vacation

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‘i’m on fire’

Posted by 19 Mar 2010

I’ve been on vacation. Hence, no writie this past week.

That’s a shame, as the small moments I’ve had to check feeds have not yielded posts. But my time hasn’t been wasted: I’ve written a lot. I’ve been to Boston and NYC. I’ve seen friends, had drinks, talked a ton.

I saw the Biennial at the Whitney. And I’m here to tell you that it was beyond weak. After reading decent reviews of the show, I expected something decent. But no. Most of the art centered around homes and personal space. Most of the pieces were craft-based — that is, the pieces focused more on how they were made than the actual output. My favorite example of this was the black and white geometric paintings made by sewing together black and white canvases. What? Really? There was a ton of sub-par video installations, but 0 interactive pieces. All-in-all, terribly short-sighted.

Skip it; it’s not worth 4 floors of uninspired art to see the 3 or 4 standouts. (Storm Tharp’s paintings were the highlight for me, with 3 or 4 ‘second-place’ pieces by George Condo, Aurel Schmidt and the Bruce High Quality Foundation.)

I just caught this though — digg has announced plans to curate links. This is so up my alley — something I’ve been thinking about for what seems like years. And ties so neatly into this site. I saw both Chris and Andrea earlier this week and both brought the site up. We all seem at a loss with exactly what to do with this site.

It’s obvious (and stated) that facebook has all but killed mog. We had a great run — a decade. But the drag I’ve felt for the last 8 months on here is real. I’ve got 1000 plans for the site that I haven’t followed through on. It’s not the best excuse, but finishing writing my most recent novel has taken precedence. My free time is not infinite and I’ve picked that path instead of this one at the moment.

The history of this site is important, but there is also some intrinsic to here, to this, that I need to massage and explore. I have a feeling that the entire experience needs to shift, but I need a little time to figure out what it should become.

But it’s more clear than ever that curating, link-sharing, filtering and discovery are all critical to the next phase of learning and entertainment. Now to marry those to the mog codebase.

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‘got my blueprint / it’s symphonic’

Posted by 8 Apr 2009

in brooklyn for spring break having major epiphanies. example: i love nyc more than any other place i have ever been, but i do not want to live here anymore. leaving brooklyn to move to be with todd in staunton always seemed like a slightly premature exodus from the city that never sleeps. pangs of city-sickness hit me over the last 2 1/2 years. but today walking around i suddenly realized that i don’t really want to pack up and move back, for all my love of this place and walking and stores and people and diversity that i wouldn’t trade my house and yard and job and friends to be back. it came as a quite relief to have this revelation, and to understand that i wasn’t being disloyal to new york in so much as loyal to my new home.

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live and learn

Posted by 30 Mar 2009

things i learned while in boston/vermont last week:

  • ‘the grass is green’ line in ‘paradise city’ might actually refer to weed. yes, i’ve only been listening to the song for 22 years and never made that connection until we heard it on the radio driving through vermont.
  • my girlfriend is so attached to me that she will pull me down into snow and ice when she slips and falls on that same ice.
  • you can go home again — i saw my best friend from 9th grade, who i hadn’t seen since 9th grade. aside from the different experiences over the last 18 years, nothing had changed. it’s comforting to see how this can work.
  • the ben and jerry’s factory tour is not worth your time or money. it’s short, marketing saturated and doesn’t teach you much. also, it’s terrifying when you are the skinniest people in the tour group. no, wait, let’s say the only skinny people. also, the tour costs money and you basically get a tiny sample of an existing flavor and a 10 minute talk about the assembly line. (along with a 10 minute marketing movie and the joy of watching b&j commercials while you eat the ice cream you paid for.)
  • waterbury is below burlington, so when driving up and you want to go to waterbury, you should stop there first. as opposed to driving up to burlington and then back down to waterbury. this was a fail on the navigator’s part.
  • the mfa in boston might have amazing art, but they also take the award for worst display/presentation in any museum i have ever been in. the rooms, the lighting, the pieces they display — i could not have been more disappointed.
  • the harvard museum of natural history has cool things, as long as you are into a quarter of the museum being filled with stuffed/mounted animals from the early part of the 20th century. the rest of the museum is pretty cool.
  • when looking for vermont cheese on a farm, here is how you don’t do it: you check the farm’s website and they say they are closed for the winter. you call the farm and the recording says they are closed for the winter. the navigator really wants to go though, so you agree to drive by the farm, just to see. where you see a sign out that says ‘cheese .4 mile’ — which clearly overrides the first two communications about being closed. except your rented car doesn’t have an odometer that measures 1/10s of miles. so you drive a little too far down the road, get stuck behind a tractor and have nowhere to turn around once it becomes painfully obvious you have gone too far. at which point the farmer gets out of said tractor and asks why you are following him. and is nice, but clearly believes the website and phone should have been sufficient to keep us away until they actually had cheese to sell. the sign had been put up that day, clearly a bit prematurely.
  • mud season in vermont isn’t too bad if the ground is totally frozen.
  • one night in a bed and breakfast across the hall from a pastor is enough for tripp.
  • i will still eat my weight in shanghai dumplings if allowed.
  • colt 45 goes better with indian food than sam adams cream stout.
  • there is an intersection in burlington that almost killed us. it’s a 5-way intersection — 2 normal streets intersecting and a one-way street coming in at a 45 degree angle. the driver (me) goes to make a right on red, finds himself about to somehow magically about to turn onto this one way street and panics. so he straightens and pulls through the entire intersection on red. no one honks, squeals or otherwise makes a fuss. and then realizes he just blew through a red light at an active intersection. slight aftermath panic ensues. and then much laughter.
  • boston has a ton of bleach blondes. bad bleach blondes. maybe everywhere does, but it seems more obvious there.
  • trader joes sells an excellent pint of frozen yogurt. that is slightly bitter — it really is frozen yogurt.
  • fairfax, vt is boring, but it appeared that saint albans might really know how to party.
  • my friend from 9th grade is building his own house. singlehandedly. while living in a finished apartment above his garage, with his wife. he has been doing this since july and is already up to wiring the house. even after being there and talking to him, i can’t fathom this. as much as i want to grow my own food and be self-sustaining, it has never occurred to me to build my own house.

there are more, i’m sure. but this is a good start at least.

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‘life passes like a sigh around me’

Posted by 25 Dec 2008

oh, christmas.  how it feels like anything but.  sandwiched in between my hard-of-hearing grandfather, who is spending the first christmas in seventy-four years without my grandmother, and my father, whose quirks and behavior have caused both my sister and i to recently hypothesize about him possibly being aspergerian.

it’s weird and sort of laid back on this holiday trip.  i’ve been reading a lot and playing a lot on my laptop, having been blessed with the christmas miracle of poachable wi-fi from a generous -or more likely unknowing- frankenmuth neighbor.  i finished the last twilight book with some sadness but am now pleasantly ensconced in the hour i first believed.  i love the feeling of being comfortably settled in the middle of a good book – it’s dependable and there whenever i want it.

when it’s not really quiet around here it’s ridiculously painful.  my grandpa, in his deafened state, has also grown picky of late – in food, of action…  he reamed me the first night we were here for my lack of capitalization of his name, said that i could do what i wanted to with my own but that he wanted a big E and a big H.  he spends hours a day playing sudoku, laying on his bed, and i swear sometimes i can hear his mind whirring busily.

i have such a difficult time listening to my father talk to him.  he raises his voice and when my grandpa still can’t hear him, he shouts at him – as if the irritation and agitation are something he can’t hear, either.  no amount of persuasion causes him to pause before one of his screamed tirades. he just can’t see what is wrong.

i miss todd.  this is our third christmas together, yet not actually together as 600 miles separates us again.  i find myself still reluctant to do christmas with his family, although we all gather together for easter and thanksgiving.  i think it’s still ties to my mother.  even if christmas current is nothing like the christmases with her, it is still tied to her memory.  as if doing something with todd’s family would cut one last tie.  things with him are still off, and i’m not sure i know what to do anymore.

my youth pastor and i found each other on facebook.  i always liked him a lot and thought he was pretty cool.  i remember thinking how cool it was that a pastor had once been a bartender and still enjoyed margaritas.  he sent me a message that asked, “So…where did I go wrong that you list your religion as: “confused”???”   i wish i had an answer.

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‘my soul is full of longing / for the secret of the sea’

Posted by 3 Aug 2008

beach-bound for the first time in 2 years.  last summer was the first, i think, in my life, that i didn’t walk in the sand somewhere, and it may have fucked my equilibrim for the entire 365 days thereafter.  i hope to balance back out this week – i really need it.

does it show me to be in a wrong mindframe that i already researched the closest free wi-fi spots to our cottage?  yes, “cottage.”  me, four adults, one child, three dogs, in a cottage.

funny that i unintentionally included myself as neither adult or child in that scenario.

To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me. - Isaac Newton

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flaming humps

Posted by 24 Jul 2008

It was hot this week. Miserably hot. The thermometer in my car read 103, but I believe that it melted in the intense frigging heat of being left in an uncovered parking lot for many hours. It definitely feels hotter than 103.

Even the camels I pass on the way home from work have given up. They were just sitting in their shaded field, heads on the ground, and humps on fire. The steam was incredible. But they didn’t care. They could always go inside if they wanted to.

Their enui disgusts me. These camels live in a nice air conditioned estate built just for them, with large bay windows along the east wall so they can watch the sun rise over the lake from their barcaloungers; and murals that cover the south wall depicting early 20th Century labor struggles. They don’t do much all day but eat grass and bore the egrets that come to bathe in their pond.

Thanks, Tripp and Rachael for coming to visit me and the family. And for drinking Tito’s vodka with me in the kiddie pool while we squirted water at each other’s breasts with the baby’s bathtub toys. And for making me listen to Dizzee Rascal. And also for going with us to T&A sports bar and the T&A breakfast buffet, even if it did suck. And getting drunk at the baseball game. Oh, and the Indian food at the Krishna temple… even though it gave me the craps.

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Ken-tick-y

Posted by 5 Jun 2008

I could write a book about my vacation last weekend. The primal conflict would certainly fall under Man v. Nature, and my dramatic situation (which is so brilliant I could never make it up) would be young lovers struggling to escape an army of ravenous ticks in the deep woods of Kentucky.

Our first mistake was choosing the trail marked “Wilderness.” No, our first mistake was not bringing any bug spray into such a wilderness.

And there we were, in a struggle for our very blood. In the deep woods of Kentucky against a downpour of thirsty deer ticks. They came from the trees, big and small, and stuck in our socks. I had seen a deer the night before, and it was skinny. It looked almost two-dimensional frozen in the lights from the tennis court. So perhaps the first mistake was not taking this as an omen and abandoning the hike in the woods altogether.

Many mistakes were made, and in hindsight several very obvious considerations had not been taken. Ten minutes down the trail, we were as paranoid as a man who has been hit by lightning seven or eight times.

But this chapter ends in me lighting the tip of my pocket knife and burning off hundreds of insects. I was picking dead ones out of Lisa days later.


(Lisa, as she is bitten)

The rest of my vacation was very pleasant, and so my book would be filled with babies, family, humor and new adventures. Such as boating in our black tank tops.

…and hallucinations after sampling the squeezin’s from a hillbilly’s still.

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