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[From the Parapsychology Foundation.]

SEATS FOR THE JUNE 6TH LECTURE GOING FAST . . .
Walter Meyer zu Erpen of the Survival Research Institute of Canada will deliver his talk entitled Do Tables Tilt, Turn and Float? Table Levitation Phenomena, 1850-2006 on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at the New York Academy of Science in New York City as part of the Parapsychology Foundation’s Perspectives Lecture Series. An historian and archivist by profession, Meyer zu Erpen has participated in a Spiritualist study group since 1998. The group has experienced strong psychokinetic phenomena in good light. Through video clips and still photographs, he will illustrate the history of physical phenomena in the seance room from the notorious 19th-century Italian medium Eusapia Palladino through the ingenious induction methods of Kenneth Batcheldor to the Hamilton Group and on to the group in which he sits, among others.

The New York Academy of Sciences is located at 2 East 63rd Street in New York City (just off Fifth). The lecture will start promptly at 7:00 p.m. The check-in desk at the back of the 4th Floor Meeting Room will open at 6:30 p.m. LAST MINUTE RESERVATIONS ARE BEING ACCEPTED. Call 212-628-1550 or e-mail to: office@parapsychology.org to reserve. Donation is $15 at the door ($13 for Psychic Explorers Club Members). For more information on both of these lectures, and how to get to the lecture hall, go to the following website address: http://www.parapsychology.org/dynamic/050200.html.

Although many are disappointing, they’re so quaint in their fakeness, I love photographs of the paranormal. These are of British medium Colin Evans, and they were taken in 1938 with infrared film. It’s not obvious to me how he’s doing it!

I was worried that going on and on about my birthday was going to make everyone want kill me, but now I’m glad I did. I woke up to all this nice email, and comments here, and an IM from the guy I had fallen in love with bigtime, but it didn’t work out alas, in fact, he broke my heart worse than ANYONE EVER, but apparently I’m doomed to love the guy until the day I die (typical, right?) because it was nice to wake up to an IM showing he remembered and was thinking of me. (No need to point out I’m a loser. I KNOW.)

I go to the gym and come back and my best friends on Echo completely surprised me with a gift!! I had recently re-discovered these pearl stud earrings my sister-in-law Karen picked out for me and I was wearing them everyday, I loved them so much. Then I lost one down the shower drain. I unscrewed the whole thing, checked the trap but it was GONE. I couldn’t believe it! I was so forlorn. But my first gift of the day was a new set of pearl earrings from my Echo friends!!

See!! (Sorta!!)

Then, I went to meet my friends Emily and Clive’s new baby Gabriel (who of course was gorgeous, and if you saw Emily and Clive you’d be like, “yeah, well, of course they have a beautiful child, hello”), and they had cake and raspberries waiting for me!! So this amazing chocolate cake was the first thing I ate today.

More to come …

4:39PM

I’ve been opening up cards and email. I love it! Thank you everyone who sent me cards and email. My plan was to go a couple of galleries and maybe to MOMA. Forget MOMA. But now I’m feeling too lazy to go the galleries. But if I don’t, all I will have done for my birthday is SHOP.

Which reminds me, I went to get a new pair of my favorite brand of jeans and I went down to size 0. ZERO. Happy birthday, Stacy!!

4:50PM

I just realized I can use my isight camera to get another picture of my earrings, and less blurry.

4:57PM

Ohmygod. Mr. Worst-Heart-Break-EVER sent me a generous gift! Sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh. Sigh to the infinity power.

5:16PM

Okay, the galleries all close at 6PM, so I am forced to extend my birthday until Tuesday, when they open again. I had already decided to extend it until tomorrow because Howard and I mutually agreed to change birthday dinner tonight to lunch tomorrow, because lunch is more fun.

5:51PM

Ohgod. I looked and I missed the boxing class I was considering, too. So, I ran out, got a fruit smoothie and a slice of pizza and for my birthday I’m going to watch the movie Shaun of the Dead, which I have already seen at least ten times, but apparently I will never tire of it, and I will laugh at all the jokes like I’ve never heard them before.

I have gifts to open! And I’ve got more coming because I have two birthday dinners coming up!! Here are the gifts I have left to open. The pile to the left are the gifts I gave myself. The SIZE ZERO jeans, and a couple of tshirts.

By Monday I should be normal. I swear. But today is the day that I talk about the fact that I still have no idea what I’m going to do tomorrow for my birthday. My favorite suggestion is “do something you’ve never done before or learn something new.” I still like those ideas but the problem is, I have a lot of faults, but not doing things I want to do and not learning new things are not among them.

I was trying to think of a new place to explore for old archives. I love going through basements, attics, closets and old file cabinets that no one has looked in years or decades. My first real job after college was working as a photographer for the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They let me look around there, and I found a collection of old glass plate negatives in a closet. No one knew they were there or what was on them, so I started making prints from them in my spare time. The best was a picture of Halley’s Comet from 1910. Pictures of the comet from 1910 are, of course, the first pictures in existence. I gave all my copies away, damnit.

I found a picture of Einstein. I don’t know who he is standing with. There were no records with the plates.

Compare that to a picture I took of M. K. V. Bappu of the India Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore, standing with George Field, who was the director on the Center. I feel like one photographer in a long line of photographers who took pictures of visiting dignitaries. Note how the visitors look happier than the hosts.

Sadly, Bappu died unexpectedly on August 19, 1982, just a few days after his 50th birthday. Oh god.

Here’s another print from that collection from the closet. I don’t know who these men are or where this was taken. The scanner cut off a little on the right, but I’m too lazy to re-scan.

So, what to do, what to do. Things I’m mulling over:

– Find new place to explore (running out of time, this kind of thing takes preparation).

– Go to the drumming gigs.

– Ask Howard to lift my bed so I can go through what I’ve stored underneath. (I’ve got a bunch of stuff stored in the space underneath my platform bed, but I can’t lift it myself to get it.)

– Go to a boxing class. Or, start learning a new language or a new instrument.

– Walk around the entire perimeter of Manhattan.

I can’t think of anything else. It’s official. I no longer have any imagination.

Last night I went drumming on the West Side Highway, across the street from the Hudson River. A practice I started although no one is this photo except the head of the band (Manhattan Samba) is aware of that.

I wrote about this two books ago. Actually, there’s a nice synchronicity to me drumming last night. I learned to drum in response to turning 40. It was too loud to practice in my apartment so I would practice down by the river and annoy everyone there. (Most of them were very nice about it, especially the construction workers, which I wrote about. It was a sweet story.) One day I brought Ivo there to help me with patterns I was having trouble with. Now he holds classses there in the warmer months. It’s so nice to drum outside.