I was wondering the other night if all of the so-called addictions -- alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive debting, gambling, and all the rest -- aren't often or always simply the hypomanic phase of Bipolar II. Bipolar II is a mild form of Bipolar disorder, what used to be called manic-depressive. In Bipolar II, the depression and anxiety are severe, but the mania is a little milder, what is called hypomania. It's characterized by things like obsessiveness with new interests, overspending, and hypersexuality. Maybe that's why people who are addicted to one thing will often become addicted to another.
All depressed women know how to play Solitaire, I told my husband the other day. I don't even know who taught me. Probably another depressed woman in my family. I'm an old hand at it. For about ten months, I've been playing games at a site called Pogo, which is what they call a "casual gaming site." Apparently these are very popular with women, as opposed to those online roleplaying dungeon whatevers that boys seem to like. Pogo has things like card games and word games and puzzles; also, casino games. You win and lose tokens, which can be exchanged for sweepstakes entries. It costs nothing to play, but for something like $25 a year, you can use the site ad-free.
I have a handful of games I like to play, mostly puzzles and word games, and I play them every day in the same order, with various rules for how long or how many times play each. I played the casino games for a while but got kind of bored with them. (I've actually gone to real casinos a handful of times and only played slots, but at times felt a little too into it.)
Like all of my other strange little obsessions and habits, it seems to calm and relax me.
I actually got a small publicity job, trying to get a book blurb through one of my few remaining good contacts on behalf of the good former boss who hired me (as opposed to the bad one who fired me). I had to write an e-mail, basically, and will get a bonus if we get a blurb. It was nice to be asked, and I still seem to have my chops.
Lately, I see some of the smarter people I've known turning up as experts on TV shows and in documentaries. Recently, I was watching an old American Experience about John Dillinger, and one of the experts was Professor Claire Bond Potter, whom I knew as a graduate student in history when I worked at the NYU history department. Today, I watched a show about Folkways Record and the talking head was someone from summer camp, Richard Carlin, who wrote a book about the label and is a music editor and writer. I'm not an expert on much, but I'm awfully opinionated.
My jewelry-making stuff is still packed away, and I miss working with it. I'm subscribed to a beading magazine now, and I feel like some of the styles and trends are passing me by, though I'm rarely slavish about jewelry fashions. I just like trying new things.
One night recently, I watched a couple of those fascinating new shows about hoarders. The next day, I watched a show about "pickers" -- antiquers who travel around looking for old houses and barns where they can pick through "junk" to try to find treasures. The pickers visited some collectors who seemed to me to be just a whisper away from being hoarders. And are the pickers perhaps future hoarders? They almost seemed to have that hoarder mentality: "Oh, someone will want this sometime." "This could be used for something." "This is good stuff." At times, the only difference between some of the collectors and the hoarders is that the collectors had all nice stuff and they was often some sense to the arrangement, but their homes were almost as cluttered and dysfunctional/non-functional as the hoarders'.
My Dad and Mary came to town last week and took us out to lunch at the Second Avenue Deli, in lieu of Passover. It was a rare treat -- for them because they're actually good and generally don't eat this stuff, and for us because most of our local delis are not quite as good. It was actually kind of fun and informal, and about as good as deli gets. And probably a month's worth of sodium for the whole hypertensive crew. But good tongue, corned beef and pastrami are worth it, once in a while.
Subscribe To
Posts
All Comments
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Collecting
I am a collector. I have the bug -- just not the space and the money. And the thing about collectors is that we all understand each other, no matter what it is we collect. My friend Jannah's husband collects lanterns -- camping lanterns, train lanterns, road-work lanterns -- and I totally get it, even though lanterns are not my thing. My uncle collects Chinese cookbooks.
My first good collection was postcards, and unfortunately they are gone, lost in the Great Storage Loss a few years back. (We put a bunch of stuff that couldn't fit into this small apartment into storage, which we really couldn't afford, and eventually got behind in payment and lost some 80 cartons of belongings.) I used to buy postcards at antique stores and flea markets, and especially liked the ones with beautiful buildings, from New York State, and from Florida. When I lived in Binghamton, I used to lunch at an upscale bar called the Beaugart, and often chatted there with an older guy who had a disability, a withered arm. I must have mentioned that I collected postcards, and he said he had a shoebox full of cards that his brother brought back from World War II. He gave them to me; they were amazing. This was in the late 70s.
My next good collection shaped up in the mid-late 80s, and that was baseball cards. I quit cocaine in 1986, and without a cocaine habit, I felt so rich that I used to go to a baseball card shop out in Brooklyn (had a crush on the owner, too) and spend about $75 every couple of weeks. I liked to save favorite players and was starting to buy some older cards from the 50s. The collection, filling about four looseleafs, sat unattended for a long time, and was also lost in the Great Storage Loss.
In the mid-90s, I caught a collecting interest from V.: bottle caps. (V., as you may recall, is a close friend I split with a couple of years ago. He was kind of my other significant other.) I had known that he collected bottle caps, but hadn't really seen any. In the mid-90s, he came back from an antique shop with a big haul, and I finally "got" the extreme beauty and design sensibility of bottle caps. By this time, there was eBay. There was also an association of American collectors who had a weekend meeting/sale/swap every year, and I went to them with V. for several years. This collection did *not* go into storage but is now dormant. It's hard to spend money on things that don't do anything, at this point. V. is a lot more well-off than I am and lives in a much larger space, so he collects all kinds of things.
During the bottle cap collecting phase, I also got into soda and beer labels. I was online and saw a posting of amazing South American beverage labels for sale. I e-mailed the guy and offered him a flat price for the lot. My cap collection is mostly American sodas before 1972 (corked-lined caps rather than plastic), but my labels have a lot of non-American and beer labels, and are in a few looseleafs. The big expense with those, oddly enough, are the pages to keep them in, which are the pricey ones that stamp collectors use.
Now I have a cheap collection that I adore: fruit stickers. I have a little blank notebook and put in one of every sticker I get on fruit, whether bananas, plums, apples, mangoes, or whatever. I like to eat fruit so it costs nothing.
eBay is deadly for people who have the collecting bug. I found roller rink labels on it which I wanted so badly to start collecting. Roller rinks used to give out labels to stick on your skate case! I used to save the pictures on my computer before the last crash. I would collect them if I had more money. Also fountain pens. Back in the pre-email days, when I actually wrote letters and a journal, I used to use a fountain pen pretty exclusively. I liked a Pelikan but also have a couple of nice Mont Blancs.
Went to the dentist today for my last fitting, I think, for the first two bridges. (The third will wait a while until the area where he pulled a tooth some weeks back mends a bit more.) If I'm lucky, the three bridges and a crown for one molar should be my last big dental work for a while.
My first good collection was postcards, and unfortunately they are gone, lost in the Great Storage Loss a few years back. (We put a bunch of stuff that couldn't fit into this small apartment into storage, which we really couldn't afford, and eventually got behind in payment and lost some 80 cartons of belongings.) I used to buy postcards at antique stores and flea markets, and especially liked the ones with beautiful buildings, from New York State, and from Florida. When I lived in Binghamton, I used to lunch at an upscale bar called the Beaugart, and often chatted there with an older guy who had a disability, a withered arm. I must have mentioned that I collected postcards, and he said he had a shoebox full of cards that his brother brought back from World War II. He gave them to me; they were amazing. This was in the late 70s.
My next good collection shaped up in the mid-late 80s, and that was baseball cards. I quit cocaine in 1986, and without a cocaine habit, I felt so rich that I used to go to a baseball card shop out in Brooklyn (had a crush on the owner, too) and spend about $75 every couple of weeks. I liked to save favorite players and was starting to buy some older cards from the 50s. The collection, filling about four looseleafs, sat unattended for a long time, and was also lost in the Great Storage Loss.
In the mid-90s, I caught a collecting interest from V.: bottle caps. (V., as you may recall, is a close friend I split with a couple of years ago. He was kind of my other significant other.) I had known that he collected bottle caps, but hadn't really seen any. In the mid-90s, he came back from an antique shop with a big haul, and I finally "got" the extreme beauty and design sensibility of bottle caps. By this time, there was eBay. There was also an association of American collectors who had a weekend meeting/sale/swap every year, and I went to them with V. for several years. This collection did *not* go into storage but is now dormant. It's hard to spend money on things that don't do anything, at this point. V. is a lot more well-off than I am and lives in a much larger space, so he collects all kinds of things.
During the bottle cap collecting phase, I also got into soda and beer labels. I was online and saw a posting of amazing South American beverage labels for sale. I e-mailed the guy and offered him a flat price for the lot. My cap collection is mostly American sodas before 1972 (corked-lined caps rather than plastic), but my labels have a lot of non-American and beer labels, and are in a few looseleafs. The big expense with those, oddly enough, are the pages to keep them in, which are the pricey ones that stamp collectors use.
Now I have a cheap collection that I adore: fruit stickers. I have a little blank notebook and put in one of every sticker I get on fruit, whether bananas, plums, apples, mangoes, or whatever. I like to eat fruit so it costs nothing.
eBay is deadly for people who have the collecting bug. I found roller rink labels on it which I wanted so badly to start collecting. Roller rinks used to give out labels to stick on your skate case! I used to save the pictures on my computer before the last crash. I would collect them if I had more money. Also fountain pens. Back in the pre-email days, when I actually wrote letters and a journal, I used to use a fountain pen pretty exclusively. I liked a Pelikan but also have a couple of nice Mont Blancs.
Went to the dentist today for my last fitting, I think, for the first two bridges. (The third will wait a while until the area where he pulled a tooth some weeks back mends a bit more.) If I'm lucky, the three bridges and a crown for one molar should be my last big dental work for a while.
Friday, March 19, 2010
readers!
It seems like a few people are actually reading or have read this blog, even though my Sitemeter continues to come up all zeroes. Well, enjoy reading, and tell your friends.
It was really amazing to hear from someone who, besides having a lot of other similarities to me, used to summer near Floradan Lodge, where I went to day camp. The Floradan days will be covered more completely in my memo, but I remembered one thing about that colony today: there was a family named Snowden, Irish Catholic to the best of my knowledge, who had something like 9 or 11 kids -- all with flaming red hair. We also had a couple of Handwerkers who were related in some way to the family that started Nathan's Famous. I do hope to hear from more Floradan and Laur-Lee and Mohigan Woodlands people, since I've pretty much lost touch with everyone. (To the couple of Woodlands people who contacted me via a prior blog: I had a computer crash since then and lost your e-mail addresses and other contact info. PLEASE resend!)
Our plumbing is finally fixed, which is a great relief, though the sink is without its stopper. But not only is the sink leak fixed and the tub drain unclogged, it's really, really clean. I see a long shower in my near future.
I'm watching Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson on Netflix. It's from 1971, so maybe I saw bits and pieces when it was on Masterpiece Theater. I'm enjoying it so far; she was great back then.
For no reason I can determine at this point, my friend Scott sent me the sheet music to "See the USA in Your Chevrolet." He's an old friend I met online and in person once or twice, and usually I get holiday cards from him and a few e-mails a year. (Every time I do, my husband makes suspicious faces and asks about him, and I tell him the same thing, over and over.) Maybe I can learn to play it on uke, if I ever do learn to play that thing.
It was really amazing to hear from someone who, besides having a lot of other similarities to me, used to summer near Floradan Lodge, where I went to day camp. The Floradan days will be covered more completely in my memo, but I remembered one thing about that colony today: there was a family named Snowden, Irish Catholic to the best of my knowledge, who had something like 9 or 11 kids -- all with flaming red hair. We also had a couple of Handwerkers who were related in some way to the family that started Nathan's Famous. I do hope to hear from more Floradan and Laur-Lee and Mohigan Woodlands people, since I've pretty much lost touch with everyone. (To the couple of Woodlands people who contacted me via a prior blog: I had a computer crash since then and lost your e-mail addresses and other contact info. PLEASE resend!)
Our plumbing is finally fixed, which is a great relief, though the sink is without its stopper. But not only is the sink leak fixed and the tub drain unclogged, it's really, really clean. I see a long shower in my near future.
I'm watching Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson on Netflix. It's from 1971, so maybe I saw bits and pieces when it was on Masterpiece Theater. I'm enjoying it so far; she was great back then.
For no reason I can determine at this point, my friend Scott sent me the sheet music to "See the USA in Your Chevrolet." He's an old friend I met online and in person once or twice, and usually I get holiday cards from him and a few e-mails a year. (Every time I do, my husband makes suspicious faces and asks about him, and I tell him the same thing, over and over.) Maybe I can learn to play it on uke, if I ever do learn to play that thing.
I'm in a mood
We're having some plumbing work done. We've been having problems with a leak and two slow drains and Barry just plain didn't want to tell the landlord...because our apartment is less than spotless and he feared the landlord would give us holy hell. Which he did. We worked really hard on the problem areas in the few days between his first visit and his return with the plumber, and made a big improvement, but we have to do more before the end of the month and it's making me a little crazy. Barry, too. Besides the fact that I rarely go out, he has somehow gotten the idea that it's too much trouble to go out more than once a day; also, that he needs a big nap in the middle of the day. This is making life a little hard.
The good news is that the weather's turned nice and I'm thinking I'd like to go out within the next couple of days.
I now have a subscription to The New Yorker because I got a year for $10. It doesn't get much better than that, even if I don't read a lot of it. $10 a year is worth it just for the cartoons -- hell, it's worth it just for the Roz Chast cartoons. It's a little highbrow for me and a lot of it just bores me, but I see there's a story by Junot Diaz that I'm looking forward to reading.
The imprint I worked for in my long-ago publishing days was right next to the imprint that published Junot's novel The Brief Life of Oscar Wao. But the book hadn't come out yet. So one day, I see this way-handsome guy looking at the shelves with our books on it, and sort of chuckling to himself. I said, kidding, "Hey, are you laughing at our New Age books?" He smiled at me and said, "No, I just had no idea there were books about some of this stuff." Whoa, very handsome. Then his publicist got off the phone and he went in to see her. Before I saw him again, I read the book. I had just about enough Spanish and just about enough knowledge of the Dominican Republic to pretty much get the book. (In the 80s, I dated a Dominican guy for 2-1/2 years and studied up on Dominican politics out of curiosity...actually, I picked it as a research topic in a how-to-write-a-research-paper course.) The next time he came back, I made a sort of bowing down gesture and threw kisses and shit and told him how amazing his book was. Every time he won another award or was in another newspaper or magazine, I felt a very personal happiness for him, even though he wasn't one of "my" authors.
Here's something interesting, apropos of the Diaz novel: I just finished The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, and my knowledge of Yiddish culture and Jewish religion *wasn't* up to the book -- I know I missed a lot more than I did in Junot's book. I've always had that basic New Yorker third-generation-Reform-non-practicing-Jew smattering of Yiddish, and marrying Barry, who has actual Orthodox people in his family, has upped my knowledge of language and custom considerably. So why is Michael Chabon writing over my head? He didn't even append a glossary for non-Jews who would never get it at all. Who the hell is he writing for?
I read a lot less now that I rarely ride the subway. When I worked, I did almost all of my reading on the subway, which was a good 2-1/2 hours a day at my last job (the 10-15 walk from the subway to the office was for listening to music). Now I read a lot in the dentist's waiting room. I carry a book anywhere that I might have to wait. I'm rereading An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser because Theodore Dreiser was amazing.
I'm a little stuck as far as my own writing but it was amazing to hear from someone who knew of Floradan (among other really interesting parallels to my life).
Deep dark secret of the day: I subscribe to a few blogs with cute photos of dogs and cats. Especially cats. I am not only a fool for my own cats, but for all cats, really. And certainly all kittens.
I heard once from some scientific source or another that all baby animals, including humans, are particularly designed to elicit the "awww" response from adults. They have big eyes relative to their faces and features that somehow say "cute" to adults of their own species and often others. So we're basically hardwired to be drawn to and feel protective of babies and kittens and puppies and piglets and lambs and tiger cubs and the whole shebang. (I once bottle-fed orphaned baby piglets at summer camp.)
We have been watching this dopey show called The Human Target. It's just a kind of cartoony action show where a really good-looking guy protects people with the help of his two assistants, the big burly ex-cop (Chi McBride) and the weirdish guy who can do all kinds of things with computers and electronics and schematics and stuff. The only reason I like watching this show is that the weirdish guy is played by Jackie Earle Haley, and he kind of fascinates me. I could watch him all day. Barry calls him "Jackie Pearl Bailey," which doesn't mean anything except that it sounds funny. But I find Jackie more fetching than the handsome guy (the actor's name is Mark Valley). Then again, typical good looks are not my thing.
The good news is that the weather's turned nice and I'm thinking I'd like to go out within the next couple of days.
I now have a subscription to The New Yorker because I got a year for $10. It doesn't get much better than that, even if I don't read a lot of it. $10 a year is worth it just for the cartoons -- hell, it's worth it just for the Roz Chast cartoons. It's a little highbrow for me and a lot of it just bores me, but I see there's a story by Junot Diaz that I'm looking forward to reading.
The imprint I worked for in my long-ago publishing days was right next to the imprint that published Junot's novel The Brief Life of Oscar Wao. But the book hadn't come out yet. So one day, I see this way-handsome guy looking at the shelves with our books on it, and sort of chuckling to himself. I said, kidding, "Hey, are you laughing at our New Age books?" He smiled at me and said, "No, I just had no idea there were books about some of this stuff." Whoa, very handsome. Then his publicist got off the phone and he went in to see her. Before I saw him again, I read the book. I had just about enough Spanish and just about enough knowledge of the Dominican Republic to pretty much get the book. (In the 80s, I dated a Dominican guy for 2-1/2 years and studied up on Dominican politics out of curiosity...actually, I picked it as a research topic in a how-to-write-a-research-paper course.) The next time he came back, I made a sort of bowing down gesture and threw kisses and shit and told him how amazing his book was. Every time he won another award or was in another newspaper or magazine, I felt a very personal happiness for him, even though he wasn't one of "my" authors.
Here's something interesting, apropos of the Diaz novel: I just finished The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, and my knowledge of Yiddish culture and Jewish religion *wasn't* up to the book -- I know I missed a lot more than I did in Junot's book. I've always had that basic New Yorker third-generation-Reform-non-practicing-Jew smattering of Yiddish, and marrying Barry, who has actual Orthodox people in his family, has upped my knowledge of language and custom considerably. So why is Michael Chabon writing over my head? He didn't even append a glossary for non-Jews who would never get it at all. Who the hell is he writing for?
I read a lot less now that I rarely ride the subway. When I worked, I did almost all of my reading on the subway, which was a good 2-1/2 hours a day at my last job (the 10-15 walk from the subway to the office was for listening to music). Now I read a lot in the dentist's waiting room. I carry a book anywhere that I might have to wait. I'm rereading An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser because Theodore Dreiser was amazing.
I'm a little stuck as far as my own writing but it was amazing to hear from someone who knew of Floradan (among other really interesting parallels to my life).
Deep dark secret of the day: I subscribe to a few blogs with cute photos of dogs and cats. Especially cats. I am not only a fool for my own cats, but for all cats, really. And certainly all kittens.
I heard once from some scientific source or another that all baby animals, including humans, are particularly designed to elicit the "awww" response from adults. They have big eyes relative to their faces and features that somehow say "cute" to adults of their own species and often others. So we're basically hardwired to be drawn to and feel protective of babies and kittens and puppies and piglets and lambs and tiger cubs and the whole shebang. (I once bottle-fed orphaned baby piglets at summer camp.)
We have been watching this dopey show called The Human Target. It's just a kind of cartoony action show where a really good-looking guy protects people with the help of his two assistants, the big burly ex-cop (Chi McBride) and the weirdish guy who can do all kinds of things with computers and electronics and schematics and stuff. The only reason I like watching this show is that the weirdish guy is played by Jackie Earle Haley, and he kind of fascinates me. I could watch him all day. Barry calls him "Jackie Pearl Bailey," which doesn't mean anything except that it sounds funny. But I find Jackie more fetching than the handsome guy (the actor's name is Mark Valley). Then again, typical good looks are not my thing.
Friday, March 12, 2010
very gloomy day
Even though the days are warming and Daylight Savings Time starts this weekend, I am feeling glum. I keep dreaming about vacations, new neighborhoods, new apartments, new jobs, college campuses, concerts, new boyfriends, and having a trim figure for which I can buy a lot of clothes. All of these good things in the dreams tend to get hampered by transportation difficulties: no car, no driver, no bus schedule, missing trains and planes, odd subway changes, and the like.
The dental saga continues. My dentist is very precise about fitting bridges so yesterday he took off my temps, did a fitting on the permanents, and replaced the temps. I like the bridges but almost cried when he removed the temp from my lower center: the teeth on either side of the missing tooth were filed down to ugly nubs to accommodate the bridge. But an implant would have been way too expensive. As it is, the two bridges will cost a total of $2,400, which I'm told is a good price (two three-tooth bridges). The dentist is a nice, oldish Syrian Jew (lots of them in this neighborhood). Barry always comes with me and the dentist likes that, tells me I have a good husband. The dentist has asked several times if we keep kosher and keep the Sabbath and so on. He wears a yarmulke. I guess he figures it's a waste for such a nice Jewish couple not to be more observant. I have always refrained from telling him that Barry's love affair with pork would be problem number one.
On Monday, we're supposed to go to a Dan Lynch's alumni memorial tribute gig for Karola Herry. Dan Lynch's was a blues bar where many of us, including yours truly, hung out and played for many years, until its closing in 1996 or 97. It was a really divey place, more so as the years went on, but some really excellent musicians passed through there, like The Holmes Brothers and Bill Perry and Larry Johnson and Jon Paris and Popa Chubby. (If any of you are blues fans, yes, I know or knew all of them.) Karola was a manager and bartender there, a big sunny German woman well-liked by most. Not me, though. I had a boyfriend for about a year who was a performer at Lynch's, and I later found that Karola was sleeping with him whenever she felt like it, and making no secret of it. The boyfriend did fess up and apologize (they'd been involved on and off for many years), but she never did. Anyway, she ended up selling real estate in Florida and recently died at 65.
There was a Lynch's alumni Haiti benefit about a month back but I wasn't up to going; Barry did. I will probably go Monday because there are a lot of people I want to see, not because I had any great love for Karola. Of course, the ex-boyfriend in question wasn't at the last gig but will be at this one...I think it's about 13 years since I saw him last. He was the last guy I was serious about before Barry -- I also thought he was serious about me, which I think he was at times, but it sure wasn't anything like 100%.
The Lynch alumni, like so many groups, came together on Facebook. I am supposed to go to a party with my high school graduating class next month; also a Facebook thing. It's kind of hard to escape these days. With a lot of the old friends, a few messages was enough. Others seem to interest me more than I interest them.
I think I have two people following this blog via Blogger but I keep getting SiteMeter reports that no one is reading this. That's OK -- it's mostly for me anyway.
The dental saga continues. My dentist is very precise about fitting bridges so yesterday he took off my temps, did a fitting on the permanents, and replaced the temps. I like the bridges but almost cried when he removed the temp from my lower center: the teeth on either side of the missing tooth were filed down to ugly nubs to accommodate the bridge. But an implant would have been way too expensive. As it is, the two bridges will cost a total of $2,400, which I'm told is a good price (two three-tooth bridges). The dentist is a nice, oldish Syrian Jew (lots of them in this neighborhood). Barry always comes with me and the dentist likes that, tells me I have a good husband. The dentist has asked several times if we keep kosher and keep the Sabbath and so on. He wears a yarmulke. I guess he figures it's a waste for such a nice Jewish couple not to be more observant. I have always refrained from telling him that Barry's love affair with pork would be problem number one.
On Monday, we're supposed to go to a Dan Lynch's alumni memorial tribute gig for Karola Herry. Dan Lynch's was a blues bar where many of us, including yours truly, hung out and played for many years, until its closing in 1996 or 97. It was a really divey place, more so as the years went on, but some really excellent musicians passed through there, like The Holmes Brothers and Bill Perry and Larry Johnson and Jon Paris and Popa Chubby. (If any of you are blues fans, yes, I know or knew all of them.) Karola was a manager and bartender there, a big sunny German woman well-liked by most. Not me, though. I had a boyfriend for about a year who was a performer at Lynch's, and I later found that Karola was sleeping with him whenever she felt like it, and making no secret of it. The boyfriend did fess up and apologize (they'd been involved on and off for many years), but she never did. Anyway, she ended up selling real estate in Florida and recently died at 65.
There was a Lynch's alumni Haiti benefit about a month back but I wasn't up to going; Barry did. I will probably go Monday because there are a lot of people I want to see, not because I had any great love for Karola. Of course, the ex-boyfriend in question wasn't at the last gig but will be at this one...I think it's about 13 years since I saw him last. He was the last guy I was serious about before Barry -- I also thought he was serious about me, which I think he was at times, but it sure wasn't anything like 100%.
The Lynch alumni, like so many groups, came together on Facebook. I am supposed to go to a party with my high school graduating class next month; also a Facebook thing. It's kind of hard to escape these days. With a lot of the old friends, a few messages was enough. Others seem to interest me more than I interest them.
I think I have two people following this blog via Blogger but I keep getting SiteMeter reports that no one is reading this. That's OK -- it's mostly for me anyway.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
what up with that?
I reconnected with an old, old male friend on Facebook; we go back over thirty years and have been in contact intermittently during that time. We've always cared a great deal about each other and have had a lot in common. Except now, he's posting these horrible anti-abortion screeds and scripture and anti-Obama stuff...you know, everything I don't want to see on my page. Since I first met him, he had a career in the Navy and settled in the South, so I'm not too shocked that his belief systems have shifted wildly since he was a teen. Not quite sure how to handle this, though it's bothering me and I've considered "unfriending" him.
Watched the Oscars last night, being a movie addict from a family of movie addicts. (In recent years, I watch more at home than in the theaters, but it makes me no less a movie addict.) I was extremely pleased to see Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker win big awards. I just saw it within the past week and was really impressed with Bigelow's toughness. Plus, I've had an eye on Jeremy Renner since that rather awful movie where he played Jeffrey Dahmer. He was clearly a whole lot better than his material in the Dahmer movie, and let's hope he gets more parts of the Hurt Locker caliber, since there was no beating Jeff Bridges last night.
The latest Heeb Magazine lists the 100 Greatest Jewish Movie Moments, very cool, and the #1 moment is from The Big Lebowski. Which is how I got there from Jeff Bridges.
I have indeed started a memoir, and it's about school and summers. I've been turning it over in my head for a few years, and it got to be time to write.
Watched the Oscars last night, being a movie addict from a family of movie addicts. (In recent years, I watch more at home than in the theaters, but it makes me no less a movie addict.) I was extremely pleased to see Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker win big awards. I just saw it within the past week and was really impressed with Bigelow's toughness. Plus, I've had an eye on Jeremy Renner since that rather awful movie where he played Jeffrey Dahmer. He was clearly a whole lot better than his material in the Dahmer movie, and let's hope he gets more parts of the Hurt Locker caliber, since there was no beating Jeff Bridges last night.
The latest Heeb Magazine lists the 100 Greatest Jewish Movie Moments, very cool, and the #1 moment is from The Big Lebowski. Which is how I got there from Jeff Bridges.
I have indeed started a memoir, and it's about school and summers. I've been turning it over in my head for a few years, and it got to be time to write.
Friday, February 5, 2010
my teeth, my career
I'm still in the middle of all kinds of dental stuff. In addition to whatever I've already described, the walls of a weak, on-borrowed-time tooth in the upper right came loose and started to hurt. Last time, the doctor removed the walls and the filling, all the loose stuff above the gum. Today, he had to go in for three roots. Barry has been a major champ, coming with me to these dental appointments and sitting there with me when I'm in the chair, sometimes stroking my hair a little if I seem tense or in pain. The only thing that really hurt when I was there was the injection of the novicane into the upper palate, and I expected that to be pretty painful. I didn't make a peep; I usually do some whining or loud gasping. The rest was even kind of interesting; I could definitely feel him pulling out one of the roots, but with no pain. And he put in sutures.
Then, of course, at home, the novicane wore off and I bit on gauze for three hours and dry-swallowed some Tylenol with codeine. I also used an old-fashioned pain remedy that is not now legal in this state but is in 13 others. Barry bought me some bananas and some vegetables that can be cooked to squishiness.
I lose track of the days. I have less and less energy and recently went through a bout of sleeping badly and having a lot of nightmares that seemed interconnected: I was on a job where I had already been fired or was about to be, I had a mean boss much like my last one, I was horribly late on some big project for which I still felt responsible, or somehow she had given me an impossible load as a cruel joke. I was a pariah.
The truth is, even though I had some historically lousy bosses, I generally enjoyed my co-workers. I made some friendships that lasted beyond work. And from 1983 until around 2006, I usually worked for high-level people so I got to meet interesting people and do interesting things, or at least meet a lot of high-level people at the company. I worked at the Metropolitan Opera House for about seven months, which was fairly amazing. It's all there in that one building, with the exception of some off-site storage: orchestra rehearsals, ballet rehearsals, set design, the whole thing. Placido Domingo gave me the eye, which apparently doesn't land me in anything like an exclusive club, but still. Bad boss situation. Oddly enough, I got a job there for a friend of mine from my NYU job and she got a wonderful boss and stayed there for years.
I like to think I'm a kind person and on a couple of occasions have passed on or set up jobs, and passed along my ultra-cheap Manhattan apartment to an old co-worker when I moved in with Barry.
On one job, Bill Small, the former head of NBC News, introduced me to Charles Kurault, saying, "She keeps everything working around here." At the NYU History Department, we had McGeorge Bundy. At NYU Law School, I had close encounters with both John-John and Jackie, and once saw Mario Cuomo in the student lounge; you could see his charisma from a mile away.
There have been cool little things at a lot of these jobs. I wonder if I'm wishing that I could do them again. More likely, I'm trying to figure out how to write these things. Or where. I'm still proceeding as if the summer and school stuff is going to be the first book so that's not going in here, but a lot of the work stuff would probably have to be a novel or something and maybe somehow fictionalized.
I can't write plot, people. I cannot invent stories. Every story you ever hear me tell is one about me, or one that someone told me. I am interpreting existing material in a subjective manner. This is probably why I have never managed to get started as a writer. Can you tell that I've kept journals, diaries, and now a blog since age 8? Can you imagine what kind of letter-writer I was back in the pre-e-mail days?
Which just gave me a really good idea for a short story.
Then, of course, at home, the novicane wore off and I bit on gauze for three hours and dry-swallowed some Tylenol with codeine. I also used an old-fashioned pain remedy that is not now legal in this state but is in 13 others. Barry bought me some bananas and some vegetables that can be cooked to squishiness.
I lose track of the days. I have less and less energy and recently went through a bout of sleeping badly and having a lot of nightmares that seemed interconnected: I was on a job where I had already been fired or was about to be, I had a mean boss much like my last one, I was horribly late on some big project for which I still felt responsible, or somehow she had given me an impossible load as a cruel joke. I was a pariah.
The truth is, even though I had some historically lousy bosses, I generally enjoyed my co-workers. I made some friendships that lasted beyond work. And from 1983 until around 2006, I usually worked for high-level people so I got to meet interesting people and do interesting things, or at least meet a lot of high-level people at the company. I worked at the Metropolitan Opera House for about seven months, which was fairly amazing. It's all there in that one building, with the exception of some off-site storage: orchestra rehearsals, ballet rehearsals, set design, the whole thing. Placido Domingo gave me the eye, which apparently doesn't land me in anything like an exclusive club, but still. Bad boss situation. Oddly enough, I got a job there for a friend of mine from my NYU job and she got a wonderful boss and stayed there for years.
I like to think I'm a kind person and on a couple of occasions have passed on or set up jobs, and passed along my ultra-cheap Manhattan apartment to an old co-worker when I moved in with Barry.
On one job, Bill Small, the former head of NBC News, introduced me to Charles Kurault, saying, "She keeps everything working around here." At the NYU History Department, we had McGeorge Bundy. At NYU Law School, I had close encounters with both John-John and Jackie, and once saw Mario Cuomo in the student lounge; you could see his charisma from a mile away.
There have been cool little things at a lot of these jobs. I wonder if I'm wishing that I could do them again. More likely, I'm trying to figure out how to write these things. Or where. I'm still proceeding as if the summer and school stuff is going to be the first book so that's not going in here, but a lot of the work stuff would probably have to be a novel or something and maybe somehow fictionalized.
I can't write plot, people. I cannot invent stories. Every story you ever hear me tell is one about me, or one that someone told me. I am interpreting existing material in a subjective manner. This is probably why I have never managed to get started as a writer. Can you tell that I've kept journals, diaries, and now a blog since age 8? Can you imagine what kind of letter-writer I was back in the pre-e-mail days?
Which just gave me a really good idea for a short story.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)