Awkward in NYC

Damn merry makers, ruining my Sunday tea.

(Source: tragedyseries)

You can write to Chancellor Davis by going on the UC Davis website: http://chancellor.ucdavis.edu/contact.php

Watch the violent attacks on students and read about the “responses”: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/19/uc-davis-police-pepper-spray-students_n_1102728.html

Chancellor Katehi,

Watching the videos and reviewing the photographs of the violent attack on UC Davis students, who were clearly occupying the grounds of their own institution in a peaceful and non-threatening manner, made myself and my family ill this morning. I was and am moved to tears each time I think of it. What example are you setting? Our nation cried out as peaceful protestors were attacked and killed in the Arab Spring movements, and yet those who we entrust with the education of thousands of students would have them shot like dogs in the street.

Your actions were reprehensible and unwarranted, your “response to those actions even more so. You regret that your students believed enough in their own rights and liberties that they dared to engage in collective action on THEIR OWN campus? Your response makes it clear that the safety and security of your own students means nothing to you.

My thoughts are with the students of Occupy UC Davis as they fight for representation and the right to raise their voices against tyranny. You, madame chancellor, have clearly taken the side of tyrants. I look forward to your swift removal from office and hope that ultimately you are charged in a court of law for the assault on these students.

This week:

• I got to go to the Eater Awards at the Dream Hotel on the lower west side, mingle with fancy chefs, eat delicious food, and drink delicious drinks. It was a fabulous party. 
• A particularly flattering picture of myself and my boss with said fancy chefs made it onto Eater’s press coverage of the event. 
• I got the press copy of a very supportive article on my organization that will be published in USA Today’s special Fall/Winter Kid’s Health Magazine, which includes two of my photos and a prominent credit to me. 
• I got an email from the Director of my Policy Analysis graduate program at the New School telling me that he met with my former boss (City Council Member) and she so praised my work on food legislation that the school wants to do a feature article on me and my work in food/food policy. 

This morning:

• I woke up ten minutes late and extra sleepy, stepped out of the bedroom into the darkness of the morning and straight into some fresh, wet, chunky cat barf. I can still feel it between my toes. 
• On my walk to the subway I stepped on a particularly large tack, that somehow got through my platform heel and went straight into my foot (the non-barfed on one). 

Lesson: Don’t get cocky, there’s still a world’s worth of cat barf and tacks to get through yet. 

Now, I can die happy.

Well not really, but I can be really excited that I got my photo in a widely read food/restaurant blog. Win!

Cat loves headlock on Flickr.

Hard to explain how obessively loving my cat is, oh wait, no its not #catheadlock

My chest was bursting as I walked home from the subway today. Really it had started on the train. A train of thought which I could trace back for you: A teenage boy mentioned turkey dumplings, I started to think about Thanksgiving, I wondered what if any my family traditions were, I thought about a question I had been asked recently about what my “last supper” would be which had got me thinking about what foods I found comforting-at the time I had no answer, I could think of no comforting familial foods, but in the train I thought about it again and I found a comfort food if you can even call it food: taco dip. Taco dip is actually something from my mother’s side of the family, but I can explain how it got me thinking more about my father. Taco dip comes from my mother’s cousins, my second cousins technically but in practice my aunties. There are some generally accepted rules about taco dip, although I confess I have never made it myself, but mostly that it have some kind of sour cream base flavored with what I assume is taco seasoning from a packet, lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, and probably olives-which I always pick off. I started thinking about taco dip, and about how that was maybe the closest thing I have to a comfort food, a food that reminds me of home and of my family. I can hardly remember a large family gathering that went without it, if the cousin aunties were not there invariably one of my regular aunties or my mother might make it-particularly if it was warm weather (cold weather typically calls for another family favorite, chili dip).

One of my cousin aunties made taco dip the day we mourned my father’s death by celebrating his life. It was an outside the box taco dip, there were definitely crumbled Doritos in there, not standard in the family version. I remember a debate about it between the auntie cousin who had made it and the auntie cousin who is her sister-an outside the box taco dip causes a stir even at a “funeral”. Doritos or not, the taco dip was one of the only things I ate that night. It made me think of summer, of the large family gatherings my mother’s family used to have, it comforted me.

And somehow after thinking so long about taco dip I thought about thanksgiving again. I thought about all the other holidays and milestones I would pass without my father. I wondered which ones would hurt the most. I thought about eating a steak on his birthday. I thought about what legacy my father had left. Since I work in a non-profit now the word “legacy” started me thinking about grander ways to honor my father, through foundations or somesuch. Of course that is not the kind of man my father was. My father will leave no legacy of that kind, only the kind that lives within the people he met.

I started to think on something I have always thought, how special my father was. What an incredibly unique man he was and how strongly he will live in people’s memory because of that uniqueness. I thought about how he was the most special person in the entire world, except maybe not more special than me. And that has nothing to do with thinking I am better than my father, because honestly if I get anywhere near to being the kind of person he was I will have wildly exceeded my own expectations of myself. I think that I am special because my father taught me for my entire life that I was special. There is something that sociologists or psychologists or some set of “ists” refer to as Indigo Children, I’ll spare you the babble on it but essentially they were thought to be children with unique psychic (or other kinds of) abilities. I have always interpreted just as people who have something “in them”. Anyway, its not that I ever thought I was particularly good at anything, just that I’ve always thought there was something “in me” that isn’t in most people. I have always felt special, unique, and sort of magical in a way that both isolated and empowered me my entire life. Not being the New Agey type, or even anything close to it, my father never actually said things like this to me. He said much simpler things, and more importantly he so loved me that I knew, I knew that I could do, be, or overcome anything.

I said before my father died that I would not be able to live without him, that my heart would die. In some ways that is true. A part of me is not dead, but perpetually wounded and hurting. Like a toothache, it rises and falls unexpectedly, but never actually goes away. I feel it every day. The sheer fact that I don’t have a nervous breakdown every day further solidifies to me that I am an incredibly Gemini Gemini. Having two minds about everything is helpful when you need to compartmentalize just to get through your day. When I got the call that my father was dying I was in a taxi, I got another call as he took his last breaths while I was in an airport lounge, then I sat on a plane for 2 hours, then I sat in a car with a family friend I do not know particularly well for another hour. I didn’t cry because I couldn’t. Among the many things I inherited from my father is an overwhelming privacy about my feelings. As a Gemini I am a natural communicator and will gladly tell you about all the times I wanted to kill myself as a teenager or the first time I had sex or a half dozen other things most people would consider “private”. But I am not going to tell you how I am feeling. Except maybe, this way.

Every day I think about my father, and every day I could cry, but most days I don’t. In the moments of exhaustion and fatigue during my spinning class I think of my father and I cry but no one sees it, during meditation I think about him and I want to cry but usually I don’t. I am distracted by a text from my landlord telling me the location of my rainboots, which were scuttled away recently in an attempt to forbid us from using our doorway space. And now my brain is split and I am thinking about how irritating it is that they would leave a stroller in the hallway all the time when they lived here, but they are now they don’t want us to put shoes by the door. Having pointed this out to him, I anticipate an awkward exchange is forthcoming.

Halloween @ Brooklyn Winery!

Pumpkin carving on Flickr.

Pumpkin carving

Yep, fucking Chicago

(Source: tragedyseries)

I distinctly remember going to the train, getting onto the train, sitting on the train.

I took out the New York Times magazine that I hadn’t received on Sunday. Or at least that’s what I told the New York Times. In fact, it had been a mistake based on an oversight. I was not trying to cheat the New York Times.

I read a story about a man who left his former job as a CFO of some company to open a small vinyl shop in Cleveland, Ohio. I was thinking about Tom or maybe John Duggan as I read it. I was thinking about the girl in the story who presses the two toned obscure Christian metal record from the 90s.

I read a story about the illusion of validity. About a man who trained as a psychologist with the Israeli army and realized that for all their testing, primarily through the use of useless team based challenges from England circa WWI, they were really determining nothing about the leadership qualities of the soldiers they were supposed to assess. They were determining nothing, but determining with absolute certainty. With vigor and confidence that their results were meaningful, even when they all certainly knew their evaluations were hardly better than random guesses. The man goes on to work in behavioral economics, or at least that was my reading of the reading. He is friends with Thaler, which is a name from economics that I remember coming up in grad school. Maybe the man continued to be a psychologist. Well, it doesn’t matter after all. The important thing is that the man goes on to be quite recognized for recognizing, through the use of statistics, that many of the confidences we have in ourselves and in others are completely baseless. Worse than baseless, they are often completely wrong. He measures the performance of top Wall Street traders over a series of years only to find that there is no statistical correlation in their successes from year to year. A zero percent correlation. Their successes and failures are totally random. Despite sharing the results in detail with the people who pay their bonuses, the CEOs decide to continue to reward the brokers’ random successes because the fact, the statistical fact, that their successes are random does not mesh with the smooth slippery version of a reality they have already settled on in their own minds. They have the illusion of validity.

I think of Luke and I wonder if I should share this article with him even though by now it is two days old and I wonder if I will even remember to share it. I have a list of things I am supposed to do written on a checklist inside my purse. I return to it in my mind: garbage, cat litter, cook the chicken, send some people some photos. At this point in time I have not done any of those things.

But after the illusion of validity I am already absorbed in a magical description of the magical writing of Murakami and I am imaging myself in his stories of altered realities. I am imagining myself as Aomame, which means green peas. I am thinking of John again but I am also thinking of Gale and wondering if this is an interesting present for her. I bought her a book last year after all, but she liked it. She bought me an e-reader, which I hated. I don’t want to buy her the book in the “e” version, that is so terribly impersonal isn’t it? Besides which the book is really a tome, close to 1,000 pages and almost a foot thick and I can’t help but think that the impression and the weight of the book should be part of the present. The weight, the mind boggling size of this phone-book like novel, that is part of the gift.

At this point I have forgotten where I am and the train is very crowded. I am starting to panic while the man next to me continues to fall asleep, slowly leaning into my arm. This is a game we have been playing for awhile. Fall asleep, lean on my arm, I give him a gentle push in the opposite direction and the cycle starts again in approximately 5 minute intervals. I am trying to see out of the subway windows but there are so many people on the train that I cannot tell where I am. The voice of Serge, my Russian podcast host who has for months been trying in vain to teach me Mandarin, has added a trance-like quality to my reading and I am not sure anymore if I am awake. I am not sure how long I have been on the train. I can hardly hear Serge anymore. Occasionally, I hear snippets of the conversation on the podcast, ta zai ma?

I am trying to see out the windows but there are too many people. Each time I crane my neck the man standing nearest me also turns and looks out the window, further blocking my view, as if he cannot comprehend what I might be trying to see. I cannot see anything. I take my headphones off. The sound is exactly the same as when Serge was softly repeating Mandarin in my ears. White noise, zhhhhhh… It has been too long between stops, I must have missed mine. I need to get off this train but it is going to be so hard to get through these people. I am panicking, panicking….I cannot imagine where I could be that takes so long between stops, until we stop. We stop and we are at my stop, at the right place

I gave some advice today, which I hope was the right advice. But I can’t help but thinking my father’s would have been better.