Month: January 2012

This top was in a shop where everything costs a million dollars so I cannot have it, but I do love it.

Yesterday I ended up having one of those days where I worked for ten hours straight on one small section of the book, and didn’t get it where it needs to be. I feel like watching tv for ten hours to balance it out.

Meditate. (Done.)
Blog. (Doing.)
Start in on book edits. (Must do.)
Swim. (Could skip and do an at-home exercise.)
Get cat food and other food supplies. (Really should do.)
Work on Verdi Requiem. (Must do.)
Start work on taxes. (Really must do.)
Find a day job. (Really really must do.)

Finney and Buddy’s to-do list:

Eat. (Done.)
Nap. (Doing.)
Bite someone. (Really should do.)
Break something. (Really should do.)
Nap. (Must do.)
Eat. (Must do.)
Strategically place self on couch to make it impossible for Stacy to move or reach the remote. (Really really must do.)

I get a lot of email from the friends and family of murder victims, due to my book about the NYPD’s cold case squad, and the blog I maintain specifically to help people (and to try to sell books too, of course). They ask for help, I tell them what to do and most of the time I never hear from them again. I wonder how they made out, but I realized I already know.

When I was working on my book I studied the numbers very carefully, had a statistician check my work and wrote the following: “An unsolved murder has up to 5 – 10% chance of being cleared within one year after it goes cold. After two years, that chance decreases to less than 1%.”

So the chances are that all those people who have contacted me over the past six years still don’t have any more answers than they did when they first wrote me.

An old-time barber shop on 11th Street that I pass by every Tuesday on my way to choir practice.

There’s this horrible gap between my temporary teeth and my gum line, which you can see when I smile wide. At least three people fainted from the sight of it on my way home. One child burst into tears. And this dog barked and barked and barked. I think he was trying to warn everyone. It won’t be fixed for another week and a half, so if you see me, cross to the other side of the street.

I can still sing, however. I may look like a monster, but my voice is unchanged.

One World Trade Center, rising up and up. This picture accurately captures my mood for the past two days. Dreary. Hopeless. Mostly about my book. I just can’t get it to where I want it to be. But I met with my agent and now I feel ready to try again. For the billionth time. Hope has returned. Thank you, Betsy.

I’m now reading New York Diaries in order, cover to cover, experiencing it as Teresa Carpenter intended. I’m getting glimpses of the moon through a telescope in 1844; the anxious thoughts of a young, single girl worrying about losing her beauty, and death, and never being loved; Michael Hirschorn’s scathing account of a book party (thank god I know for a fact that I wasn’t there); Theodore Roosevelt’s head-over-heels joy of having found love; 150 year old complaints about immigrants that could have been written today, (except even in the exasperation there’s more compassion).

There’s a number of “could have been written today” entries and I’m sure it’s no accident. In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “If even so-called left-wing intellectuals are so proud of the boxes of condensed milk their government dispenses to us, ” and of course it made me think of those yellow boxes of food we dropped on Afghanistan, which, if I’m remembering correctly, were filled with pork and fed to their animals. Everyone meant well (mostly).

This is my kind of history book. If I was a history teacher, I’d assign it.

In one of the entries I worked on, a police inspector wrote about catching a run away slave named Henry Long and returning him to his “owner” in Virginia (the Fugitive Slave Act had recently passed). This is the jail known as the Tombs, where Long was taken.