11 March 06
Teapots and Bras
Not the first two things that probably roll into people’s heads when they think about New York.
We went to Ripplu, a place Barbara Anderson put me onto: the Japanese bra store. My friend Sue was brave enough to get herself manhandled into a size she’d never even heard of… but they did let me sketch and actually set up a chair for me. Next, Takashimaya, a Japanese department store on 5th Avenue, more museum than shop. We walked all the way down east 59th past the Tassel Store to Terrence Conran’s, where my sister loaded up on Pantone colors and kids’ toys, and where I drew teapots and Phillipe Stark’s alien lemon squeezers. On to Zabar’s on Broadway for cheese and cinammon rolls. Then a different kind of bra fitting experience at Victoria’s Secret. I volunteered for this one. Jeez. We were glad to get home for a cup of tea and a game of Monopoly (we all got creamed by Richard, who didn’t join us on this excursion, lucky for him).
8 March 06
Full Days in New York
Yesterday, the Guggenheim, the Empire State Building (a great sketching location), lunch at Otto's, the New York Public Library; today, the American Museum of Natural History. All day. I have had tropical butterflies fluttering around my person as I tried to sketch them (the atlas moths were easy because they were locked in a prolonged embrace, immobile); heard Kenneth Branagh tell me about the Galapagos, Harrison Ford tell me about extraterrestrial life, and Maya Angelou tell me about the Big Bang; sketched birds and skeletons and generally tried to avoid the large crowds of obnoxious schoolchildren. Tonight I'm going to go and stay with a friend from uni for the next few days. My sister joins us tomorrow. Different gear set required...6 March 06
Lunch with an Old Friend
When you get all hot and bothered that the man they choose as pope is the former head of what became of the Inquisition, it means you still care about the Church. On this, we could agree. I had lunch today with a Paulist priest I used to know in Santa Barbara. He has become the head of Vocations at the "mother ship":http://www.stpaultheapostle.org/ here in New York. His job's hard. There are very, very few young men in the United States willing to give up a lot of options, including sex, for a life devoted to prayer, mission, giving. Of those few, the main competition for the Paulists are the Domincans (love that swishing white habit and searing mind) and the Jesuits (love that intellectual worldliness). Guys come to the Paulists -- a particularly American order -- if they want community but not too much. Want to preach in a parish. Want to reach out to apostates like me or college students. Over portobello mushrooms and mozzarella with him I pondered this. What was it that drew me to the Catholic Church in the first place? I ask because I have several friends (notably "here":http://www.cassandrapages.com/ and "here":http://mulubinba.typepad.com/mulubinba_moments/) who are deeping thinking, questioning Episcopalians, a religion into which I was baptized. I find myself wondering why I left THAT, as opposed to why I left at all (which is a different question). It all comes down to the Eucharist, for me. Strayed though I am, and trouble that I have with most of it, in Catholicism, everything, everything revolves around this: Eat me. I am the body and the blood. Ingest your deity. It's a lot for the squeamish, but it doesn't lack cojones. I see women who embrace Rome but not its nitwittedness, abandoning the Ratzinger cliques and becoming womenpriests. I would like to meet them. Sophia, benedicta tu. Cojones and then some. I was hesitant about bitching about th pope with Ed. Why, he said. We do it all the time. We agreed that there probably a lot of things in the world that warranted the attention of the Church more than whether or not some priests may or may not be gay. I did go to Mass today with him, the first time in a long while. The church of St. Paul the Apostle is the third largest in New York, after the cathedrals of St. Patrick and St. John the Divine. What can I say: I felt right at home. I write this because it's one of the subjects about which I rarely blog: my faith. It's tattered and torn and somedays I wake up railing against what God may or may ot be there but it has to be mentioned, sometimes: I felt right at home in this place.13 February 06
Hearts of Stone
Barbara Anderson is guest blogging today.
Being single on Valentine’s Day is like being a Muslim at Christmas. It has nothing to do with you, but you can’t get away from it. It’s everywhere—in the grocery store, the jewelry store, the gift shop, the stationers’, the record shop, the book store, the garden shop, the drug store, the department store, every mall and shopping center and AM-PM Mini Mart and fast food stop and restaurant (“Make your reservations now for our special Valentine’s Day Aphrodisiac Dinner! Just $50 for two!”); today in the mail there was an offer from the local windshield replacement company: Have your windshield replaced before February 15th and get a box of See’s chocolates for your valentine. Between the end of the Christmas frenzy and Feb. 14th, there’s more red and white in the stores than the Cohen brothers ever thought of putting in “Fargo.”
As a single person, I ask you: is this fair? Is this right? In this enlightened day and age, when we have rules and regulations in place to ensure no one is discriminated against because of race, religion, physical condition, gender or veteran status, here we have what’s become a virtual national holiday, with merchants crowing about their Valentine specials, and bed-and-breakfast owners falling all over themselves to offer romantic getaways to love-besotted couples. I’m here to tell you that I want equal treatment. I want special offers of glorious weekends alone in some georgeous hideway on the coast, with a four-poster bed and a down comforter and scones and tea by the fireplace in the late afternoon as I sit and watch the surf break on the rocks below. I want restaurateurs courting me with lovely meals served at a linen-covered table, fresh flowers and complimentary wine, and no pitying or condescending looks because I’m there by myself.
What’s the big deal about being a couple, anyway? I’ll bet most of those couples wish Valentine’s Day would go away, too: the men usually clueless as to what to give their wives or girlfriends, the women marshalling all their feelings to the fore, ready to have them be hurt again this year when he gives her carnations and she wanted roses, or chocolates when he knows she’s trying to lose 10 pounds before summer gets here. What a dope. And then there’s all that unfulfilled expectation of the romantic weekend or the intimate dinner that the newspapers and magazines and TV news have been flogging for weeks. Like Christmas, nothing can live up to the hype. I usually spend Valentine’s Day reviewing my list of reasons singlehood is enjoyable:
- No matter what time I go to bed, no one cares
- I can eat baked potatoes every night for two weeks running and nobody says, “Baked potatoes AGAIN?”
- No listening to someone else complain about their boss
- I always get to drive
- No “what do you want to do?” “I don’t care; what do you want to do?” “I dunno.”
- Full and immediate access to the bathroom, 24 hours a day
- Never having to say I’m sorry for leaving the kitchen/bathroom/car in a mess
- No interminable weekends visiting someone else’s ghastly Aunt Josephine
- Pizza and a video—my choice, both—on Friday nights
So go ahead: While you coupled-up types are spending 45 minutes at the Hallmark rack debating funny-vs.-mushy-vs.-sincere and hoping against hope that you haven’t waited too long to order those long-stemmed red roses and make that dinner reservation at that trendy and overcrowded restaurant, I’ll just be settling back with the remote in one hand and that first slice of Greek pizza in the other, ready for a satisfying evening watching Nicholas Cage persuade Cher to dump his dopey brother and marry him. Now there’s somebody worth giving up my Friday nights for.
12 February 06
The Other World Championships In Italy
Save the date—from 10-11 March in Lucca, Italy, is the 1st World Sudoku Puzzle Championship. Each country can be represented by at most six people, so get your entry form in soon, or something like that. Myself, I’m still stuck on the Diabolical one in today’s paper, which will probably seem trivial to those converging on Lucca.
10 February 06
Vanishing Winter
I actually have a hankering to watch some of the Winter Olympics. Since I always ignore the Olympics, there must be some explanation for this, and probably it has to do with the fact that winter seems very far away here, with it being clear and the temperature reaching the low 70s. But we don’t have a telly, so the hankering will have to pass, though the kitties are a bit disappointed they won’t get to see any of the cat skating.
1 February 06
Why I Like Shopping at the Coop
Because a third of the way through your list which you left on the counter but can pretty much remember you run into Susan who messed up her knee but still wants to go for a bike ride and by the way could you please send me any info on the wildlife programs she says and we yuk it up and then up shows Warren the Arboretum Superintendent and Susan says hi Warren and I say Warren I was just going to call you to ask you about gray pines like specifically how did the Native Americans use them and he says oh have you seen the painting of them on the wall over here and we all say botany botany here in the coop and he says they ate the seeds but you’d need exactly the right kind of groove on a rock so they don’t smash and then they cooked the whole cone when it was green but then his cellphone goes off and he says they didn’t use them as cellphones and then in the checkout line there’s Julie and she says you didn’t come to my chocolate tasting event tonight and I say well no I’m doing Weightwatchers but just then Numenius slaps down a Chocolove Dark with Orange Peel on the belt and we all laugh and complain how after forty nothing quite works right but chocolate makes it better.
28 January 06
Sister Spa
While Numenius was installing Tiger, and my mother and brother were browsing in an independent bookstore in Calistoga, I wallowed in mud with my sister-in-law. “No mudpies,” said our cheerful attendant, leaving us in the company of a rubber ducky and a rubber froggie.
Rain here. It was a perfect day for a mudbath.
25 January 06
Bagali Polo and Guinness Truffles
Ron and Joe came up looking for mountain plovers but got skunked, so we met them at Bogey’s and then went to Ali Baba for dinner. Dessert was at Ciocolat, where Ron cut three truffles into four pieces with her trusty swiss army knife and we each tried a piece of cinammon, triple sec, and guinness truffle. Much jollity ensued. Because we could talk about depressing things too, but tended not to.
24 January 06
Joy and Death
It turns out they are frequent coauthors. I am sitting in on a seminar this quarter and one of the recommended papers for tomorrow’s session has the following citation:
Joy, Michael K. and Russell G. Death, 2004. Predictive modelling and spatial mapping of freshwater fish and decapod assemblages using GIS and neural networks. Freshwater Biology 49:1036-1052.