It Hardly Matters

I'm Baaaaack...for American Idol

2008-05-21T20:07:00.011-04:00

8:15. So this year, for the first time, there was something happening in my life more compelling than American Idol: my grad thesis. (As I type that, I shed a tear for that pathetic truth--but truth, no matter how pathetic, is the way I'm trying to roll these days.) I missed almost all of AI after February in order to work on my thesis, which now that it's handed in, I kind of feel like was a bigger waste of time than watching American Idol religiously. But I digress.

I'm home tonight, watching the Two Davids duke it out. And oh, that opening number cheesefest! And the live feeds from the Davids' respective hometowns featuring former contestants Mikalah Gordon and Matt Used-to-Be-a-Marine are making me think about how insane it is that reality TV has given these people some semblance of careers.

Let me break the live-blogging to say that I love David Archuleta and have since the first time I heard him. I feel like he's this little conduit to purity, which is rare in reality television and in actual reality.

This Mike Meyers racist promo is making me choke on my navratan korma. No shit, I am eating it right now.

OK, I thought that Seal was Chikezie. Now I'm officially on Chikezie watch. Side note: Syesha is as compelling as a Jasmine Trias. From your reaction I can tell that I am right.

8:30. Only 90 minutes left!

YES. Castro doing Buckley. Watching him in the opening number--singing "Get Ready" while enthusiastically snapping his fingers--was downright painful.

More blatant promos. How delightful. I love that people are clapping for two strangers getting free cars.

Look how multiracial the girls are this year! It's like a United Colors of Barbie pitch meeting at Mattel. Speaking of the girls, my favorite is the skunk-haired nurse, even though she just butchered Donna Summer beyond recognition. Oh SNAP! Queen Donna herself!! OK, now I'm happy. BRB after the Queen brings it.

I lied. Let's talk about blingy microphones. And by "let's talk about" I mean "I love."

8:34. Paula's boobies! Donna's last note!

8:40. Carly Smithson & Michael Johns singing this cornball arrangement of "The Letter" is basically the producers going: hey if you don't like either David, these two could be valid singing stars, and they happen to look cute together, too. Another From Justin to Kelly, anyone?

Finally. Chikezie. Wait, I forgot about that stripper guy! YES CHIKIE BABY. Souling up some Bryan Adams. Why are D&D dressed alike? Damn, they're making Cook sing the song that started Archuleta fever. Rude. No, Lord, please, why the actual Bryan Adams? He looks like one of my high school boyfriends mixed with Doug Savant and a little meth, and sounds like the lovechild of Castro & skunk-haired nurse. Of course Bob Ice is digging it. (Update: dinner finished. On beer #2. It's a special occasion.)

8:54. I love that Jordin Sparks/Chris Brown song that's all over the radio, "No Air." Good for Jordin and her Lane Byrant spokesmodel self. I'm so happy that "they" haven't starved her and stuffed her into inappropriately tight clothing like they did to Kelly Clarkson.

ZZ Top is awesome and I'm not just saying that because I played a ZZ Top tribute show at the Annex back in October and won the "Best Legs" contest. Really. God, this song dragging on forever. I'll take this opportunity to speculate on who will come out to sing with Archuleta. Stevie Wonder? Sean Lennon? Smokey Robinson? Maybe Kelly Clarkson.

9:00. Brooke White and Graham Nash. Nap time.

9:06. Who the hell are these people? The Jonas Brothers? I think this where I draw the line, I mean I like to know what the kids are listening to but these dudes and Miley Cyrus can kiss my old, withered ass. Chill, tambourine child, chill! See Pat? That's me.

9:12. My ears are bleeding from this kid in the cape. I feel badly for the USC band for having to back him...and....he's been cut off for a commercial. Perfect.

9:18. God this whole being old/writing a thesis thing is still inhibiting my enjoyment of this program as I listen to something called One Republic, something I have never heard of. Thank the angels they've dragged Archuleta out. A word keeps repeating itself in my brain: Coldplay...Coldplay.

9:23. Here comes darling Jordin, cute and wearing a golden dress, like a mix of Beyonce and Jennifer Hudson going to the middle school Winter Carnival dance. Another problem in addition to the dress: her song sucks. BRING OUT CHRIS BROWN NOW. Boooo...commercial. A Coldplay commercial!

9:32. Why am I laughing at this stupid Pips thing? I blame Jack Black.

Here comes the Goddess Carrie. True glamour and class. She is THE Hotness. It's a shame I can't listen to her annoying gnu-country songs. But she is the real deal--she even has the Whitney microphone hand slap move down. Question: Does she kind of look like the hottest marketing manager/manta ray ever in that outfit, or is it just me? Another question: Does she ever blink? I wonder how Bob Ice is feeling right now.

9:41. Did I just see David Archuleta in his underpants?

Here come the Top 12 doing a George Michael medley. That might be the gayest sentence ever written. More Skunk Nurse and more Chikezie!!! So thrilled, so happy. Holy Hell, GM has arrived from the heavens like Frankie Avalon in the "Beauty School Dropout" number in the Grease movie, except dressed in black, not white, and wearing some $10 H&M women's sunglasses. His voice is sounding a leetle shaky, friends.

Who is singing with Archuleta??? Did I miss something? Did he and Aretha trade fours on "Think" while I was stirring my curry?

9:56. Come ON, already! Losing stamina/interest/brain cells.

9:59. OH SHIT. No way. Cook, really?? This is total crap. See what happens when I don't vote?

OK, now I'm off to cry myself to sleep.

Until next year!

Why Do You Only Do That Only

2008-02-22T00:20:00.004-05:00

If the video doesn't work, try this.

Big Girls Don't Fall

2008-02-21T18:28:00.003-05:00

My sweater smells like mittens and icicles or a wool scarf caked with miniature snowballs after an afternoon of sledding or skating. It's the scent of being two nanoseconds away from burning your tongue on death-defying sips of too-hot, powdery hot chocolate served in a palm-sized Styrofoam cup that you just drink right there with your skates on. When you bite on the pliant lip of the cup a plasticky chaser cuts the sickening sweet of the molten lava you've just swallowed, and you wait for the warmth to travel to your fingertips and toes.

When we skated on frozen New England ponds, we looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting--no joke--with the horses and sleighs and muffs and skating skirts transmuted into silver sliding discs, 1980s Day-Glo snowpants, and those gloves that changed color with the temperature. Rental skates were always either too tight or too loose. They were tragically, obviously, not yours. But you were excited to at least get white ones, however scuffed. The alternative pair were the color of spoiled eggs, which meant a lackluster performance over the cracked and rippled ice.

Was it Look Park? Forest Park? Either way, the lake was huge and flat only in the middle, where boys had scraped smooth a rectangular area on which to play hockey. These weren't neighborhood boys, these were high schoolers with scholarships and double-blade racing skates. They were boys to be avoided for fear of notice and/or body checks that could send a ten-year-old to Mercy Hospital. So I'd break free from my little sister, a Weeble in wool and Gore-tex, tottering alongside my mother, and my Dad practicing his long, low strides in black skates he's had since college, and go exploring.

I'd scrape along the edge of the lake. Low, leafless branches reached desperately toward my feet, looking for spring. After a few minutes, I'd attempt a twirl in a secluded nook, careful no one could see in case I fell. That was my goal: not to fall. This was easy at first, in the cautious beginning, but after three successful twirls and a hitch twist into my backwards stride, I'd get heady, start picturing myself in a spangly leotard and a matching hair scrunchie panting through a smile as I rounded the rink into my final triple lutz. My parents and sister, on their feet behind the giant ice arena sneeze-guard, looked meaningfully at each other in between chants of support. I was gunning for World Champion and everybody knew I was going to do it. I'd be the American Dream, face on a box of Wheaties.

When you fall and your skull bounces on four inches of ice like four winters, you see black, then white before the Polaroid of your brain develops into a landscape of stars. It's a graceful fall, the Nike swoop of falls. In your whole head there's a cold pain, not a hot one like needles or scalds. Your father picks you up, and you say you're okay even though your head feels like a split melon. There's no blood, but you feel some phantom ooze warming the back of your neck, just where your scarf is wound tight. You cry, even though you're a big girl.

Self-Referential Revelations

2008-01-14T13:14:00.000-05:00

Molly tagged me.

1. What's the story behind the name of your blog?
It has everything to do with the intersection of listening to Mates of State on repeat and my own lack of courage. The only way I could start writing was if it didn't matter.

2. Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Massey made me do it. He, like me, was bored at work and told me to write for him, so he could have something else to read while he, like me, was supposed to be editing reading passages.

3. What has been your best blogging experience? What about the worst?
Best: It got me into grad school. Worst: I posted an old story and my family called me in alarm because they thought I was morbidly depressed. I had to explain that no, I was morbidly depressed last year.

4. What do you think will happen to your blog in 2008?
I hope to trick it out and focus it more on music writing.

Now I'm tagging: Lauren, Devery, Jeff, Adam, if you please.

The Tooth Fairy

2008-01-10T11:38:00.000-05:00

Eleanor’s hair was always in pincurls: tiny black buns swirled through with streaks of white fastened with bobby pins close to the base of her skull. A single pink spongy curler contained the few hairs that constituted her bangs, creating a sort of duckbill protruding from her hairline. Eleanor smoked long, thin, brown cigarettes that she mashed, half-smoked, into an olive-green metal bowl affixed to long, thin, olive-green metal stand. When my mother sat in Eleanor and Harold’s driveway, her gleaming white Salem 100 butts—smoked to the quick—nestled awkwardly into a pile of brown.

Harold was a mechanic. He worked out of his garage, which smelled so strongly of oil and stale smoke that I felt it might explode at any moment. A glossy calendar featuring curiously enthusiastic blonde women (reading a book, or straddling a motorcycle) in very little clothing hung on the wall, higher than my eyeline, but low enough for me to see if I stood on tiptoes. Once, alone in the garage, I moved close to the calendar. I noticed a clear plastic overlay, curling at the edges, and after looking over my shoulder twice, lifted it. Miss September’s clothing peeled up and away from her pink limbs, revealing a pelvis adorned with a strip of what I figured was pubic hair, and two shiny breasts that seemed to smile psychotically at me like a deranged woman I had once seen at the mall. I dropped the overlay like it was on fire, looked over my shoulder again, and casually strode to the other side of the garage to inspect what I suspected was a car engine leaning against a pile of uncut two-by-fours.

Eleanor drove a 1978 VW beetle, sunshine yellow. It was always parked outside of Eleanor and Harold’s yellow-brown house on Quaker Road, just around the corner from our house on Roanoke Road. From the rear window, a bumper sticker proclaimed: You Bet Your Dupa I’m Polish. My sister and I loved that car, and when we begged my mother to trade in her puke-green Ford Granada for one, she’d sigh and say, “It is a cute car,” then exhale toward the closed windows in our living room. When I asked my mother what “dupa” meant, and she explained that it was the same thing we called “fanny”, but in Polish.

For whatever reason, every time I had a loose tooth, my mother would send me to Eleanor’s house. I’d have been complaining for weeks, jiggling an incisor with my tongue every waking minute, trying to loose the tooth from its stubborn root. Once in a while, I’d taste the metallic rush of blood when I’d managed to rip away one of the dead tooth tendons, simultaneously revolted and stimulated by the taste of my own blood. After two days of complaints, my mother would scream, “Let me look at it!” and I’d wail and cry and run away, knowing that if I’d let her anywhere near my mouth, she would have ripped it out of my head, causing me excruciating pain and suffering. After this display, I knew I’d either have to get it out myself or be sent to Quaker Road to deal with Eleanor.

I must have been 11. I’d been wailing over a loose tooth for a few days. After dinner, my mother had commanded, “Go over to Eleanor’s so she can look at that tooth.” I protested, citing the inconvenience of the after-dinner hour. “What if she’s busy?”

“She’s not busy,” my mother stated. After some thought, I agreed to go—I had the brilliant notion that Eleanor, a neighbor, would never inflict harm on a girl of 11 that wasn’t hers. I’d be safer with her than with my mother, who was clearly sick of my whining. So I trudged out of our dead end, took a meandering right onto Quaker Road, pushing and pulling at the nearly-ejected tooth the entire way. When I skulked up Eleanor and Harold’s driveway, my heart raced as I tried to talk the tooth into breaking off: Come on! Get out! Just break off already! But it hung there, stubborn as a stain.

Eleanor and Harold’s doorbell was illuminated with orange light. When I pressed it, I could hear a deafening BONG BONG from where I stood. I flushed with embarrassment for interrupting whatever Harold and Eleanor did at 7 o’clock at night. Thirty seconds later, Eleanor opened her heavy door decorated with a mustard yellow valance. Her curler was firmly in place, a freshly lit cigarette smoldered between the index and middle fingers of her right hand. She wore a polyester sleeveless shift with a pattern of repeating ovals—brown, beige, brown, beige.

“Megan! Hello!” She said this as if she had been expecting me.

“Um, hi, Eleanor.”

“Hi Megan!” Harold called out jovially from an unseen room. The din of a television enveloped my name.

“Hi Harold!” I screamed.

Eleanor opened the door all the way. “I hear you have a loose tooth. Come on in!”

I walked into her kitchen, a foreign and oppressively beige place. An overhead florescent light cast a greenish hue over the room. I stammered, “Well, my tooth has been bothering me for a while, so my mom thought I should come over here so you could take a look at it.” As the words escaped my mouth, I knew I was in for it—Eleanor was going to rip that tooth out.

I stood there, Eleanor’s bulk hovering over me, her mouth a smile but her eyes all business. I opened my jaw against itself and jiggled the tooth with my tongue for effect. She peered into my mouth. “Ahhh. Yeah. That needs to come out.” She rested her cigarette in a small yellow dish on the counter.

“Uh huh.” My mouth was still agape. My heart still pounding.

In a flash, Eleanor reached her surprisingly nimble fingers into my mouth, clamped on the doomed tooth with her forefinger and thumb, and yanked.

It was over. An acute sense of freedom cloaked my body as my tongue frantically prodded the space between two shockingly secure teeth. Eleanor wrapped the tooth in a shred of paper towel she ripped from a wooden paper towel holder adorned with mushroom decals. She bent down and handed it to me, smiling. “Put this under your pillow tonight for the Tooth Fairy. Now go on. Say hello to your mother for me.”

“Ok!” I was out the door, running toward my house which was darkening to midnight blue in the last shreds of September light. I heard Eleanor and Harold’s door bang shut as I rounded the corner onto Roanoke. Visions of quarters were in my eyes, the tooth no longer part of me, but a foreign object wrapped in paper in my hand. A foreign object worth exactly fifty cents.

Love, Williamsburg Style

2007-12-30T19:07:00.000-05:00

Davey Is the Greatest

2007-10-28T21:16:00.000-04:00

My man Davey is still keeping it real. That has to be the L train.

Davey Dance Blog - 28 - NYC MTA - The Sunshine Underground - "Put You In Your Place" from Pheasant Plucker on Vimeo.

A Bit of Stevie

2007-10-26T15:21:00.000-04:00

So I'm trying to write about Stevie Wonder. It's difficult. But here's what I've come up with. For my grad school friends: it's part of a longer piece (wink), called Prescriptions for the Soul.

Track 1: Fingertips Pts. 1 & 2

For fans of apt introductions. For enthusiasts of raw talent. For prepubescence. For rhythm and commands from bandleaders. For blindness and vision, extrasensory perception, the feel of cool ivory under your fingerprints. For witnessing something important. For articulation. For the beginning, the beginners. For people who like things in parts. For promise. For hope. For permission.

I’m watching a black and white video from the early 1960s. The music starts immediately, mid-harmonica solo. He’s lip-synching but no one cares, if they know. He is high-pitched, and young. He’s standing in a bible-salesmen suit on an empty stage, no band, feet close together in shined shoes. He can’t stop moving, he’s electrified. The audience, mostly female black teenagers, claps along, slightly out of time, slightly bewildered. They smile teenaged smiles colored with embarrassment, self-consciousness and fear. Several of them are wearing cheerleader sweatshirts with large white Es on the front. He sings to them, asks them to clap louder, and they do. (Robert Plant will borrow this vocal riff from him years later when he sings, “lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time” on “Rock and Roll”.) He’s a child, but I suspect he already knows things we don’t know. I’m watching him and I’m thinking: thank you.

(Stomp your feet, jump up and down, do anything that you wanna do!)

It'll go on from there, through every track on the 4-disc set, At the Close of a Century. Oh, and here's the Fingertips video.

La Lotta Continua

2007-10-25T16:14:00.001-04:00

Today I find myself utterly, crushingly distracted by the memory of someone who once told me he loved me. Or, more accurately, by the memory of the moment he told me. It's a physical memory, detailed, and warm, next to me from the moment I awoke until this second. I'm pulled by it, neck snapping up and to the left.

It's curious, with all its power and pull. How can he walk around knowing that he said it? With all that guilt and meaning, if, in fact, he meant what he said? That's what's astonishing me, the fact that I'll never know if he meant it, if anyone ever means it, those three words we long to hear. I have a mind to believe that once they are said they just float into the universe with all the other words and are rendered meaningless.

Does the curiosity of this love-day mean that I love him too, in some obtuse way, out of some deep soul-stirred dream? Or is it love that I love, I miss, that fat glowing thing?

I try to convince myself that love exists only when someone makes a move, does something, creates a real connection with another person, a life, not mummifies it in memory or art. Although Caravaggio could convince me otherwise.

Sleepless

2007-10-10T12:18:00.001-04:00

When I can't write, or won't, I can't sleep. So I've been up to all hours lately. Instead of applying my anxiety to my work (my new mantra, thanks, Jo Ann), I sit and stew in my own juices for hours on end ingesting various media: music, TV, films, books, magazines. I try to turn the level up a notch during what are supposed to be "writing hours": watching touching PBS documentaries about inner-city kids performing Shakespeare at London's West End Theatre, reading Lucy Grealy's harrowing medical/psychological memoir Autobiography of a Face, listening to The National's two albums on repeat, finally popping The Lives of Others into my DVD player instead of letting it rot in its Netflix sleeve on my coffee table. All this in search of my soul.

The kids in the PBS documentary (My Shakespeare) were having trouble. They weren't actors. They had never read or seen Shakespeare. They had no hope of success in any tangible way. But after a month of intensive rehearsals and constant guidance/encouragement from filmmaker/actor/director Paterson Joseph, they pushed through adversity (thank you ESPN, for that phrase) and connected to their characters, wrenching emotions like love, lust, and betrayal from their souls and getting them out on stage.

An actress friend of mine once told me that she had to stop acting because the ability to access and control emotions, though she could do it, was too much for her. She couldn't stop feeling them after the scene ended. I think this kind of direct access to and control of emotion is necessary for all art. But writing isn't a performance. It's just always there. So if you're attuned to your emotions when you're writing, if you're ripping your heart out, when and how do you put it back in?

Last night, I caught American Beauty on TV, uninterrupted, unedited. I remembered going to see it in the theatre with Jane, when it first came out, when she still lived here, when she made me go see the best films. Afterwards, we clutched each other and sighed with overwhelming wonder at the Wes Bentley character: how gorgeous, how real. The plastic bag dancing in the wind. We probably cried.

It's so easy (too easy?) for me to access my emotions. It's wrangling them into art that pins me to the couch. What good is all that emotion with no means to get it on the page? So I'm up all night, feeling stuff, staring into the night, the flickering television casting a frantic shadow in my bedroom, wondering what to do.

My Dreams Have Come True

2007-09-26T20:33:00.000-04:00

Stevie Wonder, Boston, MA, September 20. Section 2, Row N, Seat 21. Words can't describe...

Six Years

2007-08-24T12:03:00.000-04:00

It's weird. I keep forgetting that every year in late August I start getting a permanent migraine, become absent-minded and dull, and just want to sleep all the time. Joy, happiness, or even plain old laughter is hard to come by. At first I chalk it up to end-of-summer stress, financial woes, loneliness, and more recently, back-to-school trepidation, but after about a week of feeling weird and out of it I remember that it's because it's approaching the beginning of September, that beautiful New York month when the humidity drops but the sun still shines and there's hope and renewal and football and new notebooks that is then shattered by hatred and death and destruction and fear.

I'm not ready to write about September 11, but I hope to at least attempt to do so, someday. For now, I'll just rant for a minute.

What the hell is happening at Ground Zero? It's a disgusting tourist-laden pit of stagnation and emptiness. I try to follow the "plans" for "fixing" it, but they are so convoluted and pointless and long overdue that my brain becomes mush.

The number of firefighters that have died because of what happened on September 11 has climbed to 345. Two firefighters died there last week, trying to stop a fire in a building that has stood broken and empty, blackened and shrouded, for six years. This week, two more were seriously injured, helmets shattered, by a falling 300-pound jackhammer that slammed into a FDNY work shed at 75 miles per hour. The FDNY was our country's army, our defense, on that day, on- and off-duty firefighters rushing toward the unknown and into the hell that was the World Trade Center to try and stop it, to try and save people.

So how is the current state of Ground Zero acceptable? How can our city and our government not feel the outrage that I do and make steps toward change, toward clean up, toward moving on, toward respectful remembrance, toward honor and decency? I may be uninformed about what's really going on down there, but the fact remains: it's still a hole, a pile of debris, an open wound.

I don't care if it's a park, a building, a giant fucking slab of concrete. Please do something with that space. It's been six years. At this rate, on the tenth anniversary, we'll all still be staring through a chain-link fence into a pit. Is that how we want to honor the dead? Is that their legacy?

Wave Report

2007-07-31T18:50:00.001-04:00

I couldn't go a whole month without posting. I've been away, busy, depressed, whatever. Plus, they are jackhammering outside of my apartment and my beautiful backyard looks bombed out and depleted. In my brain, I've given the whole less-than-peaceful-in-my-own-home thing a month. It's all about September 1: the apartment repairs should be complete (outside plus the downstairs floor which has half a moldy carpet and an open sewage drain), and school starts again. It's been a summer of tidal waves, none of which are actually comprised of water. One day I'm baking in the sun in a affordable-but-cute-as-hell baby doll dress, drunk at 4:30 PM, listening to a great band (for free) at McCarren Park with various and sundry lovely and festive friends, loving summer in the city. The next I'm so depressed I'm nearly incapable of figuring out how to possibly feed myself since I keep all of my food in the kitchen and not within reaching distance of my bed. One day I'm talking about ideas and love and Edith Piaf and traveling to Peru with a gaggle of beautiful and well-toned people who happen also to be above-average cooks and funny. The next I'm watching a Hey Paula marathon and wondering if it's still weird to cry on the phone to your mother when you are 33 years of age.

But such is life. How boring would it be, otherwise? I'm learning, slowly but surely, to harness these floods of emotion into my work, not to be torn down by them like an inexperienced boogie boarder in the surf. Wish me luck...

I've Been Tagged!

2007-06-13T17:12:00.000-04:00

By Mol. Yes. So in the spirit of all things blogilicious, here are 7 random things about myself.

1. I am, regretfully, not related to Melissa Gilbert.

2. I once played Mrs. Claus in a school play but lost the role of the Statue of Liberty to Heather Friedrich and never forgave her for it.

3. I have every issue of the New Yorker since 1995 in my apartment.

4. Fish create real, irrational fear in me, kind of like snakes do to Indiana Jones.

5. I hate going downtown near Ground Zero and every time I do I feel that sick, acrid air and begin to cry from grief and disbelief.

6. I read three personalized horoscopes for myself every day.

7. If I could die and come back as someone else, I'd be a wide receiver in the NFL or Aretha Franklin.

There you have it. And Lillet, Katie, Tiny/Shiny, Saint Peg, Spillah, Baldur, and Alice, consider yourself tagged.

Egypt Story: The Wedding

2007-06-04T14:23:00.000-04:00

In honor of the fact that one year ago, I was sailing up the Nile, I'm posting a snippet of a story I wrote about my trip. It's not done, it's not perfect, and the characters are confusing, but here it is. (For a bit of context, this section describes El Gouna, the wedding, and the last night of the trip.) Happy Anniversary, Yasmine & Josh! And much love to all Egypets...

From our balcony at the Ocean View Hotel in El Gouna, we could see Saudi Arabia, a grey-blue mass floating beyond the man-made lagoon’s rock walls and the Red Sea. I didn’t know it was Saudi Arabia until Meredith told me. She was much better at geography than I was, but I was better at it than some of the other people on our trip—at least I knew that Egypt was in Africa. (Before I left New York, I had checked the atlas, just once, to make sure.) We could also see Wang and Rich on their balcony, up and to the left, resting their arms on the ledge, looking at us.

“Hello, ladies,” Wang singsonged, followed by his infectious laugh. Rich, his roommate and sidekick, waggled his fingers at us and grinned.

“Hi boys!” Meredith trilled, the words taken by the wind. I waved, rolled my eyes, and went back inside our room, where I stretched out on one of the twin bed’s scratchy sun-bleached blankets and waited for our luggage to be delivered. I smoked, because a cigarette was the closest thing to food I could find, and because I was lucky enough to be in Egypt, where I could smoke anywhere I liked. Two days later, Mer and I would sing “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” in our bathrobes to Wang and Rich as a thank you for a love poem they had dropped down onto our balcony. It was written in pencil on a small piece of graph paper and featured a drawing of a unicorn.

This was the relaxing bit of our two-week trip, which included three days in Cairo, a three-day private cruise up the Nile from Aswan to Luxor, five days at El Gouna, a Red Sea resort, and a final two days in Cairo. In Gouna, there were no early-morning tours or lectures, just beaching and drinking and waiting for the reason we were all in Egypt--Josh and Yasmine’s wedding. At El Gouna, we had to deal with something that we had completely forgotten how to deal with: unstructured time. Ahmed, our brilliant and beautiful tour guide, had left us to return to Cairo and prepare for his wedding. When he told us he was engaged, six girls blinked almost imperceptibly, including me. Our other tour guide, Omneya, the one that made the single men blink, turned off her meter and accompanied us to the beach, torturing the boys by wearing a bikini and telling them about her apartment near the airport and that she was studying music in graduate school. Without Ahmed and Omneya telling us what to buy at Khan Al-Khalili (and how to buy it), or how long to stay in the museum, we were lost. Meredith and I missed the tours, the stories of the goddess Nut giving birth to the sun each day and the heretic sun-worshipping king Akhenaten and the slashes ripped across his likenesses after his death. Now, our time was spent figuring out if we should sit by the beach or by the pool, and whether 12:30 PM was too early to order a bottle of Sakkara with our lunch. We always decided that it wasn’t. We napped in the sun, pale bodies slathered with 45 sunscreen, newly-purchased Naguib Mahfouz books perched on our faces.

By this point in the trip, all 30 of Yasmine and Josh's friends were comfortable with each other, the friends from college, the DJs from DC, the web designers from San Francisco, and Yasmine's brother Sherief's guests from New York, of which Mer and I were two. We’d run into each other down by the marina, in the gift shop of the Ocean View, or returning towels by the pool, and embrace as if we had known each other forever, or at least had spent a summer at camp together, crowded around firepits in the dark, telling each other secrets.

****

The night of the wedding, I dressed in my never-worn green chiffon halter dress, pleased that I had lost five pounds as I lay in bed the entire day, suffering from what Omneya called the “Pharoah’s Revenge.” Earlier, Erik, one of Josh's friends, had knocked on my hotel room door, having heard of my illness, and had offered Meredith, my de facto nurse, a Japanese root that smelled and looked like dung. I had swallowed it as if it were a truffle-covered lobster tail and washed it down with a bottle of Baraka, praying for the dirt and dung to clean me out and make me better. Now, lightheaded, I zipped my dress, pushed my earrings through my earlobes, and dusted gold powder onto my eyelids. I was in a dream, dirt on my tongue, everything in slow motion. I was going to make it to the wedding. I had to; I had promised Wang and Rich a dance each. Not to mention William, the three-year-old. It was going to be fun—well, as fun as a wedding can be for a dateless 31-year-old who had spent the last five hours puking.

And, like everything else we had done in Egypt, it was fun. The ceremony unfolded sweetly under a rising moon, the reception outdoors, around an Olympic-sized pool. Immense palm trees were lit dramatically in reds and oranges, a few shades darker than the bride's pale gown. Pots big as manhole covers were stuffed with lilies and starflowers and swirled in the pool, nudged along by the wind rushing off the Red Sea. Photographers crouched; chefs tonged falafel and lamb onto waiting plates. Champagne was gulped by Josh’s friends and sipped by Josh’s parents. The Egyptian aunties glittered. Fatima, the mother-of-the-bride's best friend, wrapped in coral silk, told stories to eager clusters of guests, her husband’s hand ever-present on the small of her back. Yasmine and Josh looked at once the most exhausted and the most beautiful I imagined they would ever look. Sherief was beaming and handsome, the prince. He started dancing the second the band sounded their first note and didn’t stop until the last guest was gone. Meredith flitted, filled with whiskey and merriment, one minute twirling on the dance floor, one minute whispering in the ear of a Bulgarian drummer. Rich, sickly like me, poor dear, munched on a roll and giggled next to me for most of the night. “How you feeling?” he’d ask every so often. "Better," I said with each sip of iceless gin.

A wedding cake was presented on pillars by five smiling waiters. The DJ played "Ain't Nobody" and I had to get up and dance. I picked William up and whirled him around. Mer and I danced together like old ladies. Wang and I did an interpretive dance to that song from Dirty Dancing that’s always played at weddings. Someone even attempted the lift. Healed by the gin and champagne, the dung pill, and the night, I was okay. I danced, fingering the hem of my dress so it would explode when I spun around. Everything was going to be okay.

****

Our last night in Egypt, Rich sat next to me on our midnight felucca ride on the Nile. About 20 of us, fresh from a weepy Egyptian feast at a fancy Cairo restaurant, were seated along the wooden walls of the boat, passing cans of beer and joints in lazy circles, mirroring the full moon overhead. The felucca driver wore a brown galabaya and a dusty white turban. Sherief had said something to him in Arabic, and we had climbed aboard. Nothing else was on the river.

There was a guitar, and so we sang. The couples touched each others’ hands, squeezing just enough to imprint the memory of this night into their lover’s palm. The uncoupled devolved into their beer, their hash, into their private grief, wishing they held something besides liquid or fire in their hands. Rich whispered, “I’m cold.” I gave him half of my pashmina. The guitar filled the interior of the boat and rung out over the water. I was grateful. For this night, for the guitar. For Sherief, for Meredith and Wang and William. For Fatima. For Rich. For Josh and Yasmine. For

Egypt

. For my life, a continent away, but under the same moon.

I Heart Andy Pettitte

2007-05-05T22:30:00.000-04:00

Is it weird that I'm home on Saturday night watching YouTube videos of Andy's postgame interviews? Yeah, I know.

I have a renewed interest in the Yanks this year. Too bad Andy's the only one pitching. I don't know if he can drag the Yanks' season out of the toilet, but he's making my spring better.

Welcome back, baby!

Spring In Brooklyn

2007-04-20T17:45:00.000-04:00

Inspired by Lillet.

I Didn't Break Up with You

2007-04-12T13:49:00.000-04:00

Hi, friends (meekly), how are you? I still love you, and ithardlymatters. But I've been hired away to write about music on zoom-in.com. It's fun, and I'm writing a lot, which is good and excellent and fulfilling. In fact, right now, I'm supposed to be writing for them, but instead, I'm writing here. About them, granted, but it's something!

In other news, the light in my bathroom is out, my wireless router died, my phone is not holding a charge, I had to get the Cruiser jumped a few weeks ago, my iPod battery had to be replaced, my printer ink is getting dangerously low, my debit card was apparently used at a retail merchant where "security lapses occurred," so I have to activate a new card, it took my 2 hours to figure out my NY state tax forms this morning, the soles of my favorite boots are coming apart, and my therapist can't see me next week because of a scheduling conflict.

What happens when everything breaks, needs new parts? At first, it's a giant pain in the ass. But then the new parts arrive or are attached, and the sense of accomplishment and newness overwhelms you with a warm swoosh breathing future as it passes. Breaks beget growth. You're supposed to snap off the wilting heads of flowerpot pansies so new ones will sprout. You get your hair cut. You get a snack during the commercial break. You can only become friends after you break up.

So I've taken a break, but I'm back, better. Like my boots will be, with new soles.

I Love Rock and Roll

2007-03-12T22:24:00.000-04:00

I'm weeping. Over the 2007 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony being held at this very moment at the Waldorf Astoria. I love to imagine Ronnie Spector and Patty Smith and Michael Stipe and Grandmaster Flash and whoever the hell is going to show up from Van Halen (not Dave or Eddie, we know that much) getting drunk backstage and talking smack and maybe even tearing up a little. It's a big, commercial, musical lovefest, and I'm loving every second of it.

Van Halen is one of my favorite bands. Mostly because they were the favorite band of my three best friends in junior high: the boys. The boys were in a little band of their own, Addiction, that rehearsed in one of their attics. They were a fearless threesome, drums, lead guitar, and vocals. One of them had printed out a banner in computer class: ADDICTION in zeros and ones on oversized, perforated 1980s printer paper, which hung over the drumset. It was hung there so that when they made VHS tapes of themselves performing, people wouldn't mistake them for the actual Van Halen.

I was one of the only girls allowed up in the attic. After a while, they even let me sing the "Hey Hey Hey!" part on "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love." I never told them this, but that was pretty much the greatest thing I did in seventh grade. I was in the band. For five minutes, but still. Up close, I got to see Dan tap out the guitar solos, Bret do the work of Alex and Mike by drumming and singing backup vocals, and Diamond Jay leap around doing his best Diamond Dave impression, minus the mesh bodysuit.

Only Mike Anthony and Sammy Hagar showed up tonight. Eddie's in rehab, Dave refused to show, and Alex is lost in the Bermuda Triangle or something. Mike and Sammy played "Why Can't This Be Love" with Paul Schaeffer and his brass-laden band, which was pretty painful. Then Velvet Revolver covered "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love." At the "Hey Hey Hey!" part, I was transported back to the attic, and I couldn't help but think that the boys sounded just as good.

Live, from Springfield

2007-03-10T15:14:00.000-05:00

There's a VHS tape labeled "Family" that sits in my parents' entertainment center. It was filmed in 1987, when my dad borrowed a 30-pound video camera recently purchased by the Springfield College Athletic Department in order to record basketball games and gymnastics meets. He was the Assistant Athletic Director, so was allowed to take this newfangled toy home for a weekend. It was larger than our dog, and had a gold plaque screwed to its dull grey side on which was etched "Property of the Springfield College Department of Athletics." As my dad lugged the awkward camera through the front door, looking like a member of the Channel 22 Eyewitness News Team, my sister and I, aged 8 and 12, leapt from the couch, our squeals mixing with dog barks and the banging of the screen door. We had a VCR and a Commodore 64, but this was a whole new technological adventure. Now we can be on TV! I thought.

As soon as the initial excitement wore off, we went to work on our scripts. All of us: me, Kim, Mom, and Dad. We decided that a Saturday Night Live format would suit our creative vision best, and began brainstorming story arcs, characters, and musical numbers. We were going to be stars.

Because the camera was school property, only Dad was allowed to touch it. We watched, fascinated, as he set up the tripod, hoisted the camera onto his shoulder, then gingerly screwed it onto the mount for some steady-cam action. My mother, my sister, then busied ourselves with setting up the mis en scene for our first skit: a scene in which I adopted a Mr. Roger-like demeanor and welcomed special guests, including my sister as Mrs. McFeeley, and her special delivery: the dog. My mother sang the theme song from behind the camera, where she functioned as the director of cinematography. "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighborhood..."--you know the rest.

The camera had to go back to the Athletic Department on Monday, so we had to pack all of our ideas into two days of a creative-binge and-purge session. The rest of the skits included a piano recital by my sister, a saxophone recital from me (cringe), a lesson in dog grooming starring my mother, the dog, a wire brush, and a pack of cigarettes, my dad (Ray) lip-synching to Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" wearing a sports jacket and a determined expression as my sister and I (the "Ray-ettes") danced behind him, a thrilling demonstration of my science project (a question-and-answer circuit box I had thrown together), and a highly embarrassing solo dance number to Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" by yours truly.

The "Family" tape was clearly a work of inspired genius, a synergy of genetic talent (think of the Wainwright/McGarrigle clan, or the Barrymores, or the Zappas) that had been festering for years with no outlet only to be unleashed all at once for our adoring public: ourselves. What was captured that weekend was not only an hour of material that could be used to extort four people for the rest of their lives, but also the fun that those four people had together, despite being related. I'm sure the Springfield College gymnastics meets were compelling, but I bet that our weekend with that camera was the most fun it ever saw.

For Fun: 1993

2007-03-08T12:50:00.000-05:00

special advance cassette.

yes, I'm wearing black chunky shoes.

Bimbo's, San Francisco.

Thanks to Milk Milk Lemonade. Rock on, people.

iPod I Ching

2007-03-07T21:32:00.000-05:00

Fine, I'll do it too.

1. How does the world see me?

Freaky Black Greetings, Mos Def

2. Will I have a happy life?

The Red Lagoon, Devendra Banhart

3. What do my friends really think of me?

All Mixed Up, The Cars

4. Do people secretly lust after me?

Please Apply Yourself To Me Sweetly, Phantom Planet

5. How can I make myself happy?

Not Right, The Stooges

6. What should I do with my life?

Supernova, Liz Phair

7. Will I ever have children?

Hair, PJ Harvey

8. What is some good advice for me?

Creep, Radiohead

9. How will I be remembered?

Nuthin’ But A “G” Thang, Dr. Dre

10. What is my signature dancing song?

Reno Dakota, The Magnetic Fields

11. What do I think my current theme song is?

Area, De La Soul

12. What does everyone else think my current theme song is?

Overjoyed, Stevie Wonder

13. What song will play at my funeral?

A Head With Wings, Morphine

14. What type of men do I like?

I Walk The Earth, King Biscuit

15. What is my day going to be like?

Use Me, Bill Withers

Now you know everything about me. No comment. (Except #9: yes!)

Nothing Better

2007-03-02T12:32:00.000-05:00

You know it's a smashup Valentine's Day when at 9:10 pm you are rudely awoken by an MTA employee repeatedly screaming "Please leave the train!" through the loudspeaker of the Metro-North from White Plains. You cuddle into the seat a bit more, for warmth, thinking it's all a dream, then realize that you are indeed cuddled into a Metro-North train seat and everyone else has abandoned the train for Grand Central. Yes, you are the sleeping person on the train. And they want your ass off.

Your eyes pop open and you leap as gracefully as an elephant with an inner ear problem from your seat, clutching your 20-pound schoolbag and muttering "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry" to no one in particular. You lurch off the train and your feet hurry along the platform, unused to moving in this particular way, like an untalented skier ejected from a ski lift.

A few minutes into this perambulation, you begin to understand that you are going to have to suffer through the two-train subway ride home while trying to push an overwhelming urge to vomit out of your esophagus. You kind of cry. The lingering taste of the free gourmet potato chips and pomegranate-flavored vodka martinis you consumed for the last three hours hangs stubbornly in your mouth. I can do this. Just keep moving.

**

It had snowed that day. Well, it had iced. Me and my fellow graduate writing students at Sarah Lawrence had fought through delayed trains, unplowed snowdrifts, and ice pellets that caused minor facial lacerations to get to our morning classes, after which we were informed that the rest of the day's classes were cancelled. Most students left for the comfort of their sofas, calling taxis to get them back to the train station. My friend Melissa and I had meetings with our professors, though, and had to stay on campus. So we decided that we'd get a drink up in Bronxville as soon as our meetings were over (we had originally planned to go to a poetry reading that night, but the poet was stuck in Virginia, airports closed because of the storm). We had nothing better to do that night.

We got a cab to downtown Bronxville, entered "the fancy place" in town, and ordered two fancy drinks at the bar. We were the only customers and the only women in the restaurant. The handlebar-mustachioed bartender and the Italian owner took a shine to us and brought us chicken dumplings on the house. Around 6:30, during our second round, the couples started arriving, women in turtlenecks clutching single roses wrapped in cellophane followed by men with slicked back hair and expensive overcoats, here for an indulgent Valentine's Day dinner. Here we go, we said, and rolled our eyes.

Melissa and I laughed and clinked our glasses, happily slipping into the minority of the clientele. We didn't need an expensive dinner with an expensive guy, just expensive drinks and good conversation with a like-minded writer chick. We were on a date with our new lives. It was the best Valentine's Day I'd had in a long time. Maybe ever.

Until the train part.

For Jimmy Honey

2007-02-12T23:08:00.000-05:00

“And I know, I know

And I say, oh, I say

That no matter where I go, no,

I will always see your face.”

Fat Camp

2007-01-30T11:35:00.000-05:00

This past weekend I spent at my parents' place in Massachusetts. To stave off the bitter cold and 400 pages of reading for class, I watched a fair amount of cable. On Friday afternoon, I stumbled across the following gem: Fat Camp, an MTV documentary about, well, a Fat Camp in the Poconos. From the first weigh-in, I became mesmerized by the trials of Petey, the King of Camp, and Marisa, the object of his unrequited love and recipient of several love letters (including the following endearment: "When people were calling you a ho and a slut and saying you were fat, I was always there saying you weren't." Ah, sweet love.). And then there was Dianne.

Dianne sported the unfortunate combination of a body shaped like a prize-winning tuber and the personality of a mewling piglet/sadistic high school lunch monitor. Unapologetically whiny, she waddled through camp against a backdrop of kids earnestly playing volleyball, kayaking, and running, complaining of the constant activities and her lack of friends. Dianne didn't play well with others (we find out at one point that she has been home-schooled). During the camp-wide "Color Wars," in which two teams battled each other for four days of activities, we found Miss Dianne prone in the infirmary, a cell phone somehow strapped to her right ear, proclaiming that Color Wars were "stupid" so she "opted out" in favor of laying on her ass in the air conditioning. Now, Dianne, what kind of attitude is that for a Fat Camper?

For all her complaints, she dished out punishment with swift swaths of her meaty little fists. When her bunkmates suggested she take a shower, like they all had, she went ballistic. She screamed her little pink head off, offended to the point that she inadvertently released her grasp on the towel she was clutching (apparently she had caved and decided to wash), and, well, you can imagine what happened next. The towel fell, the other girls laughed, and Dianne marched straight to her counselor's room to tattle. Poor Dianne.

At the end of the documentary, those geniuses at MTV redeemed our little friend. The camp sponsored a concert night where what I imagine was a local high school cover band played hits like Blind Melon's "No Rain" and Lynard Skynard's "Sweet Home Alabama." Surprisingly, this second ditty was a hit with Dianne, so much so that her raised hands formed little round devil's horns and her stringy blond hair flapped back and forth as she headbanged and sang "Oh sweet home!" in all the right places. Yes! Our Dianne was a rocker chick! The film crew captured her in all her glory, rocking out, and losing a few pounds in the process. Now that's more like it, honey!

At the final weigh-in, everyone had lost weight. Petey, Marisa, even Dianne. Camp was over; everyone cried, traumatized by the thought of going back to school. I cried at the prospect of this show being over, which meant I had to go back to my reading. I clicked the TV off, opened my book, and thought of Dianne in her black T-shirt, joyously flinging her hair back, not caring about how fat she was, or how alone, and gave her props. She was going to be okay.