So my unknown half-brother Patrick Kenny turns 17 today, which is a year older than I was when I learned of his existence. I wish him cake, and basketball, and long bike rides and good grades and a happy birthday and I wish our father will grow some balls one of these days and tell him he has a sister.
Families are convoluted and fascinating; they convince me to believe less and less in mortal existence, and, ultimately, I see that as a good thing.
The Burg has hit cyberspace, and my friend Jeau of the never-updated Photon Theory and assistant editor of The Onion (my God, when did he get that job?!) is in it, albeit briefly.
I want to make a bigger, better movie, but not about Williamsburg hipsters, and in my syndicated feature Jeau would have a much much bigger role. CONGRATS, MISTER RANDAZZO!
Well well, it seems our fearless leader can’t continue his reign of unrestricted fascism without a slap on the wrist from people with actual law degrees. My favorite part of this article about the outcome of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is the part where W. is quoted as saying, “I’d like to close Guantanamo. I also recognize that we’re holding some people that are darn dangerous.”
Two years ago, the court rejected Bush’s claim that he had authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers. In this follow-up case, the justices focused solely on the issue of trials for some of the men.The vote was split 5-3, with moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the court’s liberal members in most of the ruling against the Bush administration. Chief Justice John Roberts, named to the lead the court last September by Bush, was sidelined in the case because as an appeals court judge he had backed the government over Hamdan.
Thursday’s ruling overturned that decision.
Moment of yesterday: walking home from the T, a woman walking out of her yard made actual eye contact with me and actually said HELLO! I was so shocked, I had to pinch myself to realize I was in Dorchester, not friendly Philly. I like my new neighborhood.
Moment of the day today: A woman sat down beside me this morning on the train to work. Halfway through the 25-minute ride, she put her arm around me, kind of laying it on the top of my seat area. As we got closer to Central, her hand began lightly resting on my shoulder, perhaps by accident, perhaps not. Shocked, I sat motionless, then leaned forward a bit. I didn’t get any creepy vibes off her, but could only imagine what it must have looked like to the people around us.
Awkwardness is fascinating! Hence, this is my Moment of the Day.
“Hey, hey! Are you moving in?” Towny white woman, mid-50s, big Southie accent.
“Uh, yeah,” DD said, climbing out of our very large, obvious U-Haul truck.
“Cool! My name’s Maryann, that’s my driveway you’re parked in front of, but that’s ok. What’s your names? You’ll like it here, all the neighbors are really friendly…except for that house right there, they never talk to anyone, but they’re, you know, V-I-E-T-N-A-M-E-S-E…”
She made a squinty eye motion while mouthing the word “Vietnamese”, perhaps thinking she’d find some Irish neighbor solidarity. I didn’t have the heart to tell her DD chose this neighborhood based on his Vietnamese friends in the area and all the Vietnamese restaurants he loves, or explain that her Vietnamese neighbors have lived in this area for decades and probably don’t talk to her because (a) she doesn’t speak Vietnamese, and (b) she’s a bigot.
Regardless, our welcome at Savin Hill marks a far cry from Cambridge, where I received a whopping TWO hellos in the 9 months we lived there, and where the neighbors across the street congregated on their front porch to watch us move out, then walked past us, but never once said anything or even made eye contact. Wow.
Life is about boxes now. Tons of stuff stuff stuff. I can’t seem to focus, so I’m doing what I always do when I can’t focus on actual work: designing and redesigning my business card. It’s a mind-numbing activity, much like TV, only cooler cause there’s no commercials and you get to choose your own fonts. Try it.
Yesterday, driving back from La Interview, I stopped at a red light next to a mini-bus of some sort. Inside, I noticed the driver, an older man wearing a baseball cap who was beating real drum sticks on the steering wheel. He was really going at it. In fact, he seemed to be practising. I thought, here we are in traffic, and this bus driver is beating his heart out on the steering wheel. Is this what we do? We drive buses, or upload web articles, or answer phone calls or send emails during business hours, and in the brief pockets of downtime, we play a beat on the steering wheel, regardless of who’s looking? Because if that’s not how it is, that’s how it should be.
In other news, last night I tricked grimy E. into taking a bath by letting him pour in half a bottle of shampoo so it would seem like a bubble bath, then telling him he could go scuba diving in the bubbles to retrieve pennies i’d thow in while his eyes were closed. Ahaaa! I am so tricky!!
You could see hundreds of stars above Huron Village last night, including the Big Dipper, but only eight over Savin Hill. The meaning here is clear: Cambridge people pay not only for nicer cars, schools and houses, but also for a better aerial view, whereas Bostonians in Dorchester are stuck with smog and fewer parking spots on their narrower streets. Where is the justice? I bet the city of Cambridge had MIT grads engineer a giant, invisible fan that hangs motionless in the stratosphere, whooshing all the pollution down to Dorchester, over the set of Gone Baby Gone, much to the disappointment of Mister Affleck and his film crew, over all the Vietnamese restaurants and liquor stores, over the babies and the dogs and the gangs and the Irish immigrants, who are used to living a perpetually overcast existence anyway.
Whatever. I’m fine with seeing only eight stars. The sky glows a postmodern hazy orange, which is way more interesting than a plain old clear black sky in Cambridge. Sure.
We are 45% moved in.
Last weekend, a laborious three days lugging AV equipment through inches of mud and 50 degree rain in Burlington, Vermont, DD and I visually documented some really lame wedding for a bunch of waspy strangers. In a stunning show of GPCC (Gore-Predicted Climate Change), it’s now 90 degrees. In an effort to ignore our CCSA (Climate Change Shock & Awe) and instead celebrate the tropical feeling, we’re having one of our three rooms in the small but happy new apartment painted as I type, a cool Palm Leaf Green, which looks crappy online but glows like green tea ice cream when smeared on a wall. J’adore!
In between Home Depot and moving boxes, we stopped at Whitman’s Peaceful Meadows dairy farm for some ice cream and cow love. I think of anthrochica this week, in moving solidarity, and also in gratitude for the still photos of Holy Land she let me borrow for the 2-minute promo video I finally half-finished (it’s moderately passable, N., but still reflects the nausea and bad weather integral in its conception) for the Globe’s affiliate website, travelnewengland.com, though there’s no telling they’ll actually use it.
One small step for painting the new bedroom, one miniscule leap in my unpaid freelance video work. Lead thou me on…
Thanks to my old friend Ghastlymess, I’ve discovered LibriVox, a digital archive of audio recordings of books in the public domain. You can listen to tons of Joe Shmoes reading Chekov, if you want, even in Danish, if you speak it. Or you can read your favorite Yukio Mishima novel into your computer and upload the mp3 to LibriVox. Endless possibilities, people.
I am going to go to CRINGE in Brooklyn and read all my journals from the early 90s into a microphone so a bunch of people can laugh at my embarassing, uncathartic adolescence.
You should too!
It was WMD at first, then it was Saddam, then it was Zarqawi. Who will it be now? Who will be the new excuse for killing and detaining Iraqis? Or is it that an excuse is no longer needed- they have freedom to do what they want. The slaughter in Haditha months ago proved that. “They don’t need him anymore,” our elderly neighbor waved the news away like he was shooing flies, “They have fifty Zarqawis in government.”
Thank God for PBS. Who are John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, anyway? (Actually, they’re a fabulous grantmaking organization.) Seems like they fund all of public broadcasting these days, thanks to the administration’s current disdain for all things educational, progressive and unifying. Yay for the MacArthurs!
I saw two excellent documentaries on Point of View last night:
What I Want My Words To Do To You, about a women’s writing group in prison, and Chisolm ‘72: Unbought and Unbossed, a documentary about Shirley Chisolm’s run for the presidency in 1972.
Watch them! Shirley Chisolm is my new hero, seriously, and the producers of the prison doc are my new rolemodels. I really need to get a grant, one of these days, and go off to make The Great American Documentary about the 90,000 Burmese refugees Condy Rice is accepting into the U.S. in 2006. John D. and Catherine T., want to fund me? It’ll be awesome, I swear!
The first one had a brightness-related screen buzz and a CPU buzz. They graciously replaced it for me. After two weeks of perfection, the new MBP started having the CPU buzz, a weird error many MBP users have been experiencing. It goes away when you run Photobooth, but guess what: you can’t run Photobooth at the same time as FCP, else it’ll confuse the machine’s video outputs. Grrr! This has resulted in a big headache for me — figuratively AND literally — and I continue to wait, impatiently, for the next Firmware update to address this highly inconvenient problem.
I won’t even get into the heat problem, how you have to pad yourself with eight layers if you want to put your LAPtop on your LAP. Ironic, no?
Mr. Gates, if you pay my $3k credit card bill that I racked up purchasing your latest, highly-marketed machine, I’ll drop all the complaining. Deal?
I have nothing fascinating to report: my teeth are on their way to being beautiful, and the impacted canine is now about 65% in. Which is, if you haven’t been paying attention to our developing story, very exciting. They put a little hook on the bottom wire, slightly more to the right, upon which I now attach those dang elastics to the canine…but magically, voila! Changing the direction of its movement has yanked the tooth down significantly in only 24 hours. If this were a baseball game, my grounder would still be rolling in the outfield and I’d be in a mad dash halfway between second and third base on the first out of the eighth inning. Just, you know, to give you some perspective. Because I know how enraptured you all are with the story of my oral reconstruction. Yes, there will be an afterparty when I win the Series.
The end.
Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State was forwarded to me by my boss. It’s a pretty accurate summary of the incipient GOP-led downfall of our nation.
It feels like New Year’s. Not just the cold weather we had yesterday, but the feeling that comes with a birthday — like you can start over, if you want.
We went rock climbing, then had Japanese hotpot and Italian gelato. Today L. visits from San Fran. Next weekend, we begin the downsized move to Dorchester. The world is spinning, and I need book recommendations. Basta.
I was walking to the Harvard T this morning when a group of middle school kids on an obvious field trip walked past me. Passing the last two kids, one white, one black, the black kids says to the white kid: “Don’t ever trust white people!”
He said it loudly, while looking at me, so I’d hear it and react. Instead I looked at my shoes (is it my shoes?) — I cut the tops off my hightop Converse today, it looks a little silly — I looked at the metallic thermos I was holding, my raincoat, my skirt.
“DON’T EVER TRUST WHITE PEOPLE!” the kid shouted after me, again.
What did he want me to say? “Yeah, don’t trust me. I’m craaaaaaazy!” It reminded me of all the passive-aggressive racial hostility I saw in Roxbury (actually, getting glass bottles thrown at you along with runawaydirtycracker! is downright aggressive) or in Philly, or even in Cambridge, when everyone in our snooty neighborhood glared at Maisha, playing soccer in the street. Both sides accuse (silently or otherwise) the other of being untrustworthy or, frankly, just existing.
I guess it’s a good thing I’m moving to super diversified Savin Hill. In the words of Sarah Turchin, “something needs to change/end/begin.”
