I Miss Ruby’s

Why can’t I find good barbeque in this town? How hard can it be? After the meal I had last night, I don’t know why people aren’t rioting in the streets. Here’s an excerpt from my restaurant review:

“While waiting for your meal, you can carefully consider five flavors of barbeque sauce laid out at a serve-yourself plunger bar: regular, sweet, and spicy versions of the house sauce and sauces that supposedly hail from North Carolina and South Carolina. Although the copious array of choices indicates that the makers of Soulfire at least understand the basic philosophy of barbeque—the sauce makes or breaks the meal—the sauces themselves disappoint. For the house sauce, think baked-bean-juice with a little chili powder, and the sweet and spicy versions having only a little more sugar or a little more chili. While the careful labeling of the Carolina sauces conjures up visions of feuding redneck-family codgers, glaring from either side of a state line, barrel of precious BBQ sauce in one hand and protecting shotgun gripped in the other, don’t be fooled. North Carolina tastes suspiciously like apple-cider vinegar thickened with chili powder and South Carolina like yellow mustard cut with same powder. And, the sausage plate comes with a mysterious sixth sauce, which appears to be the love child of the two dueling condiments.”

[Image from: http://www.rubysbbq.com/]

New...uhm…Job

Yesterday I was woken up by a phone call with an offer for a part-time job: Associate Producer of a science podcast. They actually offered me a similar pay to what my first job was straight out of college! This may seem like a step backward, but it feels like progress after a summer of making $25 a day. Also, I took it as a sign that I’m finally trained enough to be a professional journalist. (Can you smell the new job optimism? Surely, this won’t last.) On my first day, I spent 9 hours editing audio for the podcast, which was actually quite fun. Editing audio is a strange activity. It uses some parts of the brain that you use for editing print--you have to think about what the people are saying and keep their content intact--but it also feels a bit like needle-point or some other crafty, fine-handiwork thing. You get into a groove in which you become a physical extension of the keyboard-mouse-software system. You develop shortcut moves, reflexes almost. You hear a sound, deal out a series of strokes, and then the sound is improved. After trimming and cleaning up different tracks, I spent most of the day removing people’s uhms and ers and repeat mumbles. Now they all sound like polished spin doctors of science. By all means, have a listen: Go to the New Scientist podcast website and download today’s show.

[Image from: http://alts.homelinux.net/task.php?task=multimedia&view=alt]

Medium

Here are the results of my first day of photojournalism class where we actually got to hold a camera:

Eric

Pat and Liz

Kirk

Kate

Levity to Cut Blog Fog

I’m having a bit of a blogging impasse, hence the lack of entries lately. Everything I think to write seems either silly and shallow (not worthy of following my post about Pete) or incredibly personal (too delicate for a blog post). Perhaps a photo-heavy blog entry documenting my recent feats of tourism will build a bridge back into my normal bloggerhood.

Cape Cod cuties

En route to Liberty Island

Mme. Liberte et Moi

Liberty clones in various stages of undress

Flirting with the camera

Molly takes Manhattan

View from the 86th floor

Meanwhile, my porch-bound tomatoes bear fruit!

Pete

There’s going to be a memorial service for an old boyfriend of mine, Pete. He disappeared from a boat a month ago. From what I understand, they never found him, but they presume he is dead. Here is the horrible news that came in a message through the grape vine, originally from his family:

“We are trying to locate Peter. On July 24th, he boarded the passenger boat Hiryu at 8pm local time, traveling from Naha, Okinawa, Japan to Nagoya, Japan. He was last seen at 9pm, and was discovered missing at 9:30pm. It was dark, the waves were 3’ swells, and the boat was approximately two miles from the shore of Ie Jima island.

At this point, Pete’s parents believe that Peter died while in the water. We hope he may be staying with friends in Japan. Could you please send us (or call us with) any contacts you might know of Peter’s friends everywhere.”

It’s been probably ten years since I loved Pete. And it wasn’t one of those serious loves--no, it was more like a confusing, precious learning experience with lots of potent memories--so typical of the infatuations of one’s early twenties. I don’t think we’ve corresponded once since we broke up, but I have been tracking his adventures through a mutual friend who loves us both. At one point he was traveling the world and finding odd jobs, such as working at a Chinese publishing company where he read American best sellers and made recommendations for Asian publication, or at least that’s how the glamorous occupation appeared through the lens of a nostalgic old flame.

I knew Pete before he’d caught his international travel bug. I knew him when he was all about listening to the Flaming Lips, hiking with his two short-hair German pointers (Luke and Leia), quitting crappy jobs, finding the perfect inexpensive snack food, soaking at local swimming holes, dying his hair flame-tipped orange, getting a girlie tattoo, drinking cheap beer, and taking road trips in his sexy, red Buick convertible.

The funniest thing he ever told me is that a group of his best high-school buddies went on a camping trip to the Grand Canyon, and at the last minute he wasn’t allowed to go along with them. I can’t remember why, but they ran out of water somehow on their multi-day hike, so they were cotton-mouthed and pissing sludge by the time they were “rescued” days later. Pete told me that he was green with envy, because they had gone through such an adventure together and he had missed out on the experience. At age 20, this sentiment struck me as crazy, because as much as I loved camping, I liked my adventures tame. (Probably why we never made it as a couple.) Now that I think about it, it seems less shocking that he would die in some bizarre way--washed off a boat in an oriental sea. I’m not going to say that he would have wanted it that way--he wouldn’t have. He would have wanted to live to tell the story.

I’m afraid to go to his memorial service, afraid because I have this sinking feeling that Pete will pull a Tom Sawyer on us and show up, smiling his funny smile and only half aware that everyone assembled is grieving the loss of him. And we would all be angry and happy and furious for the worry that he had caused. And I can’t bear the thought of him getting into so much trouble for just being his adventurous, carefree self. Or, maybe what I’m really afraid of is that we’ll all show up secretly hoping for his miraculous return, only to feel like tragic fools when we realize that such an appearance is a fantasy and he really is gone.

A mutual friend said to me, “We loved him best.” It’s true. We loved him at that delicate and beautiful age when we were just discovering our adult selves and our place in the world and you could first see the basic shape of our lives forming.

Rest in peace, sweet friend.

Peter Vlach (March 26, 1976 - July 24, 2006)

Pete when I knew him

[Both images from his memorial website]

Park-pourri

What a lazy day. I got lost in winding paths of Central Park, found myself but got lost again in the Natural History Museum’s minerals and meteors galleries, napped in the dappled sunlight that peaked through the tall trees, eavesdropped on gossiping picnickers, wrote a letter, caught up on some phone calls, and finally walked back through the park past the carousel, the large central fountain, giggling playgrounds, a disco roller skating contest, and a Dominican pride parade. My favorite part (besides the nap) was this 34-ton meteorite in the basement of the museum. I get scared about how small I am when I touch things from outer space.

Children blur past this retired giant

Worthless sparkling rock

What’s All the Stink About?

Today, in hot pursuit of a journalism goldmine, I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in order to smell the Amorphophallus titanium, a.k.a. corpse flower. A corpse flower is a unique flowering plant from Sumatra that blossoms only once every few to ten years with a single giant flower that can be three to seven feet tall and three feet wide. Size isn’t this bud’s only talent. It also stinks of dead meat. This enticing quote from the garden’s website says it all: “Notable not only for the stature of its bloom, the well-named corpse flower also produces a revolting stench of putrefaction.”

I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to get some good tape for my radio show of crowds of people groaning from the stench and botanists speechifying about how glorious this stinker is. Sadly, I was a day late and an odor short of a great radio story. The corpse flower only reeked for 8 hours and I missed the window by an entire day. Who’d have thought that such a veggie beastie would be so shy? No worries, because the flower was still impressive in height, though not all stinky. Check out the pics:

Me and “Baby” the corpse flower

Close up of “Baby”

Water lilies looking

Children feeding the unruly horde of killer koi

“The Man” Is Conned (with My Assistance)

Wow, this happened to me the other day, and I’ve been trying to figure it out for weeks: I was trying to fill my subway (MetroCard) at a vending machine. I couldn’t get it to work. This guy says, “Hey I’ll swipe you and you can pay me back.” The train was coming, so I felt this pressing need to make a decision (my Achilles heel). I knew to be suspicious of someone in New York trying to be friendly, but I had the correct change in my hand and thought, “Why not?” He swiped me in on his card, I gave him $2 and we were both on our way. Nothing came of it, but I just knew he was making money off of someone. I just couldn’t figure out what. Had I narrowly escaped victimization? Has he found a way to make a couple of bucks off the system? Or, was he just a nice guy? Unlikely.

But I finally discovered what the scam was! In a search for MetroCard prices on the internet, I found the following description of a scam, and bingo it matches my experience exactly. Fortunately, I was not victimized. For some reason though, I find it hilarious to be called a “mark.” I suppose in other circumstances I would not feel that way.

from Wikipedia:

“The MetroCard system is susceptible to various types of frauds, perpetrated by clever con artists, who have figured out how to get the turnstile to release without charging a fare.

A typical con involves deliberately jamming a MetroCard vending machine in a station, and then waiting for somebody to try buying a new card just as a train is approaching. As the innocent customer discovers that the machine is broken, the con artist offers to swipe the mark through the turnstile on their own card in return for $2 (the same as the regular fare). If the mark accepts, the con artist swipes their altered card, and lets the mark go through the turnstile. The mark comes out even (they lost $2 but got a ride out of it), the con artist makes $2, and the MTA is stiffed a fare (plus the cost of fixing the damaged vending machine). This scam is often run by a team of 2 or more people, with one person working the turnstile and the others acting as lookouts.

There are reports of people making $200-$300/day running this scam. A report from New York State Senator Martin J. Golden claims this scam is costing the MTA $260,000/year, and some con artists are making up to $800/day executing it.”

[Image from: http://www.sheilacallaghan.com/images/metrocard.jpg]

Frank Lloyd--Right On!

I finally went to some art museums today. It was simultaneously lovely and overwhelming. I saw a terrific show of Klimt and Schiele at the Neue Gallery. It was fun, because I went alone and got to see every single piece and listen to every single segment on the audio tour without anyone being impatient or not understanding my need for compulsive thoroughness.

I also heard a lot of people talking loudly and stupidly about the art. I don’t have a problem with people having little art history education--in fact, I laud them for going to museums anyway to absorb a little culture. And, I also think that people should not be afraid of forming their own, even naïve, opinions about art--that’s what it’s there for: interpretation. However, I really don’t want to hear the bull when I don’t know you from Adam. It was pretty annoying to hear these uncouth loudmouths trying to sound smart and critical, professing in stentorian voices to their timid wives or friends on subjects they clearly knew nothing about. What happened to the rule about using your “gallery voice”--didn’t their mother teach them anything? Anyway, it didn’t get better at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, even though that museum is one thousand times larger with more rooms to hide from the yahoos.

After the tiny, manageable Neue Gallery, the Met’s gargantuan-ness rendered me speechless. I spent the first 30 minutes in a confused panic. “What should I see today? How the heck do I get there? How can I possibly cram 12 more trips here before the end of the summer? Oh my god, I haven’t even considered the Guggenheim, the MOMA, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. I’m screwed!” In the end, I tried to find the modern art section, got lost in the British fashion exhibit, found refuge on the rooftop garden, and gave up and had dinner in the shi-shi café. After gathering my wits over a bowl of pesto pasta and glass of sparkly water (feeling particularly fancy), I decided to take a guided tour. A lovely college intern raced us around in a whirlwind tour of about 8 eras and cultures, which helped me form a plan of attack for next time: scrap the Egyptians and Greeks, go straight for the Moderns, and try to find some Dutch masters. If I stumble upon the Japanese or Russian section, it will just be icing on the cake.

I love traveling alone sometimes. Don’t get me wrong. I also enjoy a terrific travel buddy, but there are some very delicious things that happen when you are a solo tourist. It’s just so quiet and self reflective and you get to indulge yourself in every decision. Perhaps it’s from growing up in a family of five children, but I like getting my way and getting to eat whatever is on my plate.

A couple favorites

I Might As Well Still Be in 9th Grade

I just reconnected with an old friend who I have known for 15 years. It’s funny how much you don’t change at all. He and I still have much of the same things in common--a thirst for world travel, a love of learning foreign languages, and a passionate distaste for George Bush (only now it’s the younger one). How much of our kindred tastes result because we grew up together and influenced one another to become the people we are today? Or, were we originally drawn to one another because of our shared interests? We’ll never know, but it’s nice to have a good friend in New York, none the less.

Serendipitous view of the Empire State Building from a park bench
(Sadly, my camera phone sucks.)

Personal Worst

Ug. I just got my results for the triathlon. I didn’t even break the 2 hour mark!! That is really bad (for me). Here are my stats:

Overall Rank 1702 of 1981

Swim 0:15:03
Swim Rank 905
Trans1 0:11:23

Bike 0:50:53
Bike Rank 1263
MPH 214.6
Trans 0:03:01

Run 0:43:11
Run Rank 1880
Pace 0:15:25

Final 2:03:32

Why oh why did I dawdle at the first transition?! I seem to remember having to switch out my minidisks, but really, I could have done better than 11 min and 23 seconds! A little hustle could have saved me from this shame. Woe is me. Slow is me!

Okay, enough of the self pity. I am pleased with my swim and bike times. I don’t have all of my previous years’ race data in front of me, but I think that this is my personal best on the swim by 28 seconds. Woohoo!

Liz and Kate rockin’ the swim start

10th Tri

I finished my tenth triathlon today. Yep, the big one oh. I’ve been doing the Danskin women’s triathlon every year since 1997, and I’ve missed only two of them--one year for being sick and one year for not finding anyone one to drive with me there (lame!)--but anyway, I made those up by doing two others one year when I was on a racing kick. Thank goodness I got over that, because today was exhausting, and I now need a year-long break to recover.

I know that every race presents a new challenge, but this one surprised me. As you know from a previous post, I am not able to run these days because of my arch nemesis (hah! pun intended), the Evil Bone Spur. So, I’ve been feeling a little sad about participating anyway and having to walk instead of run the last part. Perambulating casually while everyone else is huffing and puffing just goes against all the thrill of a race. There’s no pushing yourself and feeling the wind through your hair and getting that endorphin rush. I don’t even think my heart rate was up by mile 2. Very uncool!

So, to make up for the disappointment of not getting to try for my personal best, I decided to participate in the race as a journalist. I bought a clip on mic, borrowed the school’s minidisk recorder, and made arrangements for my friend Pat to hand my recording gear to me when I got out of the swim. I somehow managed to stick it on my bike and not wind the wires into my chain, and I just held it while I ran. It was pretty fun. Not only do I have hilarious tape of me wheezing and cursing while pumping up some steep hills during the biking segment, but I also got to interview some co-participants and my training buddies during the running segment and before and after the race. I think it should make a pretty fun radio piece once I get some time to edit it all together. The most hilarious discovery was that it didn’t occur to me until mid race that I was that crazy lady talking to herself. Oh well, the things we sacrifice for a good story.

The lovely “Before” picture

PS. I won’t post the “After” pics, because our inner beauty was blinding.

Taxi Savvy

A tiny bit of New Yorker has surfaced from my thick Texan core. Who knew it could happen in only a month? I was hailing a cab today, as I always do to get from work to the Chinatown bus that takes me to Boston on the weekends. And, as always, it was taking way longer than I thought it should. About 30 cabs will pass me before one finally stops. And, often I’ll see some experienced New York pro whisk out in front of me and grab one at the last moment--stealing what should have been my ride. But not today! I had been standing on the corner for at least 10 minutes and some guy walks up just as a cab is slowing down for me. I walked right up to the cab, body checked the cab-stealer, and said “Excuse me!” quite firmly as I opened the door and blocked his way. He said, “Relax!” and indicated politely that it was mine fair and square. How about that?! I finally speak their language.

[Image from: http://www.shopnbu.com/]

Bad Journalist, Bad

So, in my excited gush over the sea plane experience, I forgot to admit something. I’m a terrible journalist. I'll admit it: I hate talking to people I don’t know--quite a liability in a profession that relies on interviews with total strangers. When it's really bad, I get overly anxious and full of self-loathing. I don’t know why it hasn’t gotten much better since the beginning of my school year when I first discovered this. The way I’ve overcome my dismal problem when it comes over me is by forcing myself to just do it, but it feels like forcing myself to fall off a cliff and trusting that there is a pool of deep water to break my fall. This method failed me at the last minute today. Alas, I had wanted to interview the sea plane pilot because I thought that would make a fun radio show. However, at the last second, I panicked, decided that I was on vacation and I didn’t have to get up the nerve to bother this guy, and jettisoned the plan. I couldn’t renege because he packed my bag in the plane’s floaty feet. (Did you know that they store things in those whatchamacallits?! I didn’t--cool huh!) Too bad, because it could have been pretty cool to get some sea plane audio. Maybe I’ll move to Seattle and try again when I’ve developed some cajones.

Gorgeous Orcas Island

More of the same, only at dusk

Leavin’ On a Sea Plane

We took a sea plane from Orcas Island, where my brother was married in a lovely seaside ceremony. Tears were shed, snot was sniffed, and they were wed. It was pretty darn romantic and lovely to see my big brother marry a terrific woman. Anyway, we took the sea plane out to the island and back in order to save time and it was so cool! If you ever get the chance, splurge on it. It’ll be worth it I promise. I saw tiny houses and barges and seals frolicking. Scott actually saw a baby seal and mamma from the plane! And, to boot, we saved 2 hours of driving time, 1 hour of ferry riding, and 3 hours of waiting in line for the ferry--woohoo!

Mountain view from the sea plane

Konsciously Kool

Scott and I stayed at the Ace Hotel in Seattle last night. It’s pretty cheap, but I was told that all the rock stars stay there when they visit. It’s disgustingly hip. All the walls are white and covered in alterna-art™. The rooms contain only Ikea furniture. It’s eco-friendly (read: no AC). The facilities are communal, meaning the bathrooms are down the hall. So, it feels a little bit like a clothing optional establishment (even though it isn’t…I don’t think) because you walk to the showers in a white bathrobe--past the front desk and lounge!--to get to the showers. The lounge is pretty chic, with super modern, clean design and excellent natural lighting. Plus, every room has peanut M&Ms, carrot Clif bars, and a mini copy of the Kama Sutra bookmarked with two condoms. Thanks, Ace Motel. Thanks for taking care of all the details for me.

Ace Lobby

Clippity Clop, Cloppity Clip!

I finally might get to write something meaty. Okay, that other writing assignment they gave me turned out to be killed, and I shouldn’t have gotten so excited about it. (Damn bimonthly writing cycle means that even the slowest team of mentally challenged grannies could scoop me on a story.) However, one of the editors has given me a new writing assignment, and I think this one is going to stick…I hope. It’s a 500-word profile, still too short for my blabby mouth, but maybe I'll learn a little something about getting to the point. Please send me good writing vibes and good luck voodoo so that I write something intelligible and so that they don’t take it away from me at the last minute.

[Image from: http://magazine.fandm.edu/winter06/wn06_story2.html]

Jealous, Jealous Again

Scott bought a freakin’ AC for his new computer. [growl!] Why does this make me jealous? And, how is it possible to be jealous of a machine? Please don’t ask. I know it’s crazy, but it’s really how I feel. I can’t explain it because it comes from the farthest depths of my soul, where I have no ability to reason or express concepts in any spoken language. Alls I know is that I’m sweatin’ like a whore in church here in NY, and when I go home to Boston to visit my sweetie on the weekends, I find that my apartment is very hot. No biggie, right, because he and I are in this together. We are a team. We’re both hot, we’re both saving energy, we’re both too poor to afford AC. Even the dogs are hot, but they still love us and isn’t it fun trying to think of creative ways to beat the heat? It all makes sense. That is, until Lil’ Chip (the punk!), Scott’s apparent favorite resident of our apartment, shows signs of overheating, and what happens? Scott, who usually can’t be motivated to buy himself food when he hasn’t eaten for a day or do laundry when he runs out of clean underwear, rushes out to the hardware store in a tizzy to purchase and install a window unit for his computer. AAaargh! I’m not gone for more than 10 hours and he has installed an AC for some other reason than to please me! Scott, your wife is hot! (Pun, freakin’ intended!) And, yes, she’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself, but when her mother board is overheating and she can’t process information well, she might blow a fuse and crash, so you better back up that hard drive, baby.

[Image from: http://www.sidewalkbubblegum.com/pctyrant.com/mainfebruary.html]

Coolness

Oh, happy is the day that ends with chocolate ice cream. With coconut!

I finally got to write something today at work. I’m so pleased. I have been feeling a tad bummed because they weren’t really having me use my skills at work. Well, I was doing some damn fine internet research for them, but it just doesn’t fire the same ganglia as a nice writing assignment. Anyway, I’m pleased to finally put my partially-masters-degreed skills to some professional use, though piddly it may have been.

And, then after a long day of writing, I cooled off with a relaxing stroll through the East Village with Kharissia and some ice cream. What a lovely day!

I would like a mole of Molli-Coolz, please:

(snapped at the ballpark concessions, no kidding!)

Nature’s Snack Foods

I am presently eating some peanuts leftover from last night’s game--a fun evening, but the Mets really tanked. Their pitcher actually let the Marlin’s pitcher hit a grand slam, even though pitchers are notoriously bad hitters. It was pretty sad to see him booed off the field only one pitch (a single) later. Kharissia had to point out some of these details to me, as I am not always in tune to the subtle details of the sport. I love seeing baseball games with Kharissia. She knows every player’s position, all their stats, and how cute they are (tres important). She knows all the rules and can explain them to me. Plus, she gets into the cheering paraphernalia without thoroughly embarrassing me. She also likes to eat ballpark snacks. She really has her priorities straight, that Kharissia. We had a “four-course meal” last night, which meant we went out about every other inning and got hot dogs, ice cream (the soft-serve kind that comes in a souvenir helmet), peanuts, and finally nachos. It was quite fun, though I was a little ill by the ninth inning.

Anyway, I’m snacking on some leftover peanuts today and thinking that peanuts are pretty great. They come in little, natural, individually-wrapped packages that keep them fresh. They taste great with just salt. Nutritionally, they’re not great for you, so they give you that satisfying bad-girl feeling, but they aren’t so bad that you ever feel guilty afterwards. This afternoon, I’m realizing that peanuts in their shells are really best enjoyed at a ballpark where you can shell them and dump the shells wherever. In my little room the next day with only my laptop in front of me and the dusty shell shards falling everywhere and the thin, papery skins flying towards my keyboard, threatening the electronic innards of my little workhorse, peanuts don’t really make sense. They still taste good.

My view of Shea Stadium:

My hotdog’s view: