Favorites

My procrastination tool for today was a trip through the rarely visited Favorites folder on work PC #2. Imagine my sadness upon discovering that some of my most beloved sites of yore--the Captain James T. Kirk Sing-a-Long page (which I discovered on my first day as a WebTV employee, when I literally got paid to do nothing more than surf), the Jive Page (subtitled 'Speaking the Forgotten Language'), and the Peeps science experiment page, to name but a few--are gone, having disappeared into the ether, or possibly met their end with the demise of free server space somewhere along the line.

I'm sure others have risen from their ashes (while others, such as the brilliant T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project, still live). But it's disappointing to lose some of the blissfully inane, pop culture-filled, gloriously irreverent pages of old. Sure, the ability to buy airline tickets, pay bills, keep a journal, and do all manner of constructive things online is great, but I think there also still need to be resources for the stupid shit people did when the Internet was still a novelty and it seemed like the best thing you could possibly do with it was post sound files of William Shatner singing the hits. So get out there and support your favorite homegrown, uneducational, fantastically silly web page; it just might be gone tomorrow.

English: It's all rubbish

This story, reported by Lonely Planet, is too fascinating to ignore.

In an effort to improve the English-speaking skills of residents and 'internationalize' his city, the mayor of Tainan in Taiwan has decreed that rubbish trucks should blare out English phrases over their loudspeakers. This novel way of getting people to work on their language skills is the brainwave of the mayor's wife - and now, instead of playing Beethoven symphonies as they used to in the past, the city's rubbish trucks teach conversational English.

The trucks announce their arrival with phrases such as 'How are you?' and 'I'm fine thank you. And you?' Some 300 separate phrases and sentences have been recorded for residents to work on, including some less frequently used ones such as 'How much is this cabbage?' By all reports, older members of the community have been a little mystified at what is being taught, although the mayor hopes that after a few months of putting out the rubbish, most of Tainan's elderly will have at least a basic grasp of English.

RDRR

Last week's article about the world's funniest joke is, in itself, pretty amusing (certainly more so than the one about the two fish in the tank). But I think I'll have to break ranks with my fellow world citizens, as I find the joke about the hunters only chuckle-inducing. Instead, I'd be more inclined to bestow the superlative of Funniest on one of the following, the first forwarded to me by my Aunt Sharon, the second from Patricia O'Conner's Woe Is I:

1.) A cab driver picks up a nun. She gets into the cab, and the cab driver won't stop staring at her. She asks him why he's staring and he replies, "I have a question to ask you but I don't want to offend you."

She answers: "My dear son, you cannot offend me. When you're as old as I am and have been a nun as long as I have, you get a chance to see and hear just about everything. I'm sure that there's nothing you could say or ask that I would find offensive."

"Well," says the cabbie, "I've always had a fantasy to have a nun kiss me."

She responds, "Well, let's see what we can do about that. But I have two conditions: #1, you have to be single, and #2, you must be a Catholic."

The cab driver is very excited and says, "Yes, I'm single and I'm Catholic, too!"

The nun says, "O.K., pull into the next alley." He does and the nun fulfills his fantasy. But when they get back on the road, the cab driver starts crying.

"My dear child," said the nun. "Why are you crying?"

"Forgive me sister, but I have sinned. I lied. I must confess: I'm married and I'm a Baptist."

The nun says, "That's O.K. I'm on the way to a Halloween party, and my name is Kevin."

*******

2.) Duck walks into a hardware store. "Got any duck food?" he quacks. "Sorry, no," says the proprietor. Duck leaves.

Next day the duck is back. "Got any duck food?" "No," says the proprietor. "I told you before. We don't carry it."

Next day he's back again: "Got any duck food?" The proprietor glares at him. "Look, buddy, we don't sell duck food. We never have and never will. And if you ask me that one more time, I'll nail your little webbed feet to the floor."

Next day the duck is back. "Got any nails?"

"We're out of nails today," says the proprietor.

"Got any duck food?"

Void

It's the sort of schizophrenic sun/clouds/sun/clouds/clouds/clouds kind of day (literally, that is) that sets me to thinking about change. Realizing that while nothing in my life as is feels wrong per se, there's something in me that's itching for newness, difference, variety. So I opt for the Castro Peet's instead of the one downtown (not entirely thrilling, to be sure, but definitely less crowded and more soothing, in so far as a coffee shop can be) and, en route, think, 'What will it be? A new apartment? A new city? A new set of furniture for my bedroom? [Aim low and you'll more likely hit your target.] A trip to the middle of somewhere I've never been?'

At work I find an email from Daryl waiting for me. He reports that while he and Shayne are generally happy in their Hawaiian idyll, they miss their friends and family back in the contiguous 48 and don't feel they've been able to make the connections with people that came so easily, relatively speaking, in San Francisco. ('We spend more time with fishes than we do with people,' D reports. 'It is good.')

And I turn on my phone to the triplicate beep of a voicemail message, which turns out to be from David, he of so many years ago and that one watershed summer. He and Ian are living in Mystic, he reports, which means that for all of their peripateticism of the past few years they've gone and wound up where they started. He called Mom and got my number, wants to know what I'm up to, wants me to get in touch. Which I will, soon, when I come up with something to say, some words to encapsulate the changes of the past nine years.

On Sinister, tucked into the middle of a story that's no less brilliant for being a non sequitur, someone writes this:

there is a loneliness that is not quantifiable in words. there is a loneliness that stems from the feeling of being somewhere that nobody else has ever seen. there is a loneliness that comes of drifting away from what you've been assured is real, never knowing if you'll come back into contact with it again. there is the loneliness of finding out you've been lied to. these are the causes, not the feeling itself. if words could befriend the feeling through expression, it would no longer be so lonely.

And although those words don't speak for me (this itch isn't loneliness, and to the best of my knowledge I'm not the recipient of any recent lies), they do, somehow, speak to me. I've been there, can sympathize, don't want to go back. And there's the key: I don't want to go back. What I'm longing for is the chance to find out--and to shape--what's ahead. Now it's just a matter of how.

At long last, the poem.

Ivy

Word of an opportunity named Cornell
wound its way down the country road,
reached the farm boy.
He traded dust-covered overalls,
plaid shirt, heavy boots
for chinos, a shirt crisp with starch,
Sunday shoes and a good cap,
piled into a car with friends to head north
to see ivy climbing brick walls,
a clock tower higher than anything he'd seen,
a town spread out at the feet of the hills.

The friends met with important men in suits and ties
who sat behind great oak desks,
wore specs, sucked on pipes.
Yes indeed, Cornell would be thrilled
to have some fine young men
from Old Chatham.
Tuition, you'll find, is quite reasonable.

Then hand-shaking and gracious
Thank you kindly, sirs.
The boys set off for home,
stopping at night to sleep
roadside, under the stars.

That night, he didn't dream of
his hands on udders,
or carrying warm buckets of milk,
hands blistered from the handle of a shovel
and stiff leather reins.

Didn't dream of counting
each penny over and over
until he was sure that the tuition was stored safely
in the collection of glass jars in his closet.

He dreamt instead of the greenest ivy,
of a clocktower touching the sky,
while a farm boy, a student, on a hill
beheld all the world stretched out at his feet.

Monica

While doing a bit of cleanup in Outlook the other day (an endless, endless process), I noticed a folder called 'Out' that I could not recall having seen before, ever (although it's evidently been there for years). So I dug in.

And there were six months' worth of messages, sent between the day I switched from Pine(!) to Eudora and the day I switched from Eudora to Outlook, somehow archived without my knowledge. I've been reading through them over the past few days, a process that has allowed me (for better or worse) to reconstruct that period in my life job-wise, boy-wise, and friend-wise. It's sort of fascinating, I think, to look back on a you that you'd sort of forgotten.

Many of the messages are part of a continuous back-and-forth between my friend Monica and me. Monica was great--just endlessly fun, sarcastic, full of good humor and a true sense of adventure. She and Shayne and I fast became an inseparable triumvirate.

But then she decided to move to Alaska to be with her boyfriend Terry, whom she really dug, although Shayne and I could never figure out why. (He'd done a lot of assholic things to her in the past and did not, generally speaking, seem to be the sort of fellow one might move to frigid climes to be with.) She was leaving, and we were crushed. That disappointment translated to desperate (and, of course) useless attempts to get her to stay, mainly by dissing Terry but also by plaintively whining about what her departure would do to us.

And then, somehow, we realized we were making things worse. Better, it seemed, to let her leave as a friend than to risk alienating her and then losing her anyway. So I sat myself down and wrote this:

I vow

--that although the T word makes me squirm, I will not retch when I hear it, and I will remember that it is music to Monica's ears;

--that although nothing makes me more sad right now than to think that Monica will be gone in a week, I will remember that she's going not to make me depressed but to make herself happy;

--that although I want to do everything in my power to make her stay, I will send her off with my best wishes;

--that I will remember that I, too, picked up my life and moved to a totally different place, leaving behind people who loved me, and I will remember that we have all weathered this separation;

--that I will recognize that who we love may not always be who others love, or who others want us to love;

--that until Monica leaves, I will hold my peace in terms of her going, and if I cannot think of anything positive to say about Alaska or Terry, I will simply talk endlessly about myself.

That is all.

Love and kisses,
Your idol

Reading those words again the other day reminded me of how much I miss Monica, and how sorry I was to see her go (although, ultimately, Alaska didn't work out, and she's gone on to do some amazing things). They also reminded me that the vows I made to Monica do hold--must hold--for my other friends, too, especially now that romance is in the air.

There's a fine and difficult line (I think of piano wire, or a laser) between what we hypothetically want for our friends and how well we're able to deal when they get it. It's entirely too easy for me to allow a friend's gain (especially in the relationship arena--more time as someone's amour=less time as my friend, dammit) be my loss. Because that's not how it works--or not entirely. There must be--and can be--a balance between holding hard and letting go. I found it with Monica; I just need to find it again now.

Too true

As ever, This Modern World is painfully, sighingly spot-on.

Nyet

Yesterday's breaking news: Russia's space program can no longer be arsed to take 'N Sync's Lance Bass into the ether. Because he '[failed] to fulfill the conditions of his contract [namely, not forking over the $20 million required for the journey],' according to an official with the program, Bass will remain earthbound, at least for the foreseeable future.

A highlight from the Times' coverage of this important news story:

'Adding insult to injury, the space agency said Mr. Bass, 23, would be replaced on the October mission by a cargo container.'

Wanting does not die

The poet Martha Serpas makes me cry, although usually in a good way (be that what it may).

In Praise of the Passion Mark

First the unintentional: raspberry
blush, many-speckled lights,
and the message: oops, sorry.

Then the hard mark of the all-nighter,
a true Hoover, a hole black as leather,
daring you to plummet.

We were dancing, it just happened,
she said, helplessly sentenced
to a week of turtlenecks

in May, in the sticky South. The frozen
spoon failing, she took a curling iron
to her neck and still her mother knew

the mix of teeth and lips and love.
Alone, she admired her shoulder's
violet smear: she was wanted

and had wanted. She'd have it
needled and inked, a permanent
badge of desire, a license for love.

And when the plaid-clad chem teacher
appeared with his bright bruise,
news traveled fast: wanting
does not die after all, after age,
one sort of taking in does not
supersede another. Go

for the jugular. We cannot
be sucked
dry.

Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero

Although I haven't actually checked, I'm sure CNN has a One Year Anniversary of September 11 graphic all set to flood the airwaves (if it hasn't already) over the next week. (Ditto MSNBC and the broadcast channels, no doubt.) I also have a general fear that the worst is yet to come as far as treacly, exploitative, jingoistic commemorations of last year's terror.

But Frontline's Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero is not, admirably and thankfully, among said worst. Rather, it's a truly thoughtful and undeniably thought-provoking look at a variety of answers to the question, 'Where was God on September 11?'

A Catholic Monsignor explains how he knew immediately upon hearing of the attacks in New York that religion was behind them. A photographer looking at images of people jumping from thousands of feet to their death wonders whether they saw heaven beneath them as they leapt. Some parents who lost children tell how they've come to accept those losses as God's or Allah's plan. Marian Fontana, whose firefighter husband died in the towers, admits that she's given up on God, at least for now.

All told, the program is a stunning look at what seems to me one of the key questions of that day: how can faith answer for such an inconceivable horror? (Or can it?) In the process, it gives space to anger, and hope, and severe doubt--space that I imagine few other September 11 tributes in the American media will allow.

What the world needs

It's a relief to know that there's a tool to assist me in my attempts to translate hackneyed, vaguely outdated, not entirely grammatically correct English slang into Russian.

Dispatches from Corporate America, take 1.

Marketer A [rushing to the desk of Marketer B]: I forgot about the Energizer bunny's ROI thing.
Marketer B: Right, let's get on that right now.

TEAM

My desire for humor, which late last week got kicked to the floor and then suffered the indignity of sadness' foot on its throat, has picked itself up and brushed the dirt from its trousers.

So thank goodness for Erfert, who has shared with us one of the many reasons she loves San Francisco:

'Last night Mendy and I had a few drinks at our favorite bistro on Chestnut Street. When we walked outside, we ran into a very seedy-looking fellow in a Winnie the Pooh costume, who was lounging around outside a bar and smoking a cigarette. I looked him up and down and said "What's with you?" He replied, with a world-weary air, "Pooh's lost his edge, sweetheart." "I'll say!" I said. Mendy, for once in his life, said nothing. Then an even seedier guy in a Tigger suit came out of the bar, and I knew it was time to leave. So we did.'

Then Melissa pipes up with a recommendation for a site that allows you to create a miniature Lego version of yourself. If that's not a cause for cheer, what ever could be?

Once again, the TEAM pulls through and the forces of slightly bizarre amusement prevail.

Would you walk your heaven away?

SiSu

I can't find the poem, but digging through every scrap of writing I could find turned up a journal entry I'd made back in January 1990. My brother was in the process of applying to colleges then, and for reasons I can't now remember was hesitant to apply to Syracuse, although it was a school that interested him.

While putting laundry on his desk that January day, I noticed an envelope addressed, in Poppa's hand, to Greg. Actual mail from our grandfather being a rare thing indeed, I had to be the snooping little sister and read the letter, which left me in tears as I slipped it back into its envelope and replaced it. Here's what it said:

'OK og [only grandson, which, at the time, he was], here's the 40 bucks for your application to Syracuse. I only expect one thing from you and that is to try. There is no shame in losing--only if you don't try. You have Finnish blood in you and we have a motto--SiSu. As you grow older and wiser you will understand what it is. Love from Poppa.'

Poppa

My Poppa has died.

I'm standing in the middle of the Calgary airport yesterday, trying to dodge the hordes of passengers swirling around me, blurry in my eyes, while Dad tells me the news over the phone. He went peacefully, he says, and without pain. We were all there with him until the end. We held him and told him how much we loved him. He was tired, Em, and it was time for him to rest.

Between tears that are suddenly threatening to break me (but I can't let them, not here and not now), I murmur, I know, I know, I know. And I want that knowing to make the loss easier, but it doesn't. Not yet, at least.

I dreamt of Poppa on Tuesday night, in one of the small pockets of rest I got. He wasn't like he usually is in my dreams--strong and lucid and laughing. Rather, he seemed weaker, and his speech, when he spoke at all, was understandable but slurred (although he still said intelligent things). The last image I recall is him leaning wearily against a wall in a hallway somewhere and then, finally, falling straight back onto the floor. No one lifted him up, although I remember hoping they would. They seemed to know something I didn't.

In Pat Wallace's English class freshman year, we read Rita Dove's Thomas & Beulah, her paean to her grandparents, then wrote poems about our own families. I wrote one each about Gommy and Poppa, and considered those pieces among the best poetry I'd ever been able to create (a relative measure, to be sure). I tried to find Poppa's poem this morning, sat on my bedroom floor and dug through files, journals, folders. I came across papers, my thesis, every film analysis I wrote in four years of college--but no poem. I will keep looking. I'm convinced it's here, and in the absence of anything else to cling to, I need it.

Poppa was imperfect, sometimes deeply flawed, but still our cornerstone, deeply loved and (sometimes achingly) admired. I love him, and fretfully miss him, and only wish I had the chance to tell him so before he left.

Hausbrandt

Early morning August 4, we're zipping through the streets of Beziers after our nuit at Municipal Camping when I spy a sign. It appears to be a coffee pot about to gulp down a cup of coffee, but that seems too surreal to be so, and I don't really get a good enough look to be able to confirm or deny my first impression. I pass it off as the fruit of a mind fatigued, a vision born of my not-yet-croissant-filled stomach and caffeine-less veins.

But then we stop for gas, and across the street, swinging from the front of a shuttered cafe, is the sign again. J fuels up as I grab my camera and traverse the parking lot for a better look.

And, well, damn. Sure enough. Hausbrandt coffee advertises its wares with an anthropomorphic coffee pot that's either self-referential or cannibalistic (or perhaps both). I snap a few photos and head back to the Golf.

But that's not to be the last of it. The sign shows up again on a cafe in a Ljubljana alleyway, then on sugar packets resting in wait on a table when we stop for coffee, then again as we round a corner. It's just there, its subject smiling blisfully as it tips its head (?) back and prepares to drink deeply. Of itself.

Disappointments of home

My return to the US in the wake of my first trip to Europe--Canterbury, 1990--left me reeling with (literally) sophomoric misery. Everything American seemed dull, embarrassing, shoddy at best. Subsequent returns from subsequent trips have been easier (after a semester in London I ached for nothing more than a comfortable couch, my friends back home, and a bag of proper American pretzels), but the feeling that our fellows abroad are onto something we aren't has stayed with me.

While our president vaguely admits that global warming is an actual problem but follows that with the defensive stance that Americans should do nothing to change their ozone-wrecking ways, our European brethren drive ever-smaller cars and pay a premium for their petrol.

While we're almost willful in our waste of water, those across the sea (and, I'm told, the Japanese before them) have created toilets that one can half-flush or stop mid-flush, using only enough water to get the job done.

I won't even start on Europe's relative lack of chain restaurants, or the superior quality of their fast-ish food across the board, or the fact that a proper coffee is taken casually at a bar and does not cost a small fortune--all too hackle-raising to get into.

There are annoyances: diesel is pervasive, smoking is (mind-blowingly, to the American mind) permitted everywhere, and the toll system on the autoroutes is incomprehensible at best. But for the most part, I'm still left with the impression that despite the US's bluster and overweening pride, our quality of life doesn't match up to that of Europeans. There's a good deal we could learn if only, for a few moments, we'd shut up and listen.

European haze

I have recently escaped from a souvenir shop across from the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. A family (not sagrada, to be sure) of Danes (or their ilk--I didn´t hear enough to be sure) had me more or less pinned to a display shelf as they surrounded me in order to get a better look at the tchotchkes on offer.

We will soon endeavor to escape from these madding crowds, from the umbrella vendors and the ponchoed tour groups and the buses belching up diesel fumes. Barcelona is an amazing city, but this is not the best perspective from which to see it. (Standing hunched under an awning last night while the city exploded in rain and the street lights snapped off was a better, if still imperfect, vantage point.) I want quiet alleyways and restaurants that aren´t used to tourists and sites where the queue to enter does not snake around the corner (no queue at all would be even better). That´s the afternoon goal.

I´m losing track of days--was yesterday morning Bize Minervois? When did we leave Nice? Where in our journey did the Pyrenees fall?--but in a pleasant way. One more week of these shape-shifting days, these unstructured hours, and then it´s back to caring about the time. But I don´t need to think about that yet, not while there´s still the chance to let the days come and go as they will.

And this one, celui-ci, is not nearly done.

New, new frontiers

Although I recall memorizing at a tender age the words to my Dad's Beatles and Barry Manilow albums (quite a selection there, Pops) and the songs constantly flowing (check that--oozing) from my Mom's favorite Easy Listening station, my first musical love was Journey.

Greg and I had LPs and 45s when we were younger, but those were mainly filched from our parents (with the possible exception of Paul Hardcastle's '19', which came to us in mysterious ways). The first record I actually owned, presented to me (along with a Garfield nightgown) on my 11th birthday, to my immense pleasure, was Journey's Frontiers.

I remember this album well: the band members in a weightless, space-suited circle on the back cover; the vaguely creepy, Metropolis-esque face on the front; the lyrics printed out in miniscule type on the sleeve. I listened to it for the first time (although I had, of course, heard chunks of it before on RI104) the moment I got it, there in Aunt Connie and Uncle Vinny's living room. Glenn, my impressively musical cousin, slid the record out of its cover, held it (like you were supposed to) between his palms, barely touching it, and lowered it onto the player.

And there it was: 'Separate Ways,' that timeless plea of heartbreak and promise, swelling out into the room. Glenn turned up the volume; my 11-year-old self sat down on the couch and reveled in the music, the words, Steve Perry's soaring voice giving shape to a conundrum I could not, at that age, have truly understood (although that understanding would come some years hence).

It was bliss, and I was hooked. I don't think anything else touched my record player for the remainder of the summer and well into the fall.

As with so many things we adore early on, I eventually moved away from Journey, tucked Frontiers into Dad's record case and more or less forgot about it as I turned to (in approximate chronological order) the illicit pleasures of Purple Rain, Top 40, Bruce Springsteen, and, come the angst-soaked days of high school, as much moody Brit Pop as I could digest.

And although it's easy--almost too easy--to make fun of Journey these days ('What Would Journey Do?' is a prime example of the ease of the jest), there's still something in me that surges at the memory of that summer day, those notes, those words. My adoration of music, my belief that it said to the world things I was feeling but couldn't say myself, may have been established well before the needle hit the record, but they were reconfirmed, forever confirmed, the moment Journey filled the room.