Pulling a Bilbo Baggins
So, it's my birthday. I've gifted myself with a Zelda haircut. I'm going to a party tonight that is only about 15% birthday-related, so I figured it would be tacky to wait til then and ask for everyone's attention to make my big announcement that I'm moving to Chicago in a month. It's not really my party, see. And I'd just end up quoting Bilbo's birthday farewell speech from The Lord of the Rings. I sure love an excuse to say "eleventy-first," but his birthday's September 22nd, not the 23rd. God, why do I KNOW that?
San Francisco: five years is too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable...hobbits. I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.
*vanishes*
Labels: California, memoir
Last Day
I'm going home tomorrow, so I felt the need to spend all day aimlessly wandering the city. Nothing monumental, just a long walk from park to park, wilting in the heat. Five weeks far away from home have taken their toll on me. I can't possibly look at another painting or discover where one more subway train leads. I want to hole up in my own room and refuse to learn anything for a few days. And for the love of god, I need a haircut, and about fifteen showers.
I was in the market for comfort food, so I took myself out for some curry off 23rd Street. They played "The Sloop John B" on the stereo, and though this has been the best rather than the worst trip I've ever been on, I sipped my beer, sank into the bench, and thought, "ain't it the god damn truth."
One last little jaunt led me to 23rd and Fifth to see the Flatiron Building. Tired or not, I can't say no to Mister Daniel Burnham. If you're like me, you love to throw around antiquated phrases like "twenty-three skiddoo," whether or not you can find a suitable context for them, let alone understand them. Legend has it, this one originated with the Flatiron Building, whose odd shape creates a wind tunnel on 23rd Street. Back around the turn of the (20th) century, men would hang around in the street to catch glimpses of women's ankles, exposed by the wind, and the cops would tell 'em to skiddoo.
I've also read that the phrase actually originated in Chicago. Dammit, New York, you can't own
everything. In any case, my 23rd year is going to skiddoo this week, so I'll let it mean that for the moment. Looks like it can mean whatever you want, really:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_skiddoo.
Anyway. Much to the city's credit, it's got a Lego rendering of Chewbacca, which I saw in F.A.O. Schwartz today.
Everything in the store cost about $500, except the life-size stuffed moose, which was something like $1,500. I am bewildered by this place. I think I need one of those classic I <3 NY t-shirts modified to say "I honestly feel sorta indifferent toward NY."
Don't listen to me. I've been on the road too long.
San Francisco, open your golden gate.
Labels: travel
Coney Island
We went to Coney Island the other day, but everything was closed. Just a seaside town they forgot to close down...
You couldn't even shoot the freak that day.
We wandered up and down the boardwalk and listened to the ferris wheel creak in the breeze. It sounded like the whole apparatus was about to come crashing down.
Then we shared a funnel cake we got from Phillippe. Here comes a special boy!
And then we took a stroll along the beach. I traced Lori's name in the sand, tried to walk in a huge set of footprints made by someone with a stride about three feet long, and we watched an eerie man in a suit walk along the shore at breakneck speed, briefcase in hand.
Labels: travel
Gotham photos
Central Park with our buddy Joe:
The Museum of Natural History:
I'm not taking many but what I've got, you can find
here.
Labels: travel
Red Letter Day
Nobody close to me was particularly affected by 9/11, but as an American I figured I would be remiss to ignore the five-year anniversary. So yesterday I set out to Manhattan to visit Ground Zero and pay my respects. I had trouble finding my way to the site (the grid system starts a ways north of it) but the sight of a crowd of protestors in shirts reading "9/11 was an inside job" (conspiracy theory much?) helped me get my bearings. Just turning the corner to see that gaping hole in the skyline up close made me shiver up and down. You can get a closer look into the pit from the Path station that runs through it. Hard to imagine that this empty space was the site of such a recent major calamity. I'd opted to go in the afternoon to avoid the crowds who showed for the four-hour morning ceremony (besides, I've no business taking up space that belongs to families directly affected by it all), so the scene wasn't too chaotic. There were policemen and firefighters all over the financial district in their dress uniforms, and bells were ringing out across the street.
My next stop for the day was the city library, where I'd intended to look for ghosts in the stacks and maybe take a photo with the lions out front. I got off the train at Grand Central, which became an event in and of itself. The building is massive and ornate and I couldn't get enough of it. The friggin' ceiling has golden constellations on it. I just think of the way I have to hold my breath through the entire lobby when I'm in the Transbay Terminal at home (holy mother of urine stench!). Did the Transbay Terminal ever look like this? No, sir, it did not. I could hang around there all day - except I was library-bound. But since I am a genius at event planning, I failed to look up the hours before setting out, and lo and behold, the library's closed on Mondays. But it really didn't matter, as there was a sharp-dressed choir standing on the steps before a big audience. They started their set with the national anthem and the director announced that they were the one and only Boys' Choir of Harlem. Effing class act, all the way. Accidental outdoor concerts make my world brighter. You don't even know. A crazy barbershop-style mens' chorus sang a set in between the boys' choir's two sets. Hey, what's funnier than Elvis? Forty old men in khakis pretending to be Elvis!
I had some time to fill before hopping the train to the Village, so I stopped by the Soup Nazi for some lobster bisque, which came with a truffle and was so good I felt drunk after eating it. Then it was off to the New School's graduate program in writing for a presentation and panel discussion by writers who'd respectively authored historical, fictional, and poetic accounts of 9/11. How chilling to hear personal accounts. It's not like seeing that TV footage. It suddenly became real for me.
Labels: travel
New York City
I suppose I should spill some deets about New York. But New York moves too fast for blogging. Too fast, sez I! I arrived on Tuesday at LaGuardia and naturally fell into a state of overwhelmed confusion for a couple of days before I adjusted to the pace of the city. No bean fields here, that's for sure. I'm now a bit uncertain about the state of air travel in this modern age of ours, as the first suitcase to arrive on the luggage carousel was actually somebody's keychain. Huh.
Predictably enough, my first interaction with a New Yorker consisted of a cabbie yelling at me with the insistence that the freeway exit I needed didn't exist. Ah, stereotypes.
I've been all over the place already. Today Lori and I walked across the Queensborough Bridge to wander around Central Park, bought our weight in Jelly Beans, nearly took a rowboat out on the crystal, um,
green water, saw the Dada exhibit at the MoMA, and now we're getting ready to rock out in Williamsburg. There will be dancing and mayhem.
Yesterday was my historical walking tour day, when I hung out with a guy I knew in high school and hadn't seen since way back when. Quite the time warp.
We're listening to Sinatra and "New York, New York" just came on. I should get back out there.
New York, I like ya.
Labels: travel
Family reunion style
So, we threw a bash for Grandma and toured the family farm land in Iowa yesterday. It amazed the four of us in my generation to no end that this is our origin and that our parents, as worldly as they are now, come from teeny tiny Percival Iowa...
Freeman Farms' grain bins for storing corn.
My dad and his sisters.
We grow soybeans.
My sister is
really excited about soybeans. Really.
Pinups don't wear flipflops, Nem.
View the full album here. Now I'm off to the exact opposite place from this: NEW FREAKING YORK! (cue theme from
The Muppets Take Manhattan).
Labels: memoir, travel
Then and Now
Here are a few pictures from the last time we all got together, and a few from this weekend:
And here, our great grandfather John Conradi arrives in America from Germany in 1910:
Labels: memoir, travel
Judy and the Dream of Horses
We must have fallen into a Lisa Frank trapper keeper somewhere along the gravel road that cut across the prairie this evening. Past the dry creek bed and away over the bean field we could see two rainbows, one of them heart shaped. But the real thrill of the evening came at sunset as we passed a broad, empty expanse of grass bordered by a wooden fence.
Each of the three of us cousins hails from multiple big cities, so as we bitched about the cosmopolitan things we miss now that we're here, we weren't prepared to see six horses gallop to the fence to meet us. Their silhouettes stood dark and majestic against the setting sun and our conversation instantly ended as they ran furiously toward us and stopped mere yards away to stare back. A full-body nimbus glowed around the dun-colored one, who continued to return my gaze even after the others had lost interest and returned to grazing.
We turned to head back to the house before nightfall when the countryside would plunge into absolute darkness. I suppose it goes without saying that we had no more complaints to issue about Nebraska.
Labels: memoir, travel
Omaha, NE
The truth is out: all you have to do is wander around an upscale shopping district in a small town wearing a backpack the same size and weight as yourself, and everyone will stare at you like you're a space alien.
Sniffly goodbyes were said in Chicago after a day roaming the Loop and an evening of me interrogating everyone around about the specifics of snow survival. I still don't think I understand how the whole "winter" thing works. Sounds like living on the moon all winter, the way you can't leave the house without all that equipment on. But I bet it's beautiful, just the same.
Once I got sick of lugging my backpack around Omaha's Old Market district, I found a park with a huge dancing fountain and sat in the grass for a few hours. The prairie sky has always freaked me out a bit when I'm out here. It's so immense and blue that I feel overwhelmed when I look at it, as if the ground beneath me is rushing up to meet it.
We stayed up til three in Grandma's basement shooting pool and speaking of our scandalous past. I've been back to Nebraska a couple of times in the last decade, but this full cast of relatives hasn't gotten together here since 1994 when our beloved patriarch died - four of us cousins, two aunties and my dad, and of course Grandma. (minus my mom. Hi mom.) I'm extremely curious to see baby cousin again, since none of us have seen her since she was running around in a neon unitard, covered in ice cream, and insisted on sleeping with her tap shoes and swimsuit on. I think she also bit one of us. Now that we've respectively gone between seven and twelve years since seeing her, she's gone off to college, grown to be maybe six feet tall, and is modeling.
I'll post some pictures eventually. Gotta go wash that Chicago bar smoke out of my clothes. UGH.
Labels: travel
