wishes packaged in manageable sizes

When I was eighteen, I wanted to be the Editor in Chief of the New York Times. This was not an ambition in the vein of "Oh, I'm going to be a spaceman!" type fantasies. This was me, methodically imagining how I would climb and summit that particular ladder.

I don't actually want to be at the helm of the New York Times anymore, for two reasons. One, I've lost my interest in newspaper journalism, and two, jesus christ, that place is a writhing deadly snake pit. You grow up and you change dreams, be they spaceman or newswoman.

No, what I want now is far more reasonable. I want to be a novelist. I want to be a novelist of middling success and fame. If fame, for instance, is a spectrum, wherein I represent 0 and Princess Diana is a 20, placing Brad Pitt at about 15 and the Mayor of St. Louis at a 4, I wouldn't mind hovering somewhere around 5.

That is to say, slightly more famous than the Mayor of any fair-sized Midwestern city.

Not so famous that I'm instantly recognizable from my dramatic airbrushed jacket-picture, or get to meet the President, or write a book about writing a book, or say snobby things on Oprah (Toni Morrison, I'm looking at you). Not so well reknowned that I chair a prestigious writing workshop. Not so successful that I own more than one house.

No, I don't think that's the life for me. I wouldn't mind getting recognized by a particularly keen-eyed reader, perhaps once a year in a cafe or so. I'd like to be invited to speak on NPR one day. I would be delighted to teach writing at some leafy New England campus, where I become an institution and as I age, begin to develop a stable of endearingly idiosyncratic behavior like eating whole cantaloupes while teaching class or saying "what..OH" for no discernable reason during my lectures.

I don't think I need an army of successful published books to feel like I've accomplished something. In fact, a couple duds is never a bad idea. Builds character, gives you something to laugh wisely and ruefully about during interviews or with budding novelists. Failure, public and published failure, keeps you anchored and makes your successes taste sweeter, I think. No, just half a dozen books for me would be great. Half a dozen times to stay up all night worrying about the reviews, half a dozen jumps of glee at seeing your name in print again, half a dozen schmoozy and stuffy release parties. Like I said - with a couple bad ones thrown in, it's got the making of success.

That's the thing - the making of success. I'm trying a lot these days, to figure out what kind of writer I am, what kind of writer I can become, where my happiness would lie and what would be false, untrue, unfair to my character or unrealistic to my style. I'm trying to grow, as Lily so famously put it in Hotel New Hampshire.

In fact, that nails it. I'd like to be like John Irving. I'd like to spend my life telling stories, writing them down, and seeing how they fly. No more. But also, no less.

Now where's that genie?

and for the even smaller attention spans

click to enlarge and see the Dooce Stipple Effect.

Stories, lists, pictures... all in one day. So don't ever say I don't give you the world. THE WORLD.

and for those of you with short attention spans

- Mark your calendars and rev your engines. Next Tuesday (May 3!) is the day The Shivs take over the world, with an 8PM gig at Kenny's Castaways on Bleeker. This is your chance to be that cool blogger that knows the Next Big Thing before the LES hipsters do. Go, rock out, enjoy.

- I happen to like rainy mornings for the sole reason that it's the one time that I actually relish entering my building, if only in that it becomes a sanctuary from the rain.

- We threw the mother of all surprise parties for the Kate, to mark her birthday two weeks early with a Merry Unbirthday party. There were scones and cocktails and spiked tea and the most unbelievable peanut-butter-and-jelly cake and there were pictures and I'll show you as soon as I get them off that lazy camera. Yeah, it's the camera's fault.

- We bought a playstation this week and *punches fist in air*.

- We are going home this weekend for Greek Easter (those orthodox and their pesky schism!) and I plan on marking the solemn occasion by not making fun of the church on my blog and thus starting a flame war. How very mature of me. Pat pat.

- One of my favourite British bloggers is rumored to be coming to visit in August, another one might be moving here, and next week, we are playing houseguests to a blog couple of good repute so the general transatlantic blogginess of it all is just too adorable. TOO ADORABLE.

- I'm not sure how this fits in anywhere but I thought I'd say it: Jen, you're probably the most honest blogger I know. Every single time I read your posts, I come back to my edit page resolved to just write without thinking too hard about how it'll sound to who's going to read it and whether I should say it and why or why not. But you've stayed very true to the style wherein you just don't give a monkey about who thinks what about why, and I love that. Come to think of it, I love it in you, too. So, hi Jen, I love you.

- Um, I think I'm done. FER ner ner.

black fur and make-believe

Mouschka looked more like a ratty urban fox than a stalwart German Shepherd. She was the runt of the litter and though her paws and her ears proved her breeding, her body was woefully undersized. Her parents' owners said she was purebred, but hey, this was Africa, it's not like the AKC was making the rounds, right? In fact, for all our trying, I don't think we ever really owned a purebred Shepherd. But in the beginning or end, that didn't really matter.

Mouschka was loyal in that unique doggy way and it more than made up for her size. Anything that I played with, anything I touched, even my favourite trees in the yard were guarded with slavering devotion and some pretty fierce growls for a dog so puny. I had one of those rollerscooters that I often left carelessly in the middle of the driveway, but the gardener was hardpressed to put it away when a fifty pound snarling street rat was standing over it. Antoine - that was the gardener - had an otherwise friendly relationship with Mouschka, but anything that was mine was untouchably holy. Even, ironically, his water can that he used for his twice-daily prayers. He let me use it, once, for a pretend game, and he couldn't get it back for Mouschka's growls.

Mouschka was already slated for the sweet nightshade of lethal injection, because of her several painful maladies, when she got hit by a car. My mother's car, to be exact. She - Mouschka, you understand, not my mother - had this irritating habit of racing after people's heels, not so much that she bit them, but only for fun. On one of the driver's nights off, my mother came home from a school meeting to pick me up for a dinner with Dad. I was waiting on the steps, watching her pull in.

She usually didn't have to honk because Seidou, the night guard, would have seen the lights through the metal gate and started to swing it open to the dusty street. But he was in the bathroom so Beatrice came running out of the house to open it. Cue, as usual, the delighted rat-dog chasing at her heels. I can barely remember the sequence of horrific dominos as I watched from the garage door steps but when Seidou also rushed out of the side entrance to hold the swinging gate open, Mouschka naturally crossed the driveway to play, and that's when my poor mother felt the bump rolling under the front left tire of the Mazda and when I started screaming. They buried her in the fields across from the house and Mom started smoking again, after having quit for six months.

No dog I ever owned had been quite as loyal as Mouschka, but Champion certainly tried. In fact, when I refer to Champion, I usually say, "that dog was dumb as a bag of hair but boy, was he loyal". What made Champion especially noteworthy in our morbid history of sudden pet death was that he didn't die. This isn't to say that I know whether he's still alive - my parents had to leave him with their French neighbors in the Congo, after being transferred to the urban life of Cairo where the poor beast wouldn't have fared well.

No, Champion's uniqueness goes beyond his ability to simply survive our family for more than a few years. He went from Tunisia, where he was the only puppy to survive his young mother's litter, to Houston, where he routinely threw himself at our wooden fence and got terrified by bluejays on his food bowl. The bane of Champion's life was the pool at that house in Houston. It was all he could do to not die from terror every time I swam in it. Instead, he would run relentless circles around the perimeter, barking hysterically. If I sank under for more than a few seconds, the moron would throw himself into the water and try to rescue me, all one hundred pounds of smelly wet fur and frantic claws. Sometimes, I think just to keep himself in the game, he'd bark maniacally at the automated pool cleaner that skimmed the bottom all day.

After Houston we dragged him to Kenya, which is really where he earned his reputation for both stupidity and loyalty. My father, mocking my thirteen year old choice of name for the dog, called him Prince Stupid instead of Prince Champion, and after a while, the dog started answering to Stupid, or Stoop. He had a really hard time with our Kenyan houseguards, who were part of a company that provided security. The guards were almost never the same, week after week, which threw the insecure Shepherd into a frenzy of misplaced protectiveness. He was fine with them if they stayed at the gates, but when Mom would open the kitchen window and called "ASKARI!" for them to come get their evening tea, he'd become the snarling picture of terror that belied the cowardly baby he really was. Because Stoop was beyond training, we just had to advise the guys to walk slowly and look forward and promise them that he was really too much of a big whiny baby to hurt them. I don't think they believed us.

Stupid as he was, though, I loved hanging out with him, putting my bare feet on his back as the black thick fur heated up in the sunshine and the rattle of his breathing tickled my toes. Mock him though I did, he was a good dog. But it wasn't the askari threat that proved the mettle of that stupid loyal Shepherd, though. It was Kirby. It was the menace of beauty that was our first and only Terrier.

From the minute we brought Kirby home, the little Jack Russell was the only apple of my eye, the wiggling crafty little beauty that I couldn't stop hugging or praising or playing with. A less loyal or patient First Dog, on seeing their abject demotion to Second Dog, would have retaliated. But it was in this graceful slide from favor that Champion really proved his utter dogginess. Kirby was everything he wasn't - smart, quick, fearless, impossible to catch, impossible to reprimand, and the barking howling begging darling of my heart. As a young puppy, he thought it the pinnacle of hilarity to climb onto the slumbering Champion's back, grab his black ears with those sharp Terrier teeth, and growl.

I wouldn't have thought it possible for a dog to sigh but Champion actually sighed. He'd lumber to his feet and trot obediently around the yard with the snarling clinging Terrier trying to start a fight on his back, and then with one powerful throw, he'd fling Kirby to the ground and look at him with long-suffering brown eyes, then climb back onto the verranda and fall asleep again in his sunny patch. My father, who hated the impertinence of the Napoleonic little Jack Russell, suddenly developed a wealth of affection for Champion and started referring to himself and the Shepherd as "the Dogs in this family". It was a joke that gained even more ground when Dad and Champion went to the Congo while Mom, Kirby and I went to Houston for a year. That was the last time I saw Champion.

Kirby, on the other hand, continued to be both a darling and a menace in my life. Our townhouse in Houston, while spacious, wasn't nearly enough to contain his zest and mania. He broke collars to chase squirrels, peed on furniture as sulky retribution, bent the venetian blinds in the fury of throwing himself at the window to bark at yardmen, and humped the plumber. It was in Houston that we discovered that Kirby was epileptic, but his strong muscles and heart were something our vet expressed amazement at and the reason that Kirby wasn't put on daily Phenobarbitol.

His trip to Brasil with my mother, after I'd left for college, was to be his last adventure. The fits had gotten worse, and when my mother took him to the state kennel to get stamped to leave Brasil (and come visit me in New York), he had another terrible attack. The vets there, thinking he had rabies regardless of my mother's furious insistence to the contrary, demanded to keep him overnight for "observation". Keeping him overnight in an unsupervised and strange kennel, though, prompted another fit that, unsoothed by my mother's worried hugs, led to the heart attack that killed him.

I like to joke that Kirby's incessant dashing and yapping is what gave him epilepsy in the first place and this is admittedly a funny thought, but I cannot think of that early morning international phone call without getting a little emotional. Insane or not, Kirby was the first dog I'd picked for myself and loved with unparalleled fierceness, and that love was the crux all the reasons that my parents continued to give me pets, even when those poor maligned creatures could do nothing but love me briefly and die suddenly.

Like Jade. She stands out in the morbid timeline as being the truly sweet one. We named her Aquaba Jade - aquaba means "luck" in an Ivorian dialect. She was the consolation for the loss of Mouschka, and she made the move to Tunisia with us. It was a particularly hard move because Ivory Coast had felt so much like home, and she was the perfect dog for it. We spent hours in the lush wilds of the backyard in Tunis, where I'd play solitary games of being Artemis with Jade as my loyal wolfhound.

But one day when I was at the school I found loathsome and miserable, Jade ate rat poisoning that she'd found buried in the yard. She died a gruesomely sudden death in my father's arms, on the way to the vet, and to spare me the horrific details, my parents told me she'd gotten pneumonia and passed away quietly during a nap. Somehow this was meant to ease the pain of yet another pet torn from me, and they didn't tell me about the rat poison until years later. Perhaps because when we'd moved in, I had been helping the gardeners search for all of the deadly stuff in the yard, and we'd all missed just that one packet. Perhaps I would have blamed myself, and losing her was hard enough.

They were all, though, dogs to the truest definition of the word. Jade was the classic Shepherd. Loyal but fun, quiet when you needed to just rest your tear-streaked face in some warm black fur, and a companion in every imaginable game. Champion stayed true to me even when my heart had abandoned him to the fickle genius of Kirby, and he's pictured most in my memory as napping on the warm brick tiles of that verranda in the afternoons, and the regular rise and fall of his breathing as I rested my feet on his back, under the glass table where I did my homework. Mouschka was mercilessly mocked by careless friends for her runty size and her hair-loss (and the heel-snapping thing was both annoying and her downfall) but she was the perfect size to cuddle with on the deckchairs surrounding the pool and she loved going on long walks. And Kirby - well. Kirby was crazy and fun and smart as a whip and a complete handful, but boy howdy did I love that dog.

Boy howdy did I love those dogs.

afternoon gods

We weren't trying to be bad. It just occurred to us. We stood on the beach in Tolo, my cousin Jacques and I, with the lapping Mediterranean bay enticing our bare feet, and asked the dockhand how much for the paddleboat.

I don't remember how much it was. At fifteen, I had small amounts of cash given to me on vacations and what I spent it on was more important than how much it was. We were about half a mile down the beach from the apartment my parents had rented in the sleepy Peloponnesean town, and it was early afternoon. The accomodating Greek sun was slanting down through the citrus groves that blanketed the curved mountains around us. Ask my parents for permission? Why?

Besides, Jacques was a year older and thus much cooler than me and it wasn't cool to ask your parents for permission to skip around the bay in a paddleboat with your cool cousin. So we paid the weathered dockhand for two hours of paddleboat ownership and got in, setting a course for the chunky little islands that ringed the sparkling bay.

I wore a denim bikini, a fact that my cousin found hilarious as he kept teasing me to take the top half off. Our summers together had started when I was ten or eleven, young enough to run around the pebbled beaches of Greece wearing nothing but a sand-packed little bikini bottom, shrieking at the waves and at Jacques' impish insistence that yes, I was positively surrounded by deadly jellyfish. But at fifteen, I'd long grown into my bikini top and an adult sense of propriety, so I just punched him in his scrawny tanned arm and paddled harder.

The waves rolled us forward, closer and closer to the little monastary island of Koronis. We were almost halfway around the western side of it, our furiously paddling legs bringing us to the tempting lip of the open sea, when we saw the nude sunbathers, stretched out like content iguanas on the scorching rock, getting sprayed by foamy waves that crashed onto their refuge. Laughing and embarassed, we kept paddling into deeper blue water. At first, I tried to sound nonchalant about my unease, as the waves pushed under the paddleboat with growing intensity. But with typical teenager bravado, it took my water-splashed shrieks to make Jacques agree to turn the rudder bay-ward and to calmer waters. Boys, when it comes to their delight in girls' terror, will be boys. And cousins will be worse.

We zig-zagged towards Romvi, the bigger island in the bay, and found the true treasure there. The island was a natural marine reserve so when we pushed our battered little paddleboat onto the shore, we found ourselves utterly alone, with a jaggedly steep rock path climbing up into the hill of the island and several ominous caves whose murky depths disappeared at high tide. I stuck to the glass-clear waters, pulling on my flippers and mask to get closer to the bottom of the bay. Jacques climbed up the face of the hill, not saying much on his descent except to shamefacedly pull the cactus prickles out of his heel and calves. I laughed at him, salty water stinging my throat.

For hours, Jacques and I sunk lazily to the bottom of the shallow sunlit sea floor and shot up to the surface for air. We played ridiculous games underwater, like seeing who could stand on moss-covered rocks longer, or uselessly jinxing each other when we'd point to the same thing simultaneously. It never felt cold, the water in Greece. It always felt like a dappled magic carpet that made you weightless and perfect. It was coming into the brisk seabreeze above that shocked you, sending your skin into rashes of goosebumps and leaving a harsh ringing noise in your ears. Diving down again was the only comfort. So dive down again we did.

As my feet searched for a place to stand on the seafloor, I very nearly stepped on a live sea urchin, a treacherous little ball of pain that Jacques diverted me from by throwing himself, full-bodied and in slow motion, into my body. After a moment of angrily confused tangled limbs and a water-filled eyemask, I saw the tiny little enemy gliding gently along, kicking up the sand that was his crafty disguise. I stole a nearby empty urchin shell as a vengeful memento.

Finally, the sinking sun ducked behind the hill and abandoned the sandy shore where our boat was grounded so we dragged the boat back into the surf, pointing our cycling legs towards the colorful crowded harbor. It was only as we paddled closer, skin stretched dry from the salty water and shoulders turning pink, did I realize we might have a problem. When we gave the boat (and the extra hour's charge) back to the squinting surly dockhand, Jacques started translating his chastising rant.

"Tio Angelo," said my cousin in our shared Portuguese. "He says Tio Angelo's been looking for us." There was that pit, that teenager's moment of dread, when they know they're in trrrroubbbllle. As we scurried back silently down the beach in the pink hues of twilight, I saw at least five or six fisherman looking at me as though they'd recognized my father's frantic and gruff description of his precious daughter. Looking as me and shaking their heads a little, this daughter that had disobeyed!

There, in the distance, was my short and obviously angry dad, the pounding of his leather sandals along the sand roughly equatable to the pounding of his terrified overwrought heart. He nearly cuffed my cousin and he looked at me with mingled relief and fury. "Hours!" he yelled, "HOURS. We didn't know where you were." He didn't know where I was, he kept repeating on to our hung heads.

There was so little use in explaining that it hadn't been done out of surly rebellion or gleeful mischief, that it had been a genuine mistake. There was little point in telling him about the glorious clear waters of Romvi, the startled and naked Europeans caught sunbathing on the monastary island, the frantic brush with prickly pain on the bottom of the sea. My mother and father were, justifiably, furious with us for not telling them, for not being careful, for our reckless childlike irresponsibility. We could have drowned! We could have gotten hurt! We could have been carried out to sea! All consequences that had been nonexistent to us when Jacques had suggested we rent a paddleboat, and I had first squinted into the harbor and said, "let's go to those islands!"

It was, in my memory, the first time I remember seeing the consequences of my stupidity, the effect it had on my parents. Later that night, my mother, gently forgiving me the way she always did, shook her graceful head a little and said, "you should have seen him, storming up and down the beach. You could have given him a heart attack." That she was lovingly rubbing my shoulders as she said this didn't make the cold shock of culpability any less jarring.

Like so many Greek stories before, realization had come a moment too late. The good intentions had still been a road to Hades. It had been a quiet attack of imagination-strewn nerves for a mother, an afternoon's nightmare for a father, pacing the rooms and pacing the shores, while the trickster gods of Greece keeping their beloved daughter frolicking below the dancing waves.

Tolo, Greece, July 1995.

et cetera

I don't do this very often but I'd like to link to two new blogs. Well, one new and one new to me. Tiffany and her guy are traveling around the world and they're currently in China. She's got such a fresh, curious voice that I found myself sifting through her archives both for places I've been, to see her take, and places I haven't, for the same reason. Go there, have a browse around, and never forget your runcible spoon.

Also of note, my best friend from high school, the more holy in the unholy trinity of Erin, myself, and her: Rachel has started a blog. That's the only time you'll see her referred to her properly spelt name on this site, because I much prefer calling her Raychul. Pop over there to follow the depths of hilarious madness she gets into when her brilliant mind starts wandering. God knows how the world will cope with Lawyer Raychul.

Looking at new blogs (something I'll admit I do very rarely because I'm a lazy bastard, okay) made me realize that the last time I asked you all to introduce yourself was sometime in the wilds of 2003, and I've lost those comments to the ether of site transition.

So, I'm asking again. If you stop here regularly on your blog rounds (or even if you don't but you're feeling friendly), please say hello. Say who you are and where you blog, if you do. Also, tell me your least favourite food and your most favourite word. Just for fun.

Hi! I'm Krissa. I blog here. I hate shrimp (because they look like cockroaches) and I love serendipity (because it makes me think of friendly snakes).

Rainstorm Utterly Fails to Impress, Sources Cite Downsizing and "Namby Pamby Liberal Rainstorms"

If you happened to look or be outside in the past ten minutes on the small island of Manhattan, you would have seen what meteorologists are scrambling to label "the most polite rainstorm of all time". In the time it takes for a crosstown bus to go one avenue block, the rainstorm dripped and simpered its way from New Jersey to Long Island, muttering all the way about appointments it must keep and simply being stretched too thin these days.

New Yorkers with the vantage point of a high rise office were annoyed to see what promised to be a threatening advance of precipitation in the air at roughly 3:30 PM. Turning away from the droplet-streaked window, they only had enough time to place the call to their secretaries to secure them one of those nice golf umbrellas from the Brookstones downstairs. Turning back to the window, many a high-powered Manhattan drone was then surprised to see the sun's annoyed countenance, having thought it had long enough to nip round to the local for a pint and being called abruptly back to duty.

The rainstorm, meanwhile, displayed very little zest for its job, and was heard shamefacedly saying, "I'm so sorry, pardon me, I've just got to - oh, you're there? So sorry again, I - well, ooh, there you go, I'll just slip right by without - OH! Sorry." Many pedestrians noticed that the rain kindly fell around them, leaving them mostly dry and humbly begged their forgiveness, as it shuffled embarassedly through the bustling city.

While the Rainstorm Union couldn't be reached for official comment at press time, several unconfirmed sources say that the mighty and powerful movers and shakers in the rainstorm world are "embarassed" and "humiliated" by the accomodating appearance of their usually fierce presence. A few old-time tropical storms were more than willing to shake their heads violently and call this a "truly tragic moment" for their illustrious organization and blame the "touchy feely vibes" among younger, more innovative members. "In my day, you battered, you broke, you didn't saunter," said one member who wore the golden badge of the Broken Umbrella, the most coveted award in the Union. Press reps, off the record, insist this has absolutely nothing to do with recent cost-analysis ratios that rocked the weather-making world recently, calling today's rainstorm a "disgrace" to what is still a "powerful landmark of New York life".

The soft-spoken rainstorm, however, insisted that it had someplace very important to be and hadn't meant to rain across the often-soaked buildings of New York (it also made veiled references to construction on the Triboro and wordlessly indicting an election-year Mayor) . "I'm quite fearsome, really, but Manhattan isn't my zone," it mumbled. It also insisted it was "just listening to my iPod, you know? I didn't even notice I was raining, honest." Expounding on the myth of rain's constant fierceness, the storm insisted that sometimes, it's just a little rain, nothing to ruin anyone's good time. "It's just such a cliche," it complained, "rainy days and Mondays, you know? I went to Hampshire. We learned to think outside the box."

No word yet on whether more powerful rainstorms will be attempting to regain the populace's fear and respect (and the industry's top Broken Umbrella Award) during their weekly showing on Wednesday. Whispering its last comment, the nameless press rep for the RU said, "it's April, you know? We've got an image to maintain here."

and i've been waiting such a long time

When you look through these pictures (click above), I want to reassure you that it's okay to sing the Chicago song. Just in case, you know, you were worried about your image.

storyboards and temper tantrums

As plans go, it was standard Friday night fare, but perfect in its simplicity. Dinner at the famed and tiny Kebab Cafe, lauded by Astorians as the best place to get middle eastern with the added hilarity of the charismatic owner, Ali. Nine o'clock movie, Sin City, at the Astoria Kaufman Theatre. The theater was at the southern end of Astoria, and Kebab Cafe was on the southern end of Steinway St., right nearby, according to the superpages map I diligently checked before leaving the office.

It was when we turned onto Steinway, at 7:30, that the alarm bells started ringing in my head. Western Beef? Autobody shops? Where was Kebab Cafe? Where? WHERE?

The first domino fell.

I got on the phone, called information, all the while insisting that I'd seen the map online, that I knew that it was at Northern and Steinway, knew that fact to be true even in the very face of reality as we stood on that intersection with no cozy Kebab Cafe to be found. Information put me through to cheerful Ali, jovial wonderful proprietor of the middle eastern foods I'd been craving all week (tabouleh! falafel! pita!), and he said, yes honey, we are at Steinway and 25th avenue. Eight avenue blocks from where we were.

The second domino fell.

I looked at my watch. I did the math. I whined to Stuart, who was proposing everything short of teleportation to stop me from being sad about Kebab Cafe. We'll take a bus! A cab! We'll...

The third domino fell, and with it, furious little tears threatened to leap out of my eyes. I fucked it up, I moaned. The date we'd planned to celebrate the beginning of a weekend, the beginning of spring, our neighborhood, good news at Stuart's job ... I'd fucked it up! And Stuart, holding on to the thread of my rapidly disheveling calmness, looked stunned. Helpless.

And that's when I stopped. That's when I turned around the childish Good Ship Tantrum and stopped. And as we started to walk west again, towards a casually hip diner we knew near the theater, as my breathing got long again, I tried to explain to the man next to me something that he probably already knows - that plans are always more than plans to me.

A plan, in a life as erstwhile-chaotic as mine has been, has been like a liferaft, if that wasn't a sad and tired metaphor. But it is, so I'll explain it this way, the way I did as we walked slowly to the diner.

Magazine editors have storyboard walls for each upcoming issue. They take pieces of paper and design each page, laying down the artwork. It allows them to move pages around, reconfigure feature stories, but they've got the stories and the artwork there all along.

I have a storyboard too. For every evening I plan, for every weekend I look forward to, every trip, every life event, I automatically storyboard it. How I picture it going, who will be there, sometimes down to what I want to wear. It's like a catalog of my evening, in small happy frames. And when I see an evening a certain way, I come to rely on that process of unraveling the storyboard as it occurs. I take pleasure in it, as if life were a movie and I was watching it play out happily.

But when something happens, something I didn't plan, it's as if some mischievous imp dashed into my calm and collected warroom, grabbed my storyboards off the wall and delighted in tearing them to shreds with his devilish little hooves. Nevermind that he doesn't have opposable thumbs - he just ruined my movie!

And that's when the tears start. And the useless whining. And the utter inability to go with any kind of flow I didn't evaluate, price, and approve beforehand. And what I finally realized standing on the corner of Not There and Other Way, what finally swung into the frame to save the day from yet another one of my pouts, was how inherently selfish it was. How inherently self-centered it was to get upset when my perfect plan didn't work.

Because there were - if you remember - two people standing there. Two people who'd been looking forward to middle eastern food and the jovial Ali. And only one of them was throwing a tantrum. The other one - Stuart - was completely robbed of the chance to be maturely disappointed because of the mammoth snit I was throwing. When one person is overreacting, the other person must underreact. And at the look of helpless despair on Stuart's face, I finally started listening. It's okay, he was telling me. Let's go to Cup Diner, he suggested. We'll plan another evening around visiting Ali, he promised.

And right there, on the corner of Steinway and Northern, I threw away my tantrum. I tossed the ruined storyboard out the window, told the merciless little imp who preyed on my need for organization to go stuff himself, and I put down the snit. We had lovely burgers at Cup Diner and enjoyed every minute of Sin City.

And when we got home, I realized that storyboards can change. That I can reap the benefits of my need to plan and organize - always knowing a good restaurant in any neighborhood and having a stable of laid-back weekend diversions - as well as enjoy the detours and where they might take me. Because when I got home, I read in the newspaper that there's a famous old mansion at the northern end of Steinway.

It's right near Kebab Cafe.

Maybe we could go this Friday night.

What would I wear?

freedom of information?

This is probably the worst day of the week to publish this question, since no one reads weblogs on weekends, but I can't get it out from under my skin so I need to turn to the internet. Hello, Internet.

Let's say I'm a photographer. And I photographed military personnel and military equiptment, and also coffins returning from Iraq. These photographs are then OWNED by the United States Armed Forces. Let's say that an independent journalist online then demanded to see those photographs, under the Freedom of Information Act, and the USAF released to him a CD of those images. And then let's say the independent journalist then released those images on the internet to any and all media that wanted high resolution images. And different magazines requested high resolution images, and then printed them uncredited.

My gut instinct, and the instinct of any photo agency worth its salt if that had happened to one of THEIR photographers, would be to cry foul. After all, someone owns that image, and the person who is distributing them on the internet is not the person who has the legal ownership and distribution rights.

However, the images were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. A national body owns those images, not a photographer per se. When a document is released under FOIA, I don't need permission to reprint it. Why is a photograph any different?

Except... and here's what bugs me ... I couldn't very well pass off the document as my own, could I. I'd have to credit it, wouldn't I? So why aren't these photographs being properly credited by the media outlets that are reprinting them? If they're owned by the USAF, even if they're public domain to use, shouldn't they be credited to the USAF? Or even better, to the actual struggling photographer that took them?

This might very well be the most boring question in the entire world to anyone who isn't interested in digital image rights or photographers' rights, like I am. But perhaps some of you out there, especially you photobloggers, might have an answer, or be able to point me to someplace that does. I don't want to release the names or links to these images because I'm not trying to start an internet brawl. I'm just curious.

This Ethicist is now open for discussion.

ii

Dear Stuart,

I don't know why today is the day that I need to write some things down for you in this so public a forum, but today is that day. Maybe it's because you've been working for a few weeks and it's been yet another change, yet another development. Maybe it's because I've spent all my downtime today thinking of fun things we could do on our Friday night. Maybe it's because this weekend marks six months of marriage. Maybe, though, it's because every week, you find a new way to make me laugh until my sides hurt, and last night it was that thing you did where you met my nose with yours and then jerked your head back and forth so that you looked like a woodpecker on my nose and it's just so goddamned funny that I'm laughing right now, remembering it.

I just never thought that life could be this beautiful and more importantly, I never thought that even the difficult parts, the mundane parts, could be this full of joy and hilarity. Every morning, I bounce out of bed while you're showering and pour you a cup of coffee from our demonically retarded coffee machine (WHY, WHY does coffee always leak when I'm pouring? Why, Black + Decker, WHY?) and deliver it to you in the steamy little bathroom. I start making our sandwiches for the day, glad to know that every evening you'll exclaim what a masterpiece it was even though it's the same sandwich every day. We have breakfast at our dining room table, cereal or toast and jam and coffee and tea and it's all so very mundane and normal, and yet it's the most beautiful time of the day.

I kiss you three or four times before you go down our stairs and it never feels like enough. We text throughout the day, funny stories about the department store or crazy Tobey or the Mafioso and it brightens my day, every time.

I love how you put up with my obsessive plan-making, which changes every minute but is always done with nothing but excitement and anticipation. I love how you cherish every minute of our weekends, I love how you're always smiling when I see you. I love how your upper lip curls when you're frustrated, I love how you call me a nooly when I'm being crazy. I love lying on the futon in the office while you type at night, I love the way you always find me and wrap sleep-heavy arms around me every morning, right as the alarm goes off.

I love, too, the way you put up with my flaws. I've said I was going to do the mounting pile of dishes for three days now. For three days now, I haven't done them. You know very well that if the tables were turned, I'd be righteously indignant. Not a peep of righteous indignance out of you, and that's love. Because those are a lot of dishes. I love how you're so slow to irritate, slow to find fault, because you really do believe the best in me even when I'm behaving at my worst.

I also really love the way you call me "small one".

I love your eyebrows, I love your beard and its stubbornly inconsistent growth patterns. I love it when you catch sight of yourself lately and say, "wow! I look thinner!" because I know how hard you're working and I'm so intensely, stupidly proud of you. I love playing tennis with you and kissing you at the net every time one of us has to go up there to retrieve yet another failed ball. I love watching movies with you and the way you slide over to snuggle under my neck during the commercials.

I'm writing this and not editing it because I edit everything else I write but this will be something that I post here, selfishly written just for you, just because I love you, just because it's thursday and you've changed my life today like you change my life every day and because we're meeting on the first car of the N train in 20 minutes and like every day, I can't wait to see you again.

Love,

your Nooly

the twins

My headache has been around all day, and at the five hour mark, it became a Headache, and we all know that capitalized nouns are proper nouns and proper nouns are unique things and unique things need names, so I asked Biscuit to name it.

"Emma!"

Which I disagreed with, so I invented an Overwhelming Sense of Malaise for him to name instead, thinking I'd just switch the names and throw away the Malaise, but he tricked me, Biscuit did, so now I have an Overwhelming Sense of Malaise named Morris.

So Emma and Morris are rattling around in my head and while it's getting kind of difficult to see through the fog of pain and ennui, I just realized that with names that pretentious, the bastards are going to want to go to the Ivies so here I am, a single mother of two snobbish preppy Unpleasantries, with a pile of bills and constant requests for more Izod shirts.

Some days are just bad.

Dear Amy Sohn,

It was with my own diminishing interest that I read your column in the April 11th New York Magazine. I have a couple points that I'd like to hash out, just to stand up as the voice of some of us "young marrieds" out there.

I’ll be the first to admit that marriage is an incredibly important relationship. It’s earth-shaking, it takes adjusting to, it’s hard and beautiful and it’s worth every minute. And as with any life-changing step, it has reverberations throughout every avenue of my life. And then I read your column, and suddenly, I’m backpedaling up a steam. Marriage, it seems, isn’t THIS big of a deal. It's not ruining my social life and my friendships. I mean…

Sexless pariah?
About to reject my friends?
Never able to go out without my husband?
Always leaving early?
The brunt of domesticated jabs?

I’m not any of those things. And I’m young, and married. Right smack dab in your spotlighted demographic. We even live far enough away that going out sometimes is a hassle. And yeah, sometimes, we don’t. Sometimes, we stay home and watch a movie, or exercise together, or get a good night’s sleep.

But rejecting them because they don’t fit into my little married twosome, or being rejected by them because I don’t drink enough, smoke enough, or stay out late enough? If this is the experience of the average young and married New Yorker, then tell me - exactly how shallow are that average New Yorker’s friendships?

My friends haven’t rejected me, and I hope they don’t think I’m subtly rejecting them. The friendships in my life (and, I'll venture to say, in most people's lives) exist on a basis of mutual love and understanding. They love me and understand that while my life has changed, they are still important to me and I will make every effort to spend as much quality time with them as I have, and that I do that willingly and not out of some couple-time replacement therapy. I understand that loving them, and making the commitment of friendship that I’ve made, means that I need to see my personal time as more precious but just as flexible. It means that I make time for them because I know that nourishment is what sustains friendships, and that friendships are what sustain me.

Do they view me as a sexless pariah? Am I suddenly unable to discuss my marriage with my friends and trust that they’ll be just as fair and impartial to the man I love as they were to any other relationship I dissected with them? I certainly hope not. While the terms of discussion have changed – none of my friends are going to suggest I get a divorce if I mention a domestic squabble – I’m just as able to talk about my relationship as I was in the past. My friends and I hold true to the same set of guidelines; just because we vent about our partners doesn’t mean we’re ceding executive control over our decisions, and any advice is offered thoughtfully and lovingly. And really - sexless pariah? Am I the only person in my group of friends to be in a relationship? Are they all twelve? Or do they also know the terms of endearment, that is, that every relationship has its sexiness and its mundanities? Is this even an issue, to anyone but the supposed young marrieds in your article?

Here’s the thing, though, Ms. Sohn. I could understand everything about your article, I could write off the unfairness to most marriages and friendships as catchy magazine writing and dramatic flair. I’m sure you actually do have a lot of good friends who understand that you’re married and are even going through their own transitions.

But your interview subjects really break my heart. You know people whose friends continually mock them for cooking a good meal for their partner? Isn’t that what our mothers called jealousy and told us to ignore? You interviewed someone who complained that her married friends can only stay for dinner and don’t smoke pot? And these people call themselves friends? That’s not friendship, that’s sad. True friends do not exclude their married friends, or insecurely anticipate their own eventual rejection. True friends do not stop enjoying someone’s company because they quit smoking or because they live farther away.

Because really, and surely you know this, true friendship isn’t based on convenience. True friends do require care and attention, but the moments when they really shine are when you need them the most. And in any new relationship, in any time of sea change or transition, that’s when you need your friends to be their truest, to call on all of their reserves of selflessness and understanding. That’s when they know to make one-on-one plans with you, to ask if a weekend lunch is better than a late-night pub crawl. That’s when they can help you dissect the crux of a marital spat without making you feel like they hate your partner. That’s when a true friend can celebrate your life, instead of holding you accountable to the change of terms.

Your article went halfway. In all your neat explanation about how marriage makes both the married and the single sides of a friendship lose interest, you didn’t get to the most important thing about marriages and friendships. It’s this: if your friends aren’t doing all those things that come naturally to true friends, perhaps the problem is not the marriage. Perhaps the problem is the friends.

evidence

If there's any proof that images are misleading, it's the fact that you can't see my sunburn in this photo.

It was tennis on Saturday and a two hour walk on Sunday. It goes from the top of each cheekbone to meet on the bridge of my nose. It's the first blush - literally - of summer.

And try as I might, I couldn't capture it. But maybe if you look closely, you'll see what I mean.

footsore and hearthappy

As of yesterday afternoon today, Biscuit, Stuart, Shiv, The Kate, and myself officially signed up as Team The Tribe (Jason, SIGN UP), walking and quoting Eddie Izzard in the same life-affirming breath! It's a sight to see! We'll be a powerful walking army of tens of thousands! And we'll raise millions of dollars! And fight for a cure! and we'll ...

... well, the whole entire WALK will be tens of thousands. And while the whole event usually raises over five hundred grand, we're aiming our sights a little lower. But we're definitely fighting for a cure. And our little Team The Tribe, while probably no more than ten or so, will be TEN STRONG! VERY VERY STRONG! And probably very very achy, after six miles. But also VERY VERY HAPPY! To be doing our part. Will you do yours?

I'm urging you, as blog readers and friends and shiny huggy lovely people the world over, help out. Head over to Amazon. Give us a couple bucks, or twenty. Give what you can spare, and know that it's for a wonderful cause, because it's for the people that you love in your life, and also for the people that others love, and for people that others have loved and lost.

Let's end this thing, okay?

Red ribbons and battered sneakers and new-millenium fundraisers, RAWR!

Set This Entry To The Tune of FedEx Hold Music

Does anyone else out there thing there should be a Poke function when you're on hold for more than 5 minutes?

Like, some sort of electronic zapper, controlled by a specific number or numbers that the cusomer can press, something that delivers a harmless but irritating jolt of electricity to the customer service representived ostensibly solving your problem and NOT blogging/talking to his girlfriend/playing Quake Online, a jolt that tells your caring customer service representative that YOU ARE STILL ON THE GODDAMNED LINE AND YOU'VE HEARD ONE TOO MANY DUNCAN SHEIK SONGS AND YOU'RE MAD AS HELL AND YOU'RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE?

Does anyone know if this software is in development? BECAUSE I HAVE PUNCHED EVERY FATHOMABLE COMBINATION into my telephone keypad and I'M STILL SITTING HERE. ON HOLD.

nothing's right i'm torn

I'm not one of those people who routinely links to funnily inane things on the internet. That said, please check out:

karaoke for the deaf, performed by HBO Comedy's The Hollow Men.

And do yourself a favor - watch it two or three times. It JUST gets funnier.

i'm terribly sorry, but you're an idiot, OR, conquering greyhound

Stuart and I went to Rhode Island last weekend, traveling by that great equalizer, Greyhound. As if Port Authority isn't disorganized and chaotic enough, the "depot" in Providence is more like a hut by the roadside, downtown. When we arrived ten minutes early for our 4 PM departure, there was an idling bus and a lot of silently confused, semi-queueing people. You know that line that forms when no one's QUITE sure of the outcome of standing in a line? It was one of those lines. Complete with those two or three opportunistic leeching assholes that stand AROUND what is clearly a quasi-line, and who will attempt to nonchalantly step into the queue they weren't standing in, when the starting gates open. I HATE THOSE ASSHOLES. Oh, wait, where was I? Right. Rhode Island.

It was surprisingly chilly for the given temperature, and everyone started grumbling shyly at each other when it was 4:10 and no one had come from anywhere to tell us anything official. Was this the bus to New York? We certainly thought so. Where was the driver? Who knew. Was this a sign of the apocalypse? Probably.

Finally, after two or three harried Greyhound "employees" had rushed by to no avail and with no answers, my generously patient and kind husband took it upon himself to go into the small depot building, mysteriously full of people just standing around staring at screens, and get some answers. Other people had seemingly tried, but they'd come out just as mystified and blank-faced as those of us standing in the "line" (but not nearly as faux-nonchalant as the line-cutting twatheads hovering around us).

And I stood there, sharing sympathetic grimaces with my co-line-standers (and throwing glancing glowers at the hovering fuckwits) for another five cold, windy, and confused minutes. Until Stuart came out of the bus depot.

And boy, DID HE COME OUT OF THAT BUS DEPOT OR WHAT.

The door swung open, and out walked my husband in his long black wool coat, with his short black beard and determinedly-knitted-together eyebrows. And he was followed by NO LESS THAN FOUR GREYHOUND EMPLOYEES, in various stages of determination and grumpiness. He was followed by FOUR GREYHOUND EMPLOYEES, who walked in a V formation behind my handsome and triumphant husband, and I could see in their walk that they'd been TOLD, and I could see in his walk THAT HE'D TOLD THEM.

I cannot even tell you the pride that welled up in my chest. The visible stirring of my fellow sufferers, at seeing this confident and conflict-solving man emerging with the guilty party all but trussed on a stick and carried across his victorious shoulders. He'd TALKED TO THEM. And he'd MADE THEM COME OUTSIDE AND DEAL with the two waiting buses and the twenty waiting customers. And there they were, walking behind him, walking behind the man WHO'D SINGLE-HANDEDLY SOLVED GREYHOUND'S DISORGANIZATION AND SLOTH PROBLEMS. At least for that day, anyway.

I'm telling you, that moment, it was in slow motion. I saw, frame-by-triumphant-frame, a procession of victory. The victory of paying customers over the daily injustices and indignities of long-distance travel in America. It was in slow motion, just like that scene in Armageddon where Bruce Willis comes out of the rocket hangar WITH THE MEN WHO WILL SAVE THE WORLD, and they are all stepping in time to HIS UNQUESTIONABLE GENIUS.

We, the patient waiters, we the toilers under the tyranny of Greyhound, we all but cheered when Stuart emerged from that depot with those bus drivers and organizers, who finally put us on the correct buses that we'd paid good money for, all thanks to MY HUSBAND and his polite yet insistent DARING. And I don't know about everyone ELSE in the line, but I'VE NEVER WANTED TO SHAG ANYONE SO BADLY IN MY LIFE. Lucky me, I married the guy.

Who is, by the way, SO much hotter than Bruce Willis.

Ed note: yes, there was another post here for about ten minutes. The reason for its disappearance is because I realized I wanted to rework it into a longer piece. Don't worry, before long, it might appear around these parts! Sorry for the glitch!