some thoughts on easter

I like going to the Greek church with my dad every year, which surprises people who know me but shouldn't surprise anyone who really does. I like the moment the lights go out and the old is extinguished and the new is brought out, and the slow progress of candlelight through the church. I like symbolism even if the deeper meaning isn't ultimately mine.

I like the sounds of the cantor, and the arch of the priest's eyebrows as he reads the Epistle of St. John, and the stiff, nervous altar boys as they progress through the church with the sacrament. I like singing the Christos Anesti bit, even though it's all phonetic, and I like seeing the origins of language in the words, like cosmos and photos and necron. I'm not crazy about the standing parts I confess but since a few Alexander lessons have lodged under my belt it's an interesting time to practice.

I like, most of all, being there with my dad. I hope it's not terrible to anyone that I don't say the Nicene Creed or the Lord's Prayer anymore because they feel so sacred, and personal, so meaningful if you're saying them right. I follow along with the Greek, recognizing the letters and recognizing my heritage and I hope that's alright.

Happy easter to anyone who's celebrating today. Let's all eat of meat! That part I'm wholly behind.

grass, green, and other obvious things i'm learning

2008, so far, has been different from all my other years. Almost entirely because of what I've started thinking as the Krissa 2.0 work. You see, I've been doing - what's the right word for it? - some Person Maintenance. Checking my engine, making repairs, learning things, unlearning old things. How much more mixed can this metaphor get? Much more.

I say Krissa 2.0 because I happen to like the original Krissa a lot and don't want to make it sound like - or allow myself to think - I'm changing the fundemental... Krissaness of it all. But there are things that have needed work for a while. My eating habits, both their quality and quantity. My finances, period. My motivations, organizations, follow-through, and the way I relate to myself inside my head. All of these things could function better and you know, I just don't see the point of doing things one by one! So, thus, 2008 is shaping up to be an interesting year. It's like I have a big sign over my head that says "Pardon My Dust - Grownup Under Construction".

So far, it's been working. Mostly because I'm learning that small changes beget small changes and the effect, well, snowballs. I think the first small change was that the last cigarette I smoked was October 7th, two weeks to the date before we got nano. It's odd to call that a small change, but I didn't really allow myself to think of it as a Huge Deal until now, four months later. Now it's a Huge Deal mostly because wow, I'm not cheating? Really?

Then there's nano, who reminds me every day that he needs my (and Stuart's) routine and responsibility in order to survive. I mean, here I am navel-gazing over thriving, but nano literally needs to eat. (And eat and eat and OH, are you eating that carrot? REALLY?) The dog brings me some much needed routine aside from just being an enormous bundle of cute. Multi-purpose dog!

The interesting side effects of all this have been manifold. The vainest of course is oh, look! I'm dropping a jean size and my rings are loose. Then there's the house which has never been this tidy for this long. And the focus I'm bringing to writing is, uh, coming slowly! Pardon my dust! Novelist under Construction!

The most unexpected side effect is that suddenly I'm wondering how much of my personality is really already poured in concrete, how many of my likes really aren't fixed with steel. I've tried squash soup and zucchinis and rare tuna and edamame and soon I'll try sushi (really!) and aubergine and why not, broccoli. I've put greens in stews and enjoyed whole-wheat pizza and walked straighter and tried to talk with my hands a little less.

It's interesting to know that I can change, and to watch myself do it - to know that just because I decided something once, doesn't mean I can't change my mind. It seems maybe sort of the most obvious thing in the world (Woman Looks Up, Notices Sky Blue!) but I've never sustained this many small changes all at once and found pleasure in them. Or maybe not since I started tying my own shoes and wiping my own butt around the same time.

I keep wondering - who am I going to be at 40? 50? Am I going to crave cauliflowers? And rock climb? At least I'll know that back in 2008, I learned how to get up early and not eat the whole bag of cheese already.

auld lang syne

From the Mayfly project, my twenty four words for 2007:

Hated job, found better. Cut hair. Moved to Brooklyn. Summered. Quit smoking. Went to Catskills. Dog! Dog! Wrote, procrastinated, wrote. Liked myself this year.

From Flickr, favorite moments, faces, and places for 2007:

Altogether, not too shabby.

bah humbugged

I'm letting the little things get to me these days. Me! I'm sweating the small stuff with gusto. The thing that is bothering me the most isn't actually that my dog thought it'd be fun to eat a tiny corner of our beautiful living room rug, our priceless rug that's been in my family for a decade, THANKS, DOG.

Actually that's pretty bad, yeah, okay, that's the worst thing.

NO! It's not. It's that I've lost my Christmas spirit. It's like it rolled under the rug sometime in October and I didn't even notice, but here we are on December 6th, by which time most years I'm longingly dragging out the hot cocoa and the sparkly decorations, and I just don't care. I actually longed to be Jewish the other day so I'd have an excuse. I thought, we don't really need a tree this year. Or any hoopla at all.

And the thing is, it's not like I'm OKAY with this total grinchbug attitude. I'm not! Christmas is my favorite time of year. We just moved to this beautiful home, this home that's itching for garlanding and twinkling lights in the windows. What's wrong with me! But I look around at the living room and all I see is needles everywhere that my dog will eat, where do we put the tree because Nano's crate takes up half the room, man, lying down to water the damn thing? And we're too poor for a lot of presents anyway so the tree is going to be all depressingly bare underneath. Plus there's only two weeks left!

But this depresses me, all this niggling lazy grinching. I don't want to be a lazy grinch! I want to twirl through the snow with my baby and drink cider and listen to songs and wrap lights around the tree! Except that I'm broken! I am definitely broken. I have a beautiful house and a wonderful husband and dog and it's Christmas in New York! What's wrong with me. BROKEN.

I think perhaps the solution to this is some immersion shock therapy. I think I should meet Stuart after work in Union Square and look at all the pretty things in the holiday market and get some cider from Starbucks and buy ourselves a little, manageable potted tree and some fresh pine garland and come home and eat a warm dinner and decorate and listen to songs and connect. And resist the temptation to wrap nano in christmas lights.

Maybe that'll bring my Christmas spirit out of hiding. What do you think?

in memoriam

Today I received an email from my alma mater telling me the sad news that my political science teacher had passed away a few days ago.

I took three classes with Ray - a lecture in the first semester of my junior year and two seminars after that. At Sarah Lawrence, we didn't have a lot of lectures, and they were something the teachers resisted a little. Even though they were limited to around 50 students, a lot of faculty felt that they didn't fit in with the spirit of small interactive classes the school is known for. I took four different semesters of lectures at SLC, the required minimum, and Ray's was the only one that grabbed me and made me think almost as much as the seminars did. Mostly because of Ray.

I remember one moment in his lecture where he was talking about the socialist revolution and its failures in the U.S. and he looked up at all his students and pretty much threw his hands in the air, and said something to the effect of, "boy, I sure am wasting my breath on you people." He often accused us of being trend-commies, revolutionaries in name only, just trying on social justice until our real lives kicked in. In a lot of ways, Ray was a bitter, angry tirade of a man.

I realize this doesn't sound very respectful. It's perhaps not, but it is how he was. He was a relentless man, committed even through gritted teeth to explaining the other side of the coin to his students, the alternatives to the way he saw his country headed. I didn't agree with him very often but he was an immensely intelligent and diverse teacher. We read material in his class from every side of the spectrum, even if he was tearing down an argument minutes after explaining it.

Ray and I didn't see eye to eye, politically - I'm far closer to the center than he is, although still comfortably on the left. And I guess I do mean comfortable, because I never sensed he was. Which was impressive, in a way. It was impressive the way he kept his arms wrapped around ideals that would have been easier to let fall by the wayside, especially at affluent Sarah Lawrence in affluent Westchester. He was impressed by action, any action. He told me once that he held me in higher regard than my more socially-left-leaning classmates because I ran the paper with such ... well, dogged insanity. I guess he saw the same dogged insanity he knew in himself, and saw that I was pursuing passionately something that I cared about, something I knew would make a difference no matter how bitter it sometimes made me.

Ray showed me the importance of staying attached to the things you're passionate about, even when they jade you. I guess it never occurred to me to tell him that, because it rarely occurs to us to tell the teachers in our lives that their lessons are well-remembered. We take their wisdom and make our lives better for it and perhaps we get sort of far down a road they helped build for us without turning around and recognizing their contribution. It hits me hard since so many of my professors at SLC - for whatever else I can criticize about the school - were inspirations to me. I think perhaps I should tell them.

lifesaver

Yesterday I spent nearly 10 hours in a conference room at the Red Cross in Manhattan, getting my CPR/AED Professional Rescuer certification.

I KNOW, right? ME? I nearly passed out last year when Stuart cut his finger on a Guinness bottle. My self-enforced fear of blood (especially blood of someone I love so much) made him hide from me the slice he cut into his thumb a few months later, until it was too late for stitches and he got yelled at by an ER doctor and it was all my fault. MY FAULT!

So I was a little nervous about the CPR training. For the first few hours, I sat there imagining all the way my students would horribly injure themselves, reading over and over the part of my packet that reminded me that once I was certified, it would be my legal duty to use my skills on the job. ACK.

Something shifted between the rescue breathing practice and the conscious and unconscious choking. By the time I got to CPR itself, and using a defibrillator, I felt strong and confident. Nevermind that I got lightheaded during the presentation about a heart attack and cardiac arrest, imagining my dad's eight years ago. (I mean, duh, I cry in father/daughter commercials, this is to be expected.)

I really nailed CPR. I started feeling confident with my rescue breathing. And hey, I aced the test! I am the valedictorian of saving lives. Nyah nyah. In some seriousness, I only realized afterwards when I was explaining it all to Stuart (and making him lie down on the floor so I could practice safely turning someone over) that this has scared me for a long time. Not knowing how to respond if someone I'm in charge of, or someone I love, gets hurt and needs my help is the stuff of my nightmares (and of course, lately, there have been dream turtles, but I'll get to them in another post).

Yesterday made me feel like if the situation calls for it - if one of my kids gets hurt - I won't have to run around in a blind panic for lack of a more productive reaction. I'll probably know exactly what to do. They say adrenaline always kicks in anyway, that even before this training I would have been more collected than I imagine (since anything is more collected than my nightmarish exploding-head technique). But the card in my wallet reminds me that I have what I need now, just in case if I didn't before. It's very empowering.

I think I'll do First Aid next, and conquer that little "See Blood, Promptly Faint" problem. It should come in handy when the universe bequeaths me seven sons and all they ever want to do is run into walls of knives.

cranktastic

I'm fighting a cloud of maudlin today. Maybe it's that school starts again after a whole glorious week off in which I was both lazy and productive and enjoyed both immensely. Maybe it's other annoying news I can't really discuss here, but will soon, I promise.

But I actually think it's hormones. The thing is, I don't get down or depressed easily without something concrete bothering me. But from about 9:30 last night to now, I've felt fragile and tense and irritated with everything. I've taken to moving very slowly and deliberately through the apartment because one tiny bump or misplaced glass or scrape on my shin will test my patience, to the point where I think, "I should just start crying and get it over with".

Even pulling on a sweatshirt and getting my head stuck in the arm hole made me cranky. And there's no good reason! It must be hormones. I must be hormonal. And it's exactly the right time of the month, too, which is weird since I rarely get affected by that. But I'm hormonal! And tetchy! Going for a run, making a cup of tea, trying to get some writing done, even cleaning the bathroom counter (shuttup) didn't help. I didn't write enough, nearly enough, because the craptacular mood kept getting irritated to the point of frazzled by all the construction going on in a one-block radius to the apartment (THREE! THREE DIG SITES!).

I mean, maybe I do have a bee in my bonnet that I haven't placed my finger on yet. But maybe I'm just hormonal. I feel like I have to give myself permission for this dark cranky mood, justify it somehow, absolve myself from not snapping right the f! out of it. Is that good, because it means I'm usually functioning at a much higher happiness level? Or is it bad that I can't just let myself be in a funk?

Who knows. Now I'm going to class and that means trying not to take it out on seven year olds.

Tried-and-true funk-lifting methods, feel free to share.

quote of the day

"If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."

- Richard Dawkins quoting Douglas Adams, in his eulogy for Adams, September 17th, 2001

madonna and whore

I'm a reasonably happy person. In fact, I'm sure there are people out there that think I'm ridiculously happy, almost drugged with satisfaction, and usually these people wear much more eyeliner than I do.

And from my saccharine-soaked platform of jubilance, I rarely get really angry. I mean, I experience negative emotions. I get upset about being ten minutes late to a movie, I get frantic with worry about the tiniest things, I get practically frenzied about What The Fuck I'm Going To Do With My Life, and I get annoyed when there is too much cutlery stuffed into the drying rack.

But look elsewhere for sugar right now. I am a woman and I am angry. For almost two weeks, I've been trying to temper my stifling rage at the Melissa Summers/Today Show situation. A promient and witty female blogger goes onto national television, no, is invited onto a national morning show to talk about her moderate and sensible point of view that women, as mothers, shouldn't feel badly or castigate themselves for having a glass of wine during a playdate with their children and other mothers. Summers is articulate, temperate, and RIGHT.

And she's basically set up by the Today Show to be labeled as the opposite of "healthy". She's not sitting up there having a rational discussion about what it means to have a moderate glass of wine. She's part of a segment where three other women, having one glass of wine at their playdate, are filmed through the glassy alcoholic necks of wine bottles, where they show the same wine-pouring shot three times. She's ambushed with idiotic questions and not allowed to say what she means. She's set against a robotic talking-head psychologist that doesn't answer either of her points, and she's confronted by Meredith Viera who basically equates her capable full-time mothering to a babysitter.

Not a single element of this entire charade is about men. We are not watching men having a beer while their kids play in the yard. We are not talking about the pressures of fatherhood. We are not even talking about whether a husband and wife can relax with a drink whilst watching their children.

THIS IS ALL ABOUT WOMEN, and only women are subjected to this ridiculous debate.

Because they are WOMEN.

I cannot stress enough the way my throat closes over when I think this through. My brain gets very messy, and very loud. I can only equate it to a room full of filing cabinets, half of them flying violently open by an unseen hand, papers and folders and documents all being flung into a snowstorm of information by some Carrie-like wrathful angel of feminism.

File folders marked with angry red letters about the glass ceiling for motherhood in the corporate world, about the inherently unfair standards dropped on the shoulders of working mothers. Post-its that ask, if there was an equally body-specific and private decision like abortion available to men, would there even been a national platform for outrage over their choice to do it? Whole cabinets full of pissed-off notes about being objectified, being forced to swallow lies about what Men Want and What Gets Them To Marry You. An entire drawer on the issue of weight and curves and aging and sexiness.

I am angry that segments about women like the Today Show segment even exist, because they are not complex and thoughtful evaluations of modern motherhood, they are idiotic and prejudiced stones of judgement that are all too easy to hurl at this society's favorite punching bag. It's like some horrific national itch that no one will collectively face and eradicate because it's too fucking enjoyable to drag it out into the harsh light of day and watch it scab over again.

The anger is like a blowdryer dropped into a series of interconnecting estuaries and canals - pretty much the whole body of water is vibrating with electric current. I want to scream, I want to rail, because I am so tired of the millions of subtle little papercuts that women are still enduring. How inequal can we possibly stay whilst having all the shallow pinnings of equality? What will change people's MINDS?

I am not an angry person. But I am angry because all this means that we still suffer under a Madonna/Whore complex in every aspect of our public AND OUR PRIVATE LIVES. Women cannot have a glass of wine when their children are in the house, but men can have a beer at a barbeque? Are women less capable? Is that it? Or is this because only the mothers are really expected to be responsible for their children where fathers are expected play a secondary support role? Men are still, what, the point person for hunting and gathering, so the role of motherhood is the only thing women should be capable of doing? Motherhood, a beautiful and powerful force, is used as a confining straitjacket by people who still want women to do it to the exclusion of anything else?

Aren't we tired of cavepeople, of Venus and Mars, of Ozzie and Harriet?

Are we women, or are we solitary martyrs? Are we people, entitled to all the tiny triumphs and flaws and choices and mistakes, or are we templates and objects and standards and platforms? Are women allowed to be human, or must we constantly be either angel or demon?

I am angry about this. I am sick of this. I am sick of women being type-cast, stereotyped, generalized, judged, and ultimately penned in to societal expectations and mass castigation when they act out of form. Summers made a joke about sometimes rolling her eyes when her kids cry. This doesn't make her a bad mother. It makes her a normal human being.

I am sick of women judging each other, like directors that gladly named names at the McCarthy hearings only to get the heat off themselves. I am sick of the Mommy Wars and the glass ceilings and the choice/life battle and all the little injustices that men don't ever have to squeeze their eyes shut to avoid, just to have a day free of anger.

I want to see women turning this judgemental unfairness and inequality away at the doorstep, never allowing into their lives, and getting angry together at the slights and slanders against us. I want to see one giant feminist Care Bear Stare of rejection for these norms, these wicked compartmentalizations, these absurd expectations and inevitable failures of being a woman.

I am going to leave the burner on for this. I am going to stay just angry enough to keep the blood pumping and the adrenaline-fueled awareness on high. I suggest you do, too.

2006

If a picture is worth a thousand words, these are worth thirty grand. Which is far more words than I have in me to write, in the waning hours of the year. I'm not one for resolutions on New Year's Eve. I'm much more given to reflect on the 365 days that have just passed, and what happened therein:

I left my job, I started a new one, I started a novel, I stopped writing a novel, Stuart got promoted, Stuart got his green card, we went to England and New England, I turned 26, Biscuit graduated with his degree, Neff went to law school, Barrie got married, I discovered how much I love sci-fi and fantasy novels, my hair grew longer, teaching turned out to be very hard, I made a few new friends and held on tight to my old ones, I celebrated Christmas and Easter and birthdays, I drank lots of good wine, I tried lots of new food, I fell more in love with my husband than ever, and I've grown up just a little bit.

Bring it on, 2007.

con(fidence) artist

Criticism is a funny thing. There are a lot of people you read about in cautionary tales, people that don't ever do anything they want to do in life for fear of judgment and social exclusion. I am not one of those people. You have to believe me or this whole little exercise won't work.

I am not beholden to the opinions of others when I really want something. Case in point: Stuart. We met. We wanted to get married. I honestly didn't care how completely insane that seemed. Sure, I cared what kind of wedding party we threw, and whether our parents would support us, but as to the rest of the world? Meh. As to the rest of our friends? If they knew me well enough, they'd understand right away that I was neither in jest or in sane, or they'd voice their concerns but trust me to take care of myself. If they didn't know me well enough to know what I look like when I've made up my mind, they could hold their tongues like grownups.

The key element, though, was my own unshakeable belief in the rightness of what I was doing, leave-of-her-senses though it may have looked to everyone else. That's what I mean when I say, I don't care what other people think.

This, though, is different. I'm facing - and have made - a pretty bold move. I'm leaving comfortably numbing daily employment for the much less stable world of freelancing and writing, and I'll have to supplement that income with part-time work. The question naturally has become, what am I willing to do for part-time work?

Here are two answers.

1. Oh, I'm looking to do something interesting, something involving writing and editing - maybe proofreading, copy editing, copy writing.

2. I'm willing to do whatever will pay me a base minimum for about twenty to twenty-five hours a week and most importantly, won't either put me on a career path I don't want to be on, OR distract me from my writing by being mentally exhausting.

Three guesses for which one is harder to say out loud.

And I've been struggling with this, struggling with being able to say that yes, I'm considering bookselling, and yes, I'm considering walking dogs, what? And on top of that struggle, I've been struggling with why this is so hard for me to admit, that I'd take non-career-focused work right now just so that it didn't become yet another distraction from my writing.

If I think I'm so immune to the peanut gallery's snarky opinions (or, worse, what's said when I leave the room), then why is it hard to say out loud?

I realized why. Because I'm not really sure, either. Any doubts and judgements I see as possible reactions are only manifestations of my own personal doubts and judgements. And why not? Everyone I know has a good job. All my friends - whether they're professionally happy or not - have steady, gainful employment. And who do I think I am, deciding not to "bother" having a full-time job and traipse around eating bon-bons and writing on the web instead? Do I think I'm better than them? Do they think I think I'm better than them? Do they secretly just think I'm lazy and want to stay home and pop out babies? Do I THINK I might be secretly lazy?

See where I'm going with this? Am I being mean and malicious about my own choices because I think that's what others will say? Or is it the other way around? Don't I know I won't sit around eating bon-bons? Or do I?

Criticism's a funny thing - someone else's or my own. Confidence means I honestly don't care if anyone thinks I've lost all but a handful of my marbles. Doubt and worry make me seem like a paranoid neurotic, counting on a million other hands like Tevye. I obviously need a couple double-strength jolts of that confidence, and I'm the only person that can whip those up.

Only then will I stop listening to the nasties - either within my head or without.

virtual insanity

Last night after dinner, Stuart was fighting off a cold in the bedroom and I was doing some work online when his half-paused game of San Andreas caught my eye in the living room, so I turned it on and tooled around stealing cars for a while. I don't really like the plot-line elements of the game but it sure is fun to steal cars and then wreck them and then harass pedestrians.

Stuart was lured from his lair and decided to show me how to fly a plane. So I drove to the airport and got in a plane, and he told me how to tilt the wings just so and step on the gas and taxi down the runway and lift in the air and now put my wheels away and hey! I was flying a plane!

After flying through clouds for a few minutes I decided I wanted to see the virtual sights so I started to dip back down through the clouds and BAM, I SLAMMED INTO A BUILDING and Stuart kept yelling "hit triangle! triangle!" but of course, I couldn't just get my pilot out by hitting triangle because my pilot was a conscientious pilot who'd strapped himself into the cockpit with a nice secure seatbelt and instead of remembering to hit triangle to get himself out of that cockpit he choked on his in-flight peanuts as fiery death consumed him, OBVIOUSLY, so triangle wasn't helping, thanks.

Only when I'd thrown the controller into Stuart's lap and was clinging to his teeshirt with freshly sharp manicured nails and mewling did I realize the problem, the problem that hitting triangle could never solve. "You know what?" I squeaked. "One of my actual recurring nightmares is to be asked to fly a plane that I don't really know how to fly but I figure, hey, it's just like driving a car except with thrust and in-flight peanuts and so I agree to fly the plane and I'm flying along with a sense of false confidence and then BAM I SLAM INTO A BUILDING."

Stuart said, "oh."

If I never do that in a video game every again, it will be four days and four sweat-drenched nights too soon.

on the nature of elephants and their impeding presence

It's very rare that I neglect the blog. It takes a certain level of busy or terrified or exhausted for me to not want to blog.

Friends, we have come to that. It's not really busy or terrified or exhausted, but it's a combination. I've got some irons in various fires that are moving around, switching places, and it's making it impossible for me to think what to talk to you about. Our wonderful trip to England almost doesn't feel like blog material - it felt a lot like going home to Rhode Island for the weekend in that it was perfectly normal, lots of quality time with family, and not really blogworthy. If you were to ask me what we did - go ahead - I'd say, "we spent a lot of time drinking wine and laughing and going for small errands in town and I went up in a tiny plane." I got to know my parents-in-law a lot better and it's fair to say I adore them. So boring blog content there. Family life harmonious, snooooze.

I haven't done anything noteworthy since I've gotten back, either. I saw X-Men, I hung out with an old friend who was in town, I had a wonderfully restorative brunch with dear friends, and Some Really Big Stuff happened, stuff I'm not ready to talk about.

Which is the crux of the problem. There's an elephant in our living room and I promise, when I feel like I can explain the changes around here, I will. Until then, I'm boring.

I will tell you that I had a dream last night that started with me cleaning the house with Stuart, progressed into a strange medieval village where ghost horses terrorized people, morphed into a field trip with some very precocious and darling students and me flying bareback on Pegasus as their guide, and ended by being offered a job at a brilliant academy where these students studied.

Very, very weird. Much like the past week.

misconceptions

A few months ago, I came across a photograph at work. It was taken by Lauren Greenfield, a photographer for the VII agency. It was a portrait of a young woman, about my age, standing outdoors with verdant green grounds behind her. She wore a tank top and light blue drawstring pants, and her hair was straight and dark brown, hanging down around her shoulders. She was thin, with prominent collarbones and a flat belly and long neck.

I remember noticing it for several days, pinned to our edit wall as part of a layout, and thinking, "ahh, I wish I was that thin". Now, let me put something in perspective for you - I will never look like that girl, nor did I imagine I might even with the most diligent exercise and diet in the world. I am curvy and short, she is tall and lean. So it wasn't any kind of direct envy. It was more a passing realization, like I do so many times on the streets around me, that this person was thinner than me and I wish I was thinner.

Imagine my own shock and consternation when I realized that of course, the photograph featured in Greenfield's spread was promoting her new body of work - Thin. A book and documentary about - you guessed it - eating disorders and obsession with thinness. In fact, without the book in front of me it's only a guess but I'm willing to hazard that those light blue pants were actually scrubs, and that my dream girl was actually at a clinic for rehabilitation from eating disorders.

So I'd been staring at a picture of an anorexic girl thinking she looked good, wishing I had an approximation of her figure. She was sick, and many women in her predicament are dying, but I was unable to see it for what it was.

Perhaps, if you're a man, you need a few minutes to let the enormous sickness of that sink in. You women, you already understand. Most of you are all too familiar with how horrifically we women can get our visual perceptions into such a twisted frame of mind as to imagine an anorexic woman as a symbol of envy.

I don't want an eating disorder. In fact, I could say with some confidence that it's unlikely I'll ever develop one. This isn't to say I'm any better than these women but there's been no sign or behavior in even my darkest moments where that kind of illness could take root. And I am thankful for that. But it makes what happened even worse. It means that even with a relatively healthy frame of mind, I am still so self-critical as to see a girl so thin she's killing herself and think, "yeah, that's sexy".

It was a jarring moment for me. If the lens of self-criticism over my eyes swerved so badly in that direction, it also means what I'm seeing in the mirror is tainted with a funny-house effect. So I've made an effort, even while I struggle with the right diet and exercise, to stop being so harsh on myself. Because the harsher I get, the more divorced from reality my eyes become.

And this is coming from someone who's still relatively healthy about her image. I can only imagine how many other women are reacting to the messages of thinness around us. I know that, for me, every single time I've seen a girl as thin as Greenfield's photograph, I've forced myself to stop and think about whether it's healthy - not just for her, but for me. We have to stop doing this to ourselves. I have to stop doing this to myself. Illness isn't sexy, and thinness doesn't need to be universal.

I wish we knew this better, we women who are so bright and full of life and energy and who spend too much negative energy agonizing about our bodies instead of positive energy improving them - and our minds, too, which is more important. I hope I will learn.

hello my name is krissa and ...

... I have a problem. I think I have a caffeine addiction.

Stop not falling over in shock like that. It's not like I mainline coffee. In fact, I drink about one cup of coffee a week. So when I get these weird headaches about once a week, even after eating well and drinking lots of water during the work week, two things happen.

At first, I completely refuse to take headache medicine. Who am I trying to be, some sort of samurai warrior? Tom Cruise? Tom Cruise with a samurai sword? It's not the taking drugs that bothers me. I have no problem with drugs. None. Drugs are ace. Go doctors go! But something about this particular headache makes me think if I'm just tough, and ignore it, it'll slink away out my ear or something.

And then when the headache gets to the point where I'm squinting because it hurts less to squint and also trying to decide if I can take a nap under my desk (I can't), I start totalling up what I've eaten and drunk that day. What usually happens is I realize I haven't had my two to three daily cups of tea.

Tea! Sweet innocuous anti-oxidizing tea! Nectar of the intellectual, the liberally-inclined, and the dotteringly old! Tea! .... rammed with caffeine. Tea has as much caffeine as a cup of coffee, and while I save the coffee for weekends and special occasions, I absolutely drink buckets of tea.

Except on days where I get these splintering headaches. And refuse to take anything for them because not only should they go away on their own, taking medicine and brewing a cup is tantamount to admitting I've got a problem.

But now that the Tylenol Rapid Release and a cup of Twining's Prince of Wales is coursing through my various systems, I'm less inclined to care. Oh sweet merciful relief.

the best weapons come in teacup sizes

People are always getting on my case about my irrational love of chihuahuas. They're tiny and loud and nervous, everyone says (and by everyone, I usually mean Biscuit, who swears he won't darken my doorway if I ever own a chihuahua). People don't seem to understand that I'M tiny and loud and nervous, which makes me + chihuahua = match made in heaven hell. I love those tiny yappy-type fuckers. I think they're fierce miniature little ninjas and I want five of them. Also, they have the added bonus of being portable in even the daintiest of my purses and people, my purses get pretty dainty.

I have a deep personal appreciation for the get-out-of-my-space fierceness of chihuahuas. My friend Raych had Lupe, when we were in high school together, and I've never been more reluctant to turn my back on anything quite that small (note: I am usually only reluctant to turn my back on rhinos, veloceraptors, and other much larger predators). Lupe would bark and snap at you in this way that stated, very clearly and without prevarication: "the minute you turn your back on me, fearsomely large adversary, I will BITE MERCILESSLY THROUGH YOUR ACHILLES' TENDON so that when you are felled, I may eat victoriously of your face and possibly internal organs, depending on time." This is quite clearly the message of a chihuahua's bark.

You might wonder why this would attract me to them. It's because I respect that. I respect the genetic ability to cause a ruckus totally disproportionate to your size. As you can imagine, this ability resonantes with me. I also respect skunks for the same reason. I was at the Bronx Zoo this one time, and we were looking down on a serene wooded area where absolutely fucking enormous deer were roaming about aimlessly. Suddenly they all started skittering about, freaked out like they were teenagers caught smoking. I looked around for the source of the commotion and oh, yes - there was a skunk. A small animal about a foot in length with a God-given defense mechanism that drove deer twenty times its size away. That commands RESPECT. I, also, am small and seemingly without defenses and while I don't stink up a room or rip through your Achilles' tendon, I have built up my own set of defenses against the cruel world (mainly involving my awesome lung power and big, big friends).

So you see, I have respect for the diminuitive chihuahua. I feel that we would be great companions. One of the reasons I don't insist on getting one as soon as we're allowed to have dogs is because of my husband. I seriously cannot imagine Stuart carrying around Doctor Death*, my little chihuahua. And you know, he'd have to be carried, because Doctor Death cannot cross storm drains on a leash. At at some point in his life, he would have to be carried by Stuart. And, well, Stuart is a lot of things but dainty and wee is not one of them. Because I love him, I perhaps think that getting a chihuahua would rob him of the ability to live his life NOT carrying around a tiny little dog the size of his hand. Still and all, I'm pretty sure that if anything could convince Stuart of the AWESOME POWER of the angry chihuahua (and our immediate need to own one, STAT), it's this video. Stuart, and the rest of you as well.

FEAR THE CHIHUAHUA.

* This is not really my dream chihuahua name. My dream chihuahua name is so awesome that if I told you, you'd rush out and buy a chihuahua just so you could use my awesome name and I'm not stupid, so I'm not telling you. PPFFBTBT.

I will write this entire post without ONCE resorting to the word "blogiversary"

Today marks the fourth year this blog has been in existence. That means it's starting kindergarten, asking about its private parts, and wrinkling its nose at vegetables. Oh, toddlers, nature's little marvel.

Petit Hiboux has changed a lot since I started it over on blogger. I've gotten less chatty but I like to think I've gotten more down-to-earth. I blog a lot less about the minute effects other people have on me, like heartbreak in all its various forms, but I also see more honesty, less subterfuge, in my daily writing. My life has changed considerably but some nice things have remained constant - my friends, my family, my apartment (ours, now).

In 2002, this blog was all about frippery and hidden meanings directed at boys I liked. There was a lot of song lyric quoting and a lot of silliness. This is because I was 22 and still learning what blogs were. In 2003, there was a lot of linking and high-school-like blog friendships forming, and towards the end there was a lot more heartbreak and subtle digs and coy intrigue. In 2004 there was sea change - from moments where I've never been more disconsolate about my life to the highest points of elation. In 2005 there was a lot of work, a lot of slow necessary changes and adjustments, and a lot of happiness. And in 2006, there will be more sea change.

So through four years, the blog has changed as much as I have. It's brought me some marvels and it's taught me that I'm not only capable but nigh addicted to writing something every day, writing out my reactions to my own life and the lives around me. It's taught me to take my writing for a certain necessary level of granted - to take my status as a writer as a given. That's no small thing.

But I won't make some pat reflection about writing this completely for me. I don't. If I needed to (and sometimes I do) journal for myself, I'd do it on paper, in my living room. If I need to write fiction, I also do that in my living room - not here. Here, I blog for you guys. I blog for the community, for the experience of sharing my personality and seeing what pings bounce back, for the feedback. I blog because I believe it's a radical thing to take your life and share it - it's something we do on many levels all around us and blogging is one of the ways I do it. I don't really believe bloggers who say they do it solely for themselves - did I mention the part about paper and privacy? So I do this for you, which is why I'm thanking you today.

There are some of you that have been reading this since its frippy, early days, there are some that read Petit Hiboux through all the moany self-reflection and intrigue, there are some who liked that and haven't liked the lovey-dovey crap, to paraphrase all the back-handed compliments about my current love life. So there are probably some of you that don't read this site anymore, because of that. I respect that. And there are some that started coming here right when the lovey-dovey crap started and perhaps for you, that's all pH has ever been and you enjoy that. I appreciate you, too.

That's the thing. I appreciate everyone that's ever visited this site, linked it, commented, loved it, become my friend through it. I don't get any hate mail so I presume my detractors are the smart kind of detractor, the kind that just move on. Really, simplistically cheesy and totally without ironic content as this may be, I appreciate you for reading, for following along, for being the wide spectrum of humanity at the other end of this little megaphone.

You rock. I hope we can do this for another four years. Thank you.

c'mon, get happy

I can't imagine that there's a grumpy New Yorker out there today. We're all like sailors on shore leave, running around gawping at the brisk breeze and the sixty degree temperatures and the sun, oh lord, the sun!

This morning I left the house in a black tee, a brown cord skirt and black tights and boots, and even though I knew it was already 52 degrees outside, I threw on my wool coat, out of habit. I was only four paces from the front door when I wisely changed my mind and ran back inside to switch to a black sweater instead. I didn't even wear the sweater when I went to lunch with the divine Stephanie Brown, or when I spent the morning in our magazine's art department, moonlighting as the assistant art director (who's out) by mounting the pages to the edit wall, which gave me extreme satisfaction because I'm a fiddly, visual person and it was a fiddly, visual job, very different from my usual drudgery at the magazine.

It reminded me of when I lived in Houston in high school and worked at the Gap (yes, I was that girl). I used to tag along behind my wonderful manager, Bernadette, as she set up the window displays for the store, and she got tired of me following her around so she just gave me the job. Oh, I longed for the days that I was scheduled to come in JUST to be the visual coordinator for the windows. The crisp guidebooks that came from corporate, detailing the look for that month, the long pins we used to rouche the shirts just so to the mannequins, the personal touches that I sneaked in to every window. Loved it possibly more than any other part-time work I've ever had. Doing the wall today reminded me of that.

And in exactly twenty minutes, I get to leave the office and saunter over to Grand Central, one of my favourite and most memory-laden spots in Manhattan, to catch the 5:40 to Dobb's Ferry with wonderful Jason's loaned D-70, to shoot headshots for Barrie's students. I get to ride that Hudson line train with the setting sun, speeding north with a coffee and the paper, and it's two hours earlier than I've left work all week so I'm positively giddy with excitement. And it's Friday, and I've got a night of birthday celebrations ahead of me, with Barrie and Belinda.

Are you sensing a theme? I'm twirling with happiness, it's just bubbling over everything I do today. The coatlessness, the beautiful weather, the wonderful loaned camera, the lunch with Stephanie (veal and amaretto biscotti! raviolis! oh! my! god!), the satisfaction of the wall, riding Metro-North again, hanging out with Barrie and Belinda and their boys tonight ... it's all so much, look at all those commas!

I hope my glee isn't infectious in the bad way, in that way where you're having a terrible day and you want to fling monkey poo at me for being so goddamned annoyingly HAPPY. If you have the urge to fling monkey poo, I will hug you so hard that your monkey-poo-flinging urges will be squelched and you will be left hugged and loved with a handful of unflung monkey poo. If you're sort of neutral about the world, I will also hug you and spread some sicky sweet sunshine your way and you will feel better. And if you're riding on some bizarre drugged cloud nine with me, we can skip off into the sunset singing like some crazy Japanese animation where everyone has huge eyes and shivers all the time with glee.

Unrelated to all this but another indication of the giddiness: let's just say that last night I drank rather a lot of wine, shall we? So this morning wasn't a good time to try my balancing trick where I put my hose on, standing up. I had one leg in and the other foot inserted so of course I was not at a good time in history to be a little shaky, which I was, because I mentioned the wine, yes? So I fell over. On our bedroom floor, with my feet caught in some unintentional yoga Tree pose, lying on the floor, laughing so hard I couldn't even sit up straight.

THAT'S how giddy I am. Let's hope it lasts.

Stuart just asked, what are you posting about and all I could say was, as you'll see, "stuff"

Last night, we made a dinner for Beth (of aforementioned awesomeness) and Josh, and it was astounding. We made pizza from scratch, Josh twirling out the dough and laying it expertly on the pizza stone that spends 99.99% of its life on the floor of our oven. We brushed pesto on the pizza and then tossed the sliced roma tomatoes and fresh mozzarella on top, putting it in the oven for about twelve minutes until Josh declared it "done, perfect, baby". You can tell, Josh was the maestro of the pizza.

But I was the maestro of the salad. It was baby spinach leaves tossed with gala apple chunks and crispy bacon, with an apple vinegar dressing that twanged with ground ginger. Stuart brought home the avocados that were meant to be the final touch in the salad but neither of us were raised eating the things so they were hopelessly overripe. So much for me asking Biscuit exactly how to BUY an avocado.

We talked about child-rearing and how all four of us were terrified of teenagerdom and we decided we'd have to move to the same city so we could dump the rascals in a basement and put our heads together for wine when the teenagers threatened to take the lead in the hostage negotiation that is adolesence. We talked about making a foursome trip up to Montreal because I don't know, Canada calls, man.

Tomorrow night, Stuart's taking me on a Shana-encouraged trip to Artisanal for their Sunday night fondue which, if you'd known it was farmhouse cheddar with pickled apples, you already knew I'd find a way to get there. The price is surprisingly right and we've been angelically good about taking packed lunches to work for weeks now, so I have less guilt than I should about hitting such a decadent place for dinner. $25 for fondue for two? Oui, please.

And on Monday, a gaggle of us are going to MoMI in the middle of the day (O, useless presidential holidays, how I love thee) to indulge in the Wallace and Gromit short-film matinee! We're members of the museum in a fit of Astoria-loyalty, and we have yet to really take advantage of their film festivals. Also, they have a partnership with UA theatres and sell batches of tickets for $6.75. Hello, saving pennies all over the damn place.

Throughout all this, I'm sick. I'm sicker than I seem, because there's just nothing I can do but dope myself with Advil and Robitussin, but I have some sort of monster cold/throat infection/cough/stiffness. It ruined our Valentine's Day fondue-at-home plans (which you can see we're making up for) and it kept me home from work on Wednesday. Beth is convinced it's bacterial, not viral, since my lymph-nodes-the-size-of-golf-balls effect just won't go away. It gets bad at night and in the morning, when the Advil is wearing off. Don't you think that in 2006, there should be an over-the-counter at-home test you can do just to see if you have a bacterial or a viral infection? I'm stubbornly averse to going to the doctor just to determine if its the common cold or an infection. Averse, I say! So here I sit, sniffling and coughing up my yummy post-nasal drip. (UPDATE: I just downed some benadryl so that my sinuses will dry up and I can sleep. What's up, prescription drugs? How's it going?)

On a final note that interests no one but other women who know who they are, I have some news. Without naming any names, you know those two precious gems we spend our adult lifetimes carrying around? Well, some of us are lucky enough to have a small amount of these gems and this really doesn't concern them because much as they complain, they can wear the lacy numbers from a certain gem-encasing pink store with the initials VS. Well, ladies of a more gem-laden persuation, I'm here to tell you, screw VS. I've been fighting those pink-clad bastards for years now, finding their gem-carriers to work great for exactly the first week. And then I spend a year feeling sorry for myself and my gems as I push them around in bathrooms trying to get the $60 contraption I just bought to do its job.

I say, free yourselves from the Gisele-hypnosis of VS. My mother, sick of hearing me complain, offered to finally take me to "a REAL store, not VS" and we hit the mall (O, the mall) to shop at department stores. And man, did I find what I needed. Did I find some serious, minimizing, shoulder-weight distributing, still-pretty-sexy-and-lacy gem carriers that'll carry these gems the way these gems deserve to be carried. One of them is this one and I am here to say, HELLO and thank you, Mom. I think maybe also Stuart thanks you too, mainly because I've finally stopped complaining about the situation. Also because it looks, well, hot.

People of delicate consistencies who think women's bodies are just born this perfect, you can look back now. On a final note, my hair! It grows long! I am just as surprised as anyone to notice that it's finally really growing. I took this as a comparison point and also, yes, I'm vain. You're not?

Mr. Infidelity and Mrs. Other Woman

Last night, Stuart and I watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith, otherwise known as What Killed Jennifer Aniston Dead, or She Totally Shoulda Seen That Coming, or Wow, Vince Vaughn Is In This? What Were The Soundbytes From THAT Shoot Like? Maybe something like, "hey, I can see you're hitting ... you know and hey, more power to you because she's... wowee, and anyway, if you're not... can I just ... I'll just step in and take THIS since you're not using it any... right?"

You may be able to tell that I'm feeling very ambivalent about this film. Not the film itself - in spite of all feelings of ambivalence I thought it was a hilarious film, just the right amount of sexy guns and quippy lines. I'm a big fan of the clever spy genre and I kept shouting out Splinter Cell commands like "TRIANGLE! HIDE THE BODY!" which amused Stuart because he loves the geeky. Also adding to my enjoyment of the film was how totally smoking hot is Angelina? So smoking hot. I never thought she was that foxy when she was younger but a couple years and some sensible style tips (ditch the goth and Billy Bob, lady) has really added to her allure. Stuart kept mumbling discontentedly about lesbian impulses and "Ross... Carol.." while I kept pointing at the screen and needling him to admit she's a tall drink of vodka.

No, it's not the film I had problems with. It's the fact that every time I genuinely enjoyed something (the plot or Jolie's shapely gams), I had to look at Stuart dolefully and wave my little imaginary flag that says "Team Aniston" on it. My problem wasn't with the film. My problem, sadly, is with the whole Brad/Angelina THING (as an addendum, my other problem is with the entertainment media's obsession with joining hot couples' names. Bennifer was bad enough, but now we've got to do it to EVERYONE?).

Look, if a dear friend of mine came to me and said, "I'm in love with someone that's not my spouse, what do I do", I'd be their friend and I'd have an enormous amount of sympathy for their situation. It's a crap one for everyone involved - well, no. It's only half-crap for the spouse who's leaving. It's not like he or she is leaving to go chain themselves to a rampaging rhino for the rest of their lives, that would be crap. They're leaving to do something they want to do more than stay where they are, the only part that's crap for them is hurting the person they are leaving and any kids that might be unwilling victims of that. Still, it's crap. It's a sorry, sad situation.

So much as I want to castigate and hate Brad Pitt for leaving his wife for another woman, it's not the act of leaving per se that disgusts me, because I have to presume they're like any other human being (like a friend of mine) and try and be fair and understanding. It's the whole public angle that makes me sort of nauseated. We see those tabloid headlines all the time, scandalous allegations being thrown from paper to paper like the shit-flinging that it is. And we all think to ourselves, "that's bullshit, it's just scandal-mongering, no one would be that obvious and cliched." But Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie were, in fact, that obvious and cliched, and because they are high-profile, famous actors, the sordid obviousness of it all was dragged into our lives. You never want to believe that the most trite situation could really come to pass, that a woman could really be publicly left by her husband after months of tabloids told you she would be.

It's a gut, emotional reaction I have to the situation and it's not meant to be taken as any kind of commentary on the state of marriage, Pitt's or anyone else's. It's more that there's a rising bile when I think about how the ugliest possible event came to pass, and was documented to the fullest extent of the media, and that we all lapped it up. Even posting this here is a form of accepting the media's take on the situation. What do we know? The most sordid side of the story. We're not really being asked to see the three people involved as humans but when I do, because I can't help but doing so, I get disgusted for them, saddened that something so shatteringly momentous became public fodder.

But they must have known it would. Which is why, all my protestations to the contrary, I do place a tiny nugget of blame in Pitt's court. Surely, when you're as famous as he is, you start to evaluate your choices differently? Surely, that's the price of all that glittering stagetime? That every choice you make is going to resonate like an off-the-charts earthquake in the lives around you? Surely, going in to a movie like this one, with a co-star like THAT, and a wife at home ... surely, there was a choice to not do the most shattering possible thing?

But there I am, treating them like they're above the concerns of normal human beings. They all go to the bathroom, get pimples, cry, make mistakes, and deserve a basic dose of understanding for their actions. Don't they?

This is why it was difficult for me to watch the movie. The whole menage-a-trois, as it unfolded, has been less funny and entertaining for me as it has been confusing, throwing everything I thought about the difference between fame and obscurity, humans and supernovas, into stark relief. Do I even have the right to question them? Hasn't the media given me that right, and they by their choice of career? Should I, if I'm going to evaluate their actions, try and see them as the person next door and extend them the benefit of generosity? Or should they have known better?

Of course, the real point is, it doesn't matter. I don't live next door to Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston. But I'm a person in a marriage, I have friends in serious relationships, and to see on the big screen of celebrity the sort of dissolution and betrayal that we've all been watching, very few people can help relating that to their own lives. Which, in the end, is why we're all still watching, and why we're all so obsessed. And why, even though I was waving my imaginary little Team Aniston flag, I end up sounding more like Tevye than anything else. On the other hand... on the other hand...

... On the other hand, those were some HOT sex scenes.

supercalifragilistic!

Three weeks ago, I woke up sick. Well, it's more like I woke up and could barely open my eyes. Every time I tried, my whole body screamed to shut them again. It was the morning after Dave arrived and we all took the train in to Manhattan together, me with my glasses on, screwing my eyes shut as every burst or brilliant sunshine assaulted the train carriage. I kept asking Stuart if my eyes looked puffy - they felt puffy.

By about 11 AM, the right eye strode ahead in the race to drive me crazy, with a painful scratched feeling developing under my upper eyelid. I called my wonderful eye doctor and told him about it, and he referred me to a specialist whose name I'll praise to the high heavens for eternity. I made a 3PM appointment with Dr. Rubenstein and settled into my long painful day. When I got to Dr. Rubenstein's, he took about ONE look at my right eye and said, "that's too violent of a reaction for such a tiny little scratch."

Then he said, "do you have Mediterranean blood?"
I told him my father was Greek.
"Right, okay. There might be some heriditary conditions, we'll talk about it in a minute."

What proceeded is this. My eye, overreacting to the tiny corneal abrasion I'd probably given myself carelessly removing my contacts, had developed its own special case of iritis. I have an overly dramatic EYE! It figures. There was no real, external reason for me to develop iritis, which is an inflammation of the iris, but I had sort of given it to myself. My body thought there was something to fight in my eye, and in the great tradition of Don Quixote, started tilting at all sorts of imaginary windmills and getting itself really worked up in the process. That night, Dr. Rubenstein was unsure that it was definitely iritis, so he wanted to clear up any infections that might have been brought on by the abrasion. He sent me home with incredibly powerful antibiotic drops, and told me to come back in, first thing in the morning. I spent twenty miserable minutes trying to hail a cab at 47th and Park and I would have cried all the way home but my eye hurt too much.

He also told me some other things. He said that if it was, in fact, iritis, that it called into question the possibility of something more serious - namely, the reason my body was attacking itself. He explained why he'd asked about my heritage: because of something called HLA-B27. It's, as far as I can tell, some sort of protein that some people have, which attaches itself to the exterior of your cells and confuses the body, and your immune system, about the difference between foreign and native. It's like a con-man taxi driver, giving false direction to get your cells to bear arms against fellow cells. HLA-B27 is being found positive in a lot of people that have a whole host of auto-immune problems ranging from Lupus to rhuematoid athritis to Behcet's sydrome.

Dr. Rubenstein walked us through it again the next morning, when I brought Stuart in to listen with me and absorb the information. It was definitely iritis, he said that morning, and finally gave me some anti-inflammatory drops to calm the iris. He also gave me some minimal dilation drops, to exercise my pupil by moving it around twice daily, firstly to keep my iris away from other parts of my eye it might infect, and secondly so that the pupil didn't get forced closed by the inflamed iris and get stuck to the back of my eye. (Let me just stress the freakiness of this - GETTING MY PUPIL STUCK TO THE BACK OF MY EYE was a concern for me recently, if you can believe it.) The drugs worked miracles and in three days everything felt normal except for the insane amount of daily eye drop administration.

But the HLA-B27 thing is still on our minds. The doctor stressed to me, repeatedly, that even if I took a blood test for HLA and discovered I was positive for it, it didn't mean I'd get any of those auto-immune diseases. "It's corrollary," he said, "not cause-and-effect. We don't know how many people are wandering around, perfectly healthy, who are positive for it. We don't know about them because they never have any auto-immune problems so we've never tested their blood for HLA." The way he explained it, there's simply a high percentage of people who, being diagnosed with auto-immune diseases, are also being found positive for HLA. It's like the contrapositives I studied so dutifully for the LSAT. And it's confusing.

He told me, too, that a lot of doctors would, in his charming language, pooh-pooh the need to test for HLA. I told him that my GP was a very practical woman and that she might scoff at any test for which no resulting action could be taken - if I test for HLA and I'm positive, all I get is a handshake and a higher statistical likelihood of developing an auto-immune disease. Dr. Rubenstein, who'd by this time been patiently consulting with me for two hours over two days about something that technically didn't have anything to do with my eye, said something I'll never forget. "If your GP scoffs at the test," he said quietly, "find another GP. I'm a cancer survivor and I don't believe in doctors dismissing your concerns."

Stuart and I were quiet for just one beat. The doctor continued to assure me that there was no reason at all that I should worry or panic - if this was just a freak isolated case of iritis, so be it. But to take the blood test, and find out I had a higher likelihood of getting auto-immune diseases, would only serve to make me more aware of those diseases and symptoms and be on the lookout. "I want you," he finished, "to have the information that will empower you to do what you need to do to take care of yourself, anyone who tells you not to worry or research isn't a good doctor." Please permit me to be childish for just one brief interlude and say that my doctor, he's a badass, he could totally kick your doctor's ass.

As you can tell by how incredibly long this post is, I've been thinking a lot about these things. I did talk to my GP and as I predicted, she scoffed a little at administering a test that would lead me nowhere, but she'll conduct it if I insist. Which I will. Meanwhile, I'm trying to ignore any and all calls to hypochondria or forehead-crinkling worry (I leave that to both mothers), and I'm trying to lessen my fear of all those scary auto-immune diseases by singing them to the tune of a certain Mary Poppins song...

Ankylosing Spondylitis, Rhuematoid Arrtthhhritis! Lupus, Excema a bit and don't forget Psorrriiiasis!

So that's what happened with my eye. Do you remember the part about the PUPIL getting STUCK to the BACK OF MY EYE? I KNOW. For all the uncertainty and weirdness about what may or not be a protein I have which may or may not lead me to get auto-immune diseases, the REALLY weird thing would have been to get a stuck PUPIL.

So, the moral of this story (which you can't react to because my comments are still broken ha ha ha, send email if you have any stories about HLA or if you just want to trash me for singing a song about a disease where your spine fuses together) is always go to the eye doctor when something feels wrong with your eye because they've got other disease possibilities on offer there. Two for the price of one!

workout

There's this great episode of Friends where Chandler quits his job because he doesn't want to turn into someone who only cares about the numbers, only to get lured back by great pay, and the episode closes with all his friends wondering where he is at 11PM on a Friday night, and it turns out he's at the office, yelling down the phone about the WENUS.

It's sort of like that in my life right now. Not that I'm blogging about work, but there's this new system being implemented to handle the financial side of producing a magazine, and as the person most adaptable to change (and the daughter of an accountant), it's sort of been put in my lap to handle the transition from the old system to the new one. I can joke all I like about "I, for one, welcome our new PeopleSoft overlords", but let's face it, it's sort of my job now.

What's fascinating in all this isn't whether or not too much work has or has not been dropped in my lap, or whether or not it was ever part of my job description to do all this stuff. What's fascinating is there's a part of me that LIKES it. And then there's another part of me that HATES that I like it. I'm naturally a problem solver - I'm one of those people that will ASK to untangle your necklace for it because I like knots and undoing them. Which is, I think, a jarring side of my otherwise totally chaotic, creative personality. So there's all this really complicated work to do, and there's attendant paperwork, and there are people to handhold as they unwillingly are dragged towards change, and there are new systems to implement, and I complain about it because it's a pain in the ass, but the real pain in the ass is I simply won't let it go.

My otherwise disorganized, free-wheeling personality turns into the Virgo everyone who believes in Astrology thinks I should be. And I enjoy it. What's problematic is that this isn't my natural state, I don't think. A friend once said, when I pointed out how overwhelmingly messy his room was, "you're exactly the same as I am, messy at heart. Only you fight it and make yourself miserable by guilting yourself into being someone you're not." I've never forgotten it, albeit paraphrased, because what he was saying was that it is not in my NATURE to be meticulously organized and attentive.

Which, to an extent, is true. I am organized and meticulous in very small bursts, and then completely three-sheets-to-the-wind when it comes to maintaining that level or organization. These little systems and tasks I'm setting up around myself here at work, gleefully, will only turn into crabby sullen teenagers that I hate having to nurture in a few months.

So what's natural? Is it really possible that I'm this diametrically opposed to myself? Can I really be BOTH nitpickingly organized and then a shitstorm of mess in the same lifetime? How can I both secretly adore making Excel spreadsheets, and then let my shoes litter the entire apartment?

Is this normal? And now, I have to go back to the WENUS.

resolutishions

So, I've never made New Year resolutions before*. Mostly because I know myself pretty well and I'm only likely to do something that seems like a really good idea right when I do it (diet, fall madly in love and get married with no second-guessing, etc). I'm not really the sort of person that can say "I'm going to do this in the nearish future" and stick to doing it. It's all or nothing with me. Before Stuart moved in and became something really nice to snuggle up to, thus prompting me to keep relatively regular sleep hours, I used to clean whenever the mood struck, and that mood struck around 1:30 AM about twice a month. Or I'd get into some really insane project, like reorganizing my dresser drawers or reorganizing my photographs. These aren't things I plan, so resolutions never seemed like they fit my M.O.

But I want to commit to small plans that are manageable this year. So I've made some decisions that are resolutionish. They're not really hard and fast rules, this is more like a tester year for the whole pre-planned decisions thing. Nonetheless, here they are, for posterity:

1. Get involved with people that need my help: this is something I've meant to do, year after year, but life gets in the way rather selfishly. I've always wanted to do volunteer work but everytime it seems like life is calm enough to find a project, life gets uncalm. And it's not a good idea to dedicate yourself to something when there's very little of yourself spare. But this seems like a good year - hopefully, this year I'll be transitioning away from a nine-to-five existence and into something more flexible, and one of my promises to myself is that I will find useful ways to fill the time between school (hopefully), part-time work, and writing. So when Jen mentioned she'd joined NYCares as a volunteer, I looked into it. It's a great organization in its flexibility and its wide scope of projects. Tomorrow night is my first project - reading bedtime stories to kids living in family shelters. I love children and I want to work with Barrie, eventually, on some literacy projects she's got up her sleeve, so this seemed like a good place to start.

2. Be more attentive to special days: I'm not going to go totally insane and start crafting my own doilies or pincushions, but I'd like to start planning for friends' and family's birthdays and other holidays a little better. I'm good at the big holidays but I sometimes forget to do more than just call a long-distance friend on his or her birthday. It's not hard to find a card and send it, so I want to start doing that more often.

3. Be more conscientious of daily routines: I'm a pretty good creature of habit but there are a lot of things I'd like to do on a daily basis - little things - that I sometimes slack on. Washing my face every night is a big one, because I'm currently lucky enough to have good skin and I shouldn't take that for granted, taking care of it now will go a long way later. I also need to drink more water and put things away properly when I get home. These are three little tasks I'm going to try to improve this year.

4. Accomplish at least 2/3rds of these household projects: completely rehaul our hallway of picture frames, deal with the gross brown spots on our bathroom ceiling, repaint and restructure the kitchen cabinets, install a dimmer in the dining room, get a new bookshelf for the office, find a new ceiling light-fixture for the office, TOTALLY RE-ORGANIZE OUR LINEN CLOSET FROM HELL, frame Jason's beautiful christmas card from last year before it starts fading, re-do the art in our bedroom, get our landlord to install a new front door lock to replace the really sticky current one, and solve the desk-space problem in our otherwise perfect office.

5. Do at least some of these things that I always say I want to do and aren't hard to do but somehow never get around to doing: visit a vineyard in the NY area, go bike-riding in the city, go row-boating in Central Park, go camping again possibly with friends this time, go apple-picking in the fall, bake bread, walk across the Manhattan Bridge (I know!), go to the Bronx Zoo in the spring, and take more pictures with my Nikon.

I'm comforted by this last one, because I know I'll get some or most of it done. If I'd made this same list last year, it would have had all those things on it but it also would have had things like: go camping, play tennis, get involved with Barrie's summer Shakespeare, take at least one stupidly extravagant vacation, explore Queens, and write more, possibly for publishing. So, of all the things I didn't get around to doing in the past year, I've done a fair amount of the things I wanted to. That's encouraging.

What are your resolutishions?

* this isn't strictly true. I made something like a resolution somewhat close to New Year's last year, which was an incredibly huge accomplishment - Stuart and I started paying all our bills on time, on the same day every month. Then my dad, flushed with pride upon hearing that his daughter was committed to never again getting her cell-phone shut off, made me this totally awesome yearly spreadsheet where I could input the amounts paid every month to each company and the confirmation numbers I got online once the bills were paid. It meant that every single month this year, on that day in the middle of the month when our joint checking account was the fattest, I sat down with twenty minutes to spare and paid all five of our bills. Not having a credit card really helped this transition - so did Stuart getting a job. It's a tiny accomplishment and we still don't budget or save like we should (sorry, dad) but just paying our bills on time, all at once, every month, has given us a stability and preparedness that feels a lot like adulthood. You could say, sadly, that this was my most successful resolution. Today, when I copied and rebuilt dad's 2005 spreadsheet into page two, 2006, I felt incredibly proud. Also, what a rockin' dad, huh? You can borrow my dad if you need someone to build you a cool little spreadsheet that makes bill-paying fun.

pulling teeth

Here is a list of things I would rather be doing than what I'm doing right now:

Walking around outside.
Eating lunch.
Buying myself winter boots.
Reading a book.
Doing dishes.
Cleaning the bathroom.
Taping matchsticks together, end to end.
Delivering a suppository to a hippopotamus with irritable bowel syndrome.

See how it goes from the somewhat desirable to the sort of tasks you'd assign to convicted war criminals? That's because I'm writing. And it's absolutely positively hair-pullingly AGONIZING.

I would like to take this moment to really speak to other aspiring writers out there. I'm not talking about bloggers - I'm talking about people who are actively (like, today) trying to create fiction out of thin, resistant air. You know all those novelists we read about in the newspaper, that we listen to on NPR, who say gloriously unhelpful things like, "oh, I love writing, it's like breathing, I'm not happy unless I'm doing it, etc etc etc."? You know them?

KILL THE BEAST, man. I say we all get pitchforks (the weapon, not the indy zine) and light them on fire and rake them across the front doors of their houses. I say fling elephant dung at these novelists' walls whilst stabbing at their rosebushes with fire and angst. Because I hate those people almost as much as I hate Gregory Crewdson and broccoli. I'm standing here to say that as part of the Betterment of Self v.4.5, Fall 2005 Edition, I have been (trying to) write, trying to work out the same piece of fiction for the greater part of three weeks now, and with all the generous helpings of constant, daily encouragement (Shana, Stuart, I'm looking at you), IT IS STILL HARD AS FUCK. Do you hear me, you novelists, you smug speakers on the radio who say that writing is like air when really it is more like being shoved underwater and trying to GASP for air? That is how hard it is.

So hard that I would rather attach my fingernails to ten trains all going in opposite directions at full tilt that stare at my blurry monitor for another second. So hard that words I wrote ten minutes ago, words I liked back then in the haze of ten minutes ago, are words that I now want to tie to a white picket fence and slice repeatedly at with an out-of-control chainsaw. So hard that even the act of coming up with violent metaphorical situations for my pain is easier than writing anything that ISN'T a violent metaphor.

You will forgive me, then, for this ten minute interlude of roaring confusion. You will understand that I'm going to publish this post, allowing my blog to serve its original purpose, that is, someplace for me to whine like a starving orphan baby, and then after hitting publish I will return to that wretched word document and continue my torturously slow pilgrimage to my own chosen destiny. But know that I will feel better for the outpouring of slammed-finger-in-car-door agony in which you have allowed me to indulge.

And if you know what I mean, if you know the pain of teaching yourself the patience to go in the direction of the things you've always said you've wanted and never had the courage to achieve, you can pour out your own violent descriptions of the angst of creativity right there in that little comment box. Because that's the howl of frustration I have unleashed.

But my title, my title is wrong. It's a frustration that leads to a pain that's not so much like pulling teeth, or getting blood from a stone. Those metaphors are not remotely apt, not nearly dramatic enough in their scope. It's more like that thing that cats do with the extension of all paws in opposite directions, making their own circumference thrice their actual size and creating a disc of cat so unwieldy, so unyielding, as to make the insertion of cat into carrying case an impossible feat.

Yeah, it's kind of like THAT.

running on empty

I took a break from work and sat outside, drinking water and reading the Metro section of today's New York Times. I read an article about the search for Amelia Earhart. More specifically, it's about one female pilot that has paid for and repaired a 1935 Lockheed Electra L-10E, identical to the one that Earheart was flying when she vanished. She plans to fly this plane over the exact same route that Earheart flew when she disappeared.

Now, I tell you this to prep you for the following brief grammatical exercise. I am going to quote, verbatim, the entire third paragraph, which consists of two sentences. Sentence the first:

"One woman's desire to solve that mystery is being refueled at Allaire Airport in Belmar, New Jersey."

and the second:

"Grace McGuire, 54, a pilot, is hoping to recreate and successfully complete Earheart's final voyage."

Let's visit the construction of that first sentence, shall we? I am going to make typographical notations when I reprint it.

"One woman's desire [to solve that mystery] is being refueled at Allaire Airport in Belmar, New Jersey."

The italicized text refers to the subject of our sentence, that is, what the sentence is about. The underlined text is the predicate, as in, what is being done to or by our subject. In brackets is a prepositional phrase and as such, can be happily removed from the sentence without losing any meaning. So now we have:

"One woman's desire...is being refueled at Allaire Airport in Belmar, New Jersey."

Desire? Being refueled? Perhaps metaphorically? No, it can't be a metaphor, or figurative at all, can it? After all, the writer mentions a specific location, the writer is implying that the desire actually exists in some sort of desire-dispensing container at a very specific airport in Belmar, New Jersey. What an airport, right?

I included the second sentence not because it had an equally profoundly stupid grammatical faux pas, but to prove that the author of our article, in an attempt to provide a badly-placed image linking desire (an intangible subject) with an airplane (which runs on actual fuel), needed that second sentence to get across the actual point of the paragraph. He needed the straight man to say, "yes, actually, we're talking about a person, her plane, and her desire to do something with that plane."

I found this sentence both offensive and alarmingly badly constructed. I don't think I've ever been so offended by a sentence, actually, because it's such a horrific mishmash of correctly-used grammatical elements - the subject, the predicate, the darling prepositional clause so near to my heart - and uselessly confusing metaphor. I had to read it three times to understand that he didn't actually mention the plane being refueled at all, but one woman's desire to solve a mystery. Which involved a plane. But not in that sentence.

See?

Similarly, on the opposing page, there was a headline about Oprah Winfrey and a public apology from Hermes. The headline ran, "Oprah, No Diva She, Accepts Hermes Apology on the Air". Oprah, no diva she? Who talks like that? Why is there all this unnecessary flowerization of the standard, trustworthy English language? Did all the staff-writers and copy editors die, only to be replaced by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Edith Wharton? No diva, she?

Between the Oprah headline and the fuel of desire, permit this normally eloquent reader a small moment of WTF?

New York Times, while you're going through this difficult and challenging transition to NYTIMES PREMIUM SELECT ELITE DOT COM, consider shifting some much-needed energy from fleecing your customers to de-flowerizing your copy edit staff.

way down in dixie

What do you say that isn't cliche? When something like a hurricane happens, who would think the worst of it keeps getting worse, days after the fact?

I just read that there are bodies in the Superdome, that people are just walking around with dead bodies in their midst, that people who would otherwise be horrified or scared or thinking about what to do with the dead simply cannot think about that, have had the natural human reaction desensitized out of themselves. It's the worst thing to think of, of course, but it reminds me of all the stories we read about the black death in Europe. Which only makes it more dramatic but you know what I mean.

I hunger for, look for, stories of people reaching out to each other during this, like UTLaw taking in students from Tulane Law and cities all over Texas accepting tens of thousands of refugees and maybe even individual people, opening their homes for other people.

But my mind strays back to the escalating terror of the situation. Reporters have stopped even trying to be fair about terminology, calling the gun-wielding citizens "thugs". Hearing the mayor's despair, seeing the OEM director railing against FEMA and asking if they've never "been to a hurricane before" - people can no longer watch their words and for some reason, it tells me even more about the crisis than the pictures.

I was in Houston for the floods, in the summer of 2001 and I won't kid when I say it was literally like a pleasant walk in the rain compared to this. No one lost their lives. A woman gave birth on top of her car. The news stations stayed online, without commercials, until they flooded. And it felt, in the midst of all that water and destruction, nothing compared to Katrina but still, it felt like people were banding together.

I keep searching for people banding together during Katrina because after looking at the worst of the stories I turned to Stuart and said, "I can't believe this. Not of this country," and yet, it is. So I'm looking for the best. We're giving what money we can. I'm praying, agnostic that I am, for relief.

And that the worst will finally pass, days after the eye of the storm has.

twenty four and nine tenths

When I was one, I had a wooden walker that I would race in, from one end of our apartment in Buenos Aires to the other. I also answered the phone "owa", mimicking my mother's "ola".

When I was two, we moved to Aruba where enormous iguanas sunned themselves on our deck. My brothers went to boarding schools, a fact that was the reason that I was never allowed to go to boarding school, my parents apparently learning their lesson about children and watchful eyes.

When I was three, I had a friend named Tania Barros and we always played the Pretend Game. "Pretend... THIS! Pretend... THAT!" She had long hair that I coveted, I had short hair that she coveted.

When I was four, I had a colonoscopy to remove what may have been polyps from my intestines.

When I was five, we had a BMW in Morocco and I was afraid of it because the round headlights looked mean. Also, I spoke a little arabic because our maid's son was my friend. Not the same maid that accidentally left the waterhose on in the indoor garden and flooded the entire sunken living room and then went screaming out of the house, terrified of the landlord's consequences. Different maid.

When I was six, I had panda pyjamas that I loved, and my mother did a treasure hunt around the mostly-empty house in New Jersey so that I could find my presents. They also took me to the Statue of Liberty for the first time.

When I was seven, I got an ear infection because the little gold earrings that my godfather had given to me were so precious, I kept pushing the backing further and further into my ear so that I didn't lose them.

When I was eight, I got glasses, and my first pair had Woodstock on the side and my mother misplaced them in an airport in South America and I was devastated. Also at eight, my mother cut her hair short and when she came home, I was so thrown off by the unfamiliar look that I spent an hour crying about it. I was sort of a melodramatic kid.

When I was nine, we moved to Cote D'Ivoire and I met Anna and Julia and when they were talking about being in the "lift" at the hotel, I had no idea what they meant but I didn't ask, assuming they were playing with a forklift. I learned over time what they meant without having to ask and look stupid, and just assuming an answer would reveal itself in context has since become a somewhat dubious skill of mine.

When I was ten, I danced a little Flamenco routine at our International Festival because I'd been home sick the day our French class had learned our class dance and the teacher had told my mother I thus couldn't participate and my mother basically said (in nicer terms) "fuck THAT noise" and taught me a little Flamenco routine which I performed wearing a Flamenco dress that my dad had brought me from Spain. I took my glasses off to dance so I have a memory of not being nervous because all I could see was the chalk line on the grass that my mother had marked down for me.

When I was eleven, I went to the US on holidays with my best friend Cecile and we insisted on owning matching clothes in everything but I pitched a fit when Cecile got a sweater in D.C. and I didn't. Also, my mother found pot in the drawer at a HoJo and we changed hotels but because I was so young, she told me it was "cigarettes" and I didn't see what was so wrong with that.

When I was twelve, we moved to Houston from a short-lived assignment in Tunisia and I was considered a complete and utter nerd at the middle school I attended. I only had one friend. We wore matching squaw costumes for Halloween.

When I was thirteen, I got contacts, the beginnings of a figure, and a boyfriend. Suddenly, I had more than one friend. Pre-teens are shallow.

When I was fourteen, I got involved in a youth group and we sang hymns and went bowling and then went to Mexico to build houses for young families. I can't tell which moment it was that I lost my already-shaky and socially-acquired faith; whether it was when our youth group changed the words to "Peaceful Easy Feeling" by the Eagles so that it was about Jesus and not a woman, or whether it was when one neighboring mission group on the Mexico trip had a somewhat charismatic Baptist leader who told us to "stand up if we felt the holy spirit" and I was almost compelled to stand up just because everyone else was and it made me vaguely disgusted with myself. Maybe a combination of the two.

When I was fifteen, I celebrated my birthday at a camp by Lake Naivasha with classmates I'd just met, having just moved to Kenya. The standout moment in an otherwise awkward weekend was that Marnix, whom I didn't personally know yet but thought hated me, saw me run full-on into a painful bush and came over to help extricate my caught pants from the thorns. It was the first time he was nice to me and I think it was the start to our friendship although doubtless he'd forgotten it.

When I was sixteen, my parents threw me a sweet sixteen party in our living room and that morning, we cleared the entire living room of furniture. My brother had sent me Billy Joel's greatest hits and I spent the morning in there, listening to it and dancing around the room. I still love empty rooms. It was also the year I lost my virginity.

When I was seventeen, we moved back to Houston and I got my first real job, working at the Gap. I also joined and hated our high school drill team, dated a punk and a theatre dork, walked around the Village alone for the first time whilst in New York on holiday, got into drinking coffee as a hobby, and got into college.

When I was eighteen, I spent most of my time with my college roommate and best friend, Beth. I also ate a chili dog for the first time, had my first hangover, lived in my own apartment for the first time, got in my first (and only) near-accident, and by the end of being eighteen, broke up with my first serious boyfriend.

When I was nineteen, I had a self destructive friend who was in love with another mutual friend of ours. I got stuck in several snowstorms, went to Egypt and hated it, and went to Maine and loved it.

When I was twenty, I was depressed a lot, got into R.E.M. and Radiohead, and am convinced the three are related. I started smoking, made more self-destructive friends, was the editor of the college newspaper, practically failed out of English Medieval History, watched my brother graduate from his MBA, and ran out of money a lot. Oh, and wore lots of hoodies.

When I was twenty one, I snapped out of it. I also fell in love with several good friends, all to disasterous effect. Notably, I quit my college newspaper and thought about moving to London. I also started this blog.

When I was twenty two, I graduated from college and got a job. I also had two or three really stupid relationships of varying lengths and stupidities. I spent a lot of time going to stores and buying clothes on a credit card that withered and died a few months later without too much long-term damage. I also met Biscuit.

When I was twenty three, I decided to apply for law school and then decided not to go. In between those two things, I had appendicitis, during a blackout, I got an agent, I dated two very different guys, I met Kate, I was pleasantly surprised by great gifts and great family at Christmas, I spent Valentine's Day alone, I went to Brasil, and I met Stuart.

When I was twenty four, I had a new roommate (Kate), a new toy (iPod), and a new love (Stuart). I also had a wedding, a honeymoon, great holidays, and a blizzard, made the decision to quit smoking, made the decision to start a diet, learned how to play tennis, painted a room red, got to know my in-laws, went to two weddings, got a great tax return, and developed a taste for Madeira. Twenty four, I think, was a good year.

Let's see what twenty five brings.

homesick

I didn't really miss New York at all when I was on the island. It's weird to call it "the island" because that makes it sound tropical but one can't really call it "the isle", can one. That sounds even weirder.

Anyway I say I didn't really miss New York. That's not to say I didn't miss my friends (I did) or I want to give up life here and move to the island (I don't) but homesickness only affects me when I feel that the place I'm in is not fulfilling me in some shallow or meaningful way that home does fulfill me.

Does that make sense? When we were in Kent, at the B&B getting ready for Shiv's wedding, we needed to eat. The inn was in a residential part of the town and there was nowhere easily walkable. So we looked at the menus for the area that the hostess provided. After three tries, finding out one place didn't deliver until 5 and another place wasn't OPEN until five, we had to order from Pizza Hut. Who didn't even want to deliver to us because we were at a hotel, until Stuart convinced them by use of cunning exessive politeness to bring us food for which we'd pay hard-earned money.

That was a shallow moment because the whole world doesn't have to be like New York. But in New York I can get sixteen kinds of food from cultures around the globe delivered to the park bench I'm sitting on at three seventeen in the morning on Christmas Day. That's fucking awesome, by the way. So I had a shallow moment, where my inner brat lay down on the floor and kicked her arms and legs around and said WAHH TAKE ME HOME.

I had a more meaningful kind of homesickness the next day, at a pub in Covent Garden with friends where we went to kill time before our flights. Stuart and I decided to go for a little walk through the busy square, watch a little Punch and Judy, and just generally revel in not carrying our heavy suitcases. It was nice to be walking along hand in hand in the perfect English summer sunshine, watching all manner of people stream past us. We sat down in one of the alcoves and watched a string quartet play recognizable classical music. I turned to Stuart and said, "You know, for all I say London is just like New York so I might as well live at home, we don't have string quartets." I went on to think, we also don't have this gorgeous summer weather, we also don't have cornish pasties or quince jam or wonderful canal holidays or sheep, SO MANY SHEEP. Okay, that's England, not London, but you get where I was going with that.

Then, almost unbidden, I thought of the blind Greek accordionist on the N/W that I like to call Themistoklis, who played Fools Rush In for a solid year and always says in heavily accented English, "Ladies and Gentleman, your donations are greatly appreciated." I thought about Leroy, the black guy with nothing but his thumbs who, when he asks for money on a Friday because you've just gotten paid, says, "If you can't give me your cash, then just give me a smile!" And how I always smile. And I thought about how we might not necessarily have classy string quartets with more charm in them than all of the Bond actors combined, but how there's nothing quite as awesome as walking through Herald Square and hearing a saxophonist play Girl from Ipanema and wonder what he knows about you, nothing quite like the guy that plays Edith Piaf songs on guitar in Brooklyn, and how much I missed those things.

So really, it came down to realizing that for me, walking through Covent Garden on a busy Sunday felt like a moment in a pleasing Richard Curtis film, but walking through Astoria on a muggy Sunday to have lazy breakfast at Tastee Corner, well, feels like normal life.

being introspective about your blog is oh so 2005

It's hard to blog these days because everything I'm about to say either ends up sounding rehearsed and stilted and like it came straight out of a can labeled "Things That Are Both Introspective and Yet Simple" or it's going to get too real, too un-photoshopped, and there are only some people that want to see the un-photoshopped versions.

I could blog about the wonderful day we had on Tuesday, with tennis and beer and laziness and cheese on toast. Nope, it'd just seem like it came out of the can with the label, where I'm all, "look at the harmony and simplicity, isn't it divine?"

Or I could blog about how Stuart and I are learning the edges of our disagreement maps, we're in the Here Be Monsters territory where we're starting to learn each other's weaknesses and while most of the time our better impulses lead us away from the napalm shots, sometimes we cave, sometimes we're not the best people in the world. But nope, parents and real-life friends read this who'd then start asking about the state of our marriage, offering unsolicited advice, or just ... I don't know.

I could blog about pressures at work, trying to find new avenues for my creativity, trying to see the middle road between the huge highway signs that say BOOORING and the one that says SELL OUT. About looking for freelancing gigs and trying to keep this space pure and alive and fresh and about learning to spend less time criticising other people's writing and more time making my own better. But that's job related, isn't it, and there's an embargo on that.

All around me, I'm seeing blogs falling to the wayside. Either I'm just not interested anymore, a writer has gone in a direction that's no longer what it was when I first started reading, or they've become peppered with too many links and not enough content, or - more gracefully than quitting - they've just quietly stopped writing. And I think, that's the way to go. Why am I still here? But it's because I love this space. I love that every now and again, it's an immediate receptacle for an inspired idea, a funny conversation, the need to rant.

I don't want to give up blogging but I've just written an entire entry about how I can't see the forest for the trees. How can I get more personal without essentially telling people to not comment to me anything they read about, or without vetting it with Stuart first? How can I still blog if it's just going to be pat, neatly-tied-up-with-a-catchy-moral tidbits that bore me on other sites?

You guys, sadly, aren't even the ones to answer those questions. I guess I am. And that's the other thing - comments. Why do I have them? If I really just wanted to write, wouldn't it be easier if I knew I wouldn't have people's immediate reactions? Wouldn't that mean I'd just write, get it out, and forget about what people thought of it because I would be deaf to their opinion? Or would the loss of the instantaneous connection of commenting actually make me lose interest in something I was convinced I would lose interest in two months after I started, in 2002?

Oh, look, I just found some lint in here. Fascinating.

the pumpkin lives

Beth has written a post that's inspired me to write a post just like it. Someone once told me there was a word for this, it had two m's and two e's in it, but lucky for me, I've forgotten it. So, without further new-vocabularizing, here is my list of ten childish things I still do:

1. I stomp up stairs all the time. Stuart said I make noise completely disproportionate to my size. Which, actually, I think holds true for the next item.

2. I can be incredibly loud, in general. I laugh too loud. My mother always said to me, "if you want to get attention, whisper", lovingly but erroneously trying to guide my boisterous nature into something aloof and demure. It won't work. I'm not aloof and demure. I'm loud, even when I'm trying not to be. And when people tell me I'm loud, it hurts, because it's something that's nearly impossible to change and they're making it feel like a flaw.

3. I chew my fingers. This is incredibly embarassing to me. Wow, this is becoming a list of things that are embarassing. Which is ironic because children are almost never embarassed.

4. I put stuff down wherever I want whenever I want. My adult impulses (I like to think of them like the shoes your mom bought for you that are two sizes too big but she says you'll grow into them) tell me to be neat, so I try to obey that with my weekly tidying binges, but my very first impulse is to just drop everything on the floor because this is the most immediately easy solution. I am working on growing into my adult impulses.

5. I am one of the most effective pouters I know, and have been since a very young age. My bottom lip was like, MADE for quivering. Also and conversely, I continue to use my large brown eyes and general cuteness to get me too many things in life, from not having enough spare change for my morning coffee to asking Stuart to bring me something from another room.

6. I still daydream about the future. It's less varied now that I'm married, because that's one constant (as opposed to "maybe he'll be named Henry!" or "What kind of hair should he have?"), but I still play little games where I imagine vignettes from my future that please me.

7. I burst into dramatic tears on the turn of a dime. Not to get my way, necessarily, but as a genuine emotional reaction. I am starting to feel as though I need to stop doing that because it forces everyone involved with my sobfest to drop their own concerns and deal with the sobbing kid, I mean, adult. See?

8. I will still run to things that I need to get to faster (the bus, the bathroom, etc) even when I am wearing completely the wrong shoes which never happened when you were a kid. I also totally love skipping. In fact, I often move my body like a little kid, since I jump around a lot when I'm excited and slump and whine when I'm tired.

9. I am fixated, often immovably, on things I want. And when I get them - when I was little it was my patent leather red mary janes and currently it's a new pair of jeans - I'm delighted beyond all reason.

10. I eat the marshmellows and the marshmellows ONLY out of a dry box of Lucky Charms.

11. I hate following rules, often including the ones I set for myself. Like, only choosing ten things.

labels, libel, and an incredibly long blog post wherein i attempt and fail to justify my hatred of hipsters

I have to explain what I'm wearing today to give you some idea of where this post was born. After a criminally fabulous and quadruple-cosmo bachelorette party last night, I didn't have the energy to shower this morning. I was already running late and washing the two tons of glitter off my face took enough energy. So I pulled on my jean skirt, a green tee shirt, a red velour zip hoodie, and my new shoes.

My new shoes are awesome. I found them yesterday at DSW for a decent price after despairing at the price tags of comparably expensive brands. They're non-lace sneakers, slim and tan colored, with flat soles that are perfect for city walking. I wanted something that I could wear with a jean skirt that wasn't my beautiful black leather ballet flats that are getting too much loving wear already. So I found these, and I'm in love.

I tell you all this because it's what I was wearing as I stood on the subway train heading towards the city. In my jean skirt, tee, hoodie, city sneakers, and ubiquitous iPod cords dangling from my ears into my pocket. Do you see what I saw when I looked down? This is what I thought when I saw myself in my mind's eye:

"You are such a trend whore."

And it made me think a lot on that 30 minute ride about labels, and trends, and looks, and why we simultaneously trash them and then follow them to the letter. How can I live with the paradox, the hypocritical nightmare, that is the following two statements that I believe with utter certainty (except in moments like this when I challenge them)?

1. This is New York City and one of the things I love about New York City is the elbow-rubbing familiarity we all have with the "types" of people we would never otherwise travel in similar circles with.

and

2. I fucking hate hipsters and trend whores and people that otherwise spend 30 minutes making sure their attitude is appropriately disheveled and ironic before they leave the house.

Do you see the problem here? Do you see the snake-eating-itself problem my logic is undergoing? Someone Sarah Brown brilliantly said recently (I think it was in New York magazine but you'll have to forgive me a lack of credit because of the afore-mentioned cosmos), "why call them hipsters when what you really mean is asshole?" and it's completely true. What do I have against that type of person, what is the vitriolic snarky bile that rises in my throat, when I stand here claiming that the diversity of personality and lifestyle types is the very essence of what I love about New York?

I have a couple of theories, and I put them forth to you because if you're really honest with yourself (and it seems that after a night of cosmos, I am really honest with myself), you'll admit that you're this much of a hypocritical asshole as I am.

(But before I go on, perhaps you are not. Perhaps you get on the subway in the morning, roam around this glorious city, and take delightful, child-like glee in the varying groups of people, living their wildly different lives. Perhaps you see the bullish investment banker yelling his sandwich order at the deli guy and then turning to his friend and saying, "JESUS, doesn't anyone speak English?" and think how forthright and patriotic he is. Perhaps you see the mother with the double wide stroller who throws a hissy fit when she can't get to the coffee line because other people are standing there as protective and assertive of herself and her children. Perhaps you hear the twenty five year old unemployed artist waif behind you in the movie line talking about how she's so broke because her dad hasn't sent the monthly check for her two thousand dollar penthouse on Ludlow and think how lucky and happy she must be to have such loving parents. PERHAPS YOU'RE ON TOO MUCH ZANAX, okay? I'm describing things I've actually seen and if you want to be holier than thou about how patient and non-judgemental you were, go touch yourself. )

This is how I see it, this is how I'm trying to understand my own hypocrisy. Either I'm jealous, I'm right, or I'm a complete asshole:

Let's start with the hypothesis that I'm right, that we're all right, that these people are obnoxious scum taking up valuable space for the rest of us hard-working and decent people. What is legitimate in my dislike of example #3, the artist waif with the parentally-endorsed lifestyle? Well, for one, I think the phenomenon has taken and possibly ruined an entire interesting and historically diverse neighborhood of New York City (the L.E.S., once the home of pickle vendors and Jewish grandmamas). Secondly, I've been around enough of what we disparagingly call "hipsters" to form a legitimate opinion of the way this culture interacts with itself. I remember being at an artist's party in Williamsburg for a friend's photography show a few years back. I really, truly like the guy. I like his photography. But this party was more than I could handle for the following reason - it didn't seem like anyone was actually talking to each other. Everyone was mentioning the names of people they knew in common, mentioning which recent parties they'd been to, what openings were cool right now, how totally hilarious it was when that one guy ran around naked with a pig mask on. I stood in about four conversations and thought, "these people aren't being artistic. They're NETWORKING." And networking, while a valid and important part of business culture, isn't what I DO with my friends. And these people were, ostensibly, FRIENDS. It was just so surreal.

So that's the possibility that I'm RIGHT, that I don't have to feel bad for launching vitriol at the subculture, that I gave it a shot to impress me, as a lifestyle, and it utterly failed.

I'm not completely comfortable, though, with how that gels with the first in my pair of truths, the part where I said I consider myself to be an incredibly tolerant person, someone who celebrates the curltural diversity of the city as well as the ethnic and racial diversity that's more prominently discussed (and, duh, not part of the cultural differences I'm talking about here). Basically, I can't be right about hating these people AND be right about celebrating people's lifestyles even when I wouldn't choose them myself. Being right, in this instance, is saying "your lifestyle is for CRAP," so I'm still being an utter hypocrite.

Hey, maybe it's just that I'm a complete asshole! No, I'm going to throw that theory out the window (but you're welcome to expound on it in my comment box) on the grounds that if I really was just a complete asshole and nothing more, I wouldn't be riding that train, looking at my unintentionally-trendy outfit and feeling really fucking BAD about calling everyone else an asshole. I'm not an asshole by virtue of taking the emotional rollercoaster ride of trying to figure out if I'm being a complete asshole. Listen up people that misuse the notion of irony - that still isn't the textbook definition of irony but it's coming sort of close.

So we're left with one ugly green-eyed monster of a theory - jealousy. Jealousy masking itself as vitriol and snark is the most simultaneously pleasurably guilty and personally offensive thing we can do to ourselves. Here's what happens - you see someone living a certain kind of life and imposing bits of that life on YOU, bits that are totally different from the bits of your life that you're imposing on them. The guy at the deli counter in the six hundred dollar suit yelling about someone else being incompetent forces you to assume that he's getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat everyone like trash. The mother with the stroller is being pushy because she assumes that her children and their fucking enormous stroller are more important than you and your standing room. The chick with the thousand dollar loft on the LES, well, you don't HAVE a thousand dollar loft on the LES, do you.

These people offend you because they are indulging in personality and lifestyle traits that you don't have and you find grating or offensive in their alienness. If you did, you wouldn't notice theirs. I don't really notice other girls on the train that are friendly, a little poor, read prententious books and wear glasses. But I'll bet there's someone else on that train looking at me and thinking, "HER, with her books and her glasses, who does she think she IS." And it's jealousy. It's a sneaky KIND of jealousy, because if pressed you wouldn't say, "yeah, okay, I want their life, WHAT OF IT?" That would imply that you've found something lacking in your own, something that the person right next to you has and you want it.

Jealousy, in this instance, is more complex and crafty than throwing a temper tantrum in the sandbox because you want Mikey's red truck. It's a pervasive kind of non-empathy for someone else's choices, and the worst part about the vitriol that you launch at other people is that it's belittling the perfectness of your own life. I make assumptions, cast dispersion, at someone else's LIFE because deep down in places I don't like to even admit I have, they have something I want. The gobs of money with the banker. The superior self-centeredness of the mother with the stroller. The hipster waif, with her easy debonairness of living solely off her parents and being the center of everyone's cultural and media attentions.

They have something I think is cool, but I don't want to admit I think it's cool, so instead I mock them mercilessly. Some of my mocking may even be valid, some of my points may even be legitimate, and some of it is just me being an asshole. What it really is, though, is impossible to resist. It's so easy to be vitriolic and snarky about other people, because it serves as a stunningly complete cover to the twinge of jealousy that you're ashamed to admit you're feeling. It's versatile, the snark, it wears well over insecurity.

But that's the problem. The best person I can be is the first one from my couple of truths - the person who delights and defends everyone's right to be completely different from me. The worst person I can be is the one who turns around and stamps all over that truth with the green-painted footprints of jealousy and intolerance. And if we try to get anything right in the daily nightmare of injustices we unthinkingly commit against ourselves, our loved ones, our planet, and total strangers - the one thing we should all be trying to get right is being the best person we're capable of being.

My family has a funny story wherein my bro