somewhat peeved - but still anxious to be helpful:

Happy Wedding! This collection of items is usually only found in an evidence locker. Don't get caught!

I hope they have their own rubber gloves.

He Bought It For A Dime

Left to my own devices, I eat a really wide variety of fruits, vegetables, legumes, meats, fishes, fowls and grains, often all at once, explaining my overwideness and undertallitude. Pete's had a few health issues along the way that somewhat limit his diet. He can't eat seeds or nuts, white flour is his mortal enemy and most dairy makes him nervous; on top of that, he won't touch eggplant and though he likes the flavor of mushrooms their texture makes him squirmy. I personally find eggplant smooth to the touch and delicious; mushrooms are downright sexy. More for me!

Last time we made the pilgrimage to Virginia, Daria brought with her a quinoa salad she picked up at her gym's juice bar. All of my gyms had uneven bars, so I'm not up on spa cuisine but quinoa I learned about on PBS. Her salad had yummy golden raisins and almonds and a light, slightly sweet dressing. It was tasty, but I wanted cashews, mushrooms and dried cranberries. And chicken paprikash, for dessert.

One day, I was exercising with a friend and babbling about being lightheaded, not to mention fatigued. You're right, I should switch to decaf, but suddenly I realized I'd been eating stupidly, despite the fantastic variety of foods. Somehow, I'd lost sight of the fact that I am so anemic on good days doctors wonder why I remain conscious. Thus, I've been on a tear with quinoa boiled in good stock or broth and lots of herbs and greens sauteed with olive oil and garlic, with the whole mess sprinkled with lemon or lime juice. Different greens have different nutritional values, but most have good, solid amounts of iron, which is great. Iron can also be binding on the intestines, thus the quinoa. But you could saute cardboard in olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, sprinkle it with lemon juice, and you'd be glad to eat it.

On the other hand, I'm a little hard pressed to explain the 10 boxes of creamed spinach neatly lined up in my freezer except to say spinach makes me stronger than Bluto and I had a coupon.

Hope Finds A Way

The Sheheyanu:

Finally, let me share with you the one last blessing for this morning, the sheheyanu. We bless God who has kept us alive, who has sustained us and who has enabled us to reach this season.

I had begun to think recently that these three terms: keeping us alive, sustaining us and enabling us to reach this season speak of the three ages of human beings, First, we are children awe-struck by the world and grateful for being alive. Then, we are middle aged adults struggling to remain stable within the direction we have set for ourselves thankful for being sustained. Finally, we are elderly individuals grateful for just reaching a new day.

That’s a nice interpretation. But, I have been inspired by words I heard this year to look at it differently. Our lives need to be a combination of all of those every day. We must never give up the thrill of being alive, always seek to find our direction and be grateful at the end of each day, knowing we have navigated the dangers of life successfully.

I credit this understanding of the Sheheyanu to a quotation I heard from a former astronaut, Pinky Nelson, commenting on flying the space shuttle after the tragedy of the Columbia.

He said: "You really have three things going on at once. There’s the professional astronaut that’s cool and calm and watching the instruments. There’s the little kid who’s got a ticket to Disneyland is having the ride of a lifetime. And there’s the older person looking over your shoulder trying to take it all in. You know if you’re not scared during a shuttle launch, then you don’t appreciate what’s going on."

If we’re not scared during life, we don’t appreciate what’s going on. And if we don’t feel like a kid in Disneyland each and every day, we don’t appreciate what’s going on. And if we’re not watching every step of the way trying to stay in control, we don’t appreciate what’s going on. And the Sheheyanu reminds us that we should acknowledge the deep enjoyment of life, the living of life with meaning and the acceptance and overcoming of our fears at every age of our lives.

Welcome to our new lives, to this new day.

But You Can't Stop Thinking About Her

Okay. Okay. Okay: we're sitting in the car on the way home and I burst out laughing.

Tata: Omigod, I forgot to tell you something.
Pete: You like my rugged good looks?
Tata: Pffft! Like I shut up about that. Remember I took a shower for about a year before we went out?
Pete: I remember.
Tata: And remember that I've been glum about my hair for weeks?
Pete: How could I forget?
Tata: And I've been putting my hair up in a ponytail to avoid dealing with it?
Pete: I'm still snickering. I mean, sure.
Tata: And since I got sick I've been complaining I could smell fever on my scalp?
Pete: Hoo boy, yes.
Tata: And you know how we bulk shop at Costco and use giant bottles of smelly goo?
Pete: Indeed I do!
Tata: Well, I was in the shower before and I washed my hair, and I was really frustrated because I couldn't get the shampoo to lather, which I thought was because my scalp had suddenly become oily or something. So I washed my hair a second time and still no lather and I was just like, "What?" So finally I turned the bottle around and if you can believe it, I have been washing my hair for - like - six weeks with conditioner.

And then, when I expected him to drive off the road in stupefaction at my antics, Pete said the most extraordinary thing.

Pete: I know.

What?

Tata: What?
Pete: I was looking through the bottles on the shelves in the bathtub. There's this stuff, that stuff, some other stuff and I said, "What's she washing with?"
Tata: And you didn't say anything?
Pete: Nooooooo. You're mysterious.
Tata: I'm not mysterious, I'm - like - stupid.

Don't panic! I've washed my long, luxurious blond hair, glazed it, conditioned it and come clean about this episode with every last one of my female co-workers, and at the end of the story, when they're gasping at my ability to move about in society without a keeper, I can see they are mentally reviewing the products in their bathrooms.

Speaking of review, let's review this new picture of Panky with pumpkins.





Man, he's cute.

To Parade Your Snazz

Creamy, chewy Christ on a cracker! Grab a Kleenex and clutching pearls, Poor Impulsives!




Heavens to goddamn Mergatroid, my girlfriend's a half-eaten cheeseburger! My boyfriend's been plated and sucked clean of sour cream! Who knows who ate 'em first! Whatever will I dooooooooo?

Kids, Auntie Ta's never steered you wrong. No, the sled's not at all going to rocket down the hill, across the frozen yard and voooosh! into space, and you won't even a little slam into the street and the snowbank on the other side. So hop on.

Let's be completely honest. Your partner in chem lab makes your insides titrate, and it's a different world now than in the exotic antiquity when your parents and I smoked pot with our gym teacher. They'll deny it, since old age and sloth are a whole lot easier to live with than the memory of how we used to get tanked and drive the farm hills with the lights off, because the idea that you might scares all dainty shit out of them. And with good reason. We were young and stupid, but you are on camera almost every minute of your day. Are you under arrest yet?

Yep, your parents fight off night terrors imagining what theories you're testing with that lab partner. They've become the kind of spineless ninnies they once despised, but the change is not irreversible. You can be brave for them. "But, Auntie Ta," you say, "my parents want me to save myself for marriage. Stop laughing!"

Kids, please don't make me tell you about how your parents learned special macrame knots at scout camp or about those parties in the prop room that involved a can of Spam and tap shoes. You're going to date - preferably outside of your high school - and dating means coming into physical contact with another human being, on whom you will practice the little tricks that will make your adult sex life happy and well-adjusted. Cover up, pets! Just - don't tell your parents, don't get any diseases and don't make any babies. They're less hilarious than in the movies, and they'd remind your parents of the prom. Which reminds me: how're your big brothers and sisters, anyhow?

Look, chances are super-good you'll get nekkid and do the happy cha cha cha, then you'll break up and feel heartbroken, and after that you'll get nekkid and do the happy cha cha cha with someone else. You might not even be all that heartbroken, but anyway: the point is that worrying about where your Sweet Baboo has ba-been is a ba-big waste of time. Plus, what you've been safely up to is your own mmm-mmm-mmm biz.

Don your gloves and mittens, kids. You don't have to lose your cool or your nerve when you get rid of that nonsense no one needs. So when your parents experiment with this crazy abstinence and shame thing, don't forget it's not too late for you to raise them right.

A Hit Before Your Mother Was Born

This is Miss Lotte Lenya singing Mack the Knife on BBC1 in 1962, before I was born. I have her autobiography, it's an interesting read. She's a complicated character and you'd like her. She married her first husband twice - the Nazis came between them, doncha know - and her other husbands once. Once of my great-grandmothers was married five times. Marilyn Monroe died six months before I was born. Neither of those things is very important but both are true, and that means they matter in some context, we just don't always know which.

Miss Lotte Lenya, as you can see, had powerful feelings about historical events that shaped her life. She was forced out of Europe by Hitler, as you may have guessed; thus her emotions make logical sense to us. We encounter this in life. Sometimes we can see why people act the way they do and sometimes we cannot. We see the emotion. We do not see the why.

Observe this Yahoo! article - and you can say that again, brother:

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent," responsible for their own troubles.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.

Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He's an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation's oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.

I studied this graph at some length yesterday, and I invite you to do the same. The single most important thing I can say about the image is that respondants were asked if they considered black people friendly, lazy, hardworking or irresponsible. The phrasing of these questions - I can't - I don't know how to say this, but what does one say when pollsters ask if you think all black people are stupid? "No, but I feel my IQ dropping as we speak" springs to mind. In what way is it possible to answer about any group of people anything other than, "That group of people has excellent taste in shoes," or "None of those people is holding an umbrella"? What the poll purports to measure is prejudicial feeling but where is the opportunity to express the simple truth that each individual person is different from every other person? Isn't it logical to say, "I know that within every group is a lovely spectrum of human personality traits, and I dislike shoes"?

When you answer the phone, you are, of course, free to turn the poll back on the pollster by saying, "When you are ready to ask me an unloaded question, call me again." Thus, you have context.

I am sensitive to the pressures of language. When you ask me a question, I answer the question you asked. Then the one you didn't. Then the one you meant. What did you really want to know?

Most people will say some other person should be treated harshly so long as there is no possibility they will be treated the same way. If you ask, "Should Ethnic Person B have recourse to lawyers?" the answer will probably be, "No." If you ask, "Should every defendant be given a fair trial?" bet your boots the answer is, "Yes."

A woman I know married a man from Africa and has several children with him. To people who answered the survey above her children are not white, and to some people, this whiteness business matters. It's a sickness, really, an affliction America chooses not to treat. White Americans, for instance, may not vote for a black candidate because he's black. Sometimes we can see why people act the way they do and sometimes we cannot. We see the emotion. We do not see the why.

And, sometimes, there is no why.

The Joker Laughs At You

I am me, and as mes go, I'm pretty much as me as mes get. Even so, there can be controversy.

Tata: I am giving you homework! Follow Grandpa around and record his voice.
Daria: You are not the boss of me, but yesterday, I was sitting in the third row of my truck, recording voices as Mom drove around and Grandpa told her where she was taking wrong turns.
Tata: That's exciting, since he's blind. And I am the boss of you!
Daria: You are not the boss of me, and I haven't checked the sound quality yet.
Tata: I am the ringleader! There's a ring! I am leading it!
Daria: Pipe down, you!
Tata: That reminds me: I still need a plumber.

This morning, I've called half a dozen of my closest creditors and service providers to tell them I'm moving. My car insurance company wants to know the license and policy numbers of everyone living on the premises, which may have something to do with state law but violates everyone's privacy. Yesterday, the US Postal Service wanted me to provide a credit card in order to change my address online, at which point I decided my government could kiss my fabulous ass. Today, several of both creditors and service providers either refused to change my address unless I provided a phone number or would only change my address if it sent verification - and I laughed out loud when the rep said this - to the old address.

Obviously, I've got my hands full with the Stooopit and my cup overfloweth with vitriol. Naturally, I thought of you, and your needs. Isn't that just like me?


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It really is!

h/t: Wintle.

Get Up And Run Away With It

Yesterday, I climbed up and down a ladder to put up temporary paper shades in the kitchen and living room. If you haven't seen these wonderful things, you should know that they soften light and create tranquility. I needed tranquility because climbing up and down the ladder caused my right hip to kick my ass from the inside. It would not be accurate to suggest I have a Home Decorating Injury, but I certainly sprained my mojo.

While we sit back and contemplate carefully sitting back and contemplating, let's also consider how sometimes things take turns we might've seen coming. For instance: Zou Kai won the Men's Floor Exercise with a routine that should have embarrassed him. Don't get me wrong: it was crisply executed and stacked with difficult elements. He is a remarkable athlete, no doubt about it. But - and I know there are people ready to argue with me - it wasn't a floor routine.

Yes, according to the code of points, it was. But no, it wasn't. A floor routine is supposed to place into a harmonious and exciting whole an athlete's skill and technique. By this stage of competition, with luck and good television coverage, we've seen the routines a few times. Twice during Zou Kai's floor exercise he did this half-hearted leap for which his feet barely left the ground. For a man who can almost fly, he barely hopped, and the first time I saw him do it, I nearly dropped my refreshing adult beverage. I mean, really. Won't anyone think of Me?

Besides the safety of my drink, there's something else - if you believe that: many routines by both the male and female athletes have become little more than tumbling passes set end to end, with pauses and twitching to mark beginnings and endings. Zou Kai provided a particularly egregious example of this, and by egregious I mean that his tumbling passes were astounding, then he stopped, and then he would do another stratospheric tumbling pass. And astounding it would be, but that's not a floor routine. In fact, there's a whole sport dedicated to this called power tumbling, and that way lies Zou Kai's destiny. Go with my blessing, Zou Kai!

The Danes are apparently monsters with the power tumbling. I admit: there's something about a blond man in black tights doing a series of somesaults that makes me want to do handsprings.

Thing is: this is what the audience wants and the code of points now rewards athletes for pandering. So since we're pandering, why not pander BIG? Let's get rid of pommel horse which almost no one loves*, ditch floor ex and replace it with long, gorgeous, swooping tumbling runs. We can send Cirque du Soleil and TV talent shows perfumed thank-you notes for showing us the way. Because, in truth, we're never going back.



*Kurt Thomas, you know I love you. Thanks for carrying my sister with the broken foot to the truck at gymnastics camp all those years ago. But that can't make up for giving us the only reason to keep pommel horse in the lineup: the often vain hope that it might - if only for a moment - be interesting to look at, and let's never again speak of GymKata. It can only open old wounds...

Rise Up In the Sweat And Smoke Like Mercury

Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you make a movie with Rula Lenska.



Fortunately, my stepmommy Darla is looking out for my best interests. The word cinematic doesn't quite cover this career opportunity.

HENCHMEN NEEDED
(London, but planned worldwide expansion)

Turtleneck sweaters! Oh goody!

20-30 henchmen needed for moderately-sized supervillain organisation with large expansion potential (fortresses built into geological structures, corruption of government officials, possible genesis of 'nemesis' vigilante). Electrical theme.

Applicants must be willing to learn new skills, including but not limited to operation of specialised 'lightning guns'. Applicants will also be required to wear specialised uniform when at work (functional rubber suits with my logo on front), except in cases where deception is required (posing as hostages in order to ambush vigilantes, etc).

Desired (but not necessarily required) in applicants:

-interesting deformations/obsessions/powers(?) giving rise to interesting nicknames (e.g. Claws, Pyro, Buzzsaw, and similar)
-unwavering loyalty
-being a corruptible government official
-ability to work as part of a close-knit team (unless interesting obsession is of the 'lone wolf' variety)
-grudge against any well-known vigilante
-flexible moral code

This seems ambitious. Can I apply for entry level Minion?

Equal opportunies employer. Both henchmen and femmes fatales absolutely welcome.

Great promotion opportunities - right-hand-man position constantly being unexpectedly opened. Would look good on any future supervillain resume/CV.

Send an email with details of any prior henchman work, or details of what is driving you to join the ranks of a supervillain organisation. Will reply to all serious applicants. Hope to hear from you, and with luck, welcome you into a rewarding and promising career!

- Jacque (The Zapper) Zerapi

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! I just read the words prior henchman work!

* Location: London, but planned worldwide expansion
* Compensation: £20,000pa starting salary, with added commissions based around success of supervillain operations. Contracts negotiable depending on applicant's personal skills/powers.
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

Well, of course not! Creating a supervillain organization is going to take up your whole day. Thus, we still have all night to puzzle over this vomity vomitrociousness:

Hat tip: the guy who sits next to me in the library.

Ephesians? You read your kid Ephesians and wonder why she can't fucking sleep? How about something a little more secular and age appropriate like those lovely Bronte Sisters: "It was the only house on the moors and it was creepy. Beautiful and creepy. Cathy and I fell in love, which was beautiful and creepy. One day, she was annoyed and the next day she was dead of fever, which made her beautiful, though no less creepy. I mourned her as only I, Heathcliff, could mourn her, beautifully and creepily. And in death she hounded me to mine. Which is, you guessed it..." I suppose Goodnight Moon is out of the question because it might interest the little darling in science or bears or something - but listen, I have one important word for the maker of these terrifying pajamas: headbands.

A bazillion years ago, headbands became an overnight sensation. I can't recall seeing them on the street, but I can't remember if I'm wearing shoes, so that's no certain indicator. Anyway, suddenly, everywhere a person turned, there floated the smiling face of Olivia Newton John sporting a headband and warbling Let's Get Physical, which was hugely mortifying. If you had a pulse. I immediately understood what had happened: a small group of people in a closed environment had one stupid thought and because of the pressurized environment it blew up and made a giant, fashionable mess. Headbands would not have happened if even one person - one person! - had said in a stern voice, "You all look stupid. Cut that shit out and get back to work. Those thighs aren't going to firm themselves."

This has got to be said: Crazy person - and I mean that in the nicest, least judgmental and not at all spitting-mad manner - Crazy person, despite your best intentions and despite what you think you see, your children look like the best dressed Klansmen on the whole fashionably doomed Templar crusade. Burn these terrible costumes - not on Iman's front lawn, mind you, no matter what she's peddling at Target. Resist the impulse. I can tell you feel it! Get rid of these hateful things, plunk your kids into some soft, pastel footie pajamas and read them some motherfucking Winnie the Pooh. Save your children a lifetime of wishing YOU would get therapy.

Don't Go Out the Back Door

Some months ago.

Miss Sasha: We're having 'Panky christened in August.
Tata: In a church? Like, splashy-splashy, scrub off the original sin?
Miss Sasha: Yes, and then we're having a luau at Dad's house.
Tata: You're serving roast pig to old Jews on a Catholic occasion and setting it to soothing hula music?
Miss Sasha: When you put it that way...
Tata: Lightning's bound to strike. I'll go roller skate under an antenna in some other town.

Later.

Daria: You're going.
Tata: I'm not going.
Daria: You're going.
Tata: Nope. Not going!

Also.

Tata: Dude, I can't go.
Minstrel Boy: It ain't about you. Zip yer lip and go.
Tata: Thanks for setting me straight, cowboy - as straight as I get, anyhow.
MB: Well, gotta mosey off into the sunset, fight crime and mix metaphors. Burr whisk, away!

Later.

Daria: You're going.
Tata: Maybe.
Daria: You're going.
Tata: Maybe. Man, I'm sick of talking about this.

After that.

Tata: I cannot in good conscience spend my whole week fighting the homophobic and anti-choice rhetoric and violence of the church and show up on Sunday in a grass skirt. Hey, did you know I could say the words in good conscience without laughing hysterically?
Miss Sasha: Fine. Wear your coconut bra to the party. I know you have one.

Thursday.

Miss Sasha: I have potentially upsetting news.
Tata: I'm still the black sheep of an increasingly angry family?
Miss Sasha: My biological father's coming on Sunday.
Tata: Who knew that black sheep came blacker? Because there's one now.

Saturday.

Tata: I thought you were staying in Cape Cod and coping with a plumbing disaster.
Mom: If he goes to the christening tomorrow I'm not going.
Tata: Have you made this declaration to Miss Sasha?
Mom: Not yet. If I call now it'll ruin dinner.
Tata: ...Whereas if you wait, you can wreck her entire evening! I'll have to try that next time.



You will no doubt be pleased to hear that no one was killed in the baptizing of this baby.

Time To Let It Grow

If I hadn't recently started taking bellydancing lessons I might not have noticed this right away. The teacher lives in the house directly behind me as I pointed my camera toward the town's main drag. Many streets in this town look just like this: large, old houses and snug, old Cape Cods, surrounded by trees and plants. A large number of the houses were built by the same builders in the early twentieth century. My great-grandfather bought a house for his wife and seven children eight blocks away in 1917. The trees are an important part of the character of the town, which prides itself on being a walking community: you can walk to the store, to a restaurant, to buy a snow shovel. A few years ago, the Department of Public Works began doing something mysterious: cutting off the tops of healthy trees and leaving fifteen or twenty foot stumps. Two avenues over, there's a block that looks like totem pole training school.

One day, I drove past the teacher's house and saw a Department of Public Works crew had taken the treetop of the tree on the corner and started hacking asymetrically at the next one. I was horrified but not as horrified as the teacher and her family, who were traumatized. After some thought, I proposed the homeowners turn that one tall stump on the corner into art supplies by inviting woodworking sculptors to make something of it. They'd have to wait a year for the wood to dry, but it could be done. As you can see, surprises were in store.

If this story sounds confused time-wise, there might be a good reason for that: I was frantically working on other things. Each time a treetop came off it was after crews departed, apparently finished, but returned. On Thursday as I drove home from work I saw five crew trucks and a large crew taking down the second and third trees. I had my digital camera with me but I was so busy fighting the urge to turn a chainsaw on a chainsaw-wielding lunkhead it didn't occur to me to menace same with a camera. So: that's totally my fault. I'll try to remember next time to calmly threaten cobags with Kodaks, their natural enemies. The moment passed, but there's one important thing to remember: the trucks weren't from the Department of Public Works. They were from a private contractor, the trees were on town land and were town property.

Sometimes the town takes down a tree when it interferes with the electric lines, but these were no different from trees anywhere in town in that the had grown up around the wires. So what's to stop Public Works from deforesting the entire town? This drives my brother-in-law Dan crazy. He's a landscape architect. Every time I tell him the Department of Public Works is up to something he gets a weary look in his eye like he's retired from crimefighting, hung up his tights and it's someone else's turn. He says the last tree the crews cut has a hollow, round spot, which made me wonder if they'd started with the wrong tree and kept going. He says, "The trees must have been a hazard of some kind, right?" I'm so mad about this Dan's in grave danger of explaining to a judge why I should be denied bail.

When I took these pictures yesterday the sunlight was so bright I couldn't see the pictures I took. I was guessing. The teacher turned into her driveway as I stood there, staring at electrical wires and wondering what the camera saw. She was shocked to see the fourth tree apparently cut in half after she left the house that morning. My sister says a consultant working for the Department of Public Works gets paid to decide to take down trees and if there's no deciding there's no job. That may or may not be the case. The town has a committee that makes decisions about trees. Yesterday, that group's website was down.

There may be a perfectly rational explanation for what's happened here. I'd like to hear it. The homeowners would like to hear it, too.

Want To Be She May Be

This commercial warms my icy heart, combining as it improbably does my loves beee-YOO-teeful mermaids and totally spotless bathrooms.


Bless my buttons, so old am I I only saw color TV at Grandma's house until I was in high school. Imagine (or remember) what Adam West looked like in gray tights! Black and white left a little too much to the imagination. Even so, every graytone commercial for Weeki Wachee looked like a lightning bolt from the blue.

In 1946, Newton Perry, a former U.S. Navy man who trained Navy Frogmen to swim underwater in World War II, scouted out Weeki Wachee as a good site for a new business. At the time, U.S. 19 was a small two-lane road. All the other roads were dirt; there were no gas stations, no groceries, and no movie theaters. More alligators and black bears lived in the area than humans.

The spring was full of old rusted refrigerators and abandoned cars. The junk was cleared out and Newt experimented with underwater breathing hoses and invented a method of breathing underwater from a free-flowing air hose supplying oxygen from an air compressor, rather than from a tank strapped onto the back. With the air hose, humans could give the appearance of thriving twenty feet underwater with no breathing apparatus. An 18-seat theater was built into the limestone, submerged six feet below the surface of the spring, so viewers could look right into the natural beauty of the ancient spring.

Newt scouted out pretty girls and trained them to swim with air hoses and smile at the same time. He taught them to drink Grapette, a carbonated beverage, eat bananas underwater and do aquatic ballets. He put a sign out on U.S. 19: WEEKI WACHEE.

The first show at the Weeki Wachee Springs underwater theater opened on October 13, 1947 - the same day that Kukla, Fran and Ollie first aired on that newfangled invention called television, and one day before Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. The mermaids performed synchronized ballet moves underwater while breathing through the air hoses hidden in the scenery.

In those days, cars were few. When the girls heard a car coming, they ran to the road in their bathing suits to beckon drivers into the parking lot, just like sirens of ancient lore lured sailors to their sides. Then they jumped into the spring to perform.

Flying Spaghetti Monster, I was probably two or three when I realized the most glamorous human beings on earth were wearing spangled costumes and sucking oxygen out of tubes 19 feet below the surface! The only way they could possibly be more miraculously fantaaaaaastic would be if they spent their days off waterskiing in tiara'd pyramids, like these ladies from Los Angeles, who are so glamorous you could just pet them all day. Some of us probably have.

Alas, my bathroom could be cleaner.

Is Wrong With You Is Wrong With Me

Yesterday, through an absolutely unreproducible series of circumstances, Daria and I missed the funeral. Auntie InExcelsisDeo and her daughter Monday drove like Jehu and skidded to a halt in the Jewish Cemetery, dressed like they were going to the beach. Monday was wearing her sister Sandy's clothes, so I hope the word JUICY wasn't printed across her butt. We were all caught flat-footed by the timing of the ceremony. I tried to remain calm in the face of this potentially disastrous morning, but Daria took a somewhat different approach, and by approach, I mean she approached a few drive-thrus.

Yesterday, Daria called me six times that I know of because checking my messages seems a little perilous right now. I'm not so great with the phone, while Daria's will one day graft itself to her ear. Anyway, after lunch, Daria called to tell me she'd gathered her wits and her recycling, her drycleaning and her children, and rolled out the giant Ford Excoriator. First, she stopped at Taco Bell for her middle child Sandro. There, she couldn't decide what she wanted, if she wanted anything, so she ordered a Mexican pizza, a crunchy gordito and something else shiny. After letting go of the drycleaning and the recycling, Daria hit the McDonald's to pick up chicken nuggets for tiny Fifi and couldn't decide between an Angus Third Pounder and a chicken sandwich. Because, you know, because!

Tata: Put three of those things in your freezer immediately and throw one away.
Daria: I'll eat something and Tyler will eat the rest when he gets home.
Tata: I do not have to tell you that some things do not improve with age, and hello! Didn't you two just spend about a year on NutriSystem?
Daria: Well, yes. But three more and I can start my Ph.Diet. So yeah, I'm not good with the letting go of stuff.

Sometimes, the subconscious serves it up piping hot, with pickles, to go. If I hadn't been at work I might've been wandering around a parking lot at Wendy's.

And Shouting Out Rude Names

After a brief vacation, hiking in the Great Outdoors, Johnny, our Southwest Bureau Chief reports:

Unintended side effect of trip: work feels like an unforgivably criminal waste of human potential. I'm positive that I am the only person who has ever felt this way. Really. You betcha.

Image: Johnny, used courtesy of the artist, who has a great future ahead of him illustrating staff meetings.

Less than an hour later, Johnny wrote to say that since the hospital in which he labored was bought yesterday by a Christian healthcare conglomerate anxious to remove abortion from the list of possible services, perhaps updating the old resume was an excellent use of time.

"Don't worry," I said, "Art therapy is on the way!"

From Sharkey, who shares the Poor Impulsive's need to entertain himself with art and fast, comes Today and Tomorrow - molto interesante! - and this wild idea:

‘Passive Aggressive Anger Release Machine’ is an interactive sculpture by Yarisal and Kublitz. Experience the most satisfying feeling when a piece of China breaks into million pieces . All you have to do is insert a coin, and a piece of China will Slowly move forwards and fall into the bottom of the machine, breaking, and leaving you happy and relieved of anger.

[Sic, sic, sic.] My favorite thing about that image is the chalkboard to the right and the words Canadian food.

You see, art school is not just for dirty hippies. No, it takes real talent and insight into human nature to divine that somewhere a Christian healthcare conglomerate is buying up hospitals and women are going to die, which might create just a little stress on the staff. Inserting a coin and smashing a Chinese kitty into a million easily contained pieces might help, but I'd go for the positively tragic romantic couple figurine. Hope the condom didn't break for the little lovers! Just add money and schadenfreude and someone's going to crash.

You Know I'll Be There

It's Tuesday, 100 degrees and Sharkey is predictable.

Tata: Golfing?
Sharkey: Tonight, after work.
Tata: Daria says your going to play golf is the funniest thing she's heard in years.
Sharkey: What can I say, I'm a funny guy. Tell her I appreciate her concern for my wellbeing.
Tata: She's got pneumonia so you'll be pleased to hear the laughter almost killed her.
Sharkey: You're right, that IS funny.

Around Your Old Address

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
— G. K. Chesterton

When one spends a great deal of time with a chef one doesn't so much lose one's waistline as develop a circumference. I am eager to get moving. Thus, last weekend, Pete and I conquered household tasks at his place together and separately, and with vigor. I went out and worked on the garden, which was reassuring. While I had my hands in dirt I was in no way making and eating exotic sandwiches. This reminds me: jazz, Georg and I and a dozen or so of our friends used to go camping and during the few hours between I Meant To Do That and When Does the Bar Open?, we played a glamorous game called I Am A Sandwich. It was like Twenty Questions, except with lettuce and tomatoes, and everyone's goal was to get over on the group with some obscure cheesy goodness. Speaking of tomatoes, I staked up the tomato plants with bamboo poles and zip ties, in anticipation of the day when fresh mozzarella and basil solve the problem of pomodoro prosperity.

One of my least favorite tasks is transplanting and tying up the bean plants. Pete had sowed the seeds generously, so I had to spread out my little hostages and wrapped a bit of cotton string around each. I tied the other end to a line stretching across each row. Beanstalks, as every child knows, climb to the firmament, though most stop after about three feet and seldom cost a cow. I transplanted my fingers to the bone but I only tied up about one-third of my leafy captives before moving on to other tasks like mulching, food prep and plotting the cocktail hour. You get just one 5 p.m. each day, and gin isn't going to drink itself!

Yesterday was the anniversary of Steve Gilliard's passing, and at the Group News Blog, you will find heartfelt laments. I can't add to that, and if I could, what would it bring into being? At lunchtime, I drove to Home Depot in glorious sunshine, bought four bags of shredded pine bark and after work, put down mulch with Gilly in mind. I used to go dancing when someone died because grief needs a place to go and we can't let it settle or it stays. Likewise, the house we care for now was the place Pete's family moved when his mother died, and grief settled in. Painting, gardening, sewing seeds and making repairs in anticipation of life celebrates what we had and what we will. So for Gilly, I put pine bark around a bed of decorative and fruit trees. In ways we are still learning, he was so very wise.

Trip It Was Back Then

The Systems Guy has known me for over a decade. He appears at the doorway of my cubicle today to do some hour-long higher form of magic, during which my workday comes to a close. He has come to our office with two new assistants. He tells me his last assistant spent ten minutes talking with me and developed an embarrassing crush. I tell the Systems Guy I'm crush-proof, but I still have to leave and my stuff is on the other side of him.

Tata: I bicycled to work. See?
SG: That's a bicycle helmet?
Tata: Yup, and that's my basket.
SG: I just thought you were special.
Tata: Special or Special? Because I am special.
SG: Well, Special, obviously and specially padded.
Tata: Co-workers! Co-workers! Systems Guy thinks my job is so stressful I might get a concussion sitting at my desk.
Co-workers: We kind of have a betting pool. So: yeah.

We Know You, They Know Me

I've been a little tense lately. Yesterday at the family store, I re-wrapped a wedding gift twice because I kept tearing the double-thick formal paper when I folded hospital corners with extreme prejudice. Though Pete manned the register at the toy store while I womanned the till in the gift shop and we love working together, it was a long day. After work, we bicycled to my house, drove to his, gently wedged a tree into my trunk and planted it in Mom's backyard two towns away. By the time we got home, leftover Chinese under one arm, we were exhausted, determined and scheming a scheme. As we'd bicycled to the stores in the morning, I was carrying so much weight in my messenger bag I could barely breathe, let alone pedal, and damn it, I was not doing that again.

You know that moment when you get over yourself in a big way? It's strange, really. You're marching down life's highway in fetching Ferragamos with your dogs barking for ages and finally - finally - you think 'Hey, maybe Adidas and sweat socks wouldn't cut out my still-beating heart and who the fuck invented pantyhose anyhow, the Marquis de Sade?' You reluctantly switch to flats and learn to live without podiatric agony. The sun comes out and angels sing. Even so, you look back and wonder what took you so long.

When I couldn't breathe - and thus could hardly utter topical dirty words - suddenly I was completely, totally over my reluctance to put a basket on my bicycle.

A Boy And His Cat

This morning, we ran errands. While Pete picked up bagels, I stood on a one-way street and epoxied a finger puppet to my car's antenna. Pete was and remains skeptical, but I have every confidence that in the seas of look-alike white cars and gray cars through which I sail to purchase my elitist arugula, which until recently was a peasant lettuce, I will easily navigate to my own white car now that I've glued a five-inch irridescent grasshopper to the antenna. It might've been more fun to affix gold-painted macaroni to the roof but imagine the glare. By the same token, I dare you to NOT imagine me pedaling around town with a megaphone, instructing people to surrender Dorothy. As you can see here, Drusy was very helpful as Pete assembled the basket.

Lovely Topaz basked in the sun during all the commotion, which I understood because I made the mistake of putting down the camera and nodding off for two hours. The day was gorgeous. We'd gone walking around Lake Carnegie and sat on a lock in lazy afternoon sunlight. We drank our Joint Juices and read all the plaques. We stopped at a farmer's market wedged into a tiny house on Princeton's Nassau Street and picked brussell sprouts and lemons for grilling. By the time we got home, I could barely hold the camera.

Then we took lazy catnaps in golden afternoon light.

Women Stand Around

Sometimes, I forget to shut up. My office is populated by people of all stripes over the voting age. One is very young and gives off the factory scent of New Co-Worker.

Tata: Whatcha doin'?
Kim: Poking holes in a plastic lid with a bendy plastic fork.
Tata: Wouldn't you enjoy using scissors?
Kim: I'd have to clean the scissors.
Tata: That's vandalizing ancient state property! You'll use those scissors rust and all, young lady.
Kim: What's for lunch?
Tata: Soup, though today I crave grilled cheese.
Kim: They make grilled cheese at the student center.
Tata: I avoid going over there. I meet people I'd prefer not to. Dated the whole town, you know.
Kim: You could make grilled cheese in the microwave.
Tata: I...no.
Kim: But if you went across the street you could get one of those delicious cookies at Au Bon Pain.
Tata: I bake my own at home and so could you.
Kim: Our oven died kind of a slow death and we never replaced it. It was from the sixties.
Tata: So am I. Do you have a toaster oven?
Kim: No.
Tata: What?
Kim: Sometimes I boil something on the stove.
Tata: How does your family cook?
Kim: We don't.
Tata: (Nervous now) I'm sorry, what do you eat?
Kim: Microwaveable stuff and takeout.
Tata: That's a very expensive way to live.

Was that MY mouth? Is it finally SHUT?

Kim: Sometimes my dad makes salads. I guess.
Tata: Salads are delicious. You can use all kinds of vegetables.
Kim: I don't really like vegetables.

Damn it, I'm about to talk again. I can tell!

Tata: They're so easy to prepare!
Kim: Like, what? Broccoli or asparagus? I had them once. I wouldn't recommend them.

The hits just keep on coming!

Tata: You had broccoli once?
Kim: I hope my dad's home tonight so he can help me make a salad for tomorrow's picnic.

I snap. Not only do I snap, I really snap. I forget this is my co-worker I see every day and I draw breath to ask why in glamorous tarnation a college graduate needs assistance tearing lettuce when suddenly the microwave beeps and my soup within steams. The spell is broken and I exhale. She is uncrushed. Turning, I retrieve my soup and promise myself I will never again mention food to this person.

Then I eat soup filled with delicious carrots, celery, broccoli, tomatoes, fennel and onions. Whew! That was close.

I And Bragger And Junior Lee

The other day, I was walking across campus at the unnamed university and passed two students climbing a tree. They were talking about climbing the tree. I thought, 'If you were cats, I'd open a can of tuna.'

This Is For the Discotheque

Saturday afternoon, I found my sister Corinne staring at the shelves in the family toy store, conversing with a teenager whose resemblance to the fair Georg was startling. The teenager was an acquaintance of Corinne's, which was news to me. The question at hand: birthday party, present, another teenage girl nobody really knew well. Suggest a gift. Ready....go. I made a long, long list.

Block of Velveeta. Dryer lint. A pineapple. A bag of cat litter. All the colors of PlayDoh conveniently pre-mixed, which would save lots of time. Pot pourri and a broom - for parades. Like on Fractured Fairy Tales. Safety matches. You could need those! A snow shovel. It's, like, an investment. For an hour, I babbled about gifts because that's what stores are for when I'm in them. The whole time I was thinking about this Barry and Levon bit, because the best gift I ever got was in three huge Korvette's bags: enough boxes to make 240 lbs. of banana pudding.

Aw yeah.

Some things, kids have got to discover for themselves.

Days Are Lit Like Everyone

Pete and I have had a tough time remembering whose shoes are whose, let alone remembering to go outside and pad back in with pictures and shoes on our paws. Such pressure! It's so silly to fret when sun dapples our afternoons and yellow pollen coats our cars, which means that spring in the air and a rising prices at the pump turn a middle aged lady's fancy to hoofing it to work. And hoof it, I do! I should start carrying a camera, shouldn't I? I certainly thought so this morning, as I loped across the Albany Street Bridge over a Raritan River so smooth a single duck's paddling strokes rippled gently from center and side to side. So let's talk about space.

Our model is some sort of reality TV personality. Please don't tell me who because I promise not to care. No, what's important here is that our model's spine looks like a spiral staircase and her toes could only be closer together if they were webbed. Women: I'm about to say something important. This momentousness may never happen again so please take note of both the date and what follows. Here goes: nothing says, "Infantilize me!" like standing around pigeon-toed and helpless. No man with a pulse and a say-so about your raise will take you seriously if you think this is an excellent posture to work, supermodel, work in your workplace, as in life. Strike this pose and you are toast, professionally.

It doesn't matter if you agree with me. It doesn't matter if you don't like it. You will not be respected if you make yourself look feeble. Don't bother exclaiming, "That's how the models all stand now!" Despite our darling's musculature, her feet make her look like a 98-pound weakling, unable to get out of even her own way, let alone up a flight of stairs or down to business.

Women, Miss Lynda Carter knew something thirty years ago working femmes may or may not know now: if you're going to bump up against big boys you'd better take up some space. Think I'm kidding? Let's experiment:

1. Sit in a booth with three male persons. No matter how big you are or how small they are, the menfolk will slouch, knees wide. If you cross your legs they will spread out wider. It doesn't matter if these are your brothers, cousins or James Brown's horn section; they will assume you are much smaller than you are, and the space under the table belongs to them.

2. Walk down a hallway where you know men will be walking in the opposite direction. Pretend for a moment you're fully human and walk straight ahead. When a man walks dead into you and looks surprised, say, "Excuse you" and walk on. Another man will thump into you. It's as if you're only visible to special people, possibly with night vision goggles. Try not to act shocked. Back in film school, you saw Delicatessen, and somewhere deep down you know you're edible.

echidne is in a bit of a mood, and as a no-wave feminist, I understand. Probably. My parents were feminists. My daughter is post-post-feminist. It's all so very over in a time when girls grow up and skip off to corporate jobs without a moment's thought as to what happened to both allow and force them to do so. In fact, we live in a time of enormously unexamined behavior, and for the most part, it's up to each of us to give ourselves a vigorous look-see. Though I'm no expert at anything other than looking or seeing, I'll help you get started. Stand up straight, shoulders back. Plant your feet parallel about shoulder width apart. Wear shoes that make you able and not unable. You've got to get some ground and stand it. Woman, take up some space.

Transmit the Message To the Receiver

My brain is full of soda.

Tata: Is there a special tool for painting staircase spindles?
Man: Besides paint brushes? Why are you asking me this?
Tata: Someone has to answer all my questions. Today, I have chosen you.
Man: I have a meeting, and a question: who are you?
Tata: Sheesh, even I know that.

Questions, questions...

Tata: Pete, what would happen if you replaced sandbox sand with granulated garlic?
Pete: Terrible burns.
Tata: Would it still be funny?
Pete: Oh yeah.

...all day with the questions.

Tata: Has Daria told you she calls me to discuss poop so I'll yak?
Todd: I'm totally going to remember that.
Tata: I'd be disappointed if you didn't.
Todd: To get you to chuck over the phone...priceless.
Tata: I've got Ziploc bags and postage. I'll mail you a souvenir.
Todd: Oh yeah, "Hey Todd, what'd you get for your birthday?" "Ahhh, I got some puke."
Tata: But it's birthday puke. That makes it SPECIAL!
Todd: When you're right, you're right.

The Din Of Our Rice Crispies

I. I am a genius!

We dismantled Dad's kitchen and I ended up with a bigass container of dried black beans; by bigass, I mean a 7-quart Sysco restaurant container, and by beans, I mean of indeterminate age and/or magical power. For many long months, I stared at this container and waited for inspiration, which means breath of the gods and there's just not enough Gas-Ex, thank you. One day, a plan came to me. Pete laughed out loud, uncertain I'd do it. Two nights ago, we filled a quart bag with beans and went for a walk. The plan:

1. On a rainy night, fling beans near chain link fences everywhere.
2. Wait.
3. Watch out for falling giants.

The possible results:
1. Planting.
2. Composting.
3. Feeding outdoor critters.

We enjoyed furtively peppering lawns, alleys, empty planters and scrubby gardens with prospective beanstalks, which process became more entertaining the closer we walked to the center of town and spectators. No one asked us what we were doing. No one said, "You've literally beaned me." No. People watched as Pete and I walked by and I exhorted our little legumes to grow toward the sun, be free, be free! This public art project memorializing my father is called the Beany Benediction.

No cows will be harmed in the making of it.

II. I am an idiot!

As we prepared dinner last night, Pete asked if there might be garlic in my kitchen. This request surprised me. "I'm fresh out of fresh but I've got chopped, freeze-dried and a metric buttload of granulated. When I acquire Garlic In A Tube, I shall rule the Alium World. Mwah hah hah!" I cackled.

Pete sniffed the chopped and made a face. Pete stared at enough granulated garlic to temper the effects of beach erosion. Pete grabbed a freeze-dried chip slice and tossed it into his mouth. Five. Four. Three. Two -

Tata: What's the matter with you?
Pete: That was disgusting! Omigod -

And even though I watched him scrape the insides of his mouth with his fingernails I popped a freeze-dried slice of garlic into my mouth.

Tata: I'm not certain but my teeth may be on fire.

I sat on a chair in my kitchen, evidently waiting for the return of either common sense or blood to my extremities, as garlic still in my mouth continued hydrating. At no time did it occur to me to lean three inches to my left and spit out the tiny flaming tidbits singeing my tastebuds. For the rest of the evening, Pete and I randomly burst out laughing and moved a few inches further from each other. This morning, I woke up and the first thing I smelled was my own rank breath.

At work, I handed out emergency Altoids and promised I'd never do it again.

No More Falsehoods Or Derisions

It's an ad. Ignore that. See the kind of beauty that leaves me breathless.

And Murmur Vague Obscenities

Part I.
Part II. Electric Boogaloo

Part III. The Embarkening

The week before we took a cab to Newark Pointless Security Airport, Siobhan and I studied the regulations and packed. I borrowed half of Daria's summer wardrobe because she wouldn't need it here in winter. We bought tiny bottles of expensive products and became convinced that Halliburton quietly cornered the sample size shampoo market. There can be no other reason why Customs cares about 4 oz. tubes of curl defining pomade when that whole Formulate A Bomb On Board The Plane process was demonstrated to be impossible YEARS AGO. Later, I spent a week losing the battle with frizz.

Also that week: I was so tense my shoulders were glued to my ears. I didn't want to go! I wanted to be on the boat but I didn't want to travel there! Anyway, at about this same point of near hysteria, I had a fine talk with Me about ridiculous overeating.

Tata: Hey! HEY! WHAT are you DOING?
Tata: Uh...mmmmph mmmmumph mummph...nothing!
Tata: Put that down! You're not even hungry.
Tata: I'm not what? Of course, I'm hungry.
Tata: No, you're nervous.
Tata: Uh...mmmmph mmmmumph mummph...What are you talking about?
Tata: I mean it! Put that DOWN!
Tata: Okay! Okay! What is your problem?
Tata: I'll tell you what my problem is: your inexplicable fat ass, that's what!
Tata: Bite me. I have a fabulous ass!
Tata: Really?
Tata: Yep.
Tata: Let's go look.
Tata: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGH!
Tata: Now the healing can begin...

I put down the plate and went back to the exercise cycle. It can be tempting when traveling to forget one's newfound resolution. On the day we traveled - Saturday - I discovered that I'm no better at flying than I have ever been, and once we got to the hotel in Miami, boat-related parties and events were planned. At a party, where most all I could do was marvel that I was standing outside in a t-shirt staring at palm trees, I also located the hotel's gym. I hate gyms. But there it was, taunting me. The next morning, I sat my erstwhile fabulous ass on an exercise bicycle and pedalled for all I was worth. Since the bicycle was in the back of a room without the usual wall of horrifying mirrors and nobody paid the slightest attention to my presence, I actually enjoyed the whole thing. It was a revelation. That day - Sunday - we braced ourselves for the ordeal of going through Customs, since Newark had been an ordeal, but Port Miami wasn't. Whooosh! Hundreds of our fellow passengers were through so fast I turned around, blinking. What?

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I used the various exercise cycle types on the boat. At first, I avoided the mirrors and eye contact with other people because I was afraid they were judging me. Later, I avoided the mirrors and eye contact with other people because I didn't give a damn what they thought. That's a giant step forward. See? A bad attitude can represent progress!

Also on Monday afternoon, Siobhan said something like, "Blah blah blah after I pushed the skinny twigs off the jogging track..." which I only half-heard because she's always assaulting someone and after a while it's all a blur.

Tata: DID YOU SAY 'JOGGING TRACK'?

After dinner Monday night, I took the elevator to the top of the boat and walked 15 1/10-mile laps. Then we saw that Vanity Project show that took the wind out of my sails. Tuesday, I woke up with a different plan in mind, but we went to Grand Cayman, then I cycled, we had dinner, then I walked. Wednesday, I had an idea that was both genius and appallingly stupid. Isn't it funny how that happens?

I was eating fresh fruit and salads with every meal, avoiding the buffets when I could and skipping dessert entirely unless it was more fruit. For the first time in ages, I finished a book, started another and finished that. I was getting just enough sunlight to turn my skin a fetching golden brown. Then I declared that for the rest of the cruise I'd only wear shoes to the formal dining room and to the gym. It was genius! I hate shoes! So I walked 17 laps Wednesday morning, bicycled in the afternoon and walked barefoot on the jogging track that night.

During the day, the jogging track was a sunny, social place where people ran, walked, lay on deck chairs and read books. The warm sea air felt fresh on the skin, and only lightly breezy. At night, the feeling was totally different. Every night, the boat sailed at an impressive clip. Up at the top, the wind rushed over the higher surfaces with some force and I walked half of each lap with the wind and half against it. On the first night, the wind grabbed my left foot and I wondered for a half-second if I might go over the side. Rather than discouraging me, this made me mad.

Think you can scare me, do ya? Now, that right there is a sign of genius.

The next night, potheads lighting up where they wouldn't be on camera gave me the Evil Eye each time around the track. That didn't scare me either. Then Wednesday night, I walked barefoot, with the idea that - pffft! - screw it, I'm walking. About lap 16, I felt like there was dirt under my feet that didn't come off. A lap later, I tried scraping it off. A lap after that, I had to quit. The jogging track had tiny metal bits embedded in the finish and they'd cut pinholes in the soles of my feet. Naturally, I had to find Siobhan immediately and declare my genius.

I don't remember how, but I spent some part of Wednesday evening with my feet in the pool and a drink in my hand. Later, at karaoke again, I was so appalled by those California housewives' rendition of Super Freak I curled up into one of those positions normal adults don't assume in public. When Youlia our waitress appeared, I had one foot on the table, one leg hooked under my hips and, since it was Pajama Night, a hideous red sheer polyester robe falling everywhere in a cascade of terrifying ruffles. I apologized for being folded in thirds. Then switched to gin in pint glasses.

The next day: walking, cycling, walking. Feet in pool, drinks in hand, Siobhan and I saw a band called Great Big Sea that was loads of fun. I put my time on the boat to good use. I read, changed my diet, exercised more and got some sun. I napped every afternoon and disengaged from politics for a while. I came back feeling healthier and stronger than I have in ages.

First one making an 'Odette to society' joke gets a green manicure to the kisser.

On Tuesday, Siobhan and I returned to our cabin and found this terrifying creature on the edge of my bed. Note its proximity to our balcony door! We screamed!

Tata: Get back! It could be feral!
Siobhan: What do we feed it? Do you have any beer?
Tata: Beer will not protect us from this beast.
Siobhan: I'll get my camera while you disable the thing.
Tata: Thanks, Marlon Perkins. I'll just do that.

As we later discovered, that was only the first wave of the towel animal assault.

Be Real, Got To Be

Part I.

II. Wednesday-ish

The motion of the boat is both amusing and reassuring. At first, I wondered if Sunday night’s dinner was going down. Then I wondered if it might come back up. Then we started drinking, which had the unexpected side effect of making unsteadiness on my feet relatively normal.

On Sunday, we met Youlia, our waitress. She might be 22, speaks four languages and hails from Kiev. She’s obviously very bright. She suggested I buy beer by the bucket. I considered making out a will and leaving her my jewelry but Monday night, I didn’t order the bucket of beer. No, as Siobhan and I annoyed a random German kid and a Christian family during Steven Page’s Vanity Project show, I nursed a beer I would have preferred smashing over the sound man’s head. After an hour of soul-crushing boredom, I allowed as how the Vanity Project show had been a bland aggregation of mid-tempo songs about agonizing breakups unfolding in slo-mo and never actually concluding. The German got up in a huff and stomped off. We assumed it was over between us and him, or for that matter anyone offended by my hugely charitable critique.

The little theater was packed but emptied. We stayed, moved closer to the stage by joining a mother-son pair we’d met at lunchtime We understood who we were dealing with when he said he lived in Georgia but once made a pilgrimage to Kevin Smith’s comic book store. She ranged between pleasant company and socially toxic at unexpected intervals. She made a fried chicken and watermelon joke that left me positively speechless, so I turned my attention to ambushing a waiter since there was no way for us to leave. We were comfortably seated in a cushioned round booth while around us hundreds of people pressed body to body, waiting for the next show. When I turned back to Siobhan, she appeared to be mouthing words that made no sound. The son, somewhat aware of our shock, said, “Now, Mom, people don’t say those things anymore.”

The show we were waiting for was both simple and complicated: BNL’s Steven Page and Harvey Danger’s Sean Nelson presented the songs of Paul McCartney. Siobhan and I had seen Sean Nelson earlier. He is a rumpled giant whose hair makes him even taller. He looked like a Far Side character wandered into the bar, was taking offense at something said by the piano, and I don’t mean near it.

I did not at all mind Page and Nelson talking about how they as young musicians suffered for their love of McCartney. The stories were vastly more interesting than the songs. Siobhan and I both enjoyed hearing Let ‘Em In and Just Another Day, but it was late by then. Enough people had lost interest that I could see an almost clear path to the door and did not doubt my ability to clear the rest of it, so we went. It was after midnight and we had a 7:15 wake up call, which I assure you is always an authentic, crappy experience.

It is worth noting that the television in our room has ABC, NBC, CBS, Discovery, and TNT subtitled in Spanish. In the afternoons, I can indeed catch a few minutes of All My Children before I konk out but even that does not come without an undercurrent of extreme weirdness: these channels come from Colorado. They’re two hours earlier than Eastern Standard Time and they warn constantly of blizzards and 58 degrees and pleasant. I can’t tell what time it is or if I need mittens to step onto the balcony. I have mixed feelings about this, knowing that Pete shivers in the pitched gray of New Jersey while I’m slathering goo on sunburn. This, like everything else about the trip, has been for me a sharp lesson in whom I’m oppressing and how. Last night, a drunken woman at the next table in the lower level formal dining room who kept shouting, “I know what I’m saying! Sweet poontang! Poon-TANG! Poon-TANG!” Boy, did I want to oppress her. Tonight, another table full of drunks held a symposium on their relative anatomical strengths at the same improbable volume, causing Siobhan and I to swear off the lower level dining room for the remaining duration of our journey, but not before the waiters put on a dance extravaganza we could not actually see. This was fine by us until one of the drunks turned to our waiter, a dignified, professional waiter of some years who happened to be black, and slurred, “Aren’t you going to dance?” Yes, I wanted to oppress that asshole with a baseball bat.

It’s another story when we get off the boat Tuesday in bathing suits to lie on the beach on Grand Cayman. I awoke to find the Disney Magic, taller than anything I could see on the island, parked about 150 yards outside my bedroom window, two more cruise ships further away and, as I discovered later, three more on the ship’s other side. They reminded me of cattle, so I named the boats Matilda, Martha, Bessie, Bertha, Edna, Enid and Cowpurnia. Then I went to breakfast, because it’s hard to sunbathe glamorously on an empty stomach unless you’re a famous anorexic.

Siobhan and I took the water taxi, mysteriously called a tender, to the shore, where we were herded into a caged room plainly decorated by Albert Speer during his seldom-documented tropical period. Then we were herded to an outdoor concrete bus stop thing, after which we were marched to a parking lot. By this time, I expected cocktails by I. G. Farben, but we stuffed ourselves onto small, exotic buses. A bored woman in an ill-fitting uniform drove us through a traffic pattern that put Rube Goldberg to shame to a stretch of highway lined with evidence that every major conglomerate owned a piece of Grand Cayman, and no scrap of property was too scrubby to be left for the people who lived there. At least, this was my impression as we passed the Blockbuster Video, Subway, Quiznos, KFC, McDonald’s, Burger King, pre-fab malls and a slew of familiar chain hotels. After we disembarked, we were herded to a small section of beach with deck chairs and left to our own devices for several hours, during which Siobhan took odds on the domestic dispute two rows over. Yes, the beach was pretty. Yes, the water was gorgeous. Yes, we turned interesting colors on a Caribbean beach, but the whole thing is and was a shamefaced lie, and it was harder to talk to our bus driver when at 10 a.m. we passed smashed tourists hanging from every window and deck of Margaritaville and The Hard Rock Café. It’s either Percy or Geertz who said that our presence as tourists changes the place, and though I knew that, I was ashamed of my complicity in the theft of this island from its people, not to mention two KFCs within a shitty one-mile stretch. Naturally, I bought Pete a t-shirt so we never have to go back.

Siobhan waves goodbye to an island that's already lost.

The show the night before and the episode on Grand Cayman convinced me that I was done going along to get along, and from then on, I went my own way – often on the jogging track. And it went pretty well until I went my own way barefoot.

Part III.

Stories Are Told, Rumors Are Started

This morning, I awoke in my bed, staring up at tiny Topaz staring down at me from atop a set of old stage flats that passes for the headboard of my bed. This would have been more remarkable if I had known how she came to be seven feet straight up above my head. Later, I saw her climb hand over kitty hand to the top, which explains why in a week Topaz looks fitter. Thus, my first thought this morning was, 'Holy crap, how'd she get there?' and my second was about canned tuna.

"But Ta," you're saying, "Where've you been?" Ah! This strange story may take a bit of telling. I wrote some notes. Join me in a bit of fresh time travel, won't you?

I. Last Monday-ish

We had breakfast on our balcony. I can hear Anthony Bourdain scoffing at the pure pasteurized excess that is having 6 tiny wedges of grapefruit and orange join a grape on a plastic plate for complimentary room service on an 8’x4’ janitor’s closet open to an outside wall, but I can’t deny the mind-bending beauty that was sucking down coffee in 78 degree sunlight as Cuba rested peacefully on the blue horizon. Goddammit, it was wonderful.

A thousand years ago, I struggled as every freshman comp student does with the anthropologist’s notion of authentic experience. I can’t remember if the writer was Walker Percy or Clifford Geertz, but I do recall apprehending immediately the difference, lost now on many Americans, between touring Europe and It’s A Small World. Yesterday, we whooshed! through customs in the Port of Miami like the country couldn’t get rid of its nerd rock fans fast enough, while two days ago, Newark Airport – I am NOT calling it by its Newspeak name – was an armed camp full of unsmiling automatons. It’s all bullshit, you know. There’s no such thing as safety, which if you didn’t know before you might finally understand when at karaoke the first night of the cruise two utterly unconscious California housewives did a horrifying 6-minute rendition of Rapper’s Delight. One thing you should know about Barenaked Ladies fans: they are white people. I’m not saying their skin is on the melanin-light side; no, I mean they are white-white-white people who look like they’ve never even held open an elevator door for a black person. It’s like a frat party exploded on this ship, with exciting harmonies. I don’t know what to make of it. The two or three black people I’ve seen on this boat out of uniform looked a bit annoyed and, though I’m not black and I can certainly sometimes be blind to the glaringly obvious, I stared open-mouthed at those two women pretending to be the Sugar Hill Gang. Don’t get me wrong. I’m old. I went through one of the best-integrated school systems in the country at the time, and I know all the words to this song. I would never in a gold-plated million years stand up in front of a crowd and pretend to be black. How does doing Rapper’s Delight differ from doing a karaoke version of Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff, as a drunken damsel did two performers later? I don’t know. It just does, and I was astounded to realize I was in a room full of people who might not make that distinction. Then again, someone had the butt-clenching bad taste to torture us with My Heart Will Go On on a fucking cruise ship. I begged our waitress to bring me another beer. “I am not drunk enough for these people,” I sobbed. “Next time, get one of those buckets of four beers,” she said sympathetically. Live and learn!


Siobhan's view from Seven Mile Beach on Grand Cayman.

What does this have to do with authentic experience? Absolutely nothing. In fact, cruising like this is designed to eliminate authentic experience of any kind. I just left 26 degrees and raw. Why is my cabin air-conditioned? There’re piles of Canadians on this boat – so pale you could read the paper through their ski – if there were newspapers. There aren’t. Contact with the rest of the world is prohibitively expensive. It costs $2.49 per minute for me to call Pete, which become much less shockingly exorbitant if I eschew swearing:

You?
Fine. You?
Fine.
Cats?
Fine! Miss you!
Miss you! Tomorrow at 11!

It’s too expensive to ask, “What?” No, that is the kind of clarification one does not demand when subject to international roaming rates. Further, texting is cheaper but when we talked about staying in touch that way, both Pete and reflexively told those kids to get off our lawn. We are essentially out of touch then because internet service runs250 minutes for $100, and I spend that much time every week reading and re-reading Orcinus because Dave doesn’t just make a point. No. Dave sharpens his point of the lathe, sending sparks flying everywhere and skittering across the floor, honing that point to razor-sharpness, to the microns-wide point beyond which there can be no narrower, sharper point without a nuclear collider and Kali help us which is wildly unlikely, arguing is a waste of time when your argument lies bleeding on the floor before you’ve noticed the filleting. Being small and covered with fur, I have to work to understand what’s going on there. This week, Dave Neiwert is a very expensive date, let alone Pete, who, no question, puts out.

Please know that in the months since we met again in July Pete and I spent two whole nights apart until I got into the cab for the airport. Siobhan and I have traveled together before: to the S.C.A.’s Pennsic War a bunch of times, to Syracuse, to radio conventions, and to Vegas. We have shared rooms, cabs, bathrooms and beds, in a pinch, not to mention a stray boyfriend or two or four. Eh, so personal boundaries can’t be a big issue with us. Even so, I left home to rest in the sun. Siobhan came here to boogie all night. What a wild duet! I spend almost every waking moment on the boat in some state of needle-pinning emotion. The boat is GIGANTIC. The ocean is SO BLUE. Breakfast on the balcony is ASTOUNDING. Dinner last night was SCRUMPTIOUS. Omigod, I’m exhausted, just thinking about leaving the cabin. A few more STUPEFYINGs and I might pass out, and while all this is thrilling, it’s 85.7% less fun than it would be if Pete were standing next to me, giggling, because I suck at math.

My heart might stop, with that much excitement. That sounds like an authentic experience.

Part II.

Make Me Fries

This reminds me of the National Lampoon graffiti artist post-it, which I can only paraphrase:

Meant to write "Clapton is GOOD." Hope there's been no inconvenience.

Quilted And Timeless, Seldom Denied

Last night, just before I closed the family store, I heard two people talking by the half-price ornament display. I heard a man's voice deep and gruff and a woman's light and inquisitive, and where they were browsing I couldn't see them. I was reading Digby because 40% of my nephews were running around next door and I was too tired to contemplate exploding space dinosaurs. So the people were browsing. I was reading. I heard the man's voice behind the Thymes display not ten feet from me, so I looked up to greet him. He was about 5'6" and kind of squarish. His shoulder-length hair was bottle blond. He was wearing a yellow and black Catholic school girl outfit and a Hello, Kitty! backpack. My one and only thought, upon seeing him, was, "I hate plaid."

This morning, I awoke in darkness as usual. A light rain fell outside. Instantly, I regretted having to leave the coziness of my bed for the crappiness of getting ready for work. Siobhan, no mincer of words, reminded me yesterday that the 180 Days project was already in shambles.

Siobhan: Three weeks and you're fucking it up. A new record!
Tata: It's New Brunswick. Don't get that on your shoes!

Well, you wouldn't want that, would you?
And speaking of what you don't want, did you know you can get paranormal restraining orders? You sure can! Who's bugging you? Bigfoot?

No longer fear the woods! Take a hike without harassment.

Why, I would like to take a hike! And so can Santa, that bastard!

Spend your holiday free from elfin magic! Every year like clockwork he waits until you’re asleep, breaks into your house, and leaves things lying around.

No whammies...no whammies...For the his and hers matching recliners -

God
Never fear The Lord’s wrath again! In the fire of his jealousy the whole world will be consumed, for he will make a sudden end of all who live in the earth. ...except you.

We have a winner! I mention this because I'm being haunted by the ghost of Richard Viguerie, which foregoes usual paranormal parlor tricks like dripping blood, flies and showing up uninvited to formal dinner parties for sending creepy and hilarious email.

While many conservatives, libertarians, and fair-minded people of all political persuasions are still disappointed at the Fox News Channel’s (FNC) exclusion of Ron Paul from the January 6 debate in New Hampshire, we are relieved that their January 10 debate in South Carolina will include all of the candidates.

In New Hampshire, Ron Paul finished just 2,111 votes behind Rudy Giuliani. It is possible that if Congressman Paul had been included in the debate, he might have gotten at least 2,200 more votes. So, FNC may have affected the outcome of the New Hampshire primary. That’s something a news organization should never do.

Seldom have I come closer to wetting myself. In life, Richard Viguerie corrupted the public discourse but now that he's haunting me, a treehugging pinko, he's hilarious. Fox isn't a news organization. It's an organ of propaganda for Viguerie's baby the Conservative Revolution. Flying Spaghetti Monster, even the living know that!

I'll take today's picture this afternoon, when things may dry out a little. New Brunswick makes its own gravy. I guess all that is obvious.

Back Up To Heaven All Alone

Tuesday

I woke up an hour and a half bfore the alarm. My skin felt prickly. It was as if someone stood by my closet door, but no one did. Eventually, I got up, read my email and used the portable exercise cycle contraption Pete gave me during the December Gift-Giving Extravaganza. Then, at a time when I should have been jumping into the shower and running away! away! away! to work, I started breakfast. Just before 7:30, I called the office and left a message.

Tata: Good morning, Helen! I bet you've noticed I'm not there! I'll be along soon. I was doing fine until I started cooking breakfast, then I was cooking breakfast, then I was still cooking breakfast and, inexplicably, after that I was continuing to cook breakfast. There's enough for six linebackers in my kitchen! I'll be there in a little bit, and boy, will I be full!

Half an hour later, Helen was listening to her messages when I arrived. Breathless, she pointed at me and laughed until I walked away, away, away. My PC made noises like angry bees all day, which excited the unnamed university library's IT department.

One of my co-workers and I are on the same sleep schedule. I know when I'm up, she's up. When I'm sleeping, odds are good she's sawing a log. She mentioned she hadn't slept much either.

Tata: I was up before 5.
Lenore: Me, too.
Tata: You would think that would make me early for work but no! I was not! I got up and made breakfast for six people who weren't there. There's still toast in my toaster! So I was late.
Lenore: Don't you know I sat on the edge of my bed this morning and said, "Gerald, I'm going to turn over a new leaf and start eating breakfast," but I didn't! Next time you're cooking you call me.

We often dress alike without prompting.

Wednesday

It's finally light out before I start the car in the morning. Yesterday, as I walked to the parking lot, I was stunned by the pinks and golds of the sunlight just barely above the rooftops as overhead, woolly gray clouds gathered. The first drops of rain landed on my windshield as I put the car into drive and made my embarrassingly brief commute straight at a rainbow that appeared to be anchored just south of New Brunswick. During the walk from the lot to the library, I was dumbstruck by the size and clarity of the rainbow over the city. As I stood there staring the clouds burst open and I was soaked, but I laughed all the way to the front door. My PC sounded like it was straining to take off.

Today

I often say that when I leave the house I forget one thing I need, always at least one thing. This morning, I had to go back for my bookbag and the leftover toast. I'm having soup for lunch and this toast will taste wonderful, soaked in broth. I've been assured that when the dying part kicks the bucket my hard drive will not melt. That might be true of other people's PCs but not mine. We don't know what will happen.

I'm Up Before the Sun

We used to be a lot older.

This is Mom. Isn't she pretty? She sure is. That's her great-grandson looking mighty photogenic. For the sake of clarity, let's call him "Spanky" - or, as Daria pronounces it, "'Panky". Try it out: Hey, Panky, let's go get tattoos! or Panky, that's my walrus! I like it. So there we have Mom and Panky. When I was a kid, I calculated I'd be 36 at the turn of the millenium and I recall feeling horrified that I'd be SO OLD! Now, Sophia Loren is gorgeous after 70. It's a different life than it might be if we didn't expect to live long enough to know and love our great-great-grandchildren, which privilege brings with it an increased responsibility to our present and our future.

On the other hand, since my life expectancy is about another forty years it's pretty embarrassing that I haven't planned - say - dinner. I'm working on it!

Sitting In A Nest Of Bad Men

Pete's a far better photographer than I am, so when I took a pile of pictures from the spot above the river I wasn't surprised when I didn't get the city in the frame. Ah well. My city, shrouded in fog, disappears before one's very eyes. The city I loved is gone, anyway, a victim of corporate greed, and my first clue that I should leave was when the artists moved away. I held on, and my city disappeared. For the last few months, it's been on my mind that this was the place Dad was young, and where life once held such promise.

Ah, a person can believe in the soul of a place even as the lies pile up - not in New Brunswick, but in some places, yeah. Yesterday, Pete and I drove around in circles on Route 9 until we found the right Shore road to take us to the Jackson Mills Mall. We wanted a giant food processor as our present to each other. Christmas has been exhausting physically and emotionally; fortunately, the one song guaranteed to make me burst into tears played on the PA system at Le Grand Chef. Note: smart shoppers give you plenty of room to browse when you're a soggy mess.



Years ago, the way I coped with losing Morgan was to act as if he'd died, and now he's engaged to be married to someone I've always liked. It's as if my crystal ball exploded. Pete and I got a really great deal on the 12-cup Kitchenaid.

Of Juniper And Lamplight

This week, Pete and I are packaging jams and jellies we made for shipping. I feel nervous for our glassy little darlings as they travel to Arizona, California and Cape Cod, but go they must, to be followed out of the nest by others in a day or two, to California, Utah and New Mexico. We have family in these places. Some recipients will see the significance of what we've done. Some will make toast and wield a spoon with abandon. We cannot say which is which, but one never can, which is half the fun. Merry Joyous SolstiKwanzHanukkaMas to everyone; to all, a Happy New Year.

This morning, I was thinking of wayward and lovely Isadora Duncan. You will note that baby had the temerity to not be born when I wanted him to, which of course sets the tone for a lifetime of scandalous public behavior. Personally, I suspect he'll arrive on the 18th, if only because that would inconvenience me terribly. Rejoice! The banks are packed and the stores mobbed; the madding crowd will render me predictably homicidal. But, you know, it is better to give than to receive and I won't be changing any diapers, so I'll suck it up and sally forth. This kid might pick my nursing home. I should invest, don't you agree?

Got My Electronic Dream

Some days, I sit down to write with a topic or a conversation in mind. On those days, blogging is utterly effortless. Oh, look at me, I think, I'm a natural! Blogging is my life, and I've revolutionized the way words can be used to describe my wonderfulness. You will be pleased to learn there are other days, when staring at the blank Blogger screen humbles me properly and if that doesn't do the trick there are yoga poses specifically designed tame the rampaging ego. My teacher smiles when she says, "And now, Ta's favorite: the seated forward bend."

We can't really gauge our true size in the world. We can't. We overestimate our importance and understimate our potential; we march like giants and crawl as infants do. What are we and what are we doing? What are the effects of our actions? We cannot tell. This, like brevity, is the soul of lingerie. I mean, what else explains the persistence of boy shorts in the wardrobes of women with womanly hips?

Astrologically, today is a very special day. We don't have to talk about the constellation - oh, tee hee already! - of signs, portents and other crap; suffice it to say, I've told Miss Sasha that today's the day I'd like a grandbaby. It would be convenient for me. I'd like to get started on the project of both spoiling the little guy rotten and dressing him like Joey Ramone. Heaven knows I've been patient, but even my patience has its limits.

Well, it's lunchtime and I've got dinner plans. Let's hope I don't have to make a stern phone call before tea.

Up With Your Rules

This morning, everyone in the tiny cul de sac by the Raritan River believes that I am a hand-painted moron. I suppose I am. I mean, you absolutely haven't lived until you've ducked out for a bottle of wine and locked your keys into your motor vehicle with the engine running right in front of your apartment, and all you can say is, "How is that even possible?" There's also this:

Tata: Are you going to break into my car?
Tow Truck Dude: No.

He reaches into a tool box and grabs a hammer.

Tata: I am not using that on my JerseyChickMobile.
TTD: Well, I don't want to break your windows!
Tata: Then DON'T, crazy man.

To be fair, the Tow Truck Dude would probably say you hadn't lived until you've driven the wrong way around a roundabout to be greeted by an ice-scraper wielding little old lady with a ladder over one shoulder, blurting out hot ones like, "This isn't even the FUNNIEST problem I've had all day," and "If you'd arrived ten minutes later, my legs would've been flailing out that living room window."

You Always Were Two Steps Ahead

Yesterday, I walked out of the unnamed university's library and into the maelstrom. The sky overhead boiled, a raging, filthy gray, while off to the north: tranquil blue. I marveled for a moment at the almost comical angle the light took across the streets and through the trees.

"Things just haven't been the same since someone dropped that house on my sister," I said. Then I drove to the orthodontist. Speaking of driving, my favorite road trip ever puts it in gear every Monday night on the Science Channel, as three brainy characters drive around, checking out green technologies other brainy characters have brainly geared up. Look at this amazing episode guide:

Deep Fried Diesel
Monday, November 19 at 10pm et/pt
Get in the van with Chris, Nobu and Micah as they convert their diesel guzzling bus to run on pure vegetable oil, learn to make bio-diesel and explore cutting edge hybrid vehicle technologies.

Human Power
Monday, November 26 at 10pm et/pt
Nobu, Chris and Micah get the solar tech lowdown from California solar pioneers, install a panel to their bus, build a bike out of bamboo and then head to Oregon test drive the The Human Car.

Sun Power
Monday, December 3 at 10pm et/pt
Chris, Nobu and Micah battle veggie engine trouble on the road to exploring solar concentrators, micro-hydro power generation, state-of-the art lighting alternatives and solar ovens.

Dirt Rules
Sunday, December 16 at 3pm et/pt
Big trek to the Mid-West where Micah, Chris and Nobu install a floating wetland made from recycled bottles, see how to turn food waste into methane gas, learn about urban agriculture, and build a green roof on their green bus.

Last night, Pete and I watched Human Power and Dirt Rules. The floating island thing looked brilliant. I totally want to install some in the Raritan River and claim them in the name of France. Earth worm farming is great, great stuff and I'm utterly inspired by the green roof technology. Plus, our hosts are utterly charming at every turn. They helped me put my finger on what's bothering me about the public discourse regarding energy: the American public is waiting for oil companies and utilities to solve this problem without any public involvement. The public is used to going about its business, and fully intends to do so now.

This is not the ad that makes my skin crawl but it's from the same agency and certainly the same campaign. BP - now "Beyond Petroleum" - and DuPont want you to know they've partnered up to head off an oil-based Apocalypse, and your consumer future is secure. There are so many things wrong with this I'll stick to one little sticky point: the oil companies are the major beneficiaries of the Iraq War. Not us. Not the Iraqis. The oil companies. You can say that by extention we benefit when things go well for the oil companies but that's like saying if your drug dealer's rolling in it your future of shooting up is secure.

The thing Invention Nation gently points out is that the oil companies cannot offer a solution to America's oil problem unless they get out of the oil business. I don't see anyone rushing to do that, do you? Nope. The solutions to our energy problems will come from people and businesses who see the future clearly. The solutions will come from people like you and me, who see that this addiction corrupts and contorts, and we want to be free of it.

Dick Cheney doesn't get the ruby slippers if you don't give them to him. They're yours. You have the power. What will you do?

See How the Black Moon Fades

Johnny, our Southwest correspondent reports.

1.
Looking at these pictures makes me shake my head in disbelief that I am still alive. I used to say when I was young that the heart could break a thousand times, that you just got up and got back in the ring. But nothing bad had happened to me then. The worst heartbreak I'd had to face was if some punk rock girl wouldn't have sex with me.

In the death throes of my first marriage, we moved into a broken down old house in Arlington, a grimy second-rate suburb of Cambridge, a dry town where you couldn't even buy a bottle of beer to drown your sorrows. The house was creaky and sagging and an ominous wind blew across the loose clapboards from the cemetery directly behind it.

I would come home from work and walk Tano, then I'd take a six of beer upstairs, which was my territory. I'd drink and kill the time until dinner, staring out the window at the forsaken headstones, wishing one of them said my name. I dreaded my wife's hateful stare so powerfully that I wouldn't even go downstairs to the bathroom. I pissed in empty gallon jugs and lined them up in the back of the closet.

Eventually it would be time for the dinner ordeal. We'd glower at each other with barely concealed hostility until it was over. Then I'd take another six upstairs to help me kill the rest of the evening. It made me so desperately sad to walk past her sleeping on the couch that sometimes, rather than go down to the horrible little room in the corner where I slept, I'd lie down on the floor in my little office and spend the night there. Then I'd get up in the morning, stiff-necked and hung over, have a couple of beers, and go to work.

I remember the night I told her that I would be moving out in the morning. I'd gotten a lot of nasty surprises when I married her, and, to be fair, she'd gotten just as many from me, but she said something that night that I couldn't even believe I was hearing. She said 'Are you seeing someone?' Like the torture of surviving another hour of our miserable existence together wasn't enough to drive me out of that haunted house.

I blamed my first wife for a long time. Then I got over it. People will tell you that things happen for a reason. I think that's shite. I don't believe that some malevolent all-knowing entity crucified me and broke my spirit just so I could appreciate the marriage I have now. But that's the way it shook out. So who am I to complain?


2.
It doesn’t all fit in the scanner, but you get the idea. I smeared a bunch of medium and extender on a piece of window screen, then stuck in an outline of the Captain cut from tarp canvas. I’ll take a picture of it the way it really works, stuck to a window, with the sun behind it. The medium turns opalescent and the Arabic turns luminous and unearthly. I have about nine paintings going and am in love with all of them and want to ask them to marry me. The glee, the glee, the glee of paint. Did I forget to mention the glee of paint? I don’t care what I had to crawl through to get here. God damn. Life is good.

P.S. I don't know much about history. Don't know much biology. But I do know. Mandinka.

Moon Shadow Moon Shadow

It's my whole family, by gum.

1.

Daria: Mom learned a new word today and she really liked it.
Tata: What's happening here?
Daria: Mom learned a new word: furfuracious.
Mom: Furfuracious!
Tata: How are we spelling this?
Daria: F-u-r-f-u-r-a-c-i-o-u-s.
Mom: It's a good word.
Tata: I've never heard of this word. What's it mean?
Daria: It's kind of like fur, squared. And we thought you should know it because you have two cats.

2.

Mom: I learned another word yesterday and it too was a really good word.
Tata: Fascinating. What was it?
Mom: It was a very good word and I can't think of it right now. It started with S.
Tata: So many of our best words do. Can you describe this word?
Mom: It started with S and it was a very good word. Daria, your dictionary is in the same place?
Daria: It sure is!
Mom I'll just go look it up.
Tata: Did...did Mom just take the two-year-old and head off to read the S-section of the dictionary during Thanksgiving dessert?

Thinking Of Me When You

Siobhan and I embarked Saturday on a pilgrimage to Macy's one day bra sale. Bra shopping is depressing, exhausting and never occurs without incident. This incident was special, I think: we ascended on an escalator to the floor where lingerie waited, if lingerie can be said to wait. Honest, I was minding my own business. There before us stood a man wearing jeans, a jacket and a t-shirt with the words partially obscured. Immediately furious, then doubtful, then furious again, I pursed my lips and pushed past him and his pasty clan.

Siobhan: I can't believe it! You're offened by that guy's shirt!
Tata: I was, but now I'm not sure.
Siobhan: You're offended because that guy's shirt said FUCK, admit it!
Tata: I was offended because I thought that guy's shirt said, USE BIRTH CONTROL? GO FUCK YOURSELF!, but then I wondered if the jacket concealed other words, and the shirt actually said, NOT USING BIRTH CONTROL? GO FUCK YOURSELF! I mean, if I'm being invited to go fuck myself I'd like to know why but I'm not going to get into it with him before I purchase two bras and get two bras free.
Siobhan: No, no. I've seen that shirt before. It says, USE BIRTH CONTROL? GO FUCK YOURSELF!
Tata: What is that asshole's actual message?
Siobhan: His message is that you should go fuck yourself.
Tata: Sure, but why? I mean, is he saying he's not gloving up for anything? Is he saying he has a moral issue with preventing unwanted pregnancy? Because his shirt is designed to provoke a response and he's wearing it where children can see it. Even meek mommies have a problem with that.
Siobhan: No, no. His actual message is that you should go fuck yourself.
Tata: Me in particular? How'd he know I'd be here?
Siobhan: Magic 8 Ball.


When this scene was described to him later, Pete asked good questions.

Pete: Was he alone? Was he with a woman?
Tata: He was.
Pete: Did she have her front teeth?

I allowed as I didn't know because to get even a little tangled in this scenario would involve Constitutional issues I didn't want to discuss with the local constabulary in Ladies Lingerie. But hey, I appreciate his honesty in wearing that out in public because I could see what kind of misogynist douchebag he was, and that discussion would prove fruitless. I wondered briefly what other ideologically revealing t-shirts he possessed. Then we bought bras.

It's All Right If You Don't

According to the New York City rock and rock and roll radio let's go, today is National Bologna Day, while tomorrow is the immensely popular Punk For a Day Day, which fortunately comes with a side of eyestrain, so you know what all the shouting's about. Yes, it may turn out we were all just in a bad mood for a few years, with safety pins. So old age won't bring many surprises. Thus, it is fitting that I have an appointment with my gynecologist.

"Ta darling," you're saying, "That was an odd segue. I feel vaguely uncomfortable, like a million voices cried out and were silent - nearly enough to make me reconsider my breakfast combo."

You'll live to dine again. Among the things bugging me today are that I need to get a mammogram, and that my insurance company requires women to get prescriptions for mammograms. My insurance company assures women that preventive care is good care. Get a mammogram! Everyone should have one! Take two, they're small! So...why the prescription? Send me a pushy postcard once a year from one of those resorts only insurance company CEOs can afford.

Having a lovely time. Wish you were here! - I kid, because I love! Princess, make an appointment for the old smashy filmy. It's cost effective for me!

So why the permission slip from the gynecologist? Are breasts a controlled substance? Have I been wielding them without a license all this time? Scheduling unpleasant tests willynilly? The doctor assured me years ago that one day, mammograms will go the way of the dodo, replaced in the balance sheet ecosystem by MRIs when their costs come down. The MRI makes sense to me because you hold still and a technician takes very detailed pictures of your innards. I have had my extremely photogenic innards photographed, if you will, in this way and it was completely painless. I enjoyed the complete painlessness of the test, and would like to enjoy it annually, but if I have to have a half-assed and unpleasant test every year, can I just get it and get it over with without the insurance company both pushing and pulling? That's too much to ask? Baloney!

The Most But I'll Take the Least

Recently, I've been all over the map. For a few weeks, I was in the kind of pain that makes the eyes water and in person makes me mysterious. For instance, sometimes I lie face down on my cubicle floor, which used to induce panic in my officemates but now elicits giggles. For another, if you and I meet in the local grocery emporium and you see me holding very, very still next to the dog chow, singing along with the P.A. system at the tops of my lungs, I might be riding a wave of pain and waiting to crash on shore. Or I might be conjuring up a dog chow-based prank. We don't know! I'm unpredictable that way. For the last month or so, the explanation for quirky behavior has most likely been startling pain that bursts forth in my brain like Roman candles.

Yes, I've been going to yoga and it helps. No, not as often as I could or should. Pete convinced me to drag myself to his chiropractor, who twisted my neck this way and that, which I enjoyed about as much as unplanned dental surgery. Then, to my surprise, the agony stopped. Just...stopped. I spent the next two days waiting for it to come back, then simply waited. In the course of the last week, I've felt ordinary aches, pains and a few twinges but no agony. I have now seen xrays of my spine, which resembles not so much a straw as a Slinky. The chiropractor looked at the films, looked at me, looked back at the films.

Doc: Did you ever fall on your head a lot?
Tata: I did gymnastics in the seventies. Sometimes we fell on mats but there was also concrete.

I have an appointment this afternoon, which is very exciting because I will enjoy the planned neck adjustment like further unplanned dental surgery, and very much look forward to pretending it's not happening. Around 4 this afternoon, don't be surprised if you feel a disturbance in the Force when it takes every ounce of restraint I possess to keep from punching the nice chiropractor.

Every age we attain lies between familiar territory and terrifying frontier. The little changes we see are mostly annoying but not, as a matter of course, shocking unless you have no signposts in the wilderness. People who were adopted face this because they can't see their birthparents age and die in one of the cases where genes count; further, society as a whole is more open to discussion of changes in our bodies but that doesn't mean we tell each other the unvarnished truth, which is that we have a whole lot less control over our bodies than we like to imagine. During August and September, I ate like it was my job, assuming the hunger was hormonal.

Tata: Mmmmph mek mek mmummphy glump.
Siobhan: Ahh, the eating. How long?
Tata: Mpppquch.
Siobhan: That's unusual for you. Your complexion is also a touch flushed.
Tata: Givvus!
Siobhan: If you still had all your internal organs, we'd know what all this meant.
Tata: Pffffffft!
Siobhan: Right! If you still had all your internal organs you'd be lying on the floor, screaming. I forgot!

About a week ago, the eating also just...stopped. I feel like I've been hit by a bus - in reverse. Yes, I've been un-hit by a bus. Let's see if I can walk that off.

Waste My Love On A Nation

I can't help it. When Pete says, "You're so pretty," I hear Johnny Rotten.

Damn, I love those boys more every year.

But enough cuddly crap: I've got a potential human to protect from the evil of pastels. Miss Sasha, who has taken to heart my desire to eschew dumb baby garbage and get trashy, forwarded a few links to unusual purveyors purveying unusual merchandise with the advice, "Here, make your dream come true."

Tata: What exactly is my dream?
Miss Sasha: To dress your grandson like the Ramones.
Tata: Right...right! Well, it's collar spikes and torn up jeans for him, then!
Miss Sasha: One of these sites has lullabye versions of Nirvana, Metallica and The Cure!
Tata: What, no Bauhaus?

Look at these fashionplates. Who wouldn't want to dress up babies like Joey and Dee Dee? It's all I can do to hold off buying a leather jacket in toddler sizes. And I sure hope someone makes leather bracelets for pre-schoolers, because if not, I'm prepared to take up leatherworking just for this. That's the kind of sacrifice I'm willing to make!

In the meantime, I'm TOTALLY cleaning them out for black onesies and embroidering the Anarchy symbol where most kids wear Barney.

You Stepped Out Of A Stranger

People ask me questions all the time, everything from Who told you you were funny? to Why are you sleeping on my lawn? This morning, my student worker asked if I planned to dance all the way across the building. I told him it was a long way to hula. So that was an easy one. The trickier questions involve my family and the one I hear most frequently: does that wacky Daria exist?

Yep. Our cousin Monday snuck up on us and snapped this moment for gobsmacked posterity.

Here you see me in a charming ensemble dragged from the back of Daria's closet describing to Daria how I'd dried my hair upside down for our sister Dara's eighties-themed sweet sixteen party. Yes, that is my butt. No, you can't have it. What would I sit on and complain? Sheesh. Daria had just finished explaining that her hair is naturally a giant cloud of Jersey Chick curly hair but that wasn't retro enough, so she went with a hairband with a streaked coif attached. It's a nice touch.

Further, that purple balloon behind me was altogether familiar. I slapped it and yelled, "Masher!" which caused Daria to spit her adult beverage.

We don't finish a lot of drinks.

The Trial And Error of My Masterplan

Some time ago, I used to get up Sunday mornings and stare at the TV until my vision came into focus after Saturday nights at the bar. If I were very, very lucky, I found Simon Schama's History of Britain while I was playing "How Many Historians Am I Holding Up?" I like history but I'm no pushover. The History Channel never impressed me. Simon Schama, art professor and possessor of imperfect teeth, rocked my world with his stunning and muscular accounts of events I'd read about a thousand times. Holy crap, I loved his ability to shock me. I mean, it's history. We know how it turned out. (Side note: movie about a big boat? Yeah? The boat sinks. Yes, I'm that kind of bitch.)

About a year ago, Schama came out with another series on BBC2: The Power of Art. On Sunday, Pete and I watched the last two episodes, which were FANTASTIC. Despite the torrential rush of television news, it can seem as if history has already happened and the day's events are just drops in a great, meaningless bucket. I'm not saying that impression is good or apt, I'm saying it's possible to feel that way, and it can be especially possible to believe that all the great art that will ever be already exists. It's not? When was the last time you went to a gallery show of contemporary artists? (Mr. Rix: hush, you!) When was the last time you saw art at all?

"Art is the enemy of the routine, the mechanical and the humdrum. It stops us in our tracks with a high voltage jolt of disturbance; it reminds us of what humanity can do beyond the daily grind. It takes us places we had never dreamed of going; it makes us look again at what we had taken for granted."
- Simon Schama

It is possible to reduce the history of art into glossy dorm room prints chosen for pretty colors and matching decor, but such reductions are truly vulgar, as Schama points out. Case in point is Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat. From the program guide: Painting became an important means of communication for David since his face was slashed during a sword fight and his speech became impeded by a benign tumour that developed from the wound, leading him to stammer. He was interested in painting in a new classical style that departed from the frivolity of the Rococo period and reflected the moral and austere climate before the French Revolution. David became closely aligned with the republican government and his work was increasingly used as propaganda with the Death of Marat proving his most controversial work. That sounds neutral. David was controversial. Actually, that painting was so loaded a statement his family wasn't allowed to bring his body back into France after David's death. Let Schama tell it. As stories go, it's a doozy.

Joseph Turner's Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840) is just a painting, you might say.

You might also say there's nothing on TV.

Young To Walk Him Around

Courtesy of the intrepid Suzette, we find that topaz and drusy are not just Topaz and Drusy, glamorkittens, they're also jewelry.

Unfortunately, it's a little hideous.

Yes, I remember when pothead baubles appealed to me. Well, sort of. That hazy recollection is part and parcel of a distant, THC-soaked epoch in which, like the Pleistocene, feathers rocked. I mean, it's not as if we're all busy rewriting our gloriously disastrous pasts, right? So that still-fragrant roachclip collection you're concealing from your biographers - dude, bust it out. Meanwhile, at the eighties party for my teenaged sister, I happened to be wearing the ginchiest blue earring with a pink flamingo logo, and had this conversation several times.

Cousin It Girl: That is THE cutest thing! Where's the other one?
Tata: There's only one. We were all about asymmetry.
Cousin It Girl: Love that pink flamingo! What's that blue pillowy thing?
Tata: It's a condom.
Cousin It Girl: A condom? Why would you have a condom?
Tata: Sex was invented in 1994 so before that we had condoms for emergency water balloon fights.
Cousin It Girl: That is ...quite... an accessory.
Tata: Sure, sweetie, and so much more hygienic than keeping it in your wallet.
Cousin It Girl: That's older than my wallet.
Tata: Sweetie, you shouldn't use condoms older than your wallet.
Auntie InExcelsisDeo: Or your children.

Recently, I have taken terrible pictures of the kitten princesses, mostly because they move with the speed of light but also because when they're doing something adorable this adorable thing takes place on my lap. Yesterday, a kitty jumped into my lap and insisted on a vigorous scritching. This is not unusual but about a minute later I realized the pushy pussycat on my lap was not Drusy but Topaz. I can't tell you how startled I was as Topaz, who detests leaving the ground except to fly through the air, preferably to break something, leapt about demanding a thorough ear scratching, meaty treats and car keys. Naturally, I googled.

I found a bunch of "treasures" someone will no doubt discover in Gramma's jewelry stash and use as proof that she should no longer wield credit cards. Then: other jewelry designers combine topaz and drusy in more attractive ensembles. I don't hate this bracelet, though I think I'm a few mumus away from my Mrs. Roper Years. On the other hand: I should talk. Pink flamingos. Sheesh.

I Was Defeated, You Won the War

I'm sitting in the aromatic family store again on a beautiful, sunlit afternoon as Putumayo's Sahara Lounge plays. Coffee and taboule sit on the counter. Pedestrians, languid in the sunshine, window shop contentedly. Sometimes, I lie on the floor and consider how I can photograph a single object or group of objects for the store's website. I think about it and think about it, then I do it, then my sun-drunk mediocrity soaks into the fabric of the web.

Two weeks ago, I popped into the family store and my sisters' mother went full-metal hinty.

Joan: You used the bathroom before you came here?
Tata: For years. What?
Joan: You might not want to use ours. Did you know gas builds up in toilets? I didn't know that. The toilet blew up yesterday. We found the lid on the floor. Imagine if one of the kids had been in there. Dan spent half the night with a wet vac.
Tata: Wait. Are you saying that the toilet blew up, sending the tank lid flying through the air and the pipes spewed raw sewage?
Joan: You should have smelled the basement.
Tata: And when did this happen?
Joan: Last night!
Tata: Just as soon as I quit puking I'm going to laugh all day.

Thus, spending the day at the store is a mixed blessing as we regard normally dependable indoor plumbing with suspicion. This is especially serious as I have the hair-trigger gag reflex, meaning that Daria calls me every time she changes a diaper because hearing me try not to hork is music to her ears. Yesterday, Mary came clean, so to speak.

Mary: Remember on Saturday, when you came running into the store?
Tata: You were shouting, "DAMN IT! DAMN IT! DAMN IT!" and my ears were burning, yup.
Mary: The toilet overflowed and I called my friend Mia. You saw her there.
Tata: She was there. Why did you call her?
Mary: To bring me the Target-red plunger. It had just happened. I was gonna tell you but I asked if you were working Sunday, remember?
Tata: I do remember! I was on my way to a dinner party and not working Sunday.
Mary: Yeah, if you'd been scheduled the next day, I thought I'd tell you why you might need two plungers. So I'm telling you now.
Tata: Are you saying I might need two plungers to use the bathroom? And why do I keep asking people what they're saying?
Mary: Fear not, for I will translate.
Tata: Omigod, if you tell me the Charmin's a plan I am going to yak on your shoes.

Supposedly, everything is working. Supposedly - but I doubt the bathroom! I fear it! A customer tells me I should open the Yellow Pages and find myself a bathroom therapist. I tell him they're all bathroom therapists. He tells me I have a fear of bathrooms. I tell him no, just the one - just this bathroom. He laughs nervously and recommends an all-cheese diet.

Just now, the bathroom has forgotten about me. I have gained the element of surprise.

Pieces Of Me You've Never Seen

Yesterday, in a crowded room and the course of conversation, someone casually said, "Morgan's getting married." Nobody saw this, I know, not even Siobhan, as I held perfectly still and felt the universe skip a beat. Talk continued and the subject changed. This, I learned in childhood: when in doubt, freeze. No one has to see how you really feel, especially if you're not sure.



When he left in September 1996, he took Me with him and I haven't seen Me since. I loved him more than breath, though he didn't love me. Still: eleven years. I genuinely want him to be happy, so this shouldn't matter, but it burns like battery acid. I didn't flinch. No one has to know.

A Ghost In Our Home

Weeks ago, artist Michelle Provenzano sent along news of her show at Kunstfort bij Vijhuizen in the Netherlands. Admittedly, I got sidetracked. According to the Kunstfort page, the show ended 8 July, but I may be wrong as my Dutch is so weak we might say I have none at all. Despite this terrible character flaw on my part, some exciting things may be deciphered.

Kunstfort has its own YouTube Channel, where some text is in English.

You can have a fantastic look at the exhibit space -

- and a chicken.

Miss Michelle is working in shadows - on kites and in space.




We find ourselves at an interesting moment in art history, which I am wholly unqualified to describe. Pretend I'm stuttering. I probably am: there is the artwork itself, sometimes with a performance aspect, maybe repeatable but maybe not. This is two things. I am almost saying what I mean about it.

One step away may be video or photography of these objects and events, but this is documentation and not necessarily art. It is suspect as historical record. No, really. The images we see of Miss Michelle's work are not art - unless they are.

A very modern step further is the internet art show. The online gallery may change its exhibits but, as everyone knows, the internet is essentially forever. Depending on the medium or media in which an artist works, a show may be said have no end now, regardless of what happens to individual items on Google Images. Don't anyone say appropriation!

Thus, if Miss Michelle has a show near you, you must go see it for yourself and refuse to rely on anyone else's eyes, even mine.

Exciting stuff: the artist, the shadow kite, the drawing on the walls, floor and ceiling; a language barrier defeated by objects. I like the feeling of weightlessness and traveling over surfaces. Your mileage may vary.

As a footnote: when I see this, I want to quit my job and go back to art. I long for the studio, the ideas, the shows, the frantic creative drive, study and purpose. The possibilities of interactive media excite me. It's like living on the edge of starvation, isn't it?

A Witness Out Of Darkness

The aurora australis from space.


So beautiful you could die of happiness.

I Love the Flower Girl

Before Miss Sasha was born, I picked her first name and her father picked her middle name. When the time came to sign her birth certificate, her father was off on a bender of some sort. I didn't know how to spell her exotic French middle name, so I guessed and guessed wrong. Dad said, "Great. You named her Bicycle Seat." Of course, I really hadn't. I could spell that. Years later, the Fabulous Ex-Husband(tm) adopted Miss Sasha, and I took the opportunity to correct the misspelling on the new birth certificate. Live and learn.

In May and early June, I heard a whole bunch of people use a phrase over and over. I tried hard to keep a straight face. It is really important to note when communicating with the other humans that what you're saying is not what the other humans hear. It can't be. You have your own way of stringing together words that is uniquely yours. My next door neighbor sits outside on warm evenings with a cell and a pack of smokes, and for a couple of hours seems to say nothing more than, "Like...like...you know what I mean?" and I can tell by her inflection she believes her friend does. I don't have a fucking clue what she means without the ordinary clues provided by nouns and verbs, and I have to say, this neighbor provides me with a very unsatifying eavesdropping experience.

She says one thing. I hear something else. That's fairly standard.

The phrase I heard everywhere in May and June was "come to Jesus," as in people were having "a come to Jesus moment." My brain is of course uniquely mine, but in this case, I'm not sure, so as a public service, I'm saying this in a reasonably public place.

When you say "come to Jesus," I hear -


I'm just sayin'.

Swept Away For A Moment By Chance

I had a dream about us. You're a green fuzzy Muppet and I'm a Tiffany lamp. We go bicycling and sip chocolate milk. One of us wears an ascot, though neither of us has a neck.

**

It's serious, and it's not: just before I open my eyes, I don't know when I am. Time's the thing. Will I open my eyes in Hartford, starving, teenaged and pregnant? In New Brunswick, as the driven other woman or so sick I wish I were dead? In Boston, despondent and alone? In what apartment, with what gut-churning fear? Me, as I am, I never wake up back in time, so why should I think I might? With my eyes open, I am here, now, with so little to fear I should rest easy. Yet, I hardly sleep at all.

**

We have no common language. You, sweet as sunlight, slip in the side door. Later, I remember strawberries in crystal cups.

**

It's serious, and it can't be: I see your face and others behind it. You see a thousand years.

**

You breathe and breathe, and you breathe without me. On a breeze, I arrive like rain.

**

It's serious, and it's nothing: your names are yours, while mine tear off and scab. Time's the thing. One day, I will hear my true name. Then as now, will words pass between us?

**

I have a dream about us. You are a dollar store gift bag and I am a box of rubber bands. We go dancing and load squirt guns with apricot nectar. One of us will leave, though neither of us will ever go.

They Will Lean That Way Forever

This morning, my horoscope, which usually stops inches short of Run screaming, Ta! Flee! Flee! said something unusual. I don't recall the exact words. Sort of The relationship will develop but not the way you think. I thought, 'Huh. Perhaps Cablevision will declare glasnost.' Every morning I walk to work, an older man with a beatific smile jogs past me at a good clip. This morning, he grabbed my hand and asked with a heavy accent, "We run?"

I thought he meant around the puddle in front of me, so I said, "Sure," and started running. We ran across the Albany Street Bridge, through traffic and past the vile candy-scented construction latrine. My bookbag flapped heavily across my back. The temperature was already above 70. I was not sorry to jog past the portapotty. He had a solid grip on my wrist that didn't feel threatening. I laughed because the sun was shining, because running feels so good, because it was utterly thrilling to let the antic unfold.

Tata: Why are we running?
Man: I don't speak English.

I couldn't believe my good fortune. Under the Route 18 overpass, he let go of my arm and we walked through a narrow space between traffic and a concrete barrier.

Tata: What is your language?
Man: I am from Russia. Everyone in America should study Russian. I tell everyone in Russia they should study English. What do you think of my English?
Tata: Sounds pretty good to me! I study Italian.

I stretched the truth. So sue me.

Man: At the university?
Tata: Years ago. I see you every day. Where are you -

A backhoe whirled out of a sidestreet about ten feet away. He grabbed my arm again and we ran up Albany Street. I was overjoyed. My heart raced. We stopped when he felt we are safely out of the construction zone. By then, his voice was positively operatic.

Tata: Where are you going?
Man: I lead minyon at synagogue. You know what is synagogue?
Tata: I do! And that's a beautiful one. I have to go in the other direction.
Man: What is your name?
Tata: I'm Ta.
Man: My name is the same as the first craftsman of the United States.
Tata: Your name is Paul Revere?

He did the thing that will make me cheery all day.

Man: Arnold, like Schwarzenegger!

He flexed a bicep. He took my hand and kissed it. He turned left and ran to prayers.

I turned right and skipped across four lanes of traffic because I could.

Time Stands Still For Those Who Know

This story starts with a fire at Sharkey's apartment complex on Tuesday afternoon and ends here, in this newly tidy corner of my BandAid Pink bathroom. Isn't the tile ghastly? It is! However it looks on your monitor, it's ten times worse in real life, where I gaze upon with my real eyes. Ew!

Sharkey: The apartment two doors down and up a floor caught fire yesterday.
Tata: Get out! What happened?
Sharkey: Well, the management turned off the gas so nothing else would blow up. Can I use your shower?
Tata: Of course, dahhhhlink. But...um...
Sharkey: Yes?
Tata: It's strictly BYO Rubber Duckie.

About forty-five minutes later, Sharkey opens the bathroom door as the kittens, parked at threshold and mad with curiosity, do a double-take. They see me on the couch, so who's that guy? They're not the only ones with questions.

Sharkey: Woman! What the hell's going on in your shower? Do you use all those things?
Tata: Damn right, I do. I'm middle-aged. I schedule Daily Slathering Time, without which I'd look like Tut's mother.
Sharkey: Mercy!
Tata: If they don't turn the gas back on tomorrow, pick up my keys at the store and shower again.
Sharkey: Danke schon.

Thursday, I was helping a customer at the family store when Sharkey appeared, borrowed my keys and went off to ablut. He returned just before closing time, smelling better, though Sharkey always smells pretty good. We have this in common: smelling good is our hobby and we take every opportunity to practice it. It's practically a public service.

Sharkey: I knocked over all the bottles when I scared the cats.
Tata: That mental image has too many verbs.
Sharkey: Consider setting up a Hydration Buffet in your living room.
Tata: Know how folks hollow out Bibles to hide guns? My Bibles hide firming lotion.

Friday, Siobhan, whose father has been in the local ICU since Tuesday and whose sister is getting married in three weeks, emailed plaintively.

Siobhan: Help!
Tata: What's in it for me?
Siobhan: I need help with an errand.

Previously on Poor Impulse Control, Siobhan almost died in February and since then can only walk a little way before things get dicey. I checked the tags in my underwear and remembered Siobhan carried that person through years of depression.

Tata: Reporting for duty! Where are we going?
Siobhan: Bed, Bath & Beyond.
Tata: Awesome. I have coupons and need stuff from there!
Siobhan: I'll pick you up at 7:30, you selfish bitch.
Tata: Can't wait, sweetie!

We go the supersecret back way and Siobhan parks close to the store.

Tata: How big do you want these storage boxes?
Siobhan: Ten of the biggest they have.
Tata: Show me how big.

Siobhan looks at me through her eyebrows. Then holds her hands almost as far apart as they go.

Tata: What shape? Square?
Siobhan: Oblong.
Tata: Rectangular?
Siobhan: Here's a whole lot of cash. Get out of my truck.
Tata: If you leave without me I'm keeping the money.

I got a cart and marched merrily through the store's narrow aisles to the back, where America stops to talk on its cell phone. Hyperventilating, I found a very young store employee and asked the $64,000 question: Got plastic stuff coffins? He led me to a display, where we found a number of giant plastic whatsises insufficient for Siobhan's needs. Making do, we stacked two large thingamabobs in my cart, and he dragged eight flatter ones to - he said - Register 5. I thanked him and dashed off to find a Euro Style Shower Caddy with at least four more attractive descriptors. Then I doubled back for square glass canisters and found my youthful employee friend, who pointed me to a set that wouldn't actually solve my problems but would be a good start on solving a few of them. I was quite happy and, after a few accident-enhanced attempts to navigate the tiny aisles, promised to injure myself less on the way out.

In fact, I was overjoyed. I despise shopping but love to leave a store with a project in mind, and it was at the peak of my I Know What To Do! Happiness that I discovered a man on a 12' ladder and burst out laughing. The man on the ground directing him saw my face and immediately forgot about the man on the ladder. I hope nothing terrible happened to that fellow. The man formerly directing traffic 12' up - or as Siobhan later read off his nametag "Paul" - directed me to Register 5 and led the way. My eight storage containers rested atop a 3' x 4' x 3' laundry dolly and we dragged them to a register with a teenaged cashier. I liked this boy immediately. He was a little odd looking but cheerful. By now, everyone within the blast zone of my laughter and two-cart container parade was smiling.

Tata: This and these are for my girlfriend. She's waiting in the car and cursing my ancestors. These and this are for me. I have coupons. Isn't this exciting?
Harry: So...separate orders?
Tata: You're adorable! Thank you so!

At this moment, I could swear "Paul" turned on his heel jealously, but said, "Don't leave. I'll be right back to help you take all this to your car." I stared after him briefly but smiled at Harry and gave him my undivided attention. Perhaps I was the first person all day to look him in the eye and listen to every word, but absent-minded customers plainly missed out. With a wicked gleam in his eye, he grabbed his price gun and twisted himself over and under a counter and a display. I never took my eyes off him and don't know how his bones didn't shatter. I handed him Siobhan's vast cash stores, and we moved on to my pile of problem-solving purchases. By now, even the other customers inconvenienced by the size of my stuff watched with amusement, especially when, not seeing "Paul", I pushed two carts from Harry's register without any of my own bags. As a traveling attractive nuisance, I could have waved debutante-style and thanked my director to amuse everyone within earshot. Harry chased me the ten feet, calling the name he'd read off my credit card. Several cashiers between us said, "I'll help!" "Can I help with that?" before "Paul" reappeared and took the laundry cart behind me. By now, I was saying, "Just a person...just a person, leaving..." as I pushed the cart out the door and turned around to see "Paul" staring as he asked in slow motion, "Where's your car?" I turned back to my cart, sailing off through mall traffic into the parking lot. I skipped off after it and caught it halfway to Siobhan's truck. Somehow, the laughing and chasing didn't catch her eye. Five feet from the rear bumper, I yodeled, "Siobhan, sweetie, would you please open the door?" The tone, an octive above my usual, alerted her to the presence of a stranger.

Siobhan: Hello..."Paul."
Tata: Thank you so much for helping us!
"Paul": There's no room in your truck for the containers.
Siobhan: I was taking a call and expected the shopping to take longer.
Tata: Stand back, "Paul". We're professionals.

Siobhan grabbed a messy pile of shipping boxes from the back of her truck and tossed it on the ground. She and "Paul" negotiated the stacking of empty plastic hoositses in the back while I stuffed my bags into the passenger seat legroom because I easily fold in thirds. "Paul" took the laundry cart and headed back to the store. We smiled and waved as he walked the forty feet to the sliding door. I grabbed the pile of cardboard off the ground and a knife and we resorted to the PeeWee Herman voices.

Tata: Hey, Boxy! What would you like to do today?
Siobhan: (Tearing tape and folding) I'd like to lie down!

This morning, I assembled the shower caddy in only one Jonathan Richman Album Time Unit and thought of Georg as I used all my wits and freakish upper body strength to install it. Georg can do absolutely anything. I've seen that, and the travails of the week may have been just a bit too much. So when I found myself stymied by the geometry of getting a lengthy pressure rod past a dangling disco ball and a bank of cat boxes, I asked "What would Georg do?"

I hope Georg might do this, though I'm sure she would have replaced that tile.

Use My My My Imagination

I stood for a long time in my kitchen, torn, staring out the window at the small lawn, the parking lot, the trees opposite. Twilight softened the moments between breaths as I tried and failed to think. The kitchen disappeared. My yoga pants and t-shirt that read "I like chicks (with big dicks)" disappeared. Everything fell away. I was dressed in black, wearing a maroon beret and speaking in a voice rough and gravelly like Charles Aznavour, because if you're going to have a cinematic existential crisis, you've still got to rock it so old school you fart Rive Gauche dust.

Tata: Le sigh!

I could only think of one philosopher to quote in my hour of desolation.

Tata: "While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish?"

Then, in my torpor, I observed movement on the lawn, which was merely a bourgeois construct and not cool and delicious. I went from Aznavour to Electric Youth in no seconds flat.

Tata: Bunnnnnnnnnnnnnnny!

Genuine lapin.

Like! It's baby bunny season.

This bunny would fit in my hand, which is half the size of yours.

Le sigh. I look great in a beret and angst.

There's A Blaze Of Light In Every Word

Until recently, one moment in Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc made no sense to me. It all happens very fast, as we know it would not in real life, where suffering may seem to have no end. Joan is chained to the stake and the flames are rising. One tongue of flame scorches her face and she wrenches her head aside. In the next moment, she stares Heavenward, accepting, as fire consumes her. Then the girl is gone. Hallelujah.

This evening, a gentle rain falls, whispering and musical. The kittens have chosen windowsills at either end of the apartment, though they have several times switched sills for views and breezes. Whole wheat bread baked with a salt and sage crust, perfuming the living room; now pumkpin custard steams slowly in a bain marie. Last night, I made yogurt, and I have food for the week. On Friday evening, my hairdresser and cousin Carmelo offered glad tidings.

Carmelo: This weekend is the beginning of Gin & Tonic Season. I've just bought my bottle of Bombay Sapphire.
Tata: Oooh! You mention this in case I've been hunting without a license!

In two hours, Carmelo made that nest atop my head into a streaming vision of blond highlights falling in soft curls, but before we get there, we have to go back in time. Press Play and read on.


After work Friday and before my appointment, I cleaned the cat boxes, tossing the stinky litter into the dumpster, and with the garbage went my keys. I stood there for a minute; I stood there for an hour, wanting someone to fix this for me. When that didn't happen, I stared at my keys. Then I threw my head back and laughed. The thing was nearly empty. I jumped up, threw a leg over, and dropped inside. Neighbors, standing some yards away and staring, all stopped talking. I threw my keys over the wall to the street. Then I jumped back out, cleaned up and changed clothes, and went to the salon. When told of my adventure, Carmelo smiled but did not laugh. He said, "Thank God you don't smell." I looked around but there was no film crew.

That was the day Carl's father passed away, which shocked me. It didn't seem right so soon after my father died that anyone else should suffer as we did, though everyone hurts and few of us see it coming. So as bad as I felt Friday, I felt worse Saturday reading that Steve Gilliard was dead. For me, this felt like a last straw, and I stood in my kitchen, sobbing about a person with whom I'd exchanged a few emails, but whose common sense and insight had long felt to me like a smooth worry stone and a bright crystal ball. The long night of pain was over for one starry soul. Hallelujah. Then I set up bread dough, which did not rise.

This morning, I got up early because I don't sleep anymore and went to Costco. My shelves were little ghost towns, scenes of unchanging emptiness. I walked through the aisles, blank and staring, picking up things I needed and passing others. Something burned out of me and cast itself on the wind. I knew this when I picked up tapenade and heard myself singing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, a song I didn't know I knew, out loud in the refrigerator aisle. These lives well-lived, these people fall in light, and out come these words of sorrow and benediction. Hallelujah. I did not fight the sensation of walking through the warehouse store with a spotlight over my newly-blond head, and I sang quietly without a thought to what anyone else might think. It was as if I were the only one there, in this cloud of white light with my grief and loss -

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

- and of course, the tapenade is a little salty.

Summer Sky And Stars Are Falling

Sometimes, the beauty of the whole world spreads out before us as undeniable as night and right as fresh air. A jewel, a moment we hold in one hand and turn this way, that way; if we give ourselves to time and rest gently on the breeze, we become, endlessly. There is no need, no more.

Eve Brewed Good Apple Wine

I had a dream about us the other night. You'd invited me to your city for dinner and I traveled a long way to meet you. Who knows why, but I thought we would be alone, and in a way, we were. In Ecuador, two friends and I found a restaurant like this one, where surfaces appeared to roll one into the next, floor into wall, and shadows made by candlelight softened all angles. In the dream, the empty restaurant formed a soft, billowing envelope around our table for six. One of my friends from your city sat down next to me, but I could not take my eyes off the woman touching your arm.

This woman took only polite notice of me, but I saw everything about her, from her slender wrists to her skin's honeyed hues. Her hair hung long and sun-bleached, while her eyes were the color of the sky where it meets ocean. I knew at once she was your lover of some years and she didn't worry when your key was late at the front door. My presence meant nothing to her. I wondered about you, and why I had come so far, but it's not that mysterious, is it?

You had to show me what I observed in impassive silence. I have been here before, in the pillowy time before you tell me you love her but it's not enough, she doesn't understand you like I do. You can't leave her, but you can't live without me, you'll say. You'll beg me for solace with a wicked gleam in your eye. There is no reason for joy before we strike this bargain. You love me and I will be yours now for years to come.

Naturally, I ordered dessert.

Oh, How Time Flies

Let us whisper all we know: You live in exile upon a rolling sea. I have lured many to the rocks.

I'm leaving for Virginia Friday afternoon. On Sunday, I'll come home to you.

You live in exile upon the dark ocean. I know. I know it.

You don't need the harbor anymore. I see with diamond eyes.

Won't You Ease My Worried Mind

You are splendid smooth surfaces and other cheeks. You are curves fading softly into distance and rounded lips. There is no here and now with you without crushing absence around the bend. Your secret hollowness will always be untouchable. Pressed, you break and disappear.

I am the bright morning when your heart breaks open. I am silence before mimosa leaves offer their prayers. There is nothing to say when the choice is you or the folds of curved space. I might be any collector if I had never loved cobalt blue. Rest here, and wait for fireflies to find us.

Cut glass. Broken to a width of two microns. A vessel filled with wax drippings and a desert of dried tears. Roadside evidence of ordinary disaster. Bad luck's dosage instruction. The surface between us and sepia toned children. Maybe we loved them, or our longing is traditional. The brightness of knowing, while there is still time to gently circle back.

Friday Art Blogging: The Only One I Know Edition

The trees were still budding days ago when these structures went up in New Brunswick. Yesterday, I took my camera and walked to work, intent on showing you just how big these things are. The man in this picture is probably a little over six feet tall. By the way, I was entirely surprised by just how fast the leaves filled out, and how hard it was to find a clear shot of this image - please don't feel frustrated by the sunshine. After the recent storms, the ground still hasn't dried out. There's mud everywhere.
I love this image with my whole black heart and some of yours. It stands on the corner of Albany and George Streets, on the lawn of Johnson & Johnson's interplanetary headquarters. Buildings to the left obscured by trees and my refusal to look at them were designed by I. M. Pei, who probably looks back on that design and wonders what's in the water out here and how he quit whatever it was cold turkey. Plus, on my walk home from the library, a terrifying parade of slick corporate identi-babes streamed across the sidewalk, flowed across teeming Albany Street and stopped for cross traffic on Nielsen Street. They were talking about hotel arrangements but what I heard sounded like geese honking. They were spike wearing heels on cobble stones. Every one of them had long, straightened brown hair. They were dressed in tight-fitting synthetic suits. I was filled with such revulsion I stepped off the curb and into traffic to get away from them. I had to. I was invisible to them. One actually bumped into me, looked straight at me and was surprised something was in her way.

That's eight hours from when I snapped this picture at the corner of George and Hamilton Streets. It's early. The sun dapples the lawn but smiles on the old stone building behind this structure. In theater, a free-standing, three-sided tower is called a periactoid or periaktoi. It's a good, stable structure offering a stage crew a pile of advantages, the first being no one breaks a foot kicking set supports. One day this week, a strong wind blew off the river, which is about 100 yards behind me in the first image, and a crew blocked the sidewalk on Albany Street with caution tape, lest art take wing and injure the curious.

This line of towers and panels is not far from the one just above. New Brunswick is a small, snug town. Things are close together. Unplanned space looks like broken teeth, except for lawns like this, which create the feeling that these buildings are unapproachable. Most people will not walk up to these panels and examine them. The towers might as well sit in the middle of the Raritan. Ordinarly, I have a problem keeping off lawns and avoiding attractive nuisances but have I mentioned the mud?

Because the sun is low over the river to the east, these panels look and feel bright with possibility. In the afternoons, when the sun has rolled over the leaf canopy and sprawled languidly in the western sky, long shadows like smoke rings vibrate and billow. These images appear through the trees and the shadows, less possibility now than threat, like the growling of an as yet unseen giant cat. We are small and breakable in the eyes of our own imagination.

Laughing In the Face of Love

Milton Glaser

Something new called the Coexistence Festival raised its banners in New Brunswick over the weekend, and I was thrilled to see all 43 panels. Some are familiar amd many do nothing for me but this one, standing on perhaps the most traveled and photographed and surveilled corner in the city, was the only one that made my heart race. There's no other place this image would remain intact. Some idiot would feel the need to vandalize it, and that "some idiot" factor is important when thinking about public art.

Outside the library stands a Mary Miss installation that is universally loathed by the faculty and staff. Sometime, I'll take pictures of it because otherwise you'd never believe a description of what's out there. In my opinion, it's not just that it cost the university over $100,000 that makes it a whirling vortex of suckitude. No. It's bad art. It's lifeless, it interferes with ordinary movement and restricts simple line-of-sight judgments like, "Hey, what's that guy up to?" You'll notice the installation is not featured on Mary Miss's website - or you can trust me: it's not there. That is because when we saw the piece unveiled, staff members here stared at the construction project that'd made our lives miserable for some time and said, "Excuse me. That sucks. Get out of Dodge."

Some people tried to be nice. They said things like, "That naked Emperor has a nice ass." We have been stuck with this eyesore, which made me appreciate temporary eyesores - though I've always liked that one - for at least a decade. I've had time to think about it, I've weighed the merits of this installation. My feeling hasn't changed. This thing is bad art, and shame on the committee that didn't speak up before the money was spent.

I'm not sure what about coexistence merits a festival. That's like saying, "Hey, let's celebrate our...um...adequacy," and reminds me of Tom Lehrer's National Brotherhood Week. And I'd stand by that assessment that coexistence is a foolish, modest goal except people get all wound up and kill each other for no fucking reason whatsoever. So, sadly, coexistence suddenly looks ambitious, and let's invite the Indigo Girls and Richie Havens. I'm a little frustrated.

It's 2007. Two thousand goddamn seven, and some idiot will at least try to vandalize that gorgeous image and those simple words to obliterate the powerful notion that we are all interconnected. Peace, love and understanding just keep getting funnier and funnier.

Your Heart In This Fight

This song has been on my mind for a week.


I accidentally let myself get very dehydrated Sunday, so I've been fighting off a fever for a couple of days. This means when I do my daily "How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up?" even I know I'm wrong. Yet, a fever means I lie flat and think of thinking, which is great indoor-outdoor fun for me, and what I've been thinking about is presence and absence in life. I mean, of course I have. Dad died, and with my siblings and Darla in our separate homes, it's as if I quit some substance I feel leaving my body.

I mean, fuck.

What courses through our bodies is every bit as interesting as what we do with them. Davening is a Jewish practice of praying with the whole body. It is a form of commitment to the moment, apart from all other moments, in which a person - usually a man but not always, anymore - is supposed to become entirely present during the Shema: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheynu Adonai Echad..* I couldn't put my finger on where the Torah described it, though Deuteronomy was a good bet. Siobhan, as surly a wildcat as ever put animal print lingerie to incendiary use, was a Biblical scholar in a previous life:

Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (New International Version) Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society

4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

*1. Deuteronomy 6:4 Or The LORD our God is one LORD; or The LORD is our God, the LORD is one; or The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.

The emphasis is mine, and it's important; that word is sometimes translated as might. One's body and vigor mean everything, which makes lovely sense, doesn't it? Anyone who says you can't dance with the cosmos is plain misguided. This reminds me of the Whirling Dervishes, described on YouTube as: The Whirling Dervishes are a sect of Islam taught to love everything. The ceremony is so beautiful I can barely breathe. Please go look at the dancers I can't embed on PIC. I've watched this half a dozen times now and when they open their arms, my heart races. Once, I danced in an aisle as Coleman Barks read this poem by Rumi, the Whirling Dervishes' sufi master, because I could do nothing else.

If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,

Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,

Like this.

If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,
or what "God’s fragrance" means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.

Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.

Like this.

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.

Like this. Like this.

When someone asks what it means
to "die for love," point
here.

If someone asks how tall I am, frown
and measure with your fingers the space
between the creases on your forehead.

This tall.

The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns.
When someone doesn’t believe that,
walk back into my house.

Like this.

When lovers moan,
they’re telling our story.

Like this.

I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.

Like this.

When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.

Like this.

How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?

Huuuuu.

How did Jacob’s sight return?

Huuuu.

A little wind cleans the eyes.

Like this.

When Shams comes back from Tabriz,
he’ll put just his head around the edge
of the door to surprise us

Like this.


From ‘The Essential Rumi’, Translations
by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

I'm not sure I believe in God, but I believe in the astonishing beauty of becoming completely present at the right moment. It's not easy. Life appears to be long and it's tempting to fall asleep and stay there. If I've slept, I don't want to sleep anymore.

There are many ways to dance. Dance with me.