Don't sweat the technique

The alarm went off this morning at 7:30 am, way too early for a Sunday. Once I registered the facts of the alarm and the radio and the morning itself, I was immediately aware of the insistent ringing in my ears and the dull hum in my brain, remnants of L's birthday festivities from last night. So, with about five hours of sleep under my belt, I lurched out of bed and got ready to run a 4-mile race in Central Park. I brushed my teeth, put my contacts in, and headed uptown on the train.

Last night we kicked things off with a tapas dinner, which sounded great in theory but in actuality may have left all of us slightly hungry. I know I was about ready to eat my napkin. Then we moved on to our latest nightspot of choice, conveniently located two blocks from the apartment. Knowing I had this race in the morning I kept my alcohol consumption to a minimal degree, for me, at a birthday party, with fun people. We were having a great time, the music was lively, except for a weird Bon Jovi interlude, but as the night progressed, Ashesh rightly pointed out that "the crowd was...changing." Changing into a more surly, outer-borough, inappropriately-dressed permutation of its previous self. (Ladies: keep your bras under your clothing. This applies to most of you.) So finally we left, got some pizza, and went home. Success.

On the train up to the park this morning I assembled these recollections in my brain as I thought about why I was running, and also tried to focus on not getting mugged by the other tired and untrustworthy people around me. My head felt a little inflated and my body was exhausted. L had just rolled over when I left the house.

So I finally started doing this run, then, and it seemed pretty standard: pick somebody up ahead of you and gradually overtake them; run on the periphery of the road so you don't waste too much time jostling past other people; take note of the dreadlock guy you see at every race, who runs at about your pace; don't stop for water, don't even think about it; focus on your breathing; note how pretty the park is in the springtime; let gravity speed you up on the downhills; consider the communal nature of these races, the fact that you can dissolve into a sea of 8,000 runners with 16,000 legs pumping on the asphalt just like yours, the way that the crowd becomes something almost organic; just listen to your music and keep moving.

I felt winded at points and felt like I dropped my speed down to a crawl. At other times I really pushed hard and basically stalked some hapless runner until I passed them. I was dying to come across mile marker 3, and when I finally passed it, I didn't feel like I had much left for the remaining mile, and I couldn't even muster up a decent sprint for the very last stretch, when the banner at the finish line is in sight, an actual crowd is present along the edges and the thumping dance music obliterates whatever club tune you've been listening to. But I crossed the finish line, gave myself a high-five over my head (which may look like an ordinary clap, but it's not), gathered my complimentary water and sportsdrink and tart macintosh apple, and headed home.

Later in the afternoon I checked my results out on the web, and it turns out that today I posted my fastest pace-per-mile time ever, in the two years I've been running these things. It was a solid twenty seconds quicker than my usual effort, and I beat last week's time, in the same distance, by a solid minute. Maybe I didn't waste as much time dodging other people today, or maybe I happened to just hit some nice new peak of fitness today, but whatever the case, I felt really proud of myself.

I'm already thinking about what my goal time is for the next four-miler I do, and the next threshold for my pace time. In hindsight (of course) it felt great to wake up early and get out of the house and do something, to wipe away the cobwebs left over from a night on the town and embrace the day. When I came home the ringing had subsided in my head. Today I felt a certain pride and contentment that I doubt I could feel from, say, Federal Income Tax, or Professional Responsibility, or Entertainment Law, which are the exams I'm facing in the next couple days.

I guess the moral of the story is, if you can't eat your Wheaties, try knocking back a few Heineckens and not sleeping for a night, and watch your athletic abilities soar! You'll see a real spike, I guarantee it.

Groove salad

The latest thing I have found to help me stagger through this round of final exams is a radio station on iTunes, filed under Electronic, called "Groove Salad on SomaFM." The Salad describes itself as "a nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves." That well-turned phrase illustrates everything there is to know about it, and I have come to love this random little station.

I listen to this as I cobble together my outlines, and the mostly lyric-free, synthetic beats and whirrs are the perfect complement. Occasionally a vocal will waft along to ride the spare drumbeats and syncopated clicks and clacks. Sometimes I will be immersed in the sounds and suddenly I am no longer at my desk alone in the middle of the night: I am on the midnight flight from Reykjavik to the Northern Lights, the Japanese stewardess is strutting up the aisle carrying my vodka gimlet on a silver tray and the man across the aisle in sunglasses is raising his glass in a toast, and there's dry ice everywhere, and suddenly I am behind the eclipse or in the center of the moon in a room made of ice and light, like the Fortress of Solitude, but instead of Superman there are harajuku girls and aliens and a dolphin in a nightclub, tiny candles everywhere, floating upwards like bubbles in champagne, then the Northern Lights come on and the jet flying me from Reykjavik to infinity gently lifts up, up, up, and the stewardess and the sunglasses man and the dolphin are there, and we all raise our glasses in a toast to ... we raise our glasses in a toast to ... oh no ... that's it.

I lost it. Suddenly I am back to the books, realizing I read the same paragraph about federal income tax three times. The nouns are interchangeable at this point. Undaunted, I must press on and keep reading and typing, carefully, with reflection, until the next flight from Reykjavik leaves for a brief sojourn away from the desk and the books and law school. This is why I love Groove Salad.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

A couple of days ago I finished reading The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I was particularly excited to read it because it was at the cross-section of two of the most powerful forces in publishing: Oprah picked it for her book club, hence the gaping "O" sticker on the cover, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. I love the Pulitzer prize, but in recent years, I feel that it has gone to these small, modest character studies (see Gilead, March) where intense introspection occurs in front of a rainy window, yet nothing seems to transpire. I like a novel that is ambitious - some big, brawny book spanning decades, where the author tries to take the ideal of the Great American Novel and wrestle it in between two covers (see Middlesex, Kavalier and Clay). So I was excited when the Pulitzer chose this book, and I was excited that Oprah's blessing upon it moved the paperback publishing date up by about six months.

I read this novel over the course of three weeknights, from midnight to two in the morning. It was one of the most bleak books I've ever read: about the sojourn of an unnamed man and his son through a near-future, post-apocalyptic America. In the wake of some horrible undisclosed nightmare, when the planet and most of humanity have perished, this man is hoping to follow the road to the coast, where hopefully something better will await him and his son. As they encounter other stragglers and scavenge abandoned homes and towns, details emerge of the hellish world that has reconstituted itself in the face of utter disaster: roving gangs, slavery, cannibalism. Out of chaos, this order has formed.

The redemptive quality of the book comes from the bond between father and son, the father's selfless and ingenious devotion to the boy. The father can remember the world before this disastrous event occurred; he can remember the boy's mother and knows why she is not with them. But he protects his son from these facts, and tries to teach the child decency and compassion when these ideas are completely untethered from their reality. His love for the child is so bright that it carries the novel forward.

Now, several days after I reached the last page, I'm still thinking about the book and wondering what happened to its protagonists. It was the most harrowing book I've read. I read it as L slept beside me, and when I finally put it down, my eyes weary but my mind racing, I would sleep with a hand on her shoulder or around her waist to remind me that the book was not real, and that I was safe in my cozy yellow bedroom with my wife in our too-small bed.

I have always been superstitious about the talismanic power of books. As a kid I couldn't sleep with the cover of a Stephen King novel facing upwards on my nightstand. When I read American Psycho a couple years ago, the most unredeemably horrifying book I had ever encountered, I wouldn't keep it in my bedroom, and when I finally finished it, I dropped it into a trashcan on the street the next day. I didn't want it in my home.

With The Road, I placed it face-down on the dresser at the end of each night. One of the reasons I read so late into the morning hours was that if I encountered an idea or a passage that was especially bleak or gruesome, I couldn't stop there - I had to create more distance between myself and the offending paragraphs. In a way I was on my own journey to parallel that of the characters, searching for the same happy ending (to use a pat phrase) that they sought.

With that said, I can't recommend this book highly enough. I don't think it's for everyone (I think L would chuck it out the window), but it does fit in nicely with some of the other dystopian literature I've been encountering lately. I read this book after reading EB White's wry and wistful essays, and now I've moved on to more of Joan Didion's acerbic and incisive prose. But The Road has stayed with me; I've picked it up to read the first few pages again, to try to see how McCarthy did it. In the face of such disaster and horror, his ability to find love and bravery for two unknown people recalled the best of what his characters had lost, the best of what we all could lose.

I will also say this: this is the ballsiest book club choice Oprah has ever made. The ladies are about to get their socks knocked off.

Patriotism, part II

This semester I have been interning with a judge downtown, and today I got to see a naturalization ceremony where 250 people became American citizens. They were sitting in a massive room in the courthouse, people of all ages and from all over the place, many of them dressed in their best. The largest contingents were from the DR and China, but there were people from Armenia, Malawi, France, etc, and even, thanks apparently to the benefit of time travel, the USSR. A couple Iranians and Syrians, but no Iraqis (good luck, you guys! As you stand up, we'll stand down! So try to stand up without being blown to bits!). Anyways, I digress: today all of those people became Americans.

First, a clerk made everyone stand and repeat an oath of citizenship, which required people to serve the country, if necessary, to pick up arms in defense, and to pay taxes. This seemed much more stringent than what we require of native-born citizens, but that was fine. It was amusing to note that many of our newest citizens still have no grasp of the English language, though -- when asked to repeat after the clerk, a lot of people moved their mouths and looked around without making any sound. Or maybe they were just deaf new citizens, I don't know.

Then we all said the Pledge of Allegiance, which was refreshing. Then the judge (dare I say it, my judge) gave a speech where he talked about how America is the greatest country in the history of the world, and now everyone in the room is an equal, with the same rights and freedoms. We are all immigrants, from some other place, and no one has any standing over anyone else. Your citizenship, which is ten minutes' old, is good and solid and equivalent to that of a federal jduge, like him. With this freedom comes responsibilities: honoring our fellow citizens, respecting them, voting in elections, paying taxes. This is a happy day, one of the most important days of your life, and you should go celebrate with your loved ones after you leave here, because this is a wonderful occasion. You are a citizen of the United States of America. It was really a great, beautiful speech, which I utterly failed to recapture here. I wanted to copy it when we returned, but that would have been strange.

Afterwards, like graduation, they read everyone's name, and the people walked or strided or hobbled up and received their certificate and a handshake with the judge. Family members would occasionally clap. I sat there with a big smile on my face the whole time, watching people as they looked at their names and photos on the certificate, or made fleeting eye contact with the judge as they shook his hand and then left. The US Marshals were congratulating people too and clapping them on the back. A few people even made eye contact with me, and I would give the ol' smile-and-nod, American to American.

As we left I thought about how April 20, 2007 would be a memorable day for so many people. I thought of the risk and strength and courage it would take to leave your home, either willingly or under duress, and seek a new home and a new identity elsewhere. I am very fortunate to have never faced those trials, and now there are 250 more people in this great city with the same rights and freedoms as me, despite whatever differences of culture or language may exist between us. In that room was such a sense of unity and pride, only amplified by the complete heterogenity of the assembly. All of us are sheltered in the arms of this great country.

Patriotism

In the months after 9/11 Vanity Fair featured an Annie Leibovitz cover of George Bush and his team in the Oval Office: Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet. I went out and bought the magazine and carefully cut out the cover and put it up on my wall. They looked strong, and intelligent, and capable. I felt reassured to see them, and I felt that America had some direction. Watching President Bush give his speech to Congress on September 20th gave me a certain courage and hope that was difficult to find during that time.

And yet now, of course, that sense of hope and unity is scattered to the wind. Every name I listed above is now weighed down by a litany of errors, mistakes, and examples of striking incompetence. What we are doing in Iraq is simply wasteful, of so much: the lives of our soldiers; the existing Iraqi society, which is now ripped to shreds; the good faith so many decent Iraqis placed in us; and the goodwill of the international community that buoyed us when we were at our lowest.

And yet - John McCain is out there advocating for more troops, more strength, and a longer commitment in Iraq. And the damned thing is, I think he's right: if we expect to pull any kind of success out of this debacle, we have to stick it through. But his problem, and the president's, is that our nation has lost the will for the fight, and for good reason. Once the president gets out of office, he will spend the rest of his life justifying and defending this war, and trying to come up with a narrative to vindicate his own errors. John McCain, I think, is acting honestly right now, with integrity. He's not pandering to anyone, because no one agrees with him; but he is insisting on this course, and staking his political future on it, because he thinks it's the right thing to do. And for that reason, I think what he is doing is an incredibly noble thing.

I'm a bit worked up now from reading Newsweek late at night. And at this hour of the morning I'm telling you I can see the threads binding this Imus debacle to our national fatigue with Iraq to the Duke lacrosse scandal to what happened at Virginia Tech today. Maybe all of those elements reveal a certain lack of honesty in our society, a coarseness, a cruelty, a rush to judgment, a lack of deliberation.

Oh Lord, we need a change right now. The national grief that we're about to endure - we've endured it before. The jockeying of the politicians, the race cards thrown down with such glee by all sides, the lies we've grown accustomed to, the parsed language that says nothing at all, the relentless sense of entropy...! I've had it.

I think this country is anticipating the next election because we are desperate for a change, desperate for a signal of different things to come. I voted for John McCain in the Virginia primary seven years ago, but I think his moment has passed. I am tired of the Bush/Clinton seesaw, where one half of the country violently hates our president for four or eight years, and then we switch. If Chuck Hagel can jump in the mix, and get the Republicans to pull their heads out of their butts about evolution, stem cells, gay marriage, and other issues, I might look to him. But to be honest, right now I feel the language and unity and hope and fresh air of Barack Obama is exactly the remedy this country needs.

So, in this dark night - as the last shreds of a nor'easter bluster outside the window, as the carnage burns in Iraq, as thirty-some families mourn the loss of their kids and spouses in Blacksburg, as the professional screamers and sycophants in our society sleep in preparation for another day of meaningless combat, as we all get another night older - I'm voting Obama for president. May the election come tomorrow.

E.B. White, "Here is New York," 1948:

"On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill them, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."

I love television, so what

This weekend L and I returned home, for the first time since January, to celebrate Easter. By "celebrate Easter," of course, I mean "lie in bed until eleven, enduring a sinus cold that had my head vibrating like a tuning fork and made me feel like my nose was full of gravel." Fortunately I think I have beaten the head cold into submission, but this is yet another misadventure in my travels with L in 2007. A pessimistic person might point out that something ranging from irritating to terrifying has happened every time L and I have ventured from the City this year: in Hawaii, there was the health issue that basically made the earth stop spinning; in Florida, there was the unseasonable cold front, the coldest weekend in months that of course warmed up as soon as our plane to New York left the tarmac; and now, for Easter, my sinuses were going crazy the entire time, so that it was a struggle to eat food, given that it's difficult to chew when you're also focused on breathing through your mouth. Well, fortunately I am not a pessimistic person, so I don't look at things that way.

We came back home ready and willing to buckle down and work hard, and wrap up this semester and look forward to what promises to be a great summer. L's tulips and hyacinth had bloomed, the apartment was fresh and fragrant, and the sun was shining. And then, yesterday afternoon, as I was cruising among the Internets and absent-mindedly watching, um, Oprah, the TV inexplicably shut off by itself. You homeowners out there know where this is going: THE TV WOULDN'T COME BACK ON. Five hours later, after long phone calls with the people at Philips and Circuit City, I had to accept the fact that our television had died. And unlike Jesus or the proverbial cat, it will not be coming back. Thanks to our warranty, they will be replacing our TV, hopefully some time within the next ten business days. As far as I am concerned, ten business days is an eternity in TV time, but I think this is God's way of punishing me for being too sick to go to church on Easter.

Now it's like, why bother to go back to the apartment? What are L and I going to do, talk to each other? I have spent a lot of time thinking about how I can schedule my gym-going to watch TV while on the treadmill, or figure out which networks let you watch free episodes, or what we can buy on iTunes, in an absolute worst-case scenario. But ultimately I think this will be good, at least in terms of studying and reading for pleasure and taking advantage of springtime.

Last night L wrote a message on our dusty TV screen with her finger, a suitable epitaph that is now, literally, the only thing to watch:

I LOVE MY HUSBAND
& MY TV.

Things I wanted to write about...

...but the moment has passed:

1. The 10K I did on Sunday, where two guys almost got in a fight, mid-run, and the antagonist, who was a real jerk, was actually slower than the guy he was picking on, which was hilarious. Also the fact that my calves were sore for days afterward because I haven't run downhill in months, which is sad (yet in my defense, the treadmills at the gym don't have a downward setting).

2. Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," where I basically underlined the entire book and have spent weeks mulling over the last line of her preface: "writers are always selling somebody out."

3. R. Kelly's song "I'm a Flirt," which is like the perfect complement to Diddy's "Last Night," and I love both of them. I think if I had to identify the top songs of 2007 so far, they would be Omarion's "Ice Box" and "Last Night."

4. The fact that I have hit some sort of extracurricular wall at law school, and I am just sick and tired of planning events and running things and ordering food and being excited about everything. I spent huge chunks of time in high school, college, grad school, and work doing all of that, and dammit, I'm 27 years old and I've had enough.

5. We had a really nice spring evening last Tuesday: I darted home to run outside after school, and then we went to two different tapas places in the neighborhood, sitting outside and enjoying sangria. And a waitress complimented my Spanish accent. I wore shorts the whole day and it felt as if the entire city had let out a sigh of relief - there was a palpable sense of happiness and activity and community as we watched the city stroll by.

6. The other day at law school I got totally busted dancing in the hallway, listening to my ipod. As the person passed by, looking at me weirdly, I had to pretend my dance face was my standard countenance and sort of jerkily transition into a normal walking motion. It was not seamless, I'll tell you that.

7. Speaking of which, at hip hop last week, we were rocking out and then, in the middle of everything, at that moment where the music (a hot remix of "Ice Box," see above) fuses with the motion to create this perfect expression of humanity and joy, the teacher bellowed, "WORK, Mike!' in this way that was like a compliment and a command and a life lesson and a request all at the same time. I have been reliving this moment frequently.

Barcelona eye

There were two aftershocks to the Barcelona trip, the second of which still has me reeling (the first being the exploded bottle of cava in my suitcase). This second aftershock is the medical condition known in my apartment as Barcelona Eye.

Remember when L went to Honduras for a summer, and came back with Honduran Eye? That angry thing in her eye, looking like Hurricane Katrina on Doppler radar? Our biggest fears were either that her eyeball would melt or that something would come crawling out of it. This is our tradition of eye situations.

Thankfully that whole situation was resolved, but ever since I came back from Barcelona, my left eyelid has been occasionally twitching like mad. I try to talk to my friends or L or my supervisors at work, and I realize my eye has been fluttering coquettishly the entire time. I fear that this will somehow impair my depth perception, which has always been a real strong suit of mine (as my background in athletics will attest). I think maybe I need to replace my contact lens, or else sleep a little more, because it's getting ridiculous. I'm trying to make my way through the world and it's like I've got a strobe light attached to half my forehead. If the eye twitched when it was about to rain, or when there was impending danger, that would be one thing, but it seems pretty useless so far.

Barcelona! You feed me, thrill me, drench my clothes in champagne and give me facial tics! If that's not bittersweet, I don't know what is. Have a great weekend.

New Jersey wedding

I want to write something tonight, but I don't know what. We went to a wedding on Friday night in New Jersey. It was L's friend from her old job, and we only knew one other person besides the bride and groom. Consequently we were seated at the bride's riff raff table. The cocktail reception was so opulent that they had a caviar station with a series of flavored vodkas. I didn't even know how to approach this. When I tried the caviar I could feel each egg burst in my mouth in a little briny explosion. I looked at the vodkas longingly but didn't know how to drink them.

When we started dancing the photographer was all over L and I. I would dip her or spin her or dance behind her and the flashbulbs of the photographer would catch all of our motions like a strobe light. While I feel there is some potential for a completely awesome photo of the two of us, I think the bride and groom will look at that photoset and wonder who the hell we were. I was flattered that we were dancing well enough, or awkwardly enough, or memorably enough, to merit a lot of the photographer's time. God knows the real party was at the caviar table.

Since we didn't know anyone and had booked a hotel room for the night, we drank copious amounts. I made friends with the bartender who kept refilling L's champagne, and I joked with her about the music selections and how often I was coming back to the bar. I drank glass after glass of white wine. The bartender would ask if I wanted chardonnay or pinot grigio, and I would tell her to surprise me, or that at this point it didn't even matter. Our tablemates were friendly, although the nice guy who introduced himself to us turned out to be engaged to the brittle girl who was at first unfriendly and later unpleasant. Good luck with that one.

We danced to everything: to Beyonce and Frank Sinatra and everything in between. When there were eight people dancing to "YMCA," L and I and our other friend were three of them. Even though they didn't play the Electric Slide, we did it anyway. Twice. When they played "Sexyback," at times I was Justin and at other times I was Timbaland. I worried that my subtle shoulder dips, nimble footwork, and carefully calibrated dance face were lost on the other guests. After dinner and dancing, this opulent wedding presented an open bar of dessert wines and liquers. L gagged down a few sips of port, and I tossed back Sambuca, complete with coffee beans. Except for the next morning, when my head thought it was still at the wedding and my body thought it was at the bottom of a cement mixer, I had a great time. I felt suave, confident, and good-looking. It was the most fun I've had in a suit since law school took the concept of professionalism and beat me over the head with it.

So, it was a more enjoyable wedding than I ever could have expected. And it just goes to prove the validity of my number one matrimonial rule: if you don't have fun at a wedding, honestly it's your own fault. Because all of the elements are there.

Last night I had a Stephen Sondheim moment

Because she said so, Tuesday is officially "Date Night" for L and me. This is fine, because as far as I am concerned Tuesdays have become a wasteland in the middle of the week. There's nothing good on tv, and there's nothing fun at the gym so I can go bounce around for a couple hours. Instead it's just a long evening of thinking about what I want to eat for dinner, and then settling for sub-par Bravo reality shows. Often I'll end up at the gym on the treadmill watching American Idol, which I guess is not as bad as it could be. But Tuesday night is definitely not worth writing home about, usually.

Cut to last night! For my birthday L got us tickets to see "Company" on Broadway. This is a Stephen Sondheim musical, originally from 1970, about a single man swirling among his married friends' good and bad and ambiguous relationships. It was very funny, and the sensibility of the whole thing was very modern and kind of chic. There wasn't really a traditional narrative; it was more like a suite of songs exploring married life and why you would or would not want to get involved. I thought they brought out some interesting observations about emotions from within the marital bond: gratitude, devotion, and affection; curiosity, nostalgia, and even regret. They depicted several marriages that were thankfully very different from my own.

Maybe the lack of a structured narrative freed me to really enjoy the show. Usually I resent musicals, where the repetition of a single line of a song can really retard the forward progress of the story, and thus delay the moment when I get to go to the bathroom and buy M&Ms. On the other hand, I found these songs completely absorbing and smart. Unexpected notes, sophisticated melodies, and brilliant patter in the lyrcis - plenty of internal rhymes, bawdy humor, and some heartfelt sincerity.

I couldn't believe how I was so into this show: was it the perfect storm of musical theatre for me? Take an otherwise lackluster Tuesday, look sharp, go see a musical about an institution you've been thinking about on a near-constant basis for lo these many months, hear some clever songs, laugh occasionally and nod knowingly at the vagaries of this crazy thing we call matrimony. Maybe that is how I got to the point where I was contemplating buying the cd of the cast recording. "Do I really want this?" I asked my wife. "Well, it's all in your range, so you know you'll sing it," she said, thus affirming why I wanted to marry her in the first place.

That's how I got here at this moment, sitting in the library before tackling my income tax assignment, listening to Stephen Sondheim on my ipod and wondering if I used "vagaries" properly. On this Wednesday afternoon I am looking back on yesterday as one of the best Tuesdays I've had in a long while.

Barcelona notebook

As attentive readers will note, I managed to survive my trip to Barcelona, and not die, as I predicted last week. The trip was wonderful. I appreciated the chance to explore a new urban area, and I enjoyed getting an introduction to the way James lives. He has a pretty fantastic situation over there - if anyone is going to Spain, definitely look James up and stay with him. (Totally worth your time! Don't mention my name!) Anyways, a few observations:

...Since when did air travel become a giant sleepover? I have never seen more people (namely women) in sweat pants and pajama bottoms and horrible track suits. I know people dress comfortably in order to avoid the chance of a full-cavity search by our helpful and competent TSA employees, but most of the passengers lounging around the gate area, reading US Weekly and eating Toblerones, looked downright dumpy. It's like our response to the threat created by Al Qaeda is to really heighten those American attributes that the terrorists can't seem to get enough of. We all think: if this plane is hijacked, these a-holes are going to have to take down 250 Americans who are fatter and more slovenly than ever. And I guess there's no small amount of satisfaction in that...

...Do Catalunyan parents hate their Catalunyan teenagers as much as I did? Because there's no reason they shouldn't. The teenagers over there run around the city like packs of wild dogs, hooting and hollering in Catalunyan, which is not a language but a series of clicks, grunts, and throat-clearings. In the Parc Guell James and I watched a horde of teenagers kick a soccer ball into a crowded cafe area as they tried to nail each other with ball. People were scattering about and trying to avoid the assault, and the kids just played on obliviously. Nobody said anything, no kid thought, hey, let's tone it down. As we would walk through the city, I would get extremely nervous when a pack of them would walk by. I was aware of my status as a bizarrely-dressed foreigner and completely expected to get shaken down or threatened with a switchblade by these surly, mulleted youths. But James played it cool (his education expertise coming in handy) and we never had trouble. Still, the entire country needs to go on "Supernanny," and that woman needs to come over and straighten things out. On one of my last days I was reading a book and bunch of teens came over near my bench to shoot craps or whatever they do, and I just got up and left. Nothing good would be found there...

...I have no skill in identifying Americans among the European throngs. I thought it would be easy to tell who else was from America: they would be dressed like normal people, and they would be sort of fat. Yet every time I saw a woman in a standard sweater set, or a guy in jeans and a polo, or a teenager without a mullet, I would realize that they were all speaking German and smoking cigarettes. I had no skill in identifying Americans at all. I think the Europeans have finally learned to dress like we do, without the bizarre brand names or English phrases across their clothes, and their dietary habits are finally catching up. Fortunately, it seems like many Asian tourists to Spain are really picking up the slack, in terms of dressing weirdly. And that's not racist, it's an empirical observation...

...Three times, I found myself confronted by an errant soccer ball from some kids playing a game nearby. So I had to kick it back to them. Readers of this blog will know that this situation presents about 35 of my deepest fears in one neat package. Due to a traumatic experience with a soccer coach in first grade, it has never been my forte (as a matter of fact, baseball is) (right). So when the ball would come my way, and the kid nearby would yell, "Pasa! Pasa!," time seemed to slow to a crawl as I ... trapped the ball beneath my foot, and slowly, carefully, already hearing the taunts of the schoolchildren in the guttural, undisciplined Catalunyan tongues...kicked the ball back to them with the inside part of my foot, like my favorite soccer player, Brandy Chastain. And then the kids would forget about me and I would keep walking, ready to rip my shirt off and expose my sports bra for all the city to see...

...And, that's what I have to say about Barcelona, for the time being. The flight back was an utter nightmare, and the fact that I still haven't received my luggage a day later is some verification of that. (In the terminal, I tried to relax by composing a haiku about the pretty Indian flight attendants, with their bone structure and eye shadow, and british accents, but it was too much for 17 syllables.) Barcelona remains an amazing city, and the fact that James will be there for a while offers great promise of future visits. It's nice to get some distance to reflect on your own life while you experience an entirely different version. So I am home now, using L's toothbrush and lamenting the temporary loss of half my polo shirts, while at the same time saying "perdon" to people at the Strand and adding a slice of lemon in my Coke. This is why we travel.

Travel anxiety

One of my stupider characteristics is my tendency to freak out before embarking on any kind of trip. Whether I am going home for the weekend on the bus or flying to another continent, I am always gripped by the same set of stupid neurotic questions:

Why are you going again?
Isn't your life at home good enough?
What if something bad happens to you?
What if something bad happens to someone else?
You must think you're something, tempting fate like this, huh?
Just can't leave well enough alone, can you?
Did you remember your wallet?
The pickpockets target Americans, you know that, right?
So you didn't get any Travelers Checks?
Is it too late to just stay home?
Did you bring enough socks?

Et cetera. These questions basically rotate through my brain, CNN-crawl-style, for several days leading up to the trip. Really I don't feel good until I've successfully beat back the airport bureaucracy long enough to claim a seat on the plane. At that point it's unlikely someone will make you take your belt off or squeeze your toothpaste into a baggie or whatever the hell they do at airports these days. Of course, once you're on the plane, you have to make sure you survive the takeoffs and landings, since that's when the crashes occur.

All I know is, I better not die on this trip. But if I do die, I want L to know that I love her dearly and want her to be happy, so if she wants to get remarried someday that's fine, and she has my blessing, provided that she understand that I will HAUNT THE SHIT out of her husband for the rest of his life. Because I do love her so.

Well, as you can tell, my flight to Barcelona is only eighteen hours away. Somebody get me some horse tranquilizer and shove me onto the AirTrain - this could be a bumpy night.

It's hard to take a good picture of a coffee table

Two Sundays ago we went over to Nicky's apartment, where he kindly donated a coffee table to us. We didn't know how badly we needed a table until we had one, and then we nearly began weeping with delight every time we were able to put a plate or a newspaper on top of it. "It's not on the floor," we would choke out, as the tears kept coming. And since so far the table hasn't been revealed as a Trojan horse full of bedbugs or termites or al Qaeda operatives, it's just good news all around. Some people think it brings the room together; other people just like not eating food from your lap, like we're at some kind of perpetual family barbecue.


Anyway, here are a couple photos of the newest addition to our meager little city-mouse home. It's hard to take a good picture of a coffee table, especially when it is in constant use, like ours. But a few features to note: the lower shelf, perfect for laptops and magazines; the beveled glass top, perfect for making your heart skip when you think something is about to spill due to the unexpected angle, only it doesn't because the bevelling is just shallow enough to catch it; and the fine layer of dust that clings to the entire surface area of the table like the fur on a tarantula. (Not good at similes.) We wondered where all this dust had been hiding before we got the table to act as a magnet to catch it. Was the rug absorbing it? Or what?

But I'm not a whiner! Even if our place is now hay fever central, it's great to have a table. Thank you Nicky.

***

And with that, I am going to Barcelona in two days to see James. More news to come.

Things I've recently dropped in the toilet

A bandaid
An entire book of matches
Numerous q-tips
My laptop
My birth certificate
Textbooks
My running shoes
"Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest"
A Faberge egg
My wife
A second toilet
A gingerbread house

...anything else?

Instinto de Inez

Recently John and Anna gave me a Mexican edition of Carlos Fuentes' novel, "Instinto de Inez," in Spanish. Being in the middle of a slight book drought (waiting endlessly for a package from Amazon, which I guess is delivering my book via carrier pigeon) I picked it up and just thought I'd see how I'd do, reading Spanish. My Spanish skills are extremely rusty, subsisting on the occasional Shakira song or New York-area immigrant-focused publication. I try to think about Spanish a lot, and mentally conjugate things for fun, and consider when I would use the subjunctive, but you and I both know that this is no way to maintain language skills.

So I started to read this book, and lo and behold I'm now 50 pages in, and I have a rough grasp of what actually might be going on! See, there's this guy, right, and this girl, and somehow they meet, and it might have been because of the London Blitz or maybe it was just a rainstorm, but the point is they got in a car together, and now they're like at the guy's house, and he has a friend in a photograph...it's really good. Seriously, though, I am enjoying this experience much more than I expected. I told myself not to worry about not understanding words I didn't know (immediately eliminating most adjectives then and there) so I do feel like I am merely skimming across the surface of the language. But there is something beautiful about pausing to consider a sentence, figuring out its structure, thinking of the object and the subject and the verbs and all that. Or even considering weird conjugation issues, and trying to directly translate a sentence into English. Soon I just find myself pleasantly gliding through the text, not even thinking or translating in English but just accepting a Spanish understanding of what's going on, and somehow getting it. The romance and beauty of that language strikes me time and time again, so I'll be sitting on the subway whispering words to myself: susurro, parpado...

I would love to learn more languages, I think, or deepen my knowledge of Spanish. Every time I see a possibly latino person on the train I perk up my book to better show off the extremely-Spanish title and copy, just to celebrate the common lingual bond I might share with that other possible Spanish-speaker. Just another way of making our mundo a little more pequeno, you know what I'm saying?

27 is the new 26

My weekend was intense and wonderful: an epic night at Benny's, a four-mile race to kick off the 2007 running year, a trip to the airport to see James, a birthday party, church, a classic Manhattan afternoon, a great gym class, and Oscar-night food coma. I want to write about all of this stuff, but it's too overwhelming, so I'm going to go all Orientalist on you and break it down haiku-style:

---

Juan's a good waiter:
'Ritas, black flowers, and shots
The men's room is home

---

Seven degrees, wind
7:28 per mile
He outruns the cold.

---

Wait at Arrivals...
Walk away happy and sad
Five months in one hour

---

Eight-count to the beat
It's my song! It's my birthday!!
Don't spill on my rug.

---

Twenty-seventh year:
Good wife, good life, good city,
church points out to me.

---

Usually in the back,
At the gym I play it cool--
now your boy's up front.

---

Friends, Oscars, excess
Life resumes so pleasantly
And they even sang.

Sliced and diced

Warning: this post is kind of gross, and not for the faint of heart.

This afternoon I went to go visit Enzo, John and Anna's cat, who we are feeding and chatting with while they're away in Mexico. Enzo is really one of the best cats I've ever known, because he's very dog-like: friendly, outgoing, affectionate.

Well, today I was standing at the counter, curling open a tin of wet cat food, Enzo mewling at my feet, when the edge of the can lid cut into the skin at the last joint of my pinkie finger. Suddenly there was blood running down my hand and onto the counter and into the sink. I was shocked at first - pressing the cut with a paper towel and simultaneously trying to clean up the mess. I dumped the food into Enzo's bowl to distract him and focused on the cut - I ran it under the cold faucet and watched the diluted blook wash away. The cut was like the open mouth of a smiley face. It hurt like hell. Every paper towel I pressed into it became a sodden bloody mess within a few minutes. Enzo was everywhere: between my legs, on the counter, rubbing against my arm. I thought, the last thing I need in the wound is cat hair. I thought, bury these towels deep in the trash so they don't freak out when they see them. I thought, don't let Enzo touch the blood or he'll turn into a vampire cat.

It wouldn't stop bleeding. After about 20 minutes I called L, and she called the student health people. I already had visions of my immaculate Thursday night being shot to hell - no great gym class, no good tv, just me in an ER waiting for stitches. I found band-aids in the bathroom, but I bled through two of them. After talking to L and deciding not to get stitches, I stumbled out of the apartment, doing everything with my left hand, promising Enzo, like a little feline deadbeat dad, that I would come back for more quality time tomorrow.

On the street I clutched my hands together and tried to hide the bloody paper towel from other people. In the pharmacy I jerked open the lid of the band-aid box and tried to apply it myself, with mixed results. As I returned to the street, though, I was shocked to see that the bleeding had abated. Instead of a gaping smiley mouth the wound was more like a ... parenthesis. A bold one, in a thick, unsubtle font, but only a parenthesis.

I went to the gym with high hopes. I made it on the treadmill and the pull-up thing, but then in class, we were ten minutes in when I saw that there was blood all over my hand. There was blood on the hardwood floor, too. Disgusted, I grabbed my towel and scrubbed at it, Lady MacBeth-style, and retreated to the lockerroom. With a fresh band-aid I returned, but it was only a few more minutes until I noticed blood again on my hand, and even traces on my shirt, and on the floor. I felt like that scene in "Carrie," when she gets her period in the locker room and the girls taunt her, except in my case, I expected the other hip hoppers to throw cans of cat food at me. I scrambled out, grabbed my stuff and returned to the lockerroom utterly cowed. I took a shower and left. I thought about staying to apologize to my teacher but I realized I was too angry to talk. I look forward to Thursday nights like no other; I was so disappointed.

Now I'm home, on band-aid number 4, fully expecting another tsunami of blood at any given moment. It really hurts. I figure, it must be better in the morning, right? I don't want stitches, I'm not going to the damn hospital. I tell you, these things always happen on the brink of something good (say, a chock-full birthday weekend: fun drinks tomorrow with Ashesh and Mona, a James cameo and rollicking party on Saturday, a lovely Sunday to follow). It even occurred to me that the blood stains on my hand are maybe reparations for the ashes that didn't stain my forehead yesterday.

Anyways, hopefully this will look better tomorrow morning. I hope the bleeding calms down, after a night of rest and no movement. Tomorrow I'm looking forward to returning to the scene of the crime and making amends with Enzo, getting some of the quality time that was cut short today, assuming of course that he hasn't developed a taste for human blood.

State update: Florida

Well, our second attempt to enjoy some exotic warm weather was thwarted. Not by sudden hospitalization, thankfully, but because of the unseasonable chill that settled over southwestern Florida as soon as we landed, and that did not relent until we had come back to the barren icy hellhole of Manhattan. But we were able to have some good times in Naples, where L and I and my sister had a great long weekend with my grandparents.

Although we spent a lot of time relaxing on the plush interior of one of many gated communities, my grandparents' taste for local flair gave us a lot of exposure to native Floridian culture. We drove an hour down to Goodland to eat stone crabs and sit on a restaurant deck amidst the Thousand Islands. It happened to be the day of the Mardi Gras boat parade, so gaudily festooned boats and yachts would troll past (sample themes: pink flamingoes, a drug bust, redneck yacht club) as the crowd at the restaurant - mostly old, many grizzled - downed their beer and twirled their colorful beads.

There's something strange about Florida - I can't put my finger on it, but I think it has something to do with cohabitating with alligators. Gators are such a big thing down there, a totem of something, and I think people's reaction to living among these fierce and timeless predators is to go a little bit weird. Floridians, for example, were much ruder and pushier than New Yorkers (or even Hawaiians - it's like the Aloha spirit landed here and rotted in a corner). They love their guns and Confederate flags. They're sort of trashy (can I say that?). It was interesting. Question: when we were in Florida, how many times did we hear the phrase "jew canoe"? Answer: more than never!

But, we had a great time. On the same day as the boat parade, Goodland also featured an outdoor concert by the Mullet Brothers, just outside of the Island Woman store, where we all tried on weird hats with fake wigs attached as a few locals drunkenly danced outside. I gaily tossed my fear of head lice aside so we could take many photos like this:

It was wonderful to spend some quality time with my grandparents, to read a couple great books, and to eat like a king: the signature key lime pie, fresh seafood at every turn, crisp apples, canteloupes, blueberries, and the most delicious strawberries I can remember. Although it was kind of a drag with the cold weather, I tried to buck myself up by reminding myself that at least it was thirty degrees warmer than back home. Anyways, so Florida: temperate, amusingly weird, fattening; not as warm as it could have been; good eating. That's the update on that.

Marathon man

I received an email notification from the New York Road Runners telling me I qualified for automatic entry into the New York City marathon. Twenty minutes and about $130 later, I am all signed up and ready to run on November 4th -- 26.2 miles. 26.2 miles, an extremely long distance. As I went through the registration process I realized I was just beginning to endure a ten-month barrage of opportunities to spend money to heighten the race experience, brought to me by the considerate sponsors of the event eager to scream about every possible thing you can purchase: moisture-wicking shirts! Shorts made of nylon, rayon, and mesh! Special charity shoelaces! Bags no one needs! Pasta dinners!

I have begun looking around at training programs, too. There's one I can join through NYRR that costs only $7 a month! But that seems too expensive. There's also one by a person named "Hal Higdon" that is very well-reviewed among my friends, but Hal's website is straight up Geocities circa 1998. I should go look in the bookstore, too, as well as the 400 specialty running shops that spring up in Manhattan every time a Tastee-D-Lite whimpers to a close. My mom says I should get a physical immediately to determine if I'm healthy enough to even attempt this. Always the optimist, my mom. I was also realizing that I will actually have to change my lifestyle to get ready for this thing, especially in the final weeks: I have to run and exercise in precise, calibrated ways; I have to eat very deliberately, with a weird balance of protein and fiber and whatever else; and I have to develop that bizarre marathon physique where your cheeks sink in and you start to run oddly, because your entire midsection has dissolved into three tendons holding up your new rayon running shorts.

But the good thing is that all of this is still extremely hypothetical -- since I'm already running and in reasonably good shape I don't really need to begin training in earnest for a few months, maybe late spring. But we can look forward to plenty of blisters, shin splints, and dry heaves in the weeks and months to come.

But damn if I'm not going to rock this marathon on November 4th. It's good to know the goal.