TanTian

That Thing You Do to Faces

2005-12-02T02:40:00.000-05:00

Any of you who have studied a foreign language long enough to be disqualified as a beginner but not long enough to be considered truly proficient will be familiar with the art of talking around words. This is the skill that allows you to convey the meaning of the word without ever using the word itself, and it usually works like this:

“In the park there are machines that you sit on and they go up and down very fast to scare you. But they are for fun. You sit on them because you want to have fun. Sometimes they go very high. Like in that place in California that is famous for the little cartoon mouse. They have many of these scary machines that you sit on for fun. ”

Or, in instances that simultaneously humble and amaze you, it works like this:

“I’m looking for a cruciferous vegetable that is a verdant green. It has a very thick stem and a bulbous, rounded top. It is of high nutritive value and is a member of the same genus as the cauliflower. I am hoping to purchase it so that I can include it in a smorgasbord of salads that I whipping up for a casual gathering in my place of domicile this evening."

The art of the verbal pantomime is definitely not limited to language learners—those unfortunate enough to have to converse with us often resort to this tactic, as well. In their dealings with me, the patient denizens of Beijing have proved themselves to be surprisingly skilled in this arena. With the help of some dramatic gestures, inventive facial expressions and “international” sound effects, we manage to communicate with one another quite effectively.

All that aside, sometimes precision is priceless. There are definitely those moments when you need to know the right word, right away, and nothing else will suffice. This kind of moment might come, for example, in an emergency. Or it might come when you are in a real hurry. Or it might come, as it did for me this Wednesday, when you are naked and sitting a foot away from someone that you have only met twice before and who is also naked, and you are not in a bedroom, but instead in semi-public and there are two strangers wearing white jackets talking to you and looking at you. In moments like this, for instance, you don’t want to beat around the bush. In moments like this, you want to know the phrase for “turn over” so that you can turn away from your new acquaintance and the people in white jackets, hide your blushing face, stop worrying that someone is telling you to do a naked squat, and turn over already.

This Wednesday I treated myself to a facial and treated one near stranger and two total ones to a view of my bare, wintertime flesh. I am not confident my companions can say the same, but for my part, at least, the awkwardness of the naked non-communication incident was worth enduring in order to get to the pure luxury of a facial treatment so extravagant that it included a massage (the reason, in case you were waiting for it, that we had our clothes off in the first place), lasted one and a half hours, and left me so mushy and relaxed that I could barely walk—all for less than the price of a movie ticket and a bucket of popcorn back home.

When I returned to our apartment and asked Mark if my skin looked any different he told me: “Yes, it looks rosy. Rosy around the nose.” I can’t say I was delighted but I also can’t say I care. Because, here’s the deal: it’s not really about the skin. It’s about pampering. Some of you might scoff at the thought of paying any amount of money just to have someone rub you and rub stuff onto you. But trust me, you have an inner diva and it’s just begging to be indulged, especially if your outer diva spends its days in the grey grime and cold of Beijing. I am not a person who goes gaga over massage and I don’t pay particular attention to my skin, but just two days after this experience, I am already hoping for an outbreak of pimples so I have some excuse to treat myself again.

Those of you reading this in Beijing (and I know there are a few of you): don’t delay. Grab a friend and get to the salon. And if you don’t know how to say facial, try this:

“That amazing thing that you do with soft hands and sweet-smelling potions. When you rub the face and put cream and hot towels on it. And you also rub the back, and the shoulders and the arms and even the scalp and cause ordinary Americans to wonder if they should give up their homeland and take up permanent residence in Beijing just so they can come back to you. You know, that thing you do to the face.”

(Just remember, “turn over” is “fan shen”.)

Happy Times Together

2005-11-26T01:09:00.000-05:00

Over this holiday weekend, most Americans are focusing on two things: family and food. I’ve been looking for the right moment to share two fantastic Chinese views of American family time and American food, both encountered in Chinese-produced textbooks, and I’ve decided this is it. You can use your recent Thanksgiving experiences to judge their accuracy.

A Chinese View of American Family Life

(A dialogue from A Practical Course of English Phonetics, one of the textbooks Mark uses in his English pronunciation classes. Presented in full and precisely as it is in the text.)

“Happy Times Together I”

JP: In our family we often have good, happy times together. Sometimes the happy times are with the whole family and sometimes they are with the children.

DP: By doing so, we create a large back account of good memories. We arrange good memories for our family. Excuse me, Jennifer, I’m going to prepare cheese sandwiches for you.

JW: Thank you. Jim, what do you usually do to have happy times together?

JP: Well…, sometimes we go on short hikes, sometimes we go boating or swimming. Very often we just stay home together reading classic literature like Tom Sawyer.

JW: Do you often go on a trip?

JP: Yes, we often go on special little trips. Deidra and I also have special times alone for a weekend and let Brooke and Brittany have their own ways. It is very important in helping the children mature.

JW: So you keep your love for each other alive and let the children to be individual and independent.

JP: Yes, that is a part of solid family life.

A Chinese View on American Cuisine

(Excerpts from Chinese Listening Skills, the textbook for my Chinese listening class. Translated from the Chinese.)

In America, food is very casual. Although there are enough American restaurant names to cover the entire Earth, other than McDonalds, who can say what kind of food is distinctly American? Besides California Beef Noodle restaurant*, there are no restaurants with an American flavor.
Americans aren’t very particular about what they eat. For breakfast, Americans can eat whatever they want: if they want to eat cereal with banana slices and raisins, or if they want to eat buttered bread and a fried egg, who will know? As long as they fill their stomachs, they’re fine.

When Americans come to a Chinese restaurant, every person in the family orders the same one dish. They only talk about the atmosphere of the restaurant, the romance of it, and they don’t care about whether the chef is skilled or not.

The meal that takes Americans the most time to prepare is probably dinner, although you can’t say that it makes people too busy. For example, everyone buys pre-packaged food from the supermarket. Vegetables and meat are already fully cooked or half cooked when you buy them. You don’t have to prepare many dishes for dinner, either. The dinner you see most often is: a small bowl of soup, a main dish, something sweet, fruit and coffee or tea. The soup is usually canned soup to which you add a few spices that you like; the main dish is usually fried rice. You don’t have to spend time cooking the fruit and sweets. You can cook ring the dinner bell after 30 minutes. And this is the most complicated meal. Bachelors are even more casual. They can eat hamburgers and sandwiches every day without ever getting sick of them.

With the time they don’t spend on food, Americans can relax their pace of life—time that could be spent on household chores is instead spent on exercise.

Mark and I had happy Thanksgiving times together this Friday, instead of Thursday, and made a fantastic Mexican meal instead of Tofurkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie (or fried rice and canned soup). I hope that, no matter what you ate, or where, all of you and your families had the happiest of happy times together, too.

* Lost as I was in class? Apparently this was a Chinese chain restaurant once very popular in Beijing. What do they serve? California beef noodles, of course.

The Injured Oreo

2005-10-27T07:16:00.000-04:00

Up here in the north of China I’ve heard people have a chuckle or two about the Korean taste for canines. Unlike their Southern brethren, who are notorious for their willingness to eat anything with a heartbeat, Northern Chinese are more fastidious when it comes to the palate. So, here in Beijing, they don’t eat dogs. But, sadly, while they won’t eat them, they’ll definitely still beat them. Here’s the story of one little dog that, even if he wasn’t going to wind up on anyone’s plate, still came close to being lunch meat.

Mark and I were going about our lazy Saturday business, coming home from buying some vegetables, when we walked past a grimy restaurant and saw two kids playing way too roughly with a puppy perched a leaning table. We slowed down and looked sternly at the kids for a moment, then walked on. Moments later we heard a shrieking noise so loud and so repetitive that I was convinced that it must be coming from the construction site across the street, not from a living thing, a shrieking noise so terrible and earsplitting that it took over our other senses and made it hard to see and hard to think. We turned around to witness the same two kids hanging their heads while a grown-up scolded them holding a broken brick and the puppy shrieked in agony at their feet. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened.

But it was almost impossible to figure out what to do. Others on the street slowed down, and some clucked there tongues, but no one moved to take action. We mentally raced through a list of ideas (call the police, call the RSPCA, go talk to the dog’s owners) but kept stumbling against the same block (China, China, China). I knew I couldn’t count on my Chinese abilities—all my vocabulary had run away scared, leaving me to cry into my sweater with shock, frustration and the rage of impotency. After a few minutes, we walked away, distraught and shaken.

Fate dealt us our first lucky hand of the weekend when we arrived back at campus and bumped into one of Mark’s students, Hanson, who graciously agreed to accompany us back to the restaurant to check on the dog. We found the puppy, quieter now, and huddled on an ash heap behind the restaurant’s kebab grill. He couldn’t stand or walk. When we went inside and asked if he was okay, the owners laughed and told us that we could take him.

And so we did.

2005-10-27T07:10:00.000-04:00

By another incredible stroke of luck, there happens to be an animal hospital nearby the Sports University. So the fruit vendor next door to the restaurant gave us a cardboard box (we’d asked the restaurant for a box to carry the puppy in and they’d brought us a plastic rice sack), the puppy was deposited into it, and Mark and I carried him to the vet. All through the long and bumpy walk, as he was bounced and jostled, he was quiet. We arrived feeling very worried.

2005-10-27T07:02:00.000-04:00

Thankfully, these strips of meat weren’t hanging in front of the hospital until two days later, or we might never have convinced ourselves to enter. But they weren’t, so we did, and with my somewhat recovered Chinese, I explained the situation to a very old man in a very old white coat. He examined the puppy, which lay silently, and informed us that it did not have a broken leg but might have a broken ligament. While Mark ran home to get money, guide books, phone numbers and whatever else he could find to help us figure out what to do with this puppy that we could no way keep but couldn’t abandon, I paid, without knowing what I was buying, to give the puppy some shots of painkiller that seemed to cause him almost as much pain as the original injury.

The veterinarian and his assistant didn’t have any phone numbers or addresses of shelters that might take him, but kindly agreed to let the puppy stay there for one night, against their rules, while we tried to find him a home. We ran back to our apartment to start a frantic search.

Then, a gift fell out of the pages of That’s Beijing, which we had picked up just two days earlier: on page 134, an article on the Beijing Human and Animal Environmental Education Center, the one and only private animal shelter and protection entity in the entire country (yes, that’s right, the one and only, in a country almost the size of the United States). The gods were grinning at us.

The next morning, I finally got through to someone at the shelter, and in a broken-down gypsy cab we set-off to the outskirts of Beijing, driving on a road strewn with corn kernels set out to dry in the sun. Finally, after a wrong turn that took us past a field of ostriches (no lie) our personal yellow brick road brought us to the center’s door. We were greeted by a woman dressed in head to toe army camouflage, including a hat. While this sight didn’t exactly fill us with confidence that our tired little traveler would be treated with tender loving care in his new home, our worries were assuaged by the many photos of Jane Goodal visiting the center hanging framed on its walls and by the knowledge that the RSPCA has made it the center a “sister society”. (I mean, Jane Goodal! I wrote a report on her in the second grade and I don’t think my esteem for her has diminished at all since then.)

We filled out a little paperwork, made a donation, and then it was time to say goodbye. But before we could leave, we were asked what we’d like to call the pup. Mark had already dubbed him “Cripplespot,” in recognition of his resemblance to my old and weary Pound Puppy “Triplespot,” but we didn’t think that would fly at the shelter. Hambaobao (Hamburger) was nixed because they already had one (they also have a French Fry, we learned) so we settled on Oreo, or “O-Li-O”. When he’s all cleaned up, he’ll be a reverse Oreo—mostly white with a little black—but in his sooty, dirty state at the shelter, the puppy was like the real cookie deal. And so: Oreo.

We’ve been invited to visit him and we’re planning to do so soon. In the meantime, we’re hoping that his leg recovers, that he gets a new home and that he forgets almost everything that the last eight months of his life taught him. And that he barks! In two days, not one bark. Keep your fingers crossed for Oreo, folks. Unless, that is, you want to use them to send the incredibly necessary, life saving Beijing Human and Animal Environmental Education Center a donation! They need money to help feed and care for animals, and for their other efforts, like educating Beijingers (like the kids who abused Oreo about respect and care for animals. I’m waiting to hear if the center can accept checks from abroad, but in the meantime, if you think you’d like to help out, please let me know.

Poetry in Lotion

2005-10-19T21:16:00.001-04:00

As a person with a pretty strict set of rules about what will go into or onto her body, I’ve definitely blocked-up more than my fair share of grocery and drugstore aisles while poring over lists of product ingredients. While I’ve long-since resigned myself to life as a label-gazer, and have even begun to take some pride in the vocabulary of obscure additives I’ve built over the years (do all of you know what imidazolidinyl urea or sodium tallowate come from, hmmm?) I’m still finding shopping a sometimes exhausting experience here in China.

Making sure I’m not purchasing something made with animal ingredients is extra-hard in a country where a) they eat everything, b) skin products enhanced with snake oil and sheep placenta are run of the mill, and c) I don’t read the language very well and my well-worn, portable dictionary doesn’t have the English definition for the words sheep placenta anyway

So, screening Chinese products for vegan-friendliness is time-consuming and bewildering, yes, but on the flip-side, thanks to most Chinese companies’ bizarre compulsion to include English on the packaging of products that will almost never be marketed to an English speaking public, it is also highly-entertaining. Witness, please, the skincare line that I stumbled across at our local ChaoShiFa. I am sure you will as moved (although not buy), as I was.

On the poignant futility of water:

2005-10-19T21:16:00.000-04:00

I often wish I had some pure water of activation to suck on, don't you?

2005-10-19T21:15:00.000-04:00

If your milk is dirty then this is not the product for you.

2005-10-19T21:14:00.000-04:00

Ooh la la:

Fun and Lively or Hot and Deafening?*

2005-10-12T10:53:00.000-04:00

One of the delights of the Chinese language is its compound words. By some estimates there are more than 55,000 different characters in the Chinese language (now you know why I so rarely have an opportunity to post here). Each of these characters has its own, distinct meaning and stands as a word on its own, but the real fun begins when two or more characters are combined to make a new word. Some compound words are satisfyingly straightforward, such as when the words “fly” (fei) and “machine” (ji) come together to form (you guessed it!) “airplane” (飞机), and others are much more abstract. The more abstract compound words are my favorite—they’re like tiny little doorstops propping open secret entrances, letting me peek into this country’s culture, history and psyche and puzzle over a slice of view.

One of my all time favorite Chinese words has got to be “renao” (热闹), which means “lively”, and also “jolly” or “fun”, as in “let’s go check out the fun.” (Wait, we say that in America, right? I’m suddenly having a moment of English doubt.) The two characters that form “renao” can be directly translated as “hot” and “noisy,” respectively. This never fails to amuse me. Lately, I’ve been thinking of this word a lot because it seems so emblematic of an aspect of Chinese culture that I’m having a hard time adjusting to. To put it clearly, in my book, hot and noisy ≠ fun.

I mean, sure, I like the beach in the sun, rowdy conversations and the occasional raucous party, and nobody would ever call me quiet (indulge me while I don’t rule out the possibility of hot), but never in a million years would I think of combining these two adjectives if I was asked to make up my own word for a fun, lively atmosphere. And I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that most of my fellow Americans would probably agree that they often go out of their way to avoid hot and noisy situations.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the average Chinese citizen fantasizes about demolition derbies in the Gobi Desert. (I confess I’ve actually know very little about demolition derbies but they strike me as being very noisy. I’m thinking crunching metal and gunning engines?) However, Chinese people undeniably possess if not a definite preference for clatter and bustle in every day life, then at the very least a much higher threshold for noise and for hot, sticky crowds than the average Westerner. If the contents of my last entry are not proof of this enough, then hear the case of Beijing’s famous Summer Palace:

The Summer Palace is a former imperial park filled with winding paths, a multitude of elegant pagodas and temples, and a large lake scattered with lotus plants and traversed by elegant, bowed, white bridges. To celebrate the final departure of the evil bacteria that kept us indoors most of last week, Mark and I paid a Sunday visit to this would-be-idyllic refuge, hoping for a momentary escape from the audio onslaught that is Beijing. Imagine our surprise (or maybe imagine your own, because Mark and I are getting more and more used to things here) when we discovered that parts of the park are “enhanced” with piped in music and information.

Presumably, the park plays the music to improve the visitor’s experience. Now, what I can’t figure out is this: does the paying public really demand this extra stimulus, or are they just so numb they no longer notice it? (Or maybe they really can’t hear it? I once had a taxi-driver who told me, in all seriousness, that she was convinced that Westerners had better hearing than Chinese people because the all the Westerners who rode in her taxi spoke to one another so much more quietly than her Chinese customers did.)

As I write this, the Beijing Sports University is providing me with another example of the Chinese quest for “renao”: instrumental music is currently drifting in my bedroom window from the speaker outside. Its 10:14am—people were already properly awoken at 6am with Unchained Melody and lunch isn’t for a couple of hours. I can think of no explanation for the provision of this music other than someone on the school administration, someone very, very different from me, thinking that listening to it would be pleasant.

I promise that despite the fact that all I’ve managed to do here so far is complain about this country’s noise and bad plumbing (and you’re lucky, Mark has to suffer frequent diatribes on many, many other subjects), I’m actually occasionally very glad to be living in it, being noisy and adding to the heat of a billion-plus people. And though my Chinese studies have been exhausting and my progress up to now frustratingly slow, the language does give me little presents, like “renao”, all the time. Maybe in the future I’ll write about another old favorite “luluyouyou” (绿绿油油) or “greengreenoilyoily”. In the meantime, you can play me for a little while, and spend some time guessing at its meaning on your own. (Here’s a hint: it officially has nothing to with cooking, although I would say that it has everything to do with the Chinese palate. Good luck!)

*Mark wanted me to call this entry "Scrabble Would be Fucked-Up in Chinese". But he also suggested "Paperclips" and "Jizz Powder" so I decided I'd better come up with a title on my own.

Unchain Me

2005-09-18T12:47:00.000-04:00

I’m like the marshmallow Fluff of light sleepers—it takes two earplugs with the highest possible noise reducing power and, until recently, a sleep mask, just to keep me from floating off the bed, so lightly do I slumber. I can’t deny that I am more easily roused than others by the going-ons of the world outside my bedroom window. But really, no matter how deeply and hard they might typically sleep, is anyone humanly capable of sleeping through the sounds of Unchained Melody being blasted from a loudspeaker outside their apartment at 6:15 every single weekday morning?

As surely as lonely rivers flow to the sea to the sea, those lucky individuals residing on the campus of the Beijing Sports University can be certain that their weekdays will begin with an involuntary dose of the Righteous Brothers. I’m still having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that:
a) I am not hallucinating, or actually dreaming about Patrick and Demi every single morning. (I confess that I vaguely remember once having a very long and convoluted Ghost-themed dream so this did seem like a distinct possibility for the first couple days.)
b) The school essentially has a mandated wake-up time for all its residents.
c) This wake-up time is 6:15. 6:15 AM. 6:15 in the morning.
d) This wake-up time is 6:15 in the morning EVERY DAY.
e) No one else is complaining about this!

Can you ever, even in your wildest possible dreams (dreams of the sort that are induced by the infiltration of Unchained Melody, for example) imagine a college in the United States that would not be met with a massive student uprising if it tried something along these lines?

Perhaps the daily military training that male sophomores are required to participate in is the school’s means of preventing such a student revolt. Thanks to morning marching drills, I am often actually awoken just a little before 6:15 by a ten-hut chorus of Yi! Er! San! Si!, ensuring that I am sentient enough to fully savor my Righteous Brothers wake-up call a few minutes later. However, in the unlucky circumstance that I might have missed the fist stanza because I am having a hard time pulling myself away from my restless, noise-infected dreams (about Ritz crackers that will light up if you plug them into light sockets and hanging out with Nicky Hilton, to name a few), I never have to fear: I can make up for the missed stanza and hear the song in its entirety when it plays again at noon!

Yep. At noon. It’s lunchtime, you see, and some students might not have a watch or a stomach, so the school kindly reminds them that it is time to take a break and feed themselves with another round of Unchained Melody.

Thankfully, especially considering my proclivity towards ear worms, the school sticks to the instrumental version of the song. Still, it’s not a short song. And I don’t need the words to remind me that time goes by so slowly and time can mean so much. Seriously, it‘s a sentiment that never rang truer than it does at 6:15 on a Beijing morning.

Beijing Dispatch

2005-09-05T22:14:00.000-04:00

It's 8:44am on the start of my sixth full day in Beijing, and it feels really late because Mark and I have been falling in bed as early as 9 and waking up around 6. The days are exhausting, exciting, new, hard and long and the mornings come early because China wakes up at the crack of dawn. Many mornings, even on a Sunday, we hear the sounds of marching coming from the students doing military training on campus, and all students are required to attend morning exercises at 6am.

We kind of live out in the sticks--we have a map of urban Beijing and the Beijing Sports University is literally the last dot on the top left corner of the map. To get from our place to my school takes about 45 minutes in a taxi (and costs a whopping $2.50!). But that's mainly because of traffic—without it, the ride is only about 20 minutes. I think it's equivalent to, say, living in Queens and working in Manhattan. It's definitely a world away from my old Beijing neighborhood, with its Subway sandwiches and many street lights, its multitude of DVD stores and the expensive supermarket at the nearby fancy Western hotel where I could treat myself to delicacies like vegan margarine and Heinz baked beans.

Here, we are definitely the only Westerners walking around the streets, which means that this neighborhood, with its dirt and rough edges, is probably really good news for me. I keep worrying about how Mark will do, but he assures me that he’s taken a liking to our new digs. The campus itself is really pretty—green and quiet and filled with students wearing sports attire. It’s a nice respite from the extreme bustle of downtown Beijing. And there are dumplings made to order, and 20oz beers for 25 cents, and any fruit or vegetable you could ever imagine for pennies at the nearby market.

My Chinese is pathetic. Seriously. I get incredibly tongue tied speaking to strangers and my vocabulary is practically non-existent. I have hope that it will all come flooding back to me when classes start, but for now I sound like a toddler being strangled. This is especially unfortunate because we’ve had to tackle a whole range of unanticipated challenges, mostly in terms of our apartment, and things would have been faster, if not easier, if I my Chinese was better.

That said, I don’t think I ever knew how to say “There is a flood in my bathroom every time I take a shower because the floor is not angled toward the drain properly,” or “How do you plan to extract the Rock of Gibraltar from the pipe that leads to the sink?” This vocabulary is really important because the building that we live in is new, and all the marvels of modern Chinese construction are on display. For example, the aforementioned pipe for the sink: it was leaking, so we complained. In response, a man of average strength and size came and pulled the sink of the wall using just his bare hands in a maneuver that lasted approximately three seconds. After this sturdy structure had been removed, and the inside of the pipe made visible, and it became clear that there was a serious blockage in the pipe, one that could not even be slightly penetrated by a man of average size slamming the metal end of a broomstick using all of his average strength. Literal rocks, accompanied by lots of dust, came out of the pipe, but still the end of the broom stick could enter the pipe no more than an inch.

I was confused—how could there be such a blockage in a new pipe, in a new building, especially when our apartment is on the top floor? But Mark figured it out in an instant: the people constructing the building had clearly poured their leftover cement down the drain and it had dried there. This ingenious construction site cleaning technique stunned us momentarily, but was almost immediately rivaled by the action taken when we told the man working on our bathroom that the drain on our bathroom floor was also clogged. We watched in (diminishing) astonishment as he extracted the drain from the floor and then proceeded to clean it over the sink, washing handfuls of hair down the drain of the sink.

So, we’re living and learning, my friends. We’re taking things one step (and one drain) at a time.

* * * *
A HEADS-UP

One of the many other blocks over which I have stumbled this last week is the discovery that Blogger is blocked in China. While I can still access the main site to post, I can’t view my blog, or any others on Blogspot, or on several other blog hosting sites. More importantly, nobody else here in China can easily view my blog. This discovery shocked and depressed me—the last time I lived here I had no difficulty accessing virtually any site. But I should have done my homework better; apparently Blogger has been blocked in China for the last three years.

So, I am trying to decide what approach to take with my blog. I am considering paying to get it hosted with some kind of webpage provider, but I am so utterly inexperienced with this kind of thing that I don’t know how, or how quickly, I will manage to do this. I would love to hear any suggestions that anyone might have. For now, I think I will continue to post here for now, but I just wanted to give a heads-up that I hope to migrate soon.

Third Time's A Charm

2005-07-19T14:38:00.000-04:00

The first time my dad got married, I didn’t exist. The second time, I wasn’t invited. The third time made up for all that.

Now that I’ve gone through this modern right of passage, I have some advice for anyone else who might one day be watching their parent wed. So, based on my experience…..

Tell Everyone
Tell the shop assistant helping you with your dress hunt, the taxi driver dropping you off at the church, the couple unloading their car in the middle of the night when you stumble home after the reception. You‘ll feel strangely compelled to spread the word and you shouldn‘t resist! People will be taken aback but they will react beautifully and that will feel nice.

Forbid Your Parent, Especially if White, Male and over 55, From Viewing the Movie Rize Until After the Wedding and the Reception
For fear of heart attack (either your parent’s or an observer’s), do not permit your parent to watch this or any other film about the new dance style created by young black kids in South Central L.A. The sight of your parent Krumping while wearing a garter around his head is so powerful that it has the potential to overshadow any other image from the wedding.

Shop Early
All those dresses that you see when you don’t have a reason to wear them or money to pay for them? They will all be mysteriously removed from the racks two weeks before your parent’s wedding. Be prepared to spend hours after work, whole weekends, and much too much mental energy trying to find the perfect dress, and know that you will be sidetracked on the way by the dress that looks like the perfect dress but can’t be guaranteed to keep your breasts hidden inside it, the dress that would be the perfect dress but isn’t quite adult enough for all the family friends and relatives you haven’t seen in years to observe you in, and the dress that would be the perfect dress except you don’t want to wear black to your dad’s wedding because it doesn’t seem happy enough. You will ultimately find the perfect dress, and it will have a price tag that makes you sweat, but it will be worth, ultimately, the cost and the trouble.

Let Your Boyfriend Handle the Weird Ones
Because maybe it’s a bad omen for your long-term future, but he actively enjoys conversations about ways to kill ants and the state of today’s youth conducted with older men in blue leisure suits.

Talk to Your Parent’s New Spouse’s Daughter’s Boyfriend
Because now he’s simply your stepsister’s boyfriend! And if you need to recall the conversation to someone else afterwards, you will no longer need to spend 15 minutes just describing how he is connected to you!

Don’t Panic About Your Sibling
If the wedding is scheduled to start at 6 he’ll show-up at 6:05. You’ll forgive him his lateness because you are just so relieved that he came, and besides, he’ll be wearing a brand new suit with his hair in a ponytail and his beard gone. Later you’ll get him a beer and make him dance and pull out the rubber band and release his wild man hair.

Drink a Glass of Wine, See Your New Parental Unit Grinning Madly, Smile Back
It’s that easy.

Freedom Takes Balls

2005-06-26T00:18:00.000-04:00

I just read an essay by Roger Angell (stepson of E.B. White) all about driving around the U.S. before the advent of high-speed SUVs and air-conditioning in which he talks about how the sights and sounds that once distracted and entertained the American driver are almost no more.

To Angell I respond: when you were cruising with your mom and E.B. in the family sedan did you ever encounter a large, red, rubber ball-sack dangling from the back of the vehicle in front of you?

I think you’ll agree that the existence of such a spectacular car accessory surely weakens Angell’s thesis. I can vouch that the sight of said rubber balls on a recent road trip prompted disbelief, excitement and fear of the sudden appearance of packs of dogs on the highway.

But the swinging sack did more than just distract and entertain; it inspired some deep philosophical musing. My companions and I decided that a country in which any citizen who wants to can hang his rubber ball-sack out on display is a country whose people are truly free. Perhaps, someone posited, the rubber ball-sack should replace the flag as the highest symbol of American values--we should be shipping these things to Iraq! So it was that in a mini-van on Interstate 80 campaign “Sacks for Iraq: Let Freedom Swing” was born. Donations accepted--please give generously.

What It All Comes Down To

2005-06-02T22:32:00.000-04:00

In college, my friend Amy discovered, via Nabokov, a term that gave name to what we both freely admitted was our constant feeling that everything on Earth related, or should, to us. The term was “self-referential disorder”. We were clearly suffering from this affliction (and I, for one, still am). It results in conversations like this:

Someone Else: “I’m starting to grow tomatoes and I can’t get the plants to stand up right.”

Me: “Interesting. You know, my back only hurts when I sit for long periods of time. I don’t have any trouble standing up right for long periods of time.”

Someone Else: “Hmm, weird. Do you think I should stake the tomatoes?”

Me: “Hmm, tomatoes. God, I love ketchup.”

And like this:

Someone Else to Someone Else: “I have been asking every single person that I know and meet how I can make the tomatoes I’m growing stand upright and no one has any good suggestions. Any ideas?”

Me (overhearing) to Myself: “Oh man, she is totally annoyed at me because I didn’t help her with her tomato question. She’s definitely talking about me. She must fucking hate me for talking about my back problems when she was talking about her tomato problems. Does she hate me? She totally hates me. Whatever. My back hurts.”

Thanks to Google and Sitemeter, my suspicions have been confirmed: everything, EVERYTHING, can be related to ME! The following, from the Referrals section in my Sitemeter stats, is a list of words and phrases that have brought strangers to my blog in the last seven days:

toering suck off
spanish wine breakdown u.s.
huge deviant breasts
"ear cuff"
balloon boobs
thanks letter
Licking the breasts
free pie picture

Now I am truly convinced that the whole world really does refer back to me, even if it takes plowing all the way to the 29th page of Google results for a person to realize this (that’s how far the searcher for “toering suck off” had to go find this site!). Bad jewelry? Connected to me. Lots and lots of boobs? Connected to me. Free pie? Connected to me.

Just as I always knew.

Competition

2005-05-21T12:46:00.000-04:00

Who’s more annoying? Person A, who knows her behavior is annoying but persists anyway Person B, who is entirely oblivious to the annoyingness of her behavior?*

When I was in high school and used to ride the subway an hour to and from the last stop on the Brooklyn F train five days a week, I used to have elaborate fantasies about retaliating against the dudes who carried boom boxes and made whole subway cars suffer their music at top volume. I dreamed of bringing my own box and blasting Metallica or Iron Maiden and completely drowning out their gangster rap. I couldn’t think of anything more obnoxious than this completely self-centered, in-your-face disregard for the other passengers. The answer to the above was clearly Person A.

This was before the invention of cell phones and the advent of “ring tone testers”.

We’ve all experienced the person who, with utter absorption, scrolls through all 203 of their phone’s potential ringing sounds, bombarding everyone around him with tinny renditions of every sane person’s most reviled songs at ear piercing volume, totally unconscious of the pain and suffering he is inflicting upon his fellow passengers. This person--Person B, AKA Ring Tone Man-- I now know is vastly more annoying than Person A, the Boom Box Dude. The utter self-absorption of Ring Tone Man completely blows my mind. Ultimately, his failure to notice the glares, the rolling eyes and the remarks being hurled in his direction annoys me even more than his annoying behavior itself.

Ring Tone Man actually makes me feel a certain respect for Boom Box Dude. Now there’s some irony for you, huh? But seriously, I can respect (at least from the comfort of my kitchen) the disrespectfulness of Boom Box Dude because by flaunting his disrespect Boom Box Dude shows he is at least conscious of the people around him.

Ring Tone Man had a friend, a friend who I also hate. Her name is Useless Headphone Girl. Useless Headphone Girl, who’s never noticed that her headphones actually serve as amplifiers, who’s never tested their volume, is clearly a Person B. She has a fraternal twin sister, who knows that her headphones don’t keep things to her ears alone but doesn’t care. This sister is a Person A--she couples up with Boom Box Dude and she tends to enjoy singing along with her music and, occasionally, dancing in her seat.

This (highly insightful and cutting-edge!) analysis was prompted by a recent, amusing encounter with a Person A. It was late on a Friday night, my friend Sam and I were heading home from a night of bad cinema, scurrying subway rats and puking drunkards, and we were looking for a little peace on our train journey. Unfortunately, we sat down next to three bored teenagers. A couple stops into our ride, one of the teenagers, a lanky boy in a cap, picked up the lid of Snapple bottle and began incessantly snapping the pop-top button. Ignoring a few half-hearted requests/threats from his friends, he continued to pop, clearly relishing the annoyance he was causing.

Sam and I tried to hate this kid(well, Sam probably tried to ignore him because she is nice and I am not) but it was hard to hate him because he was trying so valiantly to make that happen, and somehow, this was slightly, if absurdly, endearing. In the end, I offered him a dollar if he would stop popping the pop-top. This turned out to be a brilliant idea. His friends cracked up, he stopped popping, and when I opened my wallet to get out a buck, he refused to take it.

See, that’s the thing about Person A--you can win. You can ignore his intentional annoyingness and deny him the clout he seeks, or you can acknowledge his annoying behavior so he will feel satisfied and cease it. With Person B--Ring Tone Man and his lot-- you have no means of retaliation. To Person B, you do not exist, and this makes you powerless. So I say pack your wallet with singles and hope for Person A. And if you are unlucky and wind-up in a subway car with Person B, I don’t know what you can do except hope that the exit to the next car works and that cell phone companies will finally get over Yankee Doodle Dandy.

*Note: If you read the earlier, unedited version of this and the whole Person A, Person B thing made no sense at all to you, know that it was my fault and not yours.

There's a Thesis Waiting To Be Written

2005-05-12T23:10:00.000-04:00

There is an anthropological science that is not being used to its fullest potential: the semiotics of spices. I'm telling you, there are secrets of human existence being left untapped in kitchen cupboards across America and the world. The secret that is currently of chief interest to me is this: what convergence of cultural factors can explain the invention of "pizza seasoning"?

Someone needs to explore this urgent question. I myself have been pondering it since purchasing a lovely wooden, rotating spice rack for two dollars at a stoop sale. Either Mark and I have some decidedly weird cooking habits, or times and tastes have changed a lot in the last couple decades. Out of the 16 pre-labeled canisters that came with the rack, only eight of them were intended for a spice that we already had shoved onto the cluttered top shelf our kitchen cabinet. Yesterday I spent an hour dusting the floor with mustard seed and cinnamon, feeling like a serious drug lord as I loaded up a plastic bag with a massive pile of crinkly, dried green herbs.

Alchemy

Now "Savory" (I refuse to believe that sprinkling my dinner with an adjective will enhance it) houses dried chives, and the pizza seasoning has been replaced by ground ginger. The disgusting celery salt was dumped to make way for dill, and the crushed mint (??) container is the new home for cinnamon. The pizza seasoning (basil, oregano, marjoram and garlic, apparently) now contains basil because there was no separate container specifically for basil alone. Can you believe that? Pizza seasoning has a place on this rack, but basil on it's own is left out entirely? Fascinating.

Honestly, pizza seasoning is simply not a part of my gestalt--I can't interpret it. I can't place it in its cultural context. It's time for the professionals to get on this subject. I want some answers--don't you?

Weddings Galore

2005-05-02T23:22:00.000-04:00

My dear friend Hillary is getting married. This weekend my fellow bridesmaids and I descended on Baltimore to join aunts, childhood friends, grandmas, cousins, and soon-to-be in-laws for a celebration. The weather cooperated and showered the future bride all day Saturday and all of Saturday night, making our matching one dollar "emergency ponchos" not just fashionable, but useful, and we swished around the city turning heads with our noisy clear plastic garb. We viewed a kinetic sculpture race from the side of a mud pit, and saw a ten-foot high pink poodle, a Kafkaroach and a birthday cake, all of which were mounted on bicycles, compete for the finish, went salsa dancing and duck-pin bowling (apparently Babe Ruth's favorite sport) and watched Hillarys elders play with a fart machine. It was a wedding shower in true Hillary fashion: loopy, fun, and decidedly out of the ordinary. My favorite part might have been when I discovered that the snow cone maker and 4-pack of flavored syrup that the future bride had unwrapped and greeted with such glee had actually been purchased from her registry. (Further exploration of her registry just revealed such necessary items as KRISPY KREME 6PK FUDGE ICED GLAZED ($3.99) and STICKER MINI MIXED DOGS ($1.99))

The bowling bride.

.

“She'll take your money but she won’t take your pizza”

2005-04-24T19:07:00.000-04:00

I ordered too much pizza for an event at work -- a pie and a half too much, to be precise. I cleaned out the office refrigerator (contents: 3 half-empty bottles of soda, 1 bottle of Orangina, 2 hard-boiled eggs cuddled up in a small Tupperware, 1 jar of maraschino cherries, 1 Tupperware container containing festering left-over leftovers belonging to me, 1 unopened bottle of stir-fry sauce, 1 unopened can of refried beans) and then discovered it was not deep enough to hold a pizza box. I gave half a pie to an office down the hall, but that still left a whole pie untouched. With one black mark already painted on my vegan conscious for ordering it in the first place, I could not bring myself to toss an entire pie in to the garbage.

So, I decided to take the pie home with me and offer it to the first beggar who entered my subway car on the ride home. Glossing over the horrifying confidence with which I could assume that I would encounter a beggar, I will fast-forward to me, perched sideways on an A train seat with a giant pizza box dampening my thighs. I sat for a couple stops and then a woman came into the car asking, politely, for money. I offered her the pizza, she declined, and the two women next to me launched into a loud conversation about how the woman had turned down the free pie. Their tongue-clucking helped relive the momentary embarrassment of my rejected offer.

At Jay Street I hefted the wilting white box across the platform to wait for the F. I had to lean it against a pillar so my arms didn’t fall off. (Listen, respect your delivery guy: a whole large pizza is HEAVY.) When the F arrived there was a man sleeping on the corner seats, and I considered leaving the box there for him to discover when he woke but didn’t. I figured if no one who would want it got on this train, I could deposit it with one of the drunk guys who is inevitably sliding down a wall inside my home station.

Of course, of all days, this day the station was empty and me and the pizza were out of luck. After spending so much time with it in my arms, I had a version of Baby’s famous watermelon line from Dirty Dancing stuck in my head, and kept repeating to myself “I carried a pizza”. So, in a last-ditch effort to keep it out of the garbage can “I carried a pizza” to the bodega on our corner and gave it to the friendly round guy who works there who said he would give it to his super who he said would give it to his five kids. By this time the pizza was three hours old, which is very old in unrefrigerated pizza years, no? I was a little worried for the health of the children who would eventually eat it but I just ducked into the bodega to purchase some Bacos for tonight’s twice-baked potatoes and received a friendly greeting so I’m assuming the pizza did no damage. And since the Bacos I bought turned-out to have a January expiration date and I’m still planning on consuming them this evening, I’m hoping this is a fair assumption and there’s no cosmic scheme to punish me for poisoning the landlord’s offspring.

Watching Antonioni at the Sunshine

2005-04-11T22:28:00.000-04:00

This weekend I had to run out of a movie theatre during the final piece in Eros, the just-released trilogy of “erotic shorts” because my laughter had become as uncontrollable as the wildest of libidos . Here’s a brief visualization exercise to help you understand what I was fleeing from.

Before we start, make yourself as comfortable as possible. You might want to loosen your necktie, take off your shoes or stretch out your legs. Feel free to recline if you prefer. Close your eyes. Imagine that you are in a movie theatre, in the dark, surrounded by your fellow citizens. Imagine that you are watching a movie. This is a movie that you paid ten dollars and fifty cents for and it is showing at a reputable independent movie house. Someone in a row close to you is eating popcorn. Take a deep breath. Now:

Picture breasts.

Picture breasts under a diaphanous shirt.

Picture the breasts under a diaphanous shirt on the body of a woman getting into a convertible.

Picture the convertible driving halfway down a road, stopping, reversing, and then driving down the road again.

Picture nymphs singing from a distance across water.

Keep picturing breasts.

Picture the breasts attached to a woman picking up a wine glass and rolling it onto the floor in a scene with virtually no other action or dialogue.

Picture a woman riding on a horse and lines like this:
--“Are you ready for my chaos?”
--“What kind of chaos?”
--“Total chaos.”

Picture bigger breasts.

Picture a man rakishly licking bigger breasts.

Picture a close-up of an ear cuff.

Picture a close-up of a toe ring.

Picture a man with an ear cuff bringing his mouth up to the foot of a woman with a toe ring.

Now, open your eyes.

Are you aroused? No? Well, are you shaking with not-so-silent laughter and crying? Are you feeling an urgent need to guffaw at top volume? Excellent. You have now successfully completed the visualization exercise: “Watching Antonioni at the Sunshine.”

At the sight of the mouth approaching toe ringI had to leave the theatre and gain composure in the hallway (I was so afraid that he was just going to suck it right off!). Of course I returned to take a seat in the back row just in time to see Juliet, my movie date, running up the theatre steps away from what she has dubbed “the twirling pussies”. I sense that no visualization exercise is necessary for a scene so accurately labeled, so I’ll spare you a description of it and of the naked improvised dancing on the seashore and the wild horses. If you have ten dollars and fifty cents burning a hole in your pocket, give it a horny seventh grade boy and go and watch some women with shirts on.

Musical Compost

2005-04-05T00:06:00.000-04:00

Last week I was under an unfortunate sonic spell -- for several days I could not cleanse my mind of the lyrical line “fat man with a little jacket”. I didn’t know where it came from, or what came after it or before it, or if it was a song. I just knew that I had to sing it, to sing it all the time and often to accompany it with a little fifties-style soft-sole shuffle. I had to sing it when I woke up in the morning and at work. I had to sing it out loud through my mouth of toothpaste and I had to sing it in my head during sex. If I couldn’t sing it, I had to hum it. Whatever else was going on, I just had to sing about the fat man with the little jacket.

Eventually, Mark told me it was a Chris Farley line from the movie Black Sheep, a movie which I have never seen. These are the mysteries of the human existence.

My brain is a place of refuge for earworms, those snippets of song or sound that wriggle through the pathways of your mind and out through your mouth, and that no amount of mental pesticide can put an end to. I often spend weeks with these kinds of itinerant lyrics and melodies taking refuge in my head, crowding out the actual thoughts that rightfully reside there.

In addition to the top-40 hits and the TV jingles and the Christmas carols, for about two years now I’ve also been housing the word “Spanish”. Whenever I’m struggling to gather my thoughts, or to hone in on an idea that’s hovering on my mind’s outer edges, out it pops. “Stop a moment,” my brain might say to me, “there’s something you’re trying to remember. Something very important. Something you really need to know. Something like….SPANISH!” And then I’ll either remember that tomorrow is my very good friend Sam’s birthday and that I absolutely must call her, or I won’t and I’ll just be stuck with Spanish.

Does this make me sound crazy? Well consider this: when I was ten the song Tom’s Diner almost gave me a mental breakdown. For real. I don’t know how or why, but when we moved from New York to Hong Kong, I packed that song into some tiny, unsteady corner of my mind and brought it with me across the Pacific. My strongest memory of the first three months of my new life on a strange continent isn’t of the new food or new weather or new accents or new school or new house--it’s of the American song that tortured me.

Actually, it wasn’t even the whole song, it was just the first two stanzas of it, which were all I knew. Every unfilled minute of every hour of every day for those three months my brain would come to rest on those two stanzas, and it started to scare this shit out of me. My brothers learned that they could win any fight just by humming the song’s first line.

One day, like every earworm has so far, this one just one day shriveled up and died of its own accord and freed me! And, then, of course, there was room in my brain once more for new Canto-pop and the ad for Sincere shampoo, and, eventually, the fat man in the little jacket, who will surely be replaced by another insidious invertebrate soon enough. In the meantime, I am trying not to think about the worms regenerative powers and the spectre of Tom's Diner.

Sideways, The Prequel

2005-03-26T23:53:00.000-05:00

In more ways than a person who is female, childless and under the age of 40 should, I resemble my father. I have his notoriously underdeveloped ass, his sense of humor and his stubborn streak. I have not, however, inherited his facility with wine. Perhaps noticing this, my dad to took me to Italy after graduation and we spent days driving around Tuscany, stopping for tastings at wineries that we marked on our roadmap. In cliché fashion, I quickly gave up my weird devotion to white wine and learned to like red. We drank chiantis from chipped ceramic jugs at every dinner and we had to buy extra luggage to transport our bottled purchases home.

My new wine lust made my dad happy and he didn’t seem to care that my burgeoning appreciation wasn’t accompanied by any apparent sense of discernment. I still like to remember our impromptu visit to a very large winery at which I was asked to choose which wine I liked best from the several that we sampled. To my horror and amusement, the woman serving us informed me that - out of all the reds we’d tasted - I’d selected the wine that they supplied to the Olive Garden restaurant chain in the U.S. We cracked up. And then my magnanimous dad bought two bottles for our return trip.

Five years have passed with little improvement. Basically, Mark and I are the poster children for Yellow Tail. We’d be happy to branch out except that whenever we taste something else and like it, we can never, ever remember its name. We have no idea were to start.

Yesterday, ambling home from seeing Millions (don’t make the same mistake) we made the rare decision to browse in a local wine store and we stumbled upon a great idea for wine amateurs like us: the “best buy four pack”. Every month the store (Red, White and Bubbly for those of you who live in the hood) selects four good wines under 15 bucks and writes an informative little blurb about them. You can buy them separately or you can be suckered in like we were and buy the batch for about $30. It’s like a great little wine primer for those of us without much wine education and with even less cash. (I think what really won me over was a sentence in the description of the first wine which was something like “a $7 red from France that tastes like a $10 red from New Zealand!”.

Right now we’re sipping on the cheapest of the bunch - a $6 Spanish table wine called Prensa Real. It’s fine. It’s not making me swoon but I’m glad it’s not from Australia. Mark, who is currently sitting in the living room about 12 yards away from where I’m sitting in the kitchen eating left-over three bean salad from a giant serving bowl just called over his opinion: “When I compare this to the other wines I’ve drunk, like Yellow Tail for instance, I’d say it starts out good but then it just pussies out at the end.” I told him I would have to agree. For more expert wine opinions, stay tuned -- we have three more bottles and a surprisingly empty social calendar.

Samsara: Why I Deserve to Eat Your Popcorn

2005-03-17T23:03:00.000-05:00

I like to imagine that in my previous life I was a sixties radical or the number one wife of a Chinese emperor. But I think the sad truth is that the former me lived through either the Depression or a famine. How else to explain why a child growing up with well-stocked refrigerator shelves, packed lunches and frequent supermarket visits would feel compelled to write her name on a box of cookies in order to claim and protect its contents? Or that her teenage self and her friend Jen would buy Whatchamacallits from the school tuck shop to enjoy in privacy by the empty school pool?

You might think I’m turning towards the mysteries of reincarnation so I can avoid the simple answer: gluttony. But it’s more nuanced than pure and simple greed -- there are power issues involved, for one. For example, there’s what you might call the "hoarding, lording instinct". This is the term that describes the inclination to string out one’s Halloween candy until Easter and to occasionally re-count the stale pieces in a slow, elaborate fashion in front of one’s salivating siblings before throwing the whole plastic sack of it away in June. There’s also the “licking tactic”, whereby a candy bar or Popsicle eater responds to a request for a bite of his or her treat by licking it in it’s entirety and then extending it towards the bite-wanter.

In many instances, I think the sizing-up of portions, the choosing of the bigger plates, the counting of the number of potato chips left, the small battles over last bite, have more to do with getting a fair share than getting the biggest share. I don’t need to have the biggest of the two muffins, for example, it’s just that I can’t accept having the smallest one. Forget that you might be twice my size, or have just run the marathon, or that you skipped lunch -- it just wouldn’t be fair!

I really don’t know where this innate need to protect my access and right to food comes from if I can’t blame it on a past life. I used to have a whole child-psych theory that it had something to do with being the first-born child-- you know, protecting your rank from the siblings born to usurp it, that kind of thing -- but I recently had a conversation about these crazy food habits with Amy, the baby of four, and she confessed to many of the same faults.

So for now, I control myself at dinner parties and office gatherings -- I won’t wince if you snake a few fries and I might even offer you a taste of my pasta without asking for a mouthful of your salad in return. But until someone can come up with a better theory, I choose to console myself with the understanding that I have lived through some very hard times in human history, and that in contrast to my lifetimes of suffering, all of you with your laid-back relationships with food spent your past lives being very, very spoiled.

Submission

2005-03-07T22:49:00.000-05:00

Mark and I have a new master.

When we moved into this apartment last summer we consciously decided not to hook up a TV antenna or to order cable. I wanted to escape the powerful elixer that is exhaustion and the Bachelorette, and Mark was fleeing from too many Star Trek Marathons. I wanted to read more, to write more, to clean more, to call friends more. And, well, Mark wanted to play more video games.

So, we didn’t have TV and we both did read a little more. I started this new site; Mark went to the gym more frequently. When we hankered for some auido-visual diversion, we rented a movie. Overtime, though, we realized that while we really didn’t miss zoning out to The Apprentice or the unfortunate combination of dinner and Fear Factor, sometimes we did long for the short, serialized nature of television. At those times, a good movie demanded too much framing and plot, and a bad movie was just plain too long.

What we needed, we realized, was someway to weed out the brain sucking television and just get the shows we wanted. The answer leapt out at me one afternoon from the Yahoo homepage, shortly after a Friday night Ali G plan was squelched by our local video store: Netflix! We could rent all the series that we were interested in, and watch them on our own schedule! Without late-fee fears, we wouldn’t feel compelled to watch a full season of something in one night - we could space things out, watch them at our leisure and still fill in control of our watching habits!

We were the first Netflix members in our circle. There was no one there to alert us. There was nobody who could tell us, like I will tell you now, that Netflix will RULE YOUR LIFE.

Those of you who have not yet succumbed, hear this cautionary tale:

This afternoon at 12:45pm, after more than seven days filled with fevers and snot and other things that make sex sound like suffering, Mark and I took to the bedroom. Clothes were removed. Things were set in motion. And then we remembered: mail put in the mailbox on the corner gets picked up at 1pm and we hadn’t dropped off our two completed Netflix! If we didn’t get them to the corner in fifteen minutes they wouldn’t get picked up today. And if they didn’t get picked up today then they wouldn’t be returned to Netflix by Tuesday. And if they weren’t returned to Netflix by Tuesday they wouldn’t be processed on Wednesday. And if they weren’t processed on Wednesday then the next two DVDs on our list wouldn’t be delivered until Friday. And if the next two DVDs weren’t delivered by Friday then we would have to wait to get them until Saturday!!!

Mark put on his pants and went to the mailbox. I lay daydreaming about the next installment of the West Wing.

My friends, you have been warned.

Mystery Train

2005-03-03T08:42:00.000-05:00

If you live in New York City you know the feeling of self-pity that takes over you on a cold winter’s night when you wait and wait and wait for the subway train that’s supposed to take you home. And more likely than not, you know the feeling of disbelief that quickly mutates into blinding rage when the train that finally does come charging through the tunnel simply blasts its horn at you and does not stop. But, fellow New Yorker, have you experienced the total amazement and amusement that comes with the realization that the subway train that does not stop is packed to its most extreme limit with Orthodox Jews?

I have! On an ordinary Tuesday night, returning from a birthday party, I sat on the platform wondering whether a group of Orthodox Jews had managed to charter their own subway car, or if I was an unknowing extra in a weird movie. Then, another F train arrived, and this time it did stop. And what do you know -- this train almost matched the one before it! Apart from a black woman reading in a corner seat, a white homeboy and the Asian man that got on the train with me, it was once again a sea of modest black dresses, black hats and beards.

Everyone around me was holding on to a program from what I’ve finally figured out was this event at the Continental Airlines Arena, a huge gathering of Jewish people coming together to mark the completion of seven and a half years of Talmudic study and the beginning of some more studying. I asked the group of women and girls I was pressed up against where everyone was coming from. All I could discern from their answer was that it was some sort of celebration, but that was obvious from the energy in the car and the smiles on the 12 year olds who had gotten to stay out so late on a school night. I got off three stops later , a little reluctant to leave the party.