Sunday, April 30, 2006

Love in Bangladesh

An essay in the New York Times gave me chills today on the A train. Actually, chills upon chills.

Call me a heaving romantic, but maybe you will feel the same way.

Read it here.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Holy Crapping Crap

Or not. You don't deserve such a headline. Not for what I am about to show you. Although I will say that when I was shown this at work tonight, I gasped so utterly loudly in horror, my entire office came running over. We then proceeded to watch this clip oh, about four times in a row.

Stop the suspense here.

But then again, I am happy this evening. I wrote some not half-bad shit for my book, which is a marked improvement over the not half-bad shit I haven't written recently.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Snoozliters

I was at the announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes yesterday up at the J-school at Columbia. You've never seen a more old-school press conference and less excitement surrounding such a major announcement. But before I go on (and on), here's it said and done on Gawker.

I'm even a speck in some of those pictures (commence to play "Where's McBickle? if you like).

And I take full credit for the word "nearly" in this sentence in Gawker's coverage:

"Judging by the sartorial and tonsorial choices of the overwhelming majority of the attendees — either ill-fitting blazers and crazy gray hair or snug-fitting blazers and gelled short hair — it seems nearly everyone present is a j-school prof in for the curiosity or a j-school student in for an assignment."

Thursday, April 13, 2006

The Ice Looks Nice When You're Stoned, Probably

So with my own ban on writing about my personal life (which is rocking itself to a tiny, sharp-edged nib these days) and with my endless preoccupation with the idea that when my laptop is open (even on my lap right now) that I should be working on my book, I find it difficult to blog these days.

But for my own sanity, here goes.

I was fact-checking something for my newspaper today, and I ended up on a web site about ghosts. I got particularly involved in images of “ghosts” that showed up in people’s pictures in New York, and I have to tell you, it was a particularly hee-haw kind of crop.

Now, I’m not one to definitively say yes or no to the paranormal, but I heartily reject the idea that bright splotches on a negative are ghostly activity. People post these pictures with captions like, “I feel this is the ghost of Mrs. Mary Schooner, wife of the 18th-century admiral, Scott Freakmonster Schooner [names approximated]." or “The orb hung around my daughter’s foot, as if my dead mother were trying to insert herself into the photograph.”

I wish I knew what site it was, but I have no idea, 10 hours later. Maybe it is a product of the chain-smoking, a fantastically horrible thing I’ve done for about a week now. (I know, save it.) I know full-well it is no excuse to talk about my ability to start and quit the cigarettes, but I think it’s fascinating that my father smoked for 30 years and quit one day, only to never desire another cigarette again. I was that anti-smoking child, who was disgusted at the smell wafting through the vents in our house from the ground to the second floor. Such a lonely memory. Adults smoking when they were angry. Sad, desperate. And you should have seen the day I came home from a year living in Italy and my father pulled the duty free bag stuffed with cartons from the trunk of his car….But I’m the strangest smoker—I do then I don’t, for six months, a year, because I begin to loathe the taste and feeling. So I can only hope that will be the case again.

I’ve spent two nights attempting to watch “Brokeback Mountain" on DVD, which is an act I’m not proud of—my brain can’t focus these days, and Ang Lee—I could kiss him for making “The Ice Storm.” I grew up vaguely in those woods in Connecticut. My uncle lived there, nearish there. Same kinds of spindly and close-nestled trees. And the actual ice storm of the movie happened just before I was born, when my parents had already moved into the house I grew up in. I asked one of the parents about that time recently, and either he or she (I’m blocking which) told me they remember cuddling (wrong word. sitting? staying?) by our fireplace while the power stayed out for a couple days and the trees hung heavy with tubes around each branch of glasslike ice. There was a red oriental carpet in that room when I was a child. I lay in front of the fireplace with my lush yellow Labrador, who was the same age as me and died when we were 13.

And I asked my parents about the “key party” depicted in that movie, when couples went to parties and dropped their keys in a communal bowl so that at the end of the night they could pick at random and go home with the person who belonged to the keys they’d picked.

My parent (mother or father, I guess I don’t remember which) said they recalled those parties, that they’d actually existed in the ‘70s. “But we never went to them,” he or she said.

Well, sure. And you didn’t smoke pot, even though you admitted you did, after asking me if I did, while I was still in college.

“Your father never liked it,” my mother said. “But I did. And I would have done it again," she said, giggling a little, conspicuously, showing a part of her she rarely lets show.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Blanche DuBois Lives and Worries About Me

I got back tonight from a business trip to warm Alabama. (That sounds absurd--a writer on a "business trip." Fun to use the phrase for that very reason.) Anyway, I'm on the second leg of the trip--Detroit to New York, wearing sandals--and I get on the plane. I glance through First Class and there's a familiar old-woman face, framed in a lime green shirt of some kind. Hm, who is that? The Shins are pumping through my headphones, so I don't hear her when she speaks to me.

"What?" I ask, yanking out an ear plug.
"Your toesies! Your toesies are going to be so cold in New York!"

My mind freezes up, apparently, because I can figure out how to answer her because most of my lobes are full of the question of who she is.

I mumble out something like, "Just...came...from...Alabama..."

I walk a few steps, turn to the guy behind me and ask, "Is she some kind of actress?"

"Yeah, but I don't know who," he says. Then he gives me some line about being a jaded New Yorker who barely cares about these things. Whatever.

Two more steps...her name is forming in my head...the show is almost on my tongue...

"The Golden Girls! Blanche DuBois!"

"Yesss!" the guy agrees. Unfortunately, he goes on as we pass the not-impermeable curtain that divides First Class from Coach: "She looked so OLD on that show, but I guess she was the youngest one..."

It was a little loud. I hope Blanche didn't hear. The woman looks good for whatever Golden age she's reached. You go, Blanche.

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