procrastination, thy name is slush

because i have a revise of an essay due by the end of the day and am way behind schedule (please, reader, pronounce in the manner of the british) i figure, why not post a post right now. this week has been a whirlwind. not datingwise. not anything specialwise. just that i went away last weekend for a big birthday party family celebration thing which was a true ball and delight and the only thing missing there was j my sister who couldn't make it cause she's west coast, like snoop and dre. i'm more like tupac. sometimes we throw gang signs.

anyways, my niece and brother and i went canooing (canoe-ing?) and sang songs along the way. we went contra dancing and worked up a sweat. we played parcheesi (which i recall being spelled as parchese) and i won but nobody got sore about it. we sang new york, new york while my 100 year old aunt and my father waltzed around the living room because there was no other music available. we ate good food but not such good cake.

and then i came back to work. and was a crank on monday. but then my mood perked up because tuesday rolled around. and even though i had terribly stressmaking dreams about nothing much but they woke me up in the middle of the night, my mood perked, that's tuesday's magic. and it perked again today because i went running at 6 am and did laundry and washed dishes and ate breakfast all before i got to work. and also because i'm gearing up to write my automatic 'i'm away and not checking email' note. uh-huh. that's right. off to spain. manana (reader, please pronounce as manyana).

my friend m who lives in boston is fluent in spanish and portuguese. i asked her for some phrase translation which they don't give in lonely planet:

can i have some more sangria please?
do you want to come to my hotel room?
i don't have a condom, do you?

when k was here last week i went to meet her at her hotel (to be pronounced, reader, in the manner of the french, a la 'oh-tel') and it was one of those boutique joints on thompson street and guess what? they upgraded her to the suite. which was as big as a one bedroom apartment with two full bathrooms and a terribly delish blondie bar on the pillow (k is so fab, she gave it to me and then she took me to dinner). and she went to thank them for the upgrade and they told us (which is really kind of indelicate of them but whatevs) that that room goes for 1500 smackers a night. so k called up axl rose and they trashed it.

oh, sweet child of mine.

jackson kicks ass*

it's coming up on 8:30 at night and i'm still at work. not cause i'm working like a dog but cause i'm waiting for k to arrive in nyc so we can have dinner and say over and over to each other, i can't believe next week we're finally espana-bound. and what kinda bathing suit will you bring?

last night i had dinner with a relative, an aunt, who's coming up this weekend on a monumental birthday. 100. i'm in awe of her. she had a beer cause her stomach was unsettled. usually she likes her dewars on rocks with a twist. she schooled me in the ways of scotch and once, when my friend s. came to brunch, s., who doesn't ever drink barely at all, only wanted orange juice, but my aunt would not accept it, could not understand it, the concept was altogether foreign...and insisted the juice come with champagne. s. tried in her sweet manner to demure. guess who won? a person doesn't get to 100 without a kind of awesome, enviable stubbornness.

so my aunt she said she had a story idea for me: that when furniture or decorative pieces reach 100, they're considered antiques and everyone oos and ahs. and when a person reaches that age, it's not the same. it's a fine idea but i'd like to write a book about her.

we spoke vaguely of love too. of the difficulty of saying it. she said she's found it difficult to say, and advised that when i find someone i want to marry not to be hindered and to say those words clear and loud. i told her i love her. that was pretty easy though i don't know if i have ever said it to her before. slowly, slowly we get better at these things.

* listening to that song now. and, as the hed says, jackson kicks ass.

four questions

why is august 29 different from all other dates?

why will some people eat gumbo and make voodoo dolls?

who do you prefer, the rebirth or the treme brass band?

is not lafcadio hearn one of the best names you've ever come across?

these are all things to discuss on august 29, when you hold a katrina dinner. it's the brain child of cuz justin from new orleans who wants folks the world over to hold seder-like dinners in memorial and celebration.

he's got a great how-to guide and i humbly submit it to you:

katrina dinner 2006

ciao for now.

hellz bellz

jc, my good friend and in this case, actually, my savior or at least guardian angel, sent me a note about a blog on the jane magazine site about dating. now i am not, let me repeat more emphatically, NOT, telling you to read it cause it's kind of competition to moi. also, it's kind of stinky—so cheerleady or cheerleadish or whatever is the adjectival form. and much as i encourage pals and sometimes even enemies (which reminds me of a ww2 propoganda film i once saw called, "know your enemy, japan," its racism is mindblowing. and reminds me of david mura whose memoir and poems i dug a lot when i read them but they might in fact be a tad melodramatic. let's give him the benefit of the doubt today, since i'm feeling generous, and say no, they're actually quite good; read them), i cannot heartily encourage this.

the germane point: that competing blog (there must be many of them out there) has none of the zip of an unofficial blog and all of the treacle.

the gauntlet's thrown, then, inn't. know this, rival: we will throw down, you and i. you will be vanquished.

to wit: i had a date last night too. so there. and, it was fun. ha ha! just a coupla beers in a coupla hours followed not by any coupla-ing. a first date. a smart guy. he had a great laugh. it was a little high and giggly and sort of reminded me of the father of a friend of mine (i think that's who it reminded me of; it's hard after a few decades to remember the sources of all the different registers of laughter). who knows if i'll see him again. i've stopped trying to discern these things. this week that seems true. and liberating.

jc. i owe you a beer for your concern. quoth my landlord, have a blessed day.

pick-up games

because (also, a song playing right now on my computer) i got a bunch of bookcases from my folks who moved apartments, i did rearranging and have a stack of books i don't want no more. but i've been too lazy/inert/tired/distracted to bring them to a used bookstore. and just now, passed by that stack and thought, this might be a good time to bring them around and get maybe 10 bucks tops for 20 books, some not bad, really, just don't want them crowding me.

one in particular, the game, i could unload easy. you know this book, don't you, by a former nytimes reporter who i saw from time to time at parties long before he landed at the times and even longer before he shaved his head, put round his neck (regrettably) a thin leather choker, and grew a corpulent ego (or more likely, that was intact all along, just switched its use from reporting gas to fuel for becoming an aficionado of the pick-up).

loved the book. it was juicy and fun, and only a teeny, tiny bit depressing in terms of how dopey (some) women are and how shallow (some) men are. yes, yes women are shallow too and men are often dopey. plenty of pie.

two men i know asked me a while ago if they could have the book after i'd finished, and i said sure, but never followed up. one of them is now in a longterm relationship; the other is not. but he's so clever on his own, it would make me sad if he relied on the game to get play. on the other hand, so much of interaction is gameplaying, though it may not all be premeditated or strategized. is it worse if it's codified?

oh, now the music is a pop band the lead singer of which i once messed around with. ta da. that was a gazillion yrs ago. before my sister was nominated for a grammy, sort of. if i could mess around with a rock star now, it might have to be thom yorke.

it used to be my theory that having five crushes at all times was optimal so on any given day i'd run into someone who made me giddy. right now, i am completely without. and had a dream about an italian dude who i once loved a lot for about a week and then a little less for months thereafter. he visited me recently and has a shaved head and a goatee and an enviable gig—as a cheese and meat buyer for a supermarket chain which entails going to small towns in italy and switzerland and such and sampling and buying stuff from local farmers.

in the dream he had long, curly, blond hair and no beard and was downright cherubic. we held hands.

under the sea

my sister in law wrote a book part of which i read. it had a dedication that said something about how if you save one life, you save a universe. i thought of that today when i heard that the son of the writer david grossman was killed in lebanon. when i read his book, be my knife, i was devastated for a while. it was so intimate and claustrophobic and accurate, and i could not put it down. and though i have a bunch of his other books, i haven't gotten to them. i heard that news from an israeli friend who was in nyc and we were on our way out to coney island for a late day swim. we got there and went in and i was floating as i like to do, and that sensation of water all around, muting the sounds, nothing to look at but the sky makes everything seem so remote and okay. it's so appealing to put your head in the water.

shoe glue

a quickie to say: guess who checked me out or i think he checked me out or i hope he checked me out or i imagined he did while i stood in front of my work building choosing where to eat with some colleagues.

monsieur ralph fiennes. he of tortured love and envelopping kisses, or so they seem on the big screen.

and not, as k said, the 'noseless evil version of Ralph Fiennes a la Harry Potter,' but the one wearing bierkenstocks, as i am today. and i could see a look of recognition flash in his eyes under that pulled-low straw fedora. his eyes screamed as if in their final breath:

'we are one, my beloved slush—we share a vision! our feet are similarly shod. we enjoy similar comforts. i am english. you like europeans. sometimes even you drink tea. with. lemon!!'

my eyes screamed back: 'i like scones!!!'

and he doesn't even know that my sister, r, was born in england. there are so many, many similarities. it is, as they say, bashert.

at. last.

cupid and psyche

once upon a time, not too long ago, i had a crush on someone that developed into an obsession of sorts and then into love. i thought about him all the time: on the subway, at work, grocery shopping. he felt likewise, i think. eventually i said i love you, though when i said it i had to take a really big breath first because i was so unaccustomed to the whole thing and nervous. another time i had to whisper it because the words felt sacred.

for me, saying i love you has never been easy. it's not that i don't feel it, just articulation has its challenges. (a moment of digression: at the end of college i actually wrote my folks a letter telling them i love them since they'd say so to me regularly on the phone and i would reply, uh huh, but not out of insolence or disaffection. it was out of some kind of paralysis. so i wrote them to tell them of feelings i could not orally voice).

it might have been a kind of love i felt for this guy. i might have been in love too with the romance of it all. like when you're high and hungry, the hunger seems like a desert you'll never escape. but in a good way. when we kissed, it made me thirsty and the only way to quench it, was to kiss even more. and i'd dream about him. and then, after we 'broke up' such as it was, since this was a somewhat clandestine and messy state of things, i'd dream about him still. and i would go to bed hoping for a dream that was like a surprise prize, because there he'd be, in my dream, saying hello, saying my name. over time, the dreams changed. they were lovely in the beginning. then they were less so. he'd be on a bus, for instance, and not see me. or with someone else, and not see me.

i haven't dreamt about him in some time. until this morning. there he was, in my dream, and we embraced and even kissed. but the kiss, just a peck, was perfunctory and full of resistance and then he told me i smelled bad. and then he went around a corner and vanished. and my sister was in the dream and she asked where he went, and i did not know. maybe he vanished, i said.

then i woke up. and it was so cool this morning that i had a blanket on. and the air is clear and pure now and it's what i call september 11 weather, which sounds cynical or crude, maybe, or disrespectful or morbid, but it's not. this kind of clear, sharp, beautiful weather that's in new york city today has such associations for me now. they're matter of fact.

later, after work, i came out of a shop where i bought a moist, ample ginger snap cause i was starving, and heard a group of about five young men and women singing, and they were singing some kind of jesus song. even before i listened for lyrics i knew they were a jesus group; nobody else sings en masse in the street. then one of them, a european, said to me as she passed by, 'jesus loves you, ma'am,' and i said, 'but i'm jewish' and she said, 'that's okay.'

to be loved is grand. i'd like it again please by someone less messianic.

but what got under my skin was the ma'am. whenever did i become one of those?

nostradamus, we hardly knew you

i was in a pretty good mood this morning, except for this odd cough i've developed in recent days (call me calamity jane, sir), been working hard, eating well, going for good runs in spite of the wheeze.

but then—

shortly before the end of the day i read an excerpt from an article by bernard lewis about how august 22 could be a terrible day in which nuclear disaster is visited on israel and also maybe visited elsewhere, like my home country. and he gave some kind of rationale based on islamic history for it. sometimes i am romantincal. sometimes hypochondriacal.

today i am little other than impressionable. and freaked the fuck out.

if you had basically two weeks to live, what to do because the fact is that all the stuff i want to do can't be done in two weeks. some of it takes a longer lifetime than this one here lived so far. and does it all come down to a bomb? maybe. but it's all so trifling and ultimately inane. maybe even more inane to expect ends to be anything but that. oh, my penny ante philosophizing has given me a wheeze.

geez.

i wonder what kid rock makes of it. not to mention kid and play.

so now i make a feast. pasta with olive oil and garlic. buon appetito.

birthdays come and go

karaoke is forever.

usually on my bday, (and leading up to it and in the days following) i feel a heaviness, a sense that i need to take stock, to meditate on where i am, where i want to be...how to be a better person, resolutions i want to stick to, goals i want to meet. at the same time, it's my nature to take stock all the goddamn time, not just when i turn older offically.

this yr, those deep questions were yonder on the horizon but i didn't wanna think about them. it wasn't a question of avoidance. simply a desire to have a fun day and not sweat all that i want and have yet to have. so, i met a friend for lunch at a museum and saw that klimt painting, adele bloch-bauer, she's been in the news. exquisite/over the top most lush, most erotic. too bad all kind of notebooks and address books and post cards have klimts everywhere, takes the stuffing out of the real thing just a tiny, regrettable bit.

hours later...karaoke with pals. and really, karaoke is like a balm for what ails you. i testify. if you've never done it...a bona fide blast and if you're afraid to...remember what my dear friend t. once advised: do something that scares you every day (i amend to every week). and if you're not ailing and not skittish about it, it's mississippi goddamn fun. now older, i dispense advice.

set list included (but was not limited to):
separate ways, journey
2 out of 3 ain't bad, meatloaf
jackson, johnny cash and june carter cash (sung in a duet by slush and c.)
middle of the road, pretenders
she's got you, miss patsy cline