Janeism

2012-01-24T13:05:00.002-05:00

A couple weeks ago Claudia caught me off guard with the announcement that she had decided that she was in favor of the idea of marriage, specifically between us. At least she caught me off-guard because it was 11 p.m., it was raining, and we were up on the roof on our way home after an evening with a friend on the other side of the building. It didn't particularly catch me off-guard in the sentiment, because we'd talked about the concept of marriage off and on for quite a while -- whether, what, how, why -- and decided that we'd each need to give an all-clear, as it were, before anything more formal would happen.

Since marriage has only lately become a legal option for us, there's been a lot to consider. What parts would we want? The legal protection conferred by the state? The endorsement of some larger institution, be it government or religious? The public pronouncement in front of friends? A big party? A commitment to each other for a lifetime? The vague feeling of being conventional and heteronormative? Having looked at marriage from the outside for the better part of 40 years and having tried on some of those aspects previously, I don't take any of it for granted, and subsequent to Claudia's pronouncement we spent quite a few hours talking about all those things.

In the end I decided I was in favor of quite a few of those things. One of Claudia's tipping points was the legal protections: Even in this day and age, same-sex couples are still being denied access to each other in hospitals and other settings when they should rightly be at their partners' sides. It's a situation neither of us wants to face. And, after 3 years together, I can say confidently that we're a really good team. I would prefer not to relive the down-to-the-wire dash to return the rental car in Amsterdam's maze of canals and one-way streets on New Year's Eve (also: pouring rain and random fireworks), but there is no one else I would want to do that with. Our relationship had an early trial by fire when Claudia's mom died suddenly, but we made it through that period too. I know we have each other's back. When life flings crap, this is the person I want to help shovel it away. And, also, it'd be really fun to have an awesome party.

So Saturday morning we were lying in bed, watching the snow, and although she was barely awake, I handed her a sheet of paper. It was a copy of an early email I'd sent her on Match, before we ever met. She has always said she liked the tone, that it made her want to meet me. Only this time I updated the text a bit, from "if you want to have coffee sometime" to "if you want to get married sometime." It was fun to watch her pupils dilate as she read and digested it.

We spent the rest of the weekend in a happy engagement haze, at least when we weren't fulfilling prescheduled errands and appointments. There basically haven't been any further details sorted out in terms of where or when or how, although I am lobbying heavily for dinosaurs on the cake. Planning a wedding is a pretty good test for a relationship, I think. Although I suspect Claudia is generally classier than me and might balk at my burgeoning ideas for pinwheels, pinatas and so on, I think it will be fun. She's definitely the best person to do this with.

2012-01-04T19:39:00.002-05:00

A fire gutted one of the main commercial buildings in Inwood last night. The fire department was still hosing it down this morning when I left for work. The building housed a Citibank branch and a Bank of America kiosk, but also a lot of businesses that help make up the neighborhood's fabric. There's the pet supply store where they keep a stash of Andy's preferred kibble in the bag size I like, and the owner quizzes me on my Arabic. The yoga studio that organized and hosted the holiday market where I sold my glass and met neighbors and made new friends. The hardware store that just opened.

These are among the places that make Inwood what it is -- that make Saturday errands a pleasant walk around the hood instead of a shlep downtown. In the time it would take to go to the Upper West Side, I can drop off dry cleaning, deposit a check, buy a box of flea and tick preventive and some new picture hangers AND hit the farmers' market, AND run into half a dozen neighbors in the process.

The neighborhood response has been strong and emotional and swift. A community meeting is in the works for Friday, and people are calling around to ask about alternate space rentals, fundraisers, and anything else that will help keep the businesses afloat and local. It's nice to see the neighborhood take care of its own.

2012-01-03T06:03:00.003-05:00

My last post was probably a bit overambitious. What actually happened was I walked very slowly down to the Seine and along it for about half an hour, then we realized how far the tower still was, hopped in a cab, snapped a couple photos from the vicinity, and hopped a cab back to the hotel where I slept the rest of the day. Claudia explored Paris solo. I rallied enough for an upright dinner of nonthreatening French food that evening. Saturday morning I finally felt human again, so we spent the 90 minutes we had left in Paris tracking down a swank candy shop before driving back to Amsterdam. The GPS Erik lent us was, in fact, narrated by Ossy Osbourne, which explains why it kept complaining about the fucking roundabouts. The drive from Paris up through Belgium and into the Netherlands does explain everything you wanted to know about the old Dutch landscape painters. It's really about 70% sky in any direction you choose to look, and mostly it's covered in dramatic clouds.

The best part of the trip was New Year's Eve. Amsterdam doesn't allow fireworks except for the 5 days before New Year's, and then it has no regulations at all, so your average, drunken Dutch person can and does buy an assload of Macys-grade fireworks and set them off anywhere convenient. The noise and lights were nonstop when we got in at 7 and intensified all evening as we ate lasagna and listened to Dutch radio finish counting down the top 2000 songs of all time, according to Dutch listeners. (Spoiler alert: Bohemian Rhapsody wins ever single year.) We climbed up on Erik's roof to toast the new year as fireworks went off all around us and in some cases right over us. Eventually we wandered to the Nieuwmarkt square to see the excitment. The streets were covered in damp cardboard firework crates and broken bottles. Someone lit a bonfire that was lapping up all the spent casings and occasionally some non-spent ones that shot off into the crowd, which was too drunk to mind much. By 2, the noise had died down and we got a good night's sleep. Sunday we walked around for a while, had a farewell pancake supper with Erik and his girlfriend and kids, and took off for Heathrow. One brief overnight in a featureless airport hotel later, we were finally on our way home.

2011-12-30T04:01:00.002-05:00

We are in Paris, about to leave for a whirlwind day of the Eiffel Tower, Place Georges Pompidou, Sacre Couer, Notre Dame and whatever else I'm misspelling. The trip has so far featured pretty much no sightseeing, so this is an interesting change. Amsterdam was marked by jetlagged fog, one temporarily delicious Surinamese meal, and then decisive and violent stomach flu. I spent Wednesday on my back asleep or pondering the ceiling beams of Erik's work studio in an old Amsterdam row house. The day's excitement was rolling over to sleep for a while on my right side and then, a couple hours later, trying out my left side. It ended badly and back in the bathroom. Miraculously, by Thursday morning I was stable enough to contemplate getting in the rental car, a Fiat Panda (cute car, cuter name!), that Claudia graciously drove the better part of the day to get here. Thanks to Erik's GPS, which for some reason sounds like a drunken Englishman, we made it through the central city, across the Seine and to a charming hotel in the Latin Quarter. My first meal in Paris was plain white rice and some unseasoned chicken breast, washed down with herbal tea. Hoping for better today.

2011-12-19T10:07:00.002-05:00

At about 6:30 on the last day of the holiday craft market, the organizer brought around a tray of glasses of sparkling wine for all the vendors. I'd made my last sale probably an hour before and was starting to pack up. I hadn't been looking for closure on the whole thing, but it was unexpectedly a very nice moment.

Over the course of three Saturday afternoons I sold about 18 handblown ornaments and three bowls. Combined with some other sales to friends and workers, I covered the cost of making the ornaments, supplies and the fair itself, and made enough extra cash to fund my first glassblowing session of 2012. It wasn't a blockbuster retail experience, but it was a good experiment. I met people from the neighborhood, I bonded with other people selling their stuff, and I sold things to total strangers, which was validating. Up until this month, I'd only ever sold things to people I knew, which was wonderfully supportive but there's always that nagging "how much of it is them being nice to me, how much of it is them really wanting this thing" voice in the back of one's head.

I'm not sure if I'll do it next year, but I have some notes on how I would tweak my inventory. And enough ornaments left over to spruce up our tree a little more.

2011-11-22T06:30:00.003-05:00

I blew ornaments on Saturday. Even at a pace of an ornament every 5 minutes, it was a relaxing way to spend half a day. There's constantly something immediately in need of one's attention, the stakes are never very high, the rhythm is soothing, and every few minutes you make something new and hopefully pretty. I booked four hours with the hopes of knocking out enough pieces to make the Off the Map holiday craft fair worthwhile. I'll be selling stuff there all three weekends (Dec. 3, 10 and 17, details to come) and will also try to sell a few bowls and vases. It's an experiment but not too costly, as they go. If they sell well, I can plan for the fair next year and stockpile some pieces during the year. If it's a bust... I'll have a pretty tree and can offload them as gifts at some point. I think I made some better color selections this year, using a bright, opaque white to contrast other colors. I ran out of green early, but otherwise they came out well.

2011-11-10T20:22:00.002-05:00

What are you totemistic about?

Claudia's packed up her apartment and while she owns far less stuff than I do, we're looking ahead to a few weeks from now when more of her stuff will come to live with my stuff. The rest will go into storage or be otherwise redistributed. The has precipitated an ongoing need to edit down what I have in the apartment. A few months ago I rented a storage locker for us, and it's a handy place to keep season-specific decorations and clothes and so on. I packed up a bunch of books that I don't use often but kept my travel books and some favorite titles to have around the house. Mostly I read on the Kindle now because I'm tired of shlepping the paper versions on the subway.

With Claudia's impending further arrival, I'm reconsidering even what's still on the shelf. Why do I keep out books about Laos (which I visited four years ago) as well as Peru (maybe in another year or two)? I re-read the Hitchhiker's Guide series every 10 years or so... does it need to be here in the meantime? Do I need it at all?

This eventually brings me around to my current rant that we keep books or CDs and so on because they're totemic. Because we want them to tell people who we are, what we care about, what we know. If Don Quixote is on my shelf, you might variously think that I've read it, that I have it up there as something I aspire to read, or that I put it there to seem impressive. Regardless, it saves me from having to actually try to impress you in conversation by mentioning that I have, indeed, read it. (It took weeks.) Stuff on the shelves starts conversations; the only thing worse than a party where you don't know anyone is one where there also is nothing to point at to break the ice. Or what if I put all my stuff away and only Claudia's books on the Spanish civil war and health policy remained?

And yet, we live in New York. The quarters are snug. I've been trying to strip down the space-eating totems in favor of functionality, but so far I've only succeeded with music and, to a limited extent, books. I'm still clinging to photos from various trips, an ever-growing assortment of interesting but at least slightly lumpy glass projects, and kitchen equipment. Eventually I'm going to want room for a new vase, and then the Lonely Planet guides to Spain and Vietnam are going to be exiled to the laundry room trading shelf. At least the photos on the wall will still tell people I've been. Until we take down the wall decor and renegotiate that. That'll have to be another post.

2011-11-08T17:15:00.001-05:00

I went to the White House today for work--somewhere I even have a screenshot of the WH metting invite in Outlook. We went to report on the military families curriculum I've been working on since April or so. We have half a dozen programs up so far with some decent readership. The meeting was a nice pat on the head. I didn't actually meet any Obamas but rather a couple of WH policy fellows, who tend to be very smart. The meeting was in a reception room in the east wing, decorated with portraits of Bess Truman and some less memorable first ladies.

Most of the people I work with are in the field because we like healthcare and geek out on the idea that our work helps someone, somewhere, a little bit. It's easy to lose track of when a lot of that work is funded by pharma dollars (unrestricted grants, please) or just in the wake of deadlines. But we're actually doing something cool with the military program, and a half hour of having the executive branch tell us they like our work (particularly a Democratic administration) is a really nice perk. Even without a Bo sighting.

2011-11-03T22:04:00.002-04:00

I ran into Shank on the subway tonight on the way home. Somehow this blog came up -- she read it long before we ever met -- and how I don't write as much now. She asked if it was because I was feeling more settled in New York or because I was in a relationship. I thought it was probably because I'm less neurotic than 10 years ago.

Or because I don't feel like I'm doing blogworthy stuff. Stay tuned for a cool update next week, though.

2011-10-15T11:29:00.002-04:00

Somehow I've had this blog for 10 years and never cataloged childhood Halloween costumes. You'd think that would be a natural. Claudia is at her church helping at a kids' party today, attaching prizes to string in the fishing pond game. It got me thinking.

Photos suggest the first few years I was a princess, being too small to make my own suggestions. There might have been a pumpkin or something in there. The first costume I remember, which mom made and which I probably wore from ages 4-6, was Snoopy, with ears and a tail. In third grade I envied the store-bought costumes and got your standard, flammable, plastic C3PO. In fourth grade I recycled the robot costume made of boxes covered in tinfoil that I had used the year before in my stage debut, as one of the toys in the Nutcracker. Because 18th century Russians loved their robots. I was the Lone Ranger in 5th grade, although I'm reasonably certain the real one did not wear a sweater vest. It did allow me to have a cap gun, though. In 6th grade I was a viking, trading the gun for a sword and a polyester beard. There's a progressive butchification trend here, I think. We now come to the point of the story, which was the church's Halloween carnival when I was in 7th grade. A costume was required but anything with weaponry was banned, eliminating the possibility of recycling anything from the past few years. I was short on ideas, but my grandmother offered to let me use a costume she had kept since her own madcap youth in the 30s -- a partial face mask of buck teeth and enormous cheeks that gave the impression of being crinkled up under the eyes, with a black braided wig. Just add an exotic robe and I could be a 1930s racist stereotype of a Chinese person!

Somehow this seemed like a great idea to everyone in the family, and with some borrowed dressing gown with flowy sleeves. I still had to find something to wear under the gown and asked my mom for advice. "Red," she said definitively. "Chinese love red." So I went off and plunked down my tickets for the fishing game at the carnival, decked out in a red cable-knit sweater under a satiny bathrobe looking like a reject from the Yellow Kid.

That was my last costume until a few years ago when I kludged together a bat costume out of two cheap umbrellas and a black hoodie. Any of you got anything regrettable?

2011-10-11T20:08:00.002-04:00

I looked back at blog posts from this time over the past 10 years (woo, 10 years) and found just a passing reference to National Coming Out Day, which these days gets less play than Talk Like a Pirate Day, nationally and in this household. Mostly because we're both pretty darn out -- about the whole gay thing, although I have found a supportive pro-pirate minority at work too.

But a young and thoughtful acquaintance posted a link on Facebook today noting that it's a privilege to be out, even today. It stopped me short for a few minutes. The author was right. I'm out, pretty much all the time and everywhere. I've spent a lot of my adult life maneuvering to make that possible. I work in a liberal field -- media -- and live in a large, gay-friendly city. My boss is gay. My neighbors could care less. I kiss my girlfriend goodbye on the subway if we ride together in the mornings. No one on the MTA bats an eye. Twenty years ago I wouldn't have predicted that I'd be able to do that, although I started my career at two gay-owned companies. Society has gotten more accepting, more used to people being out, and that's made a huge difference for a lot of people. Where there was a gap between, say, the small town in California where I went to high school and where I live now, I had the resources to get to the more comfortable place.

Not everyone does. There are still young, even just potentially gay kids bullied all over the country every day. There are people who are homeless or unemployed who don't feel safe being out because it might hurt their efforts to take care of themselves. There are people who are tied to families or circumstances or places that don't look kindly upon the gays. SO I admit I started my Facebook pronouncement about being gay today with a smirk, but it got wiped off pretty quickly. There's still a long way to go.

2011-10-02T22:05:00.002-04:00

We had dinner in Chinatown last night with one of Claudia's high school friends who lives in SoHo on a block most of us would kill for, in a huge loft shared with several roommates. She is working on a documentary and just got back from filming in San Francisco for a few months. After having a full social life in the bay area, she was having a hard time readjusting to New York, where her friends were both scattered and busy. She toyed with the idea of moving west to feel less adrift.

For the umpteenth time, it was a conversation that made me mentally sing the praises of Inwood. Earlier that day, I'd run into several friends at the farmers' market, stopped to talk to neighbors in the building, and waved at others on the way to the subway. Earlier in the week another neighbor texted a call out for spontaneous after-work drinks. (Which, in truth, I couldn't make, but still it was within the realm of possibility.) People know each other here, they talk to each other, there are 10 people I could call if I were bedridden with the flu and needed soup. I think it's fair to say it's easier to get that up here than downtown, unless you've been around a long time or are relentlessly outgoing. I feel like I lucked out up here.

2011-09-26T07:45:00.001-04:00

Photos from Spain are available here if you're interested. I'll post a few of the better ones this week.

2011-09-25T12:41:00.002-04:00

I'm in discussion with a couple potential Arabic tutors. Cheaper than New School, more practice with conversation, and tailored to my limited skills. Win!

2011-09-22T13:45:00.003-04:00

Well, that's frustrating. I missed the first week of Arabic because we were on vacation but went dutifully on Monday night. Got the workbook and everything. And it immediately became clear that I was in waaay over my head. I wasn't alone in that regard, but it wasn't pretty.

The first semester used a text/workbook designed to teach the alphabet and introduce some basic vocabulary and principles of grammar. We followed it somewhat, although the teacher used a lot of his own examples to teach us letters for each lesson, but we did get all the way through the alphabet, and at the end of the class I could (with hours of looking things up) read and translate a whole paragraph of basic information. I felt pretty good about it, even though I was still shaky with some of the letters.

The second semester uses the follow-up book, assumes you can whip right through the alphabet, write words easily, and are thus ready for the stringing together of sentences. The teacher bounced around from indefinite/definite articles to gendered pronouns and word endings and loaded it heavily with words I'd never heard. It was like mostly drowning but occasionally bobbing to the surface with a familiar grammatical concept. I was lucky -- some girls who had taken a different section last term hadn't even finished the alphabet.

By the end of Monday's course, which included the teacher asking me to read a phrase, me struggling to get the letters right (never mind the meaning) and her ultimately asking, "So, did you take Arabic 1?", I decided I had a choice: spend about 20 hours a week trying to catch myself up outside of class and homework, or just drop it. I filed my drop form the next day.

It's frustrating. You'd think one class at the same institution would prepare you for the next. I'm considering writing the foreign language department. I still want to learn the language. I feel like my foundation is good, and that I'm ready for basic subject/verb conjugations that will reinforce the whole alphabet thing and start building vocabulary. I just want to do it in something about half the speed of the dervish who taught Monday night. For the moment, my cash flow is better and my Monday nights are free.

2011-09-14T07:09:00.002-04:00

We're in Granada, our second- or third-to-last stop, depending on how you count. This afternoon we have tickets to see the Alhambra. Tomorrow afternoon we'll head to Cordoba, and Friday evening we'll return to Madrid. Saturday we fly home. We've covered kind of an absurd amount of ground on this trip -- seven cities of decent size and a bunch of little ones in strategic stops along the way. It has had ts upsides in terms of rarely staying long enough to get bored someplace (the time required varies -- we were bored with Avila in about 3 hours and with Seville in 2 days, but we would have liked another day in Toledo. But we've been thinking that next time we go somewhere we ought to rent a house for a few days -- to relax pointedly, to not have to eat out every meal. It's worth thinking about.

Getting in and out of Seville by car was frustrating, but it was fun to be out on the open road. Southeast of the city the flat fields and olive orchards give way to mountains and forest, and we chugged along through hairpin turns in fir and cork oaks, every once in a while coming across a whitewashed village. Our favorite was Ronda, set at the top of two steep hills separated by a 7-800-foot chasm and joined by a very tall bridge. It was crawling with tourists but it would have been a pretty place to spend the night, if we'd planned differently. Granada, in turn, is absolutely crawling with students and tourists, and the staff of eating and sleeping establishments seem very disposed to be forgiving of halting Spanish. It's also cheaper here than other places we've been, which is welcome at this point. Those platters of jamon iberico add up.

2011-09-11T10:37:00.004-04:00

We are in Seville, henceforth known as the city that prompted the "I cannot deal with a single other historical building" meltdown. Mine, to be clear. Claudia is currently out touring the alcazar and cathedral.

We have eaten good food here, and we went to a soccer match between one of the local teams, Real Betis, and Mallorca. It was a fun game -- they won -- but sitting in the midday sun for two hours kind of did me in. Tomorrow we're renting a car again and charging off in search of the hopelessly picturesque white villages that dot Andalucia. We still have Granada and Cordoba on the schedule, so there will in fact be more historical buildings, but I'm kind of OK with not seeing more of Seville than its many fine ice cream parlors.

We crammed a lot of ground and a lot of culture into the past few days. Thursday and Friday we prowled Toledo, and Friday afternoon we hit the Prado. I now can spot an El Greco at 20 paces.

I spent most of the afternoon relaxing in the hotel room while Claudia charged through the Alcazar and took great photos. We met up and went for tapas and then for dinner at a Moroccan restaurant around the corner. It's been a little distracting checking in online and seeing all the 9/11 news and comments. Claudia, having lived in NYC 10 years ago, particularly feels it. I remembered abruptly that I started this blog 10 years ago (which has more to do with my awareness of Blogspot than with 9/11), and that seems like a really long time.

I told Claudia that I wasn't more reflective/upset/etc. today than any other day. Partly it's from a lack of appreciation for anniversary-type events, and partly because I'm irritated every day at the way the events of 9/11 became a political justification to kill so many people, ours and others, in the name of ... whatever they're calling it. Freedom? The right to have a Wal-mart in Kandahar? Staking a spout in the oil region? The fact that nothing about the past 10 years has done anything to make America a more credible focal point of global peace and understanding? So that's the mood we were in when we went to dinner, and then I tried to speak to the Moroccan waiter in Arabic (when we were otherwise communicating with him in Spanish, which was just surreal at a certain point), and I came back to the hotel and my Arabic instructor for fall semester just sent around the syllabus. It's been almost 20 years since I went to the Middle East for the first time, and 10 years since we were painfully reminded that there is a distinct shortage of peace, love and understanding to go around, but I'm finally making good on an effort I've meant to put forth. I'll spend the next 13 weeks trying to conjugate Arabic verbs, and maybe at the end of it I'll be able to order lunch or hail a taxi or something useful in Cairo or Muscat. I don't mean to draw false ties between the Arabic language and tensions between the U.S. and potential terrorism with Muslim origins or anything else. Let's be clear -- Afghans, for example, are not Arabs and don't speak Arabic. And being Afghan is not the same as being a terrorist. Don't get me started on the tendency in this country to lump brown people together. Actually, that's part of why I am taking Arabic -- because Americans have a tendency to see everything from Morocco to, say, China as one big scary mess. It's not. The people are awesome. I've been to at least a few parts of the region. I'd like to be able to communicate better with them, at least the ones who will put up with my stilted modern standard Arabic (which is sort of like going around to the southern U.S. or to New Zealand or Scotland and speaking in strict King James English -- technically it makes you able to be understood but people will look at you funny) and I'd like to be able to better represent their point of view to people here. I'll feel vaguely better about trying to make the world a smaller, more mutually understood space. It's the best thing I can come up with today.

2011-09-08T10:43:00.002-04:00

We're in Toledo, the Spanish one. Aside from flitting back to change trains and do a quick tour through the Prado tomorrow, we're mostly done with Madrid. After our night in the sumptuous parador, we drove through quite a bit of Castilla-LaMancha, which it turns out is sort of the Nebraska of Spain. We spent a good part of Wednesday touring around the areas featured in Don Quixote. We stopped in Belmonte, home of a castle that is mentioned in the book. Claudia could probably tell you all about it because she actually listened to the audio tour set, whereas I immediately squeaked "Castle!" and went charging around the battlements, taking photos, climbing towers and generally indulging the inner 8-year-old who really liked building forts. We stopped for lunch in El Toboso, home of Dulcinea, Don Quixote's fabled liege lady, and had a lunch that reliably included a pork product or three. Finally we took in some windmills high up on a hillside above Consuegra before heading back to Madrid.

Living in New York, I don't drive much, so cruising the quiet country roads between fields of sunflowers was a lot of fun, but navigating to the car rental return wasn't. I was happy to be back on foot and on rails today. Toledo is crammed to the gils with charming, winding medieval streets, mostly lined with tourist shops. Historically it was known for its steel, so for a modest fee you can get a replica of the Highlander sword or Gimli's axe. Or a pocket knife with a Real Madrid logo on it. Also, marzipan. The Inquisition is commemorated with a Jewish museum and a mosque that's been turned into an arts and crafts shop.

We're enjoying a siesta in a cute little inn with exposed beans and parquet floors. Claudia is looking up places to get some paella for dinner. As long as it has pork in it, I can keep my gastronomic record intact for the trip.

2011-09-06T14:05:00.002-04:00

Hola. We´re in Spain. At the moment I´m logged on in an 8th century Arab fortress turned hotel out in the middle of nowhere southeast of Madrid. We rented a car and drove out to the small city of Cuenca, famed for its cliff-hugging ancient houses. It was a nice place to hike around. Tomorrow we´re eyeing the Don Quixote stomping grounds south of Madrid before heading back to the city. Then we head to Toledo and eventually to Seville and parts south.

It has been a fun trip so far. Pretty much every commercial establishment in Madrid has a leg of cured ham set up on a rack for carving, and it is hard to have any sort of meal at all without some pork shavings, and very easy to have a meal that is nothing but. My favorite might actually be lomo, cured pork loin. We have prowled Madrid, browsed the Thyssen-Bournemisa museum, and took a day trip to Avila. That was a slight let-down because it was more or less closed. We did see St. Teresa´s ring finger (ring included, finger was brown and gnarly), but you could not climb the town walls that day.

So far it´s been an endless cascade of wine, ham and espresso and I see no reason to change that.

2011-08-28T08:12:00.002-04:00

So far so good in Inwood. The wind is picking up this morning and the rain has been relentless for the past 14 hours or so. The rain should taper off by afternoon, although I'm not sure about the wind. I took Andy out around the block this morning and aside from us both being soaked to the skin, it was OK. Some twigs were down, nothing worse. I haven't been down to the park yet.

We have power, so for now at least it's just a rainy Sunday morning.

2011-08-26T06:00:00.002-04:00

I feel like we're ready for a hurricane. My basic level of household stock is a couple notches shy of Mormon but enough to see us eating well for quite a few days. And Andy is a very efficient urinator when the weather is bad. Bring it, Irene.

2011-08-18T16:51:00.005-04:00

On New Year's Eve, Claudia took advantage of some windfall relationship bank (ie, I wasn't feeling well and deep-sixed our plans to go out that night, hence I owed her big-time) and negotiated a plan for 2011 wherein she would pick one movie each month that we would watch together.

Short of differences of opinion about the deliciousness of bell peppers (I'm pro) and mayonnaise (I'm con), probably nothing sets us apart more than our feelings about film. I didn't really understand this until recently when Claudia put it in these terms: "What if you were with someone who wasn't really interested in food?"

Given the time and resources, Claudia would watch a movie daily. Maybe more than one. Nothing would please her more, after an afternoon movie, than the prospect of another one that night. If she corrals me to watch or finish a movie on a Saturday morning and we discuss what else to do with the day, she'll suggest a trip to the multiplex. It seems very natural to her. By contrast, it's all I can do to sit through one. It's actually better if I go to the movie theater, because then I'm penned in. At home I tend to want to wander around the house when a movie is in progress, maybe scrub the stove or whip up a pot roast, even when it's a movie I picked.

We've had to talk about this a lot. Movies were a tremendous source of comfort for Claudia growing up, the entertainment equivalent of mac and cheese. Family squabbles would dissipate around a shared movie-watching experience and subsequent dissection of the plot, themes, performances and so on. In my childhood they played sort of the opposite role. My dad watched movies almost nightly and often forced me or my mom or both of us to watch with him. It was often under duress, and the selections tended toward the insanely violent and/or macho. I associate them with being unhappy and oppressed.

The net result is that after a long week she'll want to settle down and lose herself in the artistic stylings of Jim Jarmuch or some paradigm of French New Wave, preferably with her girl at her side. And I'll sort of want to gnaw my own arm off. When I do watch movies, my taste tends toward the uncomplicated. Comedy, sci-fi, things with the words Star and a Roman numeral in the title.

The New Year's Eve compromise so far has included Run Lola Run, Celestial Clockwork, Night on Earth, Chungking Express, Dr. Strangelove, some others I can't remember, and Kung Fu Hustle. The latter was one of my picks that Claudia allowed, and it remains my favorite of the bunch. I try to look at the whole thing as a broadening of my cultural literacy and so does Claudia, except she keeps picking things I've never heard of. I thought we'd be watching the Maltese Falcon or His Gal Friday. She picks things directed by Tom Tykwer. For a while we were going to save money by combining our Netflix subscriptions, but it became clear that we'd never be able to compromise on the next discs to arrive.

Claudia has already conceded that the experiment will probably end at the end of 2011. I always eventually make time for the monthly viewing, but I know it wears on her to have to drag someone along to something she loves so much. We'll have to find some sort of new compromise to get us both to the couch willingly. Maybe 2012 will be the year of watching Helen Mirren's entire catalog. I'm still trying to fill in my geek canon gaps. I've never seen Beastmaster (a hole to be remedied this weekend with the local nerd herd) and Ice Pirates just arrived via Netflix. Angelica Huston is in the cast. She went on to be in a lot of Wes Anderson stuff (see, I know a few things). Maybe I can make a bid for it to be the September movie.

(I asked. She said no.)

2011-08-11T15:22:00.002-04:00

Oh man. I am practically skipping. A new glassblowing studio is opening up in Brooklyn this month, with public rentals. It's sooooo much easier to get to than the other nearest studio, in Newark. I booked a slot for next weekend with Isaac. I haven't blown since maybe early June, and it's been so hot this summer that I haven't thought about it too much. But the minute I made the reservation, I was so excited. There's nothing like the feel of turning the pipe, gathering the glass, coaxing it into shape. I've got pages of sketches of projects to try out, stuff I didn't think I'd actually be able to do anytime soon. This raises the possibility of getting a regular blowing schedule going again, taking classes, meeting someone who could be a practice partner. I can't wait.

2011-07-26T21:31:00.005-04:00

In mid-July I was in Boston for a few days to attend a conference on military PTSD and traumatic brain injury. I learned a lot at the meeting, but probably more from sitting in a room full of progressively more drunk and cynical Army psychiatrists. You had to be there.

The conference didn't leave much time for anything else but the Museum of Fine Arts was hosting a very thorough Dale Chihuly retrospective and I squeezed out a couple hours to go. You can see bits of his work all over -- usually the botanically oriented stuff will show up in a municipal garden or something. But this was the whole kit and also the caboodle -- examples from pretty much every major series of work he's done, from the early work influenced by Native American baskets to the Persian series and massive, sculptural chandeliers that were hung in Venice. You can get a good idea of his work from a couple DVDs that are available on Netflix.

Chihuly was undisputably one of the earliest and most influential glassblowers to revive the art in the U.S. and create the studio glass movement here -- learning classic techniques and adapting them to new uses. He's taught generations of glassblowers. Owing to a couple of serious injuries, he no longer works as a gaffer (head of a glassblowing team, the one who is responsible for the action on the pipe and the piece itself) but rather collaborates with teams who turn his sketches into the real deal. His sketches are abstract, to say the least -- big swirls from handfuls of pencils that sort of give an impression of proportion and shape and color.

The stuff that the teams then turn out is incredible. This is where it kind of erodes a bit for me. Chihuly is a showman, a marketer, the brand name that gets glass into the public eye, so to speak. The mostly anonymous people who do his bidding, on the other hand, are some of the most skilled in the world. Do you have any idea how hard it would be to blow a glass sphere 3' across?

Completely insane. To fold out a platter the size and shape of a giant clam shell? Unbelievable.

So the work itself was amazing to me, having a vague sense of what it would take to create each piece. And the works are almost never single pieces, but rather groupings of hundreds upon hundreds of similar elements, whose individual imperfections or variances get lost in the total scale of the whole presentation. That was a major take-away for me, three years into glassblowing and struggling with consistency and symmetry. I achieve those treasured straight lines and fine edges once in a while, but often my work gets the "hmm, well, it's kind of organic" assessment. Chihuly took that and made it a signature. Essentially: Fuck up once and it looks half-assed. Fuck up a hundred times put them all together, and call it an exhibit.

2011-07-10T11:42:00.002-04:00

I'm currently in the DFW Grand Hyatt, a hotel that is both conveniently and tragically connected to the DFW airport itself. I'm supervising a video roundtable down in the conference center later today. The faculty are from all over the country, and Dallas ended up being the most logical place to get everyone in and out of. I have awful memories of getting stuck in this airport for hours because of various weather delays here or on either coast, but this time things are smooth. The whole thing is a vaguely futuristic, hermetically sealed bubble against the reality of it being 105 degrees outside and also in the middle of absolutely nowhere. I flew in yesterday, took the tram to the terminal with the hotel, checked in, had dinner with a colleague, used the health club this morning, and after today's program I will tram it back to my gate without ever breathing un-conditioned air. I've decided to embrace the experience for what it is, the polar opposite of last weekend when I was waist-deep in the mucky side of a North Carolina river, trying to haul myself and my kayak out onto the bank and worrying vaguely about leeches. The hotel is sleek in shades of gray and steel, with blinds that rise when I enter the room and light switches so subtle I have to paw at them and hope something will happen. There's a certain starship Enterprise quality to the place.

Tonight I'll get home, hang up my suit, and get ready to head out again for Boston next weekend for a three-day conference on military PTSD. Sometime in late July I'll get an actual day off. Work's been busy for months and there seems to be an endless list of projects. I don't mind so much because we're taking two weeks to go to Spain in September, so however crazy it is until then, it'll all get washed away by ancient cobblestone streets, ham croquettes and crisp glasses of sidra and rioja. We just booked a night's stay in an 8th Century Arab fortress. That also should be about as far away from the DFW Hyatt as anyone can get.

2011-07-01T17:51:00.001-04:00

I'm not sure what it says about us, but our first jointly purchased home furnishing is going to be a bigger filing cabinet.

2011-06-26T10:21:00.003-04:00

I'm going to take another swing at this and see if I can explain my position better.

From the perspective that Friday's vote was a huge win in terms of the state of New York deciding that it could not treat gay people as second-class citizens and had to afford them the same rights as straight people, I am all about it. At least five couples I know are planning their weddings right now, and I'm glad they'll get the same legal protections as our straight friends.

In the standard getting-married scenario, a bunch of things happen at once. The involved parties usually pledge a set of vows to each other to be faithful and caring. They're usually in love and they're declaring their intent to be with this person forever. And then they get a marriage license from the state that conveys the ability to be reckoned as a single economic unit (at least on the state tax return) and to inherit each other's property even in the absence of a will. Here's a nice summary. Some of those legal protections were not available to gays before Friday's vote. The ability to pledge heartfelt vows always has been available. Plenty of gay couples have worn wedding bands for years. It's just now more legally binding. (Conveniently, New York finally passed no-fault divorce in 2010). And perhaps more visibly societally accepted, which is cool.

So, the state is not in the business of endorsing relationships. It is in the business of granting legal protections for people who want to function as a single unit. It doesn't check to see if they're in love or if they really mean it or if they're going to have an abusive relationship. It just provides a framework for assets and civic benefits. And I think that ability should be available to people who are not in love. The benefits of what now is exclusive to marriage ought to be available to adult kids who are taking care of an aging parent, or two elderly widows who live together to save expenses. Or grandparents who become a grandchild's primary caregivers. Or, quite frankly, to mutually responsible units of more than two people. I think civil union is a much better term for what the state conveys. If it happens to be mixed up with love, that's awesome, and if some priest-led vows will lend meaning to the experience, go for it. But I really think church and state should be separate.

That's why the marriage debate has been disappointing. I feel like it's solving the wrong issue. It's not about religion, and marriage rights and societal acceptance are not actually the same thing. If we're going to have equality, we should really go for equality. Here's a site that lays out the issue better than I can.

There's an unfortunate habit of disenfranchised groups to stop agitating for change as soon as they get theirs. That's just wrong. One of the reasons Chicago was such an early adopter of basic gay rights in the 80s was because the huge Black community, fresh from the civil rights movement, saw equality broadly and threw their support into the fight for more rights for all. By fixating on getting what are now straight-couple rights for gay couples, the gay movement has kind of lost out on an opportunity to let a lot more people protect themselves legally and financially.

Again, I don't know if Claudia and I will get married. If we decide that we want the protections conveyed by the state marriage license, then I suppose we will get one at some point. If we decide that we want to stand up in front of a bunch of friends and publically declare that we love each unreservedly and have a kick-ass party to celebrate that, then we will. We might do one or the other or neither or both, and if it's both they might not coincide.

2011-06-25T06:50:00.005-04:00

I got a little teary last night reading about the vote in the NY Senate in favor of gay marriage, followed by announcements on Facebook by several friends who are now going to get married. It's something I never thought, growing up, I would see in my lifetime. It never occurred to me, actually. What a tremendous change in just the 20 years since I graduated from high school. Claudia's high school in North Carolina now has a GLBT/Straight club. The top sergeant in the Marine Corps is telling his fellow Marines to get over it already. We have our own cringe-worthy cable network!

As a college student coming out, it never occurred to me that I'd be able to marry a woman I loved. Quietly and inconspicuously be gay, maybe. Eventually it became reasonable to want to work for a company that offered (still taxable) domestic partner benefits, or to get domestically partnered, which when combined with a very specific will and other paperwork conveyed some but definitely not all the protections of marriage. And then it didn't occur to me for a long time that I'd actually live in a state that would recognize other states' gay marriages or supply them itself.

To be clear, I'm ambivalent about marriage both personally and politically. Having tried the marriage-lite commitment ceremony/domestic partnership thing before (it was a really fun party), I can safely say I have an appreciation for how momentous it is to actually pledge yourself to someone else. Don't do that lightly. The Times had a nice summary of what the financial/legal ramifications of marriage will be for gay couples -- complicated by the lack of federal recognition for gay marriage, which means we still have to pay taxes on partners' insurance coverage, can't file a federal return, etc. What marriage in the U.S. actually does is protect property. That's what it has always done. In Ecuador, they rewrote the constitution a few years ago and included a very sensible provision that a marriage-like arrangement could be entered by anyone -- friends, siblings, whatever -- because they agreed to be mutually responsible for each other's well being and assets. I'm probably not doing it justice. That's something everyone should have access to. I kind of have a problem culturally that it is so tied up in the U.S. with romantic love. I actually like the idea of civil unions. I think everyone -- gay and straight -- should get them from the state if they want to join forces with another person. If there's love involved and you want a cake and a party, or if you want some endorsement from a religious institution, I think that should be separate and not the same as a legally binding document. The state doesn't need to endorse my love. I do think it needs to respect and protect an agreement that people make to be responsible for each other.

Claudia and I haven't made any decisions about marriage, and last night's vote doesn't swing us one way or another. It's just not time for us right now. We're still figuring out who gets to leave their phone charger on the desk. But it's nice to have the option.

2011-06-20T18:52:00.002-04:00

I've been getting some grief (ok, two polite inquiries) about not posting lately, so here's what's new:

--I've been sick for three weeks straight. A horrible cold turned into the beginnings of a sinus infection, which was duly fought off with antibiotics, but which then lingered into a cough and has since reverted to a head cold and cough combo. I am tired of this.

--Claudia moved in on Friday, which took the form of her dresser and some art and a few boxes. It does feel more cohabitate-y now.

--We went to the Mermaid Parade (aka hipsters in shell pasties and fins) in Coney Island on Saturday. Free costume tip: those see-through vinyl umbrellas are the start of a really good jellyfish costume.

--Tomorrow I'm off to DC to film some programming on military health issues.

--I spent today in New Jersey filming little scripted episodes of doctor/patient encounters for some other programs for work. One of the actors was in The Wire. Then on the way home along the Hudson Parkway, some kids threw a rock and it shattered the side window on the car service SUV we were in. I could add drama and say it was the one right by my head (it was) but we all moved up to the middle seat before it shattered entirely. No one was wounded. Teenagers are asshats.

--I got an iPhone. I'm ashamed to say I like it way better than the Droid.

--Yesterday Claudia and I marked 2.5 years together. It's been really nice.

2011-05-24T09:35:00.002-04:00

Claudia's godsister, Liz, is moving to NY today from North Carolina. I wish I'd had her moxie at 23. It took until 34 to work up to New York for some of us...

She's arriving today with a couple of suitcases, and Claudia and I are suddenly giddy at the thought of being big sisters, or at least dispensing big-sisterly advice, none of which Liz probably needs. Some advice for aspiring New Yorkers:

1. Don't date for the first six months you're here. This is one of the things I did right when I moved, in part because I never really did a good job of coming to terms with the bay area on my own and let Sarah lead the way. Get to know New York on your own, have your own spots, your own discoveries. Make friends. Having a frame of reference for the city makes it more fun to date because you can share your own favorites with someone, and having a support network outside of dating means you won't feel the need to cling to your new romantic interest as your lifelife in the big city. Better all around.

2. Break the city into chunks and get to know it a little at a time. Not that you have much choice. Pick a small section -- Broadway in the 80s or E. 2nd Ave or Chinatown or, god forbid, Williamsburg. Walk around, poke into some shops, find a bar and a coffee spot and a restaurant that you'd like to go to. Everyone who lives here for a while has little anchor spots scattered all over the city. The funny part is how often you find that your spots are the same as someone else's.

3. Explore. Take a new subway line, give yourself a field trip assignment, get lost and find your way home. Decide on an obscure acquisition for your home or wardrobe and seek out a store that sells nothing but that. There is one. If you really want a challenge, try to find a cork bulletin board in this city. (I know where but I'm not telling.)

4. Get used to the smell. I got off the subway at 59th St. today in the first truly humid, warm day of summer weather and was instantly reminded of an identical day four years ago when I took my first subway ride as a New Yorker. That smell of mingled exhaust, dirt, pigeon droppings, smoke, garbage and urine is disgusting. But eventually it will tell you you're home.

5. Walk fast. Please.

2011-05-21T10:46:00.001-04:00

Birthday 1: Rapture 0.

2011-05-14T23:23:00.001-04:00

Claudia doesn't quite live here yet, but we realized several months ago that basically all food storage, preparation and consumption was based out of my kitchen, so we split the grocery bill although I usually do the shopping. This is where my control freak tendencies start to show up. For the past few years, I have reliably purchased five apples and three bags of mini carrots to get through the week. An apple a day, as they say. Indeed, my produce purchases were carefully orchestrated to match my travel schedule for a given week and take into account whether I had class after work, etc.

Suddenly apples were disappearing in quantity. I might pack my bag on a Tuesday morning and find only one left. Alarm! So I started buying more. This morning we went to the farmers' market and I figured I had the problem solved. I held up the bag: "I bought 10 apples."

"Oh, I hope that's enough."
"One for each of us for each day."
"But sometimes I take two!"
There was a pause here because nowhere in my wildest imaginings had I grappled with the idea of multiple apples being consumed. I think I winced.
Claudia tried to be helpful: "Maybe get 12 next time. No, 11. No, 12."
I gave up on the apple negotiations and moved on to carrots. "I'm buying 4 pounds today."
She was ominous: "At least!"

2011-05-14T12:20:00.002-04:00

Seen in Kingsbridge this morning: Fat middle-aged woman wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a corn-studded turd and the slogan "Corn Poop. One of life's great mysteries."

I don't think there's anything particularly mysterious about it. Unless you haven't eaten corn, I guess.

The greater mystery is why someone would wear that shirt, but then she'd have to wear a shirt with a picture of herself.

2011-05-02T17:22:00.003-04:00

Judging by the frenzy out in the social media, nothing I say about the hit on Osama bin Laden is going to be less-informed or less-well-articulated than anything else. I didn't hear about the news until I checked the Times site this morning. I read the full range of comments from various friends on Facebook and reluctantly concluded that my own thoughts were best summed up by Holly Near: "Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?" People had a lot of things to say about that, as it turned out.

From a practical and political standpoint, I don't know that the Obama administration had any option but to proceed as they did. I guess we could have hoped for custody and a trial. But the so-called war on terror has been in place for a decade. The thing I have very mixed feelings about is that it's a good political score for Obama.

But in the grander scheme of things, I can't help but feel that what really makes the terrorists win is when terrorism-style activities are viewed as a legitimate currency in which to solve problems. Killing bin Laden may or may not destabilize a terrorist organization. It may or may not freshen up anti-American hostility around the world. But I'm pretty sure it's not justice. On a purely snarky level, I have to say that killing people who embrace suicide bombing is not really teaching them anything. It's not a good deterrent. It doesn't bring back people who died on Sept. 11. Nothing will, and I honestly don't think anything in the world is adequate to pay tribute to their deaths ... except possibly peace. If their deaths triggered a global desire for understanding, for efforts to bridge gaps in culture and religion and economic disparities to reduce the risk that yet still more people would die, that might be a start.

Osama bin Laden being dead doesn't make me feel safer or more vindicated. It makes me sad that we're looking at violence as the primary solution.

2011-04-27T05:38:00.002-04:00

The DC trip was not anticlimatic, per se, but very straightforward. I opted for an early train down with my boss, although that necessitated getting up at 4. At the last minute our meeting was switched from the White House proper to the Executive Office Building (formerly Old, now Eisenhower) next door. It's a huge hulking building with lots of columns that I always liked when I used to drive past it. So that was still pretty cool. Once inside past two security checks, weirdly, guests are free to roam. Searching for the bathroom I passed the medical office, secret service office and travel office. We had an hour to talk with the First Lady's health policy advisor about the curriculum I'm working on. My boss tried out a chair formerly occupied by FDR.

I don't write much about work, but this is also a rare circumstance: We're doing this curriculum for free. Stuff I've wanted to do education about for a long time -- PTSD and traumatic brain injury and domestic violence and suicide and substance abuse. I'm getting time and resources to work on it, just because it's a good idea. We don't generally do altruism at that level, but other places I've worked wouldn't do it at all. So that's pretty cool.

And then afterward we walked around and got the standard views of the White House and its south lawn beehive and the remnants of the egg roll. And then took the train home. As it's starting to become a habit, I finally signed up for the Amtrak frequent rider program.

2011-04-22T11:47:00.003-04:00

Jane: I've been thinking about getting some dinosaur throw pillows for the living room.
Claudia (playing with her computer): Hmm? Why?
Jane: Well, I just thought the living room could use more dinosaurs.
Claudia (hesitantly): What exactly were you thinking of?
Jane (browsing Etsy): Well, this triceratops is nice. I really like this brachiosaurus too.
Claudia: But there are already a lot of pillows on the sofa.
Jane: But... dinosaurs!
Claudia: It's your living room. You can do whatever you want.
Jane: But we're presuming it will be your living room too. So you have a say.
Claudia: There are already a lot of pillows.
Jane: But these have dinosaurs!

This is what it's going to be like, living with me.

2011-04-22T08:25:00.002-04:00

We're starting to do a lot of government-related work at my company. I made my first work-related trip to DC this week, and stretched it into a very civilized visit, hopping the train down the evening before my meeting and spending the night with my cousin. She's 85 and I like to check in on her. I got up at a leisurely hour, took the bus down to Farragut Square with my suitcase and work bag, and talked about mental health screening for an hour with two contracting agencies before hopping the Acela back to NY in time for glassblowing. I found out I'd be back sooner than expected; I have a meeting at the White House on Tuesday.

This meeting is precipitating a certain amount of excitement at the office; we're supporting the whole military families initiative, and my boss and I will be meeting with the First Lady's health policy advisor to talk about a curriculum we're doing for healthcare providers on PTSD and so on. But it's also precipitating a minor logistics crisis. My two choices for the meeting are to get up at 4 a.m. to catch an early train down, or to go down the night before... and show up at the White House with my pajamas and toothbrush. Both have their drawbacks. Can my boss and I sustain 6 hours of train conversation? Would the secret service inspect my old Poi Dog t-shirt?

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion next week.

2011-04-19T10:14:00.003-04:00

With my first real paycheck in 1990, from the summer I spent working for my local newspaper before starting college, I bought a camera. Technically I think my dad bought it on the basis that he knew more about them than I did. It was a Nikon N2000 with a substantial telephoto lens, just the thing for an aspiring reporter. I lugged it proudly to the office and asked the staff photographer what he thought. "Pretty good paperweight," he said. He was a Leica snob when he wasn't killing our collective brain cells in a poorly ventilated darkroom. I lugged the camera through the Navajo reservation, to the pyramids and Dubai, to Hong Kong and Bangkok, to London, to Cameroon and to Eastern Europe and took good photos with it. The weight eventually led me to buy a digital point-and-shoot pretty early on. The Nikon has been sitting unmolested in my bedside drawer for years, and a quick online search reveals that it has a value of a whopping $50. It is now, in fact, a pretty good paperweight.

2011-04-11T16:43:00.003-04:00

I was thumbing through the stack of paper on the office printer looking for my spreadsheet and ran across an article from the journal Hepatology. For a fleeting second I thought, "Ooh, cool, someone is studying lizards in their spare time." Then reality kicked in and it was only livers. So much less cool.

I spent the weekend in a glassblowing workshop -- 10 hours in two days working on color applications. The teacher is one I'd had two years ago in an early course and she was duly impressed by my globe photos. The TA, an artist I see all the time around the shop, said, "What's Jane doing in the class? She's way too advanced for this." Which was both a nice ego boost and unfortunately true -- no one else had more than a year of experience, and a couple had never actually blown glass before, which was weird. I was way more comfortable with the techniques, having learned them from Isaac over several years. Still I goofed plenty of things up, but ended up with three decent pieces and learned some new techniques for using powder and stencils, and I tried marbling. It was nice just to get in the practice and intensity one last time before the shop closes. In the last half hour, the instructor and TA were busy with other students and asked me to help the new couple make a tumbler. It almost turned out but shattered on the final transfer. It's an achingly common sight even now for me, but I felt bad about it -- you'd think I could have done better by them. It was actually hard to figure out how much to just direct them so they could make it all themselves and how much to take things off their hands at key junctures to get the piece back on course when things started to get wonky. They were good sports about it, and they have a couple of small things that might be shot glasses or nut dishes. That takes me back.

2011-04-07T17:59:00.004-04:00

I think word has gotten around sufficiently that most folks have heard by now: My friend and former roommate, Sausage Boy, died unexpectedly on Tuesday. Sausage Boy, of course, was the husband to the ever-delightful Waffles. I felt lucky to be with her Tuesday night in the early hours, and we had a surreal night camped out on the sofa together. Her brother is staying with her now, and she has a huge network of support waiting in the wings.

All indications suggest that Sausage Boy died peacefully in his sleep following a heart attack. We should all be so lucky, except that he was only 49. He worked at the same company with Waffles for more than 20 years, so there is a deep pool of people who go back decades with him. I only knew him for the last 5 or so, but I got to experience first-hand the things that so many people loved about him: his humor, his selfless generosity, his loyalty, his devotion to Waffles, his intellect, his practicality. I got to see his darker side, morose and insular, which wasn't always easy. But it seemed like a measure of trust that he was willing to expose it during the two months I lived with them after moving to New York. Me shacking up with them was his idea, and it was a lifesaver for me, a debt I could never repay.

I hadn't been back to the apartment since I moved out, and I'd barely seen SB since then. Coming back on Tuesday, it was all familiar and comforting, even at the saddest of times. We needed distraction while the coroners and medical examiners did their work, so I picked up the remote and flipped through the channels, settling on Sports Center, a constant presence in the house. I thought he would have liked that. After everyone was gone, we had a glass of wine. I think he would have liked that too.

2011-04-01T18:51:00.002-04:00

For April Fool's Day, a post from Andy:

Sniffy. Sniffy. Squeaky toy. Squeaky! Squeaky! Squeaky! Tuggy. Tuggy? Tuggy! Tuggy! Tuggy! Sneezy. Licky. Yawn. Sleepy.

2011-03-30T23:13:00.002-04:00

It's done! I blew the globe out Sunday. It still needs some finishing work up on the lip, but I'm really happy with the way it came out. It was actually pretty straightforward getting it puffed up into shape, too.

I've done cells and I've done a planet. What's left but to go either atomic or galactic?

2011-03-16T23:23:00.001-04:00

We went to see the Pogues last night and it was so nearly identical to the show at the Fillmore in 2006 that I'm just going to repost a link to that (very popular) entry.

2011-03-07T21:47:00.002-05:00

I got a stack of books for Christmas that I've mostly not been reading, in no small part because they tend toward the heavy and hardcover. Lugging a large book around on the subway for weeks on end takes its toll on both the book and me, as I discovered during the six weeks I slogged through The Hemings of Monticello, which is a very interesting and heavy book. I broke down and ordered a Kindle. It won't solve all of my needs, and it's another gadget to keep track of, but it solves the dual problems of heavy reading material on the subway and a suitcase full of books on vacation. For my first book, I downloaded a copy of Don Quixote, the Penguin Classic version of which has been staring at me from the shelf for months. Oldest novel, newest technology. I kind of like it.

2011-03-01T21:29:00.003-05:00

I'm taking Arabic at the New School this semester. Maybe if I do that, this will be the Year of Things I Finally Did That I Always Meant to Get Around To. You know, that and the other 20 lbs...

It's going slowly, what with the completely different alphabet, writing right-to-left and having sounds that are not completely analogous to English. So far I can spell Djibouti and know the words for book and berries and door. This has more to do with only learning a few letters each week and only being able to write words that have them than any particular vocabulary strategy. Conversely, we're also learning greetings and things that we can't write yet. Eventually, no doubt, it will all be intuitive and the small matter of letters being written differently depending on whether they're at the start, middle or end of words will stop prompting that deer-in-headlights look. Kind of like knowing the set-up in glassblowing for a vase versus a bowl. It'll just make sense one day after a lot of practice and overthinking. At least with this hobby nothing shatters on the floor if I'm wrong.

2011-02-19T15:37:00.001-05:00

Nine hours of lathe-work, six hours of masking and four hours of sandblasting later... I present the globe in its "blank" form. The shop is completely booked, so I'm blowing it out on March 27th.

2011-02-18T15:31:00.003-05:00

Claudia arrived in Ecuador this morning to visit friends for the next week. This was our conversation Wednesday night:

Claudia: "My bag is full and I haven't even put my clothes in yet. It's all gifts for people."
Me: "Take the spare duffel. Then you'll have so much room to bring me presents."
Claudia: "What do you want?"
Me: "That coffee you get. And the tea. And corn snacks." (The homemade corn nuts are out of this world.)
Claudia: "Anything else?"
Me: "A llama."
Claudia: "I think I'll have trouble getting a llama back into the country."
Me: "Alpaca?"
Claudia: "Probably not."
Me: "Sloth? Sloth!"
Claudia: "No."
Me: "You can put it in a Baby Bjorn and pretend it's your kid. Security will be all, 'Ma'am, why does your baby have moss growing on it?'"
Claudia: Sloths are kind of big.
Me: Capybara?

She puts up with me. I like that about her.

2011-02-13T16:56:00.002-05:00

I spent a lot of time on the subway this weekend, shuttling back and forth to the shop in Brooklyn and meeting friends for dinner downtown Saturday night. Perhaps because it's the first non-arctic, non-holiday weekend we've had in several months, the trains are all screwed up with construction detours. You get more than your average concentration of subway entrepreneurs and crazy people, and as the trains are generally moving slower because of delays and traffic, you get to enjoy them longer.

One beggar yesterday on the 3 line had a particularly masterful spiel: "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure you all heard about yesterday's shooting in the projects. Random violence claimed the lives of two innocent children. One of them was My Granddaughter! I live in the projects, and I'm trying to raise $19 because I can't afford to buy flowers for My Granddaughter's Funeral. And I have a brain tumor. And none of you black folks is paying any attention to the violence that's tearing our community apart. And none of you is paying any attention to me, trying to get some money for flowers for My Granddaughter's Funeral."

There are so many great elements in here, it's hard to know where to start. First, there's the alleged shooting. There might conceivably have been one -- and there's a sad commentary inasmuch as that sort of thing doesn't necessarily leap to the front of the public consciousness. So we momentarily feel guilty for the possibility that it happened and we were too jaded to notice. Great. Then it's his granddaughter, which is a nice touch. He's devastated. Not devastated enough to be with his child who just lost their child, but he's bereft. Clearly. Kids are one of the three major subway begging spiel standards -- the kids in the shelter after their house burned down being a classic (shout out to the woman on the 1 whose house has burned down weekly for the past several years). The $19 is key. If it was just "some money" we'd assume even more quickly that it was all a crock, but $19 sounds like a feasible amount. So apparently he priced out the flowers and decided that the arrangement he needed was the one that cost $19 plus whatever he had in his pocket. Nothing less would do. Here is a man who is only asking for what he needs, never more. Never mind that he still needed $19 after several people in the car actually forked over some cash. Then there's the brain tumor. Medical catastrope is the second classic of subway beggars. AIDS is the standard; cancer is relatively novel. But then he changes it up. Rather than going for the trifecta of subway begging tropes and mentioning some deeply regretted drug use that he's kicked with help from Jesus, he switches it up and takes a page from that other urban phenomenon, the subway preacher/ranter. Intra-race hate, people! The blacks, turning their backs on their own people! The shame of it! Usually when folks play that card, they're not looking for money, they're just spilling bile.

I had this dude from roughly West 4th to Park Place on Saturday, and he was far more entertaining than the actually completely crazy guy I sat next to today between Jay St. and 42nd, who just ate cream cheese cheddar potato chips and occasionally said "Guaranteed chicken butt!" I didn't give him money and I didn't applaud his thorough show. I reckon I'll see him again next weekend.

2011-02-10T21:50:00.000-05:00

The cell, finally lit as intended. Like a static lava lamp.

2011-02-07T10:07:00.002-05:00

The details of my first relationship in college are a little blurry. Nineteen years will do that, and the entire era was marked by a frenzy of self-discovery, previously supressed hormones, massive insecurity and so on. College, basically. The criteria for someone to date were basically "gay and female." I got to practice being gay with someone for about five weeks at the end of my junior year, and then I went off on a summer fieldwork trip to the Navajo reservation for eight weeks, and then we saw each other for a few days at her parents' house in Portland, and then I did a journalism internship in Oregon all fall, and we broke up in the middle of that. So about six weeks of actual in-person time in a six-month relationship. There were lots of heartfelt letters and phone calls and angst on both sides as we came out to our parents and so on. In one memorable phone call, I completely punted when she needed emotional support about some college crisis or other, and shortly thereafter there was another memorable phone call when she broke up with me. Maybe it was a letter. Like I said, fuzzy details. We didn't really talk after that, which was suitably dramatic through the end of college but gradually faded into total insignificance. It was a little unusual, then, to run into her sister at a Super Bowl game last night. She lives in a building across the street from me, on the same floor as several other friends. The sister was charming and, of course, 19 years older than the high school kid I met on that visit in 1992. She was fun to talk to of her own accord, and I didn't know what to do with the whole sister connection. I didn't actually tell her to tell her sister "hi" or anything because ... well, if either of us cared we'd have done it ourselves by now, right? Presumably that'll fade next time I run into her and she'll just be another friendly neighbor. I guess the moral of the story, as always, is that New York is a very small town.

2011-01-30T19:23:00.003-05:00

I couldn't just pick something easy for a glass project. It had to be the globe. That precision tape job seen below is riding on a good quarter inch of clear and colored glass... before you get to the clear layer that is floating on top of the blue ocean. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of 1/4" of glass? Yesterday I headed for the shop and the sandblaster, full of hope and optimism. Two hours of sandblasting later, I had exposed blue in an area about the size of my thumbnail in the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka was in sharp relief, but at that rate I was looking at a solid month of doing nothing but sandblasting, to the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars of shop time. Not workable. I talked to a couple of real artists at the shop and got a few ideas but went home on the brink of despair. This morning I shlepped back to Brooklyn without great optimism for anything more than the idea that today would determine if I could move forward or scrap the whole thing (which was one suggestion from a guy who does this technique professionally and more proficiently than me). I bought a coarse-grit belt from one of my teachers and set up on the large, standing belt sander. Half an hour later there was some vague sense of roughness in the little patches I'd worked at, my shoulders were cramping and I was cold. I skulked out to the hot shop, where Isaac was teaching an intro course, and warmed myself in front of the furnaces. We agreed I had one last shot: the lathe. Small surface area but high RPMs and steel/diamond surface. I got a quick tutorial and fired it up. Exposing the next patch of blue took only about 15 minutes. The lathe ate through glass like ... well, if not like pizza, then at least like a tough but workable steak. I thinned out vast swaths of the Indian and Pacific and Southern oceans over the next two hours. I figure another 7-8 hours of lathe time followed by several more of belt and sandblaster and Dremel will get me what I need. One thing about the lathe is that it's water-cooled -- there's a constant little stream of water jetting over the wheel to keep the friction heat in check. This means my carefully masked continents are sliding all over or coming off entirely -- South America had a major tectonic migration and Madagascar fell off around 2:30. But I can re-mask later once the glass is thinner and sandblast the fine detail, so it'll be OK. The other downside is that the water jet makes a perpetual little rooster tail onto whoever is using the wheel. Even with a rubber apron, I was soaked from neck to boots (and also sparkly from glass dust and assorted detritus). I came home sodden and exhausted but hopeful that this might still actually be salvaged. It'll just take a few more weeks than expected.

2011-01-29T00:15:00.001-05:00

This is my Q-tip shaped globe, masked out for sandblasting. We'll see how it goes.

2011-01-27T09:12:00.000-05:00

Ah, the matching sweater family portrait.

2011-01-27T08:03:00.000-05:00

Inwood Hill Park with a fresh coat.

2011-01-27T08:02:00.000-05:00

Andrew, portrait of a snow dog.

2011-01-25T12:58:00.004-05:00

Last week I made the "blank" for my globe project. It's now sitting in my kitchen, swathed in duct tape, waiting to be masked out into continents and oceans so I can sandblast it. The colors look really cool, both for the ocean layer and the land. It's the cartography that's driving me crazy. For reference I went out and bought a globe, something you'd think would already be part of the household for someone as map-obsessed as me. The earth, as you may have noticed, is not completely spherical but it's close enough for the casual observer. The standard shape we use in glass might best be described as the fluffy end of a Q-tip. It's the shape that we always try to return to in the early stages of gathering and coloring the glass, the one that offers the most stability for dipping in the furnace and using the glass efficiently. Ultimately it can be shaped out to a sphere or bottle or anything.

So here I am, trying to draw the continents on something roughly pear-shaped. It's easy enough to draw lines of longitude, but the latitudes are all messed up. The south pole is roughly its final size while the equator is squatted up, destined to be blown out but really hard to draw in the meantime. Florida is going to be huge, while England might barely exist. I'm not sure we're even going to have the Aleutians. I try to keep reminding myself that I'm doing this for the experience, the different techniques and all, as much as for the final product. I have enough of the various colors to make a second one if needed. Although next time I might just make Venus.

2011-01-18T09:38:00.002-05:00

Do you think it's causal or coincidental that so many interesting, by which I mean complicated, things happen at night, usually late on a weekend night when you really just want to go to bed? Childhood projectile vomiting, dog/skunk encounters, things requiring expensive after-hours services.

It was getting on toward 11 last night and I was reaching for the dental floss in the medicine cabinet when I knocked over the plastic box containing my thermometer. My ancient mercury thermometer that has taken every reading of every fever I've ever had, save for those registered during that brief and unfortunate rectal thermometer phase that my mother went through when I was young. It was anachronistic 20 years ago when she packed it off with me to college, and in a short tinkling of broken glass, it finally bit the dust last night, and there I was with a wet sink sprinkled with broken glass and little balls of mercury rolling around. Claudia hollered an offer of help and I asked for paper towels and eventually got the glass out and dried the water out of the sink. Coalescing down around the rim of the drain were the little mercury blobs, rolling around and finding each other like a very small Terminator.

It's worth remembering from high school science that mercury 1) is a liquid but 2) is not really an absorbable one and 3) likes to convert to poisonous gas that will 4) cause all sorts of interesting things like sensory problems and peripheral neuropathy. It laughs at paper towels. We gradually assembled ourselves into a more organized hazmat team, opening the window and pulling on cleaning gloves. Claudia started scouring the internet for retrieval and disposal protocols, most of which unfortunately were for large-scale mercury spills in school labs that require specialized intervention. I was tired and frustrated and didn't feel like it was my fault that I didn't have a certified mercury spill kit on hand. (Mom, please don't send me one. We're going with a digital thermometer now.) Eventually we found some useful home-thermometer-type information and quickly rethought our first idea to vacuum it up, particularly as I'd just bought a new Dyson mere hours before and it would have become hopelessly and expensively toxic. A combination of stiff paper cards and duct tape eventually corraled the rogue mercury, and then everything related to the incident was duly packed away and double-bagged, and it now awaits proper disposal at a city facility wich is apparently only open on Saturdays. We bagged our clothes to be aired outside later, just in case, showered, and tried not to dream hazmat dreams.

Today I'm sleepy.
Now I'm sleepy.

2011-01-14T15:25:00.003-05:00

The glass shop is closing for renovation in a few months. There are classes running through April, but week by week they're shutting down various studio areas, requiring locker clean-outs, etc. I'm trying to get in as much time as I can right now and finish up some projects. The cells went so well that I'm trying something that's complex in a different way: graal. It's a Swedish technique that involves blowing a basic form with layers of color, then carving away parts of the various layers to reveal the color underneath. Here's a good example:

Then you put the carved piece back in the annealer, warm it up, pick it up on a pipe, dip it in molten glass, and proceed to blow it to the desired shape.
Having done cells, I'm moving on to my other obsession: maps. The plan is to do a series of layered spheres in blue, green and tan (with white on top and bottom) and carve away the land to reveal the ocean. I can't find any examples of anything similar, so you'll just have to await the results. I like to think of it grandly as terraformingI made the swirly blue for the ocean last week, and a big stash of land colors just arrived in the mail last night. Isaac and I are making the globe blanks on Tuesday, then there's the long process of masking out the continents -- usually with heavy vinyl adhesive or duct tape, then cutting away with an Xacto knife -- and then we can move on to the final blowing out. Stay tuned.

2011-01-12T09:52:00.003-05:00

I keep forgetting to bring my camera to the park. This morning was particularly beautiful -- untouched snow, sunlight reflecting pinkly on the hill and the palisades across the river, the frozen water. Andy was beside himself about all the snow. Fortunately another dog person had a camera and offered to capture Andy in action. Thanks, Steve!

2011-01-10T19:11:00.002-05:00

I had another one of those "Wow, this is my city and I live here and it's awesome" moments today walking to the subway after work. It was dark and there was nothing special about that section of midtown, except I glanced right and there, a few blocks away, were the neon red lettering for Radio City Music Hall, with a huge Christmas tree still parked in front. I looked up and there were skyscrapers, so many as to be unremarkable all next to each other, and the sidewalks were busy with hot dog and fruit vendors closing up their carts. I had another moment on Sunday, walking the dog in the park and coming across a dozen kids and parents cheerily sledding down a hill. And another the day before that, wandering across the street to watch the Saints game with friends, and meeting another neighbor whose path I somehow hadn't crossed in three-plus years here, although our circles overlap tremendously. Bright lights, sledding and the perpetual chance of new friends. I love this city.

2011-01-07T07:47:00.002-05:00

Have a look at this completely awesome video of Inwood. It's everything (or at least many things) great about the neighborhood, including a bunch of friends.

2011-01-01T12:38:00.002-05:00

OK, 2011. This is what we're doing:

--Losing the last 15 pounds. 2010 proved it was possible. Now it's time to seal the deal. I want my college weight back.
--Go to two new countries. At the moment we really only have plans for one, that being Spain this summer. But surely there's a way to get a second in there somehow.
--Start learning Arabic. I signed up for Arabic 1 at the New School yesterday, so in theory class should start in February. I picked Arabic for a couple of reasons. I've spent time in the Middle East but never learned more than the most basic greetings. Geographically, it's the language that offers the most square mileage for the buck after Spanish.
--Keep up with the glassblowing. Urban Glass is vacating its current location in the spring so the building can be remodeled. At the moment the best option seems to be a studio in Newark, which will require a lot more planning. Isaac's amenable to continuing our work together, so I'm hoping maybe one weekend day a month will turn out to be feasible.
--Read Don Quixote. See trip to Spain, above.

2010-12-31T18:12:00.002-05:00

I think most years I try to wrap up with a sort of month-by-month summary, but I'm supposed to squeeze in a disco nap before we head out for various New Year's activities. Maybe I'll just go thematically:

--I got promoted in the spring at work, a slightly awkward situation of suddenly semi-supervising a bunch of my peers. Mostly this turned out well. I have a great team.

--Nothing huge changed apartmentwise, although I joined the pet committee for the co-op and got to know some neighbors better.

--In the course of 2010, I logged four trips to North Carolina, one to New Orleans, one to Las Vegas, one to Oregon, several to Boston and DC, and then there was Mexico and Amsterdam.

--Andy came to live with me in October, bringing love, sneezes and hair. It's cliche, but I can't imagine him not being here.

--I lost 25 pounds. Diet and exercise to the rescue. I took the fall off from serious loss-related initiatives, but now it's time to get back to it and lose the other 15. Vast new frontiers in clothing sizes are now open before me.

--I got a lot better at glassblowing. Still not great, but with practice I got vaguely competent at bowls and bottles, and made the first real artistic pieces, the cells. Now I have to finish them off before the shop closes for remodeling in the spring.

--Guests came from all over: Oregon, Tennessee, Ohio, Massachusetts, Peru.

--Stuff with Claudia has been awesome. We hit two years right before Christmas. One thing about early 2010 is that we hit a point of a lot of strain, but we came through it. For the record, I'm a big fan of preemptive couples' counseling and using a professional to help set good habits rather than try to undo bad ones. We put a lot of effort into learning to be upfront about our needs, to communicate clearly, and to see the other person's point of view. It's actually been great. I recommend it.

I have a few goals or aspirations for 2011, but those can wait for tomorrow. Happy new year!

2010-12-31T11:57:00.001-05:00

2010-12-30T12:03:00.003-05:00

One of the awesomest things about snow is how much Andy loves it. LOVES IT. Loves it. You've never known snow until you've gone for a walk with a dog who is perpetually waiting for the next snowball. Normally I don't let him off-leash unless we're playing keepaway and I know the ball will keep his attention, but the soccer field was deserted this morning and I let him loose because all he needed to stay raptly focused was SNOW. Pick up a snow ball, toss it, let him bound after it one direction. Pick up another, throw the opposite way, let him bound over there. Kick up a flurry of snow in his direction and watch him leap acrobatically to catch a choice morsel with a snap of his jaws. Watch him actually catch a hard-packed snow blob and shred it, snorting insanely, into powder. It's possible he did a little too much coke in his puppy years.

2010-12-28T12:57:00.004-05:00

There is nothing special about getting stuck in the snow this holiday season. We were simply among the many. Our flight was supposed to leave Greensboro at 3-something Monday afternoon and touch down at LaGuardia at 5ish, putting us back in Inwood in time to give Andy his afternoon walk. But then Snowmageddon/Snowmygod/Snowpocalypse hit and we were stuck. It wasn't immediately clear that there would be a problem. Up until we got to the airport, our flight was merely listed as 30 minutes delayed, so we packed up and hoped for the best. It had been a nice visit in North Carolina but we were more than ready to get home. The US Air staff dashed our hopes pretty quickly: The plane we were supposed to be on was in Norfolk and couldn't possibly get to us until it made it to DC, LaGuardia and Charlotte, half of which were closed. The next flight we could get on would be Friday. Or we could drive to Raleigh and get on a flight Tuesday night that would get us as far as Dulles, after which we could try a train from DC. We were putting our names down for that option when we saw Josh, Claudia's friend from junior high, at the next kiosk, also being canceled. We all retreated and weighed our options. Amtrak was sold out up and down the eastern corridor.

"I don't want to go back to my parents' house," he lamented.
"Us either. I mean, it was great. But we want to go home."
"I'm tempted to just drive."
"... Yeah? You think?"
"Sure. We'll hop on I-81. I do it all the time."
One quick conspiratorial glance later, we were marching up and down the car rental kiosks. The fourth desk finally had a car available, and a few minutes later we had a burgundy Buick pimpmobile loaded up with luggage and headed north with absolutely no idea whether we'd hit impassable snow or traffic or both. I-81 runs up under the Blue Ridge mountains through Roanoke and Harrisonburg, darts briefly across slivers of West Virginia and Maryland and then sprawls across central Pennsylvania before heading east at Harrisburg. We had clear sailing all the way. It was almost anticlimatic, because this is the stuff from which screenplays should be written. We had a stack of CDs and talked for hours about New York, food, families, work, travel and whether and when our luck would run out.
We kept on not hitting snow. Finally, well into New Jersey, we ran into slush and the lanes actually narrowed for a while. It was a little nerve-wracking getting through the various highway interchanges and toll plazas, but by then it was nearly midnight and there were very few cars on the road. I should note that Josh and Claudia actually did all the driving -- and Claudia braved the actual tricky bits with slush and ambiguity. By the time we hit 95 and headed for the Holland Tunnel, the road was nearly deserted. We surfaced on 42nd Street in a slushy apolcalyptic wasteland, fishtailed gently to 8th Avenue and eased into a parking garage near my office. It was mercifully across the street from the subway, so Claudia and I bid Josh farewell at about 1 a.m, a mere 11 hours after we left Greensboro, and headed uptown. Broadway was bare pavement, and so was the trail through the park... for the first hundred yards. The last 100 or so were unbroken, thigh-deep snow and we barreled through, lugging our 30-pound suitcases, me in thin socks and thoroughly inadequate street shoes. I no longer need to pursue a Himalayan expedition. We got in the door at about 2 a.m. and were greeted by a sleepy but happy Andy, and a vague wave from Danielle, the completely awesome dogsitter who stayed an extra day and then decamped to the sofa so we could collapse onto the bed. I was still jacked up on adrenaline and coffee and it took another hour or more to fall asleep, but it was blissful to wake up in my own bed this morning. I took Andy out to play in the park, and he bounded around ecstatically and leaped to catch snowballs. After a leisurely start, we lurched back downtown in the late morning, retrieved the car and dropped it at the rental office a few blocks away. Christmas 2010 is officially over!

2010-12-26T22:44:00.002-05:00

We've done just about everything there is to do for a Christmas in the past few days: Seen relatives, caught up with friends, cooked dinner, made last-minute purchases and a few personal impulse buys, suffered colds, opened gifts, watched movies and attended Boxing Day parties. The last piece is seeing if we can get back to NY tomorrow in the aftermath of today's blizzard. It snowed in North Carolina starting around mid-day on Christmas and stacked up just enough to be aesthetically pleasing but not actually dangerous or impairing. The stores were empty today instead of stuffed to the gills with gift returners. The roads were cleared and by afternoon the movie theaters were packed. It's been fun and relaxing but we're ready to go home. The dog-sitter is on standby to stay longer because it's not entirely clear if we'll be successful. Fingers crossed. There's such a thing as too much Christmas.

2010-12-18T16:09:00.003-05:00

All the news today is about the Senate voting to overturn Don't Ask Don't Tell. It's a great victory for treating gays and lesbians as equal citizens in a federally recognized sort of way, though not nearly as excellent as recognized spousal relationships and adoption rights would be. I have several friends who served in various branches of the military while dodging the issue of their sexuality, and I'm glad folks like them will have a chance to carry out their careers without the constant fear of being uncovered and more or less ruined.

But on a broader level, I'm horrified that anyone would want to join the military at all. The repeal of DADT feels like a big cheery "Welcome to the American Military Industrial Complex, Making the Third World Safe for Capitalist Pillage Since 1941. Now With More Gays!" To be gay in America is to have a responsibility to be aware of inequality, to feel that the struggles of minorities, women, immigrants, the disabled, the disenfranchised are all cousins to the kinds of discrimination and inequity that gays and lesbians face. So the idea of joining a military tasked with executing trumped up wars to pave the way for puppet governments and economic dependency, to me, runs counter to everything that a responsible gay person in this country ought to be about.

2010-12-13T22:46:00.000-05:00

This is pretty much every Sunday night now.

2010-12-13T19:47:00.003-05:00

I was looking at the "365 ____" post on Boing Boing today and thinking how great it would be to start a daily project next year. And then later today I vaguely remembered that I have totally failed at my original 2010 goal of a recipe a week. Something new daily would probably last about 3 days. But then I thought about the recipe thing and these brussels sprouts and got happy again.

I love brussels sprouts, having been the weird kid who liked vegetables. These are a slightly healthier version of the fried brussels sprouts available at 181, a little neighborhood bistro near Claudia's apartment. I've been known to sit at the bar and order them and a glass of wine.

Maple-Roasted Brussels Sprouts

1.5 lbs brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved
olive oil
salt and pepper
2-3 Tb maple syrup

Heat oven to 375. Line a baking sheet with foil. Toss trimmed, halved brussels sprouts with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, spread on baking sheet in a single layer. Roast for 15 minutes, turn, roast for another 15 minutes. Remove from oven, scrape into a bowl and toss with maple syrup. Return to baking sheet, roast for a final 15 minutes.

2010-12-10T07:26:00.002-05:00

I should have set up this blog to have titles for each post, so this could be called "It's Not You, It's Us: An Open Letter to Inwood Dogs."

Andy is an awesome dog. He is made of awesomeness. He is quiet and loves people and was a perfect gentleman all through Thanksgiving with 10 people in the house. He doesn't pee in the house or counter-surf for food or destroy the furniture. You haven't lived until he's restd his head on your knee and looked up at you.

He does not, however, love other dogs. Mostly this just means he ignores them. If we're out walking and pass another dog on leash, he's generally disinterested and cruises right past in favor of something worth sniffing on the curb. He shares the elevator politely with equally disinterested neighbor dogs, or at least he shares it reasonably well. Sometimes he wants to sniff, and unfortunately, sometimes sniffing for him leads to slavering and snarling. We're working on it. Most of the dog owners in the immediate vicinity know the score with Andy and encourage a sort of peaceful non-acknowledgment. I try to avoid the park during prime off-leash hours, because inevitably there's some utterly friendly retriever who wants to be the very best of friends and will come galloping up to say hi. This is generally when Andy turns into an asshole, lunging and snarling, and I yank him back and yell at him while trying to get the other dog to go away.

Karen, the awesome dog walker, is working with Andy with some success, having the other dog sit so as to be nonthreatening so Andy can come up and say hi. She says it works and I've seen her do it with at least temporary success. He also can figure out how to walk in a pack, although he did try to hump the enormous and peaceful pitbull who lives in my building. Karen's an optimist and feels that with appropriate scolding/praise Andy can be reformed. I'm sort of unconvinced that he's not just going to turn into an ever-crankier old man (when he's not being awesome and snuggling, of course). Mostly I'm bummed that we don't seem able to play with all the really cool dogs in the neighborhood. Sorry guys, we can't right now. Andy's busy being awesome and also an asshole.

2010-12-05T17:22:00.002-05:00

Claudia and I whisked through a two-week experimental cohabitation spell with nary a hitch. The past two weeks on the one hand were a little unusual because of house guests and Thanksgiving and her overnight trip to visit her aunt, but on the other hand, it's regular life: There are no normal weeks, really. Walking the dog this afternoon we started talking about what happens next. On the one hand it's going so well, it seems a shame to abruptly interrupt it. On the other hand, speaking strictly for myself, I'm not entirely ready to have things slide into "... and then she never went home and we just ended up here." It was a good run, we're planning to do it again in another month or so when another friend will be crashing at her place, but it's OK not to turn it into something bigger than it was intended to be.

Stuff that's good about cohabitating: the excuse to make a pot of coffee every morning, the occasions when someone else offers to take the dog out on a cold morning/night, opening the dishwasher and finding that it's miraculously been emptied already, spontaneous drive-by shoulder rubs. Stuff that's different: socks under the coffee table, an extra coat and bag vying for space, actually feeling like dinner should probably be more orchestrated than popcorn.

Eventually we took a pragmatic approach to easing ourselves out of the experiment. Claudia takes salsa lessons on Tuesday nights and will stay at her place after class because it's closer and she gets home late. And then we'll go comfortably back to winging it for a while.

2010-12-02T06:59:00.003-05:00

When I was a kid, Christmas television traditions consisted of annually being slightly afraid of the Grinch, excited by the idea of the Charlie Brown special and then slightly embarrassed by how prosletyzing it actually is, and avoiding the hell out of It's A Wonderful Life. Occasionally I'd see the Rudolph special, but I didn't watch the rest of the Rankin Bass things with the misfit toys and Heat Miser until I was an adult. And by then, Christmas Vacation had vaulted to the top of the pile, and it's stayed there since.

The movie is brilliant, catching nearly every wretched trope of actual holidays with family and skewering them appropriately. You can fault the attic scene for being a little too mawkish or the kidnapping scene for being too Dumb and Dumber, but it shines at catching all the little things that make the holidays so miserable for so many. First among these is the relentless optimism and force of will that so many people put into making Christmas postcard perfect. Everything else -- the bickering relatives, the dessicated turkey, the sheer decibels -- is dead on, just jacked up a little higher with Randy Quaid (who is apparently now batshit insane). The actual brilliance of the movie is that it stops before it even gets to the gifts on Christmas morning, a scene better handled by Ralphie & co.

I admit a sentimental attachment also because the actual watching of the movie was one of the few peaceable moments during the holidays with my parents, particularly when I came home from college. The opening scenes, trudging way too far out into the wilderness to find a completely inappropriate tree, hit a little too close to home, seeing as how we'd usually just returned from our own annual tree-hunting expedition with me shimmying down mountainsides with a saw. We'd watch the movie, laugh companionably, and briefly set aside the fact that the bill for next term's tuition was going to show up in a few days and dad was going to rip me several new orifices.

Claudia does not particularly love the movie, and several other friends openly detest it, but recently I found out that some other friends do and we've scheduled a night to watch it in a couple weeks. And then the holidays will have begun.

2010-11-21T20:23:00.002-05:00

Reason 222 to live in New York? Going to the Lower East Side for undergarments. Orchard Street, which is home to the Tenement Museum as well as spectacular Vietnamese food and all manner of both high-end boutiques and fell-out-of-a-van hats and leather jackets, also is the traditional home of many of the city's orthodox Jewish establishments, including various haberdashers and pickle vendors and, as it happens, purveyors of undergarments. Word of mouth has it that particular institutions will take you behind a curtain, have you disrobe, cup you gently, and simply on the basis of feel, find exactly the perfect bra for you.

The reality is close. The Park Terrace Nerd Herd Ladies Auxiliary took a field trip today for cupping. It turns out it's just a quick visual once-over and some deliberate tucking, followed by some very directed trial and error, but we each spent about 5 earnest minutes behind the curtain with a very knowledgeable woman and walked away with better than $100 each in supportive lady accessories. The lady in charge found a winner on the second try for me, and suddenly my cleavage is magnificent. She had less success trying to steer me toward something lacy, and I was frankly against her suggestion of a "belly belt," aka girdle, in the wake of my recent weight loss. I admit that my middle is tragically under-toned, but I'm not prepared to strap it down in the name of an hourglass figure.

Within half an hour we were out on the street and headed for pho and banh mi at a fashionable Vietnamese place a few doors down, where they had dark Beerlao in bottles.

I love this city.

2010-11-20T06:57:00.002-05:00

At some point today, Claudia will show up with a suitcase. As part of our cheerfully slothlike progression toward what we presume will someday be cohabitation, we're having a two-week trial run starting today.

The fact that we're both only children gets called out a lot as a factor in this whole process. We both like our space. We're both leery of what will happen when we actually share that space full-time, much as we like the other person involved. To that end, this two weeks is really just an extended visit because it just involves her being here, which is known to be a fine thing, as opposed to her and all her stuff taking up residence permanently. It would probably be more stressful if she were showing up today with her enormous piece of art or we had to decide which coffeemaker to keep. Adding further complexity is the idea that at such time as we live together for real, it'll be in my apartment, with which I have a long, close relationship, and not in some new spot that we're negotiating together. On the one hand, it saves debates about paint color. On the other, eventually I'll have to give up a little of my autocratic tendencies if she's going to feel truly at home. Hence the easing into it. Two weeks now, another two weeks in February when a friend (Hi, C!) is going to be staying in Claudia's apartment, and after that we don't really have a plan except that at some point Claudia will remodel her bathroom and put her place up for sale. The NY real estate market being what it is, we might not have to worry about where to hang the art for quite a while yet.

2010-11-18T22:24:00.002-05:00

After getting the cells home intact on Tuesday, I realized I'd kind of been holding my breath for the previous 10 days: Would they explode? Would they be ugly? Would they actually look good? You get a decent sense when you're making something, but hot glass has a tendency to glow of its own accord and you have to keep turning it, so it's hard to really get up close. Also, it's hot. So there's always a certain X factor of whether your memory and imagination stack up against the real thing. Also, I'd never done solid work like this before -- piecing together components, layering things, planning out color and all. Half the DNA could disappear into a ghostly white. The golgi bodies could look like a big blob. The nucleus might not even show up. So much uncertainty.

So then I got them home and was able to look up close. The nucleus was warped but intact. The advanced planning I had done to separate the layers of the golgi bodies and endoplasmic reticula actually paid off -- you could see the spaces in between once the whole thing was encased in solid clear glass in a way that was not apparent when holding the individual pieces in your hand. Hooray for optics. The parts were, to the forgiving scientific minds that I work with, recognizable for what they were. You have no idea how much my heart soared when another scientific director said, "Hey, is that a ribosome?"

The other thing is that the cells are one of the few purely artistic things I've done in a long time. They serve no literal purpose, unless you need a hurricane-strength paperweight. You can't eat off them or store things in them. But they were made to be art at the samMe time that they were made to challenge what I was capable of planning and executing in glass. Making them felt like turning a corner from apprentice-level learning to being able to translate my (still really puny) knowledge into something that hasn't been done before, at least not quite like this. I'll be back to ornaments with Isaac in a couple weeks, and practicing bowls and bottles too, but now there's potential for more.

Today I e-mailed Isaac with ideas for my next project -- blown-glass globes using a Swedish technique called graal. It's a stretch in different directions but he's game for it. Ask me again in April.

2010-11-16T22:05:00.000-05:00

Inwood Hill Park.

2010-11-16T21:23:00.002-05:00

I picked up the cells today. They survived the cooling, at least as far as I can tell. They're still slightly warm. In a few weeks I'll take them back to the shop to cut and polish. One at a time -- they weight about 15 lbs each. Eventually I'll find lit bases for them.

2010-11-15T12:52:00.002-05:00

Andy's been living with me for a little more than a month now. I think his last rite of passage was hanging out with a bunch of our friends on the couch last night, hopping up next to them for snuggles. And then, of course, he farted on them. I could look around the room at various points and see who was looking particularly smug and content -- whoever had his chin on their knee at the moment.

He's really calming down, and this is a dog who had very few adjustment issues to begin with. He barks less and less each week when he hears the dogs upstairs going nuts. Mostly now he just raises his hackles and paces around staring at the ceiling. He doesn't bark when the door buzzer rings, which I find amazing. He continues to ignore most dogs on the sidewalk, including the ones lunging at him, and his walker takes him out with a couple buddies now and then, so he's managing to be in a pack without too much trouble. For the most part he's not even tugging insanely on the leash anymore, except in very exciting stretches of the park.

And this morning we got up and ran nonstop the full mile loop down Seaman to Dyckman and up Broadway without stopping. This is not very much running, granted, but I haven't run a straight mile in several years. Working back up to longer routes gradually. Andy is certainly not the limiting factor here -- that would be me. But I'd like to think we're a good influence on each other.

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

We built two cells today. I'm pretty tired. It went faster than expected -- about 2 hours to build the first, then making a nucleus for the second, then just an hour for the second cell. Aside from being insanely heavy and hot, it was a pretty straightforward process. They're tucked into the annealer now to spend the next 10 days cooling. Stay tuned.

Cell construction

2010-11-03T16:14:00.001-04:00

I never have to blog about New York again. This list just covered all the things I love about the city. Well, most of them. They left out magnificent parks, the "in-the-middle-of-it-all" feeling that you get anywhere below 59th St, the underestimated friendliness of New Yorkers, the food carts, the Whale Room in particular... actually a bunch of stuff. But "subway prewalking" is definitely a favorite. I do love the city.

2010-11-02T18:17:00.002-04:00

Even though I was on the business travel circuit pretty decently for a number of years, I was probably over 30 before I went to Boston for the first time. I always thought it would be a city I would enjoy; growing up it seemed so historical and academic, the sort of place a young and bookish kid would enjoy going. Eventually I started making periodic visits for work, and now it seems I go a couple times a year for one reason or another. To my chagrin, I can't quite bring myself to like it.

I like certain aspects of it. It's very pretty to fly in and out of. It's so much smaller and quieter than New York; going from my downtown hotel last night to visit friends in Cambridge was the matter of a 10-minute ride on the T. It has some very nice people, including the ones I met for dinner. And yet I found myself once again not loving it.

The problem could be that I always end up going when it's cold. New York is cold in the winter, but Boston takes it to a whole new level and does so both earlier and later in the year. I associate Boston with my legs going numb and having a lot of post-nasal drip. It also has Boston sports fans, who are the irritating little brother of the bully that is the New York sports fans. OK, really I mean Yankees and Sox fans here. Yankees fans have their belligerent way with anyone and everyone, including Boston. Boston fans come in second to New York but make up for it by being just as obnoxious to everyone else. I say this as an A's fan. There is also the issue of seafood, on which Boston prides itself and on which my entire gastric system casts a wary eye. But what might color it yet still more is that my first recreational trip to Boston, nearly three years ago, marked the end of an ill-advised two-month series of dates with a sincerely messed up woman. The only thing that was worse than watching the fledgling relationship crash and burn irrevocably in the hotel room was the contorted set of circumstances that led to me driving her back to New York in her car. Note to self and to all other interested parties: If that ever happens to you, take Amtrak, take the Chinatown bus, go to the airport, do ANYTHING other than make that drive under those circumstances. So weird.

Weirder still is that last night my friends took me to the same restaurant I went to with her, and we sat at the same table. The food was still good, at least.

2010-11-01T08:06:00.000-04:00

2010-10-30T22:56:00.002-04:00

I haven't been writing much lately because it's been a lot of the same stuff over and over: go to work, stress out a bit, come home, walk my awesome dog, rinse, repeat. But then I run into someone who actually reads this and I feel like I'm underperforming a bit. So, for the moment, an update:

Dog: Andy remains made of awesomeness. We having lots of walks and rope-tugging and the like. I've got a dogsitter lined up for the holidays, and Andy's been getting favorable reviews from everyone who meets him. Quite the charmer.

Girlfriend: Claudia also remains made of awesomeness. We're having a two-week trial of cohabitation later in November, just to see what that's like, and then again in January or February.

Work: I've been crazy busy for several weeks, bringing home work at night and on the weekends. It'll be that way for at least the rest of this week. I'm going to Boston in a couple days for a filming session that starts at 7:30 a.m. The horror.

Glass: Actually the class I'm taking right now is frustrating because I don't enjoy working in cold, flat glass all that much. But there's a course in Venetian canework next term, and this coming Sunday I am finally going to make The Cell. It'll be an all-day affair, so if you happen to live in the New York area and want to watch the morning of the 7th, stop by. It should be pretty cool.

Weight loss: It's going OK. I've kind of been holding at my low of the 25-lb mark, although the past couple days have been long on carbs and short on green leafies. Basically the end of a stressful week was not the time to find out that a 99-cent slice vendor is 3 doors down from my office.

Look for posts coming soon on the cell assembly, the logistics of cohabitation, and Thanksgiving menu plans. And an awesome dog.

2010-10-24T11:48:00.002-04:00

We were walking Andy last night when another guy out walking his dog stopped and said, "Hey, I just wanted you to know, Karen is doing a great job with him, really working on how he meet other dogs. He really responds well to her." Karen is Andy's walker on the days I am downtown late, and indeed she is awesome with dogs. He adores her and runs up to snuggle her when we see her out on the street. Mostly Andy walks right past other dogs with barely a glance, but if he's actually going to meet one, do the but-sniffing and all, he tends to act up a bit. By which I mean, tries to hump. He seems to think this is what he should do, although no other dog so far has felt the same. It's just funny that the other neighborhood dog owners now have a complete run-down on the dog, his habits, and areas for improvement, and some of them are even helping out as Andy learns to meet dogs less aggressively.

For the truly social dogs, there is the dog run crowd and also the 7-a.m.-and-10-p.m. Isham Park crowd, in which the owners observe while their fury friends run around together. Andy's not particularly interested in that scene, at least not so far, and I'm mainly concerned with making sure he's burned off his considerable energy, so we tend to walk far and fast instead. But it's nice to have the idea that if we want to socialize, there's a coterie of neighbors who would be happy to welcome him. As with Inwood humans, so with Inwood dogs.

2010-10-15T14:29:00.005-04:00

Andy is now fully integrated into life in New York. He gets a half-hour walk in the morning, another right after work, another before bed, and frequently others in between, weather permitting. He has shredded his first hedgehog squeaky toy and lost tennis balls under the couch and media stand multiple times, but never had an accident in the house. Even his shedding is low-key.

We've been sending videos to Erik in Amsterdam of Andy playing, and Erik reports that his kids like them. Last night we took one documenting the latest development: Andy allowed on the couch. As the dog-owning among you know, there is nothing better than a warm, snuggly dog curled up at your side with its head in your lap. Pure contentment. As long as you have a lint brush.

Here are some photos from my friend and neighbor Sue Ann, who drove me out to JFK to pick him up last week.

Waiting at the cargo company.

Customs office at JFK, for admission paperwork.

First sighting of Andy in his kennel.

Andy in the backseat, ready to go home.

Welcome home Andy! sign on apartment building door, from neighbor

2010-10-10T12:17:00.002-04:00

Andy's been around for 2.5 days now. We're getting the hang of things. Yesterday we had plans to be out all evening, so we spent the afternoon taking him on an epic 3-hour walk all over Inwood and Washington Heights. He came home, fell asleep, and I don't think he moved until we got home at midnight.

The new order of things presents a few challenges. The downside is that that the need to keep him exercised kind of eliminates my gym-going time in the morning (which, in fairness, I haven't kept up with lately). And I've actually gained a few pounds back in the past month, which is not great. BUT he presents a never-expiring excuse to go out and get some exercise. We HAVE to go out, several times a day, and to be healthy and relaxed he really needs a good, solid run or long walk daily. So I'm going to try to make this work for both of us, and combine his morning exercise with mine. I'm going to try to go back to the Couch-to-5K plan tomorrow and get us both up to speed. I have trepidation about running in the winter, but it's a ways off, and presumably I can figure something out to deal with the cold air and sensitive lungs. Let you know how it's going in a couple weeks.

2010-10-08T16:17:00.003-04:00

First full day of doggy goodness here. He did really well walking up to the vet, sitting quietly in the waiting room while an insane and poorly disciplined shiba inu barked her head off at him, submitted patiently to being weighed, thermometered and needled, and then came back out and discovered the cozy joys of his new bed. We're getting used to each other. The dogwalker is supposed to come visit later today to meet him and set up a schedule. For the moment I'm hoping just to use her when I can't get home right after work, but I'm sure he'd like the extra attention daily.

2010-10-08T07:14:00.003-04:00

Andy is in da house!

I left work yesterday at 1 to meet my very generous neighbor, Sue Ann, up in Inwood at 2. It took every second of that time -- I waited 20 minutes for an A train. We took off for JFK and found the cargo terminal with no problem, except that we were there at 3:20 and his plane hadn't landed yet. Conveniently, we're both the sort who would rather arrive early and wait than feel rushed. So we finished the NYT crossword while sitting in the parking lot. Hey, it was a Thursday puzzle. I want props.

The cargo office was a stream of truckers coming in and out with paperwork for air shipments in and out from Air France and KLM. We sat a while in the office. Finally around 5 his paperwork arrived -- a stack of shipping receipts and his European doggy passport with records of his shots. We took them down the road to customs. A customs officer looked them over, marked off something and handed them back. Back to the cargo office, where it took another 15 minutes to pay a last fee, get a receipt, and finally get clearance to go into the cargo bay. He was sitting in his crate and his tail started thumping the side when he saw someone coming over. We carried the crate to the edge of the loading dock and got someone to cut the tie straps holding the door shut. Poor guy hadn't been out of his crate in probably 12 hours, and he bounded out to the nearest patch of grass for an epic pee. We got him and the crate and loaded them into the car for the drive home, which mercifully had little traffic. Sue Ann's partner had taped a "Welcome Home Andy!" sign down at dog level on the front door to our building.

The rest of the night was a blur of getting him walked a few more times, getting him familiar with the apartment, playing tug, and finally settling down to sleep. Erik sent his Yankees blanket over in the crate, and it's folded up on my floor. He hasn't tried out his fancy bed yet in the living room. We slept through the night, and once the alarm went off at 6 he let me know he had to pee, and in a couple hours we're going to the vet.

As you can see, he's totally handsome.

2010-10-05T20:10:00.002-04:00

For some period of time when I was very young, and again for part of my high school years, we didn't have TV at all. At some point in the middle, we had one of the first satellite dishes in town. My dad tended to swing back and forth between ascetic and early adopter.

The satellite dish was one of the big, solid, beige fiberglass ones. Eventually he got a remote-control pivot motor for it, but for a while if he wanted to change from one satellite to another he had to go out to the field and move it by hand, hollering back to the house for me to comment on the reception quality. These were the early days of satellite, when Disney and HBO and certain more adult channels were available unscrambled, or could be readily unscrambled. Eventually I spent an entire summer watching the Addams Family reruns on Chicago's WGN, interspersed with Robin Hood and Alice and Wonderland on the Disney Channel.

Before we got the dish, dad explained to me that it had "everything." To him, this presumably was sports channels and movie channels. What more would someone need? I thought about my ideal channel, which would be an endless rotation of Emergency!, the Bionic Woman and Wonder Woman. He looked at me blankly for a second and said they didn't have that.

A quarter century later, I've got the Bionic Woman and Emergency! queued up in Netflix On Demand, with Wonder Woman available on disk and probably only weeks away from being streamed, the way things are going. Buck Rogers is available on demand, as are Buffy and The Deadliest Catch. My ideal channel is here!

2010-10-03T15:51:00.000-04:00

After a hard day of subway navigation, Uncle Jack and Aunt Cindy were still game for something new, so I took them for Ethiopian. They even kind of liked it.

2010-10-03T15:50:00.001-04:00

I took Jack and Cindy for a walk through Inwood last weekend and we heard some whistles from the Columbia stadium. Instead of a home game, it was teams of balloon handlers prepping for the Macy's parade. I love New York.

2010-10-01T08:12:00.002-04:00

The latest plan is for Andy the dog to arrive on Thursday. I'm waiting for the last details, but there's a food dish and bed waiting, a squeaky toy and a tugging rope. Still to come is a tube of tennis balls (a specific request from Andy, according to Erik), a brush, and the clip-on plastic bag dispenser favored by New York dog walkers. Later, when it gets colder, we'll go coat shopping.

I've walked up the hill home in the evenings so many times imagining having a happy, furry face waiting to greet me at the door. It's been a long time.

2010-09-29T07:14:00.002-04:00

Aunt and uncle are sacked out in my living room, probably still recovering from yesterday's rain-soaked outing to the Statue of Liberty. I'd like to think that they got to see the best of what New York has to offer in the first part of their visit: Central Park on a perfect, sunny day; outdoor dining; wonderful food; new and interesting things on a long walk through lower Manhattan. Yesterday they also got the crap: soaking downpours when they were stranded outside and points of scenic interest (Ground Zero, Rockefeller Center, NY Public Library) that were shrouded in construction trappings. In fairness, Ground Zero always is. And then to get home, the 30-minute misery on a hot, steamy, increasingly crowded subway platform with nothing to do but watch the rats scamper on the tracks. Followed by a grindingly slow ride home in a car that was packed the whole way. They were kind enough to laugh when I pointed out that they had borne it well and not at all like my dad, who actually might have killed the conductor, and that while it was just about the worst subway experience I've had in New York, I could think of several ways it could be worse: un-airconditioned car, crazy preacher, hobo stench, local stops. To live in New York is to brag about the suffering you've endured.

They're off to parts east and north today. Lobsters and the microbrews of Maine await them. I hope they'll come back soon. We didn't get to a ball game or shoot the freak.

2010-09-27T17:18:00.002-04:00

My Uncle Jack and his girlfriend are visiting this week, and it's been fabulous. They arrived Saturday and immediately were game for anything that sounded fun. They had several ideas about possible fun, resulting in spending today on a pizza-oriented tour of Brooklyn and plans for the Statue of Liberty tomorrow, but otherwise they have mostly put themselves in my hands. This means they've eaten tapas, Vietnamese sandwiches, and weird Chinese food, and in a few minutes I'm taking them for Ethiopian. Yesterday they asked about a weird, pink, scaly item in the produce stands in Chinatown, so today we had dragonfruit with breakfast.

We also went on long walks through areas of town I particularly like, namely Inwood, Central Park, the Lower East Side, Chinatown and the Village. I made them walk Broadway from Times Square to Union Square by themselves this morning. We had a beer at Lucky Jack's bar on the LES (note to Michaela: a fine establishment), cannoli from Rocco's bakery, and a tour at the Tenement Museum. As long as the coffee pot is full every morning, they seem happy. Wednesday they're heading on to their next adventure on Cape Cod and I'm going to miss them.

2010-09-24T19:37:00.002-04:00

Dan Savage started the It Gets Better channel on YouTube as a way to let adult, happy homos tell kids in middle school and high school that it does, in fact, get better. It's in response to a couple of young gay people who recently gave in to the bullying and committed suicide.

Is there any gay person's heart that doesn't instantly bleed over news like that? Or the wretched, institutionally supported harassment and bigotry inflicted on that girl in Alabama last year who just wanted to bring her girlfriend to the prom? Who among us wouldn't pretty much lop off fingers/pay a small fortune/give up chocolate for life/whatever to go back and half a 15-minute heart-to-heart conversation with our 14-year-old selves?

Of course my 14-year-old self was so deeply buried in conservative Christianity, so heavily in denial about anything related to sexuality at all, that it would have had to have been a very vague but reassuring message: "Look, you're completely scared and have no idea how this is all going to work out, and you're kind of afraid to know, but eventually it'll all make sense and then you'll feel OK, and eventually you'll feel good, and then after a while you'll feel terrific. You just have to gut it out for a few years and take it on faith that the unknown future is probably better than the present." Which is the leap Dan is urging kids to make: That as horrible as things are now, and as much as it seems like they can only ever be horrible, actually stuff gets better.

Among my immediate gay friends, I've got one of the more appalling (and, years later, hilarious) coming out stories, but I got through it all with nothing that a few years of therapy couldn't cure. A lot of kids aren't so lucky and are kicked to the curb. If you want to help a bit, give a little here or here.

2010-09-22T21:10:00.002-04:00

I've spent the past two evenings doing homework. Unlike, say, trigonometry, this is homework for my advanced kilnforming class and therefore counts as fun. It's still work, though. I spent probably eight hours since Sunday looking for images online, downloading them, photoshopping them into a usable form, sketching them out on tracing paper, etc. As of Sunday I didn't actually know how to use Photoshop or own any tracing paper, so the homework came along with a supply run to Pearl Paint and a lot of trial and error on the computer.

Tonight I told Claudia about it during our NY-to-DC catch-up call, and she was supportive but a little baffled: "You always work on such ... interesting things." A lot of our projects this term have to do with depth and layering in glass, and my source material includes microscope images of paramecia and diatoms, street and subway maps of Manhattan, and a population density map of the city that was surprisingly hard to find. I had wanted a topographic map but gave up because I wasn't patient enough to learn the U.S. Geological Survey's data set manipulator on its web site. Also, Manhattan is pretty flat.

Some trends are emerging here. I love maps. I love science. I'm building a 30-lb solid glass model of a cell. Why on earth wouldn't I have microbes? As an experiment and to branch out a bit, I did a backup plan, a four-layer sketch based on a photo I took in the Copper Canyon. Compared with the crisp lines of my maps, the canyon walls look decidedly impressionistic and vague. I could probably do it, though some actual drawing or painting training would help, but at the moment I'm not in love with it. Unlike the photo, which I like very much.

I always assumed that real, live artists decided what they wanted their statement to be and made stuff up accordingly. I figured they woke up one morning and said to themselves, "My work is about the transience of happiness and man's struggle for immortality" or something to that effect, and then they'd decide that painting coffee cups would be the right way to express it. But the more time I spend trying to make something passing for art (as opposed to something passing for a fruit bowl), the more I wonder if it's the other way around and the artist says, "Dang, I guess I like maps. Huh." and goes from there.

2010-09-20T07:34:00.003-04:00

Claudia and I went to DC for the weekend. She stayed -- she's got a work training thing for a couple of weeks -- but we had Saturday and Sunday to see people and enjoy the city. The weather was perfect and for once we didn't overschedule ourselves. We went to visit my elderly cousin, who is recovering from a broken pelvis but pretty chipper about it, and spent yesterday afternoon hanging out with Jenny and Joe and going to open houses in their neighborhood. What gets you a decent 2BR in Inwood will get you 3000 square feet with finished basement and 3-4BR in Silver Spring.

We also went to see the Chuck Close exhibit at the Corocoran on Saturday. It's closing next weekend. It had a lot of his huge, oversize portrait work up, but the exhibit was really focused on his process as a printmaker -- the steps of turning his complex color and geometry into lithographs and the like. All his wood block prints and so on were there, with videos of guys silk-screening a work that hung nearby. Claudia was a little bored after a while, but I found it endlessly fascinating and bought the book. There was also an exhibit by Spencer Finch, who did a whole series of works in different media on the theme of clouds, including some really cool scotch tape renderings and a series of paintings of relative humidity maps. I loved it.

The ony thing about the weekend was the recurring weirdness of the hotel. We made our plans kind of late and I picked a place off hotels.com at random, looking for something not too expensive and near-ish to Dupont Circle for proximity to the red line, which we needed for all our friend visiting plans. We ended up at the Windsor Inn on 16th near Swann. It's billed as a "European style" hotel, which translates to small rooms in most of the official reviews, but which included at no extra charge wallpaper falling from the walls and more mildew in the shower than seemed strictly necessary. We tried to have a leisurely morning on Saturday but fled after heavy-duty pounding on the walls started at 8:30. But the truly, truly unnerving thing was the staff. When we checked in at about 10:30 Friday night, the clerk was a bearded and carefully combed man with graying hair, a three-piece suit that was not retro so much as just old, and vacant, peering eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke very carefully: "Here is your room key. Please return it whenever you leave the hotel." At 10:30 the next morning he was still there, in a different suit. It took a while to realize that he was younger than us, and the overall impression was of someone putting himself through mortuary school by working double shifts. When he was still on duty at both 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Saturday when we came in from various outings, we started to get really creeped out. Each time, he looked at us the same way, like we were slightly out of focus and perhaps not actually there. It was a relief on Sunday morning to see a new staff person at the desk, and yet still another one on Sunday afternoon, although the last guy had walleye.

2010-09-17T07:30:00.003-04:00

I started another kilnforming class last night. This one is more advanced and we'll be doing thick glass pieces, more sculptural forms, that sort of thing. I had the usual first-day-of-school anxiety about everyone in the class being way better than me, and indeed most of them are flat-glass majors, if you will, with their own sets of tools. Some regard themselves as artists, whereas I regard myself as "someone who takes classes." But by the end of class I had a ton of ideas for projects for the next 8 weeks.

The X-factor is that Urban Glass, where I study, is at the start of a major transition. The city-owned building they're in about to undergo a 2-year renovation, and they have to exit by sometime in the spring. At the moment, they don't know where they're going to stay, and that's producing a lot of anxiety: Will they find temporary quarters? Will they be big enough to accommodate everything they offer now, or would some part of the facilities have to be excised? Will the move and chaos kill off a struggling arts organization? What about the people who have worked there for years, and the artists who use the facilities daily? How do you even move a 6x6' furnace built to hold hundreds of pounds of 2300-degree molten glass?

I had a whole curriculum sketched out for me and Isaac for the fall and winter, lots of projects that explored new techniques and sometimes involved building up the infrastructure to do other things longer-term. I might rescript it a bit, cut back on the long-term stage-oriented stuff in favor of things I can bring home the next day. You never know.

2010-09-15T09:23:00.002-04:00

With Mexico and Amsterdam now in the rear-view mirror, inevitably I've started thinking about next year's travel. Nothing is lined up yet, though Claudia and I have had a pretty strong conviction that it would be the year we'd go to Spain. I've wanted to go for years, because it has a lot of my favorite things: ham, red wine, Islamic-influenced architecture, and Spanish. Our two weeks in Mexico persuaded me that, although I don't have Claudia's fluency, I can get by perfectly well in the language. I know enough to deal with standard transactions and menus, and if my vocabulary falls short, I know enough words to eventually make myself understood. I didn't know the word for toad, for example, but our guide in the canyon eventually understood what I meant by "the animal that is like a frog but is very dry." Lizards were a little more awkward, being "the animals that are like snakes but have legs."

So there's Spain. But then Claudia came back from a weekend visiting a friend who is a Polish historian, who happened to mention that he would be in Poland next year and we could come visit. If there's anything I love other than ham and red wine, it's Eastern Europe. It is actually true that just a few days before, I had said to Claudia, "Hey, can we go to Latvia sometime?"

It's all based on obscurity and, I increasingly realize, world geography as explained to me in the 1970s by my mother at about the time I was starting to get interested in maps. The Iron Curtain explains my entire fascination with Eastern Europe: It was mysterious and, like a hard-to-reach toy, all the more alluring. Offer me a ticket to Romania and I will kiss you full on the lips. And then I will go to Romania and even though it may be full of belching diesel and cigarette smoke with nothing to eat but grease-slicked bureks, I will be delighted because it's Romania and no one goes there. Nixon notwithstanding, China holds a similar fascination because it was Communist and therefore suspicious to my mother, except inasumuch as we ordered egg foo young from the nearest take-out place sometimes. Spain actually qualifies too, because it was separated from the rest of western Europe by a cloud of Franco-dominated obscurity back in those pivotal years. The politically inaccessible was just as strong a draw as the geographically inaccessible. And thus I grew up to be a person who likes my vacations difficult.

It will drive Claudia kind of crazy that I'm obsessing about this already. Not so much obsessing as daydreaming about the possibilities, but really we're not likely to make any decisions until next spring at best. They're both good options, Spain and the Baltics. But I'd probably drop either in a heartbeat if she expressed a previously unmentioned desire to see Papua New Guinea.