Month: January 2013

Whenever a show I love ends it’s a reminder of how insane I am, sobbing away for people who don’t exist. I know they’re not real, and yet here I am again, mourning the loss of fictional characters I have come to love.

It pained me to watch the season finale of Fringe, knowing at every moment that this was our last time together, the way Walter knew he would never see Peter or Olivia or Etta again.

I enjoyed having to look up the white tulip, because I’d totally forgotten the significance of the white tulip. But that’s it. No more things to look up and figure out. No more new adventures, no new tears, no new laughs. It’s over. Done. I can watch reruns the way I look at old photographs or home movies; artifacts with lovely memories that are all in the past. There will never be a new picture or new episode again.

Thank you creators, producers, writers, directors, actors, and everyone else who made Fringe what it was. Thank you especially, Walter/John Noble. I didn’t even like your character at first! Walter felt too goofy, too cartoon-y for me in the beginning. But it the end, you were the one who broke my heart the most, you LSD/licorice/music-loving … actually you loved a lot of things, didn’t you? But most of all you loved Peter. You portrayed love at its most genuine, perfect and imperfect, selfish and selfless. And this was echoed so beautifully by every character in the show, by Peter for Walter, between Peter and Olivia, I could go on and on, because every character at one point or another had to embody love. Damnit. Sobbing again. Thank you for making me feel crazy, tv people. No really, thank you.

Waiting for choir practice to begin. We’re working on Bach’s Mass in B Minor. A piece of music I love. I love a lot of things too, it turns out. I guess we all do.

I didn’t swell to no-longer-looks-human proportions, the pain was, well, thank god for pain-killers is all I’m saying. Right now I’m home and resting comfortably and using this an excuse to eat what I want and not move around a lot. I do long to look myself again though, and something they said about “gum placement” (ew, ew, ew) made me hope that when the swelling goes down my mouth might go a little back to normal. I’ve been slightly funny looking for so long and it gets depressing after a while.

I’m looking forward to the inauguration on Monday. The balls! The outfits! I love Michelle Obama’s new hair (of course I would since it’s similar to mine).

Someone set up this table on the street, next to an entrance to a subway. Not sure why. Maybe just to give smokers a nice place to have a cigarette?

I was researching the descendants of Abraham Lincoln the other day and I learned that Mary Todd Lincoln, Lincoln’s granddaughter, (Robert’s daughter, aka Mamie) was married to Charles Bradford Isham, and that she was what was referred to as a “choir mother” at Grace Church, where I now sing with the Choral Society of Grace Church.

I don’t technically know what a choir mother is, but I can guess. When Grace Church decided in 1892 to have a vested choir of men and boys, they also built a boarding school to house and educate the boys. I’m guessing the choir mother was there to look after and be a surrogate mother of sorts to the boys who were now away from their families?

I took this on the way to choir rehearsal last night. I love people. I love that someone painted this on a board built around a construction site. I’m also trying very hard not to think too much about the fact that in just a couple of hours I will once again be under the knife (oral surgery, related to a dental implant I may or may not be getting depending on how this second bone grft went, and I will find that out today).

I used to subscribe to People Magazine. There was a time when curling up with People was the highlight of my Friday afternoon. But at a certain point I aged out. I didn’t know half of the people they wrote about and it just wasn’t as fun for me anymore, and so I cancelled my subscription.

The other day however, I bought myself a copy to read as a treat after my oral surgery. When my surgery was postponed I went ahead and read it anyway.

What a complete let down. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know who they were writing about—even when I did the stories weren’t fun. I gave it some thought. What went wrong over there?

– Each piece is relatively shallow. There’s little research as far as I could tell. I get the distinct impression that whoever is left there hates their job and the subjects they are writing about. And they’re not given enough time or money to do a decent job. A quick google search, slap together a few photographs, done.

– Even more crucial, I think People Magazine has lost their juice. There were few stories about truly big stars and none seemed to have been done in cooperation with the stars they managed to cover.

– They used to do stories about all sorts of people who were the next big thing in other fields, like computers and new media. There was none of that. Instead there were human interest stories about people doing something heroic, which is fine, but they were written in an earnest, this-is-good-for-you way, and reading those pieces felt like homework.

I’m more focused on television than movies these days, but we are living in an unprecedented era of incredible, genius tv. There’s not just a few good shows, there are so many great shows I can’t watch them all even though I’m currently in-between books with plenty of spare time! There is no excuse not to have a magazine packed with coverage of all this mind-blowing talent that is out there. Come on!

No new pictures today. I took this around Christmas, because I was amazed to see a doll that looked so much like the person/character they are meant to portray.

Turns out, I’m having my oral surgery on Wednesday. This whole dental implant process has taken so long the NYU students that began the work are graduating in June and the implant still won’t be done. Ugh.

I took this picture of a construction site using my telephoto lens. I actually couldn’t really see what I was getting so I was happy to see the “Chris Heart Alex” graffiti later.