Even in season, cherries are still $4.99 a pound, a price that would give me pause, except: Hey, cherry season comes but once a year. If I don’t buy cherries in June, then I’m never going to eat cherries. And that would suck.
So there I was at dinner, popping cherries into my mouth while Mr. P enjoyed his cheese course, and I came across a perfect identical set of conjoined cherries.
When is a picture of a cherry potentially NSFW? Well, how about…
We were curious to know: One pit or two?
Posted in Miscellany.
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– June 15, 2009
After 2 solid days in New York City, I returned early this afternoon via a Greyhound bus. (Sure, Greyhound is more expensive than the other fledgling bus lines, but I’ll pay a premium to ride a bus with shock absorbers that’s not driven by a tiny Chinese man hunched over a wobbly steering wheel who is attempting to set a new land speed record on I-95 while converging upon every bump in the road.)
“I had such a nice time seeing my friends. We did and saw sooo many things!” I bubbled to Mr. P as I hunkered down over my mid-day repast of animal flesh with a knife and fork. “Look at my pictures!” I handed him my camera, which he turned on in play mode, only to find:
“What is this thing?” Mr. P demanded, giving me that Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do look.
“Oh, um, that was an interesting drawing that we saw at the MoMA,” I said lamely. Improbable but true, and the next photo served as evidence of my claim that we were in a museum, not in a seedy Men’s Restroom:
A lovely drawing, when compared to Penis Hat, although the material is a drag:
Besides the MoMA, I also have pictures of the first phase of the HighLine, the former elevated railway-turned-pedestrian park that just opened last week. I had read about this unique re-use project in the New York Times and was gratified to see that the rave reviews were justified. I loved promenading alongside the thematic landscaping with a relaxed crowd of curious pedestrians. So un-typical-New York.
Eariler, as we walked around the West Side of Manhattan in search of the High Line entrance, we spied a box of fixed seating that hangs over the street from the High Line. From a distance, the people looked like a moving billboard:
When we found the High Line, we discovered how relaxing it is to sit in the box and watch the traffic disappear into the dreary horizon. Sort of like watching a river flow, urban-style.
Posted in Trips.
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– June 14, 2009
According to the Global Language Monitor, a new word enters the English language every 98 minutes, meaning that the millionth word was added to English yesterday at precisely 5:22 (ET). (Incidentally, the Global Language Monitor is an “internet media analytics company” that only cares about global languages named English.)
And the millionth word is… Web 2.0, defined as “the next generation of web services.” Wait, I thought Web 2.0 is this generation. They’ve been using Web 2.0 for years. In any case… how bloody wonderful! Welcome to the madness, Web 2.0!
According to Paul J.J. Payack, the sole force behind GLM, a word must make 25,000 appearances in a global print and electronic media, the Internet, the blogosphere, and Twitter (Twitter?!) in order to be considered a legitimate English word. This makes it all sounds very scholarly until you look at some of the recent entries that he has allowed in the English language :
While most language experts agree that it’s impossible to count the number of words in the English language, let alone deduce the exact time that a word has entered the vernacular, Paul J.J. Payack, well, agrees. “It’s always an estimation,” he said. “It’s like the height of Mount Everest is an estimation. The height of Mount Everest has changed five times in my lifetime because as we get better tools, the estimates get better.”
I think I just realized what “shovel ready” means : pseudo-scientific findings that some academic nutjob foists upon an uncaring public while admitting it’s total bullshit.
Posted in In the News.
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– June 11, 2009
I discovered the foreign language section of the town’s public library and took my time perusing the French shelf. It was like flipping through a time capsule of linguistic ambition, funded in irregular spurts by whatever budget allocation deemed call number 440, “Romance languages French,” worthy of attention. The oldest relic was a U.S. military-issued French drill book from the 1950s. I shuddered as I turned its yellowed pages, imagining the harsh, clipped tones of a drill sergeant barking out conjugations:
“To assassinate, indicative present! Je assassine! Tu assassines! Il assassine! Nous assassinons! Vous assassinez! Ils assassinent! To bomb, conditional present! Je bombarderais! Tu bombarderais! Il bombarderait!…”
In the 1960s and 1970s, the tone of the books shifted from repetitive brain-numbing drills to whimsical cartoons, with illustrated scenes of, say, families walking through the streets of Paris and querying the natives: “Où est la Tour Eiffel?” And once they reach the Eiffel Tower, they ask: “Où peut-on acheter des billets?” And once they get to the top, they say: “C’est magnifique!”
Then came the 1980s and 1990s, the era of the workbook. These books promised practice but left library-goers frustrated, with exercises that begged to be filled out but remained perpetually blank. Anyone serious about learning French had already amassed their own stack of workbooks at home, complete with half-hearted scribbles from one or two enthusiastic attempts.
The book with the most appeal turned out to be a beginner’s French textbook from 1997 called Discovering French Bleu (Première partie). I totally clicked with the cover:
I mean, look at the size of that sandwich! Mon dieu! I wonder if the English textbooks for French schoolchildren feature photos of English-speaking children with head-sized hamburgers.
The level is a little below me, but it never hurts to review the basics, like the meaning of zut:
And other basic things that every French student should learn:
And words that they will never, ever forget:
Let’s all develop a healthy fear of the French!
Posted in Culture.
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– June 7, 2009
Walking home from the town library around 4 p.m., I passed the row of generic Asian restaurants, each one boasting Chinese/Japanese/Korean tri-fold menus displayed in weathered windows. The thick pre-storm air clung like a damp wool blanket, carrying with it an unmistakable, intense aroma of grilled fish. The smell was so pervasive it seemed to coat the sidewalk itself, creating an invisible wall of briny, smoky scent that pedestrians couldn’t help but notice.
And then, I heard it. The voice of a teenage girl, turning to her friend with the only summary that seemed to fit the moment:
“Um, it smells like epic fish.”
Posted in Massachusetts.
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– June 5, 2009
Well, blogging via WordPress is very strange, so strange that I’m typing this in TextEdit (the Mac version of Notepad) to avoid the distracting bells and whistles of the WordPress user interface. Writing is fickle. It does not adapt readily to a change in process. It’s not like when you start a new job, and everything is so shiny and new that energy, creativity, and enthusiasm abounds. It’s more like going to the toilet in a foreign country.
I remember when I made the transition from longhand to digital writing. I missed the feel of the pencil in between my fingers. I missed scratching out words and scribbling in new ones. I missed flipping through a hard-back notebook in search of a blank page, reading random snips and passages that I had jotted down in fits of inspiration. “It’s over,” I thought. “Writing is dead.” It only took a month before I was playing the keyboard like a concert pianist, and my handwriting began to disintegrate to resemble runes.
But if the move to WordPress is disorienting to me, I can only imagine how completely confused you are, Dear Reader. For when you read a blog, you are not just taking in words, but fonts, colors, spacing, layouts, and other formatting as well — the face for a writer’s voice. And suddenly, my face has morphed from something green and clodgy into something slick and grayscale.
I’ve been steadily porting over content from the old site into WordPress. This morning it took me about 45 minutes to do the entire month of August 2006, which was an eventful, photo-filled month. I don’t remember writing half of this stuff. What a little pip I used to be! Is it strange to say that I’m inspiring myself?
Posted in Miscellany.
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– June 4, 2009
Ummm… is this thing on?
This is my first post on WordPress. After 6 years of blogging via a primitive hand-coded HTML webpage, this is a little freaky. The WordPress user interface is sleek and crowded, with an array of buttons and links flanking the actual writing area, which accommodates 10 lines of text at one time. It’s intimidating. On the toolbar above the writing area, there is a button, “Show/Hide the Kitchen Sink.” I’m petrified to click it.
My words may have been fine and sweet for HTML, but this is WordPress. The big league.
So anyway, for 6 years I’ve really focused on blogging for the sake of writing. I viewed blog ornamentation like comments, tagging, trackbacks, etc. as being distractions to my writing. I can’t say exactly why I’ve changed my mind/given in and moved to WordPress, but I’ve known for a while that it was inevitable, and every month that I delayed the move resulted in another HTML page with a block of 28-31 separate pieces of my writing, hand-coded into my archives and essentially lost to posterity.
Might take me a while to get off the ground with WordPress. I would like to try to move my precious archives to this site and back-date each entry, a process that could take another 6 years. Stay with me.
Posted in Miscellany.
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– June 3, 2009
When most wives ask their husbands, “Honey, Saturday is your birthday, so what do you want to do?” the plans probably involve grilling enough meat to feed a small army, donning scandalous lingerie, or begrudgingly sipping light beer at a sports bar while hubby watches football with a chicken wing dangling from his hand.
Me, I found myself on an 11-mile, 7-hour forced march across two of New Hampshire’s 4000-footers: Mts. Whiteface and Passaconaway. It had been almost eight months since our last peak-bagging adventure, so I was keen to check a few more summits off our list. That said, 11 miles is a bold ask for hiking muscles that have spent the better part of a year in hibernation. By the time we reached the wooded summit of Mt. Passaconaway, I was toast. But this wasn’t a treadmill with a stop button, and sadly, the White Mountains don’t run a shuttle service.
The trek between Whiteface and Passaconaway is a grueling gauntlet, and I gamely tried to keep my grumbles to myself—after all, it was Mr. P’s birthday. That resolve only wavered when we scrambled up cliff-like boulders near Whiteface’s summit. Then, I allowed myself a solid whine.
When we finally made it back to the car, I thought the adventure was over. But no, not 1 mile from the trailhead, we saw a car stopped in the middle of the road and the occupants staring into the woods with cameras blazing. We slowed down, thinking a moose was going to jump in front of our car at any moment, but no!
Instead, we spotted two baby black bears climbing up and down a tree, crying out for their mother. They were impossibly adorable, their tiny forms silhouetted against the forest. I briefly entertained the idea of hopping out to snap a closer picture, but then reality (and the very real risk of mama bear’s wrath) set in. Mr. P, ever the tech-savvy adventurer, captured a quick video from the car and proclaimed it the best birthday gift ever.
And with that, we drove off, weary but content—another unforgettable birthday in the books, complete with peaks, scrambles, and bears.
Posted in 4000 Footers.
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– May 31, 2009
Posted in 4000 Footers.
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– May 30, 2009
Today is my 32nd birthday. Earlier this month, when I realized that my birthday would be falling on a Friday and that I’d have the day off, I was pleased. After all, going to work on your birthday is about as pleasurable as eating saltines for dessert. But now, at home alone, bereft of my co-workers’ companionship and staring down a mounting heap of consulting work, it’s a little depressing. I was sitting on our 3-season veranda, re-working some legacy Quark files when the leaves on the trees suddenly began to murmur with the sounds of a fresh light rain. Rain on my birthday? But, it never rains on my birthday!
Mr. P gave me my present this morning: Earrings, white gold and diamonds, small delicate hoops, elegant and understated. I hugged him and kissed him, very much gratified after last year’s present of nothing (he took my protestations of “I don’t need anything for my birthday” seriously, which will never happen again). Tomorrow is his birthday, so I lap up the spotlight while I can, for there will be no carry-over specialness. But I like that we have adjacent birthdays. We share them, like we share everything.
32. People who are older than me tell me “32 is young! You’re young!” But I am wise enough not to tell them, “You’re only saying that because you’re old!” The biological clock is ticking. Oh, it’s ticking. 32 is the age that a woman’s fertility begins its rapid decline, and each passing month sounds a new alarm. I eye mothers on the street and on the subway, and they all look younger than me. What have I done? Why did I wait? Biologically, 32 is way past prime.
The house needed cleaning, but I ignored it and went to yoga. Ommmm… I read the New York Times. I listened to French podcasts. I answered emails and phone calls. I ate hummus and tapioca pudding for lunch, and then wayyy too many Kinder sweets brought home from Germany. One of my loser stocks jumped 12% for seemingly no reason so I sold 200 shares and felt relief, then regret, and then nothing.
I wanted to hug my mother and father, and thank them for giving me life.
I studied my face in the mirror as I got ready to go out for dinner. It’s an older face, but no, it’s not old. I can still see a plumpness in my cheeks, a gleam in my eye, and a girlish pleasure in my smile. I can see who I was yesterday. I can see who I’ll be tomorrow.
Posted in Miscellany.
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– May 29, 2009
