Spider

Bob and I went to see “Iron Man” last night. I must admit it didn’t blow me away, but I think that has more to do with me than the movie. Super-hero movies are just not my thing. I can never suspend reality enough to buy into them, and this one seemed particularly absurd. (The hero builds an entire metal flying suit out of available scrap while a seriously wounded prisoner in a cave in Afghanistan. And that’s just the beginning.)

I guess this is why I was never into comic books.

I’m settling back into my routines pretty well after my DC trip. My boss took me to lunch yesterday as a thanks for my small role in a project that won her a substantial company award -- that was nice. (I really didn’t do much for the project, so lunch was appropriate compensation.)

Oh, and apparently I was bitten by a spider sometime over the weekend. I had a little red welt on my leg Saturday night and didn’t think much of it, having never seen the offending creature -- my friend Liz identified it as a spider bite. By last night it had turned into a bright red itchy blotch, but I’m hoping that actually means it’s getting better. (Itchy seems good, as opposed to painful.)

(Photo: Tribeca, April 2008)

Maypole

I’m back from my trip to DC, having wallowed in absurd amounts of tree pollen and dodged tent caterpillars falling like fat, leggy raindrops from the tree in my friend Liz’s front yard. Spring may have come to New York, but DC puts New York to shame. Our nation’s capital is overflowing with seasonal fertility, and I don’t mean the government. (I don’t think.)

I went to DC to meet with a group of fellow bloggers. Reya and Barbara brought a group of us together for a barbecue and a celebratory springtime dance around an actual maypole, occasioned by the visit of Lettuce from England. I don’t think I’d ever seen a real maypole before Saturday, but now I can say that I have experienced the weaving, ribbony silliness of a maypole dance.


Before we started, Reya instructed us to grasp our particular ribbon and imagine something that we want for ourselves, and then to grasp the pole and fill it with sexual energy (!). Then we wove around each other until we’d braided all the ribbons in a perfectly imperfect pattern, and tied them off with a bouquet.


That interwoven braid is a perfect metaphor for the entire weekend. Not only did I get to mingle with my fellow bloggers, but I rode in Gary's cute new Volkswagen, spent time with my friend Liz in Greenbelt, and visited with my high school friend Kevin and my Peace Corps friends Doreen and Hakim, and their kids Ramzy and Tarek. Many individual strands came together to weave this weekend’s DC experience.

I also ran five miles this morning, which felt great after a day of barbecue and wine and dessert! And I went to a plant nursery -- an exotic errand for a Manhattanite with a studio apartment -- and helped Liz collect pepper plants and an odd assortment of flowers for her yard. Afterwards, sitting on Liz’s porch, the aforementioned caterpillars creeping around me, I could actually see the pollen swirling down through the sunlight. What a world! What a season!

Rapids

This week has been madness. Literally every waking moment I’ve been somewhere, doing something. Some of it’s been fun, some of it’s been work -- I had a couple of professional events, a documentary I watched and critiqued for a friend, a Broadway play, a few evenings with Bob. I was at the Zendo almost all day last Sunday, for services and a committee meeting. And now I’m off to D.C. for the weekend!

My cat barely knows who I am at this point.

It’s always challenging when things get this busy, but, well, that’s just the way it goes. Sometimes the river is a slow, placid one, and sometimes you’re whooshing down whitewater rapids.

Last night, I went to see “Cry Baby” on Broadway with my friend Jay. It’s a fun show, with some exceptional song-and-dance numbers. But plotwise, it’s pretty thin -- basically “Grease” all over again. Because I had an earlier work commitment, we had to rush to get to the show in time, and we ate literally on the run. As I elbowed my way through crowds on 44th Street, wolfing down a turkey wrap from D’Agostino’s, I told Jay, “Let it never be said that I am not a classy theater-goer!”

Anyway, I won’t be posting for the next few days. I’ll be back Monday. Have a great weekend!

(Photo: Chelsea, April 2008)

Free

If you're a Joni Mitchell fan, you probably know her song "For Free," about a street musician and the contrast between the music "he played real good, on his clarinet, for free" and her own music, which people paid to hear.

Like that street singer, there are so many artists in New York who simply give away their work. Here's an example: I found this book tucked into a window grate in Chelsea. The cover is by a couple of artists -- Infinity and Royce Bannon -- from the so-called Endless Love Crew. Inside, it was a published comic book or graphic novel.


I was sorely tempted to take it. But I didn't, in the spirit of making art available "For Free."

Another Diary

Piggybacking on yesterday’s theme, I have an interesting journal story.

About five years ago, my friend Liz and I were driving around in Massachusetts. We came upon an estate sale near Gloucester and decided to check it out.

By the time we got there, everything was already heavily picked over. Among the remaining detritus, there were books scattered on the floor, many of them quite old. Being a book person, I began picking through them.

I found a diary, handwritten in a hardbound book with an embossed cover, dating from 1940. I showed it to the person running the sale, thinking they might want it. But they said the heirs wanted nothing in the house. So I bought the diary for $1.

It has a name in it, but I won’t give that away. (I’ve also changed the names in the entries below.) The diary begins on February 1:

“My birthday! Everything covered in snow! Didn’t hear much from home in Texas. Didn’t do anything all day. Harry came by at 4 and we went for a long drive. That night he took me to the Latin Quarter. We had a table right on the floor. Gee, I got as tight as a loon on 2 1/2 Tom Collins. Harry couldn’t believe it. He brought me home. Marge and Pat put me to bed. I had a grand day. I am 22 now.”

The next day:

“My first hangover!!! So help me, it is my last. Couldn’t eat all day. Finally crammed down a banana. Went over to Dean Road and ice skated. Felt so dizzy and fell so many times, I finally gave up and came home. The outing helped my head.”

On February 16:

“Pat gave Harry and I passes to Sonja Henie’s ‘Hollywood Ice Revue of 1940.’ Oh, she is adorable and her skating is incomparable. We saw her at the Boston Garden. We came home right after the show. Snow was up to our shoulders. Harry tried to jump a bank and slipped and fell. He hit me with a snowball.”

It goes on and on like this, and it’s fascinating. The young author was a fashion model in a department store -- “the clientele is the best in Boston” -- and she records her outings to plays and with various young suitors. On March 4, she went backstage at a play and met Tallulah Bankhead: “She is very witty and has a husky voice.”

Perhaps not surprisingly for a fashion model, she is surrounded by a veritable whirl of young men. The social scene eventually becomes quite frantic, with a huge cast of characters. Eventually, a couple of men ask to marry her, but she turns them down:

“Len gave me a $10,000, 7 1/2 carat engagement ring, mine to have when I say the word. I nearly fainted.”

Through it all, she goes to church periodically, enjoys nights out at plays and nightclubs, and listens to Bob Hope on the radio. There are only hints of anything really personal, like the entry when she comes home late one night with a boyfriend and writes only, “something important happened.”

Then there’s the last entry, on July 23:

“What a day! Lunch at Schrafft’s with Miss Tucker. Chuck called. Saw Walter. I never had such a dirty nasty trick pulled on me. Walter is nothing but a rat! Chuck was upset. So was I. He was swell, tho. It’s best I don’t see anyone for a while, not even Chuck. A letter from Fay Photo -- wants test shots. Harry called -- and a night to remember.”

And there it ends. So who knows what happens. Does she marry Chuck, or Harry, or Len? We’ll never know. But it’s still the best reading ever!

(Photo: Lafayette Street, March 2008)

Writing

OK. I promised to write about writing.

I was inspired to think about this by Lorianne, who was in turn inspired by her friend Mark. Mark referred to an excellent recent New Yorker article by Louis Menand called “Woke Up This Morning,” about why people keep and read diaries:

“Rationally considered, what is natural or healthy about writing down what happened every day in a book that no one else is supposed to read? Isn’t there something a little O.C.D. about this kind of behavior? Writing is onerous...writing feels like work because it is work -- and, day by day, life is pretty routine, repetitive, and, we should face it, boring. So why do a few keep diaries, when diary-keeping is, for many, too much?”

Menand distinguishes between diaries and journals, memoirs and blogs -- a distinction that I’m not sure is really warranted. I think the writing of any of those things comes from a common place. And what is that place?

Menand proposes three theories about why people keep diaries: The ego theory, which holds that you believe everything that happens to you is important, and therefore worthy of recording; the id theory, in which people use their diaries as storehouses of secret longing and admissions they would be pained to make publicly; and the superego theory, which holds that diarists are writing for imagined readers as “exercises in self-justification.”

In my own case, I have written habitually since the fifth grade, when I began keeping a journal. There are elements of all three theories in my writing: I do write for imagined future readers, even as I dread having them read all the id-related urges and disappointments of my life.

Initially, I didn’t record secret thoughts, though I had plenty of them as a middle schooler. Even as I grew older, I never recorded anything I thought would be disastrous if publicly revealed. (I'm not sure anything fits that category anymore!)

And though I imagined readers, I never expected anyone to truly read my journals. (In this case, blogging does diverge from journal-keeping.)

For me, keeping a journal was mostly an organizing tool. It helped me record the events of my life, give them some order and perspective, and reflect on them a bit. My journals aren’t really very deep. I don’t ruminate on the meaning of life or heavy philosophical issues. I mostly write about doing such-and-such, going to so-and-so place. Which, to me, is really what life is about.

I occasionally re-read my journals, but it’s only the relatively recent ones that interest me much. As the journals themselves age and I evolve, they lose relevance, and begin to seem like they belong to someone else. (And frankly, they’re sometimes not that entertaining...so they’re the really BORING journals of someone else.)

Also, many of my journals seem a little whiny. When I’m venting the sorts of things on paper that I might not bring up in conversation with others, I tend to complain. In fact, I think a need to complain often feeds the compulsion to write -- Menand’s id theory in action.

These days, I have abandoned the paper journals for the blog, though here I am obviously writing partly for the eyes of others. I like the blog, because it forces me to be brief and to self-edit (this long entry notwithstanding). It also feeds another urge, a purely creative one, perhaps more than the paper journals did.

As I’ve said before, I periodically entertain the thought of destroying the old paper journals. In fact, when I bought myself a shredder years ago, that’s what I intended to use it for.

But nary a journal page has been fed to the shredder -- at least, not yet.

(Photo: Upper East Side, March 2008)

Back Yard

So I’m trying something new. I’m sitting downstairs in my back yard on Saturday afternoon, writing this entry as some little kids play loudly in the back yard of the townhouse next door.

Our little redbud tree (which I neglected to mention yesterday) is blooming pink overhead. There’s a strange bush in the corner of the yard with some really beautiful pink flowers -- I’ll post a photo of it above so someone can tell me what the heck it is. There’s another bush (below) with dark, glossy leaves and little spikes of white flowers. (How can I not know what’s growing in my own backyard?)


It’s so great to write outside! Why haven’t I ever done this before? I usually leave my laptop plugged into the wall and never take it anywhere.

I was going to write today about writing -- why I do it, why I started and can’t stop, that sort of thing. But I’m so into my surroundings that I think I’ll save the whys for another day.

We have a little bench in our back yard that the building co-op purchased a few years ago. Every winter the super breaks it down and brings it inside for storage, and every spring he puts it outside again. We also have a nice outdoor table that belongs to the super, with an umbrella and everything. That’s where I am now.


And I wish you could hear all the noises. In addition to the kids, who seem to be in an above-ground pool shaded with a tarp (which seems so weird to me, in Manhattan), I hear a soft background rush of passing cars on Third Avenue -- more like white noise than anything. A distant car horn. A piece of power equipment (a saw?) in a building nearby. An occasional bird. Layers and layers of sounds. And yet, it’s not noisy. It seems very peaceful!