Month: March 2007

I took this picture last weekend when Marisa and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Before I forget, I don’t know if everyone reads the comments section of this blog, but Molly posted the following in response to the cat comic. She was demonstrating how cat people talk and I just laughed at (and love) how universal it is. She’s really captured it:

“You are the BABY! You. Are. The. Baby. You are the teeny, tiny baby kitteh. Yes you are! Yes you are! Can I kiss your belly?”

Perfect, right? So, I’m going up to Court TV this afternoon to talk about cold cases. Every once in a while they want to talk to me about cold cases and this time I totally brainstormed two new ideas, neither of which involve me, but they are good ideas! I’m excited, but given how these things go, NOTHING WILL COME OF IT. But they’re at 42nd and 3rd, so I will take a nice, nostalgic walk back home. I will pass by where Horn & Hardart no longer is, and next to that, where Woolworth no longer is, and next to that, where Mobil no longer is. I worked for Mobil for five years and I will always be grateful to Mobil because they led me to my life now. They paid to send me to graduate school which led to me starting Echo which led to someone actually freaking paying me to write a book.

Thank you, you great big oil company, you! Oh! My one good Mobil story. Actually, I have two, but here’s one. Mobil’s inter-office mail was sent using the initial of your first name and then your last name. When I worked there someone high up in disaster recovery was named Stu Horn. So occasionally I’d get his mail and, as a result, the inside story on disasters around the world. I remember one from the Exxon Valdez oil tanker crash in 1989 (my last year at Mobil). I don’t remember many details now, actually, just that Exxon was not accepting all the help that was being offered, which I remember being amazed at at the time. There could have been a perfectly valid reason, I just remember being surprised. It was a terrible, terrible crash (of course I remember all the birds coated in oil) and you don’t need every bit of help you can get?

Oh wait. Maybe they already had enough, or too much, of whatever was being offered. I remember down at the Trade Center, everyone wanted to help, and there was only so much room and so thousands and thousands and thousands of people were turned away, and they had to find other ways to help.

In any case, I will take a nice long walk home, contemplating all the things that are no longer, and probably the fact that soon, I will be one of those things. I can’t help it! Who can avoid noting that?? I won’t dwell on it too much, but there it is!

American Idol Thoughts. What the hell?? Haley and Michael-Jackson-Level-Weird Sanjaya, and not Sabrina and Sundance (both of whom had problems, but still)??

Another photograph is missing! I don’t know where it went!

This is the enduring image of the sixties for me. I think I had a lighter with this picture on it (it’s from a Robert Indiana painting). It makes me happy, just looking at, although the time period was not all that great for me.

But I’m up to the sixties now with this book, and I’m researching LSD. Apparently all the parapsychologists were doing it! Okay, not all, but the people I’m writing about experimented with it a little, and really, who knew? It’s just bizarre, to me anyway, this cross-over in cultures. I’ve got letters from Huxley and other early experimenters, talking about all the other early experimenters, and mediums comparing their trance states to tripping! Can you believe it?

My American Idol thoughts for the day. I just do not like Antonella. Not only can she not sing, but she has this off-putting, entitled attitude. Last week it was comparing herself to Jennifer Hudson, and this week, when Simon tried to tell her the truth as graciously as possible, she was just prissy and dismissive in return. She’s pretty clueless, but unaware that she is clueless, and is unpleasant about it. Melinda is the best, but I want her to start owning her talent. I appreciate that we can’t change our self-image over night, if at all really, but I want her to stop acting amazed and grateful that someone hasn’t kicked her or something when she faces the judges.

Cats have incredibly accurate inner clocks. I knew it must be four o’clock because here are Finney and Buddy, hovering, as they always do every day when it gets close to 4 p.m., their feeding time. Look at those faces.

Finney: “Food, food, food, food, food, food. Hello? Are you still sitting there?? Do you not see what time it is? Food, damnit.”
Buddy: “What he said.”

And here is a cartoon, from the always fabulous and charming xkcd, which nicely explains this blog.

Oh God I love that. I’ve cracked up everytime I get to, “You’re a kitty!” Because every cat owner knows that we totally get that idiotic. It’s true.

I went out to the Transit Museum with my friend Marisa to see a friend’s sister read from her book, Underground Woman: My Four Years As a New York City Subway Conductor. She, Marian Swerdlow, was an incredibly charming reader, and a great storyteller. She started in 1982 and was among the first women hired as a conductor by the MTA. Someone asked her how the men treated her and of course I expected her to launch into a horror story, but she said great! They were taken aback at first, but not in a negative way and very quickly they decided they loved having women around. “They could come for work and find a date.” But aside from that perk, they were very helpful and welcoming, she said. You always hear about how badly people behave and alright already. We suck, I get it. But she spoke of them fondly and it was nice to hear for a change.

I went downstairs to see the old subway cars and it was depressing, because they were once so beautiful. I should have taken a picture of the cars now so you could see the difference. I mean, look at these trains. Gorgeous. I forgot to write down the years, but I’m pretty sure the first is from the 30’s, the next is from the 40’s and the last one was the 50’s. SAD.

I made the title of this post “Nice to Know I Wasn’t Invisible” to help myself remember that toward the end of my life I would like to write a book with that title. I was talking on Echo about high school and said this:

“I always thought I was mostly invisible in high school. I was distracted by so many things, and not very present. My parents divorced so I left school early and went to a job, had a boyfriend who was in college. But what little feedback I’ve gotten over the years has been mostly positive. Nice to know that I wasn’t invisible.”

The picture above is of the poet Robert Hayden. One of the characters in the always amazing Friday Night Lights quoted him last week. Then, whoever did the episode write-up on Television Without Pity said that the best Robert Hayden poem was Those Winter Sundays. I had to look and sure enough, it’s an unforgettable poem, and fits very nicely into my invisible theme. (I defy any dad to read it and not cry.)

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?