saturday morning

I actually slept in this morning until almost 8:30. This is nigh on miraculous.

Nova, my fat old feline, yowls a lot. But I figured out recently that, though she yowls a lot, it is often when I am sitting at the desk playing on the computer. I've had her for just over seven years now, having adopted her from the ASPCA in March of 2000. She was a timid little thing back then, and spent much of her time in the closet or under the bed. She didn't much like human contact, though over the years she grew accustomed to certain people, and would curl up on the couch almost within arm's reach. Eventually she started sleeping on my pillow at night, curled up between my head and the wall. This, when I was sound asleep, is when she was most comfortable with me. But, in her old age, she's mellowed out a bit. It's been a long, slow process, this mellowing, but Nova has settled in to her self, and in to her people. And lately, she's become practically a love cat. She likes to be near me now even when I'm awake, and will come scampering across the wood floor to jump up on the couch and rub her head into my open palm when I beckon her from across the room. And what I figured out is that she doesn't like when I'm on the computer because there's no where for her to sit at the desk. She will yowl, and yowl some more, and wrap herself around my ankles or the leg of the desk chair, until I get up and go sit on the couch, which is more conducive to kitty cuddling, and perhaps even a little brushing.

Nova's lucky that her person, being me, is a couch potato of sorts, and will spend hours reading or watching TV and knitting, in a place that Nova likes. And Nova's person, being me, is lucky that her cat is not a wild crazy young thing, and doesn't fight with her yarn or chew and claw at her knitting projects. Rather, we can be fat and old and lazy together, and curl up with each other, and love each other in our own odd way.

a call to yarns

I'm not exactly an overly self-indulgent person, materialistically speaking at least, about many things, but I do love yarn. I think it's the colors, and the softness, and the ability to so easily create something warm for the people I love. I tend to buy more yarn than I need for any given project (and yes, often enough I'll just buy it without any particular project in mind), and so have ended up with leftovers. I decided in December that it would be fun to knit up little squares of my leftovers and, somehow, put them all together into a patchwork afghan. Mom was delighted by this idea, and last year she made scarves for nearly the whole family, and passed on the remnants of each skein to me when I was home for Christmas. Shanna, my brother's main squeeze, and Cindy, my beloved yarn-partner-in-crime, have both been generous with their remnants as well. So now I've got a decent-sized bag o' wool, or cotton as the case may be, and the long process of making tons of wee little squares has begun. So please, ladies & gentlemen, don't get rid of those remnants! Send 'em my way instead.

black-bottomed cupcakes

These were one of my all-time favorite treats as a kid, and I started bringing them to the Lynch family Easter gatherings a couple years back after Mom passed the recipe down to me. They seemed to go over pretty well.

Mix together in medium bowl:
1 1/2 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup cocoa

Mix & add to dry ingredients:
1 cup water
5 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Filling:
1 large package (8 oz.) cream cheese
1 egg
1/3 cup sugar
beat together until smooth, then stir in 1 small package (6 oz) chocolate chips (I usually ignore this and stir in most of a large bag of chocolate chips)

Fill 18 paper lined cups 2/3 full of batter. Top each with 1 tablespoon filling. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes. You won't regret it.

easter

Easter was always one of my favorite holidays, right after Christmas, but this has nothing to do with Jesus. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Jesus was a pretty cool guy and all, but he just didn't figure much in my family's worldview. Case in point: when Nathan was, oh, about five years old, we got up on Christmas morning, opened all our presents, gorged on candy canes and hot chocolate and other goodies, and finally, satiated, Nathan turned to the rest of us and said in his small lispy child's voice, "Isn't today s'posed to be somebody's birthday?" To give my father credit, he pulled out the family Bible right then and there (yes, we did have a Bible in the house, despite our heathen ways) and read us the nativity story. Easter was about meticulously dyeing eggs, often with standard CVS-bought kits, but sometimes, and most beautifully, boiled in onion skins wrapped tight in lumpy little packages of cheese cloth and rubber bands. Also it was about eating a large ham, and afterwards indulging in delicious mom-made angel food cake with fresh strawberries and homemade whipped cream.

We moved from Oakland, California to the Bronx in August of 1981, to a little two-bedroom apartment on Johnston Avenue. Our neighbors in this apartment building happened to have two sons, and the four of them quickly befriended the four of us. Starting in the spring of 1982, we spent every single Easter with the Obligado family. The parents would shut us inside and "make" us watch TV while they hid chocolate eggs and wee little bunnies. In the early years this massive candy hunt took place in the park across the street from our building, and we had to keep an eye out for broken beer bottles and used condoms, but we were thrilled anyway. Two years later we moved up to Mohegan Lake, and the Obligados would drive up to our place for the day, and we got to hunt for all those bright foil-wrapped goodies (by which of course I mean chocolates and not condoms) in the safety of our own yard, in amongst the daffodils and tulips and mountain laurel. Eventually the Obligados moved up to Mohegan Lake too, and that just made everything easier.

We went to the Obligados' house for the last Easter that my family was in New York, that April of 1994. They had always come to our house before, but that first Easter after my father died, I think the adults must have decided we needed to break with tradition a bit. And Easter after that wasn't so much fun anymore. In college, and for a few years after, I spent the holiday by myself, often wandering the city with my walkman, watching people in their Easter finery walking to and from church, bouquets of flowers everywhere. It was a very lonely feeling, as if a wall of glass separated me from the day in which I found myself wandering. But then I met this boy, and started spending holidays with his family. That first Easter together, in April of 2002, we went with his mother's family to a restaurant in New Jersey. His grandmother is amazingly shy, and doesn't like new people at all, is in fact afraid of them, and this was the first time we met, and yet somehow at the restaurant she and I ended up sitting next to each other. And, seeing as I am sometimes almost as pathologically shy as she is, we were able to be shy together, and not startle or scare each other, and in the end it worked out well. And every Easter since then, until now, I have spent with this family.

I am, finally, starting to get used to the idea of being on my own again, though I still miss the easy embrace with which this boy and his family took me in. I am shoring up walls, taking measures, and will be having dinner tomorrow evening with Andrew & Chris. It's too late to sink back into wandering the city alone on Easter, that sense of separateness is not a place in which I want to find myself again. Besides, I have to see the boys if only to hopefully pawn off some of the Easter goodies that arrived from my mother in the mail yesterday. Tropical flavoured jelly beans and chocolate marshmallow eggs and mini Cadbury eggs and pastel-wrapped Hershey's kisses and little yellow Peeps. I do love chocolate, but there's only so much one girl can eat.

odds & ends

It's Friday morning, as happens every week, but I realized the last couple of Fridays that I'm not dreading the weekends anymore. Back in January and February and even well into March, I loathed the weekend. Too much alone time, time to think and stew and ponder and beat myself up and otherwise wallow in abject misery. Nate tried his best to keep me occupied. We even ventured out to Queens, had lunch at a Himalayan restaurant (salted butter tea and goat curry, anyone?), took the 7 out to the old Faigrounds and checked out the Robert Moses exhibit at the Queens Museum before wandering around Flushing and then taking the G train all the way to Park Slope, Brooklyn. And I tried my best to keep me occupied, even forcing myself to initiate contact with dear friends I was almost too shy and feeling too needy to reach out to. But Monday morning was always something of a relief. I was talking about this to a coworker and he said, "Geez, Em, you know you're in a bad place when you're looking forward to Mondays..." Well, I'm pleased to report that I'm back in tune with the working masses again, and am happily looking forward to closing up the library tonight promptly at seven o'clock and not having to think about the place for two whole days.

Speaking of the working masses, I received my annual Social Security Statement in the mail yesterday. I'm always slightly amazed by this thing, not quite sure why. If I were to die right now, my non-existent child and spouse could each receive $978 per month. Is this, in part, how Social Security stays afloat? People like me, with no dependents, paying in, dying alone, leaving no one to collect our share? If I were merely to become severely disabled, I could receive $1,201 per month. And though I earned around $1500 per year in 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1997, I earned exactly $0 in 1996. What the hell was I doing in 1996?

I check the temperature every morning before I leave for work, either through the NY Times online, or on NY1 (channel 98 here in the city). But I rarely think to actually look out the window and see if it looks like it might rain. Nathan gives me a hard time about this, but he's a little obsessed with having everything he might ever need with him at all times... not that this is a bad thing. Anyway, it's April 6th and freezing out. I mean that quite literally it's 32 degrees out. Only 5 degrees warmer than Fairbanks, Alaska. When we were in Fairbanks on January 1st of 2006, it was apparently an unusually warm -11 degrees there, and when we got back to New York, it was nearly 60 degrees here. That's a big difference. 5 degrees, not so much. I hear it's a balmy 85 degrees in parts of Madagascar, though stormy and awfully humid. I'll take my crisp, freezing New York weather any day.

another reason to love this city

Wrapped in Subway Logos, Free City Condom Is a Hit
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
New York Times
April 5, 2007

Seductive forces abound in New York City: music, bars, food, money, power. And the No. 1 train, of course, though some people think the D train is really hot.

Subways and sex? Apparently so.

In just a month, the city gave away five million of its new subway-themed condoms, officials said yesterday. Lest you read past that number unimpressed, consider that that was about two condoms for every man living in the city ? more than the city distributed in all of 2003.

This condom was the first designed just for the city, in a wrapper with lettering mimicking the logos of subway lines. First released on Valentine’s Day, the new condom exceeded all expectations, with five million sent out by mid-March.

“I think the key thing is this branding effort,” said Adam Karpati, the assistant city health commissioner in charge of H.I.V. and AIDS programs. “It’s our own brand, it’s a New York City-specific thing, and people really respond.”

The city began giving away condoms in 1971, but for decades they were available only in city-run health clinics and from H.I.V. service groups. But a few years ago, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene began recruiting bars, restaurants, block associations, theaters, shops, doctors’ offices and even churches to hand out the condoms.

Last year, with the help of 877 such partners, the department distributed 18 million condoms, compared with about 4 million distributed in 2003. Since it announced the city’s own brand, promoted by an ad campaign, 500 new groups have joined the effort, Dr. Karpati said.

Now, the subway condom has led the city into temptation - the temptation to use as many suggestive puns as it can.

The city’s posters advertising the condoms proclaim “we’ve got you covered,” and “New York’s hottest new wrapper.” A press release yesterday said, “the rubber is hitting the road,” although it probably should have said “railroad.”

So will the department choose a new, sexy theme to evoke the city’s peculiar appeal? Bridges and tunnels? Bagels?

“People have made that suggestion to us,” Dr. Karpati said. “The possibilities are endless, and so are the double entendres.”

fox news

I watched "Outfoxed: Murdoch's War on Journalism" last night. The whole thing was fascinating, but one particular bit of dialogue jumped out at me. I can't remember if it was from Bill O'Reilly or one of Fox's other overly bombastic conservative pundits, but someone said, not long before the 2004 election, that Iran wanted Kerry to win the election, presumably because of course liberals are so darned weak on security. And the reason this jumped out at me is because, not long before that fateful November day, the AP ran a story called "Bush Receives Endorsement From Iran." I was so amused, not to mention amazed, by this article that I immediately emailed it to myself. So here it is, in honor of the ever fail and balanced Fox news, the original article in all its original glory:

Bush Receives Endorsement From Iran
October 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:31 p.m. ET

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- The head of Iran's security council said on Tuesday the re-election of President Bush was in Tehran's best interests, despite the administration's axis of evil label, accusations that Iran harbors al-Qaida terrorists and threats of sanctions over the country's nuclear ambitions.

Historically, Democrats have harmed Iran more than Republicans, said Hasan Rowhani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran's top security decision-making body.

"We haven't seen anything good from Democrats," Rowhani told state-run television in remarks that, for the first time in recent decades, saw Iran openly supporting one U.S. presidential candidate over another.

"We should not forget that most sanctions and economic pressures were imposed on Iran during the time of Clinton," Rowhani said of the former Democratic president. "And we should not forget that during Bush's era -- despite his hard-line and baseless rhetoric against Iran -- he didn't take, in practical terms, any dangerous action against Iran."

Though Iran generally does not publicly wade into U.S. presidential politics, it has a history of preferring Republicans over Democrats, who tend to press human rights issues.

"We do not desire to see Democrats take over," Rowhani said when asked if Iran was supporting Kerry against Bush.

The United States severed diplomatic relations with Iran after militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Iranian clerics were crucial in determining the fate of the 1980 U.S. election when Republican Ronald Reagan won in part because Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter was unable to secure the hostages' release.

The hostages were freed as Reagan was inaugurated.

The United States supported Iraq in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, but by the late 1990s, U.S.-Iranian relations were somewhat better. They plummeted again after Bush accused Iran of being part of the 'axis of evil' with North Korea and prewar Iraq.

The Bush administration also accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons and sheltering operatives of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network. Still, Iran was happy to see Bush destroy two big regional enemies -- the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Iranian political analyst Mohsen Mofidi said ousting the Taliban and Saddam was the "biggest service any administration could have done for Iran."

And Bush, he said, has learned from his mistakes.

"The experience of two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the responsibility Bush had, will make it a very remote possibility for him to risk attacking a much bigger and more powerful country like Iran," he said.

Mofidi added that "Democrats usually insist on human rights and they will have more excuses to pressure Iran."

Republican and Democratic presidents have issued executive orders against Iran, with Reagan in 1987 barring Iranian crude oil and other imports, and Clinton in 1995 banning U.S. trade and investment in Iran.

Bush has been reluctant to offer Iran any incentives for better U.S.-Iranian relations, but in recent days there have been signs Washington will back European economic incentives if Iran stops uranium enrichment activities.

Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, was quoted by state-run television Tuesday as saying Iran is interested in buying nuclear fuel from the West, but will not concede its right to the technology.

The nuclear issue has been most sensitive, and the Bush administration is threatening to press for sanctions against Iran over it. Washington accuses Tehran of trying to build bombs. Tehran says its nuclear ambitions are peaceful, for energy purposes.

Kerry, who says halting nuclear proliferation will be a priority if he becomes president, believes Bush should have done more diplomatically to curb Iran's alleged nuclear weapons ambitions. He says Iran should be offered nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes, but spent fuel should be taken back so it cannot be used to develop nuclear weapons.

Kavoos Emami, another Iranian political analyst, praised Kerry for mentioning the need for dialogue with Iran, and said the Democrat would be better for Iran.

"Bush has insulted Iran more than any other U.S. administration. If Kerry is elected, a U.S. military attack against Iran will never happen or will be a very remote possibility," he said.

my friend ben (revisited)

Ben and I became friends in 9th grade. We both lost parents by the time we went off to college, and it was this shared experience, I think, that truly cemented our friendship. We don't see each other very often these days, really just every couple of years, but there's a closeness, an affection, even a protectiveness, that I still cherish beyond measure. A month or so ago I was talking to him about the Chris debacle and he got kind of quiet for a minute, which is unusual for Ben, and then he said, "You know, Em, I had forgotten how much I react like an older brother to you sometimes, and I never feel this way towards anyone, but I think I want to hit Chris..." Joking, of course, but still I took a strange comfort in this. Ben is a big guy.

Ben and his daughter, Daniela, drove down from Peekskill this past Saturday to have dinner at my apartment. I was a little bit nervous about this, because Daniela is a mere three (just shy of four!) years old, and I haven't had kids in my apartment really before, and I haven't spent much time around children in eons. Though we were timid with each other at first, before long we'd bonded over refrigerator magnets, and yarn, and stuffed animals, and Nova. The magnets are still caught in the cracks of the couch, the yarn is slowly being made into a bright pink scarf, and all the stuffed animals remain scattered around the living room. Best of all, poor Nova was adored by little Daniela, and demonstrated remarkable patience for a fat old feline, though by the end of the evening she was cowering under the bed. Little Daniela, at least, was adored by me if not by Nova. And in the midst of all our play, she did give me and Ben time to catch up, which was just lovely as well. I hope to see them again sometime soon.

i love cary tennis

I don't read horoscopes, barely know my own astrological sign; and I don't read womens' magazines or gossip magazines, and certainly not advice columns. But I have a little confession to make. I read Salon almost every day more for Cary Tennis' Since You Asked column than for anything else. I don't particularly care what the reader is asking, or what the problem is, but I have a serious crush on this Tennis person. Though the questions and problems don't particularly interest me, Tennis has something that brings me close to tears on a semi-regular basis. This from today's rather boring question about a woman who had a 20-year affair with someone and then, a couple years later, got upset when the someone got drunk and groped her:

"I know a thing or two about overwhelm. I didn't know about overwhelm at first. I didn't know that was what you called that terrible, cold wind that would blow when you tried to look at things. Somebody who liked me but knew I was too screwed up to get involved with told me you call that overwhelm. Before she left me for good she told me about the overwhelm and I got it checked out and sure enough there was overwhelm taller than the high corn. I had no filters. There was rain coming in. There was light of all descriptions not filed properly. There were words and memories and no system for accounting. It wasn't that the filters were defective. They were gone."

There's simplicity in Tennis' language, and yet a clarity and force that I find, at times, almost overwhelming. This, perhaps obviously due to my own experience of having a mother who, for whatever reasons, had to move very far away from me when I was eighteen, particularly moved me:

"Here is a phrase I made up when I was thinking about my friends and my kitchen: Psychological ergonomics.You want your friends close at hand, like the dishes are close to the dishwasher. New York has great psychological ergonomics. Beware of living where there is no subway!

You came to where your mother was and she left. Yes, there were reasons. We are so quick to see the reasons, aren't we? We are very grown-up. But in relation to our parents we are children, and the child doesn't care about the reasons. The child wants to be with her mother. What a great burden to be the child who understands and forgives!

Your mother up and left, and you soldiered on.

Less soldiering, more mothering, I say."

shawl for karen

So I just finished my first project involving an actual pattern, though I still have to block it. A simple pattern, but pretty, made from some Blue Heron yarn I fell in love with this past December at the yarn store in Anacortes. I bought it specifically to make something for Chris's mother, Karen, for her birthday this April, and I think I'll give it to her despite the way things have turned out. Unfortunately I don't have a camera to take a picture of it with, but maybe I'll borrow Shanna's, as I'm pretty excited and would like to have some image of it to keep.

the trouble with cellphones

The trouble with cellphones, or at least one of many troubles with cellphones, is that you never know in what context you're calling the person that you're calling. By which I mean, maybe you really, really want to have a serious conversation with this person, and the best time for this is a time in which you are both safely ensconced in your respective homes. And maybe you have to psyche yourself up for this serious conversation, and you work up the nerve to call this person, only to discover that they, unlike you, are out drinking at a bar with a bunch of people you don't know, being raucous and rowdy and loud and stupid. And there goes the serious conversation. Not that this has happened to me, mind you, but the thought of it happening, the fear of it happening, has proved to be a (probably good and beneficial to everyone involved) hindrance to even making the call in the first place. But I miss the good old days, when you called someone at home, and they were either at home or they were not, and you knew either way what to expect.

funny story

Chris broke up with me on a Friday in early January, over the phone since he was already back at school in New Haven. The following Tuesday, when I opened my door in the morning to go to work, I found a gift bag of fancy Jacques Torres chocolates on my doorstep. My friend Nick's girlfriend Sarah, a true sweetheart if ever there was one, works at Jacques Torres in Brooklyn, and one of her coworkers happens to live down the hall from me. So Sarah had decided that what a recently-dumped-over-the-telephone-for-another-woman-girl needs, quite logically, is chocolate, and had sent this bag up with Becca to leave for me.

I hadn't actually seen Sarah since last fall until yesterday, when she and Nick and I went out for dinner after work. So though I'd thanked her in an email, I finally got to thank her in person for her sweet gesture all those weeks ago. We joked about how she'd frantically been trying to figure out how to ship the chocolates to my apartment without me having to sign for them or end up having to go to the post office until Becca volunteered to deliver them in person after work. And it turns out that Becca had actually rang the doorbell, not wanting to just leave them out in the hallway. I must have already been in bed, because I don't remember this at all, but Nate was staying with me at the time and apparently thought that the doorbell was the downstairs buzzer, because Becca could hear a man's voice from inside yelling, "Hello? Hello?? Hello?!?" into the intercom. And she panicked, thinking it must be Chris and imagining the horrible, if comic, awkwardness of that little interaction, and so left the chocolates and fled back down the hall.

I guess it never occurred to Nathan to see if anyone was at the door, because he was as surprised as me when I left for work the next morning, in a very dark space, only to find a lovely surprise that made the world seem just the littlest bit warmer.

more film stuff

Through the familial grapevine, I recently took a gander at Handcrank Films' website, and it seems they're working on some pretty cool stuff like the aforementioned Eagle or Ostrich documentary, as well as more commercial stuff which, I assume, is paying the bills. Here's just a few snippets of stock footage that Erik shot around Bellingham, beautiful stuff, makes me wonder if maybe I shouldn't move out west after all.

eagle or ostrich?

One of the best things about my mom marrying Paul almost five years ago was that Nate and I got a fantastic stepbrother out of the deal. Erik's been working on a short documentary called Eagle or Ostrich, about an American Muslim learning to fly. Erik did most of the filming and audio, and it was mostly filmed around (and above) his hometown of Bellingham, Washington. Check out the trailer, and keep an eye out for it's first showing on PBS, hopefully sometime this spring.

please note: for proper aspect ratio, in the youtube viewer, click the small box just to the right of the volume bar, or the film will look stretched.