city mouse

I'm thinking of getting a bike

When considering a move to New York, I had to carefully weigh my temperament -- nervous, claustrophobic, prone to anxiety attacks -- against the very real possibility I'd be stuck riding in a rickety old metal canister underground squashed against strangers for miles each day to work. Then I remembered that I hate freeway driving more than just about anything else (even yoga), so I got over it, and for the most part I've actually grown to enjoy the subway, even my sardine-can commutes most days.

They've been doing "track work" lately on the line I ride regularly, though, and the trip has grown ever more tedious. For the past two mornings in a row, my commute to work has been interrupted by the frantic cries of a conductor over the train's loudspeaker: "Police! Police! Transit police, come immediately to the downtown train! Police!" Yesterday, it was more than a little disconcerting to note that this announcement echoed for nearly five minutes through a platform at Grand Central Station on the late side of rush hour before help apparently arrived or the conductor panicked and fled or died or something (I switched to the express before I could find out).

This morning I made it all the way down to Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall before the excitement kicked in -- this time, in addition to the distress cry, we got some more information: "There is a crime in progress. Police! Police! Report immediately to the conductor's car in the front of the train. There IS a CRIME in PROGRESS!" For the next 10 minutes, doors opening and closing at random, we commuters sighed, craned our necks, and grumbled to each other a bit, but curiously (or not), none of us actually stepped out of the air-conditioned car to see what was happening or attempt to save ourselves from this ongoing crime wave. Since it was nice out, I finally decided to continue the rest of my commute on foot.

I guess my temperament has become more placid over the past few years of subway-riding -- it didn't even occur to me until later to wonder what exactly happened in that poor conductor's car.

Sorta related: Even "7 On Your Side"'s Tappy Phillips can't get justice from the MTA!

(Cute bike-riding mice snagged from this Finnish fairy tale site.)

Tuesday Mousetrap

Wow. Not much time today, but I wanted to link to these pictures of a 1930s Macy's Thanksgiving parade, found at a "family run estate sale in a small Texas town" by the proprietors of the wonderful Swapatorium. I'm always dreaming of big cartoony animals that look just like this, so these photos are the very definition of "dreamlike" to me. Breathtaking.

Note the beautiful NYC architectural detail, including what appears to be the now-defunct elevated train and some ornate street lights. I'm hoping the knowledgeable Mr. Forgotten NY will weigh in somewhere with more information on the exact location.

And bonus! Some great Seattle World's Fair photos here too. (Via)

I am into champagne

In case this modest, meandering blog hasn't tipped you off, I should go ahead and admit that I'm about the most controversy-shy, conflict-averse person you'll ever meet.

One of my more noticeable physical tics, I was reminded after watching a video of myself in a training course recently, is a tendency to smile and nod compulsively as a person is speaking to me, indicating what, I'm not sure -- I agree? You're interesting? Please like me? If you find this habit annoying, I'm sure I'll be inclined to agree with you. If you don't, I'll probably agree with that too. Being raised partly in the South (where we hide our hostility toward others behind treacly politeness) and partly in the Northwest (where we do the same without so much treacle) probably didn't help with this tendency.

Of course you might guess that simmering beneath this placid surface are unplumbed depths of rage, and you might be right. But aside from obvious targets (the current administration, random PBS schedule changes, the mouse who inhabits my stove), I just don't get worked up about that many things.

And so I say the following with much friendly nodding, plus my most sincere love and respect to my friends reading this who may be so inclined: What the hell is it with yoga?

I know generalizing from a group is wrong wrong wrong, and generalizing from a group of celebrities even more so, particularly if that group includes Sting. And I know that those of you yogis whom I know and love have fabulously toned physiques and are spiritually evolved and informed in all sorts of ways as to what makes this practice superior to the stretching routines I warmed up with in jazz and ballet classes much of my young life. But this Daily News item pretty much covers all my deepest fears on the subject: 

Sting sat in a lotus position strumming a sitar - background music for his wife, Trudie Styler's, lengthy ode to yoga while their audience of 500-plus enthusiasts listened and perspired.

"The energy in this room is amazing," Styler began after doffing her gold stiletto sandals. "Perhaps as yoga helps us become conscious of consciousness, it has the freedom to change ourselves and to transform the world. ... The indigenous people of the world's forests, they live in nature. They feel their world. Our worlds have become so far removed from nature that I think we've lost sight of it. I see all the distractions we've created, from our cars to our cappuccinos."

And so on and so forth, until Sting and six other men starting chanting "Hare Krishna, hare hare" over and over - which prompted many in the crowd to jump up and down, drenching themselves in sweat. (Others checked out the cafe and shop, where a sleeveless hemp "Natural High" T-shirt retails for $48 and a pint of vegan ice cream goes for $10.)

The tone of the article is insufferably smarmy, yes. But still. Yoga = Not Sexy. In my humble opinion.

Actually, I think my aversion to the yoga thing mainly comes from my distaste for bare feet. What is it with feet? Why must they be unsheathed in public, when mankind has created delightful inventions like Frye boots in which to cover them? Do you honestly know anyone who has attractive feet? I mean, the toenails! The mere word makes me shudder. Why would I want to lock myself in an airless room while a bunch of strangers manipulate themselves into flatulent positions on weird fungusy rubberized mats and wave their hideous bare toes in my vicinity? I bet some of them even wear TOE RINGS. My god.

Oh my, I'm getting dangerously worked up over here; perhaps I need to recuse myself from the yoga question entirely. Unless I'm wrong, which, quite possibly, I just might be.

Just passing through

Since moving to New York, I haven't been itching to travel as much as I used to; I spend most of my weekends in Polish-occupied Greenpoint and most of my weekdays in equally alien sectors of Manhattan, and all this has satisfied much of my wanderlust for the time being. For the past few years my most exotic travel fantasy has involved a visit to a suburban Target with aisles as wide as my living room, overflowing with dustless, neatly shelved merchandise.

But I am getting restless again, probably thanks in part to a budget that could barely get me to Staten Island these days. It doesn't help that I'm surrounded by jetsetters. One of my best friends is currently traveling Taiwan, and another is off to Marrakesh in the morning. Oh, and did my mother tell you she's moving to Mexico next month? There, now you're the last person on the planet to know. And here I sit in an undisclosed location high above Wall Street or thereabouts, as I do most days of the week, idly surfing.

Of course you can learn a lot about the difference between what you think you might enjoy and what you actually would enjoy by letting other people suffer the experience. People with courage, expense accounts, and newspaper assignments, such as Sarah Lyall, whose trip to the top of Mount Snowdon has reminded me that I have a horror of heights and thus can cross this particular Welsh travel fantasy off my list.

And thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you also can learn about places and things in which you never thought you had an interest. I've long been a fan of the travel dispatches of Roy Kesey, an American married to a Peruvian diplomat living in China, which are well worth your perusal on McSweeney's if you haven't read them yet. I never thought I wanted to live in China or marry a Peruvian diplomat before reading them; now I just have to figure out whether it's more advisable to go to Peru first to find the spouse, or just pack for Beijing and hope for the best. This week, The Elegant Variation features a fun interview with Kesey, coinciding with the publication of his new novella, set in Croatia (of course). In honor of "Kesey Week," TEV just wrapped up a contest in which commenters write in with tales of travel tedium and terror, describing how and which books saved them from said misery. Good stories here, though reading some of them only reminded me that I'm super-jealous of anyone who can read in a moving vehicle without becoming hyperemetic.

Anyway, this blog, Idle Words, gets my vote for some of the most consistently entertaining, finely observed travel writing around. The photos are great, too. Check out the entries from a trip from Argentina to Chile to see the glaciers:

A little Zodiac takes you out to the boat, which then heads up the lake. As we manoeuver past an imposing cliff, the captain taps the "Release Condor" button on the main panel and an enormous bird dutifully takes off from his nest a hundred feet above the water.

The entire boat ride feels this scripted. As we near the glacier, clouds roll in and start dropping rain and sleet on the boat. The ice is half-visible and ghostly through the mist. Then, as we pull within twenty meters of the glacier face (the retreating glacier doesn't pose the kind of threat from calving ice as the Perito Moreno), the clouds open and a lone sunbeam strikes the ice from the side. I turn around to look at a brilliant double rainbow to the south of the boat, and just then I hear a tinkling sound of ice on glass and a soft voice behind me, speaking the four most beautiful words in the Spanish language:

"Whisky o pisco sour?"

Our pilot has climbed up the metal ladder in horizontal rain to bring up a tray of cocktails. At this point I would not be surprised to see a pink-hooved pegasus flying in, bringing sandwiches.

Try to come up with post title not involving cheap pun on "Welcome to the Jungle," fail, post anyway

I have a list of Favorite Movies Ever a mile long, and I have a slightly shorter list of formerly favorite movies that, upon further inspection decades later, really Do Not Hold Up. I will not divulge them all here, but this NYT article reminded me of one: The Emerald Forest.

My mom loved it so much she bought the videotape in the mid-'80s. Having vowed to pursue a future involving running away to live in the woods somewhere far from the evils of the modern age and Mauldin High School, I decided The Emerald Forest SPOKE to me, and I watched it over and over. Oh, how misty-eyed I'd get curled in front of the TV with my kitten, watching the doomed Amazon tribesmen struggle to maintain their noble way of life in the face of greedy, environment-destroying loggers! Oh, how I'd thrill to the paternal ferocity of Powers Boothe as he hacked through the jungle to find his long-lost son, taken as a small boy by these tribesmen! Oh, how I'd long to experiment with hallucinogens so that I too might identify my own animal spirit guide! (This didn't really work, I would later find).

Anyway, the Times article tells a story of an Amazonian tribe that's decided it's over the whole noble savage thing:

Since time immemorial the Nukak-Makú have lived a Stone Age life, roaming across hundreds of miles of isolated and pristine Amazon jungle, killing monkeys with blowguns and scouring the forest floor for berries.

But recently, and rather mysteriously, a group of nearly 80 wandered out of the wilderness, half-naked, a gaggle of children and pet monkeys in tow, and declared themselves ready to join the modern world.

The article floats a few reasons for the tribe's decision, but this one seemed the most sensible to me:

One young Nukak mother, Bachanede, breast-feeding her infant as she talked, said she was happy just to stay still. "When you walk in the jungle," she said, "your feet hurt a lot."

The mouse ran up the clock

If, like me, you see yourself as a woeful procrastinator with the potential to do great or at least acceptable things but lacking the gift of great discipline*, you probably have looked into "time management" at some point or another, at least while procrastinating on doing other things. I never get much farther than looking into it, sighing, and remembering that the concept of managing time is right up there with "lifehacking" and "hipster PDA" on the list of Terms That Give Me the Hives.

That's why I enjoyed this post suggested by my friend Diana, outlining an anarchist approach to time management. Yes, you too can "smash the state by breaking down tasks"! I make no warranties as to the content of the site, but the post says many things that need to be said, including:

-I hate the bullshit moralism connected with being organized. All this stuff about get started early. If you know how long something takes you can indulge yourself and leave it to the last day.
-it’s harder to do something ahead of time because you know it’s ahead of time, so you’re likely to procrastinate
-if you don’t know how long an aspect of a project will take, do it first
-pay attention to how long it takes so you know the next time.

and:

“Lazy” is Bullshit
-I don’t really believe in lazy, I don’t really know any lazy people. I know people with low self confidence who find it really hard to believe in their own projects. I know people who have never learned the pleasure of stimulating and engaging work. I know people who are too worn down by eight hours of pointless, meaningless tasks to take on new projects.

Then again, I'm always easily swayed by writers who can sling around words like "bullshit" with ease, a flair for using curse words convincingly being another superpower I lack.

*i.e., someone who waits until 12:45 the day her credit card bill is due to run over to the bank and pay it before the 1 p.m. cutoff time, someone who consistently manages to put off the process of cooking and eating dinner until after 10 p.m., someone who manages to sustain 10 percent of the NYPL's operating budget with her overdue charges, someone who muses about writing a novel, short fiction, or hell, just some sort of essay, OK, anything but business writing at this point, yet spends any productive time left in the day reading other people's writing, someone who knows she should be looking for a new job yet decides just to start a useless blog instead, etc. etc.

Happy birthday, Stanky

My mother, bless her heart, calls me up each year on my birthday to remind me that "X years ago was the MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF [HER] LIFE!" Such are the advantages of being an only child. I suppose it was the most important day of mine, too. But it's a lot of pressure to put on one poor day.

Twenty years ago today was not THE most important day of my life, but I guess it ranks up there. In June of 1986, my dear departed kittycat, Sheba, was smuggled to me, against my mom's wishes, under my friend Tippy's red Members Only jacket. Born in a barn somewhere outside Mauldin, SC, Sheba (then for some reason named "Mr. T," by Tippy and her sister Ginny) was a tiny blue-grey thing, small enough to fit in my palm, and riddled with all sorts of mites, worms, fleas, and infections. We figured she was about six weeks old, so I gave her my May 9 birthday.

There was never any doubt that Sheba was my baby, not a family cat -- a responsibility made clear when, two years later, my mom gave up on trying to deal with the early-teenaged me and told me not to come back from visiting my father in Seattle for the summer. The next day, Sheba was shipped air cargo from Greenville-Spartanburg to a warehouse at Sea-Tac, where my stepmom and I picked her up, blinking groggily. She purred as soon as she realized it was me.

Being a young cat mother carried with it a lot of responsibility, especially post-highschool -- I never did the semester abroad in college I'd dreamed of, couldn't live in a dorm (had I wanted to, that is), and mostly brought boys back to my apartment rather than staying away from her all night. Looking for apartments always entailed finding a place of which Sheba (aka Stanky, aka Sheba Amoeba, aka Shebalu, etc. ad infinitum)would approve. I chose to return to the south for grad school partly because I knew she'd be comfortable there. But, as moms say, it was all worth it to have the fluffiest, snuggliest, goofiest, most beautiful cat you've ever seen for a companion (if you never met her, you'll just have to take my word for it -- references available upon request).

Sheba lived many places over her 17-year life, but I'm pretty sure that she loved the last place she lived best, a run-down Arts-and-Crafts original in Chapel Hill, with a screened-in porch and lots of yard to ponder. Outside the big window in the front of the house was a gorgeous, prolific pink camellia bush; she'd sit in a sunny spot on a chair we set up for her in front of the window and wait for me or her daddy to come home. After parking in the yard, we'd stand there like dorks in front of the house, waving through the window at her huge, round green eyes. Toward the end of her life, she mostly stayed in that spot, and after she succumbed to all sorts of older cat diseases two years ago, we decided to place her remains under the bush.

So if you happen to be driving down Pritchard Street in Chapel Hill this week, be sure to slow down and appreciate the camellias, which are always so pretty this time of year.

And on a lighter note, new cat dad Mr. Management sends an article on Belgium's annual dead cat festival, which takes place each May in Ypres. More info here and here. Another reason Belgium is crawling up my list of places to visit soon!

The lyfe so short, the blog so hard to write

Not enough time, not enough material, the usual. Meanwhile, gentle readers, go forth and practice some Chaucerian pick-up lines! Though my brilliant former medieval prof (I mean prof of medieval stuff, he is Irish himself, and quite contemporary) has informed me that, sadly, the Chaucer blog contains some glaring Middle English errors, I still remain in awe.

Methinks I may have heard a few of these myself on my own pilgrimage to Kalamazoo some years ago*, as a young grad student presenting my carefully constructed yet poststructural, inspired yet inspiring, brilliantly written yet engagingly presented paper, featuring a thesis which would revolutionize the critical discourse surrounding the Old Irish literature of the Tain. Or it would have, anyway, if my time slot hadn't been at 8am on the last day of the conference. Oh well; the world shall never know.

Honestly, I've actually forgotten what that paper was about, exactly. So it's just as well that I've changed careers.

Related: Who knew Chaucer had such a nice garret?

 

We like to think this is the kind of room the master would have stayed in when writing the Tales. This is our largest room. As you enter the room you'll find a comfortable sitting area with cable TV. The perfect area to relax in before breakfast, after returning from your travels, or to retire to before bed.

*DISCLAIMER: I have never attended a Renaissance faire, consumed anything out of a goblet, nor owned any music described as "Celtic."