this week surgery is definitely in the air. the coffee grinder needed fixing…
the WOPR got checked out, and i swapped out my laptop’s old hard drive for a new crazy fast solid state drive. wowee! it’s like driving a Prius. no moving parts. silent. the only thing i will miss is being able to iron the placemats at the same time as using the computer on the dining room table, since the new drives run a lot cooler than the old ones.
as expected, it’s really lovely inside a mac… plus notice how nice and smooth the placemat is.
the screws are really small though…and you need a good goose to keep them all corralled.
but there’s always the Apple to let you know everything is back to normal!
my mom, in between taking me to assorted rock concerts as a kid, also taught me how to sew, knit, and crochet. sometimes she combined the two: i came home from a Rush concert once and drew her a picture of the black/white seersucker jacket Geddy Lee had worn, and she made me one. kick ass.
in college i started knitting sweaters, but knitting while attending lectures led to miscounts on rows so my sleeves tended to be really, really long.
when skinny scarves came into fashion and were selling for $40 a pop, i turned up my nose and went to the knitting store, only to hand over $200 for crazy fun yarns.
one year over the holidays in New Mexico we scored a huge ream of black fleece on sale so we made backpacking pillows, neck warmers and hats. tons of hats. tall hats, bishop’s hats, arty hats. everyone got a hat that year. my brother, who had slept during the entire hat making enterprise after eating too much for dinner the night before (oh, the days of La Tertulia) woke up and said “i want to design one.” he disappeared for about an hour, then came back and said “imagine a ball made out of 8 equal triangles, can you make a hat just like that, only the 8th piece would be my head?” when we finished there was only one word for it: genius.
i’m glad to say i don’t have the “craft bug” or any other hipster ailment concerning making things, but every now and then i see something and i say “Oooh. i gotta make me one of those.” my enthusiasm for making something drops drastically if i have to go to the store and buy something so i’m a big fan of using what i’ve already squirreled away in my (kind of large) cool-shit-i’ll-maybe-use-in-a-few-years box. i will admit that despite my best intentions i usually end up with things that are ridiculously, shamefully cute, but i think that’s somehow related to not wanting to go to the store, like i am forever dipping into the same stash of über cute raw materials.
so, a couple days ago a friend sent me a link to this bit of insanity:
yay! now i can make things out of my cat that my cat can play with. perverted, but really cool. the only problem was i had to start building up my collection of cat hair. this is what i got from this morning, clearly with some help from the pups:
and this is what BB thinks about getting brushed more:
so, intent on procrastination, i decided to make a fleece sack for my phone! after a long debate over whether to protect the glass with the plastic sticker or carry around an ugly case, i settled on making my own.
it’s a moon on there, though i could easily have made it a fried egg. which got me thinking. maybe i should concentrate on making crafts that illustrate old titles for my novel. it’s a good way to procrastinate. so this one’s for “Moonquake.” the next one’s going to be for “Drink with Clarity More,” though that’s not much of a craft project, more like a lifestyle.
week one ABQ tally so far: two yapping dogs accompanied by the classic “No No NO!!!” owner lady, two geriatric heeler mixes, one of which tried to have a little run, several unruly large dogs on 30 ft flexi leashes and one, only one very exciting corgi-heeler puppy, which, even in this altitude, didn’t have a chance with the MO.
with grass this nice and the immense hilly slope, what’s the deal?
recently a friend of mine with kids told me that her 7 year old son had started skateboarding and soon afterwards was begging to be taken to a real skate park. so off they went, somewhere in the safe environs of South Pasadena, to a park filled with older kids popping ollies, being cool and constantly texting on their phones. my friend’s kid, snotty, nerdy, and skinny, took a position against a wall, pretended he didn’t know his mom, and pulled out his calculator and starting texting. Yo. lol. ~\(+.+)/~
Stevie: the only reason you win is because i’m more interested in a real flesh rather than a dumb toy
MO: mmmmf
Stevie: for instance i got that possum good
MO: yeah, that was gross
Stevie: wimp
MO: am not
Stevie: are too. i shook that possum down, and then i rolled on it. i wore its perfume. you? you let that stinky-ass stub-tailed cat drink from our water bowl.
MO: nah-ah
Stevie: yah-ha
MO: i rolled on a dead animal just the other day
Stevie: yeah, right
MO: no, i did. eau de doo. i did.
Stevie: where was this? where was i?
MO: on the sidewalk, maybe you thought it was the letter “E”
MO: (^_-)———-
it rained dead animals left and right this week so i am only posting pictures of cuteness.
on Tuesday at dog agility class where our teacher has goats, chickens, bunnies, turtles and dogs, we found out one of the turtles had been sat on to death by its older wiser fatter friend. I thought turtles have this built-in defense, like they bring their own helmet to battle, but apparently this turtle had a faulty helmet or at least one with a bad ISO rating or whatever. a friend once told me the story about his large grandmother rolling over in her sleep on top of her chihuahua. (*smash*). the family didn’t have the heart to tell her so they just got her another dog that looked the same (i think its name was Fifi) and that was that.
even though i was tempted, I didn’t take a picture of the turtle, but then last night one of the dogs (and I know which one) did a little disco with a possum—Shake it Shake it Shake it—and so first thing in the morning i discover a dead little thing back behind my garage. I suppose even though peace has been found inside the house it’s still a little iffy out in the real world.
we called animal control who said we had to be present when they arrived or else they wouldn’t go into the backyard. since we were on our way out they told us the best thing for us to do was to somehow get the thing to the curb.
so David navigates a shovel to pick up the thing, which still has its tailed all curled up, likes it’s sleeping, and it’s a bit of a struggle because he sounds like he’s about to puke and he’s using all his long-limbed advantage to scoop, while staying as far away as possible. of course mr. possum resists being picked up, as most dead things do, and when he dumps it into my trash bag, all I can think of is that there is nothing like something that stiff, weighing roughly the same as our cat (without the scratching and screaming), plummeting to the bottom of a bag you have open and are barely wanting to hold on to.
so like I said no dead pics but here’s the bag we managed to get to the curb.
from there we went to a store that wasn’t open yet, and while waiting a freaking bird flies into the window and rolls its eyes and plops over right in front of the dog who Shook it Shook it Shook it last night and slept very well thank you very much. the bird survived but was in shock for a few minutes and then the security guard came over and just as i said “don’t touch it” he picked it up and brought it to the nearest tree.
Not dead yet!
update: it’s been almost 12 hours since possum discovery and the bag is still out there. i had a thought maybe by the time we got home it would be deflated with a little tear in the plastic, but no such luck. animal control did say to give them 24 hours. ick.
time is a funny thing, especially “brain time,” which is the clock inside our heads that we rely on as “real,” even though it’s actually dependent on our subjective consciousness and perception rather than fixed increments of seconds, microseconds, etc.
the April 25, 2011 issue of the New Yorker has a fabulous article by Burkhard Bilger on David Eagleman and brain time. David is a fellow New Mexican, which fuels my half-assed theory that kids who grow up in New Mexico develop such a weird sense of space and scale they are bound to have a screwy understanding of time as well.
during grad school David didn’t want to take time away from programming in order to eat so he kept a bag of raw potatoes under his desk. he would cook the potato in the microwave and bite at it while he typed. Impressive!
here’s my version of that, eating the entire bucket of ice cream while waiting for something to process. (definitely a disadvantage to have to use both hands, but it’s homemade salted caramel ice cream and that you cannot possibly manage with one hand).
as everyone knows, our perception of time is context dependent. our contractor told us our garage would take a month to fix up, and now three months later it’s really pretty much, essentially, nearly done. so nearly done that we’ve put up the ropes for the yoga wall, and we’ve hung our contractor up on them. ask him how long he thought we left him hanging there, and he’d say half a minute or more when in reality it was closer to 10 seconds.
which is a long time compared to the couple of seconds it took for me to snap this photo at Lincoln Center, where some guy behind me said “some people think they can stop and hold everyone up for a minute just to take a picture,”
and in the excruciatingly long 80 minutes of opera that followed, my brain drifted to things that take an even longer time (relatively) to happen, like my current writing project, the gentrification of Williamsburg (hello! Blue Bottle coffee!), and the formation of a redwood forest.
after all, for every action there is an equal and opposite abstraction. or in other words, they will make no sticks to chew on, before it’s time.
Back decades ago, when the chain stores started invading NY, and every corner seemed to sprout a Starbucks or a Rite Aid, Blockbuster Video, Bon au Pain, or a Gap, a friend of mine so aptly said “LA has won.”
Now that the city boasts even more shops from the global marketplace (on this trip a friend said “the reason they have all the same shops you see all over the world is to make it seem less scary to shop in NY) and even the street vendors have the same stuff unloaded from the MOTHER CRAPU STORE that is China, the truly great remaining bits of NY become that much more precious.
NY is still the place for me where bagels are not only edible but delicious, and only there do they give you so much cream cheese you end up with a small cheesecake on your plate after you’ve finished the bagel.
NY is also the place where Sullivan Street Bakery is no longer on Sullivan Street, (a very Los Angeles thing, actually, where Western Ave is east of West Blvd, and they are both located in the east side of the city) and the bakery that took it’s place on Sullivan Street, (the result of some sort of partner divorce split) Grandaisy, is also no longer in the old location on Sullivan street. But at least you know “B” still stands for Bread.
Inside the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a little door painted green and blue like a bad Monet, and through that you must pass underneath some really old and funky looking HVAC ducts to get to another door that says: CAUTION. do not let this close behind you, it will LOCK.
Once inside you arrive at a concrete bunker/meditation pond with a chair, a bulb and the happiest, fattest (and some very pregnant) goldfish you have ever seen. This is where to go when Armageddon hits New York. The only drawback is all the lower levels of the Met do not get reception of any kind. Just don’t let that door close behind you.
Meanwhile, upstairs in the public-sanctioned part of the Met there was a nice little show of stuff from Emperor Qianlong’s private retirement retreat in the Forbidden City, including some drawings of him practicing western-style rendering of antlers. Hey, not bad for an emperor.
Meanwhile, Qianlong’s contemporaries (r. 1736–95) were busy doing what Chinese painters do best – letting a few detailed brushstrokes act as a metonym of something large and abstract and difficult to draw. What these little waves do is bear the representational weight of the entire ocean on their shoulders. They allow all the other water scenes in the painting to be abstract and spaghetti-like, and the whole scroll, some 12 feet long, remains anchored in representation. (Xu Yang, 1750)
A few other fabulous things – Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar can do everything LA can’t: tiny 6 table space with the smallest kitchen in the world, no gas, no coffee, no tea, and a prix-fixe menu that was as reasonable as the food was exquisite. El Quinto Pino’s way awesome bartender served us a basil-gin-lemon slushy that seemed to come out of a feed tube, along with their exquisite Uni Panini and other tasty goods, and finally dinner at Blue Hill on Easter Sunday, where they sent every table home with a half pack of their farm fresh eggs.
In case the eggs got me into trouble with security at JFK, i put the Peeps my lovely hotel left on my pillow in with the eggs in my bag. seems hard to make someone with no shoes on, whose belt is in the bucket and pants are falling down, who calculated just the right amount of lotion to bring, to toss out raw eggs if they’re accompanied by Peeps.
Finally, it might be obvious that other than the bagel, which was eaten at lunchtime, there are no food shots. no artic char with onion glass, no Pulpo a Feira con Cachelos, no passionfruit marshmallow… this is the curse of an iphone battery that cannot last a single day. where in Los Angeles there is always the car to plug into, in NY a semi-functioning battery will bring nothing but darkness after the sun goes down.
Errol Morris’ piece on Thomas Kuhn, Saul Kripke, Pythagorus, and incommensurability is a giant brain bender, and it forced me to back the bus up many years. i read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions a long time ago as an undergraduate crashing a seminar led by Todd Gitlin, but i was taught the weird concept of the square root of 2 before i could even drive. it wasn’t anything profound, but i was mesmerized at how a number could go on forever, without repeating itself. forever, back then, was the length of time it took for my friend to make a cassette recording of The Clash’s Sandinista, but i still couldn’t grasp the idea. really? forever?
it was so beautiful too, a right triangle with sides of 1. so small, so simple, yet a little sad. that’s all it gets, the three sides, with the funny symbol over the 2.
i imagined standing at the point in space designated by the number 1.414, and looking over the chasm at the number 1.415, and thinking that “forever” happened in between those numbers. it took me a long time to understand that there are way more irrational numbers than rational ones; it’s just that the rational numbers are the ones you can count. it’s sort of like the Republican’s view on redrawing district lines; they want to consider only the people who can vote.
back then i wondered why the other commonly known irrational numbers π and e seemed more practical, for instance both π and e had special names, whereas the square root of 2 was just the square root of 2. e has something to do with how much your credit card charges you when you don’t pay your bill, and anyone who’s ever tried to bake a charlotte from scratch knows the power of using π to figure out how long to make the ladyfinger piece that will wrap around the entire cake. but poor old dowdy square root of 2? not much, unless you spend a lot of time in a country that still uses legal-sized paper and want to know who in their right mind thinks that 8.5×14″ paper is useful. well, it isn’t. (most of the world uses paper based the aspect ratio of the square root of 2. this means when a piece of paper is folded in half in those countries, the resulting piece of paper has the same aspect ratio as the parent, and it corresponds to the next size down in terms of the paper tray. whereas our aspect ratios are all different for our commonly used papers, and all retarded – just look at 8.5×5.5!).
so, in honor of Morris, language, meaning, and the square root of 2, here’s two ways of looking at the same window:
two ways of looking at a pork tenderloin stuffed with pistachios and yogurt, with a coffee-cumin rub:
and… four ways of looking at the same piece of sandwich bread floating in a stream:
