Rooting thru my rutabega

19 07 2009

I am a lousy sick person.

I don’t ‘soldier on’ or ‘buck up’ or ‘git er done’ or any of that when I’m sick. Nope, I drag my sorry carcass home, try to sleep, sleep some more, and then, mm, sleep.

A little bit of reading, online and off, but no writing, no blogging, no trying to get in front of my class prep, no errands, no exercise.

Sleep, cough, sleep.

Of course, Jasper-the-vampire’s nocturnal rampages do add a bit of a variety, but not of the helpful sort.

(Okay, so, yeah, I watched some ‘Buffy’ on Hulu. Sue me.)

(And when the hell are they going to get more seasons?!)

Anyway. There’s the weekend.

———————-

Reading a story in the NYTimes on Green-Wood cemetery and wondering, once again, about my [lack of] plans for the forever-future.

No, I wasn’t that sick.

Still, the thought recurs: Where to rest my bones? Along with, Who will do to the digging/burning/tossing into the sea?

For better and for worse, New York is now my city, but I don’t know that I want to be buried here.

Bills and money and work and dating and life and writing  and I’ll spend my time worrying over my funeral.

Sounds about right.

—————————

Is there anything I could have said about the Sotomayor hearings that hasn’t already been said?

Didn’t think so.

—————————-

The virus that ran rampant through my body got in the way of my responding to a post at The Pursuit of Harpyness on the response to the death of a 69 yo woman who had given birth to twins 3 years earlier.

. . . And I was going to discuss it in brief, here, but then it got all out of control and so I made it a different post. Which may or may not get posted.

That’s how it is.

——————————-

This American Life is airing a story about bedbugs, and just finished a piece on cockroaches crawling into peoples’ ears.

Good lord.

Makes me want to puncture my eardrums.

———————–

This course I’m teaching is kicking my ass.

I’ve taught a version of it—bioethics—to undergraduates before, but it didn’t go well, so I completely revamped it. Out with a general discussion of genetics and stem cells and biotechnology, and in with concentration on human embryonic stem cells and assisted reproductive technologies.

(An aside: I’m using Liza Mundy’s Everything Conceivable to survey the ART field. Recommended.)

So far, so good, but man, shit has changed since I last taught it. This is the bummer about teaching about tech: Unlike, say, the ideas of Plato or Machiavelli, technologies do change, and are changed by the societies into which they’re introduced.

In other words, I can’t coast.

I hate that.

———————-

Re-entering the world of biotech and bioethics has caused me, once again, to question whether I should have stuck with it.

I know, I can only make decisions based on the information I have at the time, so retrospective decision-making is pointless, but.

But when one is dissatisfied with one’s current life, and one’s previous life had its pleasures, it’s tough not to wonder why I ditched that previous life.

Again, I know: how easy to forget the dissatisfactions of that previous life.

Still, I’ve spent my life jumping, and landing always with an eye toward the next jump. When I moved to New York, I said, That’s it. This is home.

Only I put a hidden asterisk by the declaration: (*If it works).

As if this place, and my life in this place, is supposed to work for me, as opposed to me working for my life.

I am not the first to note that a person carries her troubles with her, so it shouldn’t surprise me that my dissatisfactions have made their way to Brooklyn.

So now what? I bitch about the something more and the something else and then do nothing more or nothing else.

Can I blame that on the cold virus?


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Git yer gay on!

28 06 2009

Any parade that begins with Dykes on Bikes can’t be bad, can it?

She was cute, but turned her head at the wrong moment:

T. scoped out a spot under a tree near Christopher and Bleeker, and she, E., N., T., T., and I shifted on and off the tree-protector stand and tried to catch whatever breeze deigned to blow our way.

At one point, near the front of the parade, there was an, oh, 10-15 minute break while. . . something was (not) going up further on. While I groused whether this was a parade or a sit-in these 99 luft (and whatever else is German for the rest of the colors) ballons kept us company:

Soon, enough, the parade re-upped, with the support of our officers in (pink and) blue:

Of course, this was a gay pride parade, which meant queens:

Fairies:

And niiiiice young men in underwear:

(Be glad I cropped out the guy with bare ass. Not good.)

And, of course, that is gay pride means that this is still (still!) a question:

Overall, it was nice. I’m not really a parade person, but there are worse things than hanging out with T., E., and N. (T. & T. booked at some point) on a warm Sunday afternoon in the Village.

One final note: There was a lot of Michael Jackson music. A lot. The sweetest moment, however, may have been when one group played Whitney Houston’s ‘I wanna dance with somebody,’ and the whole crowd sang along. As the float moved down Christopher, all you could hear was us singing ‘I wanna dance/with somebody who loves me.’


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For she loves you for all that you are not

23 05 2009

I love a good ruin. They rarely disappoint.

Buildings, I mean. Edifices. Material constructs: walls, gates, jetties, fences. Anything built to last, which crumbles.

I was perusing a book today on abandoned places—factories, mostly, but a few schools—and all I could think was slowly flipping through the pages was Oh, I want to go there.

Not that I have anything against visiting functional places. Or living in one: I like having heat and hot water and plaster which stays on ceiling and walls rather than spitting down on my head. And if you buy me a ticket to the Tate or the Louvre or the Prado I will very happily mose my way through them (tho’ a ticket to the Hermitage? I’d take that one first of all).

But after making my way through what I could of the Hermitage, I might ask if it’d be possible to check out Chernobyl. Suit me up and lead me through the plant itself, then mose with me through the near-empty streets and in and out of abandoned buildings. Let me see the overturned desks and pictures on the walls of the schools, the dust on the windowsills and the paint peeling up in waves.

Let me see all that is no longer there.

Do I find ruins romantic? Not exactly. Haunting, perhaps. Thrilling. A little spooky. It’s as if by everything being laid bare, something even more is hidden. There is the evidence of stories, with the stories themselves—gone. The silence whispers.

I remember as a kid going to Disney World and wanting more than anything to explore the castle at the center of the Magic Kingdom. A castle! What could be better!

Castle—pfft. It was a big damned hallway. I still remember walking into the joint and looking around and looking around and looking around and thinking. . . this is it? This isn’t a castle, this is just. . . a big building. A big damned disappointing building.

More disappointments followed. I’d see a building with a magnificent edifice and enter and then. . . nothing. Or, worst of all, suspended-tile ceilings, florescent-tube lighting, and gray carpeting. (Ever been though the buildings on the quad at Duke University? Gothic exteriors, seventies interiors.)

FelineCity had a good mix of old, still functional buildings and places going to seed (sometimes they were the same places).  They also had a series of ports, some of which didn’t do enough business to justify more than a chain strung between two rusted poles and a vague intimation that trespassing was not allowed, which I freely explored on my bike and on foot. There were floating rustbins and dilapidated offices and crumbling walkways and not really anyone around to shoo me away.

GradCity was also on a river, and the industries which had clustered along the waterway had largely taken leave of the city, their factories left behind for the homeless, the punks, and restless students like me. City officials have since refurbished these areas, inviting the regular folk to enjoy the scenery. I can’t really complain, not least because I no longer live there, but I do miss the kind of furtive exploration these abandoned spaces allowed.

There are seedy and abandoned spaces all over New York City, but I haven’t done much poking around them. Security is tighter here, of course, and it is more likely than not that these derelict places are nonetheless inhabited. But still, if I could get a guide. . . .

And oh! That place on Long Island, the old mental hospital? Totally off limits. I want to go.

This city is built on ruins. Yes, history is constantly erased in this Land of the Developer, but just as often it is merely hidden, built over or around, odd nooks or old mosaics or peculiar stonework all that’s left to signal that there was once something else, here.

Perhaps this is why ruins exhilarate in ways that Main Attractions! rarely do: The magic castles are so often filled with nothing but the lure of the Magic™, where the excitement is in the anticipation, not the exploration. All pitch, no promise.

But ruins pitch nothing, and that they promise nothing other than ruin is what allows one to consider not what is to come, but what has been. They are literally throw-backs to another reality, and they tempt precisely because they are present markers of the absence of another present, and presence.

Something else, something other, something more.

Gone, but not quite.


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No one is alone. . .

13 05 2009

. . . Oh yes, we are. Or is that ‘Oh yes, one is’?

Anyway.

Many of us to choose to live alone, and we cultivate our solitude even as we cultivate friends. Some of us would like to marry or attach ourselves to a intimate companion, but we’re not necessarily distraught over the lack of such a companion.

We’re alone, and we’re all right.

And yet, even if we’re—oh hell, lemme switch to the (duh) singular—even if I’m okay with my solitary existence, I’m okay because it is not only solitary. Among the main reasons I left Bummerville was the difficulty in finding friends—true friends, people with whom I’d share ideas and embarassments and beers and tears, not just folks with whom sharing went no further than ‘What’s new?’ There were a few people, here and there, but I lacked that gathering of intimates, the jumble of personalities who, collectively, form a kind of thick weave of comfort around oneself.

I can’t say I’ve fully cultivated those rich layers of friendships in New York City, but I have discovered some people who I hope to spend the rest of my life getting to know, and some of whom I already consider good friends. This is a tough old broad of a place, and as much affection as I might have for tough old broads, I also need trusted allies in dealing with her. Hence, the friends.

That works for regular life. What, however, of the ruptures of illness or trauma or disability of whatever sort? On her NYTimes blog, The Well, Tara Parker-Pope highlighted a report from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation on the difficulties same-sex couples may encounter in trying to care for their partners in hospitals. She notes that

While heterosexual couples typically don’t have to provide marriage licenses to hospitals in order to prove they are husband and wife, same sex couples often must document their relationship to hospital officials before being allowed to take part in a partner’s care.

In some cases partners and their children were barred from the bedside, and their beloved died alone. Even when they had documentation of their relationship, including legal papers in which they were designated as health proxies or given durable power of attorney, the partner often had to fight to be able to care for his or her companion.

I’m not going to go into the idiocy and brutality of exclusionary policies—commentors on the blog do that quite nicely—but instead will simply note that same-sex couples and single people are in many ways in the same unseaworthy boat: We’re screwed when we need help and institutions won’t recognize those whom we would like to help us.

Even when I was straighter than I currently am, I believed that single (straight) women should unhesitatingly support gay rights. Control over one’s body? Check. Control over one’s sexuality? Check. To live outside of normal sex roles? Check. To choose to have kids or not, and in what circumstances? Check. To live one’s life in a way that makes sense to her? Check.

Attacks on LGBT folk for their (our) allegedy degenerative effects on the rest of the healthy, wholesome, heterosexual social body can, without much imagination, morph into attacks on single folks themselves. Marriage is sacred, marriage is the foundation of society, heterosexual commitment is required for stable communities, sex outside of the bonds of matrimony is empty and selfish and dangerous, blah blah. There is One Right Way To Be, and to Not-Be that way is to be, well, ‘that way’.

Fine, so I’m ‘that way’ in more than one way. But this is how and who I am, and I’d like some security in my lonely and alienated unpredictable and gratifyingly cobbled-together life. And as much as I support same-sex marriage, I want to make sure that those of us who choose not marry don’t get left behind in that leaky boat.

Queer folk have (along with feminists) questioned the boundaries of matrimony and family and rightfully demanded reconsiderations of those boundaries to include a panoply of orientations and identities. This is good. But if the efforts to broaden the definition of marriage serve only to reinforce its privileges, well, that’s not so good.

So what do we single folk do? Do we follow the route taken by domestic partners and file paperwork designating friends as health care proxies? Do we give a list of approved visitors to any hospitals we use, so administrators don’t have to worry about violating HIPAA [privacy] regs?

If I’m in an accident or get sick, I want my friends to know. (Well, honestly, part of me wants to tough it out alone, the same part which is berating me for saying I want my friends to know. But hospitals suck and they suck even more when you’re in one alone. So Shut up, me.) I want them asking about my care and in my room and, if necessary, kicking someone’s ass on my behalf.

I want them to do what my family, a thousand miles away, couldn’t do. I want my people, here, to be with me.

Maybe this starts in conversations with friends. We talk to one another, find out what kind of support we have and don’t have, want and don’t want. Tell each other what we want from each other, what we’re willing and able to provide to one another.

I’m still assembling my life, and while it’s possible that at some point I could meet someone who could be a lifelong companion, I’m not waiting for him or her.

This is it. I am alone in this city—except for my friends. That’s a damned significant exception, and I’d like these folks to be able to act as my Significant Others.


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Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues

5 04 2009

Spring is here. Crap.

I have nothing against spring, save that it presages summer—and I don’t like summer.

Let me rephrase that: I hate summer.

Actually, many summer days are fine. Warm, sunny, blah blah. Inoffensive and manageable.

But then there are the days—and weeks—when weather turns vicious, the sun baleful and the air viscuous. I feel hunted by the sun and trapped by humidity, darting from one shadowed space to another, trying and always failing to avoid the heat rays from above.

Plus, I don’t like sticky.

And no, I don’t own an air conditioner, although every year I think, Hm, maybe this year. Now that I’m finally settled in to my own apartment, I think, Hm, maybe this year.

As much as I despair of the heat, I don’t like air conditioning. I appreciate AC, am grateful for it in the workplace, but I tend to think of it as wasteful for my home. And even though air conditioners today are much more energy efficient, and the units themselves fairly small, when I think of a box AC I think of the behemoths of old, rattling away as they suck electricity from the socket and money from my pocket.

When friends from the south would tell me they didn’t like indoor heat, I thought What?!!! How could you NOT like central heating? It’s what makes winter worthwhile: coming in from the cold, face chapped from the wind, and the reassuring hiss of the radiator letting me know I’m home.

I was less summer-phobic (and winter-philic) as a kid, but I like to remember a particular tradition from those winters: My parents’ house had forced-air heating, so in the mornings my sister and I would fight over who would fit her nightgown over the heat vents, the flannel billowing out with rush of warm air. Some mornings we’d rush my brother’s room and all three of us would crowd around his (more powerful) vent until the furnace had had enough.

And no, we did not have AC in the house.

Perhaps my southern friends had their own, fond, memories of coming in from the heat, faces red from the sun, and cooling themselves down in front of AC or vents. I remember comfort; they remember relief.

But as much as the weather can affect the temperature inside, it’s really an outdoors phenomenon. Crazy cold temps are tough to manage, but they are, in the end, manageable. Long underwear, heavy boots, heavy coats, scarves, hats, mittens—they’re the armor one wears to battle the cold, to move through the streets and one’s own life. (And winters in New York City rarely require heavy defense: a decent jacket, hat, and gloves will usually do. In fact, winters here are sufficiently mild that I kind of miss the intensity of the cold of Grad- and FelineCities, tho’ not its duration.)

How can one protect oneself against the heat? Sunglasses, sunscreen, but most hats will simply leave one sweatier than before. And while I can load up against the cold, there’s a limit to how far I can strip down. Naked in New York? No thank you.

I do like the sun. That’s why I hate the summer. In the fall, sun sneaks through the trees and leaves and dapples the ground; in the winter, it coaxes faces skyward, to catch a bit of warmth. But she turns mean in the summer, even sadistic. As much as I welcome her into my home during the other seasons, I avoid her June-August, cursing her relentlessness, her omnipresence.

Leave me alone! I have actually whimpered at the forecast of sunny summer days.

Trapped. Even if I do get AC this summer, saving myself from the oppression of humidity, I’ll still feel trapped, restricted to an oasis of cool.

Summer is my enemy. I dread its approach.


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You can hear the sound of the underground train

19 03 2009

The window was full of words.

I looked up from my magazine and saw the cascade on the tunnel walls.

The tunnels are usually dark; there’s no point in looking.  But the line is under construction, so banks of lights were strung along the length of this run, illuminating the hidden markings.

It was too much. The walls were pages, filled with painted words, page after page after page.

We were on an underground ship, charting its own course: The slow sway of the train as it crept along the tracks, horn blowing ahead to warn the workers, and the lights—oh! the lights! constant and warm and bowing toward us, beckoning us through this secret passageway—did anyone else notice this?

What were those words? Yes, we all know that someone has been here, before. But still, all those words? What had happened, before?


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Let it snow

2 03 2009

BIG STORM! the media warned. UP TO A FOOT OF SNOW! meteorologists said.

Ha. I’ll believe it when I see it, I said.

The evidence is in. I am a skeptic who yields to evidence: Yes, there is snow.

Skinny Cat doesn’t care about the snow, as nothing will interfere with her feline duties, especially that of sleep.

She may be old, but she’s as steadfast a worker as they come.


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Stupid girl

23 02 2009

I knew it was wrong. Don’t do it.

That’s what my gut said (in translation): don’t do it.

I did.

Nothing major, and it all turned out fine. But I did something that I knew, even as I was making the decision to to do this—that is, before I actually did the stupid thing—was the wrong decision.

I took the train east instead of west.

Backstory: I live in lovely Lefferts Garden. My friends, who live in Bushwick, invited me over to watch the Oscars. (No, I don’t really care about the Oscars, but it’s been awhile since I’d seen E. & T.) Even on a good day, the trek to their apartment is. . . not direct. The easiest route is to head into Manhattan, then grab a different train back into Brooklyn. This weekend, however, the trains are rather more messed up than usual, so while I was able to reconfigure my route on the way to their apartment, I was reluctant to follow that same path back to my place.

Hence the bad decision. I knew the Brooklyn-Manhattan-Brooklyn route would take forever, so sought less indirect route. HopStop (the handy-dandy public transport site) suggested a particular train-bus route. Okey-doke.

Only what sounds reasonable at, say, 5 in the afternoon, is somewhat less so after midnight. I took the train east, got out, got turned around, eventually found my way to the bus stop, discovered I’d just missed the bus (which I would have made, had I not gotten turned around. . .), and proceeded to wait twenty or so minutes for the next bus.

Hm. Where am I? I look at the bus map. Cypress Hill? Ocean Hill? I look at my handy-dandy Brooklyn NFT map. Maybe Ocean Hill. Or. . . ohhhh, shit. Brownsville.

Brownsville and East New York are the worst neighborhoods, crime-wise, in New York. I know this, knew that by taking the train east I would be skirting (I thought) these neighborhoods, but thought, what the hell, I gotta know.

So there I was, standing at a bus stop on a windy night, watching the trash blow by. And no, I wasn’t much comforted by the frequent police drive-bys.

I don’t like to pile on so-called bad neighborhoods. Kids grow up in these neighborhoods, adults go to work, there are schools, grocery stores, etc. If a five-year-old can go to kindergarten in a bad neighborhood, I can catch a bus.

Then again, those five-year-olds are not usually standing around a wind-swept street after midnight.

Everything was fine, of course. The bus came, I got on, I got off, I walked home.

But as I was standing, waiting, I was wondering why I was so insistent on taking this route home. Sure, the Manhattan run would take time, but I’d be waiting on a peopled train platform. Inside. With lights. What’s a little lateness compared to safety?

I don’t understand why I do this, why I make what I know to be the wrong decision. I don’t regret the big decisions—too much is at stake, mental-health-wise, to second guess, say, a move to NYC without a job waiting—but the small ones I gnaw to the nibs. Perhaps these stupid choices are a way of inoculating myself against future regret: If I make this wrong decision this time, I won’t always be wondering (against my gut) if it wasn’t really the better decision.

Sigh. No, I guess that doesn’t make much sense; I’m trying to make sense where there isn’t any.

But I know I’ll keep doing this, I’ll keep jumping when I should have crouched, and it’d be nice to have a reason for such unreason.


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Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’

26 01 2009

Yeah, much to say. Too tired to say it.

Went as well as a suck-ass experience can go. Amazing movers.

Everything now is in its approximate, if not final, place.

A recap:

Thursday, 2:00, then at 4:00, then Saturday afternoon:

0021

It’s now, what, Monday night? Shit got shifted around, and it’s still a mess, but somewhat less so.

It’s not perfect—the bedroom floor is a bit spongy, and the bathtub is a ski slope (no drunk showering), but there’s plenty of heat and hot water, and best of all it’s MINE MINE MINE.

The joys of dictatorship.


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You can’t always get what you want. . .

15 01 2009

. . . but sometimes you do.

Yessss, I got the apartment.

What apartment, you ask? Why, the one I looked at in Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn, the one I knew I wanted the moment I walked through it. The 1BR with 3 (THREE!) closets, one of which is a WALK-IN. The one within walking distance of Prospect Park, and a coupla’ blocks off the train. The one I’m moving into next week. The one I chose not to write about so as not to, erm, jinx it. (No, not generally superstitious, but, you know. I took everybody’s luck, too. Just in case.)

So how do you find an apartment in New York City? Assuming you don’t inherit a relative’s place, or have so much money you can simply point and say ‘Want’, you do one of two things:

You go to a broker, prepared to spend 15% of the yearly rent on broker’s fees. Plus another $50 or $100 on credit and background checks. Oh, and have a coupla’ hundred bucks in cash to hold the apartment (refundable if you don’t get the place.)

The rest of us, however, use Craigslist. You pick a category (all apts, all no-fee broker and owner apts, owner apts only), check off the variables (number of BRs, critters, cost, location), and let ‘er rip.

Assuming your search parameters are reasonable (i.e., you’re not looking for a 2BR Manhattan apartment for 800 bucks a month), a lot of apartments will pop up.

Do not be deceived.

Many are re-posts (scroll down the page, and, ohp, there it is again), and a fair number are cons. You’ll know the cons as soon as you receive an e-mail in response: they’ll mention the failed attempts to find a God-fearing broker or agent to take care of their beautiful home, an unexpected return trip to West Africa, and their sincere desire to see you in this apartment. I’ve never taken it further than that, but I assume at some point they’ll want you to send them money, at which point they’ll make the keys available to you. Ha.

Other ads will note that a picture is available, but it’s only a photo of the agent, or of the exterior of the building.

Rooms described as big are not. Closets described as expansive are not. Kitchens described as charming are not. (This is not just a NY thing, I know.)

The agents or owners won’t return your e-mails or your phone calls, or will try to direct you to this other properties they manage, which they know—they know!—will be much better for you.

If you do manage to set up an appointment to see the place, he (almost always a he) will be in a rush, barely tolerating your desire to open closets, click on lights, or check the water pressure in the shower. ‘This is a very good place,’ they’ll say. ‘I’m showing it to two more people tonight, and more tomorrow. If you wait, it’ll be gone.’ He’ll be lying about the first part, but not about the second: if you find a place you like, say you’ll take it immediately.

If you hesitate, he’ll tell you about his other properties, which are likely in worse shape or more expensive than this one.

You’ll look at apartments which frighten you. Yes, frighten: all of the buildings’ windows will be sheathed in rusted, cross-hatched steel, the lights in the hallway won’t work (‘we’ll be fixing those this weekend’), the stairs will be missing a step or two, the cabinets will sag, and you’ll save yourself the trouble of looking too closely at that growth in the bathroom. When you leave the building, you may see someone urinating against the lone tree on the block.

Welcome to East Williamsburg/Bushwick—the hip neighborhood.

But then you find a place—halleluja! Step one, complete. Now, step two. Gather receipts for everything on which you’ve ever spent any money. Dig out the information for every landlord you’ve ever had. Be prepared to show pay stubs and tax returns going back to 1973. Bring passport, X-rays, and DNA sample. And a bank check.

Okay, so that’s a bit exaggerated, but not much. In GradCity, I usually filled out a one-page form, sometimes two-paged, wrote a personal check, and got the keys, all within an hour or two of looking at the place.

For my new place, I first saw the apartment, then set up an appointment with the management company, bringing all of my financial data (including, honestly, my cell phone bills), then, after the records and credit check checked out, made another appointment to hand over a bank check and sign the lease.

This is the lease:

Double-sided, of course.

Then I had to sign additional papers regarding window bars (mandatory if one has young children) and to note the receipt of information about the presence of lead paint in the building (entrance door: yes) and apartment (no).

It’s good to have this material. I will not read it.

So I signed on all of the necessary lines, handed over the check, and made an appointment to pick up the keys on Monday.

Thursday, I move.


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