Donuts at Home

Fewer Mannequins vol 1 perzine

2012-01-16T16:48:00.000-05:00

I just made my first cut-n-paste perzine, now at age 40, 5 years after starting the computer printed and print shop collated run We'll Never Have Paris.It is called Fewer Mannequins. I am excited to have joined the zine world in a whole new way.It is for sale for only $2, or trade.email: neverhaveparis@gmail.com I can't have another email address in my life, so this will have to do. Vol 2 is ready to go in a new months. God, why did I wait this long to do this?

New issue announcement on New Year's Day

2011-12-29T12:16:00.002-05:00

We'll Never Have Paris wishes everyone a happy new yearWill be announcing the theme for WNHP9 very soon, on New Year's Day.Nonfiction memoir, as always. Issue will be out in the summer to pair with the Best of WNHP.neverhaveparis.blogspot.com

when your mom is the first to go

2011-11-24T22:54:00.001-05:00

Dear Mom,
I don't write to you that often because you're dead. I thought I would start a relationship with 1-800-FAKE-MOM, but she's well, fictitious for one, and it feels stupid to write to myself and pretend there is someone out there. IF there really was a 1-800 number, it is possible I could have tried to get used to it, the methodone treatment for smack as it were, if there was a number hotline mothers to choose from and someone was the right match in accent, affect and attitude. Had the right laugh.

I can't lie and pretend we had a golden relationship, but we were very close. There were things I wanted to tell you, the truth about people, the real answers to your questions that I knew would bum you out, so I kept these to myself. But I remember thinking to myself many times, in the last few years we were together, that once you were gone, I would want to silently drop out and withdraw from family life. Stop calling anyone, stop visiting anyone, like the end of a performance run. No call backs, just goodbye. I knew it wasn't possible to pull off.

The holidays. You kept Christmas alive with your decorations starting before Thanksgiving and ending in late February. We chided you, Dad and Ron. The aunts only did it for you, too. No one else would have even put a tree up (also November-February), let alone lots of wrapped presents as though we were children. Holidays were at our house. The first Christmas after you were gone, we did it at your house, for you. For us, too, but it was a painful mockery of the real thing. Playing a game without the rules. The second year was at Ron's apartment. That was even more painful, because it was the penultimate of holding it at your house - holding it at the new seat of the family's house. The forced action, defying gravity of inclination. The shitty presents. Shitty because they were wrong. This was what I feared most, which sounds like it should be the least of my worries, right? Material goods. However, observe the rationale: presents say 'I know you'. I know Dad and Ron don't know me, don't ask don't tell. Presents are the truth or dare of showing what you know.

I got a paper shredder. It was hard not to cry. The year after that, I spent Christmas Eve in an empty bathtub in the dark, staring at a single Christmas card from The Aunts and a candle while Jon watched COPS on TV. We weren't invited anywhere, and I waited in the tub for Jon to notice and like, come love me. He never did, and eventually I climbed out and stared into a new kind of space for the first time.

I picked on you a lot mom, which was stupid, stupid, stupid. Everyone did. But you got me. It took you right up until the end, but you got me. I knew you were the missing link, the only link. As usual, I am not saying what I want to really say, which I suppose is what family is all about, at least, in this family.

teachable moments

2011-11-17T09:18:00.003-05:00

We were laughing so loud that someone popped their head in my classroom door.
"Are you the professor?"
"Yes", I replied.
"It's a little loud."
"Go ahead", I said grandly, "shut the door!"
Gaily even. Then I got quiet. My students and I looked at each other. One of them snickered.

"Fuck, there's a class next door?" I looked at the partition between my room and the next, noticing it for the first time all semester. "Jesus, we are pretty loud."

My students weren't ready to quiet down just yet and lose face. "They're pretty loud sometimes, too." With a class of only 4, it's hard to stay on task and take it seriously, but we do. I had just modeled how to set up telling a brief story based on hypothetical question and answer and everyone had taken a turn retelling Ruth's job interview story in ASL. We work hard, then we play hard. Mine is the class where they can let it all hang out, where teacher and students are equals. So it's pin drop quiet while we are using sign language until the conversation burst, then I'm asking Rachelle if she's high on vicodent because she is repeatedly and absentmindedly jabbing at her eyeball while Beth is talking about how badly she needs a new job.

I tried to go back to the conversation, but the 10-second interruption put me in my place and made me self-conscious. I'm the professor of a college class, and not a community college. Why did I boldly inform her to shut the door instead of apologizing, saying sorry, I'll keep it down.

"Why didn't I tell her I'm a sub?" I asked the class and myself out loud. "Are you the professor?" "No, I'm a sub." They laughed. I said, "Let's find another room for next week. H building has tons of empty rooms. I don't wanna get in trouble."

"For what?" Kara asked, "For having too much fun? This is the only class I don't hate." Normally this would make me feel good but in my paranoia I felt worse. I know ASL is the only fun class they have and I love teaching it.

This class fell into my lap. The job being a sub for one semester seemed lucky enough, and then it turned into a permanent gig. They even created a class, ASL 2, for me to teach, when the ASL 1 teacher returned from maternity leave. Students love me once they get to ASL 2. The classes are tiny so there is time to get to know each other and joke around. I make fun of them, I make fun of myself. This class is the most intimate and mature - we've talked about all going out for dinner. Beth asked if she could make extra money cleaning my apt when I mentioned wanting to get a house cleaner - I said I don't know, something tells me that's a line I shouldn't cross. I invited Rachelle to go to a roller derby show with me. I would hang out with all of them, but I would be most myself with Rachelle. Melissa works in the financial department so I've seen her when I've had questions. Kara is the quietest, I don't know her as well. She's really good at ASL, and she get's right in there with the rest of them when it's rap time. When I say Sharon's name, everyone immediately says, "I see Florida!" It happened in class one day and it would be hard to explain now, but it was another moment when we all laughed so hard, including me, that someone probably would have put their head in the door and said, "keep it down".

"I don't want to get in trouble", I said again, showing for the first time my vulnerable side, stepping out of my leadership role as teacher and adult role model. This one sentences says more than it seems. Yes, I joke with them, I speak plainly to them, I let them hand homework in late, I swear and let them swear. But I have a line - I am still their professor. When they complain of being tired and overworked, I don't join in. I want them to feel they are getting me at my best, that I am ready to be there. They are paying for this class, and no one skips ASL 2 without an emergency reason. I get their respect because I know my shit, and I don't assign busy work, and I believe in them as students learning this language.

"You weren't rude, it's not like you said, hey you got a problem, bitch, cuz we can throw this down right now!" Melissa said. More laughter. "Yeah", said Rachelle, "Four on one, that's a fight she's gonna lose!"

Moments like this I wonder how it would be perceived if my department chair decided to do an unannounced observation. I have never been observed in the two years I have taught there. I would like to be, I want them to see how awesome I am in action. You can be an unconventional, laid back teacher. Though perhaps today would not be the best example, talking about vicodent and throwing a bitch down.

I love my class.

revitalization

2011-11-11T23:15:00.001-05:00

My failed year in publishing a book has surprisingly lead to me publishing a book. While I am excited to be publishing a book, I did experience one calendar year's worth of book support failure. My friend, who encouraged me to publish a collection of my stories, to which I asked for cover art work in exchange, never produced any cover art. The book started, and ended, with him. In between were months of doing nothing, attempts at having an editor somehow mold it into a book, realize I had never truly edited any of the work myself, second attempt at having an editor mold it into something, asking the would-be publisher to mold it, then asking pretty much anyone at all to do something to in some way, give me a green light to publish this book.

I realized tonight, while at a reading by an acquaintance, Paul, who blew me out of the water completely, that I should stick to where my writing belongs, in the half-assed world of zines. I label this lovingly, because this is where I belong. I tried to fly higher, and I was shot down. However, it makes total sense that I could take the stories I had wanted to do in a book, with length being the only real book thing about the endeavor, and I could print separate zines by subject matter. I could send them off separately, or, I could package them together, like a book, but printed separately, making the whole thing cute, I could go nuts with different colored paper and the whole thing.

The zine component removes the pressure of real writing, whatever that really means, that I don't quite have, not in a consistent way, and the pressure of marketing, consistent variables with which one writes a book, and allows me to do what I have always done well, which is to say fuck you and do it myself.

I can do this during the month-long winter break. it's perfect. exciting.

diary entry at 40 and 4

2011-10-24T22:54:00.000-04:00

I haven't written in a while. So, what's up with me?

I'm 40 and 4 months now. Wow. And time is flying by at an unprecedented pace since I started grad school. Friends, family and acquanitences have been asking me about it, as I have told more people I am a student. This is complicated, like everything I do is.

I had the idea when I realized I could put my LIU teaching credits to use and start a free education. I figured I could get into the program because I was adjunct staff there. I chose Speech Language Pathology because my undergrad is in that, and I don't need to complete any pre-reqs. I chose it because I truly enjoyed that subject matter as an undergrad, before the deaf obsession blew me off course. And the reason I am taking a program at all is because I see the writing on the wall for my interpreting career as I age. It's not a good career for people in their late 50s and beyond, unless you're in that upper 1% of interpreters respected for their experience in years. Running all over, competition, physical exertion, no pay raises, and just plain aesthetic choice between old and young.

the thing is, I have a fall back plan, which is teaching. While I was considering applying, I learned that it was easy as pie to renew my expired Oregon State teaching credential. Send money and new fingerprints. So, I could go back to teaching, in Oregon, and in a few years, I may be ready to do that. But, I don't truly want to teach. Maybe re-firing my academic side would stimulate me to take the teaching path since I already have the degree.

that is where I am now. I kind of felt I would not complete the Masters in SLP, but that a year of the program would kind of force me to come to terms with teaching again. Or else, do ALL the work needed to get a SLP Masters.

What I realized all too quickly is, I miss my unbridled free time. I don't want to work at half-time, and take another 2.5-3.5 years to graduate this program (and then pass like 3 standardized tests, too).

This semester is kicking my ass. When I started, my biggest fear was feeling awkward being around students in their 20s, or feeling super out of date with current practice and vocabulary. It was also giving my free time away, but this to a lesser extent because, I told myself, I kind of need this big thing to focus on. I had tons of free time as a freelance interpreter. I had a hard time filling my time up with people to entertain me. So, I decided it was time for this commitment. I tried to live it up in the summer and ensuing weeks, counting down my free weeks and days. I tried to tie up the bigger projects like my book (which I discarded), the Best OF WNHP collection, preparing for the 3rd Pete's MZF, making extra clocks, and getting in some bike rides.

I was doing fine until I took off a week to go on a cruise (which was super cool, a cruise of interpreters and workshops, knocking off needed CEUs, meeting new people, spending time in the sun and at the beach, and time with Jon, Dori and Rhea) and missed a week of classes (because I also had to babysit for 3 days). After just one week away, after just 4 weeks of school, I started asking myself what I was doing this for? I want to take off anytime! I want to go out any night of the week! Homework sucks! SO, to experiment with loosening the reign, I skipped all my work the following week. It didn't feel good. But the hard work doesn't feel good, or healing in some kind of protestent way either. And, if it weren't just hard work, but it's shitty teachers, too. I spent last night coming through a book, and even googling some concepts, because the teacher doesn't teach anything clearly and I am literally shooting blanks in the dark, knowing I have big projects coming up and trying so hard to know WHAT exactly they ARE.

I came close to ending it after this semester, but now, I want to stick with my original goal and complete one year. It makes a difference tho, to take classes knowing the possible end is within reach at any minute. Pull the cord. No one would take this kind of work for fun. But a goal is a goal, and I have credits to use.

Oh, and, I fought hard to teach two classes this semester, so I could get more credits. Fuck! Teaching ASL 1 and 2 sucks! I would probably hate my life less right now if I weren't teaching 2 motherfucking classes, two nights straight, too.

As for the lack of free time, I still wonder if I would come to appreciate it in a new way, a new organized and relaxed way, when I have it again.

In other news, Microcosm is happily going to take on distributing the Best OF collection. I need to fill out paperwork, pay for the printing and shipping, and probably will just break even with my costs. Still, it's progress, and makes a nice end goal from my time with WNHP. Perhaps with that, new writers, good writers, and artists, will send me submissions and there will be a number 9, and 10... Or not. It could end here. I could ride this for another year or two. It won't even go out till August 2012.

My brother is still a dick. My nieces are cute. My dad is getting old quickly and no one notices but me. And my mom is gone eight years now. Jon continues to me a love-hate relationship. I cycle around closer to knowing I will never leave him and love another, but then, there will be a new way to piss me off.

I went in on a pop-up store with 9 other New New Etsy Team members. Of course, I haven't had a sale yet. I wonder if it is possible (and of course it is, and it won't even be private, because they will all notice) if I could sell nothing in the whole ten weeks. Why not? Seems totally likely.

On that positive note, I did enjoy my spicy bloody mary (Square One cucumber vodka, McClure's bloody mary mix. Fair vodka is still numero uno) and now I am out of time.

Up early. I didn't finish my paper or the paperwork for Microcosm. Great.

PS there's a bag of Clementines on the counter. Absurdedly small.

I haven't' opened a pleasure book or magazine in 6 weeks.

OWS-WTC-911-USA

2011-10-16T22:36:00.000-04:00

OWS:
I have finally gone to Occupy Wall Street. And to the 9/11 Memorial. And by the way, they are a block away from each other.

I have a lot of mixed thoughts and feelings right now. Everything is coated in irony and seeping into my own biases and personal experiences - I'm just going to ramble.

I live here in NYC and I hadn't been to OWS. I first heard about it via the Bluestockings list serve. Bluestockings being a politically active radical punk group of people, hearing about a protest on Wall St. didn't catch my attention. I also have never been a news watcher, never ever. Also shit happens in NYC everyday. When I heard about Michael Moore coming, Radiohead possibly playing a live show, I started to take notice. The fact that protestors were arrested and framed by the NYPD, even this did not require a response. Going up against the concept of Wall St and big money, corporate greed, whatever, but in this vague 'you suck' kind of way just seemed dumb. And complicated.

It's complicated. I have been starting to feel guilty that I hadn't gone to see it myself. I over think a lot of things in life. It's who I am. Who cares if I go? Does going equal support? Why wouldn't I support it? What would support look like? What would commitment look like?

I can't stand to be involved in anything I cannot affect. I can't bear to be in any kind of group. I am the original punk. I don't join book clubs, I don't join committees, I can't work in a group. I hate group discussion. I hate voting. I'm for action. I can think of what would make that action happen, but if I can't force the hand, then I bail.

I feel about protests the way I feel about being agnostic. I want to feel it, but I don't because some kind of reality gets in my way. Christians want to hold hands. It makes me want to retch. Bands want you to clap along. I can't even stand group claps. I think of every Earth Day celebration. I remember my first protest. The one and only time I held a sign and marched around a block. I felt hideous. I was mortified to be involved in such a weak effort. I remember interpreting a protest against the annual APA Convention with a group of mental health patients, workers and supporters.

I tried one last time to believe in a protest cause. It was in 2005 or 2006 with Code Pink. I lived in DC and heard about their plan to stage a hunger strike on the White House grounds. I joined the parade and that ended in a staged 'last supper' on a pink table cloth. Speeches were made and people were encouraged to show support by fasting to whatever degree they felt comfortable with or joining full monty in the hunger strike. The cause was ending the war. This really made me think. I thought about it for a little bit, could a hunger strike bring down the war? Is this something I could do? If I knew for sure it would effect the necessary change, I guess I could go through with it. But, I didn't. I didn't do shit. But Cindy Sheehan did. But the war did not end.

It seemed to me that if a person could do a hunger strike and with that media attention, could not achieve a result, then everything else was fucked.

WTC:

We know 9/11 happened. No one is gonna forget it. I'm not anti-memorial, but I don't think it is my patriotic duty to touch the ground. I have mixed feelings about the people who need to go and see it. I definitely have strong feelings against taking a photo of yourself and friends in front of it. So when Jon and his friends said they were going to the 9/11 Memorial and did I want to come, I thought about the irony that I would visit a stone cold memorial to history when history was being made with live people in Zucotti Park right fucking now. So I decided to go to both. And you know what, people were taking photos of their friends and families and life goes on whether I act like like the judgement police or not. And really, the reflecting ponds (I think they are called?) are beautifully done, the winning touch being the black hole square. That hit home and reminded me why I hate memorials. It's because I hate the absurdity of trying to stop what has happened. Don't tell me that's not what is at the core.

Compensation.

That's the words that went through my mind when I entered and security asked to see our tickets at seven different checkpoints in the way in. Yes, seven checkpoints. For WHAT? NY trying to make up for the loss. Cops and security and NYPD camera bubbles and reflecting pools and America. Where is the memorial to America? It's across the street and it's called Occupy Wall Street.

Compensation. There's a brand new fancy hotel on the corner to the Memorial, the W Hotel. The American mentality is and has always been to get a refund, isn't it?

When I went to the Vietnam Memorial I was 23 years old. I went with the goal of reading every name. I wanted to show respect and not just pass by quickly. I remember seeing the movie about the making of the memorial, and the tag line, "It's got to have all the names." So I took it seriously that the wall was about the names. After reading 2 or 3 walls, I started walking, passing section after section. I cried for my innocence. I realized then that I didn't know shit about anything, and that it wasn't about the names. It was about the length of the wall. And not until much later did I realize that it wasn't even about that. It was about compensation.

9/11:

I was living in California. I first heard about the plan attacks in another language. Not hearing it in English, but seeing it in ASL. Ed Copra and another teacher and I had all just gotten out of our cars at about the same time, and Ed signed that a plane had hit the WTC. As I said before, I never listen to the news ever, so I had gotten up and gone all the way to work without knowing this. Since it was west coast time, hours had already gone by. I know a few other people who were living elsewhere when they found out. This is all I have to say on my experience with learning the news. I wonder though, what kind of person I would have been. Would I have helped? Would I have helped survivors in some way? Or would I have just split?

USA:

Survivor Guilt. We are all, this is my theory, %99 of us, living with Survivor Guilt. This is how I am going to connect my experience going from the 9/11 WTC Memorial to Occupy Wall St. As I left the info center, the last words I heard going out were from a video saying 'survivor guilt'. America has it all, comparatively. We know it. So, when we walk down the street, and see a homeless guy asking for change, we look away. Are we all greedy assholes? Are we judgmental? I think we don't know to do with our discomfort.

Maybe I am wrong and it is the complete opposite. If people felt guilty about their status they would be stepping over each other trying to give til it hurts. To individuals and mass charities. What do we do with guilt? We deny it and pass the buck.

And that is America, I guess. Then again, Americans like to help each other out. And as a government, we kind of do that, too. But now I am thinking about Occupy Wall Street again and I wonder, fuck, this is surprisingly successful! Over 950 satellite movements in 26 countries, I think. Then I think about everything I have just written and how it applies to me. Could I have faith? Is there a clear goal? Do I have some kind of guilt preventing me from participating? Is compensation owed to the people? Are the OWS people the kind of people who "haven't seen the Vietnam Memorial", so to speak, or are they totally clear in their task?

Do I feel activated? Yeah, I guess I do! But there is so much wrong with America. I mean, it's fascinating that OWS doesn't appear to have a concrete goal which was part of the reason I blew it off. It makes total sense though now that I think about it because it is too complicated to deal with. I guess a sit in is the only way to issue the 'fuck you'. I guess I could get behind that. But I am not a joiner, and going there didn't make me want to join. I do want to take the time though to care about this, which is progress.

the underground railroad

2011-09-11T13:03:00.003-04:00

Listening to The Waterboys’ album, ‘A Pagan Place’ for the first time in Dana's car requires a description of me, Dana, the Waterboys’, Amy Abdoo, my family, and the underground railroad.

Me and my best friend Dana were seniors in high school in 1988-89. I had discovered The Waterboys’ that fall by reading my brother's Rolling Stone magazine and reading a review of the 1988 album, ‘Fisherman's Blues’. I not only didn’t have a car, I still didn’t know how to drive. My parent’s didn’t think it was that important and sensed, correctly, that I was too flighty to pay attention and drive. I didn’t push the issue terribly hard because deep down, I never expected access to a car. Even though they taught my brother to drive at 16 and he used my mother’s car to get to work, I had gotten used to separate but unequal treatment as a daughter in a rather ethnically traditional family. Dana got her license and a car the day she turned 16. I would go anywhere just to kill time with her, like to visit her grandmother and get an oil change. Sometimes we would go for a scenic drive up Route 12 past the cornfields to the cool town over and listen to music and talk about our problems.

We were alike on the basic levels – taking school seriously and studying, morals, being real and not fake teenagers – we were good girls and didn’t drink, use drugs or have sex. Same with my other two best high school friends. But we didn’t have music in common, or fashion or how we identified ourselves. I didn't want to wear mall clothing, the make-up and clothing stifling, other wordly. Weekends I was content to stay home. The places I would want to have gone didn’t exist for me yet, not in Utica, NY. Dana wanted to go dancing. I didn’t want to drive to the next town over late Saturday night, hoping to sneak into a dance club. It was repulsive to me. This is later high school, junior and senior years. The real confusion for us all, isn’t it, is junior high school. I didn’t have any identity or role models in 7th and 8th grade. I can say that mostly who I am now started with Amy Abdoo in 9th grade.

Amy Abdoo, like me, came from a pretty conservative family. Our families weren't close friends, more of an annual get together. Kids change a lot between the junior high school years. Amy was one year older. The summer of 1985, I was going into 9th grade and she into 10th grade. So in the space of one year, Amy had gone from being a nondescript but enjoyable nerd to a secret blooming hippie flower. She had met a boy in her high school who turned her on to beat literature, hippies, music and drugs. She had to keep her longings to herself, and in fact, once she was 'out' about her hair-dying self, and her parents felt like they had lost control of her, that was the end for me, also and I was forbidden to see her. Because, why would I want to be friends with her if her parents had lost control of her, is how my parents saw it. She could rub off on me and that would not be allowed under any circumstances. This fortunately came after I had a few opportunities to hang out with her and learn all about this alternative world to mall clothing and format radio.

What did she say that enticed me at that family gathering when she told me about her new discoveries? Did she use the word freedom? Did she promise me some kind of mental or physical liberation? Was I looking for liberation? I don't remember. I can remember initial distrust that must have given way to curiosity. But, also confidence that I could handle what seemed to be controversial information and choices. Reading and re-reading this, I realize that I appear purposefully vague, like I am leaving out the real details. What was controversial? What was alternative? What was the freedom from? What did I learn? It’s hard to say now, because I have been who I am for 25 years and I have existed in Blue State pockets of America. I’ve cushioned myself with like-minded people and only have to endure the mass population when I’m at work or when I’m not in my circle. So if this makes sense to you, then I don’t have to explain the big WHAT that I was unconsciously looking for.

Up until 9th grade, I don’t think I was or was seen as markedly weird. To other kids, I was pretty neutral. I wasn’t popular on any level, but I wasn’t labeled negatively either, at least, I don’t think so. Inside though, I struggled with wanting some depth; as much as a 13 and 14-year old had depth. Probably I was afflicted by the same disease everyone at that age has, but I think I had it worse. I was looking for extra meaning in song lyrics. I wrote in my diary. My friends weren’t like that.

I think Amy Abdoo enticed me with word games and IQ tests. Mostly though, music was the common ground. Utica's format radio station WOUR played only classic rock. My older brother's musical interests rubbed off on me. Since whatever Ron did was acceptable, and the only thing we really had in common, I got schooled on Pink Floyd, The Police, Genesis, Rush, 70s and 80s rock, hard rock, glam rock. I never listened to what my girlfriends liked, such as Duran Duran, Madonna and Prince. Amy and I found common ground in radio music that I knew, but she taught me about other bands of those eras that I had never heard before.

I had never asked to hang out with Amy before. We’d only ever gotten together as part of a family thing, and that was infrequent and dismissible. Now I was making plans, suspicious to my super over-involved family. We kept our meetings in secret.

I asked my friend Dana to go with me to meet Amy and China downtown. It was an innocent gathering but I was also nervous of my parents finding out. We didn’t do any drugs. All we did was meet in the downtown library and discuss books and check some out. Went to a thrift store. It was completely innocent. But it was different. It was deviant.

The drugs were always on my parent’s mind. They were fearful and old world. My friends and activities had to be approved. Their number one fear were that I would, that one of us in the family, that a Catholic Arab would fall into the wrong crowd. Sex, alcohol, drugs, even just deviance of any kind was strictly prohibited.

Another time I begged Dana to take me to meet Amy's cool adult friends at someone's house up north. These were her college-age punk drummer boyfriend and some others I have forgotten, including the guy named China, who I was totally in love with. I begged Dana to take me because she had a car, but I also knew she would be uncomfortable with these people.

I was finding Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Genesis with Peter Gabriel. The more access I had to the external voices, the more I had access to my unknown, internal developing self. I began to write poetry. As I started to dress in thrift store clothing, basketball sneakers and tie-dyes, my parents grew fearful and suspicious. Their power and morals had to be absolute. Eventually my parents did not allow us to be in contact and it got to the point where my brother listened in on my phone calls. By that time, I didn't need them so much. Those get-togethers and phone calls were enough to start me on the way.

My parents let me dress the way I wanted to when they accepted that I was still a good girl and wasn't interested in sex, drugs and parties. This was not without serious struggle. You can’t believe it but this is how strict my parents were. I wrote poetry, I was sad a lot with the world, I listened to U2, psychedlic rock but kept my thoughts about discontent and the human condition to myself. I knew even at 16, at 17, that I was uncomfortable with cultural disconnect; liking what I liked and not wanting to explain it, to make it OK for you.

That’s why I felt so awkward bringing Dana with me to the library to meet Amy and going up north to meet Amy’s friends. I feel this way still today. I feel torn, like I’m an ambassador between the Avant Guard and the Normals. In the car with Dana, I excitedly popped ‘A Pagan Place’ into her tape deck. The opening track, “Church Not Made with Hands” burst open with a horn section. I immediately felt embarrassed. This was a 1984 post-punk Irish band, with a horn section! Dana listened to bands like Soul to Soul and Madonna, Whitney Housten and Tracy Chapman. I can call this the single definitive minute where now looking back, I realized I started my own life. It was like I was on the transatlantic cruise liner, waving with my white hankerchief to the people on the pier, off to a new life. I was thrilled because I had discovered this band all on my own. No one had introduced me to The Waterboys. My pride was countered by embarrassment for what I heard because I knew Dana would think it was strange and I didn't want my moment ruined. I had her pop it out so I could listen to it later at home.

I had discovered The Waterboys’ that fall by reading my brother's Rolling Stone magazine and reading a review of the 1988 album, Fisherman's Blues. I listened to ‘A Pagan Place’ again and again my senior year in high school. I listened to ‘Fisherman's Blues’ which was their most current album, and I bought tapes for all the bands that they referenced - many other Irish musical artists like The Pogues and Sinead O'Connor. I ordered the remaining albums The Waterboys made.

I hadn't taken going to college seriously since I didn't think my parents would pay for it or allow me to actually go away. Even the fall of my senior year, I only casually applied to two state schools. I don't remember how everything fell into place, but they had a change of heart and did permit me to go, took responsibility for payment, and I was college bound. I was getting out. The Underground Railroad was close at hand. My last night at home, I listened to The Waterboys' album, ‘This is the Sea’ on my Sony Walkman. I had written in my journal about my excitement and fears for starting college but really, I wasn't afraid at all. I laid in the dark long after my parents had gone to sleep and had to play the last track again. The build on this song is incredible still after twenty-two years. It brings tear to my eyes to remember that I predicted it would be a kind of anthem; that it would be foretelling, that it would be all mine.

ride share zine reading (edited)

2011-06-23T11:15:00.004-04:00

This is the story about my Craigslist rideshare.

Part one.

Last summer I planned trips to Portland and San Francisco to attend their annual Zine Fests. They were one week apart. I wanted to drive from Portland to San Francisco via the coastal highway. This was double the length of a direct drive down I-5 South, but a fantastic drive, the main highlights being the southern Oregon coast at Bandon and the Redwoods National Forest. The original plan had not been to drive, but to take the Green Tortoise Bus. In 1997 I once took the Green Tortoise from San Diego all the way to Portland which covered this route. It was cool even if it was too hippie for me, it would be cheap, social, and scenic.

When I learned that Green Tortoise discontinued this trip, I thought I could post on Craig’s List to find a ride, again - not just a ride to SF, but a scenic coastal highway ride. To be safe, I could advertise two separate posts: ‘ride wanted’ and ‘offering ride’.

Meet Ilya. Ilya phoned me in response to my ad 36 hours before the trip. By now, I had managed to get 2 riders at the final hour who would do a partial trip. A girl whose name I have forgotten and a guy named CJ. I had turned into a mini bus myself. Drop CJ off in Arcata, pick the girl up in Bandon. I had a rental car reserved, and everything was set. But along comes Ilya. He calls me on Saturday night, and at first I can’t understand him through the Ukrainian accent, but he seemed to be telling me he was taking the very same trip as me, leaving the same day, and had a car already so I didn’t need to rent a car. And sure, the others could come. All four of us, it could be an adventure! What good fortune. He didn’t sound crazy over the phone, and I assumed the other travelers would be thrilled to save the money. In truth, I felt conflicted. Doing the drive alone with car rental, gas and hotel was prohibitively expensive. Having other riders and being in control of the car and schedule myself was the best plan. But it seemed stupid to pay for a rental when here was a guy going my way and ready to share his wheels. So I said yes.

Me, Ilya and CJ left Portland in his big, fat grandpa car like a Lincoln Continental or something. He bought the car to use while exploring the USA for three months. We started the drive late, at 1pm, and barely an hour into it, both guys got excited about a billboard for hamburgers at the next exit. They pulled over, and then couldn’t find the place. Once they found it, they took their time eating and chatting. Then getting gas. Then talking about the gas. It was nearly 3pm and we had barely started our journey. I re-calculated the arrival time to Bandon, where the girl was already waiting for us.

We didn’t reach the Bandon area until almost 7pm. The girl had been waiting for hours. I felt responsible and awkward. The sun was beginning to set. I sat in the back and began to chat with her, apologizing that we were so late, even though it wasn’t my fault since I wasn’t driving. I was in such a hurry, pressing to leave since Ilya did everything so slowly that when we pulled out of the pick up spot, I realized that we had missed the turn-off for the town of Bandon. I had expected to drive right into it; I could picture the winding road opening onto the coast on my right hand side, and the Bandon Star hostel. I had thought of nothing but this moment all day, and somehow we had missed it. I cried out, what happened to Bandon? But no one knew what I was talking about. We had missed the turnoff and it was on the way to dusk.

Now I was pissed. The little bit of southern Oregon I saw was through thick fog, which only brought the night on quicker. The whole point of this road trip for me was not a cheap ride in a car. I could afford the flight, I could even afford my own car if I had to. It was to see Bandon and the Redwoods in the shining daylight. It was now dark and we were hours away from the Redwoods. Somehow, we just kept stopping the car. Since southern OR had come and gone, all I had left to look forward to was the Redwoods, so I lobbied hard to get a hotel before the CA border so we could actually SEE the trees instead of driving through them in the dark.

We spent a night at the Curly Redwood Motel. Naturally the next day we didn’t hit the road until 10am, and that was only with me barking to get ready and go. I had been the pit boss since the trip started, barking to go, go, go. We missed the only place I had wanted to stop because no one else was paying attention. At this point I was over the pleasantries, and was trying to salvage my vacation. This whole fucking thing, all four of us strangers, were brought together by me. I felt responsible.

We started our drive and entered CA and it was sunny and looking good. It was of course, late, and we were behind schedule. Ilya stopped the car a few more times in the first hour of driving. Ilya just turned out to be weird. Weird in an indescribable way. He would just see something like, a turnout, and just pull over. Or, see something that might be good to look at and come to a lurching halt. In the back seat, we were getting carsick.

And then, the turning point came. We passed a mid-40s Hispanic woman hitchhiking and then our car pulled over. We didn’t know why we had pulled over, and then the girl asked me, ‘are we picking up that woman?’ I would like to point out that the car was full, with 4 people. Also, Ilya didn’t ask anyone. He simply pulled over.

“Are you picking up that woman?” I asked.

He replied, “Yes, I always pick up hitchhikers”.

“Ilya, the car is full!”

“Well, you can move over.”

Me and the girl make eyes. She pulls a jackknife from her backpack for safety. The back door opens, and mutely, the woman gets into the back seat with us. The alcohol smell fills the car. She is pickled. The girl and I make eyes at each other. WTF?

No words have been shared, mind you. To Ilya, this was the most natural thing in the world, to silently pull your giant, used American car filled with paying strangers over and pick up a hitchhiker, making it now 5 freaks in one vehicle.

I had, by now, mentally checked out. This was, the last straw. Or so I thought, until the woman nearly barfing on us trapped in the back seat raised it to a new level. Within minutes of getting settled, this woman, reeking of alcohol as I mentioned, pulls a homemade sandwich from her bag. This, I took as a promising sign that she understood human needs for food. Because otherwise, she was totally loopy. Unable to ask or answer questions, her sandwich didn’t look half bad. A few bites in, she passed out. This cycled for a few minutes of take a bite/pass out, until she began to gurgle. Always on the ready to avoid a vomit scene (this is my only phobia), I had already predicted this could happen. So, it only took a few emitted gurgles before I demanded, “Pull the car over, NOW!”

This was, indeed, the last straw. It was like I was the only thinking person in the vehicle.

Ilya asked, “Is it an emergency?”

“Yes!” I replied, “It’s an emergency. She’s going to puke. Pull over now”.

He pulled over, and I jumped out of the car. I was in control from here on out. To the woman: You have to go. To Ilya: I am driving. Get out.

Ilya had no idea what the problem was. He hadn’t noticed she was drunk, and he apologized for the situation. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he was totally clueless, slow, and unable to command this trip. The other two riders, the girl and CJ, were visibly shaken.

Me, I put the pedal to the metal. We were now flying thru the Redwoods. We weren’t going to stop anymore. Hours behind schedule, the coastal dream was over. I just wanted to get to the Bay Area.

Part two.

I had already invited Ilya to a reading on Friday night at a Mission area bookstore.

He just was so clueless to my new opinion of him, even though I got ruder as the trip went on. By the time we got to the Bay Area I wanted to be done with him forever, but here he was giving me a ride way out of his way unnecessarily to my friend’s place in the South Bay. When he asked to meet up in SF at my reading, I agreed that he should come to it. I had hoped he would forget or become busy. He didn’t.

I declined to meet him early for dinner and texted I would meet at the bookstore. When I arrived at rock star timing, he was there already. He had come one hour earlier. I introduced him to my friend. He didn’t make any conversation at all. During the pregnant pause I noticed for the first time how one eye was larger than the other. He was a bit of an odd one.

I sat in the back, but not next to him. The host introduced himself and pointed to the readers. I waved. The first reader started. I would be second. Her story did not resonate with me, nor did her style. She read about indie rock shows in the 90s and the kinds of people that would go and places they would take place. Her voice was like, ya know, totally rocking because she was insecure and like, annoying for my age. She kept breaking her role as storyteller to ask the audience, “You know what I’m talkin’ about, right?”

“No. I don’t know what you are talking about”, blurted out in a Ukrainian accent, countered her question. Everyone stopped and looked at Ilya. He was actually heckling the reader. “You keep asking ‘do you know what I am talking about’ but no, some of us do not know. You should understand that some of us are not from this country.” The reader was speechless and you could hear a pin drop. Until she came back with, “Dude, what is your problem? Who is this guy?”

“I am from Ukraine and I do not share your experiences. It is OK but I am sharing with you that you are asking asking asking if we know but NO, I do not know!”

I slink down in my seat. Does anyone know he came in with me? I feel bad for him. His response is innocent and totally appropriate in his part of the world. Why did he have to say it out loud? Couldn’t he have just thought it to himself or saved it for afterwards? I’m up next, and I don’t want everyone hating me. I stare straight ahead like in school when you didn’t want to get called on.

She tried to go back to her reading, but couldn’t. “I can’t finish reading now, this guy just blew my mood. I can’t do this. This guy has to go.”

“You want me to get rid of him?” the host asks. Oh Christ, I think, as I stare straighter and think positive thoughts of disassociation.

“Yeah, I can’t finish this now. He ruined it.” The crowd boos and makes reassuring comments that it will be OK. She will rise again.

The host asks Ilya to leave. He has actually been kicked out of a bookstore zine reading for poor behavior. They go outside, and I’m frozen with fear that he will say something to me like, but I will miss your reading. I make eye contact with him, and then follow them outside. I apologize to the host, and I apologize to Ilya that he has been kicked out of a crummy zine reading. Oblivious as he was when inviting a drunk homeless person to vomit in his car, he asked me if we would meet up later.

“Maybe,” I lied.

We'll Never Have Paris 8 Rejection finalized

2011-04-21T15:48:00.004-04:00

We have a GREAT new issue coming out next month. I am feeling super good about it. I have spent a lot of hours on the format and editing. Just ask my boyfriend who insists I have had my face in a computer at all hours of the day. It may be ready in time for the Pete's Mini Zine Fest May 28, but cannot guarantee. You can pre-order a copy by replying to this email, or wait for it to be available on the blog or in your cool local but struggling indie book shop.

WNHP8 features:

front cover- Ero Gray; back cover - Gabriel Liston

Seth Kaplan

Josh Medsker

Joe Biel

anonymous

Karen Lillis

Ed Lin

Lauren Ridloff

Cynthia Ball

Bob Soper

Keith Landrum

and yours truly

egg on a roll - breakfast failures

2011-04-16T18:51:00.001-04:00

On my way to work; it's Saturday morning. Sitting on the train I pull my breakfast sandwich out of the bag, unwrap it and begin to eat. Every time I eat an egg on a roll it's a symbol of failure. I can count the days in between mostly as eating successes, though that is not entirely true, because there are days I eat nothing at all. Still, the egg on a roll is the personal mark of failure to me, sure as if I had gone off the wagon. Not that I am addicted to them. Just the opposite.

I have yet to master, or even show proficiency in, organizing my morning meal. That would mean organizing my morning before my first job, which no matter if it is at 8am or 12:30pm,it seems the results are similar. Me, visualizing the healthy breakfast: the smoothie, the walk to the smoothie on the way to work - and then, ten minutes later, it has somehow gone from having plenty of time to eat to probably going to be late for work, without stopping.

I am still reinventing the wheel every morning. I have no routine. The morning stretches lasted only a week. I do put my clothes out the night before, and know where I am headed, have a timesheet ready, usually also directions and an umbrella if I have checked the weather. But that's it.

As for breakfast, I never have food. 'That I want to eat', I add, but even just Food Itself. There is usually cereal, but I don't have time to eat it or I don't want to eat yet. I buy yogurt which I do deem a possibly acceptable breakfast but don't want to eat it; ever. Same for yogurt smoothies. I bring it in my bag and don't want it, then five hours later I wonder if it is still OK. Half the time I throw it away, telling myself it has surely spoiled, because I still don't want to drink it.

I don't know why.

What do I want for breakfast, you ask? My right brain wants yogurt and fruit, my left brain wants organic eggs and organic tomatoes on an everything bagel that is half as dense as a regular bagel. A mythological bagel. I end up with neither. The usual and best situation is to eat nothing and then have the late breakfast or lunch that I really want and have time for on most days I accomplish this. Often though, this is four hours after waking.

I am still hungry when I go to work.

The egg on a roll represents multi-layer failure. Failure to plan ahead. Failure to save money. Failure to support a better business paying fair wages to employees and using fair trade and local products. (I acknowledge that tomatoes have a short season and are therefore not local. I realized this week, after years in denial, that I must take control over my tomato consumption by eating only organic. I cannot eat another sandwich with shitty, mealy flavorless conventional tomatoes)

I pick up the sticky luke warm failure, lick the sticky sickly American cheese (isn't that symbolic enough that the fakest cheese in the world is American?) from my fingers, and hate my choice with each bite.

subway doors, like life

2011-04-05T08:55:00.001-04:00

If you live in or have visited NYC you are familiar with the triumph and failure of catching trains. You quicken your pace when you see people walking towards you, disembarking from an uptown or downtown train. Is it yours? You break into a sprint down the stairs, cutting through the crowd like salmon swimming upstream, and ideally burst through the closing subway doors, sometimes blocking the closure with your body. Sometimes, you get there just as the doors have closed and the train leaves without you. Sometimes the train doors have closed but it waits idling, taunting you with that "almost made it" feeling which you wouldn't mind if the train had actually left, yet it is still there. The conductor could open the doors, right now, and let you in. His chosen people.

This is like life isn't it? Here is what I have observed. People wanting to get on that train, knowing the train that should be theirs. I have been on all levels of acceptance myself, and observed the person-to-train interaction from all angles. Being on the train and watching from inside, if I am feeling self-righteous I am privately pleased the train is leaving without wasting another few seconds. If I pass someone racing down while I am prodding up and out, I feel empathetic, like a shared kinship.

Here is what I have noted. It doesn't matter how you handle the situation once those doors close. There is no secret answered. I used to think pounding the doors with your fist would get you give you a second chance. Maybe standing there patiently, smiling, would call up grace and the doors would open. Today I saw something in between. A patient wait, but with a touching of the door, like one fingering a tombstone, already knowing the chance is gone, yet still waiting, disbelieving as the train after idling, does not provide but leaves. I was exiting but paused to share a moment with this woman. She wasn't mad, just sorry, and I smiled and shrugged for her as if to say, I have been there.

We have all been there. Winners and losers on the subway of life. Entirely random. Out of our control, to some extent.

History of getting/giving musical equipment

2011-02-19T23:21:00.003-05:00

interesting history of getting/giving musical equipment

- Traded my old, extra flute for an alto saxophone while living in Portland, in 1994. Even though monetarily he took a loss, Tim Sax felt it was an even trade. The best part of this story is that his real name was Tim Sax, and he was an undergrad at Lewis and Clark, a California surfer looking little pot head jazz musician who did nothing but practice for hours a day. He said he was from SF, but it was really Walnut Creek, a good 40 minutes away on BART. I had committed to visiting while I was in Oakland, visiting my ex-boyfriend, who had left Portland despondent and then, without consulting me, up and joined the Coast Guard. I still have the saxophone.

- On two occasions, ended up with xylophone type instruments from different bands. A full size wooden marimba from a white hip-hop band called Milkshake. After playing our second gig, the marimba ended up in the trunk of my trunk, and we all spontaneously never talked to each other again. The lap sized metal xylophone I earned. I played it for many gigs in the Chromatic Persuaders, also in Portland. We were 100% experimental improv. I felt I had played that thing like no one had played it before, and when the band ended, I kept it, and still have it. My thing was, at least once a show, I would make music by keeping time with a pair of wooden claves, and beat the shit out of the xylophone with the claves, too, which was both melodic and rhythmic.

- I lost two electric guitars the same way. Absurdly, leaving them in the street. On one occasion, I was so excited to go jam with someone in hopes of joining a band, I had loaded musical gear into the back seat of my Volvo wagon, but not all of it, leaving the Silvertone right there on West St. The second time I left a guitar outside, it wasn’t even mine. So, there’s a problem. Me and Jaime both forgot it, indeed forgot about it until the next day, because I was in a hurry to get inside and watch The Simpsons. We went to Guitar Center, bought the same guitar, and never told the owner, who never noticed, as he honestly had about six other guitars and did a lot of drugs.

- I once drove to someone’s house, not too far away, with my flute on the roof of my car. Miraculously it did not fly off. I still have that flute, too.

- At a gallery party in Washington, DC, a woman I had just met offered me a Rickenbacker guitar amp. She just wanted me to have it. I had known her for about five minutes. She drove it to my apt a few days later, carried the big thing inside, and when I (weakly) offered her some money for it, told me it was OK. I still have that amp, too, but I confess I use it as a night stand.

- I lent a cheap electric guitar to a girl named Denali who I thought would be in my (last) band. We had one rehearsal and never called her again. I know I could have contacted her to get it back, but I just didn’t care about it. I hope at least she plays it. This was in NYC in maybe 2008.

karaoke friend grim reaper

2011-02-06T02:57:00.000-05:00

It's 2:39am and I just got home. I'm making raviolis. This is an unusually late night for me, so that means karaoke. There is one reason and one reason only that keeps me out past 1am, even on a weekend: karaoke. Guys, I love you. Tonite was Jim's birthday. But Before Dori knew it was Jim's birthday, she had been trying to organize a surprise karaoke evening with all my friends, even though it is not my birthday at all. Jim didn't want me to miss out on this, so he organized his birthday around it. But because we have the same friends and wanted to keep the surprise, he turned his birthday dinner into something small and intimate, because the extra friends were waiting for karaoke. Naturally in turn, I wanted him to have a fun birthday and had even pitched karaoke, but for him, as a birthday idea. I was surprised at the small dinner invitation, plus I felt guilty for that he didn't invite Dori and Axel. True, they were newer friends, and he had invited only me, his girlfriend, and his oldest friends. Still, I felt weird. I wanted to have a much more fun Saturday night, but I had spent the last four of Jim's birthdays with him, with large and small gatherings, and as an old old friend, I wanted to be there for him, even though I was missing out on a roller skating party.

They pulled it off, and even when we walked into a W 35th St address labeled 'karaoke', I still hadn't guessed it. Then we walked in, and there was everyone, well, almost. Everyone said, "surprise!" "But it's Jim's birthday, not mine!" I said. "But this is your surprise welcome back from Spain!" was the reply.

I am reminded of the story by O. Henry called "The Gift". The husband trades his watch for hair combs for his wife. The wife cuts her hair for money to buy her husband a chain for his pocketwatch.

Moral of the story: I have great friends. I've moved around in my adult life, and with every move, been forced to start again with friendships, which I care a great deal about cultivating. I've gambled and lost, and waited. I have made some great friendships here, with the oldest of friends moving here when I did, or already here, and recently, new and fast friends after so many false starts with the wrong people. So, thank you, universe.

When I die, that moment of leaving my body and spiriting onward - I want that to be a karaoke flashback. Then, I can die with a smile on my face. I don't care how old I am. I'm sure of it.

Barcelona 'a-ha' moment 2: SPORTS IMPAIRED

2011-01-23T17:41:00.000-05:00

Soccer is the only sport I don't despise, and I was actually looking forward to going to the FCB (Football Club of Barcelona) game last Sunday in the 100,000 person stadium. Jon excitedly informed me that FCB is one of the best teams in the world. I know soccer fans are spirited in a pleasing European way, unless there is a riot, instead of a testosterone-laden, product advertisement heavy American football way, which is essentially a riot at every game as far as I am concerned. Alas, even with great seats and nothing to focus on but the game, I couldn't follow the neon yellow ball, even with all the players surrounding it, even as it scored. The crowd would stand in anticipation for every close call, and sit back down if the goal was thwarted, or yell and clap and remain standing with every goal scored. I felt like I was attending a church service where I didn't know the language. I would stand when the crowd stood, sit when the crowd sat, and with a few second lag time, try to fake cheering in the way that the crowd did for something I had totally missed and felt no passion for. "YAAAYYY!" (look knowingly at other fans) (fist thrust into the air) (twirl scarf)

I thought, now I understand how Jon feels when I drag him to see a dance. He can see the dancing, but is missing the cues, the music, the emotion that leads the movement. I thought, I have a sports impairment, both receptive and expressive. I don't get watching sports, I don't care about sports, and I have never played sports. I played on no team of any kind in any year of school. I didn't identify with any athletic action or envy those that did.

What I most regret is the skills I could have gained by utilizing my body in a sport. Even more, I know I missed out on the social skills one gets from teaming. Supporting each other, communicating in a hurry, conflict resolution, following rules. Why did I think so lowly of physical activity for so many years? Why was I so lazy?

I would, I really would like to be able to follow a ball zig-zagging across a field.

Barcelona 'a-ha' moment 1: FLAMENCO

2011-01-22T01:22:00.002-05:00

Music used to mean more to me in life than it has over recent years. For different factors, aging, having a deaf boyfriend, ceasing to be a musician, less need for this stream of information, being jaded, and I will add stability versus emotional chaos and panic like exposed nerve endings. When planning this trip to Barcelona, when I thought about what I would really like to make an effort to see, I thought about flamenco. I can remember like it was yesterday going to Moto, I believe it was the first time I was taken there, and hearing live flamenco guitar and singing. Moto is overwhelmingly other-worldly in time and place, a World War II bomb shelter of a restaurant in the ass crack of Williamsburg, dripping in detail and candlelight. Though there really is no room for live music, amazingly it is there and on this evening there was flamenco, which I had never heard before. The woman was singing, as though she was depraved. Every song was full throttle emotion, start to finish, accompanied by rhythm and then counter-rhythm clapping. I was transfixed.

After internet searches that listed flamenco and dinner kinds of shows, which I didn't want to do, just before I lost patience we found a listing for Barcelona's flamenco club, Tarantos. There were live shows every evening, and several per night since the shows were only 30 minutes long, keeping it affordable and easy to attend. I honestly wasn't sure if a flamenco show meant music or dance or both, but I liked that Jon was willing to go and that we could walk there from our apartment.

We sat in the front row. The musicians started a song, and didn't seem to have their hearts into it. Still, when the singer began, I recognized and was relieved she sang in that rough, masculine vocal style that is real flamenco. I had only heard flamenco a few time and was far from an expert, but I wasn't sure if women would sing like men, or if it would be different. No, she had the depravity - grieving, like a mourner at a funeral. A few minutes into the second song, the dancer emerged from behind the curtain like a cowboy with guns drawn. Ready; has always been ready and could take you down right now. Her face was dead serious - stern, no smile, and her presence overwhelming. You couldn't take your eyes off of her. To jump ahead, I will tell you that right away I knew I was coming back to Tarantos tomorrow for another show. I was so grateful that I could see and hear this show. This is not meant to be a club or music review. I am writing because I had a few a-ha moments regarding flamenco and here is what they are.

1. Flamenco dancers are totally masculine and feminine at the same time.
2. As I watched, I figured out (I could wiki flamenco dance to see if I am right but I don't want to, I like my analysis) that this is woman's response to bullfighting. The moves, she tells a story. She is the matador and then the bull, like role playing. The outfit includes a matador's jacket; she moves as if she is dancing with the bull, then becomes the bull, clearly snorting and stomping. To me it couldn't be clearer that this dance is based on, if not the actual telling of, a bullfight.

3. I saw four dancers, 2 each show. The lead performer each night was a woman in her 40s, I would even say 50s. And these cougars were without question the better of the dancers. I loved it. More than loved it, I was relieved, inspired, grateful, proud! The experience of life, dance and sex was in your face. Thank you, Spain for honoring older women!

4. Flamenco singing is like Arabic style but in the Spanish language. Think of an imam calling people to prayer. Half of me was pulled to the dancing, almost spasmodic and jerking, like watching a boxer in the ring with a one-two punch, and half of me was lulled to the language of my ancestors that has always felt deep in my soul like something that is mine. The singing is stylized, like the blues, seemingly improvised and needing band encouragement in the form of hoots and commands -'alle!' Or maybe it was 'ole!' like in bullfighting. I want to take flamenco lessons.

new york clocks

2010-11-23T18:28:00.001-05:00

My own Yelp

2010-11-23T18:22:00.000-05:00

So, I am in the mood to do some product reviews. Not that I feel the need to justify, but yeah, I don't do this for any extrinsic motivation or reward.

Since I've cleaned my apartment, I've been feeling good and extra domestic. Staying home, reading a book! I've ordered in and then eaten leftovers the next day, prompting food reheating as a precursor to actual cooking and food buying, things I never, ever do. Went to the farmers market at Tompkins Square Park on Sunday (thanks, Pam, as always for the Ronnybrook) and then to Sustainable NYC next door, which is where I purchased the Allafia hair cream. Then yesterday, to buy items I couldn't get at the seasonal farmer's market for the salad I am making for Thanksgiving, I went to Commodities Natural Market on 1st Ave, which is where I got the kale chips, chocolate and Pro bars. The apartment is still clean, 4 days later, since we have had and are still having visitors. And, yesterday I ate more home leftovers. This is my mini East Village hipster domesticity record. Reviews!

Allafia hair cream. perhaps subconsciously I chose this because it is nearly exactly my last name. I got it first in San Francisco and love it. My hair and face actually quickly max on products, so I rarely buy an item a second time. But Allafia is making the grade. I have curly, but fine hair. This hair cream is perfect. I personally apply it about an hour after my hair is dry. I can use it twice a day, after that, it's too heavy. It gives me just the semblance of hold and de-friz, which is good enough for me. Fair trade product. They also make lotions and lip balms.

Sabra hummus. So, I'm Lebanese and Syrian. For years my hummus was the pride of my lineage. I would never have dreamed of purchasing packaged hummus. No friggin way! Then over the last several years I have discarded cooking and food prep altogether. One day, probably only to prove my point as an elitist, I tasted Sabra hummus. In a few bites I went from, this isn't too bad to, OK I admit it is fucking awesome. Now I have to admit I am a little addicted. Why does hummus, like guacamole, taste as satisfying and delicious and decadent as like, chocolate mousse? So, I know this is not an organic product and there are other organic hummuses out there, but I am not ready.

Ronnybrook Farms products. True story. One day Jon and I were at the TSP farmer's market. We browsed the Ronnybrook table and the sprite-like vendor Pam took a liking to our use of ASL and our cuteness as a couple. She threw lots of free extra dairy products in our bag and sent us with a smile on our way. Does she do this for every cute couple? I'm not sure, but we sure like Pam (this has been going on for two years now) and we love the local yogurt, milk, butter, ice cream, half and half, etc. She told me Ronnybrook has only 80 cows. Go buy at the Farmer's Market because Pam loves when she has less stuff to throw back in the van.

Gnosis Raw Chocolate. Holy cow. There is no reason why you wouldn't eat this daily. There are several flavors to choose from. This is my current favorite. It's Fleur de Sel: raw chocolate with Himalayan sea salt. I now know that raw chocolate is ass full of anti-oxidants, and that dairy blocks the absorption or whatever or anti-oxidants in regular chocolate. This chocolate also packs blue green algae. So it tastes unbelievable, is good for you (for real) and is 100% hand made and comes in recycled packaging. It's pricey, but who gives a shit.

Pro Bar. I really like these. Not advocating that a packaged bar should substitute a real meal. Even the best of these are still high in fat and sugars, but with that said, this one is the best of them. For me, it's the choice between spending $3.29 for a small healthy bar I can throw in my bag versus eating the NY food cart staples, or, nothing at all. Not a morning person.

New York Naturals Vegan raw kale chips. Food technology is amazing! This is great: get my kale intake while eating a chip. They taste good, what else can I say. It's kale, and normally kale is not top of my snacking list. They are ahem, expensive, so if you don't need these, you could skip it.

OK this was tedious and probably unnecessary but hey, haven't written in a while.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We'll Never Have Paris - submission guidelines

2010-11-21T21:58:00.000-05:00

My mission statement is to publish new and first-time writers of creative, narrative, essay-like nonfiction. A chance to 'tell your story', think of it as the written version of camp fire stories. The story must be true and also fit the theme of 'all things never meant to be' or 'tales of regret'. WNHP is no longer accepting poetry submissions. Drawings however are welcomes, as well as lists of Facebook status messages. I love those.

The submission criteria may sound super specific but it's not. It could be literal or abstract. The theme for issue 8 will be 'rejection'. So either an actual rejection from a club, from publication, from friends, or maybe a trip through your mind's insecurities - a rejection of happiness. Ideas? Start writing. If you send it to me, I promise to read it and if it doesn't work for me, I will tell you why and see if we can make it work with editing.

Deadline is March 1.

butter lane sign

2010-11-21T19:09:00.001-05:00

butter lane sign
Originally uploaded by facultylounge

yay cupcakes on sale. N0v 21, 2010.

maria andria clock

2010-11-21T19:08:00.001-05:00

maria andria clock
Originally uploaded by facultylounge

Make Your Own Clock Party - 2nd annual.

want to make a clock? Individual or private party, newyorkclocks@yahoo.com

maria clock tin

2010-11-21T19:07:00.001-05:00

P1030565
Originally uploaded by facultylounge

Make Your Own Clock Party - 2nd annual.

want to make a clock? Individual or private party, newyorkclocks@yahoo.com

leigh clock drill

2010-11-21T19:06:00.001-05:00

leigh clock drill
Originally uploaded by facultylounge

Make Your Own Clock Party - 2nd annual.

want to make a clock? Individual or private party, newyorkclocks@yahoo.com

Many see famous people in NY. I just see Eileen Myles.

2010-09-14T18:45:00.000-04:00

Seriously, I see her a few times a week, on 2nd or 1st Avenue. She must live around the corner from me.

Memoir, 1996

2010-09-07T23:46:00.000-04:00

In July of 1996 I packed some clothes, a 4-track, my flute, sax and tin whistle and went to Ireland on an open ended ticket. This was a year of firsts. A nose piercing, a new teacher, and newly married. I didn't quit my job, but I had no job to return to. I was hired on an emergency certificate which didn't promise me any position in the fall.

I also wasn't quitting my marriage, though it looks like it on paper doesn't it? I was going on a solo trip just five months into it. This was, however, completely in line with my life at the time. I had a life line across the ocean to support me from afar. Maybe less 'support' and more 'don't stop me' would be more accurate.

We didn't live together. We married in Las Vegas on his weekend leave. We drove through a snowstorm in his jeep, were married by an Elvis impersonator, and took separate flights home afterward. There was no honeymoon and our only souvenir consisted of three Polaroid photos that costs fifteen dollars.

I had more support from friends who were actually around. These were people that reflected my transforming life, running me into conflict between who I wanted to really be and the person that held down a real 9 to 5ish job.

I kind of had the best of both worlds. Of the 3 and a half housemates, I was the only one making enough money to sock it away for a lengthy trip. I made 1050 a month (or was it 1500) and my rent was 200. I had nearly no expenses. I laugh now but this was my first venture in alternative living. I thought it was great. I couldn't even breathe in Regular America in 1995 and 1996. Couldn't bear to go inside a furnished house with magnetic note pads on the refrigerator and suburban wall paper. Wall paper? We didn't have furniture. No curtains, not dresser, no TV, a broken phone that didn't ring. Not for trying to be cool and chic either. It simply never crossed our minds.

To give an example, when my brother came to visit once, he took me to the department store to buy things like a bath mat and an extra towel. Not for my benefit, but for himself for the two nights he and his friend were staying over. We all gathered, impressed, around the bath mat, gaping at the added color and promise of comfort. My brother and his friend stayed only one night and went red eye the next day. We still laugh about it. He was totally out of his element.

At the time it wasn't funny to my family, who got the report at my Bohemian house and freaky, unemployed housemates with rotating house guests without last names. They knew I held a professional job, but didn't know I had married. Now they were told I was going to Europe, starting with Ireland, for an indefinite amount of time. My mother forbade me, then upon realizing that was impossible, begged me not to go. They couldn't in their wildest dreams fathom what possessed me.

And possessed I was. 1996 was new to other things as well. My friend and I had hopped a freight train without knowing where it would go or how we could get back to Portland. This quietly sparked the long waiting fuse to get out of here, while music was all that everyone around me that mattered was doing. Traditional Irish music was new to me, too. I was mad for the foot-stomping circular rhythms of reels, jigs and hornpipes of the East Ave Tavern. Half of the tavern were actually from the country and it seemed like everyone had been and was going. So I decided why not.

Music infected me. My best friend at the time was a Bob Dylan wannabee. Living the lifestyle, driving herself cross country and busking for money. Searching for romance through poverty if you will. I felt conflicted. I liked being near this but didn't have the balls to unlearn my working for the man. I didn't want what she wanted as badly, yet the songs started to come to me anyway.

Once I wrote a whole song in my head while driving home from work. The melody, the lyrics, from my head composed in the air. I pulled up and parked in front of my house and wrote it all down in my notebook lest I forget it by exiting the vehicle, like waking from a dream.

I spent six months of this Bohemian year living like a gypsy hitchhiking through Ireland, staying with strangers, following sessions as far as France. Men I met and traveled with were confused as fuck that I was not only not ready to roll but was a married woman. I never feared and didn't care. I thumbed it because I couldn't stop myself. I would lumber under my giant green backpack towards the bus, and my thumb would go out. Standardized transportation was too much like standardized housing, too much like the kinds of adults I wasn't ready to become yet. I even tried to spend a night sleeping in a castle ruins under the stars, but chickened out when I saw broken glass and feared I wouldn't be alone, or feared that I would be.

I went not only to play Irish music but to play other kinds and work on writing my own. When I started my trip at a friend's hookup in London, I left the heavy saxophone there until I figured out where I wanted to stay. After I decided on Galway for a few months, I settled in on my own music. With the help of musicians I'd met at the hostel and at shows and the cafe I worked at under the table I wrote and recorded eight songs on a 4 track recorded. The cassette tape cover art was a black and white xerox photo of our wedding Polaroid, profile full body shot.

There was only one copy and as I write this memoir I hope when I go home I can find it. I don't play music anymore. I can't explain it. I haven't been back to Ireland since but that was the start of the wanderlust behind my travels and moves to different cities. I am in many ways the same risk taker in personality, but less as the years go by. My spirit of adventure remains, but here is how youth differs from age. My emotional capacity is split between the future and the past, whereas in youth we have only the future to look to. I travel in fact am writing this in flight home to NY from Portland, a city now full of sentiment for the friends and music and times I have just described.

And when I return home I want to find that lone remaining souvenir, the culmination and the reward of my Bohemian year. Look at it again and stare, dumbfounded at the woman I was in 1996 recording her first album in Galway City, Ireland with her now ex-husband not present, but at least represented on the cover.

"You came HERE for this?"

2010-09-04T22:32:00.000-04:00

When I engage people in conversation today at my SFZF table and tell them I am here from NYC, they ask me "Did you come here for this?" Not in a sarcastic, but possibly surprised way. Did I come all the way across country to sit at a table to sell four-dollar zines?

"No", I answer. "I also did the Portland Zine Symposium last week. I used to live in both cities, so I come to see friends and also do the zine fest."

Then some people went on to tell me their NY moment in life, while other people didn't seem to care whether I was local or not, disinterested in me or their zine.

One guy used the zine fest to try to pick me up. "What's a zine?" he asked. I explained it innocently. He then went on to ask about my Blackberry Pearl and if I was satisfied with it. Is this guy a shill for the company I thought. Trying to market below the radar to the indie crowd. Still not getting his angle, he pretty directly told me I was a cute NY Jew and did I want to get a drink after the show. "It's OK you have a boyfriend, a drink doesn't mean anything. Man, I would move back to NJ for you." This went on, and never one to slam the door, waited for him to take the hint. Wrong. While standing there going on about his hots for me, he actually got a boner. I got rid of him by giving him my email. Should have given a false one, but oh well.

So, what did I come here, to the zine fests, for? In fact, why do I do a zine in the first place?

I don't know.

I am not having a bad time. My one complaint being, why does zine fest have to equal not showering? Happily my table neighbors both at PZS (Hi Seth and Gabby!) and SFZF (hi Tomas and Amy!) are clean and delightful, but there was some serious hygiene issues happening today. Also, I have been selling zines and trading, when I want to. Mostly I don't accept trade. But, truthfully, am I the person doing this? I don't read a ton of zines. I don't trade except on occasion. I wouldn't sleep on someone's couch to do this. I constantly tally my sales and make cost versus earnings updates. I am 39 years old, well beyond the mean.

Also, I am not selling and printing my writing. That's the whole other new question for myself. Why am I working this hard to solicit submissions for complete strangers, sending reminders, sometimes practically begging, for someone's shot in the dark work. I read submissions that frankly suck. Folks who couldn't have possibly ever tried their piece out on a friend first. Who haven't read my zine first to get an idea, or if they have, miss the mark. I am a hard-to-please, greying, middle class fuck.

Sales. I love to sell. I am sure every zinester in the world would spit on me for the capitalist bend, my handicapping priority, but it is true. It is a thrill when someone buys my clock, zine, two-dollar hair clip, one-dollar hand made card. Print. I am a sucker for print and paper. Community. Zine folks are great, mostly. People with less money than me are ready to give me their zine for free, 'just take it'. Leadership. I like being the zine curator. This is my visual plus verbal art that is mostly all mine.

Also, the name We'll Never Have Paris is too cool to give up yet.

I got offered a gig interpreting a cruise next month. I was requested specifically by name. Sweet! I checked my calendar though, and bummer. Same weekend as Richmond Zine Fest.

See you Oct 16 in Richmond. With Volume 7, after I harangue more folks for submissions.

Check it out on the blog or buy or borrow a copy, then submit an essay, drawing, laundry list.

i changed my mind about movie prices

2010-08-26T17:34:00.001-04:00

I am still reliving the movie "I am love" with tilda swinton. This is not a movie review. I used to scoff at the high price of movies today. And yeah maybe the price is too high, the profit margin unnecessarily deep. What I can say is, what other art form can hold my attention, but more, take me out of my world and drop me back into it, with an entire story to visually and experientually and auditorily remember, for 2 hours, for 12 dollars?

If movies cost less maybe I would go more often and this experience would become the commute of life. Again, this doesn't apply to all movies. Right now though, I kind of feel like I would spend 100 dollars to have the experience I have sucked into the black box of the movie theater. Larger than life, shocking, predictable, oh but not, anticipating, fearing, all with the soundtrack that has been planned to match, like food and wine pairing.

What I don't get is why movies are so accessible and mainstream? Also, do actors need to be paid what they are paid? Then again, the quality of convincing acting is revered since the dawn of time right? (are there cultures of people that frown upon acting?)
Naturally when I revere these movies I hope it goes without saying that I am speaking of films. Sorry I just now 3 paragraphs into it realized that the word is film. Not special effects and computerized magic.

I was raptured by the film I am love and in particular tilda's performance. I wonder now, could regular people act? I know tv and lesser movies employ regular untrained actors for that rough look. Really though. What about acting is most powerful? Isn't it what's conveyed without words, in the eyes, in the face? Are there really hours upon hours of practice to learn how to summon the picture of despair?

At the end of this film, just as the closing credits roll, laughter bursts out in the row behind me. This was anything but a funny movie, and I felt as If I had been abruptly awoken from a nap with a few cruel shoves. What the fuck, why were they laughing, I turned around, saw 4 people smiling and giggling. It totally ruined my experience.

11 years worth of insecurities down the drain

2010-08-08T18:11:00.001-04:00

It hit me today, Sunday, just after brunch with Rhea and Dori in New Paltz as I stepped outside into the sun. No it is not the first time I have thought it. But I think this time it will stick, because of the spontaniety and clarity of the thought, that I don't have to live like this. I calculated how long I think I have been insecure, because I was not at all always like this. After the divorce, after I moved to the Bay Area. How did it happen? Well this is not the time to dwell on it. I know how I am, I don't need to go into detail. In fact, the opposite. I am way to in my own head. I really could just, snap, live the life as the person I want to be. The person I am, just not always, just not always in my control. Because I freeze in insecurity of action and thought, I am quick to judge, to change mood, but even more, to leave the locus of control over myself. I let go of the handle bars and lunge for the situation, only to make it nutty. I know I get delusional that things are about me that aren't. Or, they are, but I didn't handle things properly so that it wouldn't be about me.

Ah, it doesn't matter anymore, I know it. And I am done. It sounds absurdly simple, I sound like a head case, like I have had a labotomy, like the weight of the world has been lifted from me, but that is what I need and want and really, is true. It is true. There is no weight. There is no weirdness. There is less to control than I think. There is less to ask and answer than I think, well, different conversations to have. Everything will be OK.

Visually, it came to be in the restaurant bathroom before I stepped outside. I could benefit from a poster of the Solar System. Check it out, it is the perfect visual metaphor. The sun and the planets and orbits of rotation. I am not the sun. I am a planet. And my friends are other planets. And we are on different orbits around the sun, different speeds, different sizes and shapes and chemical make up, and sometimes we line up. That's it! And the sun is no one, the sun is just life. The sun just is. But I am not the sun. We are all moving, and we don't control it, and times goes by, and that's it.

Mostly. You know how you feel when you are returning from vacation? Relaxed and removed, but not in a skeptical judgmental way like an auditor. Not out of step, and not behind. Not really, because you missed nothing, and everyone is waiting for you, mostly. No one waited for you, things happened for good and for bad, but you get caught up, and you didn't miss anything. But you feel ready to make self-improvements. Then what do we say? "Life happened." What does that mean? Is life something happening only when you are in control? Or not in control? Where are our priorities? Why don't we live the lives we want to? Why aren't we the people we want to be? But really, I mean, not like, why aren't I a ballet dancer, but why don't I read more books like I want to?

For me it is relationships with people, relationships that happen with people: friends, work, family, things I need to order and find and manage. I was, once, believe it or not, very laid back and secure. Not sensitive, not clumsy and afraid. Like, you know what has to stop? Contacting people for me and not for them. And not doing ideas as they come to me, but also to remain balanced, not always existing for the future and ideas and new. I am gonna read. Most importantly, I am going to challenge myself professionally by reaching out for mentoring experiences, more in the Deaf community, and stop jumping to negative conclusions and doubt. With people and myself.

I am done. It will be that easy. I know how to interact in society. The time I spend in my head benefits no one. What a waste. How did it just come to me now? I guess thousands of prompts from friends and family who have had to listen to my interpretations of situations have finally sunk in. All that insecurity down the drain. Think about it, why on earth am I clinging to a broken way of being.

I have never wanted to be phony, but I believe now the phoniness comes from not having a genuine reaction, to avoid what I perceive to be a conflict in my self evaluation.

typecast podcast castaway

2010-07-18T00:30:00.001-04:00

I had a choice. I was at the fork in the road. I remember it clearly as one of the clearest situations in life I had a 50 50 shot at that would define who I am.

Watching nature documentaries on tv. We were a tv household and my dad owned the remote. There were a few family sitcoms we habitually watched but if the mood struck, say it was a rerun or he just felt like it, bam - WWII documentary. Or nature documentary. He would watch the shows with the british narrator and a lion stalking a hyena, and then going in for the kill. The lion would chase the hyena and then catch it and violently rip its flesh and eat it. Or, a cub would be separated from its mama, also perhaps in predatory conquest and my mother would say "I can't watch this.". My father would reply, Donna this is nature.". He would go on heartlessly watching nature take it course, and she would tear up.

This moment. I had a choice. To be a man or to be a woman. And I despised her weakness.

This is me, my whole lifetime later, regurgitating my choice, played out in every interaction. I have never had the luxury of transition. Every engine, every moment, my choice to be a man because I had never been a mother. Therefore, I chose not to be a woman. I met it all, bat swinging and curses flying. Everything but the predictable cigarettes and whiskey, sorry, scotch.

Now as repentance, I do cry alone when I watch nature documentaries. I even cry at pixar films. I knew when my mother died that the family life as I knew it would instantly end, and that I would have to bear that knowledge amidst the facade alone, and I was right. I guess nature took its course.

Definitely a zine fest, July 31 Pete's MZF

2010-07-13T10:34:00.002-04:00

Definitely a zine fest, July 31 Pete's MZF

So, so pleased with how magically this has come together. I feel like a real show promoter. So, there I was, on the phone, as always, balls to the wall, cold calling Pete's Candy Store and asking about hosting a zine fest there. I had meant to just get an email and politely hang up, sorry to bother you, an email for Andy, but I felt that maybe the guy on the phone could help me out, that my email to Andy would directly go unnoticed, and the House of Yes was about to fall through, and I had all these people and more emailing me daily to ask if they could get a table, too.

So on the phone I say, "Listen, I've got this zine fest and I need a place to host it..." And then it becomes clear a few minutes into it that the guy on the phone is Andy, or has power to book events, which I did not expect. So, without knowing me from Adam, and on the phone, I went from no possible dates, to a weekday, holding my ground, and getting a Saturday afternoon. I would say I brokered pretty well - with nothing to leverage with really! The only thing better would have been Sunday afternoon when they hold their weekly BBQ. Elated, I hung up the phone (and went to work but) immediately after work, phoned Margo (the Hookah Girl author), who had been the one to forward the call for zinesters to so many people. I told her I needed her on board and we needed to make this awesome. And she did and we are.

July 31, 3-7pm, the one the only Pete's Candy Store, Williamsburg.
Free entry, over 20 zinesters, authors, photographers, authors, and live music by John Henry Olthoff, Rad Unicorn, Scott Magri, and sarah y sue cachito

www.petescandystore.com

1-800-FAKEMOM

2010-06-26T10:30:00.003-04:00

Seven years later, and I still wanna call my mom. Not eat her cooking or hug her real tight, but call her. Maybe because I lived away for so many years, I guess that's the reason. We had a long distance relationship so I would call often just to shoot the shit or check in. Maybe for advice but not often because I didn't want her to worry.
Also maybe because that was the first thing to go. She was unable to take my calls months before she died. Here is a phone call to fake mom.

Hi ma. I haven't talked to you in a long time. What happened? Yeah I'm good, keeping busy. You know work is slow in the summer. No ma, I'm not gonna take another job, stuff comes in at the last minute. I know, I'm trying to eat out less. Jon is good. Yes, he's working. Right now he's in DC visiting his brother.

Its been so long I don't know what to say. If I was calling 1800FAKEMOM I would talk more often and it would be less awkward. She would already know the names and back stories. Or she could go along with it. I guess she's a professional. I could ask her stuff and she would know the answers. (could I fax her a cheat sheet ahead of time like a meeting agenda or budget report?)

Ma, what do think about dad moving down here? I know he's impulsive but no, I do think its a good idea. I told him yeah I'm totally behind it. Did he tell you what aunt Virginia said to him? I'm sorry, but she's crazy. (Would I say the word bitch? If I wouldn't say it to Real Mom could I say it to Fake Mom?)

Have you been going for walks? Is it nice there? Its super hot and sticky here. Are you eating? How are the aunts? You guys went to lunch at the cafe? That's nice. Who paid? Ha, of course you didn't! Why do you do that all the time? Its not right.

I'm coming in August. Don't worry I am coming for a week. I know, we'll see, maybe longer. OK I gotta go ma. I love you.

Talk later.

ANALOG FRIENDSHIP

2010-06-16T23:55:00.002-04:00

ANALOG FRIENDSHIP

Mission: To rejuvenate online, long distance and occasional friendships through physical, real contact.

Musings: Inspired by Miranda July, the band Horse Feathers and the postcards from Jaime found cleaning out my apartment on May 4, 2010.

Methodology: While seeing the band my mind wandered to my friend, Vincent. I recalled a story he told me about writing something on a bar napkin and realized that while I have known him for years I don't think I have ever seen his writing. I then thought of all the friendships I have that are
- entirely digital via email, text, facebook
- friends I haven't seen in years
- acquaintances I haven't gotten to know as friends

Material: This is the postcard I am mailing. My goal is to everyone I am 'friends' with on Facebook, though I will start with actual friends that meet my personal criteria. You are welcome to reproduce this reminder card and send it to your friends, this is open source material. You can change it or use it as a launching board for a creative project or pie chart.

All I ask is that you SHARE your results. Please post your friend's replies, your revised checklists, photos of you and your friend doing an item on the list, scanned letters back from friends.

I can hear again; or, Internet Poker

2010-06-13T22:42:00.001-04:00

Internet poker has been the downfall of my free time. I blame this on Jon. I even removed the program from my computer once but during a time of boredom probably during the winter when I have no friends, reinstalled it. When I could be reading a book; poker. When I could be taking the guitar out of the closet and finally planting it in an accessible place: poker. I could blame a good number of things on Jon' otherwise known as the Slow Demise.

I have gotten away from myself and this started when I stopped playing music. I have been in a musicless coma for a few years now. For a while, I didn't know anyone in a band and that was the problem. Then, everyone I knew was in a band, and that was the problem. I felt that I didn't want to lead a band anymore and be responsible for keeping it afloat with perseverance, creativity and dignity. I was tired of being asked what we sounded like and then I was tired of what we didn't sound like. The last band I was in, Jane Lee, lead to half of the band starting their own musical ventures that have proven fruitful with albums, bands and gigs, while the remaining member was just relieved to have more time to dance.

I felt a little 'fuck you' to bands for a while, maybe a year or more. Then I felt envious. Then I felt that each person in a band recently has been 'the world's smallest violin' playing a tiny song of ironic hipster pity for me, briefly, and then going off to it's band practice. After meeting yet so many more people (read: everyone that was not deaf) who play music, this week I decided, OK I think it is time. Actually I have felt it was time for a few months, but laziness and attitude held me over a bucket. Part of this changes with realizing that a lot of things could change in my life as I find myself again celebrating my existence as a hearing person. Have I forgotten that I can hear? Kind of, in a way. I've buried what I can do for valid reasons, but there is no reason to continue without giving it another try. Like yoga. Like love. I've forgotten that I can love and maybe start again and maybe I am not too old for - well - many things.

I don't want to put the cart before the horse, but I would like to drum and sing. I don't want to go back to what I am good at (flute and sax) and I don't want to try to improve my guitar playing (I suck but I can write) and I don't want to be the lead singer because while I could in a way, I don't like standing in front of everyone and singing. Drums plus vocals would be where to go now.

So, I did play internet poker this evening instead of reading a book. Ate my dinner while staring at the screen and didn't even get up for water, too. But, I did listen to music while I played and noticed that Danielson has a new (to me) album and I won some money. So maybe there is hope for change.

Send me a band and a new boyfriend. Thanks.

hair follies

2010-04-18T00:18:00.006-04:00

hair follies

Don't we all love hair? To wash it, blow it dry, scrunch, fluff and shake hair? Guys, girls, teenagers, kids, parents - we all love hair. Our hair is our identity. It is our power. Or mockery of our defeat.

My hair is naturally curly, not too thick and not too thin. On good days it is curly, on bad days it's frizzy, but once in a great while, I have perfect spiral curls that hold their shape all day and I look magnificent. I know a lot of women would kill for my curls, while many with curly hair go to great lengths to straighten their hair spending time with brushes and blow dryers. I let mine air dry. Women have asked me if I ever wanted to straighten it? If you have had long curly hair for as short a time as I have, maybe you too would not want to fuck it up and play God.

Yes my hair is naturally curly as I said, but I didn't grow up like you. I didn't know I had 'good hair' to borrow the term, until high school. For reasons my mother never explained, she didn't grow my hair. I had a boy's cut all the way to age 11. My mother had close cut hair, her two sisters had close cut hair. She had another much older sister with a 1950's bleached platinum beehive so she didn't weigh in, and yet another sister with curly thick hair that was chin length at best who lived out of state and wasn't around to be a hair model. My father's sisters had close cut hair. No one had hair that moved and swayed in the breeze so neither did I.

Girls, understand! I never had pigtails. I never had ponytails! I didn't wear braids tied with ribbons to match my birthday party dress. Nothing for boys to pull, nothing to try and oops! cut myself. I had nothing to compare it to at the time but looking back it was a kind of torture. It is one thing not to be blond but to deny a little girl pigtails is a piece of childhood gone missing.

In fact, I was so ignorant of hair care I clearly remember going to school all the time without combing my hair or so much as looking in the mirror. I found a photo of myself standing in our driveway leaning on my mother's 1980s Chrysler. The polyester boys' shirt didn't help. I wasn't a tomboy per se either. I would say I was neutral. Again, I feel certain that long hair would have pushed me over the borderline into full-on princess. I wanted a Strawberry Shortcake Doll, but I didn't want a pony. I liked pink but didn't have much of an opinion on clothes so I wore whatever was around. Somehow in 5th grade, my hair started to grow or my mother let it grow without running me to Mr. Peacoff who cut old ladies' hair.

Then everything is a blur until about 10th grade. My hair was long enough that I could get a perm. But wasn't my hair naturally curly? I am from central NY which is essentially like being from one of the following: a) NJ, b) Long Island, c) parts of Florida. By this I mean, HAIR and NAILS. NAILS AND HAIR. Lots and lots of hair sprayed permed hair. Nails with nails on top of them. So odds are, as I no longer remember, I got a perm on top of hair that had some fullness but no shape whatsoever.

What did my hair look like before the perm? I asked my oldest friend to find out. Here is what she said:
"Your hair was always so short when you were younger. Once in fifth grade it was a little longer and quite wavy. Yes, I do remember the perm--we both got them at Hollands (Steinbachs) department store in the NH shopping center. I can't forget that because yours was so tight it looked like little Cheerios all over your head and I couldn't stop laughing! From then on, beautiful curls---I'll say you got your moneys worth."

I got a perm...and it lasted a few months, then a year, then two. "Wow", everyone said, "your perm has lasted a long time!" I just never needed one again. I discovered in 10th grade that I had really nice hair that had been waiting to come out like a bear in hibernation. Of course, I could have just done the wash and go, like I have done since my freshman year of 1990 but in high school, I would take that thick curly hair, blow dry it upside down for maximum fullness- wait for it, then a curling iron then hairspray it all into a firm mountain of fro. I've seen some photos, and if my mother should have been involved in hair decisions, it should have been then. But she was too busy forbidding that I wear hats. And that is another story. My mother hated my thick long hair and she hated that I liked hats.

For the next ten years, whenever I would need a haircut I would just ask a friend to do a trim, straight across, curl by curl. From the porch window into the bathroom, my mother would call out in a sing-song voice, "If you slip with the scissors, I'll give you 50 bucks.." This became the running joke as if we were a comedy team like Martin and Lewis, initiated by either my mother or my hair-cutting friend. No trim was complete without the call and response.

From about 2004-2008 I would half-heartedly buy hair products and then use them only occasionally, as if they were long lasting like an oil change on my car. I didn't discover the joy of reliable and daily use of hair products until 2008. I just discovered how to accurately dry my hair last fall. The critical drying period consists of wrapping it in a cotton pillowcase Carmen Miranda style on top of my head for 10 minutes, then a doggie bath upside down shake followed 10 minutes later with a styling cream. You could say I was developmentally delayed with hair. Like any person with a lifelong delay, I find myself behind once in a while still regarding my coiffure but I have come a long way since the girl in the boys’ shirt leaning on a Chrysler.

Traveling the Silk Road

2010-03-13T23:20:00.000-05:00

I'd wanted to write this while it was still fresh in my mind but of course I hadn't. Here it is now, though deflated, my trip to the American Museum of Natural History.

I'd gone with my father but went in alone to the Silk Road exhibit. You had to pay extra for a ticket and while I had offered to buy his ticket, he declined. So much the better. I like going to the museum with someone, this ensures I get there, but then I like seeing an exhibit alone and meeting up after. After all, I am going there to not 'see' but 'learn' and I like to learn alone at my own pace.

The exhibit was really well done, especially the multi-sensory approach. There was a lot of reinforcement of information by visuals, both objects and text, as well as maps and colors. I felt I was back in elementary school, particularily 6th grade, the only grade I felt I ever tuned in and learned in. I was on that year, and only that year. I loved anthropology. Anyhow...

What I really wanted to say is this. I guess that since forever, people have risked their lives on their desires, while others built their lives on the desires of others. In the year 1062, for example, people traveled thousands of miles, with only the food, clothing and shelter they could carry, to distant lands just to have something they could not get at home. People traveled for gems, silk, but also spices, oils, paper. Thousands of miles for things. The modern world was built on commerce. Maybe this is not news to anyone, but when you really look at desire it doesn't seem we have come that far - until the internet.

Truly now when i consider gifts for friends, I have to ask myself what can i give that cannot be gotten anywhere? The home base has been erased. Even items that are personal and unique, like photos, can be sent, local coffee beans and chocolates ordered online, gift cards for chain items.

Another thing that entered my mind was the creation and evolution of music. For various reasons, music plays a much weaker role in my life now that it has in years past. When I listened to tracks of music from 1,000 years ago, I am reminded that people have been making sound for pleasure since literally the dawn of time. It really is my gift and my right as a person who can hear to listen to and appreciate music of some kind everyday.

See. this is how it is. I had thoughts while at the museum and came home and didn't sit and write and now it is gone. So this is just a little snapshot. More for me than for you.

field days

2010-02-04T01:06:00.004-05:00

My parents were surprisingly out of sight, out of mind. Don't know that I ever logically figured that out and took advantage when I could. As a kid, I bursted with social curiosity that could not be tamed. Right now I recall the short bike rides. I knew how far I could go and it satisfied me, the little freedom. I loved those bikes rides. Down my street and up Sanger Ave, the big hill. Continue straight and go up as far as Woodbury and turn around, or make a right onto Jordan. Either way it was nice, rich people's homes, set far back on plantation lawns. Down Jordan was my favorite. There was a roadside cross. There were 4 steps down and a standing crucifix with a plaque and two stone benches on either side.

I was a good kid. Believe it or not, I would come there and pray. It was quiet and other worldly. Behind this was a convent. Set back so far from the road and covered with shrubbery you wouldn't know it was there except this was my neighborhood. Just a few streets over that it was good enough to be another world. Never kids playing in the street here. I would sing when I rode my bike. I'm thinking mostly 5th, 6th, 7th grade.

One day I rode my bike down the winding driveway right up to the front door. Don't remember much - I guess some nuns were standing there. We talked, I was bold and friendly, they invited me in. Probably I was inside briefly, who knows, I had a cookie, and I left. Later I told my mother, who freaked out. Freaked out that I had gone inside a stranger's house. Didn't matter that it was a convent, it was even worse that it was a convent. Yes we were catholic but nuns and a creepy house. I was exceptionally trusting and this kind of behavior was typical for me. What was interesting is that if I hadn't told her, she wouldn't have known. Sounds obvious, but my parents were authoritative. They weighed in on anything you can think of. Punishments were clear and pretty damn threatening; they had follow through. They had to approve of friends. Sleepovers weren't allowed. I had to ask even to have a candy. You can forget backtalk of any kind. There was the belt, not afraid to use it. Yet they didn't follow me around. Caught doing something that would piss them off was one thing. If that thing hadn't been established, or, if I kept my thoughts and ideas to myself, maybe shit I pulled in school that didn't get called out, it was mine.

This was groundbreaking to me. I didn't see it that logically then, but I believe now that the seed was planted. I didn't go wild, not at all. Not outwardly and not for a long time. What stayed was the trust. It morphed and I split in two.

My personality - I was like a lead paperweight. Compact! Intense! Sure! I was bold in school, spoke my mind, got in trouble sometimes. Not at all what heavy-handed first generation immigrant parents would produce. You must understand how I went against the odds and grew in between sidewalk cracks. You would expect shy, timid, second. I'm like a cactus in the plant world. I need dirt and sun yes, but just a drop of water. Just the tiniest bit of encouragement. Less encouragement and more just don't get in my way. It's a visual slideshow in my mind - the elementary school years. Hours of rolling modeling clay into tiny figurines. Whose idea was that? I was sometimes funny in school. Once I threw raisins at the lunch lady. Wasn't I afraid of being beaten at home? I should have been. Cactus. Sidewalk cracks. Out of sight, out of mind. My parents didn't know enough about school to be involved and I was a good kid. Still I marvel at how I developed in spite of the extremes.

Back to the sentence, "I'm a girl." Later I was split in two. Now sometimes I was a helium balloon floating above myself. When I was maybe 13 I joined the Saquoit Community Marching Band. I don't know maybe it was Westmoreland. It wasn't my town, it was a town or two over. So odd. I joined with Rene Niehausen who went with her father. How did this one get though the parental screen? Maybe this was while my father was cheating on my mother and they had their own private shit going on because the Niehausens had certainly never been pre-approved. I rode in their car to some kind of street parade with marching band music that would end spilling out onto a summer fair. They are called 'Field Days' where I am from. It is a blur now as it was then - it's not my memory but how I took it in. Her father was drunk in no time. Clearly we were too young to be there. Something something something and me and Rene were in the parking field, standing with some older guys and their cars. Nothing happened? Then it was approaching evening. I was there but turned into a helium balloon. Probably I knew I shouldn't be there, that something could 'happen' but didn't really know what, either. Then we went home.

I wasn't looking to be a bad girl. I was unbelievably naive about sex and sexual attraction at 13, 14, 15, even keep going. But it was like going to the nunnery. I just went. As I got older this happened again and again. In high school I was truly clueless about what boys expect from girls. In college I knew but wasn't ready and just didn't worry, assumed the guys I liked or went with would be cool. But there were many other encounters discounting the safety of college dorms where I was systematically leading a guy to the bulls eye, to ground zero, and dropping him cold. Honestly, I cannot count the scenarios I ended up in where a potential rape was ripe for the picking and yet I walked away untouched. As I aged, I knew often I was flirting, then more than flirting, then yes let's go to your hotel room. Yes, to hotel rooms. Once in the San Juan islands to a co-ed nude hippie spa. Once with a New Zealander sleeping over in a closed shop in Cork, Ireland. Once in Manhattan, in the mid-90s to visit and stay with a guy I'd met once over music. Unsuspecting, single, ready to score men. And me. Not 'wanting to and then changing my mind'. Just, vacant. Completely asexual. Feeling no sexual attraction and expecting the same. That words like, "I have a boyfriend", were a perfectly fair explanation for why I had just spent the last several hours or days ramping you up for the hard sell. Get this, even words like ,"I'm married", when it was true. I did it then, too. Then after the marriage ending, there was the distancing sex. Just something to put between myself and the ex. I had sex with the guys who wanted to have sex with me. I finally got to a point where I felt I couldn't say no after I'd totally said yes. But it wasn't me. It was the helium balloon talking. Deflated and lowered but still drifting above ground. A forced smile.

Yes, it is beyond bizarre. I used to wonder if I got raped at that field days thing and blocked it out. Imagine my parents would have noticed. Not something you could hide at 13 probably. There are other indicators in my life that nag at me (used to, now I don't care anymore) that some weird shit went down somewhere at some point. I used to speculate; was it an Uncle? Which one? But I don't think so. There was that super freaky, like Friday the 13th vampire freaky girl that lived next door for a while. Lori Wolfler and her friend, Nancy Lee. I do remember one of those vacant moments of something something, she takes my shirt while we are standing in her driveway. I wonder what she is doing. Then I am home. She had been to our house, too. How did she get past the parental third eye of knowledge and suspicion for anyone not a Marionite or at least Catholic like us? Must have been during more cheating or other stuff. There were often stretches where they wouldn't talk to each other. Catholic, but not white trash. Instead of yelling, cursing, throwing stuff, they ignored each other and functioned.

The sentence, "I'm a girl." Seems it should have conjugated to 'was a girl' since it is in the past tense. That's why it hit me. I realize that in those moment without abandon, for good and for bad, it as though I channeled myself as a boy. Eileen Myles references her identification with boys throughout the whole book. I'd never felt that way until I read this book that yes, it's true, the male influence was strong in my house. Male equaled power and women didn't, no question about it.

Don't know how to end this. I bullied myself on the boast "I don't save drafts" and I've been coming back to this essay for three days now but I think I will stop here. I've pulled up the anchor.

Simpsons snap shot

2010-01-31T15:02:00.005-05:00

from my TV.

Bicycle Diaries; an interview

2009-12-27T23:17:00.008-05:00

I finally caught up today with the editor of We'll Never Have Paris, Andria Alefhi.
And now, an interview.

Donuts: How was your Christmas this year?
Andria: Better than the last time I had gone to my brother's. I felt less marginalized. Nice crowd for Christmas day. Christmas Eve was quiet. I miss the lively Eves of old. Mostly I just played with my nieces which was the usual balance of feeling good versus feeling like a nanny.

Now that the holidays are over, what are you up to? Jon is away right?
Yes, I'm not working and many friends are away including Jon, so I have all this free time to rediscover uses for my body. Today I went to yoga, I think Sunday early afternoon is a good time for weekly yoga. Then I went to Bluestockings to volunteer.

You have a weekly shift?
No, not anymore. I'm unreliable. I do special projects, which means the zine rack. Today though I subbed a shift and it was great. I met John Ross, author of Capitalism is Murder. I also got to hang out with Jeffrey who I highly respect. I also got asked by a customer to recommend some zines to purchase, so the gift horse's mouth opened right up for me. She purchased WNHP5 plus Doris, Cometbus and a few others.

What else is on the recommended shelf at Bluestockings?
Lorrie Moore has a new novel after nearly a decade. I see that Deaf and gay authors seem to be the hot new item. A book by Terry Galloway called Little Mean Deaf Queer caught my eye. Wonder if she knows Raymond Luczak.

I sat down and started to read Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne. I told Bluestockings they should ask him to do a benefit reading for the store since he is an activist by virtue of being a long time bicycle advocate. I believe he would do the reading for us, perhaps he has even been to Bluestockings. I volunteered to try to contact him, and so I just now sent him a Facebook message. Not sure he tends to his own fan page.

As I read, I was reminded of my own memories of exhilaration and freedom on my bicycle. The one that comes to mind was the summer of 1993. I had just graduated college at SUNY Plattsburgh and was spending the summer in Burlington, VT selling handmade beaded jewelery downtown. My friend and I made about 10 dollars the first day. After three weeks I could see that I needed another job. Instead of finding a daytime job, I kept the bead cart (I think Katie quit and eventually I went alone) during the days until about 3 and then wheeled it home, uphill, then bicycled to Dunkin' Donuts where I worked until closing, which was 11pm. In fact I worked alone and it was seedy and dangerous. I didn't care. This was the best summer of my life, even with the bead cart that didn't generate a dollar of profit by the end of the summer. Burlington was hippie central and I was in my first band ever, called The Frog and the Dime. Named by me. The band leader/singer and his guitar playing friend I now realize were living in some kind of halfway house. At this time this didn't occur to me.

I worked a few days a week, and when I would bicycle to work it was in the summer sun, flying downhill, listening to Frank Morgan's Yardbird Suite on my Walkman cassette player. I can still remember keeping the beat on my handlebars. At midnight I was biking home in the dark, uphill, with my bags stuffed with as many donuts and rolls of toilet paper I could carry. Some of my 13 housemates would come out for the donuts and meet in the kitchen. That summer I lived in a converted Victorian that had like 6 bedrooms and 2 or 3 bathrooms. One of the housemates worked for Ben & Jerry's and would bring home pints of factory seconds, so there were always donuts and ice cream.

That bike. I remember it was no small act to buy it. I had been working at the grocery store bakery, my junior-into-senior year summer. I was 21-years old and suffering a mini-meltdown for freedom. I felt a rush of desperation and had to leave the store. I had suddenly been rushed by my new desires and all the suggestions of travel and mental freedom suggested by the music I was listening to and suddenly I was 21 and have never been anywhere and knew I was never going to be an exchange student in Ireland and instead was working in a bakery. I needed something to satisfy movement on some level. So I walked to the nearest department store, bought a bike, and rode it home.

So.

That's a great story inspired by Bicycle Diaries. Hey, didn't David Byrne interview himself in mock characters and costumes in the bonus tracks of Stop Making Sense?

Yes, he did.

Picked it out of a hat. This is my life.

2009-12-02T22:53:00.008-05:00

People have asked me for fifteen years now why on earth I became a sign language interpreter. "I picked it out of a hat", is the answer I give. If the conversation continues and I am in the mood, I go one layer deeper, which is that there was nothing else in the hat*. I wanted to learn ASL and hang out with Deaf people and I had no idea where I would go with that. This is true, but idealized to make my whole life seem off the cuff. But in fact it was. All my major life decisions were made on an impulse.

The reason I don't say more about my motives and inspiration is because it is embarrassingly weak! My entire life's blood, sweat and tears; not only a career choice, but wrapping my brain around a second language and culture and social network that includes a completely deaf boyfriend of eight years was based on five personal life events** and a monumental event in deaf history.

Note: * there really was nothing else in the hat. A high school senior, I'd fortunately been a clean slate where I excelled at nothing and had no advising pressures from school or family. I chose my own major without contention.
**minor life events! they may as well have been free toys at the bottom of boxes of cereal.

One.
Someone gave me one of those 'learn sign language' fold-out pamphlets. I was 12 or 13. It was goldenrod paper. The alphabet, numbers 1-10, a few words, and a smiley face cover. That's it.

Two.
I watched a Hallmark made-for-TV movie called "Love is Never Silent". At this point, the only connection to this movie I have is the aforementioned pamphlet. Hardly qualifies me as linguistically competent. Yet I remember watching this movie as though I had a personal connection. I was already on the way.

Three.
I buy myself the book that everyone unfortunately started out with. If you know American Sign Language you know what I am talking about. The Joy of Signing. I do not recall what prompted me to buy it when I did. I started to teach myself sign this way. There are two problems with this method. The Joy is not real ASL. It is close, it is Signed English. You can read more about this somewhere else. The bigger problem is that I didn't know any deaf people. And flat, hand drawn pictures of hands with arrows pointing clockwise or left-to-right is no way to learn a visual and spatial 3-Dimensional language. Yet something compelled me to do so.

Four.
And then it happened. "Children of a Lesser God". The movie that gave a young actress named Marlee Matlin the first Oscar awarded to a Deaf actor. By the time it was shown on TV, I was 16. I know now that I, like many teenagers, thought I was the only hearing girl in the world to be somehow moved by a Hollywood movie glamorizing deafness as isolation and isolation as deafness. William Hurt learns sign language for the film where he works as a speech teacher at a high school for the deaf. Add dramatic instrumental music to underscore the point, and you got a whole generation of kids like me who thought they had found their calling. Looking back, I think I wanted to be Marlee and William, not really sure where the being deaf started and the being a hearing person who could sign ended. Which is ironically now as I type this, kind of where I am now, living with a deaf man.

Five.
Four and Five may be reversed but not really important. This has to do with dance. This has to do with the inspiration. My high school friend was a real ballet dancer, the lead in The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. Amy Goodelle. She invited me to see a modern dance performance at Hamilton College. You remember how it felt to go to a college event while in high school? Check it out - I had never seen a dance performance ever. I mentioned the ballet, I finally saw her in one of those the following year.

I cried when I saw the first piece. I cried the tears of beauty and grace, of amazement and embarrassment for not knowing, and for shit I didn't even know. I still don't. To this day, I cry at least once during any dance performance. I tear up just remembering a performance to 'Amazing Grace' by the Gallaudet Dance Company. And then. One girl came on and started to dance. There was no music. Direction coursed through me. I could teach dance to deaf people! I left on a cloud of determination.

Well of course it never occurred to me that one would have to know dance to teach it. By then I had already decided that I would be a speech teacher for the deaf. But even more than a movie and a dance and a pamphlet handed to me came yet another completely random event. However this event was not mine. It belonged to deaf people around the world.

Event.
In 1988, when I was a junior in high school, Gallaudet University shut down the entire campus and landed on the cover of Time Magazine with 'Deaf President Now'. Yet again, something happening which had nothing to do with me in even some kind of 6 Degrees of Separation pyramid scheme way hammered the final nail on my college major and life choices which I could relate to only because I had seen a movie about (fictitious) deaf people and could relate to rebellion because I was a teenager. I found out that the Gallaudet University protest, which really was a milestone according to most for deaf people around the world, was the inspiration for many of my generation to learn ASL and meet and somehow join the Deaf community.

Join.
Hat.

I majored in Speech and Language Pathology and took ASL 1 and 2. But I wanted to go to Gallaudet for graduate school, indeed planned to go nowhere else, and I did. I enjoyed and graduated from that major, but decided to go to graduate school for Parent-Infant Deaf Education because I learned that being a speech therapist wasn't going to get me in the deaf community. In fact, it would have the opposite effect. I wanted to be fluent in ASL and hang out with deaf people. I had no idea why.

I still don't. Realistically, I wanted to go to Gallaudet for all the wrong reasons. As a senior in college, I still hadn't socialized with too many deaf people. Gallaudet is the place to do it, but I was too nervous and obsessive when I got there. I did do it. I went from OK to really good, and from there took a long time with lots of breaks to get to fluent.

I have met hundreds of guys and girls just like me. Deaf wannabees. I still meet young versions of me. We just keep coming year after year. At least some people have better reasons. They grew up with a deaf neighbor. They work with a deaf person. I had an absurd xeroxed pamphlet, a book, two movies and a movement I wasn't part of.

I'm going for comedy here. the fact is that I love my life. I LOVE being an ASL Interpreter, which was the right career choice for me after all and I don't regret the extra degrees and years teaching to end up here. Deaf people shared their language and culture with me and they don't fucking have to, for all of us who came the same way that I came. And my partner of almost eight years is deaf as a rock. I sign at work and I sign at home, too. The novelty has worn off and now, honestly, I ask myself sometimes if I can spend the rest of my life with a deaf guy. To add the final bit of complexity, and ironically I am not alone but conventional in even this as well, that a lot of interpreters are really into music and play and perform in bands. For me, music was as strong a part of my life needs as ASL and the deaf community was. And now, I have given that up. What does this say about me and the direction I am headed?

There was nothing else in the hat. This sentence is true. And that's what I tell folks who ask me why I became an interpreter.

skin is deep forget the beauty

2009-11-25T18:26:00.001-05:00

Until I ended up with second degree burns on my wrist and arm I never have given the physiology of skin much thought. It was only a second or two on the radiator pole, but maybe because my skin was soaking wet and still standing in the shower? Dumb move on my part. I didn't notice the burn at first. No blood. As though the thin layers of skin had melted clean off, which I suppose they did.

At first it didn't seem to heal and every movement hurt. There was an inch long canyon of open skin that started to close after 4 days and that's when I took a photo. Nine days later we were telling our party guests about it since I was on the mend. Eleven days and I stopped bandaging the burn and now 3 weeks later there are still 2 scars as testament of the healing activity.

Until this burn I had never thought about how skin works. The expression beauty is only skin deep is misleading. I thought of skin starting at the most visible later of epidermis and that's it. I never realized skin works from the inside out. I wish I had put my arm under a 24-hour webcam. The skin closed up slowly and when I wasn't looking. It was a fascinating process I am sorry I didn't chart more closely.

how I learned to play the flute

2009-10-03T01:10:00.006-04:00

My story and experiences are not unique. My hardened heart pounds references to my naivete that trail like comet tails. These have kept me from writing the chapters of my story.

Music became part of my life in 5th grade. I don't know why I chose flute. They passed around the slips of paper asking if you wanted to sign up for music lessons, the free ones in school and what instrument did you want to choose. I don't remember the conversation or choosing the flute. I had no knowledge of music of any sort before this time. Perhaps my parents chose the instrument they thought would sound the least butchered being practiced in the house.

We were taught to play it first only on the mouthpiece. After a week or two we tried holding and blowing with the entire flute assembled. Mr. DiMeo always smelled of stale coffee and if he demonstrated on your flute then that smelled of stale coffee, too. The first song I learned to play, in the beginner flute book, because it is just 3 notes, was Mary Had a Little Lamb. I remember mastering it and playing it for my parents, in my pajamas, in front of the bathroom mirror. I would come to always enjoy practicing in the bathroom. Good acoustics. After just a few months, my teacher told my parents I should take private lessons because I was good. I had no knowledge of this. I know that I was able to learn songs by ear and from memory. I kept a list of the notes that I knew, how to write them in notation and the songs that I had figured out (in some cases I didn't know the names of them, like the opening bit of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons). I wrote these in a gold pen in my free Hello Kitty notebook, some times with stickers. Privately I thought I was hot shit for this reason, not for my flute playing. The songs I knew mostly were TV theme songs, like 'Dynasty' and 'M*A*S*H'.

We were renting this flute from the local store. My parents thought were were leasing it which meant your payments added up to purchasing it. We didn't rent it during the summer vacation months. That fall when we went to get it, the store considered summer vacation a break in the leasing agreement and canceled the renting total. Rich kids probably kept their instruments during the summer. This pissed my father off, so when fall rolled around he did not rent me a flute. Apparently this was the end of my musical hobby.

I should note at this point that I didn't have any extra curricular activities. Though I would have liked ice skating lessons which, who knows, could have brought me into the fold of popularity on at least a sub-level, my parents didn't go that way. I enjoyed playing the flute but now it was about money. I don't remember caring much about it but perhaps I did complain. My father was into auctions at that time, was going every week and would buy shit and stuff the garage and basement with his purchases to hopefully turn a profit in a future garage sale. He bought me a small organ. Of course I couldn't play this in school band I protested but I could still satisfy my talent for figuring out songs by ear by memory. After a few months longer still without a flute, my father told me if I really wanted one I could buy one with my own money. I placed an ad in the local pennysaver (if you even know what one of those are, a newspaper version of Craigslist) which I still remember: "WANTED: new or used flute in good condition". I paid $100 for this flute. I have no idea where I got the money from. It is possible that my parents paid for it after all but knowing my dad how I do, I doubt it, so maybe I did have it saved or something. I remember my aunt and uncle were at the house when I returned with it. They wanted me to play something, but after 4 or 5 months I could barely remember how to use it.

It came back and I really got into it. I bought some popular sheet music for the time, it is so embarrassing now. I had the music to Phil Collin's 'Against All Odds', 'St. Elmo's Fire' and Madonna's 'Lucky Star'! I knew they weren't flute pieces but I didn't play another instrument. I also went for classical music and bought hard stuff, really poured over it and made notes and practiced. Partially because I had a built-in audience which were the poker games in our basement one-two nights weekly. These were serious poker players. They could hear me practice but not see me so it was easy to build confidence without getting nervous. My dad would pass along compliments the next day because these games would go on hours past my bedtime, sometimes into the morning.

In high school I did eventually take private lessons, in the church basement, with Fran DaMico. She was a great person. Also in high school there were still the free school time lessons of a half-period a week. This was an easy out from class. You didn't even need a pass, you would just say you were going for your instrument lesson. Naturally I used these way more than once a week. Sometimes I just used the time to do nothing but often I did go and play.

I still had no other extra curriculars and I was never good at anything else. And in college I played all through the four years and this was where I finally branched off. I was lucky enough to be encouraged to take another instrument, so I chose the saxophone and joined jazz band immediately. I will never, ever forget those days. Dr. Onofrio, the jazz band instructor, and my classmate and resident genius Ian MacDougall who taught me how to improvise. I had no idea up to that point. This is where music began for me.

As I went from one genre to the other over the years, I would have shame and embarrassment over the genre of interest I had just left. I am still this way.

And now I don't play music at all. I have stuffed into my closet, foreign and estranged, one electric Telecaster, amp, alto sax, cheap keyboard, metal xylophone, mics, cords, and fancy high school flute.

WNHP5 reading tour and readiness details

2009-09-15T18:17:00.001-04:00

Go to neverhaveparis for zine info thanks

http://neverhaveparis.blogspot.com/

New York Clocks features

2009-09-09T17:47:00.001-04:00

Hey I have now been featured on Threadbanger.com and Crafty Christina

moving, again

2009-09-07T22:59:00.003-04:00

a recount, (if I can)

college, plattsburgh NY to '93

summer of '93, burlington VT

grad school, gallaudet, DC, 93-94
a. dorm 1 semester
b. shared house, cheverly, MD

transfer, portland, OR 94-95
a. apt in SW with wayne
b. colleague's house for 3 weeks

SE Madison St 7/75 ? to 7/96

packed up and traveled Ireland, return to USA, more travel, 2 weeks in Astoria OR and 4 in Bellingham WA, travel, 8 months approx (let's say 3 moves here)

again Portland

a. SE 46th and Clinton 3/97 ? - few months?

b. 1222 SE Madison '97 1 year ?

c. SE Halsey and 48th? past powell, almost suburbs to 12/98

d. SE 36th and Yamhill 1/99 - 8/99

West St Oakland *** the winner! 3 years one apt! 8/99-10/02

7th and Judah, San Francisco 10/02-4/03

22nd St SF 5/03-1/04

(home) Terrace Hill Drive, New Hartford NY 2/04-8/04

Holmead Pl NW DC 8/04-8/06

W 106 St NYC 8/06-8/07

E 6th St NYC 8/07-9/09

and now, E 5th st NYC

22 moves.

2009-09-02T15:05:00.002-04:00

I am living in the future always. I am 1 step ahead. I save nothing. I put the memories away. I put myself away. everything goes away. everything is painful. yet the present is a head on a pike that I spear and wave in the face of you like flames, fanning the fire. for what, I don't know. I'm braced for the disappointment and it is there. it is always there. maybe this is the stability in my life I lack and the only thing I can count on to find and so I do.

so when I find the photo of myself from 2002 and it is another person, when I unwrap the trinket from a wedding and see that it is Kim's and not Terri's, when I un-box the wine glasses from my mother's home, when I find something I have written, it doesn't matter the format. everything is 6 feet under or another galaxy. I've made myself autistic to the present and future and once in a while I record this in words.

I put that on display and I put it away.

Fruit-Friend-Vacation Triangle

2009-08-19T23:16:00.006-04:00

It was a true vacation. Although when I look at the photos all I see is 1,000 visual memories of when and why I was mad at Jon, I know that will fade. The disappointment will fade but keep its structure, I was going to say like a tan, but there are tan lines on the skin to keep you from lying that your whole body was tan. There's little to get around it. If you wear a shirt and no one sees you shirtless then its possible to believe that beyond the sleeves your skin continues to be golden and glowing. Like a resume. Accentuating the positives, putting your skills into sentence fragments of equal size, wasting no extra words. Each position a sliced strawberry with a quality knife.

It's difficult to believe that fruit and vegetables exist in their current format, have existed in their current format for thousands of years. In a world of processed, combined, cooked food, a colorful singular fruit is amazing. Every corner market a living museum of the antiquity of human survival. Consider the process: farming, growing, harvesting, packaging, shipping, shelving. A resume listing. Vulnerable, helpless, complete whether eaten or not. How much is thrown away? And yet this continues.

It was a true vacation. I missed no one. I was gone so long that when I returned I had the blessing of having to actively recall the names of friends I wanted to see. I was gone long enough to be missed first. text messages and emails and plans made for lunch, for a drink, for a fun activity. Kim, CC, Moses, Georgia, Jaime, Jim, Ann, Michele, Karin, Kathy. I know it sounds canned but I mean it. To see those words, "welcome back! can't wait to see you" is the wave on which I ride. I have always been schmaltzy for friendship. Even in elementary school and junior high, an age where most girls traded friends and phone numbers like baseball cards, I wrote my friends homemade cards reminding them that 'if they could look back at the end of their life and say they had one good friend they were lucky'. Too much time with adults, family who had been conservative to those outside of the family and didn't have casual American friends. Too much time reading things like 'Footprints' on Plexiglas plaques from gift shops. It started early, not only a grateful-yet-skeptical take on friendship but a slightly obsessive need for social interaction that has quieted down very little. At my age, people are spending time with their spouse, looking for a spouse (busy dating) or spending time alone. I'm still ready to go out most nights of the week and need multiple plans on a full Saturday or Sunday. If I've been alone for more than a few hours, I'm sad; when I don't get a reply from a friend after a few hours, I take it personally.

Vacation-fruit-friend triangle - I was going to say circle, round and together, where shit works out, instead of an awkward, jagged 3-sided shape.

2009-08-19T18:55:00.000-04:00

We'll Never Have Paris Variety Show #3

where: Hi Christina 632 Grand St, Brooklyn, just off the L at Lorimer

Saturday Aug 22, 8-11pm. Cost: $10 for show, includes raffle prizes

We'll Never Have Paris is a NYC literary journal and zine that publishes narrative nonfiction. The WNHP variety show is an opportunity for anyone new and experienced to perform their stuff, just as the zine encourages first time writers.

Performers include Amy Harlib with yoga dance contortion, TJ Hospodar of BACON PANTY (http://www.tjhospodar.com/), Russ Josephs (http://russjosephs.wordpress.com), Scott Magri music and video, Joseph Mauricio with comedy, Fritz and Christina of LOVE Sparkle, ANdria Alefhi, Pablo Paniagua from the Mera Makia Circus System and more!

zine (submissions accepted now through 9/03 for Vol 5) neverhaveparis@gmail.com

OPen Mic performance opportunity! for more info: http://www.hichristina.com/

Feet that don't touch the ground

2009-07-17T14:07:00.003-04:00

Today I returned a pair of shoes. This is nothing, I know that.

But then there is the future. I head back towards the subway, back to work, out of my mind from ice coffee on a still-empty stomach. You know when you come head to head with people walking in the other direction and you pass them by. That.

Old woman exiting her apartment with a shopping cart for a walking aid. Grey and wrinkled but not decrepit. I allow a second of sympathy while wondering if I will really want to live in the city through my senior years. Old dude with a nurse and a walker. I stepped to the side, almost disgusted, as though infirmity would catch. I am among the living. Going back to work, about to eat lunch, swim two hours later, rush home to shower before a party. Flying out to Europe Sunday night. I'm among the Elite Living. Pass an overweight woman in the middle of the sidewalk. She poses no future threat to me, just in my way. But then.

Then, the future I forgot about is in my path. Older guy with metal ‘hand crutches’ and extra thick black shoes. I notice the shoes barely touch the ground. Then I look up and see it. His spine is deformed into an S shape, crunched on one side from shoulder to hip. I realize he cannot walk without crutches and I realize that will be me.

How can I be going through my daily life without preparation for the calamity and yet I am. Occasionally I see myself full-length, like the mirror, and I can’t believe my leaning torso, no less than the Tower of Pisa. Now that I think about it I cannot believe no one has ever asked me about it. Not even my family or boyfriend. I guess because it’s unnoticeable unless I am in a tight fitting dress. For now. When I see it on myself, I turn nauseous and my mind starts to race. I should be doing something about it.

Like now. Looking back on the visit to an orthopedic doctor who treats scoliosis, I’m pissed at myself for leaving unsatisfied with my 3-minute visit. “I’ve seen worse. Don’t worry about it. Go home”. A part of me felt relieved to be dismissed by a professional so I let that soothe me for a few months. I literally have no idea what to expect in ten years. In twenty.

I cannot pretend this is not going to get worse. It’s not like it can go away. My spine is shaped like an S. And not a skinny art deco S. I mean a full-bottomed swooping S, measured at 35 degrees. I go through phases, just six months ago even, where I tell myself I should talk to a doctor about surgery. The dismissing doctor dismissed the idea quickly. Well, whew for me. But no one has given me a picture of the future. I’m honestly too paralyzed with fear to think about it. I feel the slow changes that no one else sees. It’s already hard to stand or sit comfortably pretty much everyday. Why am I carrying around this secret? Then again, what do I gain from outting myself?

Worry: don’t worry. I don’t know.

not to be unoriginal, but why I love NY

2009-06-13T00:25:00.002-04:00

Do you remember having a doll house? Remember the tiny furniture and the stiff little dolls that only bent at the waist and laid flat in bed? The way it was open sliced down the middle where you could jet pack fly in and out of rooms? So I didn't dig the doll house for all of these reasons. Then I made friends with the Jenkins girls who did something original. They made an open doll environment with whole shoe boxes representing individual rooms. Your doll could walk in and out of rooms that were porportionite with their size and the shoe box sized rooms allowed for walking around your play situation and it felt very real.

So NYC in one word: pedestrian. In NY you walk, and everyone walks with you. Public transportation is the great equalizer and the size of the city and the walking necessity is the universal life blood. I mean it when I say that more than great food and absurd entertainment of all kinds and all the shit you love to hate about NY, it's running into good friends, co-workers and your waitress crossing the street or on the train.

FOUND: only in NY

2009-06-11T16:33:00.004-04:00

You think only in a small small town could the following occur, but actually it happened right here in Manhattan:

On Friday I dropped 3 signed checks walking down 6th Ave to the bank on 23rd st. They fell out of my back pocket presumably when I adjusted a wedgie. When I got to the bank and reached into my back pocket I said, nofuckingway! I traced my steps and didn't get too far when, sure enough, 2 out of the 3 checks were sticking to the sidewalk. The rain had been to my advantage, turning the checks into post-it notes. Deciding that two out of three weren't bad and since the third check was just under $100 I gleefully took these wet checks and went home, where they dried into full value, not stolen or lost items for deposit on Monday.

I had meant to call to put a stop payment on the lost check but never got around to it, even by Wednesday. Though I knew it was signed and begging to be cashed by the finder, I figured realistically it had just turned to wet pulp underfoot.

I certainly did expect to get home and have an envelope addressed to me from a complete stranger who I'd hoped had heard about We'll Never Have Paris and was offering to publish the zine. Nope, it was the finder of my check who had mailed it back to me with a nice letter. So if you are googling my name (or maybe you did when you first found the check because maybe you are young and single. Or maybe you are old and single and you were wondering how old I am but once you realized I am thirty years younger than you decided to just send the check instead of a check and a photo. Or, maybe you did see that I make clocks and zines and check them out on various internet media and decide that I was without any talent. Or you are like 87 years old and don't own a computer) then here is my thank you, John A.Grigley.

more asthma fun

2009-05-25T12:18:00.004-04:00

More tales of continuing asthma fun. I have allergy-induced asthma and the only two triggers are cats and high humidity paired with pollen. Cats are by far the big winner. I had to figure out the hard way that I was allergic to cats. My reaction varies on the conditions of the house and of the cats but generally I cannot be in a house with cats for more than a few hours, certainly not an overnight. I’ve come to learn how the body’s fight reaction resembles a jealous friend. Will she come slowly to taunt me, chiding you in the kitchen until she feels satisfied with itchy eyes, followed by a runny-snuffy nose 1-2 combo and then the tightening chest and wheeze, or tease me with no symptoms so you think they never found out about not calling you back about that party and then wham! All at once you can’t inhale or exhale and do you have an inhaler in your backpack? No of course not because you don’t have regular card-carrying asthma.
,
The weather I am less sensitive to. It was last year in Austin. Man, that city gave me allergies. I had to try three different stores to find an inhaler over the course of 2 days. You know that time of year when the heat finally spikes up and takes all the pollen with it and have a pollen-baking party in the air? Like this weekend here in NY? This time it was the sneaky girlfriend hiding cigarettes and waiting for you to want one and find they are gone. I do that. I find them and cut them and put them in the garbage. I always fear he will retaliate upon discovery but he just quietly buys more. Anyhow, my seasonal allergies were mild. Some sneezing, nose blowing, but nothing major. I was taking herbal nettle which usually does the trick. I even threw in a few zyrtec for good measure fooling myself that I was the one in control of this power exchange. Allergies weren’t getting me so far this year, ha ha! I could just eat chocolate chip cookies instead of popping these pills! So far so good.

Because, I have never had such a delayed reaction attack before like this in my life. After a day of drinking at Brooklyn Brewery and Radegast, enjoying friends, eating kielbasa, walking around, followed by a show at the Cake Shop, I got home deciding I would read and write. I sat on the couch. BAM. Entire beach sized towel shoved instantly down my throat into my lungs. One minute I was looking on Hulu and the next I was questioning myself, is this really happening? I got up and put on the AC and shut the window. I tried to cough it out. Each breath was shorter and less efficient. Fuck, ok, go get the primatine mist because I don’t have a prescription product. Shake. Insert. Press.

Wait.

That seemed like a long time. Finally it kicked in, followed by the shakes. Sit down, your lungs are having a heart attack. Stare at the computer screen like a moron. And then write. Good. Wrote the essay I wanted to on 3rd period data entry class, had good voice and flow. Wow, almost 2am. Drink water, go to bed.

But then holy shit abrupt awakening of how long have I been having the second asthma attack? Not even awake enough or getting enough oxygen to get down the loft bed ladder and into the bathroom. Incoherently realize what I am doing, get the inhaler, stumble back to living room. Shake. Insert. Press. Fuck, it released late when it was already halfway out of my mouth and got that taste on my lips and it kind of froze them. Try to suck in a breath.

This is the worst asthma attack maybe ever to have them this close. I let the first one go like a Monopoly ‘get out of jail free card’. I didn’t know what triggered it but oh well, joke’s on me. Now it is waking me up at dawn and acting all bossy so I am forced to ‘what the fuck, man?’ with it. Now I review yesterday.

When did I touch a CAT? Where was the cat? Did a cat get into my apartment? How? Breweries, mental revisualization, cat? Hugged Ben, Shanta, Opus, do they have cats? Moses and Georgia I know they have a cat but could I get this fucked up from one hug? My shirt, did a cat sleep on it at some point? When I was walking home did a cat hairball get inhaled? Does a cat live at the Cake Shop?

I don’t know where this came from and it scares me a little. Is this just a reaction to 4 days of weather hiding and building an army inside the breathing pockets on my body? I am still wheezing and I don’t want to exert myself to shower but the steam will possibly loosen up this sticky phlegm I have been weakly coughing up.

Inhalers are amazing. If you have never experienced this before, it is a little drug. I don’t need one often at all but when you need it you better hope it is there. The side effect sucks for a few minutes to an hour but even when you are trying to be cool and low maintenance with your friends, forcing smiles and coughs is like putting off going to the bathroom. I’m gonna get in the shower and then look high and low for the bottle of zyrtec I was too lazy to find yesterday and swallow like ten of them. I hope this is over and I am good for the day. Damn.

pangea paper dolls

2009-05-23T01:59:00.003-04:00

if I were to liken myself to Pangea, the world super continent, I could explain how my life feels to me. That plate tectonics happened and land masses began to separate, no time to say goodbye. grade school films of 2 dimensional cartoons of pink asia and orange africa and pale yellow north america, a little music and action! Millions of years of drift by inches sped to the speed of a slow walk. with no time to say goodbye. now that millions of years have passed the continents are separated and far and distant with different histories and cultures of people. but once they were one.

and sometimes I feel like that person, that I have been drawn and quartered. there are events and careers and people in my past. there is me in my past. and I have been removed from myself and now that the moment is gone I know this makes little sense.

There but for the grace of God go I

2009-05-05T13:22:00.004-04:00

I was having breakfast at my second favorite place in NY today between jobs. I've been waiting for a job that brought me to Murray Hill so I could eat breakfast there since they only serve breakfast during the week and not on weekends. I'd gone in with a limited amount of time, factoring in being a little late for the next job (I know her and she won't care) and with my mind set on pumpkin waffles (but they weren't on the menu so I ordered French Toast). I took a table instead of the bar and sat down next to a mother and daughter. I noticed the young woman's hot chocolate and waiting for a chance to interrupt asked if that was hot chocolate with marshmallows. She said yes and I said 'then that's what I'm gonna order'.

Then she asked me if I lived in the neighborhood and when I said no, if I worked in the neighborhood. They wanted to know what were some good restaurants in the area. I noticed the young woman with the hot chocolate was friendly. Then she asked about good restaurants in the East Village. Now I was kind of center stage. I thought, shit, are they gonna wanna talk all through breakfast? I'd just ordered so we were looking at at least 15 minutes. I hate talking to strangers about 'the best of' anything. I don't know other people's preferences. After giving a conversation-ending answer I got up and went to the restroom. When I came back, they were in their own conversation so I figured I was off the hook and it was over. But as I sat there (without my book because I'd forgotten I did have one) I was listening to them. It was impossible not to because our tables were separate by less than a foot, and all they were talking about were restaurants and food! I thought, who are these people with nothing else to talk about? This is sad for a mother and daughter to have nothing else to talk about. They must be tourists and the mom must be high maintenance, needing all her meals planned out and Zagat surveys filled out.

Mom observed my French Toast and said to the daughter, 'Oh, that looks good. You could probably eat that, if you can chew it, it looks like the bread is cooked well enough'. I jumped back into the conversation and here is what I learned.

No, they were not tourists on a luxury vacation spending all their free time searching for the city's best eats. As we talked, nothing was further from the truth. I never did get their names but the young woman was here for medical treatment at the cancer center, indefinitely. Her mom took her to treatments during the week and her husband took care of her on weekends. They were housed at the cancer housing center which was near Penn Station, and there were no grocery stores nearby, and even if they could cook in the dorm, there was one kitchen and stove for so many people and going out to eat was their only opportunity to kind of get out and do something before a long day of chemo. To add to this, the only reason they were talking so much about food was because there was so little she could eat, either by doctor's orders or her own ability to stomach certain tastes and foods. She was very open about her condition and seemed to want to talk about it, since I certainly didn't ask.

I also quickly did the calculations that her husband probably stayed behind in their home state to work because he had to. Someone has to keep the money coming in to support them, and eating out and blowing all that money everyday was the last thing they wanted to do. But didn't they need to have a little dignity and enjoy a good meal, keep themselves as healthy as possible, and who knows how many weeks or months this person has left? Now that I looked at her I guess I could see that it was a wig and that having serious cancer would incline you to having conversations with anyone new who wasn't gonna talk about cancer.

I sure didn't want to talk about cancer, so suddenly talking about restaurants was the greatest thing on earth, and I sure knew where to send them. "Near Penn Station, that's easy! Do you like Asian food?" I asked excitedly. Andria doesn't like to lie. I like to be real. I could tell them about Korean and Vietnamese food because I really do love it. I could talk to them both with respect and not with fake cancer pity because that's something natural to me.

They were both real talkers. She wanted to know what I did for a living and mom was still talking about food. Then we all had to leave. She told me to get a mammogram early. They don't pay for women to have them until like age 50. And she was now 35 and already was quite a ways into the struggle for proper treatment. She looked at me like she didn't just mean women should have one, but like I should have one. I thought about it. Was it fate that I should meet them or just another NY moment? What were the odds? I left one job early to make it to eat here today between 10:20 and 10:50am. I sat next to them and sat alone, easy to talk to. It reminded me that cancer man, wtf? When they go to Pho 28 on 32nd St tomorrow or Thursday, are they going to strike up a conversation with a Chinese herbalist who specializes in cancer, or is mom going to choke on a chicken bone? Or when I see my doctor this month, should I ask for a mammogram and tell her, just because I have a feeling? God knows I never have been able to give myself a breast exam because it freaks me out just thinking about cancer.

While we are on it, you know, I've changed over the years to feeling very vulnerable where I'd originally felt invincible. I felt strongly that illness would never fell me and not just because I was young and cocky. I felt it. I knew it. Now I feel differently, like a victim ready to be blindsided and victimized by the uncontrollable unknowns in my body.

There but for the grace of God go I.

We already have a George

2009-04-28T00:09:00.004-04:00

Tonight I watched a show at Mercury Lounge for the first time in a long while. The North Carolina band, the headliner, was really good. I was attentive and engaged but out of practice as well; my feet hurt. I shifted my weight from foot to foot. The band reminded me of who I consider one of the pioneers of Freak Folk, the Dirty Projectors.

Anyhow I studied each member of the band. The lead singer kind of reminded me of a cross between my friend Christoph and Mr.Dirty Projector himself. Then I wondered why Christoph or any of my friends never buy copies of my zine. The singer"s lips bordered on undesirably large. The girl had a beautiful voice but was too shy, too young. Mostly envy enducing too young. The bass player reminded me of Dave Brainard from college. It was the beard. The drummer just looked vaguely familiar. He looked like a Jason. I decided his name was probably Jason (it was Matt). Then I wondered how he looked familiar to me. He looked like Jasons I knew. He was also scrawny and hipster. He looked like scrawny west coast guys I'd known. There were so many. Did he remind me of a drummer? Had those too. Or did he remind me of a deaf guy? Deaf or hearing? In what state, what year?

Didn't we have one of those already? Haven't I had one of everyone already? It's like that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine makes 3 new guy friends that look like but are the opposite of the gang of Jerry, George and Kramer. Then a showdown: she is walking with her new three and along come Jerry, Kramer and George. Elaine has to choose who she is going to go with. Elaine chooses the new group. George asks Elaine, "Can I come, too?" Elaine replies, "We already have a George". That's how I felt at this show. The most honest moment in my day is when someone comes up to me that I cannot remember having met and I look at them unable to lie.

2009-04-23T15:20:00.002-04:00

I'm taking an Arabic class. I've wanted to do this for years. The potential benefits include getting in touch with my ethnic background, being able to impress my family and practice with them, getting CEUs for my continuing education, possibly become trilingual. Isn't it amazing what we come up with as reasons to change the course of action in our lazy lives? As if one of these reasons wasn't good enough, no; I needed 4 full fledged reasons to sign up for this class. And, it's great! Better than I expected! I like the teacher, the room has plenty of natural lighting, the pace is almost slow enough for me.

Why then can't I do my homework? Here are some actual benefits that result from continuing education: what one accomplishes in the midst of daily procrastination.

I tell myself I will stay in to do my homework. I tell myself when I get home, I will have to do it since I have been out. When I go to work, I say, "I could be doing homework" and when the job cancels and I have a paid day off, instead of practicing I do the following:

1. Make more clocks. When that is done, make more clock labels for bags, organize clock photos, advertise clocks.
2. Schedule a yoga class. Get mysteriously hungry before class. Oops, just ate a whole meal and won't digest in time. Skip yoga and skip homework, too.
3. Plan to nap, never actually lay down.
4. Email! One never runs out of chores related to email.
5. Remove and reapply nail polish to toes. Clean stove while toes dry.
6. Hulu TV. As if I can't watch it any other time.
7. Clean.
8. Phone calls that could be made while walking to yoga were I also not procrastinating that activity also.
9. Typing up invoices earlier than needed.
10. Writing this blog posting.

Well, I guess it has worked, because it is now 3:33 and I can do a half-hour of homework then get to 4:30 yoga and there is nothing else I could try to do today but nap and even I accept that it's impossible at this point. Beside I invited my dad to class this Saturday and how would it look when I'm called on and don't know the answer.

David Byrne NYC 2-28-09

2009-03-01T00:38:00.005-05:00

I saw the David Byrne show at Radio City tonight. Naturally I am familiar with his music and public personality but can't say I've been enough of a fan to research him more. Now I am.

I cannot say enough good things about the musical end of the performance. But equally important is how completely cool he is. In the most pure sense of the word, too. I'm blown away by having seen him but without the aftertaste of built-up expectations one is supposed to have for famous people and famous moments. It's hard to believe he's been rockin'it for 35 years just from the shear amount of time but also because I didn't feel age on him or that 'look at him now' and I remember 1984, etc.

I'm excited to listen to more of his music and to his radio station and to watch Stop Making Sense. I never did watch it, now I'm interested because the live show I saw tonight was certainly a SHOW, the choreography, a performance art piece and not just live music. I just read a few excerpts from his journal and I like his writing style.

journal

making the mini-improv recording, Sequoyah

2009-02-25T23:39:00.002-05:00

see recording

Recording the concept mini-album for Sequoyah, a children’s book.

I found this book and was excited by the potential for horrible stereotypes of Indians with teepees and bows and arrows being that this book was published in 1960 (see cover). Opening it up to the table of contents, I quickly noticed the resemblance to a CD – twelve chapters, and the chapter titles all 2-3 words. The table of contents seemed ready to be a CD so I decided to pick it up when the time was right and record an album based on these twelve titles.

I decided to do it as a brainstorming musical expression, pulling the book out and writing each short piece without thinking ahead and keeping the first take when possible. I also did the songs all in order working for speed as opposed to quality as this was the desired effect. This was not meant to be a serious work of art.

The entire recording took about an hour including playback to be sure tracks were recorded right. The battery died on my looping pedal and I didn’t have another in the house, this hindered some of my choices.

Used: keyboard and keyboard features, hammer and nail, pre-recorded speech and noise, flute, hand claps, electric guitar without effects, xylophone, voice, dinner bell.

All Cherokee/White Man’s Wesa – guitar, slaps
Bright Hope – keyboard, metronome from keyboard, flute
Peace Town – flute
Powerful Magic – brought to you compliments of Yamaha’s pre-recorded tracks
Young Craftsman – pre-recorded noise and conversation, hammering a nail
The Accident – guitar, xylophone
New Ideas – xylophone
His Father’s Name – vocals, guitar, dinner bell
Useless One/A Bag of Gold – keyboard, xylophone
Days of Honor – guitar, flute

One dollar pizza

2009-02-17T20:21:00.002-05:00

I love how 1 dollar pizza is the great NY equalizer.
I eat here about 2x/week and there's always a slice of NYC inside (oh,the pun!). There are two locations. One on 6th Ave at 17th St which is a little more blue collar, and one on St. Mark's and 2nd ave. Here's who's in here Tuesday, Feb 17 at 1pm:

1 business guy alone
2 French speaking women
6 Asian boys
1 backwards baseball cap dude doing crossword puzzle
1 hipster guy in full-length fur coat
And 1 dollar pizza is handicapped accessible, 1 woman in automized type wheelchair.
In line: more guys in knit caps

Definitely more men than women. Why is that?

Facebook 25 Things - the 'fuck you' list

2009-02-03T17:22:00.003-05:00

Facebook got the sentimental one. Donuts at Home can handle the codified outrage.

1. Fuck you no universal health care in America yet.
2. Fuck you dying Roth IRA and Mutual Funds that I will never be able to afford again.
3. Fuck you Prop 8 and marriage inequality.
4. Fuck you war. Yeah, all war, any war. So what?
5. Fuck you euthanasia being illegal.
6. Fuck you weak recycling programs.
7. Fuck you requiring degrees over real life experiences.
8. Fuck you medical research depending on fucking marathon fundraisers and bake sales instead of government money.
9. Fuck you 7-10 business days to "process your order".
10.Fuck you I was this close.
11 fuck you learning a second language as an adult is so hard.
12 fuck you can't contact dead people.
13 fuck you once you hit send you can't take the email back.
14 fuck you unfair distribution of wealth
15 fuck you losing your child or spouse
16 fuck you Lorraine Duke. Yes that's right, still holding a grudge since 1995, and I don't hold grudges.
17 fuck you orphanages
18 fuck you pollution
19 fuck you reliance on technology weakening my own memory capabilities
20 fuck you imperfect DNA
21 fuck you unfair situations
22 fuck you George W Bush
23 fuck you genocide
24 fuck you no second chance
25 add your own fuck you here, I don't mind sharing.

living thru pixelation

2009-01-26T22:21:00.004-05:00

OK good, a song I don't care for. For a minute I thought I had unraveled from my own ability to choose preferences. And in a way, this leads to the topic for tonight's presentation.

Sorry! I've been interpreting too much video relay. This is not a presentation. (This is not a pipe).

Sorry again! This is my thought. I am going out to visit my best friend Jaime tomorrow in San Francisco, City of Tofu. (If LA is the City of Angels, what honor was given to the red-headed sister?) I call it the city of remembrance. It is re-gifted.

I am sad for the most ridiculous reason. I do not have a gift for Jaime. There is a reason. What can I bring that cannot be gotten via pixelation? I considered printing some photos, but all my photos are on Facebook or Flickr. I could make a mix CD but it is just as easy to sit and look at each other's iPods. I had purchased coffee from Hawaii but forgot that she herself was going to Hawaii and in fact, bought herself coffee. OK it is true, I could make something. But it's easier to bitch about technology gaining on the good old human interaction.

Which leads me to my point. I wondered, if went to the Away team and didn't return, how long would it be before the Home team noticed? Here are the following people who would notice:
the Away team (San Francisco)
the boyfriend (but it would take him a few days. a long few)
the pay checks (work. but even at that, there's no office to clean out)

Family? Friends? I have a cell phone, I have internet access. How often do we *see* people anymore? It's like within the last 48-months of code red level posting culture we have all turned into those lawn gnomes.

I could be the lawn gnome. I do it already with my feet. Here are my feet in South America. My feet at a backyard BBQ. My friend Nathan has a graphic novel called Power Out about getting unplugged. Wouldn't it be a social heart attack?

what does it mean when I like 10 songs in a row on Pandora radio?

2009-01-26T22:20:00.000-05:00

a deaf-blind New Year's

2009-01-19T11:17:00.003-05:00

This is an email from my friend Martin, who is deaf and blind (due to a condition called Usher's Syndrome, whereas people lose their vision and hearing, or also common, are born deaf and lose their vision slowly. He is nearly blind and uses tactile sign language since he cannot see sign language anymore.) He is super cool. Martin asked me if I wanted to join him as he wanted to get friends together to go to Times Square for New Years Eve. Not only did I not want to go, I didn't want him to go. I thought it would be dangerous for him. This email reminds me warmly of the power of saying yes instead of saying no to what you want to do in life and taking a chance.... thanks, Martin!

I did not expect to happen in Times Square for NYE as it would be dangerous, cold, crazy and no lavatory...... Never been there for the past 55 years so why not I go there for it once in a lifetime, right!?

Well my good friends Liz, RJ and Sylver joined me to a restaurant called Blue 9 for a great burger and fries on Third Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets in Lower East Side around six pm. Great burgers! We made sure we used lavatory before heading out to Times Square! :-)

We took the subway "L" and "F" for 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue near Bryant Park. We walked to Times Square but so many barricades and gates have been set. Asked cops where we could stand in the disabled section for people with disabilities (nerve-wracking) but cops said that we needed tickets to enter in the area so we would not be able to go there. Really to our disappointment and frustration, we were upset but then they would let us in anyway. We were soooo happy! When we arrived in the disabled area around 7:30 pm, there were few people... It was so C-O-L-D and windy... it was 17 degrees that evening. BRRRRRRR We managed to stay warm but we found a place to keep warm for a while at pizza parlor.. They asked us to leave the parlor cuz we stayed for too long! :-)

We were freeezing outside in the area but we tried to keep each other warm by hugging, dancing and moving.. Wow the lights were sooo beautiful all over the place in Times Square that includes big TV screen, big captions, flash off and on, big time clock and finally we saw beautiful crystal balls up in the air changing colors... Really fascinating!

We found another place at a bakery restaurant to keep warm. Working people there were so nice to let us stay for very long cuz they enjoyed watching us using sign language and making gestures at working guys! LOL

We left for outside feeling so cold! We went back to pizza parlor for a while but they told everyone to leave the parlor at 10:00 PM as they were going to close that time (FROWN)

Really to my surprise, more and more people showed up there after 10:00 PM they were brave for cold weather. Very crowded at 11:00 PM and there after! Some are tame, some are crazy and some rowdy!

When we stayed outside, it was brutually and bitterly COLD and very breezy. Liz asked us if we should go home so we discussed for a while but decided to stay until after midnight trying to be sooooo patient and persistent! We watched lights and balls also we chattted but it was soooo hard to understand each other cuz we used big gloves also I put wool hat over my face off and on!

So FINALLY it was midnight we saw crystal balls dropping by and we all clapped, screamed and hugged with some strangers and friends... Oh my goodness my feet and toes were frozen like a frost-bite!

We hurriedly left the area around 12:15 AM for the subway station with happy feelings. We walked so carefully cuz there were sooo many people drinking and sooooo many cars all over the place. We finally got the subway stop at 42nd St and Fifth Avenue... We were so happy we got inside subway station feeling warm! We took "F" for downtown but Liz/RJ stayed that train all the way home. Sylver and I took "L" for First Ave and walked fast to my building! Arrived home around 1:30 AM but then Sylver went home to the Bronx!

I don't think I will ever go back there again for the next 45 years LOL

Have a GREAT NEW YEAR!

A-l-e-f as in Friday

2009-01-08T23:24:00.006-05:00

I made up my name, by the way. It's a fake last name.

I heard alefhi, alefhi in some Arabic song in like 1995 and it stuck in my head.
My friend Megan had changed her name, just like she'd gotten a nose ring, and I copied her on that too, so I thought, what the hell.

I started using it when I left for Ireland and got real used to it during the 6-month trip. Started using it with friends who would never need to see proof of it when I returned, and then officially changed it when I'd gotten divorced in 1999. My justification was that I had never changed my name to my husband's when I got married, so it was delightfully ironic to change it to reflect a change in myself with a name I simply chose.

The entire process from conception to the trip to Portland City Hall to changing my Social Security card went off without any doubt or second guessing on my part. But I have to laugh when I look back and realize how every engine of my life is a consistent and systematic lunge with %100 inspiration and %0 research.

The name. So I heard the word in a song. I didn't know how to spell it and therefore couldn't divine its meaning. I picked it because it actually sounded more Arabic than my true Arabic last name (which sounded Italian because of Welcome to Ellis Island). I found myself unprepared for questions about where the name came from when challenged. Mostly I would say 'it's Syrian (read: I'm Syrian and you probably don't know any Arabs so fuck off) and that would suffice, I would get the usual rye smile that exoticism brings to the American and conversation would continue. But occasionally people would ask me what it means. "I have no idea", I could answer honestly.

I have now come to learn that actually, my name is pretty damn close to the Hebrew letter aleph. And there it is.

Here's something I never bargained for back in 1999 when the legal change seemed like an awesome idea: SPELLING. Well I guess when you make up a name based on nothing it is not going to follow the rules of spelling. I spell my name into a phone several times a week. With email and the internet I do it now much less, but I am scarred for life. Hurry up and marry me Jon so I can have the name of a white person that I will never have to spell again.

"Alefhi".
"What?"
"It's a wierd name. A-l-e-f-h-i."
"L-a-e -"
"A-L-E-F as in Friday H-I"
"(attempted respelling"
"(third attempt)"

This is no exaggeration. I now understand I will spell it an average of 3 times and that I should go very, very slowly. But what I will not do is use 'F as in Frank'. If I wanted a boring fucking Frank I never would have changed my fucking name! You people are lucky I don't say 'F as in flashdance' or 'F as in francois'. I tried a few different F words and settled on Friday and so far, so good. Fabulous.

I also once sold a car and accepted a personal check that bounced me into a negative balance because I couldn't be bothered to get a cashier's check instead. Or a name, address, phone number perhaps because 'it'll be OK, man' (read: the Simpsons were on TV and the guy had already been here too long).

And to think that for one semester in junior high, I was in Honor's classes.

film-like coating

2009-01-05T19:46:00.004-05:00

Someone made reference today to a film-like coating and it brought me around to a 1970 chromacolor kind of elementary science lab musical cartoon. It made me think of dissection and microscopes and glass slides and being once removed. I visualized opaque tracing paper, not the completely see-through kind but the frosted window kind, only a thin layer but still obscuring, blocking, preventing.

This is what it is like to listen to talking and just wait for it to be over. To be a participant only in the clinical sense of performing a duty, a surrogate bodily function. To carry the message over the border. The telephone game, cans and strings. This is to be an interpreter.

Really, the number one effect my profession has had on me is educational impotence. I can't get my mojo on for workshops, classes, lectures anymore. My instinct when I hear talking is to turn the channel to tune it out. I can't sit through anything oral anymore. I have no desire to take classes. I'm surrounded by free opportunities to learn and yet it feels like a huge chore. I realize it takes all of my endurance to learn anymore even when I want to.

As an interpreter you listen just close enough to repeat but not to understand. You could care but you don't, you shouldn't, you don't have time. You've heard it all before and God people don't know how they go on and on - if there was only an oral word count like on MS Office! But then once in a rare while it's the opposite and someone says something pure and newborn and real. You cringe in the face of your pawed over repetition. Then the frosted tracing paper comes in front of it.

You have no idea how long a string of words can be until you have to account for everyone of them. How about an 8-hour training? You can listen and doodle on your paper, tune out, think about something else, come back, make a phone call, leave the room - and I'm still right here, relaying the message nonstop, until the eye contact breaks. It's my job. Often it's so painfully boring I have to pinch myself to stay focused.

Attempted suicide. I've interpreted those conversations. For a middle-aged unemployed deaf man who signed in a deeply depressed and hopeless whisper. And the opposite - a teenager not realizing the power of her words: just the mention of it during school lands her in the psych ward for a mandatory 48-hour observation.

It is also really awesome work. Despite what I've said, I love my job. But it's true what I said about the drawback being one being only a shadow. You don't have a name or an opinion or backgrounds or closure. It really has ruined my own zest for continuing education because talking just all sounds like blah blah blah now.

I gotta go to bed now. Sorry this isn't the best piece of writing ever.

friday night prosodic poem finale

2008-12-12T23:04:00.002-05:00

the smells are man-made leather and man made misery
and nail polish
I don't reply to emails because the time will post
and everyone will know I am home alone on Friday night

the sounds are other people living
and in my apartment not even an iPod is playing
the guitar and keyboard are finally packed near the closet
with the other instruments long inside the closet

it seems fair to spend an evening alone but I
spend most evenings alone, with Jon, alone
and I wonder what I planned to do with the long homestretch
of childless years
now that it seems that every two I reinvent myself

I nearly pick up the clump of dust with my bare hand
and decide it can wait until tomorrow

on that note and on the cool number of 101 completed posts, donuts at home will be saying aideu an an instrument of public intervention. old posts will remain.

We'll Never Have new Year's

2008-12-10T14:32:00.000-05:00

New Year's reminds me of all the resolutions big and small we make as a bargaining tool for ourselves to get through another year. 'We'll Never Have Paris' is a zine for all things never meant to be.

In the spirit of combination, I invite you to submit your secret 'never have new years' resolution, poem, haiku, blurb, photo or drawing. These will appear on the blog and on a facebook page. The winners will appear in print in Volume 4 and if a photo or drawing, possibly as the front cover. They can be printed as 'anonymous'.

A contest of prolonged failure, if you will.

The deadline is January 1.

neverhaveparis@gmail.com

Atoms for Peace

2008-12-05T18:03:00.002-05:00

Know how some people feel when they wake up from a dream before they forget it, or better still I suppose is that 3/4 awake when the dream is still a snowflake melting on your jacket. It's a mental miracle, the dreaming and the remembering, and the losing it too. Did you ever see the movie "Until the end of the World?" (look it up if you are interested or I may get to a synopsis later).

Some people, not me, feel a strong reminisence with scents - they smell apple pie and are whisked back to their grandma's house in 1976.

For me, the unspeakable thrill is the randomness of time selection of songs that pop into my mind. Walking down the street, washing dishes, wishing, wondering, warming. A song will stay for a random length of time. Like a musical ghost. Does this happen for you? I also enjoy how in my head I am able to re-mix it and tune in more to lyrics or bass or the keyboard I never heard the first ten times. It's like how it is when you're stoned.

Today's selection is Thom Yorke's 'Atoms for Peace'. The lyric "so many alive, so many alive" came in first, then the mental color of the ambient keyboard layers. I don't travel with an iPod so the anticipation mounted all day. This song is so fucking good.

laundry list #31

2008-11-19T18:35:00.000-05:00

Haven't written in a while and not in a mood to be maudlin just for the sake of writing something like a writer. Just gonna write what's up:

Went to Kim's dance rehersal last night, the rehersal for the Bishop Desmond Tutu. Moses, Georgia, JHO, Diana and Janelle all went. I was going to take a great Breakfast Club photo of them and the battery was dead.

ASL class has been scattered this semester. A little disappointing. It started out so well. Maybe next semester go back to beginner ASL with a whole new cast? Maybe Jon wants to pick up the continuers.

Jon stayed home and cleaned today! We ordered a bunch of household appliances and small things to modernize a little, straighten up a little. Felt good to neaten up the clock workshop area, get rid of the cheap cd rack, move the cd/tape player.

WNHP sales: expected more sales from the writers. Perhaps at the reading in January. Never heard from Avocado, Parcell, there was another one... it looks great though and it looks like I will have some good writers for the next one, too.

I've been a very good friend supporter of seeing friend's shows. Both Janelle and JHO are playing and recording up a storm. Jaime's band is having a cd release party at the end of January (which I'm planning to attend). I can't believe how uninterested in listening to, playing music, wanting to be in a band, etc I am. I know there's profound effects on my life as a result, some things lacking because of it, yet, I feel a great definateness about the removal of music playing.

I have learned that because of my tinitus, I cannot listen to any loud music or sounds, even music not going through a PA without earplugs. I had a scare last night where the ringing fired up super loud in the normal ear. It was at a different pitch than the other and for about 4 minutes I was scared shitless because well,
Then that's the end. But it went away. But how long? Is this my future? And the ear plugs can be painful.

Jon and I waiting for the Christmas Cruise to come through.

I ordered a double order of clock parts and am ramping up for six really cold dates at BIM.

I am finally getting paid to interpret for RMA now that I no longer find it interesting.

I still never have anyone on any given last minute to go to nonsense events with andf my boyfriend is still deaf.

Today I ordered the following books from the library: no one belongs here more than you and way of the world as recommended by jho.

I haven't played poker in several months.

clocks for sale

2008-11-19T11:40:00.002-05:00

www.lasuperette.org
brooklyn indie market (BIM)
Indie Collective

OBAMA WON

2008-11-04T23:21:00.003-05:00

Eight hours ago when I voted and it was still light out, I felt gloom and apprehension. Despite what Obama supporters here in NYC said about being ahead in the polls, I wasn't going to be disappointed when McCain somehow won. I pictured the apocalyptic doom and riots in the streets when McCain was declared winner due to voting fuck-ups and schemes that skewed votes (another Florida) and I would stand above them all, saying well I knew it would happen. When I went to my polling station and was ready to cast my ballot (oddly at 3:30pm I went right in. I know some people waited hours to vote), the attendant who pulled the curtain discovered that the person who voted right before me had not completed the process. In NY that means pulling the red lever to the right, throwing the switches for the ballot, then pulling the lever to the left. Their vote then did not count. That's when I thought, shit, I could have voted twice. I imagined sniffing out extra opportunities to vote, like when you scan pay phones and video poker machines for coins in the slot return. The sneaky, shifty way with hands hitched in pockets you look for extra money, because fuck, it's there, shifty and there for someone so why not you. Like America. Like I'm not accustomed to going with the grain. To celebrating with an entire city, state, country. And yet by 9pm, it took that long, but I could see that in fact, Obama was going to win and we would not be fucked this time. Millions of us on the left suddenly being right, rights upheld, righteous action, right on!

For one evening and maybe one day, I can believe in Americans. This is a miracle.

Grey Hair

2008-09-26T23:05:00.002-04:00

Oddly enough it's not my grey hair that I'm obsessed with but my
boyfriend's. Mine I pluck with a tweezers when I'm somewhere with
sufficient lighting like my brother's or at some of the places I work. I
usually lose 2 or 3 hairs to every 1 grey that I manage to grab with the
instrument of purification. Woman have so much hair to manage, shape,
eliminate, change. We age, the hair comes, we change.

Moses and Georgia are both pretty grey and I want to take both of them into
the bathroom with a box of Clairol and say "this is for me, not for
you". We are best friends - maybe because they are married they just
don't care about the grey, but I do.

Jon doesn't care, either. Thankfully he is tolerant of my obsession. I
see them - they are seen, when we ride the subway. I'm not looking for
them like a hunter and the hunted. I just can't help it. Its the OCD
in all of us and mine is spotting and removing his dangling greys. One
moment we are talking, and then, now he has memorized the look in my
eyes and the gaze from his face, and he stops mid-sentence and says, "go
ahead". Then with a twinkle in my eyes like I'd been offered a cookie,
I swoop in and pluck his grey. If you know Jon you will know it is super
easy because he has long hair.

That's also by my design. His black, curly locks is one of his best
features and I could never live with him without it. And even that is
changing. Within the last few months I see it thinning and receding.

There are so many things about my body I cannot alter. I have bunions ripening. I figure I gotta get at least one foot done next summer. The scoliosis is twisting and pushing me a few degrees every year, like plate tectonics. I hate my dark circles and bags. I despise the rosecea. I would love for it to be nothing more than a few laps in the pool and youth! Regained! So all I can easily do is pluck Jon's greys and enjoy gazing upon his youth, five years behind mine.

one of my rants has been posted at Gloom Cupboard

2008-09-14T13:17:00.002-04:00

See my rant about lemons, yoga ashrams and the human condition in #57 of an online publication variety called Gloom Cupboard.

#57 gloomcupboard

the elephant in the room is dead

2008-09-13T23:49:00.004-04:00

You can talk about a lot things that have passed.
Past jobs, past apartments, past roommates and partners.
But you can't talk about dead people.

Can't even make a subtle, grammatical verb shift from likes to liked.
Everyone knows quickly you mean liked as in no longer likes as in no longer living.

I feel like I'm in a skit with canned laughter, and my job is to sneak the elephant across the room. Which is impossible. Because the elephant is dead. And by the way, no one laughs.

Not that you want anyone to. You are just sick of being denied the right to reference your own mother which is like, a large part of your life that is now taboo from all of those who have things in the past but not actual lives lost. Then again don't we, all of us? Is there a big difference between past and passed and gone from well, dead gone?

The answer is yes and no. And here we are.

To all of you who are uncomfortable, you make me more uncomfortable.

To all of you, it will be your turn soon. Sorry.

Miami has nothing to do with writing

2008-09-01T14:50:00.002-04:00

I have this obsession about being in the pool. Like any worthwhile obsession there are specific conditions. If I cannot have all of them at the same time then I don't get in and sadly wait in the sidelines of summertime fun.

Some people check the door three times to be sure its locked before leaving the house. I just want to enjoy the pool but it must be hot and sunny outside, by which I mean direct sunlight. Any cloud that crosses the sun even momentarily is like a referee calling a time out for me. The best time is between 11am and 2pm but these hours change with the months, the tilt and distance from the sun changing the hottest times. At the end of July I find the hottest time to be the morning, after noon it's not worth it. And then of course August is often cloudy and spotty. The water also has to be warm.

If its an outdoor pool, then it's no fun to go in alone. Outdoor pools are for playing and lounging and talking about subjects that are bouyant and wet. If a friend goes to the pool but doesn't want to get in, that's also no good. At indoor pools I just do laps and none of the above rules apply. Laps are laps.

But nothing beats an outdoor pool in the hot sun with a friend in the summer.

I'm in Miami with Jon and after waiting for Hurricane Gustav to stop ruining my pool vacation from three hundred miles away, finally, our last day, we got sun. Now I'm showered and mango-scented and laying in a luxury bed on a 2-foot thick matress with the fanciest pillow under my head. I'm hoping for a nap.

Miami has nothing to do with writing, but checking my email does. I'm pleased to see that volume 3 looks like a go, with stories coming from Alexis Clements, Jennifer Viale (a fan ready for first time in print), a triumphant return of Russ Josephs, and hopefully Dave Cole will concede after being asked one thousand times. I'm also sending my 5 last copies to a distributor, Dead Trees and Dye, in England. So I believe I will do a second printing of volume 2. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to find an online printer and see if that's cheaper than the local shop.

Yay for the pool. I vow to do this more often.

generic journal entry

2008-08-21T20:13:00.002-04:00

This post is just for myself. No grandiose points or loose ends to tie.

Memory problems: West Side Story, Alexandria, Class Action Law Suit. what is the name of the popular color I am seeing this summer: a kind of blue-toned lavender?

New vocab (just went to FIT museum. we were supposed to go to the Korean Spa for the evening. no substitute, is it?) Millinery (hat making). Saw dresses that remind me that fashion can be beautiful and wouldn't I like to look better than good? And wouldn't it be cool to go to one of those Prohibition Style evenings all dressed up?

Haven't gone to an outdoor public pool all summer, despite being more prepared this year than last year. Have the schedule, was carrying around suit, towel and lock a good part of the summer. But don't wanna go alone. That's just no fun. Now the evenings are cooling off. Thank God for Kim's pool party. That was the best. Why is it so hard to get Jon or at least someone who wants to swim into a pool in the summer heat? It sounds simple.

Work is rolling in and now I see that next summer I absolutely positively have to have a plan in place to fuck outta here for a month to South AMerica like I had wanted to this summer.

NYU, what happened to our love?

I've sold out of WNHP volume 2, very exciting. Should I print another run? Should I try to force the birth of volume 3 when as of now, 2 months away, I have no submissions? I guess there is no rule that I have to print twice yearly and perhaps I should relax and let volume 2 reap more rewards. More to come.

I'm reenergize by clock sales at BIM so I have a bunch of new clocks. I plan to get a lot more tea tins ad get it over with. Those are what the people want and they can be sold outside without getting rain soaked or blowing away.

Missy did have the baby, so I am now an aunt twice.

The humiliating rash on my face did not in fact, go away as a result of avoiding western medicine and embracing homeopathic remedies. The dermatologist (I finally went and I wasn't nice about it) identified it as a more vigilant rosecea and I started to tear up in the doctor's office. It's an inflammatory disease and we all know that inflammation is a bad thing in health. Now I am taking some shit that makes me nauseous and hungry at the same time and might not produce any real improvement. I am also now taking double the dose of Chinese herbs (I had misread the dosage for the last 2 months).

I still haven't played any music. If I could join a band that I could match via skill level and personality and mood, I would join the Crystal Stilts. I wanted to tell them that when I saw them a few months ago but I know how dumb that sounds. So I emailed them on Myspace which did not get me a reply.

I want to take some kind of class this fall but don't know what. My brain needs exercise. I do plan to take Arabic but seems there is no fall class. I would't mind some kind of fun classes from the Nonsense list. Have to look into it.

stillborn births and olympic swimmers

2008-08-13T23:16:00.004-04:00

My sister-in-law is due to deliver any day now, their second child. another little girl. actually she is more than ready, she is almost overdue. their first daughter was born on Aug 9. her only cousin was born one year later, on the exact same day. so when we heard she was due in august, we were all convinced she would deliver yet a third child on aug 9. I actually felt strongly she would deliver the week before. that came and went. the days before aug 9, we expected her to give birth. i didn't even put samantha's birthday party in my calendar because I expected, right up until saturday morning, to be called, informed it was cancelled because they were on the way to the hospital. my aunts and I were laying bets. every day since aug 9, i've been waiting for a call. I think we all are.

i was violently ill on monday with some G-I thing. I figure I either got it from my virgin drink of wheatgrass the day before, from being around the babies at the birthday party 2 days before, or from the mosquito rape at said birthday party. New Jersey mosquitos. vigilant little fuckers. I called my brother because I wondered if they were sick over there, too. turns out they were. he told me m. was puking and s. was sick too.

while I was sick and lying useless on the couch with a low grade fever, I watched the olympic swimming 400m medley. I was impressed enough just watching their strength and speed. Then the scores. No wait, that's time. Two minutes! Just over two minutes and swimming 400 meters! It's hard to identify with olympic athletes. all I can do is watch. their skills tell me they are a species different than I.

But aren't mothers a different species too? Because when I thought about my sister-in-law puking so close to going into labor, I wondered, could a woman go into labor if they were puking and sick? If you did, wouldn't that be a bad omen for your child? then I wondered, just when is she going to deliver this child? what if she never does?

And sadly, my mind wandered to women who deliver stillborn. I know a good writer shows, doesn't tell, what they want to say, but I can't be poetic about such a thing. I just can't imagine what that would feel like to carry for 9 months, with everyone waiting, with the rooms and the products ready, to actually give the birth, and for the child to be dead already. How could a child die inside of you without your sensing? It seems like the most wrong thing that could happen to anyone on Earth and I don't know how any woman could ever recover from that. I hate to write about this as any kind of suggestion or jinx, but I feel there is some connection between olympic swimmers and stillborn births that will maybe play out as some kind of artsy foreign film noir while I sleep tonight (that I won't remember).

i feel dirty

2008-08-13T23:15:00.000-04:00

Ew. I just saw a mainstream sounding band.

Knock on wood; OR, Dodging the bullet; OR, How I know I could never have a real job, ever.

2008-07-24T16:14:00.006-04:00

In 1994, two semesters into a graduate program for education, the moment came when I knew I could never work in that profession, never be 'that guy'. It was when as a group, we brainstormed the skills and personality traits necessary to be a parent and infant educator. The idea that after two semesters we should feel so smug having brainstormed our way through several flip chart pages, with different colors and circles and arrows connecting (smartly!) items that paired up. Boy, were we ready to teach!

No, we weren't, and no one was less ready than me. Didn't it allude anyone else that as graduate students, we should have to come up on our own with what was necessary to teach while the tenured do-nothing in the back of the room just smiled and nodded with our youthful wisdom? I know I saved that checklist, but where is it now, I can't say. Suffice to say it has 20 to 30 pearls of obvious wisdom such as 'being an empathetic person' and 'not judging others'. After a year's worth of schmaltzy crap, I had no idea why only a year earlier I thought that I, who didn't like kids and never planned to be a parent, wasn't hanging out with kids or parents (or the kinds of people that do), therefore not having any interest or advice for parents, wanted to then spend 40 hours a week feeling really uncomfortable in every way, shape and form.

I just wanted to use sign language and promote ASL and Deaf culture. After years of teaching anyway (Hey, I'm in grad school! Why stop now?) I made a career switch to interpreter of the Deaf or ASL interpreter. I LOVE my career for a variety of reasons, but if asked for the top reasons, I cannot tell a lie.

I have no other skills.
I don't have a boss as a freelancer, I don't have to work full time, and
I cannot work with others.

I'll even go one further: I haven't got idea one how to mingle in an office, let alone work with others.

Friends of mine with regular jobs, I marvel at their interpersonal skills! Out to lunch for co-worker's birthday? Small talk around the water cooler? Getting work done by acting like you value their part when you could just take it and do it alone? Sending a polite 'when will that be ready?' email with a smiley face so they don't think you are being pushy? Each of these would stress me out for a week before, week during, and probably two weeks afterwards. If I didn't get a reply to an email, I would have to decide how to react, if I got a reply, I would over analyze it. If there is a problem, should I go to my boss? The paranoia would get to me in about 10 minutes, then I would have to worry about the paranoia attachment disorder on top of my regular personality issues, and I haven't even done any work yet, for which, I have no skills.

All this flashed through my mind while on a corporate job yesterday. Mostly young, fashionable people. People who've been mostly recruited. Regular America. Girls in make-up eating salads for lunch, drinking Diet Coke, leaving the carbs on their plates. This is the working world. Just watching people interact confidently...OK fine, normally, made me picture being there one day, one week, one month, 50 weeks a year minus 10 federal holidays/4 sick/2 personal days. I could never do this. Ever.

Now I know there's an interpreter, a peer out there who is going to read this and get all hot and bothered, worrying that I am insinuating that an interpreter is a person who can't work a real job, has no interpersonal skills, and doesn't take their job seriously. To which my answer is of course, no. Just talking about me. It's a one woman blog. Here is the checklist from the employee meeting yesterday.

Oh I almost forgot! They also handed out the Myers-Briggs Personality tests. More proof that I don't' have the slightest idea how to be myself in a work environment, leaving me bland and slightly autistic. In real life, I'm a flaming ENSP. Having filled this out and scored otherwise while a teacher, when my purest desire was to get work done with expedience and think versus feel, judge versus perceive, these personality opposites were merely because I hated everyone and wanted work to be just work.

The shit hammer fell on me randomly and without any compensation at my first professional job after grad school. Thank you, Lorraine Duke! Even my first job with a paycheck at 16 was a disaster, I was pushed into working and hadn't a clue how to do it. I was fired after 1 month, and really didn't even know what had happened. Yeah, I was never off to a good start. Interpreting is the first job ever where I'm not pulled aside to be informed that I suck.

To all of you out there who weren't messed up from your first and every ongoing work experience your entire adult life, I salute you!

Knock on wood;

2008-07-24T16:14:00.001-04:00

We'll Never Have Bookstores

2008-07-21T16:39:00.002-04:00

I didn't want to write an opinion essay, the whole letters to the press kind of thing, but now I feel compelled to put down a least a few sentences about it. Like polar ice caps, independent bookstores are receding into extinction. In my own business self interest to sell my zine, I've phone independent bookstores from around the country. In San Francisco, in Eugene, in Kansas City, in Burlington. Phone numbers are disconnected. It feels like a hurricane quietly swept through the nation.

Support independent book stores. If you don't want to pay full price for books, go to the library and support those. Window shopping somewhere cool and then buying your book online at Amazon is not cool. There's a facebook group called Support your local bookstores Here is the link: Support your local Bookstores

Not a Joiner: 3 days at a yoga ashram

2008-06-19T22:48:00.002-04:00

Not a Joiner: 3 days at a yoga ashram

I was supposed to stay until Friday but on Wednesday afternoon while everyone was in class, I quietly packed my bags and left.

I volunteered my services as an interpreter for a yoga teacher-training course at an ashram. It’s my fault, really. I didn't fully comprehend what I was signing up for. I thought I was going to a yoga retreat (read: no frills spa). What I went to was a yoga retreat (read: cult).

I've yet to look it up in the dictionary but apparently ashram means some kind of monastery for guilty Caucasian people needing of penance in the form of busy work and journal writing. Every morning the mission bell rang across the compound at 5:30am. Folks went off half-asleep to sit cross-legged on the floor and be half-asleep with the others for 30 minutes (well, fine call it meditation if you have to). Twice a day folks did "karma yoga" which were glorified chores such as washing dishes or folding laundry. The chores reminded you that no one was above anyone else. Did I mention the cross-legged sitting on hardwood floors? One computer to share with 60 others with limited hours of operation?

Once I got there and got the picture of Freakville I thought ‘well at least I can take yoga class everyday and get a buff workout’. Even that was a surprising disappointment. Their version of yoga is more holistic incorporating the karmic yoga chores, the meditation, the singing and chanting nightly. The one yoga class they did offer each day didn’t have the exercise flow I was looking for and was mostly lying on the floor breathing.

But here's the best part. Only I could go to a yoga ashram and find someone to dislike so greatly that I wanted to punch this person in the face and then publicly flog them. This place where strangers offered me chocolate. This person was an instructor (a swami). I remembered her instantly. A real deaf wannabe. This person actually went out with me and a group and refused to use her ability to hear and speak, so greatly did she "identify with being deaf". She was there, and everything about her reeked of self promotion in the worst way, that kind of overly helpful and nice do unto others way that was so obviously to stroke her own ego but in a way that she couldn't see but I so easily could. I wasn't being utilized as an interpreter very much because this person took over and I ended up sitting there (on the hardwood floor!) wondering just what I was doing there. I know I cannot describe in words the degree to which I hated this woman, hated all people of this nature, so fucking clueless and manipulative and skilled at enshrouding themselves in phony bliss. She felt my opposite energy and it sent me out of there.

I had come to interpret, to help out, to do something specific, and leave. If it were compared to helping someone move, it would be to help you move a couch and only the couch because it requires two people, and not to stick around and load boxes in the car. I didn't join in the singing, the meditation, the chores, and didn't get up at 5:30am. They couldn't wrap their heads around the fact that I was just there to interpret. That I wasn't a joiner: that any group activities, especially those centered around praise, honor and devotion to a speaker, monk, teacher, rabbi or guru send me the other way just like a reflex action.

Why can't I see the good that can be derived from motivational speakers? I always detest the inspiration that others feel and it makes me blacken inside. A 96-year old rabbi came to preach peace and love and forgiveness. People cried and thanked him for coming. All I could think was, "Who the fuck does he think he is?"

I didn't enjoy the yoga plus I was cold since I'd gotten there, and I wasn't being paid. After I told the whack job girl "You're patronizing. Do you know that?" to which she replied, "it's all in your mind", I had to double back and take a breath. I left anyhow, but even before I was back in the real world, I knew she touched a nerve that was partially true.

This place was nutty but she made a point. And this is my never have Paris. This is my thing never meant to be. How much is me and how much is them? Much more than others I end up apologizing to people and backtracking, fast tracking, smoothing over, clarifying, retouching, what I meant was-ing, I'm sorry it came out that way-ing for all kinds on interactions, conversations, altercations, confrontations, interceptions, first impressions, and looks that went the wrong way.

I do something to people. I set them on edge. I give them the look. I can't go with the flow. Or it’s the opposite. I have great energy. We make a connection right away. We like each other instantly and have nothing but complete trust. Everyone is like this but for turning the knob feels out of my control and happens externally.

Some people have lemons and make lemonade. Some maybe just sigh, too tired to make lemonade, and go to Dunkin' Donuts for an iced coffee. Me, I run to the nearest person, finger already pointed, screaming, "Do you see this? What the FUCK am I supposed to do with lemons?" I somehow need to prove to anyone within earshot that I saw thru the plot.

I feel guilty because I tire out good friends who know how small my comfort level is. And yet to strangers I come off as laid back and ‘go with the flow’.

The ashram was on 77 acres of land and you couldn't hear the cars from the road. At two days before I turn 37, I have to wonder what happened to the person I was who could sleep on a stranger's floor and go away for a weekend with a toothbrush, a single pair of underwear and an unwrapped bagel stuffed in a backpack.

New York Closed: read the schedule

2008-06-19T17:35:00.000-04:00

More fun interactions with the NYC Rec Department. After bashing them in repeated postings over their pool personnel at the Sheltering Arms Pool, in a moment of spontaneous ignorance, actually joined for a year's membership. Ask me how often the pools are actually open.

reminded of good 'almost dying' in France stories

2008-06-18T20:37:00.006-04:00

I don't believe I have ever sat down and done much to chronicle the more interesting moments of my devil-may-care days living in Ireland from July to December 1996. The trip seems far-fetched to most people, so I'd stopped sharing the stories of my time there. Half of which was spend living in Galway, working under the table in a cafe, writing songs and recording a full 9-song 'album' with a put together band of mostly cafe employees, and half of that was spent hitch-hiking around Ireland including 2 weeks in Bretagne, or Brittany, the Celtic influenced Northwest of France. This story is about that trip.

I'm at the monthly "Where Have You Been?" event at Bluestockings, and arrive at the moment that a story teller is describing his being violently ill in France ( really it was Africa) and meeting up with a 18-year old French-speaking rapper. I quickly identified: 'hey, I was in France, couldn't speak the language and thought I might die there, too'.

I had met an accordion player (box player, for slang) in the memorable town of Kenmare. As I had been doing for 1 month, traveling south and west, I found pubs having open evening sessions, quietly joined the circle, and waited for tunes I knew to join on or started one of my own. I got into traditional Irish tunes (very randomly) after moving to Portland, learned to play tin whistle and in 18 months time was better than peers twice my age at my local tavern. Padraig was his name, and he was a young, hot shit. He would start a string and dominate it for like 7 or 8 tunes in a row, and he would look down in concentration, sweating and pounding the rhythm out with both feet. He told me he was going to Lorient for the annual 2-week Inter Celtique Festival of trad music, and I took the ferry with him and followed him there. After some time, at one of the many many private upstart sessions, I had met a French man named Gerald. He was adorable, almost sprite-like. He spoke proudly of his home in Brest and had invited me there. At this time, I went off with nearly any man in the name of music so after a few days I set out, hitch-hiking to Brest. Not speaking French, I wrote "Brest" on a cardboard sign to be sure I could get in the right car. I arrived at his apartment.

Being a gentleman, he offered me a separate bed; being married, I accepted. (Yep, I went off on this trip married. Naturally Padraig assumed he was traveling with a single American woman and was going to get some, and when I told him I was married, as did all men at that time, he couldn't wrap his head around it. "You're married? What are ya doin' here?" but it is so much better with the proper Irish accent). Why I hitch-hiked and went off with foreign men while only recently married in America is another story. So Gerald pointed me to the extra bed. In fact, I would have gladly shared a bed with him, but in fact, he had borrowed a roll-out couch from a neighbor down the hall. We laid down in separate beds after a little affectionate touching that promised that the next night we probably would not need the extra bed. But there was to be no extra night.

Because that night, after a few hours, I woke with a start. I couldn't breathe well. My nose was stuffed, but worse, my lungs were tight. I didn't know what the problem was. I had learned recently that I was allergic to cats, but Gerald had no cats. I was more embarrassed at my coughing and honking than aware that I was truly fucked and couldn't breathe. I opened a window. I politely coughed again. I walked around the room. That's when it hit me: I really, really couldn't breathe and I didn't know why. I was in France. I didn't speak French. I didn't even really know where I was or what I should be doing. I wondered if a hospital was a good idea when Gerald asked me if everything was OK. He rubbed my back and was generally taking the situation well, and I probably passed out from lack of oxygen.

He then told me that the person he borrowed the couch from did have cats, years ago. So, I am that allergic. The next day, he went to work and some friends of his that spoke less English than he did took me around. It was a sunny day, they made picnic lunches. I remember trying to politely not die and look appreciative, interesting, un-American. They implored me to return home and tell my friends that the French are nice people. And they were.

This was the summer of 1996.

RENEGADE CRAFT FAIR MCCARREN POOL SATURDAY

2008-06-10T21:55:00.004-04:00

I'm very excited! I'm finally going to be doing Renegade! That's because Karin and Naomi understand and love me anyways. They did the application and got the tent and planned it and are letting my lazy, lazy ass in anyhow! God love them!

I will be there Saturday only, so come then! 11am-7pm McCarren Pool, Brooklyn. This is the finest, but hottest, craft fair ever. Buy a bunch of stuff and then go swimming (somewhere).

Renegade
BetterThanJam

June 1 Bowery Poetry Club reminder

2008-05-24T14:29:00.000-04:00

SUNDAY JUNE 1, "We'll Never Have Paris" Variety Show
and Zine Release party. Bowery Poetry Club, 4-6pm,
$8. Come enjoy an old-fashioned variety show along
with a new-fashioned, local, print-only zine
celebrating the release of volume 2. Juggling,
stand-up comedy, the beat box hip hop stylings of
ProGrammar, solo drum compositions, and a raffle
prize. (308 Bowery btw Houston and E 1st)

andria alefhi inside The Matrix

2008-05-22T20:21:00.002-04:00

I put the key in the front door and it wouldn't go.

OK, sometimes this happens to me with this copied set. I could see without taking the key out that yes it was labeled "F" for front door. I took it out and tried it again. Still only halfway in.

I didn't think much of it, just wanted to get in. I knew Jon was out so I proceeded to buzz the 15 other apartments. 2, 3; buzz. I know it sucks, I hate when people do it to me, but I know I really live here. 4, 5; buzz. Try key again. Repeat 2-5; buzz. 6, 7; buzz. Come on, no one is home? I try the key yet again, though I accept that it won't work. Finally, someone buzzes me in (apt #9?) and I think, "thank you!" and run up the stairs to the 1st floor, 1st apt door.

It's not my door. What???

It's not my apartment.

For a split second, I think that I am on acid. Then I realize I'm in the apartment next door, which is identical.

I've lived here for 9 months, and I have gone to the wrong apartment more than a few times. This being the first time I actually remained duped until I got inside.

curtains!

2008-05-21T01:01:00.002-04:00

Hey it was great to get a letter from you.

I wanted to also write you a letter, then thought I
would type it and mail it, then thought oh what the
hell I will just send an email. I can't write
anymore, I feel practically disabled when it comes to
handwriting.

Speaking of disabled I have this recurring dream that
(wait while I typed the word 'dream' I recall that as
of recently I am re-fascinated by the song "Life in a
Northern Town" by Dream Academy from the 80s. It was
campy but super orchestrated and I wonder about the
rest of the album) Yes dream that I am physically
disabled, not paralyzed, but walking with those hand
crutches that are the crutches of those permanently
affected, not like someone who sprained their ankle.
I also have dreams where I cannot get my legs to work
and even now I am unconvinced that it doesn't
sometimes happen in real life. I do walk with a small
gait.

Finally, Sunday night I had a vision of my own end of
existence and it freaked me out. It was the first time
in my life, God knows what inspired the quandry of
what happens when you are gone. Not a fear of death,
just how GONE you are when you are well, gone. How
can one grasp and hold the concept of nonexistence?

I could have gone further with the muse and wanted to
go to bed and was surprised that I could shortly
afterwards.

Blinds are badly need to fully cover my my windows as we near the solstice.

- {a}.

Andria America

2008-05-14T22:04:00.000-04:00

When I type my name in my cell to text message in iTAP, andria comes up

'america'.

Austin trip

2008-05-14T00:31:00.005-04:00

Jaime and I met in Austin. I love how she and I meet all over the country so many years after I've moved away from SF. We expected to see some great indie music. I was secretly hoping to catch some kind of secret American Analog Set reunion show that no one but me and 5 other people knew about. These things did not happen. However, other things did! We had a very casual trip that included hanging out with people we know, as though it had been planned. It all worked out. We saw her friends Dan and Carrie, from her Iowa days. We got to play music with Dan and his friend Bill, old fashioned jamming. We went to several (smokey!) bars with either poor or no music. We also saw my friend who I knew for like 5 minutes while she still lived in NYC but we had an instant bond as writers, Cassie, and she moved to Austin just last month, drove cross country, loves it.

The Austin motel was great (had a pool!). I slept the best have in months despite the AC unit sounding like the boiler room for a large factory. I slept through that without ear plugs yet at home I need ear plugs for every little shit sound. I can't say I had an awesome meal in Austin, but I did have the best juice at this crazy juice bar with so many fucking juice options! Also had some great coffee. Bought a nice new sun dress in a boutique. Saw some worthwhile art at the exhibit at MoMA (very small museum, single exhibit kind of place, very nice, I liked the size of it). Saw a piece inspired by Willie Nelson's hair. The artist paid for the genetic DNA breakdown of his hair, this inspired by an Annie Leibowitz photo of the man in 2001.

Went to Barton Springs pool...lake...pool. Hard to explain. And get this, our hotel was right next door to the Texas School for the Deaf. Beautiful campus! I was there for like 5 whole minutes to buy a t-shirt for Jon, and in that 5 minutes, despite the size of the campus and having not contacted him at all, I ran into Theron, a friend of ours, his wife and little son. So crazy how the cosmic energy works out sometimes!

Austin Plus: people. so. fucking. friendly. helpful.
another plus: a bus day pass is 1 dollar. wtf?
Austin minus: allergies. holy shit. weather plus smokey places and smoking friends plus afternoon jamming at Dan's house with a cat equals genuinely fucked. Had to purchase an inhaler. Went to two stores with no luck on saturday. Suffered through saturday night. Broke down on sunday after just a few hours sleep. It's hard to sleep when an elephant is standing on your lungs.
another minus: not a great city for the carless.

I would go back to Austin. it was just great to have a vacation with jaime and hang out with locals new and old.

A shout out to Monkey Wrench Books! Thank you for being the first bookstore to purchase my zines outright and not on consignment! I walked away with 4 bucks! The store is the southwest version of Bluestockings, almost seems modeled after it.

Homeshow this weekend May 17

2008-05-14T00:10:00.003-04:00

I'm so excited to be a part of this designer market happening at Karin's house. I will be selling along with these folks:

Joanne Tracy Designs
the Hand of Fatima
Chelleline
Better Than Jam
Fadingflowers Paper Goods & Designs
Karen's Monsters
Kreated by Karina
Fubabee
DripStick
Charlie and Sarah
LAA Designs
and of course, KimmChi !

Call to make a reservation and get a goodie bag! Saturday 10am-5pm.

directions? not super close to the train. directions

link:homeshow

the Hearts and Crafts Affair

2008-04-25T22:52:00.004-04:00

This is one of my favorite designer markets to sell at. I see great products and displays every time, this will be my third. one day only:

Sunday May 04, noon to six pm. Cafe Grumpy, on the G train.
heartsandcraftsaffair

These weeks' pleasures

2008-04-25T21:49:00.004-04:00

things to talk about -

Zine. I have to toot my own horn, I'm pleased with the zine. It looks great. two things I would have done better would be to photoshop up the green in the grass of the cover photo, it looks like dried summer grass instead of late spring in Scotland where the shit is pretty green. additionally, I would have formatted all the text in word better and spell / grammar checked it there instead of in InDesign. I've been mailing it out all week, stuffing manila envelopes and shlepping to the the PO. I realize that I cannot possibly make a profit on this and at best will cover some of my costs, once you factor in the ones you give away for free, send out for review, sell in stores that take 40% (fair, not complaining) and mail paying for postage etc...it's funny to me now that AI consider it, spending 1.50 to mail $6 worth of zine that if both sold would give me 3.60. oh well. it's still cool.

EMusic. In an effort to get more new music, I took the emusic offer of 'rejoin us now for 75 free downloads' and got busy. I had to download some shit that i didn't' want just because they don't carry quite a bit of what I would have liked. The Talking Heads, Radiohead, The Breeders, Death Cab for Cutie (only worth a free download, you dont' see me running to iTunes to buy it, let's be clear). What they had that I enjoyed getting: Black Before Red, another Versus album, another My Teenage Stride, Beach House (free download), another Pedro the Lion, another Dirty Projectors, Cocteau Twins, the Magnetic Fields but not the new album I wanted, they didn't offer that. What I got that sucked: All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors. I tried this out for the sake of sentimentality - I played in a band called the Lemon Lime Lights in Oakland. Also purchased the Crystal Stilts, still undecided on them.

what's absent: camera. I haven't taken photos in forever. hmm, this weekend then when I go to Amanda's party/show, this other party, Moses&Georgia's BBQ, Graham's rooftop party. Popular for a weekend.

Ballet: My friend Mona is in the Rebecca Kelly Ballet. I saw her performance on thursday night. Holy shit was it good! I never knew ballet could be so deep, communicative, real. And Mona was fucking awesome! tomorrow is last performance of the run, but I guess just take note. rebeccakellyballet

Jon: Things are good. Working on the extra employment thing. Spending a lot of time together, very comfortable and happy with it. He got a bike. He's so fucking cute in his yellow Extra Small t-shirt and jeans on his bike.

Bluestockings: I am volunteering there now. today I organized the zine library. i get to make myself a free latte every shift. it's cool.

That's it I guess. Um, I'm not prone to info plugs that tell you what to do, but this is almost me reminding myself via stream of consciousness that I meant to contact Mercy Corps to send in an extra donation. I'm having fun in NYC but the world sucks out there right now. Donating to charity is pathetic and embarrassing in the big picture, but we have to do it anyhow. these guys are head quartered in Portland so you know they are on the up and up. mercycorps

OW!

2008-04-20T18:33:00.001-04:00

Last night I fell 6 feet out of my loft bed in the pitch black darkness
of 4:30am. A few times this week I felt too casual about searching for
the ladder with my feet or padding down it too quickly, slipping, and I
wondered when it would happen. It was just like those Bugs Bunny
cartoons with the road runner and coyote where the anvil is suspended in
the air for a heavy second and you realize its going to fall. I reached
with my feet but it was too late and I gulped a weak 'oh no', fell and
landed on my back. I was more shocked than hurt but once the shock
wore off I found a few places the hurt had been waiting behind the door like
a surprise birthday party. "Surprise!"

No, it wasn't that bad really. All those months of yoga had me prepped
for slow thoughtful breathing and to drink plenty of water. It was nice
that Jon was there and awake and after taking some Tylenol and getting
an ice pack I climbed the ladder and went back to bed. I've had the
black fantasies before about what would happen if I were seriously hurt
and Jon were asleep out of reach of throwing something at him. Luckily
this was not the case.

I suppose had I fallen the wrong way I could have cracked my head on the
low wooden box with sharp corners that was inches from where I landed.

Or I could have fallen just so in that impossibly freaky way that could
have paralyzed me allowing people to say for the rest of my life how
fucked up that was, that freaky occurrence.

After a good sleep and a cinnamon flax oil bath I'm on my way to yoga
now. I'm only a little sore, glad to have something to finally write
about, and lucky to be alive. In that order :)

2 Shows Coming Up

2008-04-10T22:57:00.001-04:00

Readings from new writers for WNHP at Bluestockings on May 29, 7-8pm.
address 172 Allen on the lower east side. bus 15 or V/V to 2nd ave

WNHP Variety Show and Zine Release Party.
We're doing it again. Evening of indie cabaret celebrating the spoken word.
Music! Comedy! Readings! Raffle! Fun!
"We'll Never Have Paris" will be for sale.
June 1, Sunday, 4-6pm at Bowery Poetry
Club, 308 Bowery @ Bleecker, F train to Second Ave
Cost: $8 for entry.

white house solar panels

2008-03-20T00:07:00.002-04:00

Just watched the documentary "Who killed the electric car?" and learned that under the Carter administration the White House had solar panels. Regan had them removed.

This combined with learning that the first cars were electric cars, they existed already, so they were killed off twice.

This combined with learning from my father that during World War II recycling programs were all around the country. Everything was recycled and people did it for the country, for the war. And they killed that just to let me feel in the late 80s like this was some new fucking solution.

This, with the memory of watching "Sicko" just a few months back.

All this just sealing the deal for me. Fuck you, America.

In a kind of No-Doze limbo
instead of the hope for the many
every chance, every engine
synapses missing missing missing

this week's treasures

2008-03-15T00:25:00.002-04:00

Can't guarantee I will be beholden to do this weekly like a chore, but it just happens I have a list for this week (and last maybe):

this week's treasure: good old phone. Finally talked to my friend Ann who had a baby 5 weeks ago. talked for over an hour while I had breakfast at 3pm on a school day. talked to Kim, talked to Candace for over an hour. Didn't really go out and see anyone this week, but the phone was a nice lifeline.

this week's mail: a postcard from Gabe, another article from Chris.

this week's extra-generational experience: zine reading by 20-year olds at Bluestockings. Not that there's anything wrong with that! I heard some good stuff and realized that perhaps I could do a reading there, for WNHP.

while we are at it: Looking forward to Jeff Stark's "Where have you been?" also at Bluestockings, next week. Also plan to volunteer there.

This week's cupcake: Sugar Sweet Sunshine on Rivington. Only a 1.50! More homemade and less bakery like in my opinion. I had the Sassy Red Velvet. Jon had white on white. Boring.

this week's pat on the back: Learning InDesign with a tutor. See it did happen after all, thanks Rob for not being a flake. He's great.

finally, this week's unfinished task: taxes. and researching recording studios.

clean the butter off my stove update

2008-03-09T16:58:00.003-04:00

I don't know, I thought this was funny, and now I'm humbled by the number of people who want work and replied. No sex replies. Three replies in under 30 minutes, ready to come clean; another 2 replies by 34 minutes. Wow. I'm now deleting the post.

Chocolate Chip Pancakes: wait, this is funny

2008-03-09T16:28:00.004-04:00

This is what happens when your boyfriend goes away for the weekend*. It's 4:30pm and this is my first meal of the day. I've been a little cuckoo for cocoa puffs with the stream of consciousness on the computer. Busy! Ideas!

I put out the makings for pancakes about 2 hours ago in my usual fit of multitasking, I figured the butter and syrup could warm up while I continued to dick around. I put the syrup and butter on the stove. While on the phone with Jaime, I go into the kitchen to make pancakes while cradling the cell in my shoulder to discover the butter not softened but completely melted, an entire brand new stick, two burners submerged in 1/8 pounds each. I laughed and told Jaime about it, to which she replied, "Why don't you post an ad on craigslist saying come clean the butter off my stove I'll give you fifty bucks" to which I cried, "yes!", laughing with tears in my eyes while taking the photo, picturing the sex replies I am going to get with someone making a longshot innuendo.

I made the pancakes. Chocolate chip pancakes, am I 12 years old? In fact, I made kitchen sink super fat pancakes. One I made with blueberry syrup, ricotta cheese and poppy seeds, the other with melted chocolate and raw coconut butter and cinnamon flax oil! Both fried in butter of course. Think I'm oiled up enough, smile? Then get your ass over here and "clean the butter off my stove", wink. wink.

*This is what happens with I don't stick to my routine or Sunday yoga. Stand back! Capable of anything! Jon went to AC for the weekend so he can see more of his slacker pot head friends and pretend he's going to win big. I'm pissed he's gone but glad for the uninterrupted time.

Mercy Street

2008-03-09T00:25:00.002-05:00

recently when at yoga, when I take a position, an osana, I have a flashback, a memory, random, who knows how my brain selects a file, the slideshow in my mind, I can't
even believe the memories that come, full ken Burns effect, zooming in, zooming out, gone.

the other day waiting for a train underground on the platform, the peter gabriel song "this is the picture (excellent birds)" pops into my mind. I cannot imagine why, what triggered this, but I wanted to hear it.

tonight, alone at home, I am downloading music on itunes, new bands, and I remember that I want to buy "this is the picture", on the album So. I never go back to music that I liked long ago, I'm too flooded with embarrassment, with the other lifetime, with the other self, with the pain and mystery and longing and numbness of the lifetimes I have already been through, memories that are mine but not entirely, and there it is, the album So, suddenly I trip over two words at the bottom, the song title "Mercy Street". Without a nano second instantly, instantly, Hinkley Lake. Summer, maybe 1991, Hinkley Lake, my hometown, upstate NY, with my boyfriend then, with Wayne, we are alone on a part of the beach no one knows about. We have rented a canoe, the sand is thick and wet where we are, we are sleepy and nap alone, nearly naked, and this song. this song, this memory, it is 1992 or 1993, and that is 16 years ago, 16 years ago, that man became my husband, and then there was megan, and then it all went down, and then the person I was, the ken burns effect, later driving 12 hours to a new life 12 hours away, by car, the person she was, suddenly all the music she thought she liked was wrong, naive. I was naive. The music that made me cry now made me mad, but not right away, but slowly, the old fading out, slowly, painfully, not fast enough, and now here they are, coming, unsurpressed, at odd moments, to me now that I cannot relate to the me that was 15 years ago, when I had a different name, literally.

Blog: this weeks small treasures

2008-03-07T00:06:00.002-05:00

Live show: My Teenage Stride. Arcade Fire meets the Oranges Band and I suppose the Violent Femmes and Stone Roses.. 3! Guitarist, bass and drums. Bass way way too loud. Wanted badly for them to ask "how's the sound?" so I could shout out, "turn down the bass!". Needed fingers in my ears over the ear plugs. Anyhow really enjoyed them, great songs.
Bass player looks like my boyfriends brother Jason, who is deaf, so I a got a kick out of picturing a hearing version of him performing in a band.

Cooking: vegetable soup. I made twice what I'd planned and we ate the whole pot over the course of the day. Chicken cube, carrots, celery,
beans, garlic, fresh cilantro, a whole lemon. I suppose as Ron pointed
out, anything with 100% sodium will taste that good. I bought some
awesome Ethiopean seeded bread from Silver Moon bakery which I only go
to when at yoga, way uptown.

To do: still haven't talked to my friend Ann who had a baby one month
ago. Feel bad.

This week's cupcake: silver moon, choc with choc frosting. Gave it
another shot, and it was delicious. Guess the one I got last year was a
stale fluke.

Health: I'm proud of myself for sticking to yoga twice a week. Even if
on Wednesdays I leave to check my pager for work during the headstand,
because come on, like I'm gonna do a headstand. But I did actually for
the first time get up in full eggshell for almost 1 second. That was
enough. Also even if I didn't eat enough before yoga and counted down
the minutes until I could eat at silver moon.

Live show I missed, bummer: White Williams. At South Paw, too. Didn't
think I could make it, Wednesday is my ASL class in my apartment.

Mission accomplished: there are two: found a tutor for InDesign (but,
show me the money) and purchased my flight to Austin for a trip in May with Jaime.

Finally, this week's surprise: was nominated to a board position for
Metro RID, of which I have yet to attend a meeting.