Budding tree

These four walls

I’m trying to put a brave face on midterm paper grading. That’s hard to do.

NYC – August 2011

We did a good bit of museum hopping on this trip. Among our destinations was the Museum of the Moving Image, which is a fascinating place. In the lobby, there is an exhibit that both celebrates and satirizes the proliferation of video memoirs on the web, Christopher Baker’s “Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise.” The work is relevant to my own memoir project.

I managed to score tickets to “The Daily Show.” Jon Stewart did not disappoint. See the full episode here.

On Thursday, the weather finally cooperated. Here’s Beth at the Central Park fountain.

We caught the Brain Exhibit at the Museum of Natural History before heading home.

New house

Just visiting–we haven’t moved in yet.

1 Year

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NYC – April 2011

We just returned from another rainy but good trip to New York. A few highlights: Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show at the Barrow Street Theater; the Museum of Natural History; the Fresh & Onlys concert at Williamsburg Music Hall; Central Park. Here are the clichéd but inevitable pictures in the park.

Updates

4/19/11. I’m nearing the eleven-month mark. I’ve had a big shed recently, which has scared the bejesus out of me.

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3/21/11. Here I am at the ten-month mark. Progress has been uneven, which is frustrating, but not uncommon. I wish that I had washed my face before I took these pictures.

Spring break in NYC

We had a lovely trip to New York this week. We visited the Morgan Library, saw a fascinating new play (Invasion!), and had lunch with a very dear friend.

Tuesday was beautiful: it was the only day that the wind and/or rain did not make me look as if I had combed my hair with an electric eggbeater.

The aging male

I’ll be 42 in two months. My goal is to look younger at 50 than I did at 40.      We’ll see.

First, there was the surgery. I’m now at the eight-month mark.

The crown is still a disaster–I’m thinking of leasing part of the vertex to smurfs as an ice rink–but the new hair has framed my face better. The troops will continue to retreat in the back (slowly, I hope), so I’ll probably need another procedure in a couple of years.

The front is much improved.

While parts of my face are reasonably well-preserved for their age, fine lines have begun to appear around my eyes, and the creases in my forehead are getting deeper.

I have an expressive face (see above), and I refuse to stop smiling, so I’ve started using Retin-A to build up collagen. I’ll track the results over the next few months.

I also need to get rid of the broken capillary on my nose. It’s driven me crazy for the last five years. I’m getting laser treatment in the late spring or early summer to eliminate it.

Finally, I got a little soft during the winter break.

I want to be able to play tic tac toe on my stomach again by the summertime. And yes, I agree–my belly hair would look good in cornrows.

How to use this blog

Occasionally I check the search terms that people use to arrive at my blog, and I’m frequently surprised by what I learn.  Some word strings are pleasantly surprising.  I was happy to discover, for instance, that some who were looking for information about Brooklyn, Geneva, London, and Paris found their way to my blog.

On the other hand, some of the search terms mystify me.  One recent phrase, for example, was “Older women in Santa’s lap.”  To the person who plugged that phrase into a search engine and found this site: I can assure you, you will not find what you’re looking for here.  Another person found my blog by using the term “zit.”  To the zit-curious:  while there is a photograph in which you might be interested,  this blog is not primarily about pimples.

Someone else recently used the phrase “crime scene photos” and wound up here.  I made the mistake of looking that phrase up in Google Images to see how it led to my blog.  Unless you want to become intimately familiar with the lengths and depths of human depravity, I would advise you not to do that.

Then there are the commercial sites that somehow deposit their web addresses in the “Referrers” section of my dashboard.  Neat trick, a$$holes, but I’m not buying what you’re selling.  Please stop muddying up my statistics.  (I say “a$$holes” not so much to censor myself as to make sure that my blog doesn’t appear in the search results when people go searching for the other thing.)

Regrettably, no one has ever found this site by looking up something heady like “Book reviews and Richard Dawkins.”  I finally gave up on the review essay that I was writing (on the books of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Greg Epstein, Jennifer Hecht, et al.), because no one was reading it.  For better or worse, I began using the blog as one might use a facebook page.  I guess that I’ll need to find ways to attract visitors to the blog’s intellectual content.  Suggestions are welcome.

Christmas in NYC – After

The New York trip was good but frustrating.  There was a friggin’ blizzard.  No one predicted a friggin’ blizzard.  The weather gave rise to other problems.

Let me back up a step.  We left late on Christmas day, but I made very good time to NYC until we reached the Holland Tunnel.  Never again will I take the Holland Tunnel.  Every other car cut me off, and I finally got tired of it and didn’t allow anyone else to cut in.  Somebody tried, the guy in front of me stopped short (he too had cut me off), and I kissed his rear bumper–kissed it, mind you.  Well, that, for him, was a big deal, even though there was no damage to his car, not even a scratch.  (He said there was a scratch; I pointed out that it was dust by wiping it off with my glove.)  He called over a cop so that he could file an accident report, and we waited 30-40 minutes on the side of the road.  The officer, to his credit, noted that there was no visible damage to his car.  Still, it was a bad beginning to the trip.

Christmas dinner was nice.  Here are a few pictures from outside Marseille:

The next day the blizzard hit:

This is Times Square, of course, where we were trying to get tickets to Fela! at TKTS.  We failed–three days in a row.  On the last day of our trip, after more than two hours in line at TKTS and no luck, I finally decided to pay full price, $122 per ticket.  We went to the box office.  By the time we got there, only one ticket remained.

Another night we tried to see Mike Birbiglia at Union Hall in Brooklyn.  The show was canceled owing to the weather.  Still, we had a good time at the bar.  Union Hall is beautiful:  it’s a bar in a library, and the bartenders play good music.  How many other bars have Phantogram, Radiohead, The National, and Local Natives on their playlists?

The rest of the trip was dominated by the snowstorm.  Here we are before stepping out into nearly two feet of snow, the last time we didn’t look as if we were braving a blizzard:

So we didn’t get to see Fela! or Mike Birbiglia, and we had to negotiate 20″ of snow, but we saw a few movies, browsed a few bookstores, and saw a few exhibits.  Here’s the toy train display at the transit store in Grand Central Station:

Wandering through this shop made me feel like a kid again.  (Yes, that is King Kong on the side of the Empire State Building.)

On another night, we ducked into the Columbus Circle mall to avoid the storm.  It’s a big, gaudy place, but the light show was neat despite its tackiness,  and we saw a Dali exhibit.  The mall even has a Whole Foods now.

A few more pictures of New York under snow:

Union Square Park.

A view of the Empire State Building from Filene’s on 14th Street.

Outside St. Mark’s Bookshop.

The tree on Wall Street.

Christmas in NYC – Before

We’re headed to New York City on Christmas day.  Here’s the plan:

1. Eat Christmas dinner at Marseille, a casual bistro in the theater district.

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2. After dinner, walk up to Rockefeller Center.  Look at tree.  Ice skate, if rink is open.  Fall on ice repeatedly.  See movie.

3. Sunday.  Visit Grand Central Station to see the Transit Museum exhibit.  Eat brunch at West Café in Williamsburg.  Try not to shop and fail (probably).  See “Fela!”

I’m not generally a fan of musicals, but this looks amazing.

3. Monday.  Visit the Strand and St. Mark’s Books.  Browse through Other Music.  Eat lunch at Whole Foods.  Go to Union Hall in Brooklyn to see “An Evening of New Stories with Mike Birbiglia,” if standby tickets are available.

4. Tuesday.  Brain exhibit at American Museum of Natural History.  Central Park.  Dinner at Café Lalo.  Movie.

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/brain/index.php

5. Wednesday. NYPL photography exhibit–30 year retrospective.

Itinerary is definitely subject to last-minute changes.  Very excited.

Snuggling with Seamus

Seamus has helped to get me through this trying period of paper grading.

How to write a college essay

1.  Begin your paper with the phrase “Throughout history.”  Nothing captures the imagination like something that has always happened.

2.  When you run out of ideas, make sure to use the word “whom” in the very next sentence.  It will make you sound smart.  For example, you might pose the question, “Whom is going to read such a book?”  No matter that such usage is ungrammatical.  Isn’t it the case that only smart people use the word “whom”?  Well, then.

3.  Use a thesaurus.  Why say “car” when you can say “automobile” or “vehicle”?

4.  Use a dictionary–not to look up words you don’t know, but to define complex concepts like “love,” “irony,” and “censorship” for your reader.  Don’t bother with the OED.  No, consult dictionary.com, where you’ll find gems like the following:  love is “a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.”  It may not be the last word on the subject, but it’s a strong start.

5.  Tell us how “relatable” something is.  First, the word “relatable” is incomparably elegant.  Second, what better way to confer value on something–a character or a story–than to point out that you, a nineteen-year-old college student, can relate to it?

6. Please do your part in rendering the apostrophe meaningless.  Thus, use “it’s” when you clearly do not meant “it is.”  Make a noun plural by using the possessive case:  “cat-cat’s,” “idiot-idiot’s,” “tree-tree’s.”

7. Use the word “aspect.”  Use it often; use it improperly.  By no means should you define whatever “aspect” you are discussing.  Simply say, “Another aspect is….”

8. In a work of literary analysis, inflate your prose with praise of the author.  “Hemingway tells a masterful story.  Not only is his narrative brilliant but his characters are wonderfully realistic.”  Even though you are taking up valuable space in your paper with compliments that the writer would not stoop to receive even if he were alive, all of that heavy breathing about the author shows your professor how much you appreciate literature.

9. When you plagiarize, make sure to borrow from SparkNotes.  No one will ever suspect you.

10. Remember that analytical essays are all about you.  What you think or believe is paramount–reasoned argument has its place, but above all the professor is interested in your unsupported opinions.