JOURNAL 12 . 17 . 2001
un rêve dans le zoo du parc central
monday, december 17
I wish I could say, 'sorry, been busy working on a new project' or 'how do you like this new redesign! wasn't it worth the wait??' or 'great news! Harper's accepted the essay, and I've just been busy polishing up the revisions!' But all I can say is 'so many Holiday parties! so little time! such debilitating hangovers!'
We did go see The Man Who Wasn't There last night. It's the least funny of
all the Coen Brothers' movies, I thought, but typically excellent. It did give me a touch of existential nausea, but aside from that I came out fine.
It is beautiful, and it does have a death scene as gruesome and vivid as any they've come up with before. The wood chipper was horrific but ludicrous enough to laugh off. This is a more mundane death, but with all the heaving, gurgling detail you can stand.
friday, december 7
Well, the power of imagining ourselves sitting on the porch, our feet propped up on the rail, the moon rising over the park in front of us, Lucinda Williams playing in the living room behind us, and a half-full bottle of Maker's Mark on the floor between our chairs won out over the power of cautious personal finance. So thanks, Tam, and Eden, and Jack, and Dave. You have open invitations, if it works out. It looks like it will.
Here's the scoop on the place: it's in Windsor Terrace, a couple stops on the F train past Park Slope. It overlooks the park from the 4th floor, with a big porch (with a screen door!) from which to watch the ducks on the lake and the horses coming up from Kensington stables. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen you could swing a cat in (is that the expression? in any case, we won't be swinging Eliot, much as she may like it), windows on the east and the west, and enough other amenities to make the slightly longer commute we'll endure well worth it.
When we first moved to New York, riding the subway was one of my favorites parts of living here anyway. We'll certainly read more. When we lived in Boston, I temped for a while at a bank and had a 45 minute commute. I made it halfway through Anna Karenina before I got sick of the job and split.
Did I mention the porch?
tuesday, december 4
Well. That was short-lived.
Most of my childhood, my parents were opposed, on principle, to giving us an allowance or paying us for chores or good grades. I suspected, and still do, that their reasons were related to the talks my father would have with me on our porch in Virginia, when he'd explain the idea of grace: you don't get what you get because you deserve it; it's a gift, given to you though you don't deserve it. I always heard this talk in the context of Christianity, but somehow I convinced myself it had something to do with the reason I didn't get a couple dollars a week to convert to quarters for Galaga and Lemonheads at the gas station.
It didn't make much sense, now that I think about it (wouldn't grace be better illustrated by giving me money, especially big chunks of it randomly?), and it was a terribly subversive education for the aspiring fund manager I was when I was 12. (I'd probably be a happy capitalist instead of this conflicted quasi-socialist if only I'd gotten an allowance! Thanks folks!). So, frustrated by my anemic cash flow, I'd make the best of it by adapting that genetically-imparted trick that makes it look like you've eaten more of your butter beans than you have: I'd shuffle stuff around. I'd stack my change up on my desk, one pile of quarters, one of dimes, one of nickels. Then, since the nickels pile was always the highest and only made me feel the abundance of my poverty, I'd rearrange it into little piles worth a dollar: first pure quarters, then quarters and 2-dimes-and-nickel combos, then dimes, nickels, and pennies.
Doing all that made me feel like I had more than I did, and I guess I'm still doing it, because when we shook all the little piles of money we had into the change-roller last night, buying a huge apartment overlooking the park, with a porch to watch the storms roll in from and an extra room to stuff all the books in, didn't seem like such a smart idea after all.
And for some reason I haven't quite sussed out, the disappointment I feel puts me in mind of those talks about grace, though the refrain haunting the edge of my mind isn't "we do not presume to come to this thy table, oh merciful father, trusting in our own righteousness...." It's more secular, and more economic, and I imagine it intoned not by my cassocked father in the amber-red light at the front of Ascension Episcopal, but by my friend Rahul, shuffling down Spring Street nudging his glasses up his nose with the back of his hand: "easy come, easy go."
sunday, december 2
Jennifer and I had a lot of plans for this weekend:
1. paint the bathroom
2. go to the gym, twice if possible
3. study javascript
4. get bike fixed (finally!)
5. work on Chris's and Jennifer's sites
6. send Cia scripts for her site
7. finish one or the other of the books I'm reading
We did none of those things. Instead we looked at an apartment, decided we wanted it, made an offer on it, and have now spent the past 24 hours walking around slightly dazed-looking and giddy, as though we'd been brainwashed into thinking we hadn't already been through the overwrought pageantry and nerve-withering anticipation of marriage and were about to start up that process all over again.
Consequently, my stomach hurts. Anyone have any advice?
tuesday, november 27
After a late night of wine and tryptophan, we woke up, said some teary goodbyes to Dixie, Jennifer's 14 year old dog, and set out in our rented airbrush-blue Toyota Corolla for Athens, GA, to see our friends Chris and Carrie. Chris has just opened a gallery in Athens, so we met him there, ridiculous as ever even in his serious setting. We spent the next 36 hours eating, drinking, and trying to maintain a sense of calm and focus in the midst of a whirl of dogs who were eager to show us, at every possible opportunity, how friendly and energetic they were. We also took a ride in a horse cart.
Saturday night after the rain stopped, we sat around in Chris and Carrie's back yard, drinking beer and watching the dogs drag a pizza box through the bushes. Chris's stacks of paintings and boxes of painterly junk were piled up under the carport, which has become Chris's studio. Crickets, as they're wont to do when you're sitting in the backyard of a house on the wooded outskirts of a southern town, chirped in the background. Jennifer and I are in the middle of a house hunt, looking for a place to buy in Brooklyn, but while we sat there, mud caked to the bottoms of our German shoes, I think we both wanted to ditch the city and all our dreams of snowboarding the winters away and tuck into a slant-floored house full of mutts somewhere within spitting distance of a good barbecue pit.
thursday, november 22
Happy Thanksgiving! While we were rooting around the Tracys' recipe box for ways of gorging ourselves that only our ancestors knew about, we stumbled on some gems:
But--and it's one more thing to be thankful for--we're just having the standard lay-you-out-flat-on-your-back fare: turkey stuffed with pecans, oyster casserole, rosemary beans, wild rice, cranberry chutney, tomato confit, buttermilk and apple pies....
So, anyway, thank you all my friends: thanks Blake and Constanza for watching Eliot, thanks Thalia and Ceeber, thanks and happy birthday Alyssa, thanks Jane, thanks Dan, thanks Dan and Gabriela, thanks Vicki, Rachel, Rahul, Alex and Alisa, Noureddine and Rachel, Scoop and Carrie, Furman and April and Hunter, Matt and Jennifer and Francesca, Will and Anne and coming-soon, Todd, Lucia, and the whole sorry lot of you who are still waiting for me to return your emails, send you your presents, call you as promised, and who still stick by me.
And all you people I don't know, or know only through email, who've read even a word or looked at even a picture here...thank you, too.
tuesday, november 20
At the Tennessee Aquarium, where we went after a sushi lunch, one tour guide--a guy, probably 20 years old, who liked pointing things out in exhibits by aiming his flashlight into the featured animal's eyes, making it squirm--told a group "this snake'll bite cha. Know how I know? I use to own it. I use to own this snake, it'd play this trick on yuh, you reach in'ere to give it its food, an'it'll bite cher hand 'stead of the food. I had to get rid of it." A mother there with her children said "you living at home when you had that thing?" "Mmhmm." "Your mother let you have that in the house?"
We watched a bass in a spastic death performance: we all assumed it was putting on a show as it swam wildly from one end of the tank to the other, lunging to the surface fast enough to splash all of us on the other side of the glass, then darting to a corner to turn around. We laughed giddily, reaching out as if to touch it, then leaping back when it thrashed the water. But then it started turning upside down, and one boy pointed to the glass and said "look, mom, it's bleeding, something musta got it." The dad moved the family along, and we went off to find an aquarium employee who could help. There was no one but the former snake handler, who was busy trying to wake up a giant catfish at the bottom of a tank in order to impress the young wife of a guy in a Dale Earnhardt baseball cap.
sunday, november 18
Argh. We missed the meteor shower, too, and I was even awake. I haven't been able to sleep between 5 and 7 for the past several weeks. It's frustrating and exhausting. I wish I'd at least put the time to good use this morning, though, and stuck my head out the window. In Tennessee, we probably would have had a fairly good view, since there aren't too many city lights.
There is a lot of haze in the air, though, because of forest firest that are burning up the backs of the mountains. We drove around today, and there were moments I could smell the smoke, which just reminded me of home.
Yesterday we wandered around a part of downtown Chattanooga that's being redeveloped, mostly along sort of New Urbanist guidelines, from what I can tell. Among the improvements is a restaurant, St. John's, where we gorged ourselves on appetizers including one of the best things I've eaten, worthy of any restaurant I've been too: seared foie gras on buttermilk french toast. It's worth the trip.
friday, november 16
We're trying to get ready to leave for a week's vacation in Chattanooga, where Jennifer's from. It's my first time flying since the 11th. I didn't really like flying before then, and I'm not looking forward to it now, not one bit.
Today the temperatures got up into the 70s, so I met up with Blake and had lunch outside
There was a little fashion shoot going on on the corner, casually, and the handball courts were full of kids from the high school nearby cutting class, I guess. But I had to go back to work, and Blake had to go back to bed. Fortunately there was a little pick-me-up in the office when I got back: 
Our friend Yael is dogsitting, and brought him in to the office yesterday. Now no one wants him to leave, I don't think.
I hope this next week I'll be able to get some sleep and read and write some more, so I should be a little less sporadic about updating and responding to email. Sorry if I've missed you.
tuesday, november 13
Two months after most of their broadcast towers were destroyed when the WTC towers fell, most New York television stations are finally broadcasting at full strength again. And what a treat it is: here we have an exorcism in a condo in South Carolina, a concert by the hoarse-falsetto corpse of Michael Jackson, and a lot of hysterical trailers for the late news, which promise sneak peeks behind enemy lines in Afghanistan! an account of the harrowing final seconds of the American Airlines plane that crashed yesterday! What did we do without it!
New York manages to be absurd and wonderful even in crisis:
I'm sorry I said nothing all last week. After the layoffs, I was handed a new job, which has kept me busier than I've been since college. Fortunately, I love the job, and I"m learning more than I have since college, too.
for 9.11, begin here or use the archives.
thank you, blogger