i love the smell of outrage in the morning

Did everyone else know that we have been using napalm in Iraq? During 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom? And that we lied to the British about it? Am I the only one who didn't know?

When the British asked--it's important they know these things, because as well as being our partners in this ill-conceived war, they are signatories to the 1980 UN Convention on 'Weapons Which May Be Deemed To Be Excessively Injurious Or To Have Indiscriminate Effects', which rules out the use of napalm--they were told no, no napalm. Slippery. Because MK-77 isn't the napalm of Vietnam and Korea: gasoline, benzene and polystyrene. No. It's kerosene-based jet fuel and polystyrene. It acts exactly like classic napalm--in fact, it's harder to put out, once ignited. It sticks and burns.

MK-77 is currently the only incendiary in the U.S. arsenal. For some reason, I didn't realize that "firebomb" translates to "napalm." Maybe I thought we were using nice clean firebombs that aren't full of gel that sticks to structures--and people. I will spare you the photo of Kim Phuc running naked and burning from her village in Vietnam. I know you've seen it.

This sickens me so much I can barely write about it. The lies are fucking piling up around us. The government lied to us about why we were going to war. They lied to the British about how. Blair and his people, even after finding out they had been lied to, continued to cover for us.

Lying to start a war is an impeachable offense. If you are even half as ashamed of our behavior in Iraq as I am, consider bringing it to your representative.

the project

Some of you have expressed curiosity at what I could possibly be doing that takes precedence over long, self-indulgent blog posts. Well, now that I'm done with it, I figure I can tell. There were some moments where I thought I wasn't going to pull it off, and how bad would that have been? You would all be down at a little museum in Southern California straining to hear my turns of phrase in the audio tour, and they wouldn't be there!

Not to say that they are now, either. Writing interpretive stuff for museums has proven to be very different from anything else I've done so far. Trying to be completely accurate, clear, and understandable by fourth-graders...wow. A great exercise in editing oneself, let me tell you. I use a lot of modifiers, ordinarily, and boy do they sound prissy when you've got two minutes to tell a five-minute story and need to cut, cut, cut.

SoCal needed a new reservoir, as emergency back-up. So the water district found themselves a nice four-and-half-mile-long valley, with mountains to the north and south. Dug a big hole in it, dammed the ends, piped in billions of gallons of the Colorado River and la voila, Diamond Valley Lake. Just to make it more appealing, they dumped in a bunch of fish, too, and built some parking lots large enough to accommodate trailers with boats.

You can't swim in it--no body contact, that's meant to be drinking water if need be--but you can catch fish in it. Don't talk to me about what fish do in water, I don't want to think about it.

While they were digging their big hole, exciting things were popping out of it. Bone things. Tusks. Remains of giant sloths, sloths that weighed as much as an SUV. Mastodons mammoths sabre-tooth cats dire wolves short-faced bears yesterday's camels (yes, camels started here and went east over the Bering land bridge, I didn't know that either) flat-headed peccaries Bison antiquus Bison latifrons small horses. 140 animal taxa all told. All the stuff they've been pulling out of the LaBrea Tar Pits for the past hundred years, but without the asphalt. Also archaeological things: proof that people had lived in the valley for at least nine thousand years, maybe longer.

So they decided, hey, let's build us a museum (excuse me, interpretive center) and stick all our tusks and things in there.

And I've been writing all the A/V scripts--things like a documentary-style film, and an interactive computer game, and a thing with a decomposing frog, and so on. The project was broken into six sections, and each one had anywhere from one to six pieces of writing associated with it, and just about each piece required something different. I've been sifting through hundreds of pages of transcribed interviews, ethnographic, archaeological, and geological reports, blueprints of exhibits.

I am so fortunate...I was talking to another writer friend the other night about how hard it is to find writing work that we feel good about doing. He copped to having once written a college essay for pay; I mentioned my wake-up-screaming fear that I'll find myself writing ad copy for a tobacco company. So this project has been really exciting. I got to buy a copy of Ice Age Mammals of North America: A Guide to the Big, the Hairy, and the Bizarre, which is such an awesome title, and write it off. I am telling kids about ancient critters, which I do here for free anyway, and why it was wrong that the Cahuilla were dragged to the missions for forced conversions, and how cool it is to grow up to be a scientist. I will get paid good money for having gleefully written about coprolites, putrefecation, and the archaeological importance of trash heaps.

My job rules. What was it I did before? Do I even want to remember?

I'm not sure when the museum opens. Not for a while, I think. Time enough to find a silly T-shirt with a mammoth or something on it to wear when I visit. Maybe a mammoth wearing reading glasses and a bathrobe, hunched over a laptop and eating cookies.

a meta moment

Show me the blogger who wears a tie while he types. Oops, wait a minute, I do know one of those. But I'm pleased by this, in part because there was this one guy at the focus group I just did who said there wasn't any need to be able to read blogs remotely. I don't pay attention to that shit, he grumbled.

Yeah, well, that shit is getting the Downing Street Memo looked at by Congress. Led, may I just crow for a moment, by a fellow Michiganian? Michigander? Whatever?

Like the way I invoke my childhood home when someone from there does something I appreciate, and am totally silent when another is a scary wackjob?

everything you need to know about the brothers k

The White Shoe Irregular pulls together the Amazon user reviews. My current favorite:

First of all let me say that if an author wants to sell books in this country, then use some american names for gosh sake! How in the H E double toothpicks am I suppossed to remember who's who? The fact is you can't. … If you want to read about crime and punishment, how's about a little grisham. But this guy fred dostoyefski is going to have to write a little bit more towards his intended audience. My advice to you Freddy if you read this: Russia went down with the Berlin wall, let's write some good old fashion mystery thrilllers!

But you should really go see for yourself.

time to go to the library!

The Patriot Act is getting defanged: the bit about the FBI being able to access our library and bookstore records has--pardon the inopportune phrase, but I'm excited--gone down in flames. Trust me, nobody is using the SFPL to learn "how to fly planes...put together biological weapons...put together chemical weapons, nuclear weapons". Because what people do there is sleep. And take sponge baths in the restrooms. And check out massive stacks of books with their kids. And watch videos.

And accumulate piles and piles of books to decorate the floor around the bed. Right now, mostly Cooking for Dummies type stuff, a novel, background on the Brothers Karamazov, and a book of Anna Akhmatova's poetry. That's me, terrorist in training.

getting amp'd

Spent the evening in an absurd pursuit; I participated in a focus group for this product, which is aimed at the "youth" market.

Yes, other than the market research people, I was in fact the oldest person in the room. I had to eat a lot of M&M's out of the bowl to keep up with the whippersnappers.

I did my part, though, to represent what oldsters like: when they asked us to rate which magazines we'd be like to be able to read on our cell phones, I zipped past People and Vogue and wrote in The Economist. I had to bypass the "television" section altogether because I had no idea what's on any of the channels; other than visits home, I haven't lived with a TV in...lemme see...fifteen years now. At least. I also wrote in "flamenco music" and "BBC" in the appropriate places.

I'm sure they're scratching their heads back at Amp'd HQ. But, you know, I'm still in that cohort. Barely. I have six more months of being a "youth". And then I suppose I get turned into Soylent Green, have I got that right? Or am I mixing movies? It's hard to remember when you're as old as I am.

The best moment was when we got a ten-minute break halfway through. Half of us whipped out our cell phones. One guy brought out his laptop for good measure. The public health student I'd teamed with to describe the "information" consumer of 2010 (like I was going to choose "sports"?) was on her phone saying to someone, did you get the text I sent you about my computer? and lapsing into Persian. Bless her; she was the one who suggested that in addition to the Beeb (I wasn't the only one, incidentally: there were two Europeans in the room and an Australian who all concurred) and the Old Gray Lady, news content should include Al Jazeera. She was neat.

I am feeling all hip and down and shit.

And here, appropos of nothing and via Making Light: dealing with fleas.

the brainiest scholar in singapore explains it all for you

Daryl has come up with a helpful guide to blogging etiquette.

The effect is cumulative, but if forced I would say that this one is my favorite:

7. Remember, if you forget which keys to use, a simple little memory trick is that you should start from the outside and work your way inside. Hence, posts like "poiuy!" are the height of decorum.

Thank you, it's been wonderful talking to all of you. Godspeed.

pull the plug, and look what drains out

I didn't get as much work done yesterday as I'd hoped because I was moving from crying jag to crying jag...not sure why I was so much more emotional than usual. Wasn't premenstrual, had food in my stomach, my back wasn't hurting; none of the usual suspects. I'm getting pretty good at distinguishing "real" moods from those caused by discomfort, hunger, hormones: doesn't always help the mood, but at least I know what's going on and if it's something I've brought on my own self by not, say, remembering to eat. My dad was like that too; he'd get caught up in something and forget to eat. Sometimes for a day or two. No Good.

Part of it, as indicated, is that I was thinking about my dad. Which is code for something larger, really; something I started to blog and then decided against. Too raw, too vulnerable. And while that hasn't stopped me in the past, I have some new readers I don't know or whose motives in visiting are unclear to me. A little more self-protection seems in order. Some of it was about babies, which I may yet talk about. Some of it was about men, which I won't. Because really, what good does that ever do?

This is such a weird technology, isn't it? I can't wait to see what life looks like in twenty years, when we've all gotten used to all this connectivity. When the very word connectivity doesn't sound so damn silly and wrong.

But I digress. I just finished the last first drafts of the Big Project, and I'm eating peas with a huge hunk o' butter and cookie-dough ice cream (seperate, seperate, really) and trying to decide whether to take a victory lap around the block. Or a nap. Nap's winning. I should at least call the Snail Whisperer and see if she still wants to get something pierced; we'd talked about doing that before I went to Berlin, and it never happened. And the end of this project--and my newfound determination to stop catering--seem like something to mark in that particular way.

I'll tell you about the project later. Right now...naptime...

the run-up to father's day

Dear readers who have also lost their dads: does it get easier, eventually? The days before Father's Day, when every ad boasts a product "better than a tie"?

I imagine it's a little worse for me than it might otherwise be, what with the anniversary of my father's death being so close to this blasted made-up retail opportunity, but it's probably just bad, isn't it?

woo-hoo!

Kuwait gets their first female cabinet minister. And women will be able to vote in the next parlimentary elections. Note photo of beautiful rejoicing women.

This is the sort of thing I like waking up to. This and chocolate ice cream over my cereal.

things are getting more interesting at downing street

Another day, another leaked memo: this one written eight months before we invaded Iraq. The British being concerned that we didn't have an adequate postwar strategy, and thus might look to them "to share a disproportionate share of the burden."

If this memo is real, Blair's feet are to the fire now, aren't they?

edit: Marc over at Misanthropicity goes deeper, with his usual lucidity.

do you know a kid between the ages of three and twelve?

Dave DeVries is looking for help with his next book. Dave DeVries is the guy you wish was your weird Uncle Dave, because he would take your line drawings of monsters and heroes and do this with them and make them into something really cool.

I'm afraid I don't remember who tipped me to this guy--maybe my.bicycle?--but thank you, and when I figure it out I'll post the attribution. Right now I'm too busy picking hay out of my crannies after a Western-themed birthday party I just worked and the thought of cruising around the 'net exhausts me.

et cetera

I will pay someone to come to my house and surgically extract this inane Peter Cetera song from my head.

It's been something like three days now. It's giving me a headache, right up front behind my eyes.

so it begins

The new pope has told a group of visiting African bishops that Church teachings are "the only failsafe" protection against AIDS, and decried the "contraception mentality" destroying Africa's moral fabric.

In other words, no condoms for Africa.

23% of the adult population of South Africa has HIV/AIDS. Whether you want to look at that as slightly more than one in five or slightly less than one in four is inconsequential, it's still too damn high.

And Holy Mother Church wonders why it's losing sway...when it is paying so much attention to how things really are in the world.

this not sleeping thing, it's interesting

I just wrote that I don't usually like a particular Shakespeare character because he makes me think of an appendix--doesn't do anything useful, and then swells up and explodes. I wonder if my editor will let it through? Because it's amusing the hell out of me. But then, I haven't really slept in a while.

Everything is amusing me.

sometimes i don't know which feels better when it comes to writing

Writing, or being done with it?

I know I've said this before, but I just pulled an all-nighter and am completely looped, so shoot me. Please. Sometimes the best part is the cessation of pain. This last section wouldn't have been so painful if I hadn't spent most of my time on it transcribing...what a colossal waste of time. But I made my deadline. Two more pieces for these people, small ones, and I am done. Or should I say, I am ready for revisions. Which are a given; there's a committee on the other end of the line.

The most amusing part though has to be that the power went out at about midnight. Occasionally it would flick back on, my printer and DSL box would come back up, and then pwifffff.... back down again. Upstairs my neighbor, deprived of blaring television, would curse. And I had just been thinking about how I should invest in a desktop machine, but I guess this was my message no. Non. Nein. Ni. You get the idea. Since I was working on a laptop with a full battery, I went into the bathroom and worked by the light of the emergency exit light (no, I don't know why there's an emergency exit light in my bathroom, don't ask. It's pointing in the wrong direction, too; if you took it seriously, you'd crash into the mirror). When that finally gave out, I figured I might as well nap for an hour, and then take my keychain drive over to Kinko's and work there.

Happily, the power came back on before that had to happen. So I could be sitting in the middle of the floor at 7 am, diligently applying Monster energy drink to my cavities and cheese popcorn to my arteries and cutting up the script with long shiny scissors and rearranging the pieces. Ah, it was beautiful.

Now the ogre returns to her cave for a few hours of sleep before knocking off some other writing. Yeeep.

this woman is made of iron

I have to admit that if bits of a human body fell on my house from an airplane, I wouldn't be nearly as sanguine as Ms. Hearne.

I'd probably move farther away from the airport, too. But that's just me.

thanks for the mammaries

This is so weird...last night I dreamt I was breastfeeding. Don't ask me why, I have no idea either. Then today I checked in on Mr. Nice Guy for the first time in a while, and he was showing solidarity with lactivists.

You should read him anyway, if descriptions of everything that can come out of a newborn don't bother you. His little girl's going to be so embarrassed in thirteen or fourteen years, but her dad is very funny.

the rat came back

Apologies, first, to everyone who has called today and gotten growled at; in a week, this big project will be signed sealed delivered and I will be human again. It's just right now that's so painful. The particular chunk I'm working on has none of the charms of the others.

Apologies to everyone else who was hoping maybe I'd gotten interesting again: nope. The good writing brain is nowhere near the blog. Nope. Nope.

BUT I thought I would mention that I saw my rodential friend scurry by today, this time on the other side of the redwood fence, and I was glad of it. I had just been reading that the Cahuilla people of Southern California kept roadrunners as pets, which I thought was kind of cool and unusual; the suggestion was that they didn't restrain them in a cage the way we might a parrot or a budgie, but encouraged the birds to hang out close by.

So I'm thinking of this guy as my pet rat. He doesn't live with me, I have no cage for him. He just shows up when I need a spot of brightness. Hello! Hello!

scurryscurryscurry

an embarrassing story of rocking out too hard

I've been all up in the Skype idea lately. For those who haven't heard of it, Skype is free voice-over-internet software. Load it, and if you have a microphone, you can call people for very cheap or free (the latter if they also have Skype, which I'm having a hard time convincing my lazy friends to load, but that is another story.)

If you have Skype and your friend doesn't, you can still call them on their regular non-computer phone for reduced rates. Germany, just as a for-example, is 1.7 euro cents a minute, or about two American cents. Score. So yesterday, in anticipation of a certain birthday that a certain someone in Europe is having today, I bought ten euros worth of SkypeOut credit, and treated myself to a new set of headphones, as the travel pair are spindly and unconvincing. The new pair have those big puffy ear protector thingies that make you feel all closed in and cozy, and there's a rubber strip running under the headband so you don't get a ridge in your hair, and so on. I set a mental alarm for midnight my time, by which time MonkeyScientist should be boiling some soft-boiled eggs in Berlin. Praising my ingenuity, I decided to listen to music while I did some transcription.

Ended up really liking the music. Ended up having a Risky Business moment, sans boxer shorts. Gang of Four, "I Love in a Man in a Uniform", how can one bellydance to this? Look at how far this cord will reach! I marveled. I can get all the way over to the fridge! It's almost as good as being wireless!

Key word: almost.

Because as I was executing a modified Z'ar head move, eyes closed, sweaty shirt discarded, completely blissed out, suddenly there was

no music.

And I was trailing input jacks. And...there was no sound coming from the computer proper. Examination revealed that the little things you stick the jacks into had retreated into the laptop's case and could be heard rattling about.

So much for my sound card. Damn. I had the machine unplugged, flipped over, and divested of a dozen screws before it occurred to me that maybe I should wait until someone who had a CLUE could help me; while I'm really good at taking things apart, putting them back together so they work is sometimes frustrating. And I hadn't backed up any of the stuff I'm working on right now.

Sigh.

Looks like it's time for the Geek Squad. Although I'm not sure if I want people who boast that "we don't date!" touching my computer.

felicitations on your natal anniversary

A little ahead of the game, but accurate where he is; the editor over at Radio Free Mike is taking yet another stab at thirty. Best of wishes.

mmmmmm, grilled mango

Hot Toddy goes hiking with Thor. Funny funny, and a spot-on description of that state where you're so attracted to someone you lose your grasp of your native language.

god bless australia

Really slow getting to work today, so I won't take the time to talk about Navy sonar and why it's probably part of the reason so many marine mammals are beaching themselves. Let me direct you instead to this article about Australian volunteers herding 74 false killer whales back into the ocean.

I particularly recommend the slideshow, if you need a reminder of what good hearted people (especially well-wrapped in neoprene) can do when they pull (or in this case, push) together.

another happy coincidence

The back yard is getting overgrown, and the berries are attracting several kinds of birds. My ability to distinguish one kind of bird from another is spotty at best. I'm pretty clear on penguins versus ostriches, for example, but I couldn't tell a wren from a sparrow if I had one of each up either nostril. And there's been a particularly charming reddish fellow keeping me company as I gnash my teeth over the boring part of my big project. So I thought I'd look him up, but couldn't find a workable guide.

Until I started dabbling in hem's archives, and found the tool for identifying birds she blogged quite some time ago. And it really works. It's a little slow, but makes much more sense than the other ones I found, which asked me first for the bird's species--as if I knew that! Do I look like an ornithologist? Give me questions I can answer from observation, like "what color is it?" and "what shape is the bill?". Each question narrows down the choices until you find your answer. Simple and elegant.

Welcome, little house finch.

i said i thought it would be fun to be a pigeon for five minutes

And this is what I got. Huh.

The Keys to Your Heart

You are attracted to those who are unbridled, untrammeled, and free.

In love, you feel the most alive when your lover is creative and never lets you feel bored.

You'd like to your lover to think you are stylish and alluring.

You would be forced to break up with someone who was ruthless, cold-blooded, and sarcastic.

Your ideal relationship is open. Both of you can talk about everything... no secrets.

Your risk of cheating is zero. You care about society and morality. You would never break a commitment.

You think of marriage something you've always wanted... though you haven't really thought about it.

In this moment, you think of love as commitment. Love only works when both people are totally devoted.

What Are The Keys To Your Heart?

there's hope after all

Who knew I had mad chili-making skillz? Certainly not me. Yet the proof is in the freezer. And the fridge. And my distended tummy. And my apartment smells great. Fresh tomatoes and white corn, secret seasonings...for a woman who has to look it up every time she wants to boil an egg, this is exciting news.

Of course, my perception may be slightly skewed by the half-bottle of Sierra Nevada, last survivor of a long-forgotten six-pack, that didn't go into the pot. Well, you wouldn't want me to waste it, now would you?

one of my deeper posts

Research on another topic dredged up this cool site about U-689, the wrecked German U-Boat found off the coast of New Jersey in 1991. A fishing net caught on it, do you believe it? And the American government had no idea that there was this sub, complete with unexploded torpedoes and dead crew members, just off our shore. Forty-some years later. Took six years and three lives to explore the thing.

Check it out. You'll need Flash for the virtual tour and the game.

breaking the spell of the white witch

Just learned that Walden Media does hold the rights to all seven of the books in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, and plans to film them all. The trailer for The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe had me hopping around in my seat at the Potsdamer Platz multiplex; it looks like the girls are the strong characters Lewis wrote them as in this adaptation. And just in time for my birthday! How awesome is that?

Yes, I have re-read the Chronicles recently. Yes, the Christian subtext is even thicker than I remember. But come on, it's Narnia. And they're using a real lion and everything.

sunday news roundup

A lot happened today, besides my eating too many overripe cherries while Thread shared the secrets of on-the-fly knitwear design. It seemed like an especially heavy newsday for a Sunday, really.

Eric at Movin' Out explains why Danica Patrick's fourth-place finish matters.

The French said non to an EU constitution, apparently in response to high unemployment figures. I may come back to this; it was a subject of much discussion while I was in Europe, but nobody seems to be talking about it here, surprise surprise. Heads are going to roll (ouch, didn't intend the reference to Madame Guillotine--but I'll take it).

Israel firing on the refugee camp at Jabaliya in Gaza (allegedly, militants were preparing to fire on the Israelis with a mortar): I'm on the edge of my seat already, what with 500 Palestinian prisoners being released as part of Friday's ceasefire and all 21 Gaza settlements scheduled for evacuation. Please please please nobody fuck this up.

Two million people took to the streets for Brazil's gay pride parade, the world's largest, which I have to imagine makes ours look small-town. Am I glad they did it? Absolutely. Could I stand to be around that many people? Argh, no.

Oh, and Hsu Hai Ching's Taipei funeral was a "Day of Peace" for the gangs there, who turned out in black shirts and tattoos for the procession. Anyone who has ever had a thing for HK actioners will appreciate the names of Taipei's major gangs--Bamboo Union, Pine Union, Four Seas and the Heavenly Way Gang. This is a film opening scene begging to be made.

i am in a world of hurt

Despite my best intentions, I neither spent my European sojourn seeking out esoteric dance teachers nor partying all night in techno-throbbing clubs. If anything, I got less exercise than usual. Other than what some of you dirty-minded types might imagine went on, I didn't get anything like the workout my usual life provides. Berlin has excellent public transit, so I didn't walk that much. I didn't have to cater, so no lifting 35-pound crates or being on my feet and in constant motion for twelve hours at a pop. Didn't model, so not much stretching or balancing. Finally, only one dance class in five weeks and no troupe rehearsals.

And then there is German food in general and a host obsessed--obsessed--with Hollandaise sauce in particular.

I never gain weight when I travel. Never. Or at least, not before this.

Not that I care about my weight, per se. If anything, I'm delighted by the contrast between how much I appear to weigh, and how much I actually do. I am childishly proud of my density. But I keep a close eye on how far past my bustline my stomach extends, and that first number's not real high, if you follow.

Which would be why I have, ah, overdone it in the past couple of days. Last night I went to the dojo and did my first class in nearly three years. Mostly because my sensei was finally officially passing the mantle of Chief Instructor on to Lab Rat, and I felt it behooved me to be there for such a solemn occasion, especially since I figured there'd be beer and snacks afterwards. But also because I've sort of missed aikido, and felt like getting a little beaten up might be a good thing.

I'd forgotten, though. There are actually some muscle groups that belly dance doesn't get at, and aikido does. Belly dance also don't leave bruises. So by the time I left the dojo, I was aware that I'd probably be sore today.

So why, I'm asking myself now, did I think it was a good idea to take both the beginning hip-hop class and then the first belly dance class this morning? Don't get me wrong, I was really happy at the time. There was some, well, emotional frustration in Berlin that I probably would have handled better if I'd forced myself to go find more dance classes; somehow I never seem to remember that being in motion is the best thing I can do for my head. And I did feel quite fine this morning, even through the burning. Jill was on more of an abs kick than usual during the warm-up, and I'd already been through a pretty serious set of crunches with Micaya, and of course all the rolling the night before...

I can't cough now. Does that give you an idea? I just got home from a play that had some funny moments, but laughing seemed unwise. I am wearing the flaming girdle. When I breathe deeply I feel it in my shoulderblades.

true or false?

Cleaning out folders, I found something my mother had forwarded from a dear family friend. Can you guess which are true and which false? Answers when I feel like it.

1. Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.

2. Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button.

3. A pack-a-day smoker will lose approximately 2 teeth every 10 years.

4. People do not get sick from cold weather; it's from being indoors a lot more.

5. When you sneeze, all bodily functions stop, even your heart!

6. Only 7 per cent of the population are lefties.

7. Forty people are sent to the hospital for dog bites every minute.

8. Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until they are 2-6 years old.

9. The average person over 50 will have spent 5 years waiting in lines.

10. The toothbrush was invented in 1498.

11. The average housefly lives for one month.

12. 40,000 Americans are injured by toilets each year.

13. A wire coat hanger is 44 inches long when straightened.

14. The average computer user blinks 7 times a minute.

15. Your feet are bigger in the afternoon than any other time of day.

16. Most of us have eaten a spider in our sleep.

17. The REAL reason ostriches stick their head in the sand is to search for water.

18. The only two animals that can see behind themselves without turning their heads are the rabbit and the parrot.

19. John Travolta turned down the starring roles in "An Officer and a Gentleman" and "Tootsie."

20. Michael Jackson owns the rights to the South Carolina State anthem.

21. In most television commercials advertising milk, a mixture of white paint and a little thinner is used in place of the milk.

22. Prince Charles and Prince William NEVER travel on the same airplane, just in case there is a crash.

23. The first Harley Davidson motorcycle built in 1903 used a tomato can for a carburetor.

24. Most hospitals make money by selling the umbilical cords cut from women who give birth. They are used in vein transplant surgery.

25. Humphrey Bogart was related to Princess Diana. They were 7th cousins.

26. If coloring weren't added to Coca-Cola, it would be green.

dude, where's my lake?

Maybe this is where the sock I lost in a Berlin laundromat went.

i don't usually follow these things

But since I just finally saw "Kill Bill" in Berlin and have Uma on the brain, I went ahead and read this article about her divorce from Ethan Hawke. And I have to say that I'm not impressed with him at all. He says, "I don't know if it's just too hard to be married to a woman that wants to be a movie star."

Uh, excuse me. She doesn't want to be a movie star. She is a movie star. With a great deal more charisma than her erstwhile second husband, and significant drawing power--she made as much for "Kill Bill 2" as he did for "Training Day", and she made more for "Paycheck".

And he seems to be suggesting that she can't be an adequate mother if she's still working, and I'm thinking, where are you in this equation, Ethan? Or was she left holding the nappies?

where in the name of sam hill am i?

1. These neighbors wake up to loud television, not German rap music.

2. This bed feels weird, and I get all the blankets.

3. American Airlines did feed me on the longest of yesterday's three flight segments. Twice. So I really didn't need to buy those two sandwiches at Heathrow. Or more accurately, I didn't really need to eat them both.

4. Someone needs to get to dance class pronto (see #4).

5. Only one plant dying/dead. Not bad. And none of the others seem traumatized.

6. My girls met me at the airport. When have I ever said that about someone? My girls. So glad to see their sleepy selves, even if I was brewing a tantrum by the time they got there.

7. Do I wash this clothing, or just burn it?

8. Only eleven phone messages, several of them automated. That's a relief. I was imagining a disaster I might have missed.

9. Oh yeah, I was going to renew those library books online. Heh.

10. English, English everywhere. Oh my yes.

all i ever got was dumb fake tattoos

Here's to Bob's sharp eye for catching this unusual langniappe.

starting to get confused

So my note-taking pretty much fell apart the last day we were in Ukraine, and I never picked it back up. And I'd been doing so well! Every time I travel I tell myself that I need to journal more carefully. And each time, I think, oh, I'll remember everything.

You know the rest, I'm sure.

Taking so many pictures is actually really helping. Once I got over my embarrassment that I had become one of those snap-happy tourists that make me so crazy, I started to see the utility in it. The photos help me keep track of where I've been and what I did while I was there.

this is from a segment of the Wall that
hasn't been torn down

The past few days, though, things have been a blur. I know we rented bicycles and rode around looking for remnants of the Wall. I can still feel the cobblestones in my tissues, if you get me. But yesterday? Last night I had to tick off what we had done over the course of the day on my fingers as MonkeyScientist laughed at me. Not that we'd done all that much. Went to a puppet show. Napped. Wrote. Walked around an area that had been rebuilt to look medieval, attempted to get into the Aqua Dome (13,5 euros per? I don't think so, unless it includes a sushi lunch), and ate cherry pastries. Oh, and a damn tasty Morrocan meal--seared tuna with salad, chicken tagine with green olives and preserved lemons, peach juice.

But really, I'm falling off on my touristic responsibilities. I think I'm having Olde Worlde Charme burnout.

another good reason to live in the bay area

This stunningly gorgeous woman used to be a member of the troupe I'm with, and was also one of my teachers. Hard as this is to believe, she is as patient and kind as she is beautiful, and I was very sad when she left the troupe. She also stopped teaching for a while, and when she started back up, it was at times that are hard for me to make if I want to train with my own artistic director.

But I may make more of an effort when I get home.

The effort I would encourage anyone in the area to make is to see Kristina at one of her upcoming performances. Besides her regular Thursday night gig at Amira in the Mission, she'll also be doing a fundraising event on June 19 to support SWANABAQ, Southwest Asian and North African Bay Area Queers. She's dancing with two other former UG's: Sami, an excellent example of why men should bellydance, and the lovely Frederique, who did the amazing duet with Jill the second night on Undulation.

All I can say is, make sure you've got fresh batteries in your pacemaker. You'll need 'em.

for the dog people

You don't often see dogs immortalized in marble this way.




Interestingly enough, this isn't the original. It's a Roman copy of a Greek original. It sits next to a sculpture of a little girl playing with some knucklebones in the "Hellenistic Sculpture" room at the Pergamon Museum, where if you believe the signs, everything is on the verge of falling apart. A protective net protects visitors from falling chunks of the Milet Tower Gate (when it was reconstructed in the museum at the turn of the last century, they used steel rods to hold it together--and it's pulling itself apart somehow). The polychromatic glazes on some Assyrian tiles are separating from their substrate. Und zu weiter. The English translations of the German text, where they exist, are clunky; drily informative, but awkward in the mouth and ear.

I stopped reading them after a while. It was making me too crazy. Easier to just drift through, imagining myself approaching the magnificent blue and gold Ishtar Gate with its lions, bulls, and dragons at sunset at the head of a caravenserai laden with trade goods. Or as an artist placing the last tile in the trompe l'oeil mosaic floor of a Roman senator, complete with elaborate foliage and a "label" peeling up at one corner.

The maultaschen at the cafe, essentially pork ravioli with a spinach cream sauce, wasn't too shabby either. And the trinkshokolade and milchkaffee come in huge bowls. I am going to be massive by the time I get home.

On a completely unrelated note: saw Revenge of the Sith last night. Yes, I'm in Berlin, I could have been doing something Berlinier. For reasons I will explain another time, I needed to see the movie in another country than my own. And I will just say this: did George run out of money when it was time to do the "prophetic dream" sequences? Shabbiest things I think I've ever seen.

the vein the neo-nazis are tapping

Radio Free Mike has an interesting piece up at Pacific News Service on why Germany's neo-nazis are getting any support a'tall. Checkitout.

baby's first panic attack

So this is what it's like. Hmm. Wow. It really does suck just as much as everyone says it does.

flowers for the dead

The difference between Christian and Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine is striking. The Christian ones are generally well-tended and orderly; the stone, wood, or metal scrollwork crosses that top each grave sport elaborate wreathes of plastic flowers.





The Jewish ones, by contrast, are sad. Unkempt and chaotic. On our second day of graveyard-hopping I stumbled into a damp ditch that had been hidden by thigh-high grass, and could barely see the heads of my mother, our interpreter, and the gesticulating caretaker above the waving fronds. The graveyards that have stones at all--and there is a story there, about the cemetery we thought would have Mom's answers but turned out to have been cleared thirty years ago to make way for a bridge--are often a complete shambles. The stones that have not been stolen lean at crazy angles, or lie flat on the ground, covered with lichens and snails. Rubbish lay in drifts against the stones closest to the fence in one location, a graveyard that had obviously been sited on a steep hill because the land couldn't be used for something else. That one we had to muck through mud and cow shit to get to; chickens sheltered in the bushes, making angry noises at us through the foliage. A man ran by below, chasing his wayward cow.

This is what happens when the people who would care for the cemetery are forced to leave. But if you didn't know that many of Hungary's Jews had been rounded up (the region we visited was part of Hungary when my family was there) and taken away, you might get the impression that Jews don't care about the resting places of their dead.

Which is not to say that people aren't making an effort. The caretakers of the first one we visited, a sweet old couple who looked more like an Irish fishing family than anything else, live next to the cemetery and take the best care of it they can on the fifteen dollars a month allotted by the government. And of course there is an influx of money from Jews scattered by this most recent diaspora, either folded up and handed over discreetly at the site itself, or channeled through more organized structures. Jews pay to have the graveyards fenced so that no more stones will be taken and mowed so the stones are visible. One caretaker, a very handsome man in waders and baseball cap against the drizzle, will paint the engraved letters of the stones so they're easier to read, and send you a photograph.

Because it's hard to ensure that the work gets done. One young man from New York went to Ukraine a couple of times and hired local people to clean up the graveyards the first time; when he went the second time, he discovered that the people who did the work had gotten shaken down for half their pay by the mayor of the town.

But even if the stones are upright, the grass reasonably short, the livestock absent, these graveyards feel abandoned. There are very few people left to come and put candles or flowers on the graves. Which is why this struck me.




Sometimes these things are taken care of by other means.

incidentally

There are more photos, but I'm not going to blog them all. Hit any of the ones that are up to get to the photostream.

matroyshka to some, babushka to others

The only ones I saw in Ukraine. Everything else in the shops was relentlessly modern, plastic, cheap.

ukrainian pigeons

These things?

These are storks. They have built a ginormous nest atop a phone pole. Apparently this is very common here.

The guy who's been driving us around must think I'm a complete nutcase by now. Although he appears to make a decent living humoring Jews who want to run around in the high grass and cow shit, feeling the surfaces of gravestones so old that time has worn them back to bare nubs of rock. I'm just not sure how many of his other passengers need him to stop at weird times to take pictures of the fauna.

I was really planning to write something substantial tonight, but I've been eating substantial things all day, and the two forces are in serious opposition. The short version: we found living relatives, which we completely did not expect, and then they overfed us, which we also did not expect but should have. Had we read any of the books I bought about this country. I'll tell that story presently, maybe after I've made more of a dent in the three bottles of home-pressed grape juice and one of homemade wine they sent us home with, which we need to drink somehow before we fly back to Berlin from Budapest on Saturday.

And then, because I have no sense in my pointy little head whatsoever, I decided to try the "Transcarpathia Party" special at the Star Hotel restaurant. With a side of beet salad and a nice cold beer from the hotel's own distillery, which I imagine is hidden somewhere near the pool and Jacuzzi I have yet to find. LaE, are you reading? I was thinking about you, and how stupid I was not to bring my camera to dinner. The plate was beautifully arranged, but I am not, repeat not, ordering this again because twice in one week Will Kill Me.

1. (4) Special skinny sausages, spicy.
2. (1) Special thick sausage, very mild, with lots of rice built in.
3. (1) delicious pickle
4. (drum roll please) Salo! Smoked pork fat, the best-known Ukrainian dish after borscht, traditionally eaten on black bread (made with honey and almost flowery-tasting) with salt. AX, stop reading here, you'll hate this part: it is not at all what I expected, white and flavorless and squishy. It's more like eating bacon--without the meat.

If you can imagine that.

I can, but more importantly, I can feel it. We've been avoiding all the usual typhoidial suspects, raw things, milky things, questionable water, things washed in questionable water, things grown with questionable water, etc. Which means I'm going to need vegetables very badly when I get back to Berlin. Very badly.

Although I am completely set for grape juice.

ukraine: end of the world, or not? asks monkeyscientist

So enamored with the fact that I can finally blog, from a working keyboard, without paying a million Hungarian forints a second, that instead of writing a new post, I'm just pasting a response to an email. Sorry everyone. Any moment now, this dream might end and the computer disappear.

Not. But very, very strange in some ways. Mom and I just came back from "Royal Pizza"--the first meal we've taken outside the hotel, where the menus are in English (sort of) as well as Ukrainian. And we managed okay, the pizzas (small individual ones) were pretty much what we asked for. Although we didn't realize that "ketchup" was literal. And we sort of had this idea about our food being hot that was also, apparently, off-base. I have a bit of a tummyache, but I was working on that before the food even came, so I suspect it may be related to the juicebox I had just before we left the hotel. Strawberry, not very good. Hoping to have better luck with a larger container of apricot juice I bought today from a store where all the shop ladies were wearing little lace ramekins on their heads.

Also: roast chicken-flavored potato chips, lots and lots of good bread, and Nutella for 18 hrivna and 90 kopeks, which is very expensive for food here. 5 Hrivna=1 dollar. I LOVE kopeks; I'm trying to save them up so I can drill holes in them and sew them onto my coin bra/dance belt. We are avoiding all dairy products because Mom's travel clinic said so; something about pasteurization. I actually snuck some butter onto my bread this morning.

Don't tell, okay?

It's 10 degrees C outside right now, and it was bitterly grey all day. Not even the kind of overcast that makes for good photography. Not a good day for shooting. There seem to be some celebrations of the anniversary [of the end of the war] going on here--something at a theatre (there is at least one stage, possibly two, and a 'kinoteatr' showing the latest Vin Diesel movie and 'Sahara' with Matt McCounaghey). At the Biblioteka there is a display in the window of old books about the war, and today there were fresh flower arrangements on the monuments in the central area, which is a pedestrian mall.

Ouside of the downtown, all freshly cobbled and planted with young trees, the storefronts painted bright colors at street level, things get a little more Communist. I took the stone bridge across the river (I *think* it's the Tsiza), where a woman was selling bunches of lilacs from a square plastic food-service bucket and a yellow dog kept running in and out of the street, chasing cars, which nearly made my heart stop. If you keep following that street--attractive old apartment buildings on one side of the river, one massive ugly Stalin-era one on the other with dirty facade, washing hung out, and some satellite dishes--the street eventually ends in a church. I stood at the corner in front of a closed store and pet a little black cat with white paw tips and a star under her chin and watched the babushka waiting across the street for a bus, with her bicycle and plastic bags of things.

The babushkas fascinate me. They all sport headscarves, sensible shoes, and monumental bosoms that start just under the chin and end somewhere at the junction of shapeless cardigan and earth-colored skirt. I bought a small bunch of lilies-of-the-valley from one today for Mom, for 2 hrivna; they were bound together with red thread. Lilies-of-the-valley had been my maternal grandmother's favorites, the grandmother I'd named after. Tomorrow would be my grandmother's 90th birthday, had she lived; she died just before my parents married, so I never met her.

But I was talking about the babushkas. Everyone is very careful of and respectful of them, and it dawned on me today that they've seen everything--some of these women must have been children during/just after the war, and during the years of the forced famines, when Ukrainians were forced into cannibalism (this area was Hungarian until '45, when it was ceded to Russia, and the monster Stalin). They worked on collective farms, they stood in line for bread, you name it. I can't imagine what all this looks like to them, the young women with their ultra-pointy-toed shoes and tight jeans, the boys in American sports clothing, cell phones everywhere.

Did I mention the market? In the thing that looks like an airplane hangar? Butcher stalls around the outside, produce and sweets and moloko (milk, if you haven't read 'Clockwork Orange') products in the middle. I negotiated the purchase of several small packets of paprika to take back to my mother's cousin in Long Beach, IN GERMAN, and that of two greenish bananas (Mom likes them that way) in English and Ukrainian. HA!

Up on the hill, there's a medieval fortress. We may or may not get there.

And I must point out the wonder of this thing: I am sending you email from a place that just twenty years ago probably wouldn't have let me in. Mom and I sit in a little room in what was once a duke's residence, the nicest (and only) hotel in Mukacheve, a four-star hotel with a towel warmer in the bathroom and a Jacuzzi and pool somewhere (haven't found those yet) and three restaurants, all of which, apparently, play loud, goopy music at all hours. At breakfast (jam fritters and big orange caviar), it was Muzaky versions of everything from No Doubt's "Don't Speak" and "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" to some European metal ballad I can hum but not name. With wave sounds and chirping birds covering the transitions.

got some photos up

Three hours in the train station at Chop, Western Ukraine. The border crossing. Thought we'd need all that time between trains to have our stuff shaken, but the woman at Customs was so irritated that she couldn't make herself understood that finally she just waved us through, as the other five or so Customs people sat by and watched.

I believe she called us "idiots", too. But maybe there's a word in Ukrainian that sounds just like that?

trying to blog in deutsch from magyar

Ouch, ouch, ouch. My head hurts.

Made it to Budapest in one piece yesterday, but am probably going to get kind of sporadic. Have bought, of all things, two pairs of festive socks with little toes knitted right in. Tenderloin with brambleberries (mom) and so-called Mexican chicken coated with corn and "chilli" (me) for lunch. Deutsches Bahn owes me for two train tickets from here to Zahony that I cannot use, a fact that took a couple of hours and quite a bit of traipsing up and down stairs at Keleti Station to ascertain. New German SIM card in phone means I am receiving many, many text messages from the company that I cannot read.

Great dogs everywhere. You dog people would be jealous.

there's life underground

Not even sure how I got from palynology (the study of ancient plant spores) to this very cool page about the little freight trains that used to run through tunnels under the streets of Chicago, but I had to share it with you. Especially I know that some of you are really into the urban exploration thang.

Not recommended for the claustrophobic.

meow

Seen in Prenzlauer Berg, somewhere between one intoxicating bookstore and another.

houston, we have a problem

Shit. I think I knew this already. Did I need to be reminded?

Thanks, in a roundabout fashion, to La Entropista's roommate--who was actually linked to a test that suggests I should live in Los Angeles or Chicago. Huh.

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Who's Your Inner European?

bookmark this

Just found a wonderful site--the Ancient Library--where diligent scholars (laboring no doubt under fluorescent lights) are painstakingly scanning in every page of such works as William Smith's 1867 Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. All three volumes, 3,700 pages of Greek and Roman historical, literary and mythological figures worth. And Jean Nicolaides' 1889 Les Livres de Divination Traduits sur un Manuscrit Turc Inédit, a French translation of Ottoman Turkish works of divination, most or all of which are translations of works in Greek.

Just seeing the old text is cool. But I can see this being a great resource--or a great time-waster--for fans of antiquity. If you read dictionaries for fun, you need this site.

i know what you're thinking

And actually, it's not like that. Some of the obvious reasons why I'm not blogging much from Berlin simply aren't true (well, one of them is), but if you're imagining that I am out being simply fabulous all over the city, all the time, I'm afraid that's inaccurate.

Sad but true: I've been working.

One of the big projects I mentioned just before I left is a sizable chunk of writing for a new museum/"interpretive center". I'm doing the scripts for the A/V components. And after weeks of not being able to get the subcontractor I'm working for in for research and interviews, suddenly the client needs everything Right Away. So I packed several tons of xeroxed research materials in my computer bag (seriously, 3 inches thick) and I've been working on these odd little pieces ever since. It works out; MonkeyScientist has his own work to do, so we write in different rooms together, which I think is rather sweet.

Even if I'm learning that not everyone talks to themselves as they write. Slightly embarrassing. Especially the cursing and hanging upside-down off my chair part. I guess other writers don't do that either.

What am I saying? Other writers DRINK, and shoot up and stuff. I'm doing fine, relatively.

ANYWAY. We do take breaks and go out, and I do my stealthy best to eat as many pastries as I can order with my non-existent German (nice thing about bakery cases: all you have to do is point.) We see stuff and go places. I am formulating deep thoughts on those experiences.

In the meantime, here are two paragraphs ripped straight from yesterday's email to my mother.

I spent a little time by myself this afternoon, on an abortive quest for a bathing suit. It was fun. I saw a guy I'd noticed in a coffeeshop a day or so back, and did a little drive-by flirting, just to keep my hand in. The other day, he'd been wearing a very dramatic leather duster and hat, which is why I'd noticed him. Today he was wearing what appeared to be a conservative black suit, until I got close enough to see that the fabric was printed with an all-over flower pattern in a slightly shinier black.

I can't wait for you to see how people dress here; it is IMPOSSIBLE, from what I can tell, to be out of fashion. The combinations are not as strange as some that I saw in Japan, but still. Long light green socks over dark green tights on one girl today. All kinds of striped pants. And many women have dyed their hair unlikely shades of red, sometimes in patterns with other colors.

european randomness

1. Who knew Wikipedia cared about Blood Orange Kit-Kat? The line it sounded better than it proved to be is sadly true. Although maybe the ones that are filled with more liquidy stuff are better.

2. The BBC is running a story about alternatives to embalming/cremation, which is funny because we were just talking about this Tuesday as we strolled through the cemetery under Bertolt Brecht's window. They're reading a letter from a man who would like to have his body left out for wild animals, which is pretty close to my dream of being fed to lions. South African cemeteries are apparently nearing capacity; a man is saying they'll be out of room for dead people within five years.

3. Enchilada flavored Crunchips, as close as you'll get to Mexican food in this city according to my guide, are not bad. I think I prefer them to the Sweet Thai Chili flavor. These people will do anything to a potato.

4. Mom, if you're reading; I'm trying to email you, and it's bouncing. Throw out some email, hokay?

drat!

The Red Elvises are going to be here a week after I leave, at the club where we saw the Croatian frat-rockers the other night. What are the chances? I'm deeply frustrated by the timing on this.

Of all the gin joints in all the cities in all the world, they have to walk into the Mudd Club ten days after I've vamoosed. But if you're in town (or in Hamburg before that, or Barcelona after, or anywhere else on the tour, which also swings through the U.S.) and you like to have fun, you should go.

Tell them Cheesy Slice's old girlfriend sent you. They'll know what that means.

a jewish-american in berlin

MonkeyScientist is going to be writing something that requires him to interview members of the NPD, understood in these parts to be neo-Nazis. When he left the house yesterday morning for work, he was still waiting for a return phone call from the party spokesman. Don't answer the phone if it rings, he instructed me. We joked about what I would say if I did in fact answer the phone (and did in fact speak any German); it was all ugly. Now that the meet has been arranged we're discussing whether I should tag along as his photographer. He doesn't have to know [what I am], I said. I'll tie up my Judische Haar. But apparently we're not the problem anymore...there aren't enough of us to get blamed for the thinning of German blood. Plenty of other auslanders around for that.

******

There are little plaques set between the cobblestones outside some of the buildings here. They're imprinted with the names, birthdates, and deportation dates of Jews who lived in the buildings and died during the war. Hier wohnte Jenny Shneeman, jg. 1908, deportiert 1943, gemordet in Auschwitz. Murdered at Auschwitz. Sometimes there will be a few together, three or four or five, and you can guess at the family relationships from the ages: here the grandparents, then their son and his wife, and finally a three-year-old child. All the ones I've seen so far have been Gemordet Auschwitz, or Riga. Some of them went through Theresienstadt on their way to Auschwitz...as a kid, I was in a production of I Never Saw Another Butterfly, which is set in Terezin (another name for Theresienstadt). I wore black clothes and makeup designed to make me look gaunt. I really had no idea what I was representing. I was just happy to be in the play, and not a member of the crew.

*******

Anything remotely Jewish here has a member of the polizei standing outside. Even the Beth Cafe. Which, when we walked past it last night, had two cops. Looking mighty bored. So you're telling me, I asked MonkeyScientist, that if I wanted to open a business in Berlin, and I wanted free protection from having my windows spray-painted, all I'd have to do was make it clear that it was a Jewish establishment?

******

An aimless wander left me in front of the New Synagogue, which at one time was the grandest and most beautiful synagogue in all of Europe. The architect was inspired by the Alhambra, and the Moorish influence is evident in everything that remains.

Which is not very much. The New Synagogue was attacked during Kristallnacht, although it escaped complete destruction because a lone police officer rushed over and drove away the arsonists, and made sure the fire department came and put the fire out. Which is pretty extraordinary, considering that most of the rest of Jewish Berlin was allowed to burn that night. However, the building was eventually commandeered by the army, and then used as bomb shelter. Bombs pretty much finished it off.

In 1988, the Jewish community here decided to restore part of the New Synagogue, to show how beautiful it had been. For three euros you can visit the reconstructed part. I was doing fine until I came across a photo of the last wedding ever held at the synagogue, of a rabbi to a young woman with glasses; four years and four months later they went together to Auschwitz. Gemordet. I started crying and then realized that the guards--one, the largest and blondest man I had ever seen in my life, the other a creepily gaunt fellow with bags under the bags under his eyes--were watching me very closely. And I wanted to throw myself on the floor and start screaming, what do you think I'm going to do? I'm certainly not going to hurt anything. You people did enough of that.

And I realized that I was carrying more anger than I realized.

thought we were in for balkan techno dance music

Instead we got this last night, in a smoky basement club that was exactly what I expected from Berlin--brick barrel vault ceiling, men with silly hair, and rampant drunkenness. He ordered an "Extasy", which was apparently all fruit juice and no alcohol; I had a Cosmo, which was almost completely alcohol in a very large glass, with half a pineapple balanced on the rim. We watched three girls act out the faces of inebriation--one who sat at a table with her head in her hands for most of the night, a second sporting a cigarette and a very tight and unforgiving light blue sweater who wove precariously on a raised section of floor, and a third in red attempting to swing dance with a relentless fella who found that he had to sort of toss her from position to position.

The band--I had a brief moment of hoping they were Ukrainian and thus would be singing in my target language--are in fact Croatian. Sort of Croatian frat-rock. A couple of brilliant songs, one with a Madness/Specials edge, another with more of a Russian thing going on, but otherwise...a "where is my lighter?" experience. I guess we'd missed the dj dancing part while we were out eating tapas with an old family friend of his, but from the looks of things when we came in, nobody had been dancing. So we sat, and sat, and eventually left. I am falling behind already on my stated intent of dancing myself silly in a city known for dance clubs...sigh.

I think I'm finally over my jet lag. So far everything I've ordered by myself in a restaurant has been the thing I thought I'd asked for, so I'm not totally incomprehensible. There is chocolate in the muesli and graffiti everywhere. The shelf toilets are not as weird as anticipated. There are lots of birds in Mitte and it is wonderful to hear them when one is wandering around at five a.m., trying to adjust to the time difference.

first thoughts

1. European airport Smoker Zoos are very different from the American kind.

2. Jet lag is a bitch, but hard to distinguish from what happens when you've been up all night before flying anyway.

3. I hope the people at Dollar Rent-a-Car aren't too pissed that I still have the keys to the car they rented me so I could get to the airport on time. Heh.

4. Sauerkirschnektar is the bomb.

5. People. Smoking. In. Restaurants. Is stranger to this Californian than anything else I've seen in the past twenty-four hours.

6. Certain things have not changed since January.

twenty-four hours

Waterbones will be going offline for a day or so. Got some travelin' to do. Try to stay out of trouble, hmm?

this would be funny even if i weren't hyper and about to get on a plane

Dan over at Doing Things With Words has made the connection I couldn't.

Yes yes yes, I'll burn in hell. Whatever.

listening to the little voice

No, this is nothing about saving France.

You know how sometimes you have an instinct about something, but you've already made a commitment to a course of action, so you go against your gut feeling?

I just woke up to the phone. The woman who is supposed to be subletting my place can't leave Milan because her father may be about to die. She's not coming, and could I send her back half of the money she sent for the rent?

I feel for her, I totally do. But I'm in a frustrating spot now. This is not the first time this woman has hit me with a curveball, and after that first time I felt really troubled about having her in. But it felt like I didn't have time to find someone else, so I worked a deal with her to cut the rent by half, and stifled the voice that was telling me something else would go awry. And the whole discussion of getting her from the airport to my place helped nothing; she kept going around about when she was coming in, and I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to find someone to let her into the apartment, and finally the ever-patient and loving Snufkina (who is about to travel herself and doesn't have the time for this) not only agreed to let her in, but volunteered to go to the airport to meet this woman and cab back into the city with her.

So.

I now have less than 24 hours to find someone willing to come in and water the plants, and I am paying 3/4 of the rent for a month I'd planned to pay no rent. I have a dozen plants I'd like to come home to alive. Thank god there's no cat involved.

BUT, I just learned that you can request a mail hold from the post office online, which is very convenient. I suppose I can put my lights on a timer, so the place doesn't look completely deserted. I've left a message for Thread asking if she'd like a home away from home for the month. I'll sort this out. And the level of clean I needed to get to, I don't think I do now; I'd been trying to figure out where to hide some, ah, "marital aids" (what an absurd term) and that's no longer an issue.

Today's lesson, kids: when your gut tells you something, listen.

i paid for this sickness, it's all mine!

I took my last dose of typhoid about an hour and a half ago, which means that soon I will be able to eat some dinner and go to bed. Have I mentioned how much I love travel vaccinations? No, seriously. Going in for my shots makes the trip real for me and satisfies my silly tough butch self-image at the same time. Especially on days like last Tuesday, where the nurse made a point of telling me she was giving me my Td booster right in the middle of that big tattoo. "Td" is of course the adult formulation of the tetanus-plus-diphtheria vaccines; but I still like calling it "DipTet".

The Td was funny in and of itself, mostly because it gave me the chance, at work later in the afternoon, to beg off any job requiring too much charm. I'm having tetanus, I told my manager. Don't make me talk to guests. I also discovered that several of my co-workers--intelligent people all--were not aware that you're supposed to get your Td updated every ten years. So we had some discussion about poking each other with rusty nails and then got back to work.

I feel silly that I'm proud of what the nurse said as she looked over my yellow traveler's vaccination card to see what else she might need to give me. Hep A, good. Hep B, good. Ah, you've had the rabies series? And I appreciate that she didn't make fun of my having gotten vaccinated against Japanese encephalitis, once upon a time.

Everyone else does.

one year

I sort of thought I would have something more profound to say about yesterday. As some friends have noted, some of my strongest writing seems to come from experiences of loss, and the first anniversary of my father's death ranks right up there.

But I haven't had time to think about it, or much of anything, the past few days; I'm having enough stress trying to hold everything together and get the things done I need to before I leave. I will say that today was, emotionally, a very long day. I did both the morning and afternoon sessions at a figure-drawing marathon, chewed out two friends via cell phone while waiting for a bus, fell asleep on the train, saw an intense play about Israel, and sat with Snufkina in a coffeeshop comparing damaged fingernails.

She says she loves me because I'm not only geeky enough to agree that we should take off our bandages to show each other the swollen/blue/bloody/peeling/dented patients beneath, but because I happen to be carrying fresh bandages to cover them back up.

I also saw E, for the first time in about a year and a half, and while it was hard, it wasn't as hard as it's been in the past. I found myself wondering if he'd been that skinny when I loved him, and I couldn't remember.

I suppose that's good.

I guess the point, if I have one (doubtful) is something about memory...I still miss my father a lot. And I still forget that he's gone. Things still happen where my first response is I gotta call Dad and tell him. And at the same time, I still remember how it felt to systematically decimate the gift baskets we'd been sent because cooking was too complicated, because even pouring a bowl of cereal seemed like a Herculean effort, and all the time thinking, I'd sooner have my dad than this damn gift basket.

Sometimes I am still right up against it. And sometimes not. And there's no way of knowing what it's going to be on any given day. I thought there'd be some predictable rhythm, some cycle, some line moving smoothly up or down a graph. I suppose that's how many of us think about loss, and dealing with loss: this will go away, bit by bit. The anniversaries will hurt, and the holidays, but not other days.

But maybe it's not like that. We make it through Valentine's Day, say, or a birthday, or what would have been the tenth wedding anniversary, without incident. I'm getting better, we think. And then some seemingly unrelated thing happens, and we're a wreck.

Hmm.

take your vitamins, and quitcher bitchin'

One of my troupemates forwarded this, and I have to share it. Former Ziegfield Girl Doris Eaton Travis has announced her return to the Broadway stage. She'll be dancing at the New Amsterdam on 42nd Street as part of an AIDS fundraiser, which is sweet because that's where she got her start.

Back during World War 1.

Travis is 101 years old.

She says, "I will admit that sometimes I get a little tired. Once in a while I'll take a little nap in the afternoon, which I didn't use to do, but I think I'm privileged to do that."

Uh, yeah, I think so.

what happens when you sleep with your co-workers

this is a cool little utility

If you're looking for a particular book, but you don't want to buy it, you can find out if there's a library near you with a copy using Find in a Library. You can search by city, by zip code...it'll come back with a list of libraries, how many copies of the book each has, how far away it is.

I know I've been quiet lately, and dull when I do post; things are hectic. But I just got back from a very productive couple of days in Los Angeles, doing research for a writing project I'll be delivering in stages through the end of June. It involves sifting through a tremendous amount of information, so I sat in a sort of back room on the tenth floor of the Metropolitan Water District building (which is, interestingly, much more attractive on the inside than the outside), looking at slides, reading transcripts, and puzzling over scientific papers. One really cool thing about the project is that I have my own researcher, a woman who's been brought on specifically to get the information I need. After I got over the strangeness of such a thing--of, essentially, having an eager and competent assistant--I found that I liked it.

As much as I prefer to do my own interviews, and track down my own bits, there's too much here for me to do by myself. Especially since I'll be working remotely for the first five weeks. And this woman is so organized. I came home weighted down with a great mass of xeroxes, and a feeling that I had a much better grip on what I'm being asked to do.

More on that when it's done.

oh, this is inhumane

When did the early flight to L.A. seem like a good idea? Why didn't I get myself taken off yesterday's party when I found out that I would need to be up while it was still black out today to fly? Whine whine whine. I may actually purchase some caffeine and everything, because shambling zombie doesn't begin to capture the whole flavor of how I'm feeling this morning.

like the thorne rooms, but better

I wish I were in Chicago to see this exhibit. Correction: I wish I were in Chicago with Snufkina, who loves tiny things, to see it. Frances Glessner founded Harvard's Department of Legal Medicine in 1936; she also built a series of dollhouse crime scenes to train police detectives.

Still used in forensic training today, the eighteen dioramas are engaging and shocking visual masterpieces. Built on a scale of 1:12 , they each display an astounding level of precision: pencils write, window shades move, and every detail -- a newspaper headline, a bloodstain on the rug, an outdated wall calendar, a cartridge casing -- becomes a potential clue to the crime.

courtesy of Oblomova

berlin in ten

Besides the obvious reasons (monkeymonkeymonkeyscientist), I'm really excited to be traveling next week (Urk! Must get shots! Shoes! Hostess gifts for friendly Ukrainians!) because I haven't been anywhere since 2001 and the Great Ramen Museum Pilgrimage disguised as a trip to Japan. Well, Detroit and St. Thomas and Black Rock City. But really traveling-traveling. I caught the bug at 25, and try to go somewhere cool every other year. And I'd fallen off my schedule. Good to be back on.

And the whole family-village thing with my mother, well, I've sort of been taking that for granted as something a girl and her mom do, but my catering coworkers are all agog. If only they knew how badly I abuse her when we travel together. There was an episode with a Thin Mint on an airplane once, and the night in San Diego when we wondered if our hotel room came with a complimentary baseball bat for dealing with the cock-a-roaches. This time I'm threatening to make her eat borscht and pig fat spread on black bread, and since I'm the one who's been learning some Ukrainian, she's relying on me to order. Heh heh heh. Fortunately we have the same sense of humor.

We may not have visas yet, but we have the same sense of humor.

it's official

Worked on my taxes this evening, and confirmed something that I'd suspected.

In 2004, I made more money writing than waitressing.

Even counting that I didn't work at all for a couple of months, and had reduced duty for the first half of the year while I dealt with my father's illness and death, and then had family financial support...this is still pretty exciting.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real, 1922

oh, that's right

Mercury is retrograde. Now I get it.

Anyone know for how much longer?

i am having a really odd day so far

Sloshed through rain of biblical proportions to Berkeley for a modeling job this morning. New clients, people I haven't worked for before; we made the arrangement privately and not through the Guild.

Which it seems was not such a hot idea now. Because I found myself standing at the corner of Adeline and Stuart (I was never given a house number; was told instead to call from the intersection and someone would meet me because it was "too complicated" to explain where the house was), completely drenched where my umbrella did not cover me, dialing repeatedly and getting a machine. Finally I left a message that as much as I wanted to meet and work for them, I was going to wait ten more minutes in a nearby Walgreen's and then I was going home.

They never called. I speculated on whether I could get away with demanding partial payment, hoped that nothing catastrophic had happened, and bought some nail polish remover and a travel size tube of lotion. Can someone explain to me why we need disposable women's razors with lavender-scented handles? Anyone? Anyone? Ferris? Also, Mars has a Star Wars tie-in where you can choose which side of the Force to join--milk chocolate M&M's, or dark chocolate ones.

Which clarifies something about me I had always suspected. Clearly my deep disdain for milk chocolate is evidence that I really want my head mutilated and then covered with a shiny black wastebasket.

But I digress.

I'd made a plan to meet Vicces after 1 to spend a little time learning survival Hungarian, so I called him and he agreed to meet me at Sconehenge a couple hours early. Which has so far turned out to be the most productive part of the day; I now know the three most important things in any language: please, excuse me, and where is the bathroom? We did not get to my mother only drinks Diet Pepsi or please do not make that with onions, but I'll be carrying a phrasebook. This was mostly to get a sense of the sounds, and so that I could watch Vicces' mouth as he made them, which always seems to help.

Fell asleep on BART coming back. Somebody--I'm not naming any names--needs to not stay up all night reading and compulsively watching DVDs in an effort to maximize her Netflix dollars. Ahem.

And I just got home to find that one of the gentlemen I've been seeing here has dumped me, via email. After just three or four dates, but several years of light flirtation at work. Apparently I have become two things women bemoan in men--emotionally unavailable and fixated on my work. He said it all very nicely, of course, but that was the upshot. He knew pretty much after the first, ah, time that he wanted to build something with me (yeah, right, I'm that good. Ha!), and I did not catch up in time.

I'm not feeling anything about this yet besides bemused. And, admittedly, a little relieved--this was warmer than it was hot. And terrible that he's sad, and annoyed that he tries to guilt me in a few points in his email. Okay, so maybe I'm feeling more than just bemused. But it's so strange; I am rarely if ever the one in this position. Usually I fall first. And usually I give new things a little more of a chance, if they're not exactly what I want right away.

He may be making the right call. But I was enjoying his company--and his cooking. Ah well. I am getting valuable insight. I read his email and it sounds like my own words; we may be more similar than is totally wise in a partnership anyway.

Still, I think a nap is in order. I'm had as much new information today as I can handle.

i knew her when

Now you must all go admire this cool knitted thing my friend designed that graces the cover of the spring knitty, the leading online knitting site. My late grandmother the yarn fascist would probably plotz if she saw it--Edna had a very strong sense of needlework Right and Wrong (for example, knitting: good, crochet: the devil's playground), but this is a new day.

I love it that lately so many of my friends seem to be finding their grooves. It's really inspiring.

by way of explanation




Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth.

Interesting life. Interesting life.

Berlin in fifteen.

sweet yet suspenseful

Watching Andre woo his Coffee Shop Girl.

It's nice to see that men struggle with the game too.

naming conventions

My desk is under the window which faces into the back yard, which is about the size of a dinner napkin and quite overgrown around the edges of the deck. A week ago, I was sitting here rearranging the music in my library or playing solitaire or learning Ukrainian color words or something like that, and I saw a big white rat running along the concrete half-wall that supports the fence. Before I even had time to formulate the thought "big white rat", it paused at the passionflower vine, and then jumped to the ground and went under the deck.

It didn't bother me--I'm from Detroit, I've seen much bigger rats--but I did think it was rather pretty. Wait, I was in the middle of writing an email. That's right. So I mentioned in the email that there was this big rat, and should I try to catch it? Maybe it was somebody's pet? I had this whole plan that I would put out the last of the grated Mexican-style cheese and a shoebox, but then I realized that I wouldn't know what to do with the rat once I had it. Put up xeroxed signs? Found: One Large Rat? With a picture? Anyway, I told myself, it's probably long gone by now. And I promptly forgot, as tends to happen with most things that aren't right in front of me.

Well, this afternoon before I left for the theater, I saw it again! Or one just like it. Same sequence: it ran along the wall, and then jumped down and went under the deck.

So I put out some Cheerios for it. Everyone likes Cheerios, right?

It's too dark to go out and see if they're still there. But maybe the rat will come live with me. In the best pet-naming tradition of my family, I could name it something really clever and exotic like "Ratty". Seriously. We had a dog named "Puppy", and two cats who went by "Brown Cat" and "Grey Cat" because we couldn't remember the real names we'd given them; my stuffed animals had names like "Bear" and "Bunny". All the times I've tried for more interesting names, I've failed--but then, I guess that's to be expected when one names one's pets after linguistics luminaries.

I shouldn't even admit to all this.

If anyone has a better name for my rat, I'd love to hear it. Maybe I can have a Rat-Naming Contest.

Winner gets a handful of Cheerios.