Tuesday, 29 April 2003

Of course I'm not totally happy with the pictures I took on Sunday, but that would be impossible, probably, because the event itself was too comprehensive to be adequately reproduced as one-dimensional glossy pieces of paper. I met what felt like a thousand people*, people I might not normally talk to, and watched them laugh and blush and furrow and inquire and pose—regular people doing nothing more than going about their Sunday, irregular people doing nothing more than filling my Sunday. I met them one after another, like one giant run-on sentence, and I tied them together (however crudely) into a single unit: a project, a set of pictures, negative images rolled up inside a dark little canister.

*A woman leaning out of her window wearing large pink curlers A Hassidic Jew and two turban-wearing men brokering a deal in a warehouse Little black kids brightening their piece of sidewalk with pastel chalk Circus punks riding their self-built extra-tall flame-adorned bicycles A Japanese chef chopping sushi A homeless man selling soap and poetry for $3.00 Small business owners patiently leaning over counters Women perched under salon hair dryer helmets A large man with a whistle coaching kids on how to properly slap a volleyball over a net A girl taking her three-legged dog for a walk

Sunday, 27 April 2003

Thursday night through Friday night my temperature was high and I was shuffling between the couch and the bed with a thermometer intermittently poking out of my mouth while chain-drinking cups of tea. Martin, who is visiting from North Carolina, kept himself patiently entertained by pacing the length of my apartment, making those cups of tea, watching movies and documentaries with me, and listening to me moan about how my energy had been sucked out by the fever demon.

It wasn't until late Saturday that I strayed far from my apartment, to take part in a photo project called A Day in the Life: Brooklyn, which was amazing and long and expensive and fun. (I plan to say something more about it tomorrow?) But for now, a few of the first random pictures from my digital camera for you [6 total, not related to the project], and bed for me.

Thursday, 24 April 2003

"Dju wahn to fill it move?" I nodded and stuck my hand timidly on her bulging basketball belly; she repositioned my hand and told me to wait. A few seconds later, I felt a tiny thump that had the force of a single heartbeat, and I imagined a miniature foot being thrust at the walls of its rounded home. Another one. This isn't the first time a coworker who sits beside me has turned into two people.



[unrelated to kicking babies and pregnant coworkers]
It's the same feeling that was produced when I bought a CD player, an SLR camera, a computer, a CD burner, a cell phone. It's a ball of anxiety that can be divided into four parts: uncertainty at spending so much money at once, realization of joining a sort of club of people who already have one too, excitement at a having a new toy with new capabilities, and apprehension at having to get to know it. I now have a digital camera, a little shiny black alien which is currently wrapped in a small towel and sitting next to a manual written in four languages. I feel far from attached to it, but that's how I originally felt with the other things, too.

Monday, 21 April 2003

Sunday, 20 April 2003

I'd forgotten what it felt like, the sharp sting that surges before it dissipates, and the surprise of seeing a circular piece of skin missing, having been traded for blood. My left knee, and the left arm of my sunglasses: my first casualties of my new roller skating hobby. After it happened, I pedaled home from the park on my bike, propped my knee over the bathtub, and played scientist with peroxide and an open wound, filling the jagged circle with wincing white foam.



This weekend I learned that my upstairs neighbors have moved away, which means I no longer know anyone in my building, that I will no longer get to hear Joy Division and the Cars and David Bowie filtering down through the ceiling, that I no longer have any reason to write notes in German and wedge them in the space between the door and the frame, that I don't have convenient cat sitters for when I leave town, and that the corkscrew-bug spray-music trading system we'd installed is dead. But mostly it means it will take more effort to maintain the something that had maybe started to form, before it goes the way of our trading system.

But it was also the first weekend that I realized that I have quite a few acquaintances in my neighborhood, which I only noticed because I kept running into a string of them every place I went, which kind of surprised me. I also made a new friend (albeit one that lives on the other side of the country), I saw an old friend, I went out with an old acquaintance (twice), and I discovered some new venues conveniently close to my place. Everything changes quickly, and pushes forward. The trees on my street are blooming.

Thursday, 17 April 2003

More pictures are up; these are from the long New York winter (which is, apparently, not yet over).

Tuesday, 15 April 2003

The night before I'd been crammed in a bus that had plastic chickens in the front window, boxes on top, and maracas and ropes hanging from the ceiling. A girl from Colombia was having a birthday, and, in an apparent Colombian tradition, lots of us piled in this tacky, pretty vehicle and were driven around the city: stopping at different venues and bars, getting our feet painfully stepped on, getting elbowed and smiled at, passing around a plate of cheese and bottles of liquid licorice, listening to festive music, dancing, and talking loudly. People from 20 different countries were on that bus, I was told, loudly.



I received them in the mail almost two weeks ago: stiff white leather, barely chipped metal hooks, eight blue wheels, and two slightly worn blue stoppers that stick out like buck teeth. They stood in the corner of my apartment for their first week-and-a-half, ignored except for the nosy sniffing gray face that inspected them upon their arrival (like this).

It wasn't until Saturday that it was warm or rainless enough to test them out. I was hoping that the black-topped playground I'd picked out would be empty, but of course lots of people live in this town, people who have kids and people who have been starved for weather like Saturday's.

Threading my laces, bent over on a bench at the back of the playground, I glanced up, alarmed to discover everyone in the immediate area staring at me. I adjusted my headphones, stood up, and wobbily rolled away from the bench on my skates, which were dressed for their debut in debutante white. Figure eights on the pavement, dodging a Heineken bottle on one end and a bottle cap on the other. I decided to forget about being the old, white girl on roller skates and instead concentrate on the music, the seams in the pavement, the Heineken bottle, the bottle cap.

But then a strange thing happened. The young girls, one by one, started shyly tracing my path in their inline skates, following closely behind me, giggling, and stretching out their arms to balance themselves on sharp turns. Two seventeenish-year-old guys came up to me and started mumbling about "old school skates" and how "they cool." A five-year-old boy who was driving his training-wheel-equipped bike around the playground began to follow me, too, and requested that I return the favor.

Later, I took off my skates and I shed the attention, simultaneously putting them both in my backpack.

Sunday, 13 April 2003

I've put some pictures up from August thru December 2002, somewhat inappropriately titled New York City, Fall 2002. Other pictures to follow soon, soon.

Thursday, 10 April 2003

She told me she knew him, that he was nice but kind of weird, and the way she flatly said the word, I knew she meant "weird" in a negative way. I thought she was talking about the guy in the white cowboy hat, but then I learned, no, she meant the guy in the black cowboy hat. Of course by then the word "weird" had attached itself to the guy in the white cowboy hat like a leech, and even though I reminded myself that word didn't belong to him, I had trouble disconnecting the two. Which was a shame, because he had been my favorite—the man in the white cowboy hat was an old guy with deep lines in his face, he had a sheriff's star pinned to his vest, and he cradled his guitar like a baby.

We sat at a table next to them, between them and the crowd behind us, sitting on the seam that divided the crisp notes of guitars and banjos with the roaring din of chatter and clinking glassware. The sheriff was taking a break when I decided to leave. I figured I should say something to him about how I enjoyed watching him play, but just before I stood up, he pulled up a chair and sat beside me, and we ended up talking for the next ten minutes. (Talking to him was like throwing salt on the leech; it dried up and the negative weird fell away.) He looked like he'd grown up in TexasWyomingSouthDakotaTennesseeKentuckyColorado, not New York City, where he said he's always lived. In fact, no one holding an instrument smelt of New York City in a refreshing sort of way, because it made it easy to escape without having to leave. Which is one of the reasons I like it here.

But if I made a friend by doing nothing last night, I may have made an enemy by doing nothing today. While walking home from work at dusk, I saw a rock arc over my head and skip across the sidewalk. I turned around to see a sweet-faced young black kid walking nonchalantly behind me. Kept walking. A rock flew around my left side, clearing me by several feet. When I turned around again, his arms were gently crossed. Another one flew past my feet. Instead of turning around again or stopping or saying something, I ducked in my friend Allison's vintage store and closed the door behind me, complaining to her that I'd become a target. By the time I left a few minutes later, he was gone.

Tuesday, 08 April 2003

I might not get to see it while it's on the inside of its cocoon, pushing and kicking and eating and expanding its quarters like a balloon being pumped with air. I will know something about it, though—about its sex, about its parents, and about its siblings (1, 2). When it hatches in October and begins its mission of gurgling, sleeping, screaming, and charming, I will suddenly be an aunt³. (I just found out.)

Monday, 07 April 2003

The people who have no sense of irony and buy Hummers because it makes them feel patriotic. The people who not only easily swallow false propaganda, but build on it like it's a game of Scrabble. The people who insist on calling them "freedom fries." The people who bulldoze Dixie Chicks CDs. These people scare me more than the ones in power do, because they are the ones I'm supposed to be counting on to bring about change.



Right, it's snowing again, or maybe it's sleeting right now, but I don't want to look. I'm pretending that the red-and-yellow-checkered blanket wrapped around me is heat from the sun.



I saw Michael Palin speak last week, in a bookstore at Union Square. I didn't get there early enough to get a seat, so I stood with the others at the back, having to rearrange my line of sight in cracks of space between humans every time someone shifted his or her weight from one foot to the other. He was funny (of course he was funny) and natural and likable, and he told stories from the last 15 years that he's been wandering around the earth. He admitted that he hasn't perfected a second language but would really like to do so, and then he sang a lumberjack song in German. Which reminded me that I want to know German at least as well as I once did, instead of watching it slowly fade as if I left it on the car dashboard. I suppose traveling for 15 years and being part of Monty Python would also be pretty cool, but I'll focus on remembering German and moving abroad at least once more in my lifetime. Perhaps even indefinitely, especially if it never stops snowing and if the Hummer-freedom-fry people multiply.

Sunday, 06 April 2003

Thursday, 03 April 2003

I'd stopped by the store on my lunch break to pick up some conditioner, to replace my gigantic 8-month-old now-empty container of Aveda protein something-something. I wasn't distracted by the sampler cup of green tea being offered to me on a shiny platter (I declined) and headed straight for the rows filled with fat, opaque plastic. When the green tea guy approached me again and asked whether I wanted to participate in the yoga happening at the back of the store, I started to say no, but instead I heard the word "sure" come out of my mouth.

Seconds later, I was meeting two friendly women in their fifties who had slim bodies, perfectly painted orange toenails, and thick eye shadow. They were standing on thin blue mats, and, upon meeting me, they rolled out a third. I felt silly and awkward, sitting on mats in the middle of the store with these two women—world music playing through the speakers and employees having to step over us—me, in jeans and with my hair in my face. I looked around and noticed that no one else in the store seemed to think that it was absurd.

I wasn't a big fan of the breathing exercises; it made me anxious to think that hard about breathing, and I began to wish that breathing wasn't necessary at all. The stretching, however, was good: curving and reaching and twisting myself into positions with silly names like cobra and plank and downward-facing dog; every so often my body would sing like a bowl of Rice Krispies. When it was over 30 minutes later, I slipped back into my Converse, accepted a yoga pamphlet for their class, and almost walked out of the store without buying my bottle of conditioner.

Tuesday, 01 April 2003

I think about it as much as anyone else thinks about it, but whenever I try to write about it, I don't have the energy—it's all been spent on frustration and anger and discussions and arguments, and by the time I sit down to write about it, I can only tackle less ominous/sensitive/over-discussed/exhausting subjects. Not about how I sincerely don't understand how wanting troops to come home alive is not "supporting" them, or how we can simultaneously celebrate the concept of freedom and request that everyone who dissents remain silent, or what the connection is between Iraq and that day, or why sinister motives that seem so transparent are so staunchly defended, or a million other things.

So instead I'll mention that it's a bad idea to eat a whole box of macaroni and cheese by yourself, and that the past three days in New York there's been sporadic bursts of snow, so brief that when you go to point it out to someone, it's no longer falling from the sky, which might make you wonder if you completely imagined it. And how it's been a good week for mail, including a letter punched out on a typewriter, two postcards (one from Costa Rica and one that has hologram bunnies on the front of it), a CD full of pictures and music, and (soon, soon) a pair of roller skates I won on ebay. And how tonight's episode of "24" oddly and almost comically mirrored real-world events (but in a Bizarro World way, where the TV-land [black!] president is a pretty trustworthy and likable guy). And that there are new clusters of (cold) smokers milling outside of buildings, clusters that weren't there before Sunday, the first day of the smoking ban. There are plenty of other things to talk about.

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