Slept on it

And gave something, at least, some thought.  My reporter’s notebook ran today. Since I’m news editor, I usually don’t get bylines much.

Ride all night

So that was fun.

Epic and exhausted

Too sleepy to do schoolwork, so this seems about right (write…), yeah?

By a rough calculation, I’ve had about nine hours of sleep over the past three days.  In that time, I rode my bike from Columbia’s campus down through Manhattan and into Brooklyn with a mass of around 250 people in matching T-shirts, met with the vice president of the university, submitted a friend’s Fulbright application for Azerbaijan, tended bar, ran into an old friend from high school who now works at Ruby Tuesday’s (he recommends the ribs), took notes with the New York Press Club, ran into Kramer outside Tom’s (the real one)…and the weekend isn’t over…

Is the room spinning or is it just me?

I think it was 2 o’clock Friday morning when I was riding through Times Square on my bicycle—past Lace Gentleman’s Club—and all the lights and people and cabs were in motion, turning for a second to look at us—a big spectacle ourselves, and in the midst of one—when I thought, “What have I got to lose?”   This is incredibly dangerous.  This is not counting for class credit.  This is magnificent and indulgent.  I wasn’t planning on it (I got talked into it/or did I?)  I should take this as a lesson.

Related: I learned that in 1807, Washington Irving, Washington Irving’s brother, and Washington Irving’s brother-in-law wrote some essays.  In the essays, they called New York City “Gotham” after an English nursery rhyme about a town where everybody pretended to be fools so they wouldn’t ever get in trouble for anything.

Maybe I’m a fool, but I don’t have time for a nap because I’m going to a concert in Central Park right now.  Tomorrow I’ll think it over.  No time to think now, and that sounds good to me.

Classy

I like my classes a lot, although one of them makes me feel stupid (mass mediated cultures) and another one makes me feel wimpy (karate). But if all goes well, I’ll learn things, to ameliorate the situation. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and it looks like this:

Darwin notebook B

That’s Darwin’s handwriting. He scribbled some stuff down in a notebook and it turned out to be evolution.

And in my case—I think—I really hope so…
Evolution.

until next time,
a signifying monkey

Driving on

The past few days have been ends and beginnings, and wondering about them. The end of summer, and the ability to plan my own time, has wound down.  Instead I started having to do what I had to do, and dealing with what I had to deal with. A lot of people have been telling me how I shouldn’t worry too much, that college will all be worth it, that my grandparents are going to die anyway, that everything is going to be fine. Right now I’m waking up in my new bed for the first time, looking out at a new view: the rooftops of city buildings that look so grimy up close but gorgeous from where I’m sitting, and then the top of St. John the Divine Cathedral–rising above everything else into a sky that’s blinding white–and I feel like I don’t know anything except that it’s really pretty outside.

And now for something completely different…

Remember my train set? Well, in honor of Annie’s departure from my house, my dad decided to give her due tribute in HO scale. Most of the shops or schools or restaurants and everything in the train set is named after somebody we know, and references something they like (i.e. Emily’s dance studio for my friend the ballerina).  So now Annie’s got WAM Radio. But not only that. Since she lived at my house for four months, she gets her face on the side of a miniature bus in my basement:

Yes, my life is that ridiculous

Now that we’re roommates, I’m thinking of blowing that photo up and pasting it on the wall.

Spec Spree

The air has a little bit more of a chill now and I’m starting to crunch leaves when I walk on the sidewalk. The stores have Back to School signs and it’s hard to schedule a haircut. I bought a pair of new boots and I’m listening to a new song. It’s nearing that time to start all over again, take a deep breath, and jump. The semester begins in a few days.

But just before that, there was a Spec spree: 3 days to put together the orientation issue (sans K4 or wireless until the very end) plus fix up the back room of the office (from creature/STD-infested dump closet to cafe disco-esque hangout).

The orientation issue is wonderful.  Those lucky first-years will feel nothing less than oriented.  Read it even if you’re an upperclassman, because there’s useful info about new places to use Flex and the ever-enigmatic relationship among Columbia College, SEAS, General Studies, and Barnard. My column was about (shock!) New York City.

But the last few days in the office were about more than putting out an issue. They were about smacking wood with a hammer so hard that both the wood and the hammer break.  And painting in my pajamas.  And getting myself excited.

The back room project is one that I’ve dreamed about doing since my freshman year, and this summer I finally scored money from the Spec budget to make it happen. Once we all arrived in the office, this became more of an involved process than I had initially anticipated.  But after hours of spackling, sanding, painting, and ripping a wall unit out of the wall (which had already started to go, taking pieces of the wall with it), we’ve made major progess. This will all be over soon (it has to get finished by the time first-years start to arrive for open houses), and when it’s complete with the fresh paint, new floor, rug, chairs, and alumni tribute pictures on the wall…it’s going to be more than worth it. So let’s hope that the unidentifiable stain on the carpet didn’t have anything too toxic in it, so those of us who worked on the room can actually live to enjoy it.

Photos of the final product to come when it’s ready.

Meat. Loaf.

I’ve never been able to cook. I mean, I’ve always been comically bad at it. I know how to make cereal…um, yeah. But lately I’ve been watching a lot of Food Network. That Paula Dean can really get a girl excited about chives. And the other day I decided that I want to be one of those people who hosts an unexpected yet charming hodgepodge of guests for dinner parties, with one of those really long tables that everybody squeezes together to sit at while passing a big bowl of communal salad and engaging in conversation that’s pithy yet degenerate. So I learned how to make meatloaf!

I hosted a Mad Men party the other day. Fine, I’m a walking stereotype, but doesn’t conformity just go with the aesthetic of the evening? Anyway, I made the whole dinner pretty much from scratch: cheese and crackers appetizer, chopped salad, meatloaf, creamed spinach, potato rolls, apple pie a la mode for dessert. The meatloaf was a big hit, and I served it while wearing a vintage dress and heels.  Waddup Donna Reed.

My darling pithy degenerates, circa 1963

So that was a success. Only now I’ve got to learn how to make something besides meatloaf.  Three times in a row feels like I’m pushing it.

In other news, my cousin’s baby is two!  Her birthday party was off the heezy.  There was an Elmo cake with cannoli filling.

Hey baby

I love hanging out with babies.

Everything old is new again

After having been away from home for so long, it feels both like a comfortable, nostalgic place and also somewhere different from what I’d always known.  Things I had just taken for granted all those years now stand out and seem peculiar or exciting or eerie in a way I hadn’t noticed.  I’ve been back home for around two weeks now, taking it all in.

Gil's Autoshop

Biker gang at Ridgewood Coffee Company on a Saturday night

Claudia steps off the trampoline

Walking ahead of me

Friends are starting to come back, too.  But other ones are leaving.

summer bums

Spain then Germany then Jersey

Nussbaum & Wu...?

Vamp in Vermont

It’s been really sweltering hot in New Jersey. I tend to run into people I used to know, and I’m sweaty, and it’s awkward. Coming home to a small town might feel different, but the people are all the same. We look at each other differently now, though. Everything old is new again.

It’s been a while

Oh, hello there.  It’s been a while.  For my last two weeks in DC, I guess I did more living than writing about it.  That’s good, I think…

I went to the Smithsonian and saw–among other things–Archie Bunker’s chair, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves, and this guy:

pretty fly for a green guy

I also saw a bunch of other exhibits there at the American history museum. There was one on Abraham Lincoln, another chock full of miscellaneous presidential paraphernalia, a gallery of African American portraits from DC, and a display of Julia Child’s kitchen. So I guess I’ll have to go and see that new movie then.

But overall, I was a bit disappointed with my trip to the Smithsonian’s Behring Center.  It had started off so well, with a perfectly good Woody Allen-esque experience waiting on line. A family behind me loudly belted out their opinions: “There’s this guy from Texas who lives in my dorm. I mean, he says he’s a Republican, but he doesn’t believe that people should carry guns around with them at all times.  I know, right!  I don’t know where in Texas he’s from.” Incidentally, I parted ways with my neighbors-in-waiting at the security check point. No weapons allowed.

But then once I got inside, I found that many of the exhibits covered historic events or relics from New York, Boston, or other northeastern places like that, where I’ve been to a bunch of museums that are actually located in the historic spaces they discuss. This distance, not only in time but also in place, meant a lack of connection to a bunch of things I saw, as if it all seemed somehow less authentic. I floated around the museum for five hours, trying to find something that could knock my socks off. This was what came the closest:

Well look at that, Abe Lincoln's hat

A week or so later, I was much more impressed with the beautiful Hirshhorn museum of modern art. At one exhibit called “Strange Bodies,” I saw a whole lot of really evocative pieces that were seductive or prophetic or disturbing or just plain strange, but all striking:

art and everybody looking at it

portrait of Andy Warhol on black velvet

me and the big guy

It was all challenging. Most of it had that eerie sort of beauty that’s always good to see because it reminds you how beauty isn’t just one thing, or anything expected, or anything typical. And I left feeling really excited about all that, and then stepped outside, and it was a beautiful day.

So that’s some Smithsonian. I’ll catch up with more beautiful things in a while.

Bobby and the bluegrass boys

It wasn’t supposed to have rained. We were finishing up dinner on the back porch when we looked out at the sky and saw it turning gray.  It was ominous. But the weather report had been so good, so we hushed our apprehension and had some pie. Then Dad drove into town before the rest of us, but by the time he got to the village square, we were feeling drops. He called and said the music was going to move to a friend’s house.

Saturday night was sort of the second annual unofficial acoustic-only bluegrass music festival, consisting of several dozen players–mostly over the age of 55, mostly men, mostly bald–gathering in the center square of my village to jam on their banjos or guitars or fiddles or tambourines. The whole thing got started last year when my dad’s friends (a husband and wife bluegrass band duo) figured it would be fun to play with their friends all together, for everybody in town to hear.  But this year, it got relocated into their house on account of the rain.  It only was drizzling a little, but that’s no way to treat wooden instruments.

So we all packed into the house:

gather round

picking songs/pickin strings

cold beers over there

And it worked out really well, with all the down home charm a girl could ask for on a weekend visit back to Jersey. Everybody squeezed in to make room for the musicians and those of us just there to listen, like my next door neighbor who kept drunkenly shouting things at my dad while he was playing. “Bobby wants to do Hendrix!” my neighbor called out, clutching a beer and shifting his weight back and forth between the feet of his American flag high-top converse sneakers. Then he’d laugh and take another swig.

Meanwhile, my dad seemed to be a belle of the ball, taking solos and humbly playing through the applause. He often found himself in the center of a circle that formed around him. Earlier that night, he had told me he was worried what people would think when they saw him, since he recently came down with a case of bell’s palsy that somewhat disfigured his face. But the only thing anybody seemed to see was his sound, and soon it was like the whole room went blind and transcended into the vibrations of strings and husky tones belting “wild, wild horses…”

My dad Bobby on the guitar

Then my friend Hannah came by with her violin, which my dad adamantly insisted we refer to as a fiddle for the evening. With a timid smile and a shirt woven with sparkly thread, she joined in with all the big old guys. The rest of us cheered her on (and Max got so inspired he took to playing the egg–the kind you shake).

For the night, she's a fiddler

Max, on tour from Heidelberg

Later on, the music split off into different rooms, with melodies seeping through the open doors, each leading into the next. More and more people showed up, though the turnout wasn’t as high as it would have been had it taken place outside as planned. One guy who might have been ten years younger than the rest found me outside and leaned in, saying he had something to whisper in my ear: “Got any rolling papers?” He later referred to the house as full of “fogeys,” explaining that he was “just here for the music.” And so was I, sorry.

So I went headed back inside and took more pictures of crowded sounds:

all together now...

And listening:

lullaby for Leah

Until I went off with my friends, leaving Bobby with the bluegrass boys.

Exit music

By the time I left, the sky had cleared.

Little Theater

There’s a little place called the Little Theater where I spent a large amount of time growing up. I was back last night to see little people perform a little play that I wrote. Here is the program:

playbill

It was entirely absurd and completely adorable. Actors in grades 5 through 8 donned fat suits and accents and trench coats and pirate hats and made everybody laugh.

It’s good to be home in Jersey for the weekend. No matter what anybody says, this is the best state of them all.