pag ghungroo bandh Meera naachi thi

Which means, more or less, "Meera danced all night with her anklets tinkling."  This seems to be something of a traditional song, which got a peppy arrangement (not to mention being sung by the great Kishore Kumar) for the 1982 Amitabh Bachchan vehicle, Namak Halaal. 

I've watched the beginning of this movie.  AB is something of a country bumpkin whose grandfather sends him to the city to get a job, meet a nice girl, etc.  A cousin, or friend of a friend or such, takes him under his wing, and one night, brings him to a nightclub.  Bumpkin AB is oohing and aahing over the place, but looks like something of a joke:  he's wearing his country Sunday best, which is a traditional outfit topped with a pink turban.  Most of the city guys are wearing Western suits.  The nightclub singer is too drunk to sing, so AB steps up.

This song was performed on Indian Idol (yes, really), by a front-runner named Swaroop.  Although Swaroop wore a turban on the several segments I watched, this pink one is most likely a tribute to AB in the film.  He has a lovely voice and did quite well:

But where I first noticed this song was in a greatest-hits medley in the most recent AB film, Bbuddah Hoga Tera Baap.  The title translates somewhere along the lines of "Your Father's an Old Man!". in the sense that the speaker has been called an old man and feels he is too young to be called that.  Which is a running joke in the movie:  various people in the movie call Vijuu "Bhuddah" (kind of equal to "old-timer"), which always pisses him off.

Vijuu is a retired hit man, living in Paris, who is called back to India to do one last job.  About 20 minutes into the movie, he goes into his old bar and takes a seat.  The current crop of gangsters takes exception to this, and Vijuu explains, rather poetically (the Hindi seems to rhyme), that he and Mumbai grew up together, they laughed, they sang, and now all of the youngsters are trying to copy his style."  He asks the gangsters, "Wanna see?" and they say, yes.  Vijuu whistles for the beautiful girls to be sent in, and launches into a dance and medley of AB's greatest hits -- this time, sung by AB and JrB (Abishek, who does the rap parts).  "Pag ghungroo" is one of them.

I had to do a little digging here, since I was aware that these were some of AB's old songs; I had to figure out/look up the song names first, and then try to find the earlier versions.  The ones I like best are "Pag Ghungroo" and "Kaike Paan Banaraswala."  The latter is from the 1978 version of Don (which was remade in 2004, I think, with Shah Rukh Khan in the lead role.)  As far as I can make out/remember (I saw the newer version of Don maybe a year ago, and am waiting for a subtitled copy of the original), AB plays two role:  Don, the gangster, and yet another bumpkin who is an exact double for Don.  As best I can figure it, the bumpkin gets drunk, someone offers him some betel leaf, the betel leaf peps him right up, and he sings a song about it:

So here's the medley from Bbuddah Hoga Tera Baap.  This movie opened this past July, so AB was maybe 68 when he filmed it, and you can see he doesn't have quite what he had five years earlier as far as dancing.  The clothing is awful, of course, and he looks a little heavier around the middle.  But the medley is really fabulous, and he's doing his own singing.  "Kaike Paan Banaraswala" is the first song, and "Pag Ghungroo" is maybe halfway through.

I guess I have learned quite a bit about Indian film in these past 3-4 weeks.  Of course, I started with Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, and then branched out with the actors from that film (mostly AB and Shah Rukh Khan).  I've also become familiar with some of the women stars:  Preity Zinta, Rani Mukarjee, Kareena Kapoor, and Kajol.  I love watching Kajol dance because she has a lovely smile and is the best I've seen so far when it comes to the traditional hand/neck/shoulder moves.  I've also been impressed by a couple of the other popular male stars, like Salman Khan (no relation) and Sonu Sood.  I watch a lot of clips on YouTube, although many of them, unfortunately, don't have English subtitles.  I've been searching out Indian movies with English subtitles, which is a little harder with the older movies.  Had to order the old Don and Yaarana from eBay. 

Netflix has Yaarana, and I started watching it, but the subtitles were about three lines after the line they translated, which made it fairly confusing and impossible.  Which really bothered me, since it was clear that the plot was crazily convoluted and that AB actually plays a guy who becomes a popular singer, so there's lots of singing and dancing.  The movie's from 1981, so it's young handsome AB rather than old handsome AB.  Handsome forever, that guy.

I did finally figure out where that photo came from, the one of older AB dressed like Carlos Santana, with long hair and a hat and all kinds of southwestern (US) jewelry.  It's a special appearance he did as a singer and dancer under the opening titles of Abishek's film Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, which doesn't seem to have done well and I can't say I love the song.  But here it is:

I realize I've already posted the "Go Meera Go" remix from Bhudda Hoga Tera Baap, but it's worth rewatching, especially after seeing some of the source material.  AB still does throw off some sparks.

birthday season

Welcome to birthday season.  There have always been a lot of people in my life with November and near-November birthdays, and of course I'm one.  Robin is one too, and so is my uncle Howard.  And my aunt Marion.  There are other people who have been in and out of my life who also have those birthdays, which is why the borders of the season are a little wavy.  There are some former boyfriends, an old girlfriend I'm not in close touch with, and, actually, V. as well.  V. was always fun to birthday shop for.  He wasn't that into birthdays but he loved presents.

But this was a big year for Barry:  he turned 60.  The big surprise that I was too paranoid to post about here was that I arranged a surprise jam session.  He plays drums, if I haven't mentioned that lately -- he was in two bands when I met him.  Now he doesn't play in a band but has started to go to a couple of blues jam sessions.  It took me about a year to go to one with him.  He was meeting a lot of people I knew from my blues days some years back, and I got to see them, and I got to meet some people he had met.  I've written about this.  I got a fifteen minute crush on a guy at one of those jams -- I'm sure I mentioned it.

Anyway -- I had an idea this summer to rent a few hours of studio space and get a bunch of his musician friends to come and then have him go there and be surprised.  I floated the idea past a couple of his friends during the summer and they loved it.  Then I had to investigate the whole business of renting a studio and what it cost and how big and what comes with the rental (amps? keyboards?).  And I touched base with more guys, and more or less decided on the date, and so on.  I realized that I would have to tell him to bring drumsticks, so it wouldn't be a surprise that he'd be playing, and he knows the block where a bunch of studios are (30th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue), but he wouldn't know who would be there. 

Some people couldn't make it, but he ended up with exactly enough:  Felix Cabrera (vocals and harp), Evan Wagner (bass), Chuck Hancock (tenor sax and vocals), and Arthur Neilson (guitar).  Felix is Barry's bestie; Barry used to play with Evan in a couple of Brooklyn bands; and Chuck is one of my old pals who Barry also met at the jams.  These are all people who have some other income source.  Arthur is kind of a notch up; he's the guitar player for Shemekia Copeland, who's pretty much the top female contemporary blues artist at this moment.  He's also in the house band for the Monday night jam.  I'm personally in touch with some of these people through Facebook, but Arthur isn't on and he and I have only met once.  I had to have Felix ask him for me, and was absolutely stunned that he said yes.  Barry was also somewhat stunned that Arthur came, because they don't know each other very well.  The deal with Arthur is that he's one of the nicest guys ever, and we got lucky that he wasn't gigging or on tour.  It was a very big deal.

All of these guys are first-rate, make no mistake; there are a lot of amazing musicians out there who have day jobs.  Felix is woefully underemployed.  Chuck works, and has toured internationally, but I'm not certain if he works regularly with any one band.  Evan has a day job and is still young enough to have the energy to play with a band.  (When I met Barry, he played with two bands and had a day job.)

Barry, when he played with two bands.  This was taken at one of his gigs in late 1997, very soon after we started seeing each other.  Were we not adorable?

Anyway, the surprise jam was a rousing success.  They had the studio for three hours, then Evan took Barry out for a bite to eat.

Friday night, which was Barry's actual birthday, I couldn't get off early to do anything about cooking (had to take minutes at a Board meeting until 4:00).  So we ordered in, although I did buy a dozen tiny, two-bite cupcakes from a placed called Baked by Melissa.  They were a big hit.  Saturday was the jam, and Sunday evening Elise (and her sibs Evette and Marty) took us out for dinner.  Marty's wife Laurie was also there, Evette's husband Freddie was not, niece Lindsey was nephew Ross and girlfriend Margaret were not.  The Taub/Singer/Levy clan is pretty hard to get together.  We went to a nice dairy (kosher) place (I had a salad nicoise with fresh grilled tuna, a big fave of mine).

The only thing bad all weekend was at the very end:  we came home after dinner, and most of our neighbors were in the first floor hallway.  No one had seen our front-apartment neighbor Johnny for a couple of days, and he wasn't answering his phone or door.  He had some health problems and seemed a little more wobbly of late, and as we feared it turned out he was dead in his apartment.  Johnny was kind of the mayor of our building, which is a big deal in a six-apartment building.  He helped the landlord (let Con Ed into the basement, washed the hallways, kept an eye on the trash & recycling), and all of us (took packages for people, distributed the overflow from the landlord's backyard garden).  He was just a nice, kind, sweet guy, and we were all really broken up.

I am extra broken-up that his funeral is tomorrow afternoon...the same tomorrow afternoon when my (Providence, RI-dwelling) brother and sister-in-law and nephew will be in New York and available.  I haven't seen them in two years.  We have all been too poor to travel back and forth, and my brother is pretty much not speaking to my dad, so he doesn't come for Thanksgiving...so it's been two years.  I feel terrible that I can't go to John's memorial, but anyone who knows me -- and now you all know too -- knows that I love my brother to pieces.  We have at times been almost smotheringly close.  There was a time when we both worked at NYU Law, across the street from each other, and averaged one lunch and two two-hour phonecalls a week, just crazy.  We've had friction here and there.  Part of it may be that for a really major seven-year chunk of our young lives, it was just the two of us and our mother living together, and she's gone.  He's just one click closer than anyone else I'm related to.

So, I'm stupidly excited about seeing my brother -- and this is even without taking into account my eight-year-old nephew Walter, who is kind of a junior Danny.  Very smart and very friendly and very adorable.  (Pictured: tiny baby Walter, and 2010 Walter.)  (Note my 2002 slobby dressing and grooming.  Oddly enough, I am just now wearing the exact same tee shirt.  But I'm knocking around the house, not out in public.) (This is also one of my favorite pictures of Barry.  He looks very handsome and very sweet.)

I also love my sister-in-law Jane, who is a very good mother and as smart and funny as most of our family seems to be.  Is.  Jane is also the one who was brave enough to take the last name Zogott, which made me feel a little better about kicking it to the curb two years later, when I married Barry.  There are actually only six or seven Zogotts at present in the US, all related to me; Howard's first wife, Tina, uses "Zogott-Onsted", so she's the #7.  I use it as my middle name, so people can find me who knew me as Zogott, but for all intents and purposes, I'm a Levy.

And by the way, this is my birthday weekend -- in fact, today is my birthday.  I got a lot of cards and a lot of Facebook messages and flowers and a potted orchid and a fancy lunch out and a fun dinner in.  Barry gave me a much-needed and much-wanted gift:  a new everyday watch.  The last one he gave me pretty much gave out recently, after 13 years.  That's a pretty good run for an everyday watch.  And he really nailed the style:  dial, numerals, about the size of a nickel, black leather band...and Indiglo!  I like a very simple, neutral, classic, hard-working, old-school watch, and I got me a new Timex.  (Indiglo, BTW, is when you press the stem and the face lights up with an excellent blue light.  I know other watches light up but Timex Indiglo rules it.)  I LOVE my watch. 

I do indeed have other watches.  One I would call "dressier," but it's vintage and tends to need pricey repairs once a year, so it hasn't been in rotation for a while.  The others I have are on the silly side, and some need batteries and one needs a strap.  Some of those are promotional, linked to movies, gifted to me by John Jorge when he worked at MCI/Universal.  One is Badz-Maru.  (You can Google that one yourself, if you're not a Sanrio maven.)

I've found myself a few Bollywood co-fans.  Marty Taub is one.  And also a recent Facebook friend, someone I was involved with many years ago when it was wildly age-inappropriate.  (Can't really talk about all that, but he's still very funny and a smart smart guy.)  And not only that, I have a new Facebook friend who is a Bollywood fan -- and he lives in Mumbai!  He must have seen me on an Amitabh Bachchan fan page, and sent a friend request.  So it's really my first interaction with a Bollywood film fan who not only lives in India, he lives in Mumbai, which is...well, Bollywood. 

(For those of you who don't have the Bollywood religion, the Indian film industry is centered in Mumbai, which used to be called Bombay -- which is how the Indian film industry came to be called "Bollywood."  See?)    I'm really a beginner with Indian film, very enthusiastic, but still inexperienced.  I'm somewhat limited by not knowing Hindi, along with often finding that my ill*gally d*wnloaded movies don't have subtitles.  I may actually have to break down and buy some DVDs (used on eBay). 

I did finally nail a copy of Bbhuddah...Hoga Terra Baap (I think I spelled that right) with subtitles; I believe it's Amitabh's most recent film, certainly his most recent starring role, from this past summer.  I've watched some, but I have to admit I've had trouble getting past the first big song/dance scene, which I've probably watched six times already.  It's a pisser.  Oh, wait a minute...

Not exactly up to what he did in Kabhi Alveda Naa Kehna in 2006, but the music is great and he is way cool.  Though I've noticed that in everything I've seen him in, with the exception of Kabhi Alveda Naa Kehna, he is dressed horrendously.  Be it the 70s or the 00's, he is wearing absolutely godawful crap. 

Anyway, he's the coolest, we all know that.  And his newest grandchild was born two days ago (here's another November birthday).  He has two from his not-acting not-famous daughter, but the new granddaughter is from famous-actor-son Abishek and his famous-actress-and-world-famous-beauty daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, so the media there is insane over it, and this baby girl will most likely be blindingly attractive, whether or not she chooses to be an actress (it tends to be a family business over there). (You can look up pictures of them too, I've done enough tonight.)

I'm not writing as often as I should, because I don't have the time, or am not making it.  I don't have nearly enough personal time during the workweek -- or, like money, not enough so that I can be careless with it.  If I decide to spend two hours watching Bollywood videos on YouTube, that's two hours that I'm not writing.  AB blogs every day, bless his heart, and tweets as well, but I'm no good at brevity.  I need some wide-open time and space to write. 

And since I can't keep anything in order at all at this point, I did also have a birthday-eve dinner with Robin yesterday.  We ate Indian food (and -- new tradition -- Starbucks after).  She gave me three of what I like to call "hair toys":  two velvet headbands and a French hairclip.  There used to be a store in Soho that sold French goods, and over the years, she gave me four hairclips from there.  They're pretty much my favorites.  Then the store closed.  But unknown to me, she found another store in the city that carries the same make of hairclips, and so I now have five of the amazing hairclips!

Since I wore short hair for the majority of my life (see above photo), hair toys are still a pretty big deal for me.  (Please ignore the horrible scrunchy in the other above photo.)  Well, I find that in general I'm a bit of an accessory slut since I started actually dressing myself decently.  I think I somehow crossed over at some point from not wanting to be seen or noticed to wanting to be seen and noticed, connected to a whole change of  dress and hair and wearing makeup.  Not to be too jargony, I think I started to own who I am and what I look like, and I turned out to be more attractive than I thought.  Yay for me!  But I can't quite figure how or why it happened.  Life: mysterious.

earworm and bookworm

I have certainly chammak challo'ed by way to an earworm.  Mostly I'm not that interested in listening to "filmi" music without the movie; it's usually the combination that grabs me.  (Oddly enough, it's the absolute opposite of the way I feel about American music -- I rarely watch music videos.)  But Chammak Challo stands on its own wonderfully, although the video is fantastic.

Someone on YouTube informed me that George Baker's "Little Green Bag" is a bag of marijuana.  Duh on me.

My "Amazon Associates" widget is now not working at all, here or home.  (I suppose I need to uninstall or reinstall it, but I have a lot of trouble doing anything with Blogger except writing.)  But I wanted to mention a truly amazing book Ive been reading:  Secret Historian: The life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade by Justin Spring.  I was initially intrigued by the title, since I'd never heard of Samuel Steward.  But it wasn't that I was somehow out of the loop -- Steward is something of a forgotten character, painstakingly researched and brought to life by the author.  He was a fascinating personality:  a closeted gay man who taught English literature and wrote poetry and scholarly books, met and became friendly with some of the great literary personalities of the 30s and 40s, kept meticulous records of his sexual contacts (many of which ended up in the Kinsey archives), and had quite a talent for drawing and painting.  After age 40, he took an abrupt turn, became a tattoo artist (this grew out of his taste for rough trade, particularly sailors), and eventually gave up university teaching to tattoo full-time.  He became the house tattoo artist for the Hell's Angels in the late 60s and early 70s.  After 15 years, he gave up tattooing, and became one of the early writers of openly published gay porn.  I've almost finished the book, and it's absolutely fascinating.  The author's quite a hero for discovering and putting together this amazing story.

next earworm, I predict

This song and video come from a brand-new Bollywood movie called Ra.One, which opened at something like $34 million world-wide on October 26.  As well it should:  it's about videogames and has a lot of special effects and action sequences, flying the star around on a wire...plus, the star is Shah Rukh Khan.  Bingo.  I thought the movie was a little stupid, and the blue contact lenses on SRK absolutely criminal, but this song is totally awesome:

"Chammak challo" translates into something in the neighborhood of "sexy babe," as far as I can tell.

Today's lesson in Bollywood films:  Bollywood actors rarely do their own singing.  This is not a secret in any way.  The actual singers, called "playback singers," get prominent billing in the film, and are stars in their own right.  Needless to say, most playback singers are Indian.  But I'm proud to say that "Chammak Challo" is sung by an American:

I have a feeling that Akon's had this song out for a while, but I only first heard it in the movie.  Mad respect for Akon.  He's great on this.

Needless to say, I seem to be getting more and more hooked on Indian films, and I am particularly fascinated by Amitabh Bachchan.  I found out a few days ago that he writes a really amazing blog.  And I believe I can finally pronounce his name properly, after a week or so of feeling like an ugly Westerner:  it's Ah-MEE-tahb Ba-SHAN.  But most Indians just refer to him as Amitabh, or Amitji, and call it a day.

I rewatched Slumdog Millionaire tonight.  I'd seen it a couple of days ago, but hadn't remembered until a friend reminded me yesterday that Amitabh had been the movie star whose autograph Jamal sought as a small boy. 

Don't you just love YouTube?  I just went there, right in the middle of writing this, and found a trailer that had the entire Amitabh scene.   


Life imitates film:  recently, on KBC (the actual Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), a guy who earns around $120 a month won the top prize of 5 crore ("crore" is ten million rupees, if I've got that right, and I suppose 5 crore is somewhere around a million dollars).  And the current host of KBC is -- you guessed it, Amitji.  So I hunted it down on YouTube.  Call me crazy, but I watched the whole thing, almost 15 minutes (this was the time of the last question), which was about 85% in Hindi (or do we say Punjab?), and was riveted.  You can basically follow what's going on.  And if you're with me on this, Amitji's charisma just pops off the screen, as does a really warm personality.  I have no doubt that he really is that nice.  If you wanna be a hardcore Amitabh Bachchan fan, here's that clip:

I took a peek at my blog traffic before, and apparently one person from India came to visit.  Hi!

Doubt I'll ever actually learn the language, but I'm starting to learn some things about the culture and the history of India.  Watching Slumdog Millionaire again, I picked up on some things that I hadn't noticed before I started watching Indian films; for instance, I was very much aware of which characters were Hindi, which were Muslim, and noticed some Sikhs on a train.  Another thing about Bollywood films:  there are a lot of trains in them.  A lot of train station scenes.  Even in Kabhi Alveda Naa Kehna, which is set in New York, there are no subways or busses, but plenty of railroad scenes.  (They kind of vaguely indicate that the characters work or spend time in Manhattan, but live in Connecticut, so folks keep turning up in Grand Central Station.)  And I like it -- there's something romantic about trains.

I'm going to pretend I'm going to sleep now, but I may actually watch a couple more videos.

these days

It's true that I have been persistently depressed and anxious of late.  It's partly due to the realities of life in the 1%, and probably partly due to inadequate medication.  My long-time primary care doctor is not in my new insurance plan, so I have to pick a new doctor, see him or her ($30 copay) and get a referral to a psychiatrist ($50 copay).  I couldn't figure out how to make that work financially except to wait until mid-December to see the psychiatrist (and had no idea how I'd get any psychiatric meds until then), but I actually got offered a babysitting gig:  five hours at $20 per hour.  Yes, thank you.  It's probably 40 years since I've babysat, but that's actually a higher hourly rate than I make at work.  Yes, thank you very much.  The mom is someone I know casually, but well enough that she knows things are tight for me, and it was a real kindness and offered in a very sensitive way.

Work does keep me busy and that keeps away the worst of the moods for the most part, although I have some days where I feel very sad and cry easily.  But the weekends are terrible.  Way too much unstructured time on my hands.  I rarely make jewelry because I'm so conscious of how expensive the materials are, and how impossible it would be to replace anything I use up.  (Truthfully, I have an insanely huge amount of beads, but the silver findings -- clasps, wire, earring hooks -- do get used up and silver is now wildly expensive.)

So mostly what I end up doing on the weekends is distracting myself.  Occasionally I just do something useless like sleep all day, but mostly it's Media Time.  Barry and I do love our TV and music and movies, but he gravitates to the TV set and I gravitate toward the computer.  The TV set is old and not HD and our DVD player died; even with all the on-demand stuff we get with FIOS, there's way more content and variety online.  Barry doesn't really like watching much online except for relatively short videos, but I love it:  HD screen, headphones with nice sound.  And I like to let him have the TV on weekends because he lets me hog it during the week because I work and he doesn't.  We like a lot of the same things but we do have different preferences.  So on the weekends I'll leave him to martial arts and vampires and the things he likes best.  And I can jump around, stop and start, and be as obsessed as I like.

I watched, I think, five Bollywood movies this past weekend.  And another great thing about the computer is that I can pause a movie and look something up:  how are Sikhs different from Hindus?  do the actors do their own singing?  are all Indian movies like this?

I was not only thoroughly distracted, but very entertained and very educated.  Bollywood movies totally rule.

I watched:  Ra.One.  This movie just opened, around $34 million internationally on its first weekend.  Kind of an Indian Tron.  I watched:  Swades.  Incredibly beautiful.  I watched:  Veer-Zaara.  Also very beautiful; this was the one where Sikhs and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis were all involved.  I watched:  Deewar.  Wow.  That one was from the 70s, with a very young, brooding Amitabh Bachchan.  Old-school plot about two brothers, one a gangster, one a cop.  Shashi Kapoor was the "good" brother, and incredibly wussy next to Amitabh.  Kind of like Leslie Howard next to Clark Gable: no contest.  Love the bad boys.

These are some long movies, too, generally around three hours, and I started to realize that it wasn't just comedy and drama and music, but also family issues, justice, prejudice, women's rights, government corruption, class, caste...these movies are just plain loaded.  And then everyone sings and dances.  This is definitely my new favorite thing.  I'm also thinking I like Amitabh Bachchan better than I like Shah Rukh Khan, although SRK is certainly handsome and talented.  But Amitabh is like Cary Grant, Clint Eastwood, Fred Astaire, George Clooney...great at drama, great at comedy, great at dancing, handsome young and handsome old.  Visual aids:

I rest my case.  There are a lot of Bollywood actors and actresses I haven't seen yet, and I have yet to say anything about the female stars, but I do love those men.

here's something that made me feel not sad tonight

I like this number for a lot of different reasons.  I'm on my second viewing of this movie, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, but I've watched this number a gazillion times.  I don't know much of anything about Bollywood, but I suspect this movie is kind of the golden mean of Bollywood movies.  It's really long, has romance and goofy comedy, and awesome musical numbers like this.  There are also some things that make me cringe a little, some supposedly-funny-but-really-dreadful parenting bits, some non-PC stuff.  Lots of NYC locations (!) and every American person acts weird and wacky. 

I've decided that Shah Rukh Khan, who is seen in this video brooding off to the side, is kind of the Bollywood Tom Cruise.  He's kind of cocky and pseudo-tough, and he's highly cute.  Tom Cruise never got to me, but SRK did.  But watching this now, I see that it's Amitabh Bachchan, the older dude in this video, who is the real deal.  He was 64 when this was made (2006).  It seems as if he was at one time the top guy in Bollywood, period, although he had some setbacks during his career.  He is seriously hot in this number.  And what I didn't know the first time I saw this is that the young guy in this number, who plays the son of Amitabh's character, is actually Amitabh's son, Abhishek.  How cool is that?

The colors in these dance scenes hurt my eyes in a good way.  The party at which this number takes place allegedly has a "60s" theme, but those clothes sure doesn't look like the sixties.  It doesn't look like 2006, either.  I don't know what it looks like.  It looks like a parallel universe.  And the dancing certainly comes from a parallel universe, one where things crash together in a bizarre and attractive way.  I would love to be able to dance like that! 

I keep having this vague ugly-American thought that this stuff is so weird and yet so unselfconscious -- but of course they wouldn't feel self-conscious.  It's not weird to them, it's their culture.  But it's really very foreign to me, and very charming and beautiful and cool, just endlessly rocking in a timeless way.

I know that I do strike people as sad and troubled and anxious of late; I walk around anxious about money every hour of every day, and every small increase in expenses makes me feel gut-punched.  And I haven't been posting here too often, and I suspect I've done more posting when I've felt really down than when I've felt really up.  There are a lot of good things in my life, for sure.  It's just that the roller coaster is killing me.  And I'm uncomfortable about people seeing me in pain, and some days it really is pain.  It's just grinding.  I recently had an e-mail from my sister-in-law, and she's having much the same experience.  Neither of them is working, they have a son, and my brother is having some pretty wrenching emotional problems.  There is a lot of not-happy going around, and I guess I'm carrying an additional load of disappointment.  This is not how I thought my life would go, and I'm not too optimistic about things getting better in a big way in the foreseeable future.  I feel like I've been clobbered by my lifetime of underachievement, that I'm paying now for being unfocused and undisciplined and unprofessional.  It took me way too long to become a good worker and to be satisfied by working well; I have that satisfaction now, but missed out on a lot of the benefits by not getting here sooner.  I should have been building a career instead of rebooting into a new line of work every couple of years.

better? worse?

The weekends mostly depress me since I often don't know what to do with myself.  Last weekend, I took four days off -- took two for Rosh Hashonah because I felt I needed the break -- and we went to the Atlantic Antic on Sunday.  That's a huge long street fair down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, which is held on the first Sunday in October.  I try to set aside a little money because there are generally a lot of nice handmade crafts.  I got a beautiful bronze hairclip shaped like a sand dollar ($5) and a tie-dyed swing top ($20).  Barry decided to come with me this year, but he does what I try not not to:  buy food.  To me, an $8 gyro is outrageous, plus, I'm not a fan of eating while on my feet.  Thought I confess (please don't kill me, oh sugar- starch and gluten-free friends) that we split half a dozen deep-fried Oreos, as neither of us had ever had one.  Worth the splurge.

This past weekend was dreadful because it was The Weekend Before Pay -- that is, broke, broke, broke.  This is the kind of weekend where I am trying frantically not to think, because it will plunge me into even deeper depression.  I slept a lot, watched TV, watched things on the computer. 

A week or so ago, I was really feeling the absence of scent (cologne, perfume).  My big bottle of Bellodgia has a clogged sprayer and although it's about 2/3 full, I can't get any out.  This happened about two months after I got it; at some point, just from pumping and pumping, I got it to work for a few days, then it quit again.  There's no way to open it.  I even wrote to Caron, and never heard from them.  I had bought some Gucci rush about a year ago, but the sprayer dropped off, so it will only stream; plus, it's not holding well on me at all.  My Sublime and Escape were down to dregs.  It's the season where I like to wear something a bit heavier, like Coco, but what was really on my mind was Shalimar.  Mind you, I've never worn Shalimar.  But one of my grandmothers did, or else she simply had a bottle on her vanity, and I remembered the smellvividly.  It was wonderful and almost overwhelming.  I recognize it on women who walk by.  So I got myself a fairly small portion (1/4 oz. EDT) on eBay, and it's unbelievably wonderful.  I can't believe how happy it makes me.  I'm also waiting for a bottle of Mitsouko and one of Samsara, both also made by Guerlain.  It seems like time to wear classics.

I may have mentioned The Perfumed Court, a website where you can buy smaller sizes of almost any kind of scent you can imagine -- plus it really has a lot of information about the history and composition of pretty much every scent on the site.  It's tons of information, but it does help you to find other scents of the type you enjoy -- plus you can get small samples (not free) to check them out.  It's not cheap, but fragrance samples are not as easy to come by as they used to be.

My brother is having more and more and more problems.  Not much to be done for him.  He's having more and more flashbacks about some bad things that were done to him as a kid, and although he sees a therapist, this stuff has totally paralyzed him.  Neither he nor my sister-in-law has worked for a very long time, and I'm not sure how they get along, except that I guess public assistance goes a longer way in Providence, RI than it does in New York.

I do have a new insurance plan through my job, which is about as good as it can be.  Unlike Medicaid, there are co-pays, but there are none for generic meds and none for lab tests, which is a life-saver.

Work is basically good.  The beginning of the term was pretty hectic, but now things seem to be rolling nicely.  I hired a nice new intern who seems to be working out well; I've had good luck so far with interns.

Barry is now without insurance (we lost Medicaid September 30), which is terrible, but there's not much we can do.  I don't have a spare cent to add him to my coverage (which would totally about $6,000 per year).  I'm really pushing him hard about looking for work...rather, I am strongly encouraging him.  But we are just not making ends meet. We've already sold CDs and books and Barry's drum kit.  Something has to change.