| Mystery gift |
[Jul. 7th, 2007|07:18 pm] |
Amongst the nicely wrapped gifts physically brought to our wedding by a guest or guests was a picture frame— specifically, a Lenox Opal Innocence "Wedding Promises" double picture frame. I believe this link should have a nice photo for reference.
Although there was no card attached, we're pretty sure it was a wedding gift for us— it does seem awfully wedding-appropriate, after all— but I'm troubled by the anonymity of the giver, and I wonder if maybe there was a card that somehow got lost, or just separated from the gift to which it was once attached.
If you are (or know) the mystery giver, or have a hunch about people to ask, I'd very much appreciate any information you can offer.
Thank you.
We now return to your regularly scheduled journal. |
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| Now my dad has rollerskates! |
[Apr. 10th, 2007|11:01 am] |
I'm back from my dad's multi-day birthday extravanganza and want to post about it soon, but meanwhile I feel compelled to share this video, just in case anyone else finds it as funny as I do — which, I admit, seems unlikely.
http://black20.com/virals/?s=87 |
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| Public notice |
[Sep. 18th, 2006|01:01 am] |
I'm trying to post as regularly as possible for a year.
For simplicity, almost all these posts will be friends-only. If you're a friend of mine who would like to have your lj name added to my lj flist, then please let me know. |
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| lives |
[Jan. 3rd, 2006|11:53 am] |
As we were walking home up 9th Ave last night, a horse-drawn carriage rushed past us down 9th. The horse was running full-out, many times faster than I've ever seen a horse pulling one of those things go, and the driver was straining to try to get the horse back under control. "Something sure scared that horse," I said. The carriage blew through the red light we were waiting at and then the one after that, and then it was out of sight.
This morning on the radio I heard that 13 people were trapped in a mine in West Virginia. I heard that the ongoing genocide in Darfur may soon be claiming 100,000 lives a month. And I heard that last night a carriage horse bolted down 9th and crashed into a car at 50th; three people were injured; the horse was euthanized. And that was the thing that made me cry. |
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| missing |
[Jun. 16th, 2005|11:54 pm] |
The beautiful kitten I begged for when I was twelve— who quickly became the ferocious nineteen-pound cat who hated everyone (except, mysteriously, Johann), and then several months ago became the pathetically skinny, mangy, elderly furr-person sporting dreadlocks (apparently because he'd lost the will to groom)— seems to have run away.
( Okay, stalked slowly away. ) |
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| Yikes. Almost missed national poetry month! |
[Apr. 28th, 2005|09:49 pm] |
Merwin is doing a reading for Hofstra's Great Writers/ Great Readings series next Wednesday, so this one's been on my mind.
Odysseus
Always the setting forth was the same,
Same sea, same dangers waiting for him
As though he had got nowhere but older.
Behind him on the receding shore
The identical reproaches, and somewhere
Out before him, the unraveling patience
He was wedded to. There were the islands
Each with its women and twining welcome
To be navigated, and one to call “home.”
The knowledge of all that he betrayed
Grew till it was the same whether he stayed
Or went. Therefore he went. And what wonder
If sometimes he could not remember
Which was the one who wished on his departure
Perils that he could never sail through,
And which, improbable, remote, and true,
Was the one he kept sailing home to.
—W. S. Merwin |
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| commuting, keeping house |
[Feb. 17th, 2005|06:16 pm] |
Last night I took the campus shuttle to the train station to come home to the city, as I do every Wednesday. It had been raining hard for an hour or so and was just stopping when we got to the station. The sun was setting in the west, straight down the tracks; there was no city, just a sunset we were waiting to rush into. The sky had such depth. Salmon-pink clouds and flamingo ones were racing east overhead, and the sky was one of those peculiarly impossible blues, and the train came screaming and puffing up to carry us home.
Before I washed the breakfast dishes this morning, I put away the ones from last night's dinner. In the rack was a baking sheet I'd meant to scrub up later. Something had gotten stuck to it, so I left it to soak in the sink. Johann must have found it and worked at it quietly last night or this morning until he got it clean. And love just sort of stabbed into my heart. It was strange and rather lonely, to look around and find no one to hug in response. I wanted to rush out and buy flowers or chocolates or something, but I knew really I'd probably have forgotten all about it by the time he got home. |
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| graduation speeches |
[May. 25th, 2004|11:18 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  curious | ] |
E. L. Doctorow got an honorary degree at Hofstra's graduation this weekend. Then he tried to make his scheduled speech. As a professional storyteller, he critiqued some of the stories told in the past few years by some other folks. His transition was that politicians and presidents tell stories, too, and that whether we like it or not we all become a part of those stories. He ended by explaining to the graduates that they lived not just in a house or a town but also in History— but while I could still hear him then (since the faculty were sitting right behind him on the stage), I'm not sure how many people could.
Certainly, at the start of the speech, there wasn't any explicit rationale for connecting the speech to the occasion of a commencement.
I found the event surprisingly distressing. It seemed to be mostly parents in the stands -- rather than graduates on the field-- that were actually trying to shout him down. Do the students or families have a right to something more generic and unifying in their graduation speeches? Is a commencement an inherently political event in any case?
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-lidoc0524,0,3373724,print.story?coll=ny-topstories-headlines |
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| East Coast weather |
[Apr. 24th, 2004|11:17 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  satisfied | ] |
I can't recall ever changing social plans in Berkeley because the weather ended up being too nice. Too bad, sure, albeit only very infrequently. But too nice? An excuse to procrastinate about working, maybe, but not a reason to cancel a visit to SFMOMA. Of course now that I'm back in the land of actual seasons, the weather is very influential, and somewhat unstable, member of my social circle.
So today— as a way to sort of make up for the fact that I've been neglecting him in order to get work done on the last few weekends— ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) oddthink and I were planning to go the Museum of Natural History. We had to scrap the idea, though: it was just too dang nice out.
We went to Coney Island instead. Walked up and down the whole boardwalk. Tromped along the beach and looked at rocks and shells and the patterns wind-sculpted by dry sand blowing across wet. Drank lemonade. Ate fries at Nathan's (plus a hot dog for oddthink). Ate soft ice cream. (Okay so maybe not the healthiest day.) Laughed and screamed in the front seat of the front car of the Cyclone. Sat on a bench together reading books. Walked out on the pier to admire the sunset. Turned back to find the lights on all the rides just coming on for the night. Noted again what a beautiful time of day dusk is. And how basic and good open air and the sound of water can be.
It's good to remember to take a trip to the exotic outer boroughs now and again. We can visit the dinosaurs again when it rains. |
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| But you must know your father lost a father; That father lost, lost his.... |
[Apr. 16th, 2004|01:21 pm] |
Just got this email from my dad, addressed to me and my brothers:
----------
Subject: Happy Birthday, Dad
100 years ago today, your grandfather was born in Blackstone, MA. I
regret that you didn't get the chance to know him. He was a pretty neat
guy and I think you would have liked him. And I think he would have been
as proud of each of you as I am.
Love,
Dad
----------
Chris sent a follow-up to me and Mike that just said "holy shit. he's going to make me cry at work!" Somehow I have a hard time picturing my finance-guy brother breaking down in his midtown cube, but I feel sort of reassured to hear he thinks it's possible.
I wish we'd gotten to meet my father's father ourselves.
It seems impossible to ask my dad (who was only eleven when his father died) to try to actually describe him, and I wind up picturing him as somehow an early-twentieth-century version of my dad (an impulse supported by easily observable physical resemblances in black-and-white photos but undermined by equally easily observable cultural differences between my Vietnam-era dad and even his Korean-War-era elder brothers).
"A pretty neat guy," understated to the point of obscurity— or maybe borrowing a bit from what it feels like to be eleven and utterly unpossessed of a vocabulary to match the power of your emotions— just comes back to the basic fact "he was my dad."
Assuming he's the model for my dad's ideas of how to go about being a dad, then, yes, it seems easy to agree that he must have been a pretty neat guy, and we would certainly have liked him.
Mortality bites, eh? |
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| poetry |
[Apr. 15th, 2004|11:29 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  melancholy | ] |
This is actually better in the translation into Old English done by Peter Glassgold for _Hwaet!_ some years ago-- in part because grass and yard are more clearly linked, and in part because the pronoun at the end is ambiguous in Old English--, but the original William Carlos Williams version has its charms too. I like to recite it when I'm indulging my melancholy.
The Widow's Lament in Springtime
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them. |
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| National Poetry Month |
[Apr. 2nd, 2004|07:44 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | pleased | ] |
I like that shabet is offering poems for National Poetry Month. I didn't even know it was national poetry month... but I guess between Chaucer and Eliot, it would pretty much have to be April, wouldn't it?
April here so far is grey and chill. It'd be doing its best to pierce the drought of March with a series of not-all-that-sweet showers, actually, only there wasn't much drought to March this year either. And I haven't seen a single bird sleeping open-eyed all night. Overall, better go with Eliot.
Thus, in a sheer copycat move, I offer the opening of "The Waste Land," together with its epigraph:
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: [Sibulla ti theleis]; respondebat illa: [apothauein thelo]." [Sorry I can't figure out how to type Greek letters.*
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers....
*As a side note, you may be interested to know that I used to take an odd delight in carving or doodling [apothauein thelo] onto things in my high school. This, I think, expressed a deep resentment of my school's policy of monitoring all our essays and exams for suicidal tendencies. Of course, what with being trapped in high school and all, I also probably meant it. |
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| balance, strength, pain, metamorphoses |
[Dec. 1st, 2003|03:31 pm] |
It's December 1st.
On November 15, my grandfather woke a few hours before dawn to find one of his arms had stopped working. The upper part was painful; the lower part has ceased to feel anything at all. He and Grandma waited a few hours, until it was a decent hour to phone, and then called Mom (since she's the medical one in the family).
At the hospital, they realized something similar was wrong with one of his feet. They scheduled emergency surgery for both, cleared blood clots out of both, medicated and monitored his heart to make sure he'd stopped throwing clots, and helped us spin this is as a much better way to discover a clot problem than having a stroke.
Then the circulation in his leg shut down again. Another round of surgery gave him gore-tex veins. That failed too. Finally, they identified and harvested another vein and transplanted it to the leg as a replacement.
At about 3:30 in the morning on Thanksgiving, that failed too. He (and we) spent the day reacting to the news that there was now only one safe course of action. (My grandmother seemed to have lost all color. She stayed at the hospital all day; one aunt and uncle headed back there well before dessert was served. Others headed back later; two stray cousins found themselves stranded at our house, temporarily abandoned by my uncle in his need to look after his parents.)
So, on the day after Thanksgiving, they cut off my grandfather's right leg, below the knee. Let me just say that again: they cut off his leg. His leg. Right foot, gone. Birthmark commonly referred to as Grandpa's "chocolate bar," gone. Any guarantees about mobility, stability, independence... well, entirely dependent on my grandfather's strength, balance, and ability to deal with pain. (Maybe in metaphor-land that's always true, but still.)
When he came out of the last surgery, he seemed sort of relieved to at least not be feeling pain anymore, determined to get started on therapy as soon as possible and be walking on a temporary prosthesis by Christmas. Then the anesthesia from the surgery wore off. When I last saw him before I had to finally head home from my suddenly-extended Thanksgiving visit, he was in agony.
Pathei mathos? We'll see. |
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| amorous economics |
[Oct. 21st, 2003|08:27 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
| [ | music |
| | listening to the ballgame, of course | ] |
So I'm grading papers, looking at this Shakespeare sonnet that presents itself as a humble goodbye, and I'm wondering how much bite it ends up having.
Can all this business terminology end up reflecting badly on the loved one, or is it just a way for the speaker to gain distance from the loss?
I've always loved this, and now suddenly I'm worried that reflects some nasty passive aggression in me....
87
Farewell: thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgment making.
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter—
In sleep, a king; but waking, no such matter. |
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| Unlikely baseball commentators |
[Oct. 17th, 2003|02:31 pm] |
A Jedi for those 8th innings and an Italian for their aftermath.
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if a million souls cried out in torment and were silenced at once." —Obi-Wan Kenobi
"Day after day Cosimo spent on the ash, looking at the field as if he could read something in it that had been struggling inside him for a long time: the very idea of distance, of intangibility, of the waiting that can be prolonged beyond life." —Italo Calvino |
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| allegory, irony |
[Aug. 21st, 2003|11:23 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  quixotic | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Virginia Woolf | ] |
I give someone an idea not by saying what I'm thinking but by saying something quite different.
What just happened? Does the rate of success (or failure) in this sort of thing reveal the depth of our shared culture (or its fissures)?
Do I actually have any chance of understanding something said by someone who lived and died 600 years ago on a different continent, in a different world?
Oh, sure; no problem. |
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| power, fear |
[Aug. 14th, 2003|07:21 pm] |
In the months following September 2001, I had the same nightmare over and over:
I have just landed at the airport; I'm finally home; my parents are there to pick me up. Suddenly, all the power goes out, we learn that the radio stations etc. are no longer on air, and it somehow becomes clear that something terrible has happened to the city. We are suddenly horribly afraid for my brothers, and we begin to try to find a way to get home somehow, not knowing what we'll find there.
That's it. Nothing really happened onstage at all. But it was a very effective nightmare nonetheless.
One night during those months, I awoke in my apartment in Oakland at 3:30 or 4 AM to find I had no power. That is, no lights, no radio, no clear idea of what was going on. I couldn't stand it; I couldn't get back to sleep until I'd called my mother (already awake at 6:30 or 7 her time) just to ask whether anything awful had happened. It hadn't, of course.
So I guess maybe it's progress that when the power went out at 4:20 or so this afternoon while I was at my parents' house in New Jersey, I thought first of the circuit breakers— but as I found it was not just the house, not just the neighborhood, but even the New York radio stations that had lost power, I could feel the point of a thin icicle of fear slipping easily into my brain. My brothers were at work, in the city....
And, of course, there was nothing to worry about. Just some lightning, a power outage, an inconvenience: we'll have to reschedule the dinner we planned to have at Mike's restaurant tonight; I'll have to sleep here tonight instead of returning to my own apartment; Chris will have a long walk home. No problem. A little adventure.
How I hate that my mind leaps so quickly to disaster now. Why do I have such an excess of fear— and such a dearth of power? |
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