Best Thing Seen Today
It's a tie:
1) A bunch of people lined up along the fence at the baseball diamond in the waterfront park, rapt before a dramatic game being played by local Little League teams. The impromptu audience was clearly made up of people not planning to be there -- runners, dog-walkers, etc, and the players were little Little-Leaguers.

2) A man getting on the subway in full pimp-regalia. I'm talking, white suit with tails, wide-brimmed hat, gold-tipped cane and everything. Now, this man may not have actually been a pimp, but from his demeanor, I have no doubt that he was not wearing those threads ironically.

Things I Find Unsettling

1) Finding homeless people sleeping in the ATM lobby of my bank every time I go there.
2) The sheer number of black women I see in New York pushing around white babies in strollers and creaky old white ladies on walkers.
3) The shrine for unborn "children" I walk by every day on the way to the train.
4) The frequency with which I hear someone trying the knob on the door to my apartment when I'm home, day or night.
5) Seeing a big, colorful ad for an HIV drug on the subway station wall, amidst all the big, colorful ads for movies, teevee shows, and FreshDirect.
6) The amount of hair I pull out of the shower drain on a regular basis, and not knowing whether it's mine or my roommate's.
7) Having our trashcans set on fire.
8) My landlord's crazy -- I hope -- theory that the garbage men set the trashcans on fire because they were mad about bad recyclable-sorting.
9) The way my boss makes me repeat every thing I say to him even when I know perfectly well he heard me the first time.
10) The way goldfish will follow you with their eyes when you pick them up out of the water, even when you turn them upside down.
11) The fact that Spanish is the primary language spoken on the payphone outside my apartment even though I do not live in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood.
12) The way my cell phone displays my voice-mail PIN in gigantic, full-color, back-lit digital glory when I check messages in public.
13) The fact that everyone I've ever heard making smalltalk on a cell phone sounds like an asshole, leaving me to conclude that when I'm making small talk on my cell phone, I must sound like an asshole, too.
14) Practically everything I ever hear on the news anymore.

Strangest Thing Seen Today

At the laundromat: a man, approximately late 30's/early 40's, tall, beer belly, beard, balding, hairy forearms, wearing bluejeans, untucked button shirt and well-worn sneakers -- appearing, in other words, to be your basic white ethnic Brooklynite straight guy -- occupying himself between loads by... knitting (crocheting? I dunno) what looked like a pink lace antimacassar.

You know, I realize that by now, violations of gender stereotypes shouldn't seem strange. And yet, I still just wasn't expecting to see that.

Subway Musicians

I haven't looked into the details of how it works, but the City of New York has some sort of procedure for licencing subway musicians so as to avoid turf wars. I think there might even be some kind of audition where you actually have to prove that you can play something. (I remember visting New York in the eighties and seeing all these homeless guys who had somehow gotten ahold of Casio keyboards, and would set up on the sidewalk, turn on one of the automatic rhythm accompaniment routines -- "Marching Band…Bossa…Cha cha cha…" etc -- and doodle out "When the Saints Go Marching In" or whatever with one finger. It was pretty excruciating to listen to and apparently somebody decided to put a stop to it. If Giuliani had anything to do with it, for that, I'd be willing to give him some credit). Clearly, you don't have to be able to play that something well, just passably, which is fine since I guess you’d be playing professionally for a paycheck instead of in the subway for change if you could really play WELL. Still, it's a little disappointing to realize that the myth of struggling young talents, or forgotten old ones, playing their hearts out to unappreciating commuters is just that, a myth.

Some are worse than others. I have the misfortune to have one of those Peruvian pan-flute players stationed at my regular morning-commute platform. He’s quite well outfitted with a microphone and PA and even has a little synth-string recording he plays along with. If he were just doing "I'd rather be a hammer than a nail" it would be one thing, but I think he's been inspired by the incidental music on "Survivor" perhaps, and he's prone to dramatic dynamic gestures like pausing for extended periods while the synth-strings languidly wheeze away in a kind of prelude, and then abruptly honking out glissandos that end in piercing overtones that distract you from your magazine and probably freeze all the subway rats in their tracks. The fact that he works the heritage routine so hard, with a multcolored pancho pulled over his head and his shiny black hair pulled into a tight braid, only reinforces the impression that he’d be much more welcome at say, Epcot, with a rain stick and some bird calls added to the soundtrack, than on a Brooklyn subway platform.

Although he's the most annoying subway musician I come across regularly, he is not the least talented. That distinction belongs to the young white guy on the G train platform who chops out Velvet Underground songs – exclusively, I think – on an acoustic guitar but instead of too-cool, spare Lou Reed style vocals, he sounds like Jandek, or maybe Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Gilbert Grape, with lots of volume but no real relationship to pitch. Coming down the stairs to the platform, you can't even hear the guitar, just the sound of some guy hollering like he's been hurt.

Easily the saddest case is a middle-aged asian guy who plays on the 4-5-6 at Union Square. He clearly has some classical training, because he’s always playing Bach or Mozart or sometimes tunes from Italian opera, but he can't afford a real instrument and so he does it all on this wretched little battery-powered synth-saxophone thing that makes even well-executed classical sound like a wino playing a boosted Casio.


There are some that are actually good. The first guy I ever gave money to was an old gent playing some kind of exotic asian or middle-eastern 3-stringed instrument. The music wasn't much technically, but on a Sunday morning, the meandering atonal rasp seemed meditative and filled up the empty Bedford Ave L station and made me feel like I was in an underground sactuary in Istanbul or something, instead of in the subway eating a bagel.

There are sometimes whole bands, and one group of young guys who sounded like Liquid Soul had the 14th Street station bumping with a trumpet soloing over a repetitive-but-definitely-funky riff from a drum, guitar, and electric bass rhythm section. More peculiarly, on Friday I saw a band made of all black girls, that sounded exactly like a white frat-rock college band.

The closest thing I've seen to real, undiscovered talent was a young guy who looked like a motheaten Ben Harper and had just a stunning voice – Seal's timbre and depth with Jeff Buckley's range and vibrato – playing rambling, pentatonic melodies of his own composition. He apparently had some appreciation of his own talent, as he was the only subway musician I've ever seen selling his own CD's.

He was probably the best, but still not my favorite. My favorite was a guy actually playing on the train (which I don’t think they're supposed to do). He was playing one of those things, I don’t know what they're called, that you blow into but has a little piano-style keyboard; it sounds like a toy organ. His repertoire consisted entirely of teevee theme songs, and some of the all-time best ones: I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Hawaii Five-O. It was hard not to get into a good mood listening to him, and by the time I got off the train, a fair number of riders were snapping along to The Addams Family.

Things That Make Me Irrationally Happy

1) Those little brown birds that you see on the sidewalk when the pigeons aren’t chasing them away.
2) The way really nerdy people sometimes swing their arms a little too much when they walk.
3) Catching people micro-dancing on the subway.
4) My new Ikea pole-mounted dresser/shelf combo that looks like it’s floating in space. Yeah, it’s particleboard, but it looks hella Jetsons and that makes it good.
5) The food cart I pass on the way to work that has “LIVE, LIFE, LONG HEALTHY SAFETY” painted on the side.
6) There’s some brand of shoe out there that makes the soles out of bright yellow rubber, and it’s great to watch people walk toward you in those. [Addendum: today I saw a woman wearing white high heels with hot pink soles, which was also pretty good. The fact that her feet were spilling over the sides of the shoes made it even better.]
7) Hearing our lab technician Dores, with a very heavy Chinese accent, refer to fish larvae as “baybay.”

Reason Number a Zillion to Hate Microsoft

As if we needed another.

Riding the Mystery Mobile

Two nagging mysteries recently solved:

1) Recently, I’ve been wondering why, after over 100 rat perfusions in grad school, doing perfusions on fish has me pulling the garbage can to my side out of fear that I’ll vomit. For those who don’t know, transcardial perfusion is a method for preserving highly perishable brain tissue for observation under a microscope. I’ll spare you the details, for although it’s completely painless for the experimental animal, it is a truly gross experience involving lots of guts and postmortem wiggling. Unless you are a coroner or one of those people who extract semen from prizewinning livestock, you will probably never do anything more disgusting. Anyway, doing the rats never bothered me much – much to my surprise, I have to say – but the fish are killing me.

And finally, during the last one I did, it dawned on me: Oh. It’s the smell.

I thought I was getting grossed out by fish guts (which are, like everything about fish, slimier than their terrestrial counterparts) and I couldn’t figure out why fish guts would be so much grosser than rat guts. They’re not. But fishgut smell is WAY worse than ratgut smell. To that list of gross jobs up there, I should have added “fish processing plant employee.” I can’t say that fish innerds are the worst thing I’ve ever smelled – mouse colonies, vitamin B oil, and fear-induced loose rat stools are way at the top of the list – but those win partly out of sheer strength. Fish guts don’t necessarily smell strong, they just smell really, really, bad, and when you’re perfusing, your face is all right up in there… oh god, I’ve gotta …

2) Speaking of bathrooms, the other mystery of late has been the litter of paper towels in the mens restroom on my floor. For some reason, there’s always a pile of paper towels scattered right around the inside of the entranceway to the gents’. I don’t understand it; it’s a whole floor full of nothing but scientists and lab technicians and a couple of office admin types, not exactly the sorts who pull all the paper towels out of the holder and throw them down punk rock style. And I know that the custodians clean there every day because I see them do it (they come at around 11:00pm, fyi). So what gives?

Today, after a “rest,” I went to leave the privvy and there was a paper towel stuck in the door handle… and it all made sense. We have a germ freak on the floor. He goes to the bathroom, like, 700 times a day, to wash his hands like the compulsive nut he is, and uses a paper towel to open the restroom door, and then just discards it onto the ground as the door shuts behind him. One can imagine the custodian shaking his head scornfully picking up the mess each night.

And now I’m left secretly observing everyone I ever see in the W.C. for signs of germ-freakyness. I’ll catch you, you big weirdo.

(And for the record, no, I did not use every possible synonym for “bathroom” in the post. I’ve got loads more.)

Things that Don't Mix Well

1) Coffee and microsurgery.
2) Goldfish brains and water. (I know, you wouldn't think, right?)
3) Cell phone audio and English as a second language.
4) Nudity and employment at a coffee shop. (yeah, there's a story here, but it's not really worth telling. Honestly. Suffice it to say that even after the shop is closed and you think people can't see, it's best to keep your clothes on.)
5) Walkers and bikers, on the Williamsburg bridge. (Maybe it's just me, but the sign very clearly says, pedestrians on the left, bicyclists on the right. I don't know why it's so hard.)
6) Wing tips and hot bagels with cream cheese. (think about it)
7) Gin and Chinotto.
8) Cole Porter and hollering winos on the subway.
9) Me and fire, apparently (three uh, incidents, in the kitchen in one week.)
10) Now that we're getting some nice weather, tank tops and hairy shoulders. Not mine, of course.

Strangest Thing Seen Today

A man driving an SUV, stuck in traffic, who opened his door, leaned out, and threw up, while continuing to carry on a conversation with someone in the passenger's seat. Talking and barfing at the same time. I know I can't do that.

Everybody!

How about another list:

1) Everybody here wears black. I'm not sure how to characterize it, but there is a particular look to the way people dress. One year back when I was in high school, we went to New York for Thanksgiving, and I remember my stepdad Jim observing that everybody dressed in dark colors. They’re still doing it. Not only is the dress generally dark, but it’s generally… kind of shabby and self-consciously awful. Everybody’s bluejeans are dirty and frayed at the bottom. The mens jackets all fit a little too tight, but their sweater sleeves are a little too long. The girls wear old lady clothes and lots of bobby pins in their hair. It’s weird, and if I were going to try to do it myself, I don’t think I could pull it off. I’d probably need to stop wearing all the brightly-colored ski clothes I got used to up in New Hampshire.

2) Everybody in Williamsburg ought to be a straight guy, because man, are there a lot of cute girls here (and I use "cute girls," rather than, say, "attractive women" deliberately. These are cute girls.) And man, are they hanging out with a lot of homely guys. Oh well.

3) Everybody in Brooklyn was on my commute train this morning. I remember this Richard Scarry book I had when I was a kid that showed how people (in the form of clothed, bipedal animals) from all over the world lived. There was a picture of people piling onto the commuter trains in Tokyo, where the subway attendents had to squeeze people into the trains to get the doors closed, like you’d sit on an overpacked suitcase to get it zipped. (I can't remember whether the Tokyo commuters were cats or dogs… you’d think that’s the kind of thing you’d remember. Are Japanese people more like cats or dogs, you think?) Anyway, it was like that. Lots of stranger-touching. Not that I’m complaining really; stranger-touching is about the best action I'm getting these days. But it was different.

4) Everybody in my neighborhood is coupled. It's nauseating. They clog up the sideway traffic, walking arm-in-arm, all slow-like, because who can really walk fast while you’re hanging onto your girlfriend's ass? Even the non-romantic types are coupled, apparently. When I go into the grocery store, everyone's shopping in pairs. Even the straight-guy roommate duos (yes, you can tell). Who does that? And why? Did I mention that the whole room is refrigerated?

5) Everybody's in such a goddam rush to get on the train. Let’s take a hypothetical: what do you do when you’re waiting for an elevator and you’re not an asshole? I’ll tell you what - when the door opens, you wait for exiting people to get off the elevator, and then you get on, and if you were the first one there waiting on the elevator, you stand a good chance of being the first one to get on it. You’d think it’d work the same way on the subway, but it does not. Even when an obviously full train is just waiting to spill its passengers, people are trying to climb on the second the doors open. And you could be standing there with your nose literally touching the doors and no one else around, and the instant before they open, at least two people will worm up in front of you and dart on the train before you. The same thing applies on the street. If you come to the intersection and there’s a "don’t-walk" signal, and you step off the sidewalk, a little bit into the first lane of traffic to wait for the light to turn, I guarantee that the next person to come up and wait will step just a little bit in front of you, even if they end up standing in the middle of the street to get there. I don't get it.

6) Everybody only takes cash. The grocery store, they only take cash. The video store, they only take cash. The subway machine actually takes cards, but I couldn’t make it work, so effectively, it only takes cash. In principle, I think this is a good thing since they’d only be entering my purchases into some giant evil database anyway if I were paying with a card, and of course, the cash, it encourages good budgeting habits. But it’s not so easy to work with when you’re waiting on that first paycheck.

7) It was raining like crazy this morning, and everybody was trying to put my damn eyes out with their stupid umbrellas.

8) Everybody who has a good public radio station in their community should thank their lucky stars because here I am in arguably the greatest American city, and of course the "bluest" of cities (and we all know what a bunch of Marxists they are at NPR), and my public radio station blows. There is some good original programming like On the Media and the Brian Lehrer show, but the national programming is limited and during those periods I'm most interested in listening to news programming – weekends and nights – the programming consists of a bland mix of thematically neutral classical and "American songbook" programs that always manage to alternately bore and annoy and include way too much Frank Sinatra. And, most unforgivable of sins, my prime public radio listening time, the sleep-in hours on Sunday morning, is violated by the execrable “Sound and Spirit.” To top it off, it’s recently been pledge-drive time, and I have never heard such aggressive fundraising from any of the many public radio stations I’ve supported. Usually the idea is to hold the popular shows hostage by begging on-air in between portions of the programming. But during the WNYC membership-drive, I frequently forget what "show" was even on, because I’ve heard nothing but guilt-tripping fundnagging for the last half-hour. Maybe that’s what it takes to get to hardened New Yorkers, but in only a short while of regular listening, I’ve grown to hate my local station enough to just turn it off.

9) Everybody, but everybody walks around wired either to an iPod or a cell phone. The iPod people I like, because the music is rarely loud (although I am interested to note that it turns out that it is, in fact, possible to listen to extremely uncool music on an iPod… I figured there’d be a block or something…”iMullet,” etc) and sometimes you get people who just can’t help themselves and bust a subtle move right there on the subway, and that’s kind of cute. I recently tried my iPod out on the subway for the first time, with mixed feelings. I’ve long had this attitude that I wasn’t so into portable music because I wanted to listen to the music of real everyday world sounds, blah blah zencakes, etc. But now I can totally see the appeal of walking around with your own little soundtrack and anyway, Stereolab sounds better than most of the subway musicians. Plus, those white earphones always give someone a certain allure: what cool-ass music is that cool-ass person listening to on their cool-ass media player? I don’t know, but I could use some allure, I think, so I’ll be wearing the white earphones at the very least from now on even if the jack is only plugged into my shirt pocket. The cell phone people, on the other hand, are pretty obnoxious because the cognitive tension generated by trying to distinguish between annoying people talking on cell phones and crazy people talking to themselves is appreciable; cues from someone’s appearance are less helpful than you’d think (see #1).

10) Everybody sleeps in. At first I thought it was just my lab – the PI commutes in from somewhere on Long Island, and waits until 10 or so to leave in order to avoid traffic. Naturally, the people who work for him will tend to conform to his schedule. But after a few rides in on the L at 10:00 AM myself, I had to wonder – why are there so many people on the train mid-morning? Nobody works? Or everybody comes in late… Yeah, well, everybody comes in late. It dawned on me when I found I couldn’t use those precious hours between 9-11 in the morning, when I can reasonably be up without anyone expecting me at work, to get a haircut. Because none of the salons open before 11. As it turns out, a lot of businesses don’t open before 10. City that never sleeps, I guess.

11) Everybody in Manhattan is moving to Williamsburg, apparently. There was an alarming article in the real estate section of the Times last weekend that had a half-page map showing all the new and planned construction in the neighborhood. I couldn’t swear to it, but I remember the little red dots on the map which depicted developments as being shaped like little cartoon bomb-flashes; maybe they even said “POW!” Everybody here who I’ve mentioned it too gets really irritable about it, and I think there’s a widespread feeling of dread as everyone gets ready for a yuppie invasion and braces for the inevitable rent hikes. I got out of San Francisco just before the internet bubble crapped up everything, but perhaps my timing wasn’t as good in this case.

12) Everybody was right: it costs a fortune to live here.

Milestones

Yesterday on a walk, I saw my first New York City rat, whom I startled into flight when I brushed his trash can as I passed by. If this one was representative, then it's true: they're big. Later, on the same walk, I was able to give some strangers directions to the subway. Me - I gave directions, and they were even right. I just want you to appreciate the significance of that. And then of course, earlier in the day, for the first time ever I paid someone else to do my laundry.

I must be settling in.

Check

This afternoon I walked over to the Dartmouth graduate studies office with a box full of my dissertation. I spent 20 minutes filling out paperwork and palavering with the all-powerful graduate office secretary, and then I left with an empty box, feeling much lighter indeed for the burden left behind.

I think this means I'm really done with graduate school, in an official sense. It comes in many steps; there's the commencement ceremony in June, and of course I defended months ago now, but with this last item checked off the list, there's really no way I nor anyone else can undo my degree. I guess I'm really, finally, done with graduate school.

What to say about the end to this era? All in all, not the healthiest thing I ever did.

Strangest Things

Strangest thing seen on the subway recently:
A grown woman, probably mid-20's, sucking her thumb. Like, full-on thumbsucking, complete with index finger curled over the bridge of her nose. She contentedly sucked away for the whole ride. Oh, and her nails were painted, too.

Strangest/dumbest thing seen on the highway:
A truck with a scrotum. Seriously, some yahoo outfitted his pickup truck with a pair of plastic (?) testicles, blue to match the paint, swinging away there underneath the trailer hitch, as if the truck were a big metal bulldog. And that's probably just how the truck's owner thinks of it.

What City Parks are For

This morning on my walk to the subway, I walked as I always do past this wretched little "park" that consists of an awkward triangle where three streets intersect. There's almost nothing there except for some benches a few trees and a fountain that doesn't work, and it's mostly used as a latrine by local dogs and homeless people.

But as a I walked by this morning, a breeze came up (brrrr) and there was a sound... the wind went ssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh as it blew through the scrawny, bare trees, making that wonderful sound that I recognize from sawgrass on the lake in Florida, and creekside liveoaks from camp in North Carolina, and pines around Tahoe, and birch copses in the farmland outside of Syracuse.

Procrastinators in the Park

On Sunday I transformed myself into a real live New Yorker by getting up, eating a bagel and coffee for breakfast, taking the train into the city, meeting JP and a crowd of his associates for dim sum in Chinatown, and then joining all the other people in New York who’d been meaning to get to the park to see The Gates on the last day before they were taken down.

It really was a great day for such an outing; cold enough to make me actually enjoy the hot cream cheese smeared on my chin; sunny enough to make the orange cloth of the Gates glow, and apparently Sunday is a big market day in Chinatown, so there were hordes of people spilling off the sidewalks, haggling over unidentifiable (to me), inedible (to me) desiccated sea creatures. Um, there are a LOT of Chinese people in New York, by the way. I don’t mean to take anything away from my beloved San Francisco, but New York Chinatown is a whole different ballgame from San Francisco Chinatown. In San Francisco Chinatown, you can wander through a couple of blocks and, especially if you’re a tourist, kind of imagine yourself back in the bazaar in quaint, exotic Olde Shanghai or whatever. In New York Chinatown, you can walk for block after block looking at nothing but Chinese people and Chinese writing on the signs and start to worry that you accidentally slipped through a hole in the Earth and ended up in some random neighborhood in Beijhing and how the hell are you going to find your way back. But the dim sum were good and someday I’m going to get brave and eat some of the extra weird shit.

The Gates were pretty neat. There was a ton of people in the park and in fact one of the most visually compelling parts of the Gates was looking across where sections of the path ran in parallel, and seeing the lines of people shuffle under the lines of gates. I heard some cynical types describe the color as “safety orange” or “hunter’s orange” but really the color was about as beautiful as I could ever imagine orange vinyl and nylon being. I think the common description in the press of the color as “saffron” was either clever or fortunate. It may or may not be true; I have no idea how well it matches the color of Buddhist monks’ robes, but after the very notion was out there in circulation, it was hard not to think of the Gates as saffron rather than orange, and that made a difference – instead of traffic cones and barricade lights, one thought of sunsets and airborn monks.

One of the most interesting things about the Gates is the reaction to the Gates. Or maybe, the meta-reaction to the Gates. The mere labelling of the Gates as art seems to require that people have a position on them, and that’s the part I find funny – people can feel so strongly over such low stakes. There’s pretty much no political angle; the Gates cost the taxpayers nothing at all, proceeds from all the Gates schwag they were selling goes to NYC park maintenance, they were only up for two weeks, and they were made entirely of a stuff for which there is an established recycled-materials market. Estimates from commerce types are coming in and indicate that the Gates drew in enough extra people to make a measurable difference to local businesses, but not so many people that there was bad traffic or other infrastructure strain, or even inconvenience to anyone but a few weekend runners who’d rather have Central Park a bit less crowded. So in other words, whether you want to bitch about the Gates or sing their praises, you’ve got only one thing to base it on: how they looked.

I thought they looked mostly interesting with an occasional beautiful here and there. But then again, I’m interested in anything novel, and I’m constitutionally inclined to think, “Ooh, pretty!” when I see a sunlit piece of bright orange fabric billowing in the breeze (for roughly the same reason as that kid in American Beauty got off on the windblown plastic bag). I haven’t actually talked to any real people about what they thought, but the media voices have sounded to me like either one of two opinions:

The sentiment: The Gates are art! Art is good! Yay!
The subtext: Isn’t it handy to have a monumental art installation to call attention to the fact that I like art, and am therefore cool, and I live in a city where we have monumental art installations, and I am again therefore cool.

Or

The sentiment: The Gates. Whatever.
The subtext: Isn’t it handy to have a monumental art installation to call attention to the fact that I know enough about art to be able to say what’s good and bad, and I will demonstrate it by implying without actually saying that the Gates are bad, and I am therefore cool, and I live in a city where we have monumental art installations and we are all so cool that they’re not even that big ‘a deal. Did I mention that I am cool?


What I haven’t heard is that “the Gates are a masterpiece,” or that “they fail as art because…” And I think I haven’t heard this because there is no real way to say so. More than anything else, what they are is neat-o because of their novelty; they’re beautiful if you’re the kind of person who can see them that way, but they force no particular vision on the world, they ask nothing of us except attention, and even that, they make easy. I’m inclined to look unfavorably on their detractors, because, since there’s nothing else at stake, they’ve basically defined themselves as people who, given the choice to see beauty, chose ugly instead.

I guess leaving art history behind was the right choice.

Plenty o’ Nuttin’ goes to New York!

I am happy to announce that the Plentynuff International Headquarters have relocated to Brooklyn, NY, USA. I started my new life out right by catching this show by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings at a local venue, because I can do that sort of thing now, and should you ask me "Was it funky?", I will assure you "Oh yes it was." Sharon Jones is the baddest soul sister since Lyn Collins and she is even badder than that. Ledisi*, if you’re even still out there, Sharon Jones is who you’d wish you were if you had the good sense to go wishin’. Yeah, so, anyway, it was a great show.

I remember when I first moved to Berkeley, one of my first impressions was Man, this whole place could use a coat of paint. Similarly, my first impression of Brooklyn is Man, this whole place could use a pressure wash. It’s a bit grungey everywhere you look, but I learned to love Berkeley’s weather-worn drabness, so I’m sure I can learn to love Brooklyn’s gritty dingyness.

I’ve been here on and off for a couple of weeks now, shuttling back and forth between here and Hanowhere. Even though I’m not really through with Hanover-bound obligations, I realized it was time to make Brooklyn my home base because I just wasn’t mentally in Hanover anymore, anyway. Too much has happened in the last month to do a play-by-play, but allow me to abstract the experience – with all respect to Merlin Mann’s hilarious 5ives – in the form of a few lists:


Things Learned Too Late to Do Me Any Good
1) New York is warmer than New Hampshire. A little. A very little.
2) The elevator at the medical school labeled prominently with a sign that says “This is the A elevator” is, in fact, the B elevator.
3) There’s a street in Lebanon named “Hough Street.” I don’t know about you, but I can think of only one way to pronounce that.
4) The snow shovel with the grippy handle on the top end was probably worth the extra five dollars.
5) When the physician’s assistant asks about allergies, she really just means allergies to medicines. Not cats.
6) When you’re defending a dissertation, and the defense committee asks you questions, they’re not always trick questions.
7) If you walk around in sub-zero windchill temperatures, getting your exposed parts good and chapped, and then you shave, you’ve got a two-tone face.

Things I’d Prefer Never to Do Again, Which I Stand a Good Chance of Being Able to Avoid.
1) Defending a dissertation. At 4 1/2 hours, I’m told I hold the department record. Nobody told me not to argue, I thought that was the whole idea.
2) Moving during a snowstorm. All of the bad part – that bit where the truck fishtailed – only took up a few seconds. It was the anxiety over what might happen that made it suck.
3) Drive from New York to New Hampshire with no heat in the car.
4) Drive from New Hampshire to New York at night during heavy freezing rain.

Pleasant Surprises
1) I live near a bakery. This is pleasant not only for the obvious reason – the yummy bread-baking smell greeting me in the morning – but also because it’s a blast of nostalgia. When I was in high school, I drove past the Melita factory every morning, and the baking-bread smell was such a welcome incongruence, zooming past on the highway, and a punctuation to an otherwise dreary commute. It’s a two-for-one.
2) Some New Yorkers are indeed cranky and unpleasant. But others are not, and you can’t always predict which way it’s gonna go.
3) The City of New York is quite flexible about the parking laws during and following a snowstorm.
4) Right here in the neighborhood is a French bistro and jazz bar that doesn’t charge a cover, even when they have big-name acts playing.
5) My local grocery store, Tops, while it’s no Co-op, and it’s certainly no Berkeley Bowl, is still really pretty good. And the entire cheese-beer-meat-juice-egg-produce-dairy section is one giant refrigerated room, which is kind of cool.

*Apparently Ledisi IS still around, and she's got herself a website, which I was going to link to, until I saw that it's so bloated with Flash and illegibly funky fonts, and so full of remarks like, "with the chops of Ella Fitzgerald" (I mean, for pity's sake) that there's no way I would send my faithful readers (and they'd have to be faithful, wouldn't they?) there. If you really want to know, there's always Google. Ledisi, baby, the longer you go, the harder you suck.

Happy New Year

My only New Year's resolution for now: in 2005, I will always compose my posts in a text editor first, and then copy it into Blogger so that I don't lose any more long posts like the one I just finished that was supposed to go here. (self-administered dope-slap)

I'm not going to try to rewrite it, so here's the distilled version:

Salutation and theme: Happy New Year's (like the title says)
Dissertation: Turned in.
Defense: Scheduled; this Tuesday. Committee members making scary noises about what to expect. I can take it.
Freedom: Imminent.
Date of relocation: Second week of January; to be confirmed.
New Contact Information: Will distribute after arrival in NY; don't panic, current e-mail address is good for another 6 months.
New Year's Resolutions: Postponed until I have some basic information about what my life is going to look like - will I be working crazy hours? will I be in NY or Paris? will the temptations of urban life lead me down the path of wickedness? To be continued.
Likelihood of more frequent posting after the move: High, but I'm not promising anything.
Likelihood of more frequent contact of some other sort after the move: High; I will promise something, but I won't say exactly what, or when.
Self-pity level: Refreshingly low, for a change.
Valediction: I can't promise to be a truly new man in the new year, one who remembers all the birthdays and promptly returns the calls, but I can say for sure that once this shit is over with, I will be in a much better position to earn the loyalty my friends and family have shown me. I am looking forward to rejoining the living and talking a lot more, and more personally, to everyone who still reads this, who used to read it and gave up, and who I wish read it.

That is all for now. Stay tuned.

Taking it personally

I’m over the worst of my post-election mourning but even though the disappointment and disbelief are lifting, I’m still left with a sad feeling that's just lingering on.

The post-mortem analysis that I’m reading makes a lot of the increased turnout among Christian evangelicals, and people who reported in exit polls that “moral values” was their primary issue. “Moral values” is being interpreted by liberals as code for gay marriage, and whether or not that’s exactly true, a significant part of that increased turnout was undoubtably driven by the anti-gay-marriage amendment propositions that were on the ballots in eleven states. Of course, that’s exactly why they were on those ballots, to drive up the evangelical vote. Every one of those eleven anti-marriage amendments passed, and all by healthy margins. I believe that I read that with the exception of Oregon, they all passed by at least a 2-to-1 margin; several passed by 3-to-1 margins, and in Mississippi, it passed by an incredible 6-to-1 margin.

The lesson to take from this is that the gay marriage issue is a useful one for scaring up (and I use that expression deliberately) Republican voters, and therefore we can expect to see anti-gay-marriage amendments on more state ballots in the future. Combined with the 2-4 Supreme Court appointments that Bush will make during his second term, civil rights for gay Americans have effectively been put on hold for a while.

Those civil rights will come in the end, of course, because polling also tells us that young Americans could give two shits about preventing gay people from getting married, and my experience with college students confirms this; the difference in attitude toward gays between the college students I interact with now, and the attitudes I encountered when I was in college (which was not THAT long ago) is truly striking. But these things take place in the context of human lifetimes, so if you want to get married and particularly if you want to raise children, timing counts.

I honestly don’t expect gay issues to be especially important to straight people when they go to vote and god knows, I am not a good candidate for Big Gay Martyr status myself. None of the high profile gay legal issues really affect me personally right now – I work in a generally tolerant field and hell, I’m not even dating, much less contemplating marriage or children.

But recent events require me to acknowledge that, whatever the short-term practical outcome, I hold a secondary legal status in America. And because in these days right after the election, politics is a little like sports or weather, I’m expected to talk about it casually.

I share an office with a Republican, I’m friends with a couple, and I’m related to a bunch. So now that the election’s over and it didn’t go my way, I have to talk to them about politics without being a dick or a crybaby or a bad sport. Politics shouldn’t spoil personal relationships, after all, right? As much as I might like to drop guilt-bombs like, “Hey, hope your tax cut was worth my human rights,” I can’t do that because I know the story’s more complicated than that (and liberals love complexity!) and anyway it’s just not cricket.

Gay people and black people understand about “passing”and what it costs. Now, again, the world is asking us to pass by pretending not to take it personally, that hey, it’s just politics. I can do that because there’s really no other way. But I don’t have to enjoy it.

Good Feelings Gone.

I live in a nation of strangers.

Just Voted!

And boy did it feel good.

(click, click "There's no place like home, there's no place like home..." click, click)