IPW

The Update

The traps are set. What did I use? Nutella. Apparently peanut-butter works pretty well, but this is a household with condiments of the more continental variety. After all, mice eat cheese don't they? I put the trap down somewhat out of the way where I won't step on it and trap myself, breaking my pinky-toe and flinging Nutella in my eye at the same time. No signs of the mice in a couple days. Well, one day. I'm thinking my theory about the iron is right and they all ran away since I didn't find any cheese alters. Keep an eye for the outcome of this fascinating saga.

Perhaps slightly more fascinating are our activities over the weekend. The activities that didn't involve battling miniature mammals. On Thursday we went after work to an opening that my friend Eirik Johnson was having at the Yossi Milo Gallery. I've been friends with Eirik for a while now, since high-school which means long in the rear-view. He is just one of the many people I graduated with that went on to great things which is slightly troubling. The opening was well attended mainly with the usual free booze crowd. There was also a spontaneous high-school reunion which I wasn't really expecting, NY being a few thousand miles away from high-school. Strangely enough, and coincidentally, the opening was followed on Friday by a "Seattle Party" like I mentioned before. It was attended by most of the people we saw at Eirik's on Thursday and a few hundred other of the Seattle ex-pat as they are called. I'm wary of the ex-pat title as it connotes intellectuals discussing their mutual disdain for whatever place they were patriotic to. The idea of an ex-pat in my mind is somebody who left a unenlightened place for an enlightened one. This may be true with Paris in the 1930's, but isn't necessarily true of New York vs. Seattle today. Seattle doesn't have the hustle bustle of course, but it is an intellectual enclave in the west, the weather being so poor that there is little else to do but stay inside and git smart. I think mainly what Seattle lacks is a crush of humanity which most of the really big cities of the world have and that's what the so called ex-pats flock here for. Perhaps a bit more of the 'real world' People who don't look or think like you, and who are in your face. That's what I like about this place anyway, and I hope that's what other people come here for. I suspect it might just be for the parties though. Anyway, Eirik's show was a big success and I was proud of my buddy who had made it big.

Now, some time has passed since I started the above, that was after all a week ago, I was younger man then. Since then We've done some things that will be easier describe in lists:

1. Brunch with said photographer Eirik and his wife and Gabe and Carolina on Saturday at 'Paul's Boutique', the original building and corner store on the cover of the Beastie Boys album of the same name. It isn't a crappy little clothing store anymore but an upscale and small coffee place. The crappy clothing stores in the lower east side are drying up, I already miss them even though I personally have never bought anything in any of them and am slightly disgusted by them. Am I disgusted by how wonderful they are? I think so yes. The whole area though has a history of them and city has made a half-hearted(assed) attempt to save them by proclaiming the area the Orchard Street Shopping District, and closing Orchard to traffic on Sundays. It basically looks the same on Sundays that it does any other day except that there are no cars. Unfortunately or not, market forces are driving the prices up and every day one of these little stores closes and is taken over by a trendy bar ironically called, "Paul's Boutique" or "Tenement" or something derivative of the place that just went out of business in order to make way for it. I liken it to the Europeans wiping out the Indians and then in a sad-assed and much belated show of respect for the dispossessed, naming a baseball team after them. But such is progress and eventually it will shift again, I just won't be around to bemoan it.

2. Sunday we went to lunch with a big group of friends, David (one of the three avid readers of this blog and my "boss" who I should never offend in any way, like for example putting "boss" in quotes), Joe and Kate, Chace and Leeorah and ourselves. No we weren't there....uh. Anyway we attempted to go to dim-sum, but being that it was the first day of Chinese New Years it was pandaemonium. It put the "panda" in pandaemonium (what the hell is wrong with me?) I don't really need to comment right now on Chinatown since our Doctor's is there and I believe I've somewhat covered that area of town. I'll just say that there were lots of people there, mostly of Chinese descent, setting off explosions resulting in blizzards of colored confetti. Instead of braving the two and a half hour waits (at the dim-sum restaurants) we moseyed up to the paradoxically named L'Orange Bleu. It is a French-Moroccan place which felt worlds apart from Chinatown in the throws of celebration, though only a few blocks away. It was delicious.

3. Saw Munich. Very powerful. Finally convinces me never to work for Mossad.

4. Saw Midnight Cowboy, finally, starring my pal Jon Voight. You might think I'd seen this excellent film but I missed it somehow, along with a few other classics that people look at me like I stole a baby when I tell them I haven't seen. Like what? Oh, Wizard of Oz. There You see? Maybe I SHOULD go steal a baby.

5. Went to gym twice. That's a weird place, the 14th Street YMCA. Especially the locker room. Basically take any form of public transport, the bus in your town for example, I like to use the F train here in NY since it holds every layer of social strata. Separated the men from the women. Take their clothes off. Have them stand around talking about the most random things in the world and you'll have the appropriate picture. One nude old man told another one the other day that young girls had started looking at him again and smiling. The other one suggested they were laughing at him. It's quite a scene.

Well I guess that's about it. Work is busy, at the office and at home so little time to blog, but I'm putting off several important projects tonight to make sure everyone out there knows exactly what's going on over here and why.

P.S. No mice in the Nutella trap. Maybe I should put a new one down with hummus.

A Post Script to the Last Entry

P.S. (I can't keep away) You might have noticed the part about the ironing in the last entry and thought, "He doesn't look like a guy who irons". You might be right if you judged on what you know of me. For one thing, I'm very manly. But seriously my shirts are generally less than crisply pressed. For another, it might seem that I am also the type of guy to burn himself really badly on the iron itself. That is true and I'm sure I eventually will. Truth be told I'm equally scared of the giant hot robot mouse as I am of its fuzzy counterparts. But as with the mice, I am coming to grips with the iron's presence in the house, and learning to deal. Irons used to be literal blocks of iron that you stuck in the fireplace until they were hot and then you pressed your pantaloons and unmentionables. In lieu of actually washing them. We have an antique iron that we bought in Poland that you were supposed to fill with coals to keep it screaming red hot longer. It is sitting on the shelf watching me iron with the Iron Of The New Millennium. This iron is a good deal smarter than I am and is probably the reason it didn't leave its boat shaped brand on me tonight. It wants to know what type of material it's ironing before it starts. It knows when it is upright or has fallen over and caught on fire (I've never been good at that). It even self cleans like an oven! In other words, it probably should do the ironing its own damn self. But if it did I wouldn't have passed the evening listening to tragically sad songs and losing myself in thought while attempting the sharpest creases ever and dodging the snorts of boiling hot steam that occasionally shot out the iron's backside. I'm now waiting for the clever, angry thing to cool down before I can put it back into a box without fear. One thing I was thinking about while flattening things was what to put on the blog. As you can see, it's not really necessary to actually have done anything interesting in order to write interesting things(?), but I should get back to our activities in the city. Eventually. I make a lot of promises about what I will describe and haven't come through with any of them yet. But tomorrow I will tell you about my friend Eirik Johnson's opening here in NY, the "Seattle" Party that was held the other night (someone ask why) and other interesting activities this weekend. Um, I might have just done told you about it, but I will go into better detail for sure.

A Better Mouse Trap and the Laundry

We have a mouse in the house. Or should I say, a moose is loose in the hoose. This isn't the first time, a few months ago we saw one and chased it out the front door. That seemed to work pretty well but didn't stop one of its brothers from coming back. New York is famous for its pests and has earned every sour word ever spoken about the problem. The subway tracks aren't literally full of rats, just figuratively. You see them all the time down there, going about their business. And cockroaches. Their reputation precedes them of course, those hard shelled chunks of prehistory. Knock on wood we haven't seen any in our current place but they were frequent guests on Rivington Street. Together the next door neighbor's cat and I would route them out, chase them down and squash them. Followed by a little 'High Paw'. There is an urban myth that if you step on a pregnant cockroach a billion little cockroaches will run everywhere. Such is the level of hysteria. And finally, the mice. Compared to the first two creatures, mice are like furry little pets that you kill when you can. They don't stink or bite or dwell in the recesses of your nightmares, but they do eat stuff and scurry across your toes when you are least expecting. I'm not scared of mice so much as I am scared of their scurrying. Will they scurry up my pantleg and claw my privies? Probably not, but that thought is present when looking under the stove for their cheese furnished houses. I should relate the story of two men, or sub-men, who tried to rid a ski cabin some years ago of the one mouse that lived there. They cornered the thing behind the refrigerator (they are ALWAYS behind the refrigerator) One of these guys broke out the tools and they made a plan. "I will use this broom to scare it out from under the fridge" he said. "You catch it with this bucket" He handed the other one a bucket. The bucket wielder, some thirty or forty times larger than a mouse, prepared to entrap the fleeing rodent. The Broom Swiper did his job and before long the mouse shot out from under the fridge like a fur bullet. The Bucket Wielder screamed like a very little girl and threw the bucket in the air. The mouse went someplace else to ponder the high pitch noise that had made its ears ring so. I would like to say that the bucket came down on the head of the Broom Swiper to complete the comic picture, or that the Bucket Wielder was not myself. Neither is true. Mice still employ this method of psychological warfare on me but I've found that killing them is not a problem for me via the mousetrap. I started laying down traps and sometimes they even work. Now if only I could get the vacant beady black stares of the recently departed out of my head so I can sleep. Someday I will build a better mousetrap. It will be made from an elaborate pulley system, a tiny set of scales, a swinging boot on the end of a stick, a paper cutout of a mean looking cat, a tin can full of ball-bearings and of course: a bucket. I'm a little scared that the world WILL beat a path to my door since I basically only speak English and our kitchen is neither Kosher or Halal.

We do our laundry downstairs. That's what I'm doing now as I write. It's not far away, quite convenient actually and we rarely have to wait. In fact it's a little eerie that we almost never see any of our neighbors down there, when do they do their laundry? DO they? Once something sort of interesting happened down there. Someone had apparently left their clothes in the dryer and then moved out of the building. There was a pile of ironic t-shirts and $200 tattered jeans (the hipster uniform) lying on the dryer. Over the next few weeks none of the clothes were claimed, but they were thrown all over the room. Hanging from the lamp, draped over the door, and chucked in the trash. Sometimes I have to stand back and look at it from the perspective of our Hassidic landlords, what the HELL are these goyim DOING? Or did the superintendent Eugene get tired of looking at the pile of clothes and momentarily loose it, hurling hipster uniform like a righteous dervish. I can see him breathing a little heavily afterwards, admiring the fruits of his outrage, then plopping the kippa back on his head and marching out of the room. Right, now I must go claim my ironic t-shirts before they meet the same fate. Actually I only have one, if you can call a tattered shirt with the word "BALLARD" written across it ironic.

I'm back. I thought that the above would be the end to today's entry but no, the clothes weren't dry. We considered putting them away anyway, since we are out of quarters but instead ransacked the apartment looking for some. I found some in a little box I like to think of as my treasure chest. Basically it holds all of the shiny object I've ever been distracted by and took home like a magpie. I'd like to bury it in the ground but a. I'd lose it like I've lost everything I've ever buried, and b. that's where I keep my stamps. Also if I'd buried it we wouldn't have been able to fully dry the clothes tonight and gone to work like we'd spent the night in the rain. I am preparing to iron my shirts, whenever they dry. We got a new iron at Costco the other day. Oh man, I have to go off about the Costco out here some time. Talk about building a better mouse trap. Not now though. I do have this theory that the iron will scare the mouse away though, since it sort of looks like a mouse and blows steam and has one red eye. Thats some scary stuff if you are a mouse. "That giant robot mouse has just helped 'Bald Tall' flatten the torso of another Bald Tall! SICK!" the mouse will say from it's cheese house under the fridge, "It's too intense, I'd better leave."

Anyway, if I were a mouse I'd leave. Or I'd build an alter to it out of crumbs. Okay, let's check out the wash.

I'm sure they still exist but htere used to be tons of cartoons every Saturday. Some of them sucked bad. Lots of the same background scrolling behind running characters over and over again (you know who I'm talking about Shaggy). But they were fun. I looked forward to Saturday morning like I look forward to an afternoon nap now. I have checked out the current line-up, sort of carelessly flipping and lingering on a couple of the offerings. Aside from the occasional re-airing of Bugs and his pals, they seem to have continued their downward slide towards sucky-town. The animators (there are lots of Koreans involved) don't seem to have a love for the characters that they used to. Once the really talented animators here started getting paid what they were worth, unfortunately it became to expensive to actually produce a quality cartoon. Believe it or not, the height of cartooning did not arrive with Pixar, but in the 40's with shorts made specifically for the theaters, long before the telly. I have seen, rarely aired on TV for some reason, examples of this in a couple Popeye cartoons (yes, a Popeye cartoon is the finest example of cartoonerie that I have ever seen). I believe it was "Popeye and the 40 Thieves" and took place in the Middle East, sans-oil war. The only domestic product fought over at that time were lamps full of Genies or flying carpets. I think there were plenty of both in the cartoon I'm thinking of.

Anyway. In response to the lack in most of our lives of Saturday morning cartoons, I present my own, based on the current debate raging at work. I'm trying to convince everyone that they should eat meat. But the fact that I'm wrong is harming my case.

Pardon Our Dust

Well the kinks are getting worked out still folks. It has been pointed out to me that I must have been really pleased with myself to post the last entry three times. It's not that, although the drunken blogs do have a place in my heart. During the time in which I broke the internet (the latest is that I had nothing to do with it) I frantically tried to informing the masses (you three) of what had been going on. In my zeal, I tried and failed three times to post, and was ultimately successful each time. Now I can't get them down.

Okay, a more substantial entry to come now that we are back in business.

I Broke the Internet

Sorry everyone, I realize I only have about three avid readers of this blog but I've let all three of them down. By posting my thoughts about the world I inadvertently broke the internet. I did warn you though that something big was going to happen. Technically I just broke Rob's server, VanBanyan (Named after the 19th century Explorer/Playboy/Beautician Daniel VanBanyan who among his many achievements counts discovering a direct route from Los Angles to Van Nuys California and inventing cattle) so that it no longer recognizes the WWW part which I find to be the most inflammatory bit anyway. Partially due to the internet being broken, I have taken a much needed rest from my week of daily publishings. Well, it was just a working week, 5 days.
I am back. In my absence some serious things have happened though, which will teach me to never let down my guard again. Let's review:

#1: A whale swam up the Thames River, all the way to the Houses of Parliament in London. Upon reaching Westminster Abbey it crawled out of the water and wrote its name in whalish on the Cathedral wall.

#2: Ford Motor Company is laying off up to a quarter of its workforce because it failed to take into account that when gas prices went up people might stop buying vehicles that got 12 miles to the gallon. People, these are some of the richest men in America, are they God Fearing Republicans? I would bet yes. Is that relevant? I would say, yes. You might think I'm exaggerating, you'd be wrong:

"Chairman and CEO Bill Ford said the cuts would be painful, but are necessary in order to respond to customer demands. He admitted that Ford had been hurt by the customer shift away from large-size SUVs, leaving Ford with too much capacity of the large, less fuel-efficient vehicles." -CNN

That is just dumb. Unfortunately the majority of the people they laid off were other God Fearing Republicans. Oops. (BTW I have nothing on hand to support that statement other than the fact that most the layoffs will occur in three red states and one blue one. And one factory in Ontario.)

#3: The Seattle Seahawks, whose stadium I helped build (against my wishes), after having demolished the Kingdome in spectacular fashion have gone on to win the AFC Championships and will be battling the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Superbowl in a couple weeks. Seattle responded to this news by totally freaking out. It is the single biggest event in Seattle history, greater even than the time Seattle Mayor Paul Schell single-handedly defeated Al Qaeda by canceling the New Years celebrations in 1999. But Ian, you say, you don't live in Seattle, how do you know they freaked out? #1 Because I know Seattlites. #2 Because I listened to talk-radio via the internet which I broke. I was disturbed to hear the callers who complained loudly about Seattle not getting any respect. I would point out to them that since we haven't won a championship of any kind since 1978 we probably don't deserve any. Other than for our high literacy rates which the country as a whole doesn't appreciate.

Well, as you might have guessed, I've been in the wine again, so I will end this update and fall face first into the bed. Tomorrow I will return to updating you on the happenings here in New Yohk City which will include stories of witnessing people behaving strangely and other completely normal occurrences.

A Return to the Office

I returned to the Office today. I haven't been working "in house" very much in the first few weeks of the year and it was nice to get back and see everyone. I am going to refer to the place in which I frequently freelance as The Office since I am apt to say something inflammatory and I want my defense to be: How do you know I was talking about you? A could have been talking about some other raging fool clear across town. I told my friend "Frank" (I'll call him "Frank" in these pages since it sounds disturbingly close to his actual name and may in fact be) as we were going to lunch today that he ought not to do anything interesting lest he wind up in my blog. I could tell he was dying to get in. I told him that the only thing he could probably do that I would take note of was to run out in the middle of the street. I would like to say he did this, desperately trying to be mentioned in perhaps the most obscure corner of the internet there is, risking death chasing that elusive lady: Fame. Unfortunately for all of us, and him I guess, he didn't take the bait.
But baiting Frank is just one of the reasons I like going to the Office. You see, since I'm a freelancer I am not bound to the petty politics of the place. And the politics is the best thing about an Office. Having worked at home for almost 6 years I think I went a little bit mad. I had to invent office politics for myself to be involved in, sometimes dragging my poor accountant into the fray. The janitor was constantly trying to bring the secretary down a few notches and the secretary had a thing for the CEO. Very twisted. I was like Tom Hanks on the island talking to a golf-ball. The golf-ball was The Man. At a real office you already have a "the Man" that comes with the place like batteries in a new watch, you don't have to invent him (or her, She can be The Man too).
Office workers have a hard time seeing the point, which is when it's not there to complain about you start to miss it. Especially if you get canned for writing a blog about your workplace and revealing that you attempted to lure your co-workers into the street.

A Blog from when there Was no Blog

I wrote this a year ago, or more, trying to update some of the adventures we'd had coming to New York and my feelings at the time. It's never been seen by human eyes. Until now.

I was walking down the sidewalk the other day in our adopted Lower East Side neighborhood when I passed a dark red stain on the pavement. It looked as if someone had been mortally wounded, run to this spot and rolled around for some time in terrible agony. I cringed. This dark stain was a block from our front door, in front of a school no less. I had cause to worry since not only did I not want myself or Magda to repeat this process ourselves but I hadn’t even heard anything. Such a terrible crime in Seattle would be loud. A block from my door on Etruria street I would have heard the screaming and yelling, the death rattle even. It would have been reported on the news by men and women in waterproof parkas. But this city has a way of silencing the suffering.

Not to be too dramatic. Basically the suffering is not so much silenced as it is just added to the infinite din of happiness, commerce, poverty, traffic and a thousand other noises in the city. We are not suffering. We have found one of the nicest apartments I’ve seen in these parts, and found it with relative ease. Of course we have to pay lots of money, but that comes with the territory. We have been stressed out. Moving is stressful in any case, but moving to New York, driving all of your worldly possessions across the country and depositing them in the center of Manhattan is probably the least relaxing thing you could do with your time.

When we entered Manhattan driving our 11 foot tall Budget truck, the other three thousand miles were instantly forgotten. Except for a couple difficult stops along the way, it’s pretty much a straight shot, and a no-brainer even for someone who’s never driven a truck that far before. But getting on the East River Highway at 50 miles an hour, on lanes not quite wide enough to contain the width of your mirrors is in a class by itself. I was already tense to the point of explosion, dodging cars dodging me, Magda doing her best to soothe my fears, when I man in a black Lexus pulled up along side of us and starting gesticulating like crazy, it was hard for him to pantomime accurately because he had one of those Madonna/McDonald’s headphones on and it kept getting in the way of his range of motion. Essentially he signaled that up ahead was a low bridge, and we were all going to die. I had seen signs to this effect, but I had decided that death was too dramatic an undertaking and didn’t want anything to do with it. He kept waving furiously until I saw a sign that said, Clearance Ahead 11’-7” . At that point I was a little annoyed, there are signs pasted conspicuously all over any Budget truck describing it’s height. We were 11 feet and not an inch more. I hoped. I tried to mime back that everything would be alright and he gave me a look I’d never seen before. It said, forgive me idiotic stranger, but I have tried in vain to save you from your stupidity. Perhaps my signal wasn’t clear enough, I gave him the “OKAY” sign, and a thumbs up, which may have translated to “I like having the top ripped off my rental truck by the underside of the UN building!” He ended our high-speed charades game and pulled ahead to a safe distance from were he could watch the carnage in his mirrors.

Needless to say, we survived. The height on our signs were accurate, but never before did seven inches seem so close. The scrape marks on the top of the tunnel told terrible tales of rental woe, but we wouldn’t add to them that day. The next time I saw our would be saviour in the Lexus, he was conversing happily on his headset as if the incident was a regular occurrence for him and already long in the past.

The next chilling challenge for us was to find a parking space outside of our building where we could unload our collection of heavy items for a couple of hours. We live on the edge of what used to be a very large ghetto. Rivington street was the northeren most boundary of an area of New York populated by 335,000 people per square mile. It was, for a time, the most densely populated area in the world. If you ever have the pleasure of trying to find a parking space here, you might think it still is. However, G-d finally interviened on our behalf, and cleared out a truck size space right across the street from the front door. Truck Parking Only, it said, for what appeared to be an unlimited amount of time.

We didn’t have time bask in any beams of devine light though, the final hurdle loomed directly before us. We had enlisted some of our dear friends to help pull, stuff, wrestle, trudge all of our worldy junk up to the top floor of a five story walk-up. Fortunately, some of them had even showed up.

As the hauling began, we brought everything out of the back in order to organize the unloading. This opened us up for all sorts of side adventures, as the denizens of the Lower East Side converged to comment on every item we owned. One particularily horrible looking transvestite fell instantly in love with the sewing machine that we had bought on the way over. It is an old thing, and may have actually have come from the very area we were moving it back to, this being the old garment district. In fact, I felt a little bad as if it had pulled off an unlikely escape from a sweatshop many years before and was living a peaceful life in Idaho. Some seventy years later we recapture it and bring it back to it’s point of origin. Being about 70 herself, the Transvestite claimed her mother once owned such a thing. I think I heard a sob coming from the direction of the poor machine.

The Update: We left the Lower East Side for Brooklyn after a year and three months in the glorious, hilarious, Lower East Side. Not our choice, we were essentially priced out. It turns out that our apartment was a deal, and that there were no more like it to be found once the guy we were renting from decided he and his family wanted to move back. One topic I didn’t get back to when writing the above description of our first weeks in New York was the sickly looking stain on the pavement outside the school. I had been appalled that a crime of that magnitude had been ignored. However as I walked by a few days later, a hot summer’s day, I watched a little girl accidentally drop the fudge-sicle that she had just bought from the ice-cream man that had set up shop on the corner. It seemed that he was there every day in the summer, and probably had been there the very day when a similar fudge-sicle fell to the ground, its stain so alarming to the new immigrant to New York.

Today: A Retrospective

Let's go straight to the mailbag shall we? Since starting this blog a couple days ago I have gotten exactly five comments. And I'd like to go through them with you. Let's see, here's one from Rob, who is the mastermind behind this venture and he says Right On, very good I will continue to the right. Here's one from Ebag... You've really lost it brother... yes, he's probably on to so something there... Oh! here's one that I liked the looks of, "Sheer Genius" says Kristin who is in fact my Mom, so that's a little sad....hmm, something from a Stirling who sounds like a shiny young lad, "Sometimes I think things too, but I can't read or write so good. Hence, no blog." HENCE is an AWFULLY BIG WORD for one who styles himself a cretin...so I don't put much faith in that one... Well! There we are, please feel free to keep the comments coming. In the meantime I will report on the happenings of the day.

The Day

M and and I woke up early as we had to perform a ritual known only to married couples with at least one non-citizen in their midst: The Immigration Dance. We've gone through this before of course, but we were really looking forward to the disaster that was sure to be the New York USCIS office. We had a Green Card to renew (the card is not green). We gave ourselves plenty of time to get lost wandering among the hundreds of Federal buildings in downtown Manhattan so of course we were a half an hour late by the time we actually were directed to the proper entrance. We had a thorough cavity search by the front door, and then had to go through security (I don't think the bad man had a uniform on come to think of it). From there it was disturbingly straight forward. I was sort of looking forward to a bureaucratic debacle so I could relate it in these pages but what we found was basically a pleasant, unstressed process. After being given directions to go to both the 3rd and the 10th floor from two different guards, we decided to go with the more trustworthy looking one and our presumption paid off. We followed a collection of computer printed and hand drawn signs down twisting corridors for a few minutes, a bit like finding the bake-sale in the basement of a church, and finally found a room full of patient people who all looked only slightly disoriented.
The people at the windows were unfailingly nice and courteous, even friendly. I suspect it had a little to do with the fact that our English is pretty good and that we didn't arrive in a big group that breaks into a huddle every time a question is tossed our way about the possible meaning and ramifications of answering a question like, "Name?" or "Age?" There were a few of those folks there, but even they got pointed in the right direction in the end. (I can only assume this, they may have all been sent to work-camps in Minnesota for all I know.) In fact the whole process was so chill that I ended up feeling proud. Patriotic even. When we got pointed to the room we needed to go to, the guard at the door was down the hall goofing around with his buddies, and caught up to us in our seats a little apologetically and told us to wait until our number was called, as we had already surmised and asked us to kindly turn our cell phones off. A formality I'm sure, since I could have called him on his cell phone and told him to get back to work in the time it took him to find us in our seats. We only waited 15 minutes or so, in the meantime an insane woman wandered through (how did she follow the hand-drawn signs? Who knows) talking with the friendly guard as if they were old buddies. I started to think she might actually have been lost and living in the building for several days when she asked the guard to come help her with the automated appointment computer they had set up in the corner (What was she doing there?? I was dying to know, her accent was American and she was mad as a hatter.) He sort of walked halfway there when something reminded him that he shouldn't leave his post so soon again, he told her, "I'm sorry ma'am I can't help you!". She pleaded with him. "I can't leave the door!" He said as if turning down a trip to the fishin' hole. He seemed to really want to help. He turned around and started to walk back, he saw us watching him and said guiltily, "I really have to stand by the door, I can't help." He did enlist the fellow standing at the machine next to her to help, but from the bits I heard I still couldn't figure out why she was there. Finally she was done with getting an appointment I guess and went to sit down. Just as she was about to sit she asked the guard, who was watching her kindly, what time her appointment was and showed him the paper she had received. He looked at it and told her, "Next Thursday ma'am, you just come back then and we'll see you." If having to return home and then come back two days later and go through the gauntlet she must have already've been through disturbed her, she showed no sign. In fact she seemed to look forward to it. I sort of looked forward to it also. It seemed like she was having the most fun she'd had all month. Our own processing was completely uneventful. Pictures given, stamps made, passports punched, next in line. The woman at the counter might have been selling us candy. I half expected her to pinch Magda's cheek.
And so it seems that America's experiment with being hard-asses may be ending after a trial period following Septeleventh. The flowers are blooming again, when the guards can wander off down the hall and the mean INS lady pinches your cheek (or might have) you have to think it will be all right. Unless that's what got us in this mess in the first place.
As we were leaving the room, an elderly couple who seemed to be Muslim were coming in. We asked our friend at the door which was was out, and he told us, as we were jumbled together with the old man and woman, "Straight, then right then left" That's where we went and that's where the mightily confused couple went too.

The World Has Changed

Every since writing my first blog entry last night, the earth has shifted slightly on its axis. I believe that by the mere act of unleashing my thoughts on the world, Spring will begin on March 20th instead of March 21st. Such is the weight of one's actions.
As there were yesterday there are a few things to note today. One thing is that I visited the Doctor in Chinatown, which is so much fun that I make excuses to go see him as often as possible. After not having health care insurance for several years, and now having a solid plan, I'm rushing myself to Trapper John every time I think about sneezing. That and that his office is on the 3rd floor of a Chinese mall on Elizabeth street and that it is an exotic journey that I feel should be experienced as often as possible. Today one elevator was broken and I had to stuff in with rest of my sickly Chinese compatriots. Of course I was the last into the tiny lift, and so when we reached the first floor of course it was I, the oafish gejin who was in everyone else's way.
Once inside the office it is a small cross section of the neighborhood, people of Asian persuasion, Italian background from little Italy close by and mixture of others. One thing that struck me strange was the UPS guy who came in and seemed to know the entire office, including the people waiting with me. "How's your mother?" asked an elderly Italian looking lady sitting across from me to the brown-shorted man (23º), "Hey I donno, yoo see'er more dan-I-doo!" he dialected back. "No really!" she laughed, "No serious! You doo!' He said. He then proceeded to try and get the numbers of the two Chinese receptionists. "I'm married!" said one, "So am I!" he replied, the waiting room laughing as they overheard, "Besides, that's what makes yoo a WOMAN!" If anyone was offended, they made no sign, including me. I kept reading a Cosmo from 2004. Maybe I'm a woman too. I suppose it should also be noted that he neither entered nor left with any packages to deliver.
Only one other event was worth noting. I was waiting for Magda in the sitting area of the YMCA tonight, with a great view of the swimming pool. As usual, I watched the varied bodies in swim-gear and thought about how we should all always go around naked so it wouldn't look so strange when we do. There was a water aerobics class in session and at a certain moment they all 15 of them turned to look at me. I was startled. Then they all looked away when I caught them watching me, embarrassed in unison. When they looked at me again I once again remembered that the world does not rotate around me and that this was their exercise, to look back and forth. I will reserve my judgement about whether looking back and forth in the water, startling the unwary, is a good way to burn off poundage.

The Day in Brooklyn

Today we took a little trip to the Brooklyn Art Museum. An interesting trip made more interesting by a sudden cold snap that brought some snow overnight. Yesterday at this time (7:30pm) it was 50 degrees, 24 hours later it is 22. Brr. We took the bus down there since we are bussies, a newly coined term, unafraid to travel Brooklyn by bus. From our neighborhood, full of warehouses, workshops, industry, and equal parts hipsters and Latinos, down through the majority Hassidic neighborhood. I love this area, the Hassidic area, there is something so amazing about an essentially European culture living in a Brooklyn enclave. I love the Polish neighborhood of Greenpoint equally for the same reason. Greenpoint and the Hassidic section of Williamsburg have more in common than maybe even they know, but I will get into that later (though not in this post, rest assured it is a subject I ponder often and will certainly come back to). Moving South, we enter the mostly African-American neighborhood of Flushing, I think that's where it is, it might also be called Prospect Heights. Soon we are the only white folk on the bus which is a situation more white people need to be in in general. One thing that should be noted, the bus we were on was an express, skipping stops without a logical pattern, clear to none apparently since we were whizzing past people waiting expectantly at "local" stops in the sub-freezing weather. We roared past a good many, of all races and genders and backgrounds. They were all pissed off together. The driver seemed to be so used to passing these angry people by that he took absolutely no notice of them. We on the other hand were somewhat mortified to be safely aboard, comforted in warmth, helpless witness to expectant passenger's miseries. It was sort of classic NY, "hey if you can't read the bus schedule, it's not my problem".
The Brooklyn Museum was excellent. The building itself is impressive and houses a first rate collection of art and antiquities. It reminded me that Brooklyn was a substantial city of of its own for quite some time before taken over by New York. Big enough to have its own Museum building that rivals or surpasses the Met in size. We went first to see the exhibit by Edward Burtynsky (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/#burtynsky) Which was simply put, amazing. Beautiful landscapes of tortured landscape. The country's (the world's?) biggest tire pile, in the golden light of sunrise. Marble quarries that haven't so much obliterated the landscape as they have tragically bent it. Where there was once positive earth mass are now negative, gaping holes in the ground so massive that the earth-moving equipment responsible for the destruction look like metallic beetles at the bottoms or perched precariously on razor thin ledges over shear man-made cliffs. His photos are printed large format, as all photos are these days, but in this case it is necessary to show the scale of the images. For instance, if my favorite photo was printed small, the tiny blue port-a-potty at the bottom of the cavernous black walled pit of a granite quarry would only be speck, but in this case you see what it is and its surroundings are put into astounding perspective.
So we both were thrilled by the exhibit, Magda was inspired and intimidated which all great artists should be if they want to proceed. I on the other hand might have taken slightly the wrong point from the whole show. Instead of bemoaning the tragedy that man has wrought on the earth I thought, "Wow, cool." I honestly think that once we make ourselves go extinct, or it's done for us, there should be some massive traces of our existence for the next sentient beings to marvel at, traces for them to say, "Wow, cool". Just like we do when snapping pictures of the ruins of other cultures that over-reached and collapsed upon themselves, the Inca, the Maya, the Romans, the Republicans.
The rest of the museum was very museumy. I was impressed by one other exhibit (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/2005/barye/) A Frenchy Gentleman named Antoine-Louis Barye who seems to have exclusively sculpted animals battling each other to the death. I think he basically covered the food chain, the two strangest sculptures being a tiger eating a crocodile, and an Ape riding a Gnu. I did not make that up.
We left just as the temperature began to plummet again and made our way home where we have since gotten drunk on a bottle of wine and an odd drink we first had on Orcas Island a few years back called "The Stumbling Monk" equal parts Amaretto and Fra Angelico, added to extremely hot and frothy steamed milk. Delicious. Especially for a bitter cold day like this.

This Entry is the First. Ever.

Well, it begins. I promise to do my best and provide my share of absurd material for the internet