That's my little Finn-Monster, reaching around to prevent me from looking at any cute animal that is not him. I was posting about dogs at the time and he just knew.
Today I'm moving Echo's machines from one co-location provider to another. I woke up and the machines were inaccessible, I still don't know what the problem was. I was able to reboot one and get them both up again. That's why I can do this blog post now! But there's still a problem with email.
It's shaping up to be one of those days. I did my MBSR meditation. I'm trying to be calm and less panicky. Moves are stressful, and this is a big one. It affects many people besides myself. People can't send or receive email right now, and they may not be able to until this afternoon, and you know what that's like, not getting your email when you need it. Ugh, ugh, ugh.
This move to a new host is a good thing though, and I should have done it a long time ago.
Oh God, they are pound pound pounding away at the roof again. I'm on the top floor so it's my ceiling. Given how the universe works, today is the day they will come crashing through my ceiling.
“What you’ve done right, and what you’ve done wrong can come out in the music.” - Patrick Costello. Isn't that a great quote? Anyway, this is me learning frailing ... (more below).
I hauled out my banjo last night, and found a banjo lesson on YouTube made by a very nice banjo player named Patrick Costello. I love this style. When I first bought my banjo I started by learning bluegrass picking, and it just wasn't fun. Weirdly. Bluegrass is fun to listen to, but I just didn't enjoy playing it. Frailling is more fun. It has an old-time, O Brother sense to it. I could see coming upon some old guy with a beautiful voice playing this style down by a river in the middle of nowhere in the south, singing folk songs most people have forgotten.
Plus the beginner stuff is easier. (Although I am doing it totally wrong. Your thumb is supposed to rest on the 5th string until you pluck it.) I also love that you don't need to wear picks to play this style. I hated the picks. It separated you from the instrument in a way that also contributed to making it less fun.
The banjo I have is not really right for it, although it will do. But it occurred to me that I might be able to modify it to make it work better. I could remove the resonater (on the back) and the armrest which gets in the way of the arm movement that goes with this style. I emailed the place I bought it from to see if this could be done.
I picked up my banjo again after checking out a hip hop class and then taking an African drumming class at a place called Djoniba yesterday. I saw a show about aging and brain elasticity on channel 13 the night before and was moved to learn something new. The key is finding something you actually love and therefore might continue.
Reaper. It’s a show that’s going to be on CW. I haven’t been this excited and happy about a TV show in so long, probably not since Buffy. You can download the pilot, it’s floating around. I love the best friend and it was killing me trying to remember what I had seen him in and Howard remembered it was the canceled TV show Invasion. Another actor in the show I remembered (taking some credit) from War of the Worlds. He was the guy in that scene where they first see the tripod, and one of the guys says some wrong fact about the sun and this guy corrects him. The actor stood out for me.
The title of this post will become clear if you watch the pilot. The premise is, this guy's parents sold his soul to the devil, (that's the guy on the left). The devil puts him to work capturing people who have escaped from Hell and sending them back. These people are evil so even though he works for the devil ultimately he's doing a good thing. By the way, they try to make what the parents did palatable, but it doesn't really work. They aren't evil, but still. You'll see. (Or not.) The guy that plays the devil makes him a funny, swarmy bad guy, like what little I have seen of Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock (have to watch that show). He was great. "I can do nice."
It will be so much fun to love a TV show again!
I shouldn't have made that text box red. There's too much red. I always try to pick up a color in the picture, but I should have picked a less prominent color, like the green from the hoses. Plus the position is wrong. Okay, so I'm not an artist! Actually, I went to art school so I have no excuse.
Finn and Buddy spot a pigeon. Watch their tails! Poor little guys. They so long to get a pigeon. (Those are my King Bay Library flowers on the left.)
I don't know if I mentioned it, but it rained again and the whole building got flooded, the fire department came, they had to break down part of the ceiling, there were power problems, you had to wade through water in all the halls. It was bad. So now the landlord has guys up on the roof, except it's not actual professional roofing guys. It's their regular handymen guys. They are pound, pound, pounding away up there and I'm pretty sure something bad is going to happen. They don't really know what they are doing.
I went out to Brooklyn on Tuesday to do a reading at the Kings Bay branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. They gave me flowers at the end, which I brought home and re-arranged into two lovely bouquets. I had a great time. The attendees asked some of the best questions I've ever been asked. Thank you for inviting me, Kings Bay, and thank you for the flowers.
I went out walking afterwards. The best picture I took is out of focus, as per usual. It was a shot of a sign inside a fishing store, showing the prices for chum, blood worms, sand worms, earth worms, squid and sand eels. For the record, chum costs the most.
I hate that apparently I can't hold a camera still. But here is a shot at the end of a small alley of houses. It's too picture-postcard-y, I know. It was a nice little row of houses. I'd like to find some old wood house with fireplaces nearby to renovate and live in.
This was a tacky statue outside a restaurant. Not far from this spot, a new housing development was near completion, but the word on various Brooklyn blogs is that it will be filled with the families of Italian and Russian mobsters. So even in my fantasies, I will not be living there.
I took this on the river yesterday. Howard was working, and I was reading something called One Shot. But imagine being J. K. Rowling. Christ. I would love to just once, ONCE come upon someone reading one of my books. Nevermind walking around and seeing everyone reading it. People all up and down the Hudson River yesterday were reading the new Harry Potter.
Yesterday I read about two local artists who committed suicide, Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan. I'd never heard of them before, but I read the article because I'm always curious about people who go voluntarily into something I do everything I can to avoid. There's a post about them on Gothamist today, and so I was reading the comments section because I'm also curious about other people who are curious like myself.
One of the commentors posted that Theresa had a blog and that she had recently posted about an MK Ultra thing called Project Monarch, and maybe there's a connection. MK Ultra was the name for a CIA program that did research in mind control. I looked up Project Monarch because when I looked into MK Ultra for my book I never came across even the name Project Monarch. But I didn't research MK Ultra heavily, I mostly wanted to compare the work at the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory with the direction our government took into mind and consciousness research (hint: not at all the same). It wasn't particularly meaningful that I never heard of it.
If you google Project Monarch what you mostly find are entries about a couple who wrote about Project Monarch, Cathy O'Brien and Mark Phillips. You have to google this stuff yourself, I don't know how I could even begin to summarize, mind control, sex slaves, multiple personality disorder.
My immediate reaction is, I don't know if there ever was a Project Monarch, I'm willing to believe that there was, and that they may have begun some of the experiments described. Our government has attempted some pretty nutty stuff over the years, and not with the noblest of aims, but I don't know about these two at all. They say things like Hillary Clinton knows all about this, but takes it in stride as just your typical government stuff. Insane. Although J. B. Rhine did come up against this problem where clearly troubled people would tell their stories. They were completely delusional, they'd outright lie and exaggerate, but sometimes their stories began with one element of truth. Who knows.
So that brings me back to Theresa Duncan. I browsed her blog a little. The fact that she accepted Project Monarch without question is a little out there. Plus, she just killed herself. I wonder what Duncan and Blake's friends and the professional community around them make of this? Blake was represented by a gallery and was in a few Whitney Biennials.
Theresa quoted Reynolds Price on her blog. "A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence ..."
Sadly, I gotta strongly disagree with that. I think millions suffer in almost near silence. Lots of people have no audience for their stories.
I was talking to Howard the other day, about the beginning of an idea for my next book. I don't even quite remember it, something about wrongful death. People dying for causes that turn out to be nothing, or executed for crimes that they didn't commit, I forget where I was going with it exactly, but I was inspired by a painter named Tina Mion. The painting above is one of hers. It will come back to me.
This was the second thing I learned to cook. I realize cooking is a relative term with meals like this, but it's still a big deal to me. This was less of a success. Everything felt too much, too much vinegar, too much lemon. Weirdly, it was better as a leftover the next day.
Last week I basically spent an entire day at Mt. Sinai. They are tracking World Trade Center workers and volunteers and every year or so they call you in for a check-up. Each time they seem to focus on different things. This year the mental health type questions were much more extensive and were all about people's attitudes about the extent of control they have or don't have over their lives. I'm a do-er (an evil do-er) but I am actually happy about the fact that I have finally come to accept that I can do and do and do until the cows come home, but there's a lot of things that are simply out of my control and acceptance is a key thing to peace and happiness. Then I come to this question:
Do you feel everything happens for a reason?
I hate this question. I really hate this question. I'm sorry. I know most people do think everything happens for a reason. But beyond cause and effect, which is not what this question is asking, I most certainly do not think everything happens for a reason. A day later I read this, I forget where:
"I don't believe in accidents," says the host of The Oprah Winfrey Show. "I know for sure that everything in life happens to help us live."
Give me a break. It's like I was watching Big Brother the other day, and one of the players, Amber, prays to God to help her not be evicted from the show. Even for God-believers, I have to think this is a serious misuse of God-power. God should smite her for even attempting to inopportune him with something so trivial. But to bring it back to "everything happens for a reason," she later says that God put her on the block (the Big Brother term for being nominated for eviction from the show) to make her stronger. The person who writes the recaps for Television Without Pity wrote, "God? It's not working."
There is a person in the world who actually thinks there is a omniscient being who not only put her on a reality TV show, he is now orchestrating her entire experience there.
Anyway, I'm tired of having other people's beliefs imposed on me from every direction all the time, expecially the automatic assumption that I share them. Although Howard rightly points out that given how many people do share these beliefs, it's a good assumption.
It's about acceptance, but a different kind of acceptance. I'm facing facts, there are lots of other people in the world, and everyone has their own needs and wants and the world is not all within my control. People who believe in God go even further, they cede control. But I imagine they would describe it differently.
The end result is the same. We all still have to endure what we must endure. If they get through it, they thank God. If I get through it I thank whoever helped me and feel relieved that luck was on my side today.
I was so transfixed I didn't think to turn the camera sideways, so sorry about the weird angle. But there was a huge thunderstorm, and I heard something in the hall, opened the door and saw that it was raining inside the building. It was coming through the lighting fixture, so that was scary.
But I wanted to. I took this at Union Square yesterday, where I did nothing while Howard tried to write (except I kept interrupting him with stuff like, "look at that dog!").
Thanks to the internet, members of the families at the center of some unexplained events that I included in my book got a hold of me. I may soon have an inside view! I'm very excited. Thank you, Andrea Herrmann and Raoul Larrinaga.
In other news:
- My choir will be performing Mozart's C Minor Mass next.
- Jen on Big Brother should be in therapy and not on TV.
- I was so sorry to see Shauna go on So You Think You Can Dance.
- I'm discouraged about how long my arm is taking to heal.
- I'm going to try to cook for a second time tonight. Wish me luck.
- Echo is going to move to a new host on July 31st! I'm stressed, but thrilled.
- I could use some book suggestions, guilty pleasure book suggestions. What books have you read that you couldn't put down? The kind where you go, "I'm just going to finish this chapter, then I'll go to sleep."
Whenever I pass a dog run I stop and watch the dogs for a while, especially when there's a French Bulldog among them, which I can pretty much count on these days. They are one of the "it" dogs currently. Love these little guys. But when I get a dog I'm still getting a chihuahua. I need a dog I can easily carry up and down five flights.
I'm on a mini-vacation, but I haven't really been vacationing much. Haven't seen a movie, gone to a gallery or museum, read a book. What have I done?? One day I bought a really delicious sandwich (Note to self: go back to that place) and sat on the Hudson River and ate it while reading a decent book. That was what, two hours out of a whole week?
Seriously, I've got to get down to vacationing-business. Forget a movie today. Now there will be weekend crowds. Same with museums. Maybe I'll try learning a song on the banjo? Or, go back to the sandwich place and then sit in Union Square and relax?
I cooked! I know, 'what do you want, a medal?' But I don't think I've cooked in decades. I took a class though, and then last night I started with the simplest dish, which also happened to be my favorite and voila! I made a meal! It's called Lebanese Quinoa Tabbouleh with English Cucumber. It probably barely counts as cooking since the only thing I had to cook was the quinoa, which was simple. The rest was cutting stuff up and adding it.
The plan is to keep with really easy stuff so I don't get discouraged, and the next thing I'm going to try will be equally simple. I'm thinking something called a Mediterranean Pasta Salad, which is the same kind of deal. Cook pasta and throw chopped up stuff in.
I'm feeling so empowered I might pull out my banjo and get back to trying to learn how to play it! During my mini-vacation here. If I do I'll make a little film of my first song.
This picture is cheesy, I know!! But I love our Pasha!! God, I've missed So You Think You Can Dance. I couldn't grab the pictures off the So You Think You Can Dance website, that's why I've resorted to this shot. Weren't Pasha and Sara marvelous last night? I watched their routine a couple of times. And I know the waltz wasn't Hok's best, but he's still one of my absolute favorites to watch, no matter what he does. Also Shauna and Lacey.
I agreed completely with ... guest judge (I've forgotten his name, already, sorry, he was nice, too) about Danny. I'm guessing Danny is actually a completely okay guy, and the arrogance is just a defense, but it really would be in his best interest to find another way to relate to the world. That isn't something you can turn around in a day or within a short competition, alas. But try Dannny, try. You're so good. I'd hate to see you lose because of something you had to learn in order to get by (but which is no longer serving you). When Kat was nice to him after, he smiled at her and kept looking at her in a sweet, grateful way, so I know he has it in him!
But even though I have my favorites, I love watching them all. Seriously, they are a great group. I almost feel bad pointing out my favorites, like the others aren't great, but they're not going to read this, so I blather on. Love this show.
Notice how I notice all the sad things? I noticed this on Bleecker Street, just a few blocks from me. It's sad for so many reasons:
1. Gary is dead.
2. I don't know who he was and if you google him, he doesn't come up.
3. Hudson Street Papers is long gone.
4. They call it a garden, but it's a tiny patch of earth surrounding a tree, and while some people maintain these tiny, tiny patches of earth as gardens, no one is maintaing this one. There one was strewn with garbage.
5. The sign is starting to deteriorate.
6. We all must die.
7. And be forgotten.
8. And any signs of us will eventually deteriorate and disappear, too.
Hey, but at least he was loved when he was around and people cared enough to erect this sign. I was in the doctor's office this morning, with a bunch of women, all of us waiting to have a "women's" thing done, and I had a nice chat with a woman who was 93. Maybe we'll all make it to 93!
I'm on vacation now! Maybe I'll watch Big Brother feeds for a while. I'm a Big Brother fanatic.
I took this picture only a couple of weeks ago, walking home through Central Park. I was happy and at peace, staring down into a stream, which happens to be one of my favorite things in the world to do. Just stare and stare and stare into a stream. I fantasize about having a small house on a stream some day.
I've been working day and night, getting this book ready to send to my editor tomorrow, and even though I could probably get a good eight more hours in I think I have to stop. There are always things that could be made better, but I don't think I can do them now. I just "fixed" one part and actually made it worse, and thank God I still had the earlier version. It's just so hard to stop trying when it's still not perfect. That said, I am pretty freaking thrilled with it. The stories I managed to find! I've said it a million times, but I can't believe I'm getting to tell this story.
Thank you Howard Mittelmark for helping me with the end. Thank you Eleanor Mills and Zach Elder at the Special Collections Library at Duke for hunting down that letter for me at the very last minute and in time to include it.
Okay, I'm going to stop now. This is me stopping. Nope, I'm not working any more. I'm going to lay on the couch and watch Flip This House and How Do I Look? for the rest of the day.
The word back from my agent about the first draft is fantastic. Of course it's a first draft, and she has suggestions, but overall she thinks it's great, and my editor will love it. I'll be working from now until I hand it in to my editor on Monday. I want to implement a few of the suggestions my agent made.
Here's a Buddy Extreme Close-Up. I have a friend who says cats don't have expressions! INSANE. Or did she say we just don't know what they mean? That I would half agree with, except over time you do learn what each expression means -- it's no different than learning any other language. This one means, "I will not rip your face off if you pet me now."
I want to respond to Bush commuting Libby's sentence by telling a story about why I like Hillary Clinton.
I used to work as a telecommunications analyst and by the 1980's I was working for one of the largest companies in the world. When the corporate telecommunications department of this company had meetings, it would be me at a conference table with a bunch of men in suits. I was the only female. Whenever I got up to speak, which was rarely, it was always to propose an idea to a long line of unsympathetic faces. I knew it was time to leave when I couldn't convince them that the internet was this great thing and a project that I had initiated to demonstrate this failed. Not because it wasn't a good idea, but because they were more interested in proving me wrong than giving a potentially useful thing a try. I know that sounds bitter, but I'm not. I only wish I understood human nature better at the time.
When Clinton first took office I watched Hillary on TV, trying to propose and defend her health care plan, facing down a room of disapproving men. Maybe her plan needed work, I don't know, but they were clearly more interested in proving her wrong than honestly studying the merits of her plan or even the need of a plan. This wasn't about what was good for the country. They really went at her and I felt for her. I had only been subject to the derision of one conference table full of men. She was facing down congress AND on national TV. She handled it with such grace. I've been on her side ever since.
WHICH REMINDS ME. Gore saying he invented the internet, which he never actually said. The truth is, his role, and Clinton's, actually was crucial and shaped the blogs, and the Facebooks and the YouTubes of today.
After I left the company I just described I started an online service called Echo. This was 1989, and except for the people who developed it and the college students and computer geeks (like myself) who used it for email and exchanging computer programs, few people had heard of the internet. I couldn't get anybody to invest in my company because I couldn't convince anyone with money that the internet was going to be big. I ended up putting my entire life savings, such as it was, into Echo.
No one knew what a modem was. To get people online I literally had to go around and tell people one-by-one what they were, then convince them to buy one, and then how to install it, and finally how to use the commands to navigate what was then a completely text-based interface. There were no graphics, no websites as we know them today, no pointing and clicking. I didn't have enough money for any kind of real marketing compaign and getting customers one at a time is not enough to sustain a business and Echo was in danger of going under. I was young and scared and running out of ideas. Starting a business is kinda like starting a family. You put your entire heart and soul into it and you don't want to lose it. You want to see it thrive.
Then Al Gore (and Clinton) started talking about what they called "The Information Superhighway." Again and again they explained in clear terms how cool the internet was. Everyone started talking about it. All the newspapers started writing about it. It was everywhere. And soon everyone was asking, "How do I get on this highway?" I was able to say, "Here!" Not only didn't Echo go under, but a lot of people started experimenting and innovating and you know the rest. Ebay! It would have happened eventually, but I'm telling you, it would have been delayed at least two presidential terms. And in those two terms a lot of start-ups would have gone under, and the people who had room to innovate wouldn't have even begun, so who knows how long that delay ultimately would have been and what it would have cost us.
So to all those people who smirk about the Gore inventing the internet thing, he didn't event it but he put it on the map and you don't even have the integrity and good grace to acknowledge the gift I'm guessing you're using and benefiting from.
These people were visionaries. They weren't the last to know something, they were the first. They were among the first to see the potential of the internet, the first to say we needed a national health care plan, the first to say we have to start seriously protecting the environment.
Bush's actions are not about what is good for the country. Commuting Libby's sentence is not about seeing justice served. God, I feel such despair when I see what we've come to and what counts for vision today.
Face them down again Hillary. I'm guessing we both understand human nature a little better now.
Sometimes Howard and I go to the Hudson River to work. This is what we looked out on yesterday as Howard worked and I mostly goofed off. Very pretty, right? This is Manhattan. Life isn't bad here and there.
I recently completed a course in Mindful Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). I did it because I read a study that found that it helped for "women's troubles" (nod, nod, wink, wink). But it turned out to be this incredible thing that can be applied to everything you do. It's essentially meditating and learning how to be "mindful" about your life. That's it. Just a slight shift really in how you go about your day-to-day life. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd stick with meditating. I tried it in my twenties and it gave me unbearable, excruciating back aches. Never again, I said. I'm just not a meditating type.
Sure enough, I got back aches this time too, but they teach you how to deal with that and now it's not a problem. Also, if you're uncomfortable you can do it laying down or even walking, which I love. I'm a big walker.
Everywhere I go I read about MBSR now. It really does seem to be all the rage. That's got to be because of two things: it's not hard to learn and you get almost immediate results. The class is only 8 weeks long.
If you're in New York City, I learned from Dr. Myra Weiss, and her name is on the University of Massachusett's website, along with listings for teachers around the country. It was originally developed there by Jon Kabat-Zinn as a method for pain management, but there have been a ton of studies that show it's great for other things, anxiety, etc. But if you're in NYC, I can't recommend Dr. Weiss enough. I'm not just saying that. She is warm, direct, and well, I'm taught, and if anything, I would say I went in there pretty skeptical, although I did want it to be useful, so maybe my two biases cancelled each other out.
Chris sent this to show that I am not the only one with a pet possessed by the devil. This is her dog Belle, with a haircut, and in the throes of demon infestation. Is that her tongue -- oh no! It's something she's chewing on, right? But yes, I see it's true. Belle is clearly evil. (Belle is a little tasmanian devil, actually. You have to see her. A little whirling dervish speed demon of a dog. It's very cute. It's like she is running on a motor of accelerated love.)
Jackie sent me a new banner. Thank you, Jackie! I am very happy with the new name. I love my little Satan's Fur Puppets.
I just finished Willa Cather's My Antonia, and that was a real pleasure I must say. I'm going to pick up some more Cather when I'm out today. There's nothing like a new author to love.
Doesn't this coming up week feel like a vacation week? Like we shouldn't work at all, all week? It feels that way to me. Normally I watch the fireworks from my roof, but this year I think I might walk over to the river to watch, like I used to when I was younger, and wanted to be right there in the thick of it. Nothing else would do.