Facing It

Man with pipe, (Bryant Park ) Aug 2010

I take a lot of photos, but I'm always a little wary taking photos of people. It's something I have to work my way around, because I'm actually very interested in how people look, but very conscious of being behind the camera taking the picture. The double introspection is a bit much. Either you are aware that you are asking them to be super-aware of themselves. Or you are 'taking' their photo without their permission and neither seems palatable to me. If you are asking them to pose (or pause) for the photo - then you have to deal with the face most people throw up. The one they think is their best. Then you have to deal with the feeling of putting them in that position. Then, there is only a small window of time within which both parties are actually 'willing' to have the picture be taken. This is just my experience. 'Taking' a picture of someone who is not posing or not in a public performance role feels a lot like stealing to me. The only time it feels ok is when the person is an incidental part of a bigger scene, as in the picture of the girl with the umbrella. Its something I am still sorting out. One morning I saw a fascinating couple near Bryant Park. He was black, she was white, they both wore dreadlocks and were both wearing white except for the brightly colored ribbons in their hair. And, they were pushing a shopping cart with their personal effects. I felt relatively OK with the idea of crossing the street to a discreet vantage point and taking a shot of them. Which I did. But somehow, the man became aware of me, ( Crap! Was I not discreet enough?) turned his partner's head away and started to shake his fist at me. That's right. No-one else knew what was going on - but he and I were very aware of each other and the fight we were having. I felt terrible and deleted the one shot that I was able to squeeze off before he detected me. So, my reservations were not unwarranted. Fast forward an entire year and I'm in the same park ( I pass there every day on my way to work). I went to shoot a gigantic red hibiscus and then sat down for a bit. I was right behind this man. Should I? He was engrossed in his newspaper and his pipe - which he knocked against the side of the park chair every now and then. I took one - he didn't flinch. I took another and another and another - actually not even composing the frame, but working more with the feeling of taking a photo without 'permission'. I'm still not sure that it feels right.

Giant hibiscus - Bryant Park, Aug 2010

Girl, Central Park 10/28/09

Man with smoke  - Aug 2010

Lost Filling Saves Evening.

 Bee on the coleus flower stalk.

There is nothing like fear to cut anger. I think it's a better salve than happiness because when you're really angry you're invested in holding on to it, and nothing as post-ponable as happiness will oust it.

Last night I was stirring the pot again, walking to the corner drugstore to get a repair kit for my mother-in-law, who'd lost a dental filling during her encounter with a slice of cranberry nut bread from Zaro's. That wasn't why I was angry, on the contrary - I'd hoped taking the walk would distract me from the bitter feeling that was threatening to ruin the start of my weekend, if it hadn't already. Anyway, I walk in to the Walgreen's (which has come and plunked itself down in the old location of our neighborhood grocery store, which was itself hemmed out by astronomical lease rates. I heard Walgreen's paid $5 million, and the grocery store manager told me they just couldn't beat or even match it). I went quickly to the dental aisle and picked up the repair kit and some Ambesol in case my mother-in-law started to have pain - then I went to the register to pay. In front of me there was a frail elderly lady who was speaking in a whisper to the checkout girl while sliding her Chase banking card across the counter. Then she turned to me, stepped aside and said - 'Miss, go ahead.' Normally I would, because I am always in a rush, but instead I said - no, no take your time. I realized that the wait was cooling me down and I really didn't mind. So the old lady turned back to the girl and continued speaking: 'This is my card' (again sliding it towards the register). She had no purchases. Waving her hand: 'I went back, but they are all out'. The girl and I turned to look toward the back of the store trying to figure out what it was that she couldn't find. 'They are out and about doing things'. 'I came out and the door closed, see this is my card' (again pushing the bankcard forward as if it would somehow explain everything) 'I put the key in, I think it was the wrong door...' At this, she put her hand over her mouth in a expression that was a mix of despair and "oh-oh, I made a mistake". It was then that I noticed two medical bracelets on her right wrist and my insides dropped. She was lost, or forgetting, or both. I don't know if we were seeing 'Big Al' or a close cousin, but immediately connecting the dots, the room collapsed into concerted action. It was like slow motion suddenly speeding up again as it does in the Matrix movies. The salesgirl took her to have a seat at the Pharmacy, and made a call to the medics. The security guard nodded assuredly as if he'd just foiled a robbery. Another sales person materialized at the register to ring up my purchases which now seemed  ridiculous and comforting at the same time - a lost filling, what a laughable thing! That was when happiness (or a close cousin) was free to make its entry.

Photo: this morning, while writing

West Indian 'Iced Tea' - a summer recipe

Here are the ingredients for one of my favorite summer beverages - it's called mauby. 

Served cold, its a golden brown, bracing thirst quencher. OK... its an acquired taste, but it is brown. I've been drinking a lot of it lately as a substitute for coca cola: no caffeine, no fizz, but I've got the cold covered.

Clockwise from top: 

mauby bark from the mauby tree

anise/anise seed  

(use either seeds OR flower stalk with seeds)

star anise (seed pod shown with seeds)

clove

cinnamon stick

bay leaf 

and at the center - spice.

To make the concentrate:

*Add 3 cups of water to a medium sized pot over a high fire.
*Add 8 pieces of mauby bark, plus all other ingredients (in about the amounts shown) to the water and bring to a rolling boil. Boil till water reduces to about 2 cups brownish concentrate.
*Pour off the concentrate and save.
*Add a fresh 3 cups of water to the pot of herbs and boil again. This can be done 2 more times, each   successive boil yielding a less bitter concentrate.

To make the beverage:
*Add 2 or more parts water to 1 part concentrate (depending on how much hair you want on your chest).
*Add sugar to taste.
*Chill and serve.

Photo: tonight, kitchen table.

From here

We'd like to think our perspective matters.

We know that the law upholds our right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', but that's just a cease and desist. What of us, really?

Do our thoughts matter?

our feelings?

What about our individual experiences?

'If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears...'

and, what does it mean 'to matter'?

Photos: 
1&2 - at the blessing of the fleet, City Island, NY (June 2009)

3 - butterfly on seathrift (my backyard)
4. my neighbor's garden gnomes
5 &6 - Zhongshan Park, Shanghai China (2007)
7. self portrait - Trinidad (2009)

Compensation

I have been plagued most of my life by a propensity for getting lost, and by a poor memory. Both would haunt me in serial nightmares which may have their roots in childhood trauma (what doesn't?) and would eventually mushroom into a lifelong fear of getting lost and forgetting.

Getting lost and forgetting.
One of my mother's sisters spent her last years in a deep fog, a victim of Alzheimer's. Two of her other siblings are in earlier, but nevertheless devastating stages of the illness. My Aunt Yvonne called up the other day from Devon, England where she lives alone. She is sill lucid enough to realize that she is forgetting, which may be more distressing than being in total oblivion. She does not want to live alone anymore and is planning what she says will be her last trip to Australia, a country she very much loves.
My Uncle Henry lives in Texas. He wakes up at night disoriented and wanders through the house looking for the familiar among the mundane. He thinks he's lost, but he's forgetting too. Is there any difference?

Terrifying as this all is, it is not the kind of 'getting lost and forgetting' that has plagued me.
Let's start with numbers. I can't hold them in the order that I got them. Dyslexia? Maybe.
My job is all about numbers - special numbers like prices, quantities and dates. Markdowns and margins.
These are numbers that no one can afford for me to get wrong, so to compensate for my handicap I have become a note-taker extraordinaire. I have notebooks dating back ten years detailing my daily to-do's and important events including a log of the days I was not at work ( absence is a defense), phone numbers, user names and passwords for the secured sites and databases I must navigate in the course of doing my job.
If there is a meeting, however informal, I take the minutes. Minutes are especially important in two-person meetings. If I sense that 'drape thy derriere' (aka C.Y.A) insurance is required, I follow up with an email detailing the exchange. This dysfunction is not limited to numbers, but happily, problems with prose are less in evidence. My worst work-related nightmare is being cornered with a question whose answer I know but can't remember. Try proving that. I'd be the perfect fall-gal if I couldn't  refute or confirm something with conviction, and as you know, conviction is the difference between the blue sky and a self-healing... I mean, a cell ceiling.

Similarly, I have no sense of direction - no internal gyroscope. Or, not one that functions: turn me around a few times and I'm lost. I thought a GPS would make up for my non-existent nose for North, but it did so much more. The directions given by the typical GPS are moronic, containing lots of loops and 'long cuts'. However, following them is not as moronic as getting lost and it is loads better than feeling lost.
I've named my GPS's female voice 'Alice' as in Jefferson Airplane's Go Ask Alice.
I once followed Alice's directions for Brooklyn which took me from the Bronx to lower Manhattan via the FDR Drive and through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Had I Map-Quested it, I might have gotten there faster than you could say 'Jackie Robinson Parkway', but at least I had the luxury of telling Alice where to get off, rather than feeling like an idiot that I got lost. GPS devices are really mis-marketed as navigational aids; they're at least 50% psychological aids, too.

In all seriousness, I would not like to fall victim to 'Big Al'. I'd much rather lose my faculties gradually in a way that my son and future grandchildren would find at least mildly entertaining. The more hokey stereotypes I can fit, the better. Advances in dentistry have probably saved my teeth from a watery resting place and circumvented a slew of old-lady jokes, but hell - I can get bifocals, my hearing could fade gradually.
In the movie 'Mission Impossible III', Tom Cruise's character, breathless from a brush with death, phones a friend for a favor: access to some restricted data files. The friend says, 'I've gotta use my scissors and shit for this.' which to me, was hilarious. I cracked up laughing, repeating it (at least twice) to my son, who informed me dryly with a withering look: Mom, it's 'I'm gonna lose my citizenship for this.'
Which, in 22 states and counting, would be no joke. I like what I heard better.

Corners

This morning, while riding the bus on my way to work, I had a sudden flashback of my childhood school.

It was a bluish-gray building, I'd say I remember it as a 'stern' shade of gray. The principal, Sister Gerome, always wore a black skirt and a white shirt, and on her head - a black cotton veil over a white skullcap.

The school building itself was symmetrical, but the yard was another matter. The building's wide entrance was secured only by a large black accordion gate which gave access to the lobby, and beyond the lobby, a central courtyard around which the classrooms were arranged in two tiers. The central courtyard was our main playground, but around the perimeter of the school was a narrow ribbon of yard, itself shielded by a tall fence from the sidewalk and the street beyond.

One of these peripheral segments was, inexplicably, a triangular shaped space. The apex of this more or less isosceles-shaped triangle was the least frequented spot in the entire school compound. Children would walk there with an air of trepidation, heightened by the fact that the apex was not closed, but open just enough for one child at a time to pass through to another segment of the periphery. Not only that, but the apex opened into a tiny rock garden with some low shrubs. So you'd have to navigate the narrow opening, step onto the gravel and squeeze past the shrubs. Its fair to say that the apex was planted like this to discourage us children from passing there.

The interesting thing about this morning's flashback is that it was built brick by brick from an instantaneous image of this little corner of the schoolyard. Its almost like I've folded and stored the entire memory of the school in the empty space that was the open apex of a triangular shaped piece of yard. First came the corner,
then the fences, the courtyard, then the lobby, Sister Gerome, and finally the facade of the school in that stern bluish gray.

I often wonder about my son's inner life. Just as I wasn't able (and indeed, never seriously wanted) to share my childhood perspective with my parents, I can't know how my son perceives his world, how he throws his net over the things he means to keep, which oddly shaped corners will suggest the whole, and which empty spaces are carrying entire segments of his universe.

An Ode to Weeds

Maybe it's an act of deference. Or defiance. But, yes, I water weeds. North America has so many beautiful flowering weeds (I recently learned that Emily Dickinson cultivated the dandelion) that I think its a shame to obliterate them. Besides, I am a lax gardener - I like a little disorder in the border. My first spring with my own garden was a revelation. We arrived in the month of March and didn't know what was in the yard. By April I learned: Helleboros for one. Peonies for two. Hostos, Lily of the Valley, Dwarf Maple, hyacinth, tulips, azaleas, as well as two very fragrant shrubs with white flowers that smelled like jasmine - but whose identities are still not clear.

Helleboros

There were also the 'weeds': the vigorous white potato vine, a purple flowering weed, a yellow flowering weed, a blue flowering weed, a pink flowering weed, a patch of beautiful moss growing under one tree and some tiny succulents piggybacking on top of that.

These flowers are small, but they do take on a kind of beauty when left to grow in numbers, or when photographed up close. I don't know why I've got such an affection for them. I let the potato vine grow as it pleases and 'speak to it' nicely about leaving the tomatoes and the hydrangeas alone. By and large, it has complied. I let wild grasses come up in my patio boxes, reasoning that their fluffy tufts are like flowers after all...and there is a succulent weed that has come up between the flagstones that I am watching  to see how far it will fan out. 

Maybe I was so starved of vegetation in my first few years here that I am reluctant to pull up anything that brings a little beauty into my world - no matter what the neighbors say. We have 2 full grown pine trees - down from 5, (neighbor on the right complained about the pine cones and needles falling onto her yard). Maybe I am so angry that I bowed to pressure to cut down those 3 evergreens that I am holding onto my weeds with all my might.

Photos: mine - taken in the backyard.

                                                  

                                                  

  

A Brush with Authenticity

Yesterday, I attended the Red Hawk Pow-Wow at Bear Mountain State Park. I've been attending these events ( at least one every summer) since I was given a medicine wheel by my friend David about 7 years ago. I was going to Arizona for training in energy healing and he thought it was an appropriate present. The medicine wheel itself was very simple: a leather-wrapped circle divided into four quadrants,each dividing bar made of the same pale leather twisted on itself. It was garnished at each of the four junctions with a turquoise-colored plastic bead. He told me quite plainly, and almost proudly, that this particular medicine wheel came from an Avon catalog. Now, I've only seen an Avon catalog twice, and neither time were medicine wheels featured, but who would claim that if it wasn't so?

David is a Guyanese-born East Indian with a British accent who looks for all intents and purposes like a Native American. David actually resembles the Native American actor Wes Studi (who played the Huron Indian 'Magua' in the movie 'The Last of the Mohicans'). He told me that he takes full advantage of this fact: growing his hair down past his shoulders, 'infiltrating' Indian Nation gatherings all over the Tri-State area and hanging out with the Indian bretherin. His earnestness is endearing, and I get it.

A good number of the participants at Pow-wows these days don't even look like Native Americans. I've seen African American Native Americans, and likewise many decidedly Anglo-looking Native Americans who must have just a sliver of Native DNA - between them! Even I, having not even a pin-prick's worth of Native blood, find a great deal of resonance with the idea of being Native - having some pristine, primordial aspect that is unevolved in the best possible sense of the word.

The first (and only) dancer to get my attention yesterday was the young boy pictured above. To see his picture is to see nothing. I was mesmerized by his movement - the intensity of his physical presence and the subtlety of his interpretation. He looked all of seven. He balanced his body securely even as he lowered it into a near-stoop while swaying his trunk purposefully left then right to the beat of the drum. His head was majestic as his arms, like levers, cranked the whole of him back upright. What a joy! I doubt this was instilled in pow-wow prep - there were 5 other dancers in his age-group and none of them displayed his exquisite intuition. There is just this thing - and you know it when you see it.

The Winds of Change

Bryant Park daffodils - Spring 2005

 Today I caught a whiff of Autumn. It came floating on a breeze from the east, a degree or so cooler that I was expecting for August. It was 6 pm and I was walking along 42nd Street in Manhattan, just outside Bryant Park. I was heading home from work. It's a summer for which I'd made a simple resolution: to enjoy myself the most I could - maybe even the best ever. Instead it is looking like a 'lost summer'. I am working the hardest I have in a long long time, covering for a co-worker on maternity leave, and at the same time dealing with an onslaught of orders for my own division. We landed a huge order for Wal-Mart: 1.2 million units of mens' shorts to be delivered from December this year through May 2011. We have also been contracted to produce another 200,000 shorts for a well-known private label. None of it is a challenge, the challenge is doing it all. A few days ago, I read a post,  Daily Om - The Life of your Dreams which seemed to address my current 'stuck-ness'. Over the past few months, I have been slowly making peace with my Cosmic Dance Partner (the good old CDP). I have felt the wind at my back, and I swear an invisible hand has moved a chess piece or two. This has all made my life a little smoother, not to mention giving me a sense that things are actually working to my benefit. One needs that from time to time. After the Smackdown  I was angry at the Universe, then I got way too busy to keep stirring that pot. Now, I am just doing the day as it presents itself - which included, this morning - putting someone's broken Snapple bottle into the garbage can next to the bus stop. Some things just have your name written on them, especially the ones you almost break your neck tripping over. So this is the nature of the double D ( Destiny & Duty) as it presents itself to me. It seems to be the formula for my life - my particular equation with which I tinker at my peril. Its a long equation, not light-bulbish by any stretch, but maybe there is still room to salvage some elegance in the solution. Change for me may well be borne on many successive breezes, each off by just a degree or so from the one before. Today, I caught a whiff.

The New York Public Library overlooking Bryant Park, NYC - 2007

Photos: mine

The Courageous Life

I just did some late 'spring cleaning' - gathered up several bags of clothing and 'stuff' that needs to be either given to the Red Cross, stored in the basement, sold in a yard sale or dumped. We have too much. When I used to travel for my job, I used to love living from a suitcase for the two weeks. It was liberating.

Grasses in Arizona - January '07

And, when I would go to Arizona for yoga camps - I would relish packing the bare necessities: 5 white tee shirts, 2 pairs white 'ghee' pants, 5 pairs socks, 10 pairs underwear, deodorant... and a flashlight. When I got back home from these trips, and even from vacations - everything I came back to seemed excessive - so many drawers of clothing, so many shoes. It was so much simpler just living out of a suitcase.

Arizona, January '07

My brothers and I grew up very modestly, and the few things that we had, in retrospect, have taken on the luster of holy grails for their simplicity, functionality, integrity and lack of pretension: an all-metal folding dining set that my father painted a different bright color every few years; a wooden stool that was set just outside the back door looking out onto the vegetable garden; the beautiful mosaic tile floor of the back patio that we somehow never properly appreciated as children; the bedsheets, printed with little ditsy floral patterns that I would recognize in an instant even now. I find that the more prosaic these things are, the more 'background' they occupied in the past, the greater their power to call forth feelings and impressions almost Lazarus-like from our memories.

Berries on a tree. Catskills, NY - Nov'09

We didn't have a store-bought artificial Christmas tree which most people used in the tropics. So, my father would cut down a small live tree. He had to strip the leaves because it was not an evergreen and the leaves would dry and fall off anyway. After stripping the leaves, he painted the whole tree with a layer of glue and we used cotton balls to stick 'snow' on all the branches. Then we decorated it with multicolored string lights and thin multicolored glass foil balls. It was beautiful, it was bold. So bold that we didn't want our friends to see it. Conformity does kill courage. Now that I look at the one existing photograph of one of his Christmas trees, I marvel at my father's creativity and our stunning lack of appreciation.

Arizona, January '07

Here in America, we have so much that appreciation is almost extinct, and poor courage, like a refugee has had to seek higher ground. These days courage has to make the news to make the news, and the simple art of 'making do' is now riding the leading edge of a new 'creativity' that glamorizes frugality and  homespun unsophistication. This is now in vogue and therefore smacks of (no!) conformity. And, did I mention conformity kills?

Photos: Mine

Love

I'll freely admit

to not knowing

how it works -

what it provokes,

or prevents,

what it soothes,

what it upends, 
and neither what 
sustains or suspends

it, what begins and
(God!) what ends it.

- Lorraine Robain

Up in the Air

My fingernails are almost grown out. Only about 2 millimeters or so remain before the deep ridges disappear from the nails of my left hand. I don't know the cause for sure, but every time I've had them there has been a preceding period of intense stress or grief in my life. This time they were the result (I think) of the tough time I had in February-March of this year. After February I found myself dropping things I didn't have the energy for. I eased out of situations in which I felt uncomfortable, and focused mostly on work and my son's upcoming 6th grade finals. I debated whether I should even plant a garden this spring. I almost didn't. 

In the movie "Up in the air", George Clooney's character Ryan Bingham is a corporate downsizing expert, a traveling executioner. In his spare time, he gives seminars on the merits of downsizing one's life. He encourages people to examine the contents of their life's 'backpacks', to unpack them and repack only what is really essential. That's a compelling notion, except that some things are not quite so black and white.

What about those things that bring you enough of both pain and happiness to keep you weighing them in the balance forever? 

"How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff.Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sister, your children your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other, to live symbiotically over a lifetime: star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks." 


- Ryan Bingham

Collateral

 I had been watching the tomato patch for a few days now - staring, trying to pick out the tomato vines from the rest of the plants in between. My neighbor to the right had given me the seedlings which I'd neglected to plant till at least 2 weeks too late. Then I'd neglected to stake and tie them till another couple of weeks beyond the optimum time, and now the weeding - similarly delayed. My neighbor to the right hates weeds, hates disorder and even disdains her vegetable plants that fail to perform. My neighbor to the left, whose yard also bounds mine is another prude who will snip anything hanging over her fence. I think she barely tolerates my tomatoes which lean on, and gain some support from the pristine chain-link fence which divides us. That leaves my neighbor directly behind my backyard, God bless him. His yard is a jungle. There's his pool bounded by roses, clematis, blackberries, honeysuckle, plus other assorted beautiful unidentifiable species of greenery. All of it tumbles over my back fence, made of unpainted, weathered picket and covered with an evergreen vine which grew over the top and through the spaces between the slats years ago, and stayed. In the Spring I get pink clematis, followed by the honeysuckle, sprays of cherry red roses, followed by the blackberries. The whole thing is covered by the white flowers of a vigorous and 'pesky' potato vine (a morning glory variety) that my neighbors to the left and right abhor - but which I cultivate for its flowers. I have stakes and shepherd's crooks for it to clamber on, and have fantasized about letting it run up the pole to the birdhouse, except my neighbor to the left might not look too kindly on that. But, back to the tomatoes. I had put off the weeding until today. But the thing about tomatoes is - once the flowers set, you have to be very careful with them. They fall off with rough handling as do the tomatoes themselves once they've grown in- which is what happened as I did my weeding and supplementary (extremely tardy) staking and tying today. And that is what brings me to my little bowl of green tomatoes.

The Bright Side

Never mind that the kites got stuck, 
don't their colors look pretty against 
the flowers on the tree?



Photo: Queens Park Savannah,
Trinidad - 2008

After the Long Winter

Some dreams need to die

so you can live without

Unfulfilment its worse 
than just Having nothing 
impossible impractical

expired dreams Need to go

If all they do Is ache

they need to be Extracted

like a sick tooth or broken
into a Million pieces and
scattered to the four

winds As dust and lost

like you'd Lose a tailgater or

Your patience for nonsense

shaken like you'd Shake a bad

bug or any Other sly microbe

That weaseled in uninvited or 

like You'd shake the drapes off

pretty somewhat but laden with

your Sloughed-off skin After 
the long winter.

Lorraine Robain


Photo - kites over Shanghai 2006

Default to Duty

 So, I'm back to one of my earlier strands of thought. This idea of self determination versus fate or destiny and to what extent these two overlap or dovetail, or don't. I've just gotten up from a cosmic smackdown. Yup. I'm against the ropes catching my breath. I tried to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee but my Cosmic Dance Partner wasn't having it.

The CDP has very definite ideas about what steps I should be taking and when I get too creative, he/she/it reminds me that I'm not in charge. What the CDP seems to uphold as far as my initiative is duty-driven activity. If I'm doing duty or, even better, double-duty - then voila there's a yellow brick road and I can sashay or rhumba or cha cha  to my heart's delight.

But when I set off on some little side trip, we've got trouble - a la the aforementioned smackdown.
The smackdown itself is a curious, unfathomable thing.
I don't get hurt. Not really. I just get neutralized. I get a 'game over' screen and I'm right back where I started. The music just stops.  Its like you roll the dice and draw the card that says: Go to jail, go directly to jail... When the new game screen comes up, I usually hit the 'duty' button in a hurry.

My life hums along when I'm doing the big D which includes all the motherly, wifely, jobly, and gardenly things that I've signed up for - or that fall into my lap for my attention.

I have tried to change my life a few times: or add some things that I thought would enhance my life experience, but they've never stuck. Maybe through lack of will or perseverance, frustration, bad luck, bad timing or, sometimes via the good old smackdown - I've been 'delivered' from these 'distractions' from duty. Some examples of non-duty activities: the yoga kick I was on for 6 years, the poetry kick I was on for about 12 years, an outrageous plan to leave my family for 3 months and just be alone - these things, have come to naught. Or the pinnacles I imagined I'd reach, just weren't reached, or didn't exist, or were shrouded in cloud...or, who the hell knows.

There is a sense of resignation at this point - that nothing outside of certain parameters will be supported or condoned by my CDP. So, making lemonade, I reason that its for the best, that I'm probably being protected from unseen and unknown dangers, that my duty is my destiny, so why fight it?
It's a good life all told, and I am happy when I view it as such, though sometimes it just doesn't feel like mine. So, if I want smooth sailing I say: Give me duty or give me death!        But on the inside its more like a rumble from the belly of the Amistad: Give us frickin' free.

Resisting Arrest

They say it takes 21 days to form a new habit, or more darkly, to break a bad one. I've been a hopeless Coke addict for several years.The most helpful insight to my situation was contained in the question posed to me on a plane to Shanghai. The man next to me, with whom I'd struck up a conversation asked, "Is it the caffeine, or the fizz that you really crave?" He said that these were Coke's two most addictive components - the taste and the temperature being the others. I stopped, stunned at this truly new perspective. I didn't know. I knew that I could take coffee or leave it. I knew I couldn't drink a flat coke or a hot (room temperature) coke. I knew the latter because that's precisely what they had me drink when I was pregnant to test for gestational diabetes - a room temperature super sweet, super concentrated black cola drink - without the fizz. I hated it. Could it be that I was in it just for the fizz? If that was true then I should be just as happy with a seltzer. I tried drinking Perrier for a while, I loved the refreshing cold fizz, but then I got tired of the blandness. What does this mean except that sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The net result is that with the exception of some periods of time when I seem not to crave it very much, I am still an avid Coke drinker. It was so bad (or so good) that I developed a system of grading or rating Coca Cola depending on its source. Coke currently comes in the 12 oz can, the 20 oz bottle, the 1 liter bottle, the 2 liter bottle, the mini glass bottle, and the soda fountains at fast food restaurants. The best tasting Coke ( to me) comes from the soda fountains -- if it is freshly dispensed. I never accept a cup of Coke that's been standing (as happens when they pre-dispense during the lunchtime rush). Besides the fact that all soda fountains are not created equal, each soda fountain is also subject to variation. A Coke pumped early in the morning from a machine resting all night tends to be syrupy and less fizzy than one pumped at lunchtime from the same machine when all cylinders are firing and the seltzer/syrup ratio is optimal. I'm serious.The best tasting Coke is also extremely cold - loaded with ice or just shy of freezing.

My son and I have rated the Mc Donald's in our vicinity and there is one in particular that we will not buy from - reason being the Coke tastes 'soapy' - which means that oil from the fryers must have condensed somewhere in the works of the soda fountain. This is truly spit-worthy.

The next best Coke comes from a can which has been chilled to the brink of freezing. The 2 liter will not taste good for more than a few hours after its opened. The 16 oz bottle is oddly gassy -- way too much fizz and not enough 'Coke' taste.

That being said -- my habit is one 12 oz can a day, or one medium soda fountain drink a day, but not more than 2 cans a day. I like the soda fountain option because the amount of ice they put actually leaves less room for soda. Beyond 2 cans per day, the caffeine gets to me. I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself. I know a man who drinks two 2-liter bottles of Pepsi in a sitting. Really. He chugged that down during the course of a 3 hour writing class that we both attended, so God knows how much he really consumes in a day. Maybe I'm not too bad, though it is unnerving to see what Coke does to car paint and I've heard that it can clean toilet bowls. My insides must be squeaky.

Of Passwords and Prestige

My 12 year old son is a video game junkie. This I say without a smile or even a hint of one. There is nothing I like about the fact that he prefers to spend many hours a day on his PS3 rather than doing any other activity. It used to be that he would play FIFA soccer or NBA basketball, but lately its just one game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II - aka MW2.  He plays this game with his friend down the block, his cousin in Queens, a friend in Florida, and his cousin's cousin in Austria - at the same time. The ridiculous result of this arrangement is that these boys would rather sit at the game console in their own homes than meet in person to play. Meeting in person has a major drawback - they are away from their own machines and profiles - i.e. they are away from their game 'identities': their K-D ratios, and their 'rank'.

If your K-D (kill to death) ratio sucks, you are labeled a 'Noob'(slang for the slang: newbie). That's such an undesirable state of affairs that if one of your friends is a really good player, you may consider giving him your password, so that he can play 'as you' and raise your rank or prestige. The other way this can go is - someone who knows your password and wants to ruin your rep can play 'as you' and destroy your rank.

Recently my son's account was hacked, basically hijacked. Someone signed in, changed the password and locked him out. Since he had shared his password with a couple of his friends, he had at least that many suspects. His level of distress was greater only when he learned that the 'OpTic Nation sniper clan' he'd been invited to was a fake (a whole other story). The process of smoking out the offender was unsettling for him to go through, and painful for me to observe.

It did turn out to be one of his friends, though not the one he suspected. The deed was done in retaliation for an imagined slight - but my son made light of the incident to keep the friendship. We reset all his passwords and I told him never to share them again, which translated to 'fight your own battles and don't trust anybody'. In the end it was this that he had the hardest time with.

    

Thunderbirds are Go!

July 23, 24 and 25, 2010
32nd Annual Thunderbird American Indian

Mid-Summer Pow Wow
New York City 's oldest and largest powwow will feature three days of inter-tribal Native American dance competitions to which the public is invited. Over 40 Indian nations are represented at this spectacular event held in the apple orchard on the farm grounds. A large selection of quality Native American art, crafts, jewelry and foods are available.
Admission: Adults $9.00 (all weekend pass $15.00), children: $4.00 (age 12 and under) (all weekend pass $5.00) 

Performance Times	Gates Open
Friday	7:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.	6:00 p.m.
Saturday	12:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. 7:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.	10:00 a.m.
Sunday	12:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.	10:00 a.m.

http://www.queensfarm.org/events.html

Photos: mine from various Thunderbird pow-wows

The Good Doctor

I just had what can only be described as a wonderful experience. About an hour ago, I had my wisdom tooth pulled. I'll pause here for effect... Yes - I had a beautiful time at my extraction! All week I'd been apprehensive, having nightmarish visions of the doctor standing on the armrests of the chair, yanking and being unable to dislodge the tooth, but like I do in all stressful situations, I started my abdominal breathing exercises as soon as I sat in the chair and tried to visualize a good outcome.

As I sat breathing from my belly, in walked Dr Moore. Doctor Marlon Moore. A tall, beautiful black man whose first words to me as he looked at my chart were: "Wow! We were born on the exact same day!" Same day, same year. He was pleasant, gentle, positive and bright and talked me through the whole process, being very patient and not at all condescending. He got my icky wisdom tooth out literally before I knew it.

What was very remarkable about him was his touch. I've been to periodontists, endodontists, regular GP dentists and cosmetic dentists and their "hand manners" were all very clinical and sometimes even downright hostile. My periodontist treated my face as an obstacle to his work - that's the only way I can put it. But Dr. Moore was so very caring in his touch, I couldn't believe it. After he was done, I gave him a crooked smile while biting down on gauze, shook his hand and thanked him as profusely as I could with jaw full of novocaine.

It was by far the most pleasant experience I've ever had in a dentist's chair. In fact as I left the office I was raving to Dexter (my husband) that I was in love with my dentist (actually, he's an oral/maxillofacial surgeon).I told him how sexy and handsome he was- and how could he not be, being born on the same day as me. He was also married - the lucky girl! So, I've got the ice pack wedged between my jaw and my shoulder as I type, but otherwise I'm great. Thank you, Dr. Moore!