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I was downtown yesterday for a meeting to discuss the picnic for the 9/11 volunteers, first responders and recovery workers, and I was amazed with the progress they’re making on One World Trade Center (aka the Freedom Tower, but I hate hate hate hate hate that name).

My pictures don’t capture the sheer beauty of it. Christ it’s going to be stunning. One World Trade Center, will you marry me?

Another view.

No, I don’t know why I’m watching the Bachelor Pad. I’m not quite wallowing in self-loathing enough? Except there’s a happy ending.

But first, that horrible scene with Jake asking Kasey and Vienna for help. Jake is a former loathsome bachelor (loath is the theme today) who proposed and later broke up with Vienna, who I originally didn’t think was loathsome. There was a televised post break-up interview with the two of them and Jake came off like a total pompous, sexist ass jerk and Vienna came off as not very bright and unattractively child-like, but she had my sympathy. Vienna is now with Kasey, a former contestant on The Bachelorette. Kasey was the most embarrassingly clueless person in Bachelor history, it would take too long to explain, but his idea of romance is stuck in the toddler phase. No, maybe grammar school, after you’ve watched a little more tv and have this fantasy idea of life and women and relationships, but you haven’t kissed a girl yet.

Jake is not doing well on the Bachelor Pad, no one likes him, and so he went to Kasey and Vienna for help. I don’t like Jake, (or Kasey or Vienna) but Kasey and Vienna not only said no it was literally like watching children on the playground. They reveled in saying no as only angry little children would, calling out “No one likes you,” after Jake accepted their answer and left. No grace or dignity. All that was missing was the “nyah-nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah.”

The whole show was like that. They pulled stunts like lining everyone up and then asking them to throw eggs filled with paint at the person they were the least attracted to. It was emotionally painful and the eggs hitting your back hurt as well. I kept hoping for someone to say, “What are you kidding me? NO.” It was a tv version of the Milgram experiments. Everyone just did what Chris Harrison told them to do. I could go on, every moment was lower than the next, but I want to skip to the end, when Jackie was voted off.

Jackie and Ames are a couple. I love Ames. Ames shouldn’t be on this show. Why is he on this show? He is such a thoroughly decent human being. The truth is, there must be something wrong with him if he’s on this show, but I’m certain it’s not something loathsome. Jackie was voted off, and Ames was walking back after saying goodbye to her. He had this sweet look on his face and it was like watching a kitten walk back into a pit of hungry vipers and spiders, when suddenly he smiled, waved at everyone and ran back to the limo and jumped in and left the show with Jackie.

I watched it twice. A genuinely nice moment after all that ugliness. It’s like people like Kasey and Vienna are not even members of the same species. Good for you Ames.

This bird was making a lot of wonderful noise in the window the other day.

I’ve been reminiscing about my undergraduate days at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. My interest was photography, but in the beginning you have to try other things, and I loved everything I tried: painting, drawing, sculpture, wood-carving, making furniture. I wish I had saved something, anything at all, but I am the opposite of a hoarder. Nothing makes me happier than paring down my possessions. But I’ve been a little too toss-happy throughout my life, alas. I wish I had one measly drawing to show for it all.

I console myself with how quickly possessions become meaningless after you die. A couple of generations and no one knows who you were. Quick! Name your great grandparents! Unless you’re the genealogist of the family you probably can’t. My paintings and drawings, had I saved them, would just end up in the garbage or in a flea-market somewhere.

But for now it would be nice for me, when I remember what a great time I had, to be able to look over at a painting, and remember the classroom, the smells, my clothes spattered with oils and turpentine, the teacher I had a crush on.

Does Finney remember the mice of his past? Actually, I know he does. Occasionally he goes over to the stove, where he last saw a mouse a couple of years ago, and he sits and waits faithfully, as if the mouse might one day return. Every cat I have ever had does this. I do not discourage them. “That’s right Finney. You wait right there. This is a good use of your time.”

Sometimes I just can’t bear an unhappy ending. I started to watch The Changeling last night and it was quickly so upsetting I knew I couldn’t bear it if it got worse. I googled the story it was based on, the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, and mother of God, that is the worst story I’ve read in a long time. I immediately deleted The Changeling and watched 13 Going on 30 instead.

I think I’ve uploaded different versions of this picture before. Every time I walk up Broadway and see this view I have to take a picture of it. That’s the Chrysler Building of course, but to the right is the Grace Church spire, and to the left, that triangle thing, is one of the Zeckendorf Towers.

I don’t really need to go, but I’ve been researching coal mining and Gwilym Amos and the Orpheus Glee Club (now called the Orpheus Choral Society) and now I’m just curious to go to the place I’ve been immersed in for months. The mines are gone, but there are remnants. There’s also the Luzerne County Historical Society and the Anthracite Heritage Museum, and maybe I can uncover some more information. It’s just a little over three hours away.

If nothing else, maybe I can get a hold of a better picture of Gwilym Amos. This is a copy of a printout from a microfilm reel of a Welsh newspaper called The Druid (year 1924). He has descendants. Maybe they have something they’d be willing to let me scan.

“I cried many times. I’m still crying. I had a very hard life.” That’s from Growing up in Coal Country by Susan Campbell Bartoletti. I think Gwilym had a nice life though, mostly. His father on the other hand, not so much. According to Anthony Brooks, the Executive Director of the Luzerne County Historical Society, it took only a generation for the Welsh to get out of the mines.

So while William Amos may have been crying right until the very end, his son was probably singing.