Archive for the ‘gratitude’ tag
Look out…
Lehigh’s back home. And taking her rightful place on the bed. Yesterday I was awoken by three friends and a birthday cake of astonishing artistry, now I have to contemplate the prospect of eating most of a layer cake. Must invite more company over!
As much as Lehigh wants to help, it’s a chocolate cake, so she’ll just have to cheer me on from the side lines. Had a reasonable walk today and learned a bit about my DSLR. There’s good and bad news, but one thing that struck is the way that once you shoot with something enough, you internalize the possibilities of the equipment. These days I know what my regular cameras (including the iPhone) will do with the shooting conditions I find myself in. I haven’t gone through that experience with the Nikon yet, especially with the different lenses. But I’ll get there.
Tags: daily photo, gratitude, lehigh, photographyRelated posts
Thanks to all..
Part of my Birthday celebration has been a vacation from on line life. After a couple of days in meat world, I’m coming back, so let me express deep thanks for all those great birthday greetings. I’m bowled over!
Tags: daily photo, friends, gratitudeRelated posts
Porn I say, Porn…
Of the foodal variety. No turkey today at my family dinner, but here’s the pumpkin cheese cake my aunt made. My sister was the main artiste, producing a savory bread pudding with kale, fall off the bone roast lamb, Brussels sprouts, potatoes and even a batch of luscious Parmesan and butter biscuits, made she said, because she was anxious about the lamb.
It was all as good as good can be. I brought some Spanish wine, that I took a little gamble on and was pleasantly surprised by.
In the beginning of the day I met a friend for a quiet walk around Central Park. The sky had cleared, and it was warm and perfect.
After it was all done I came home and fed Lehigh a few leftovers. Just so you guys know I’m not the stern parent some of you think I am. She seemed as thankful to have me as I am to have her, and indeed as I am to have the rich, lush life that I do.
Tags: family, food, friends, gratitude, lehighRelated posts
I’d rather just say…
SO instead of getting all ranty about the return to Brooklyn travel meltdown, I’m going to instead talk about the great people I spent time with on either end of it.
On the Hamburg end , I met up with Heike, who was a student in the ICP program in our second graduating class. She took a brief break from her trip to Marseille via Bremen to meet up with me in Hamburg and show me around the town for the afternoon. We had talks about her time in the US (I remembered her tangles with an insane landlord the first couple months after she had arrived) and her current teaching strategies at the school where she now works, punctuated by walks around Hamburg’s boho neighborhood, which could have been Valencia Street, or Avenue A or any number of other spots given the mix of used clothing stores, cafes, graffiti splattered walls and outlests for kid robot products. It felt very homey in a disconcerting way. Heike is as smart, and sly as ever, and it was wonderful that she was so generous with her time.
Hamburg was definitely intriguing, and I hope to get back there for a longer stay at some point.
And speaking of generous, a couple of weeks ago Thor had requested my return flight into and then offered to pick me up in Newark upon my return for a dinner and then a ride home. Once I got in transit on Saturday and found out that my flight had been canceled and that I was going to be heading into another airport entirely, I called him from the airport and told him about the change, letting him know that I understood if it wasn’t going to work out. Amazingly, after all of the wrangling of customs, lost baggage, and everything else, I was met at JFK not only by him but also by Patrick and Lolita. They had braved the insane traffic of Queens in a Zipcar and after a side trip to Roll N Roaster, brought me safely home.
Thanks guys!, I’m lucky indeed to know such good people.
Tags: daily photo, friends, gratitude, travelRelated posts
I told her it would be there…
Last night was the end of the year dinner for my students, out little in-house graduation before the official event at Bard on Saturday. A generous trustee hosts it at their house every year. The students got dolled up and we presented them with a certificate that I designed. It’s a lovely event and this year seemed especially emotional. I’m very grateful to have been able to spend the last couple of years with these people. I got a little teary during my short speech to them. Maybe it was the excellent red wine.
And now is the chance to get some of the built up pressures of the past couple of months dealt with. Through some talks with good friends I feel like I’ve developed a clearer picture of how I want the next year to go. The warm weather is helping with that as well; somehow walking out the door in just my shirtsleeves always fills me with a sense of possibilities.
Oh and the boot? A friend told me her husband has been following the blog, and so when she showed off the footwear, I told her I’d put it up here for his delectation.
Tags: daily photo, friends, gratitude, night, teachingRelated posts
I’ve sat next to hotness…
I’m feeling down these past couple of days: cut off, out of it. And physically a bit wrong. The causes are multiple, but a big one is the fact that Monday was the anniversary of Phil’s death. Along with a couple of other dates in the year, it’s become a spot where I have to watch for my emotions to go into a nose dive. I’ve also been on a extended period of eating poorly and not moving as much as I’d like. Finding out what my tax debt for the past year is was not much of a help either.
Paradoxically, my solution in part to the eating issue is to cancel my weekly deliveries from Urban Organics. This is the second time I’ve used their service and both times I went into it with the idea that I would cook at home more, and eat healthier. But the result has been the opposite: a box of vegetables arrives, and while there is stuff in there that I like, there’s stuff that I don’t like as well, If I don’t eat it right away it starts to spoil, and then I feel guilty about buying stuff from the market. Which means that I eat out more and still have the sneaking suspicion that I could purchase the same amount of food myself for less. So no more deliveries, and I go back to shopping more regularly.
The other kooky thing I’m doing to cheer myself up Is to remind myself of the groovy people I have been lucky enough to make contact with this past year, including the fellow mischief-maker above. It’s now been three times that I’ve had fun with him, and we have the fourth on the schedule. So creepy as I may feel, there are folks out there willing to knock some sense into me. And I’m grateful for that.
Tags: food, friends, gratitude, self destruction, sexRelated posts
As of today…
I’ve been around here for 49 years.
I have to say that the past few years have proved to be among the most surprising in all of my life.
As I noted last week, despite occasional gripes, I am one lucky duck. People talk about who they were in their past lives. Even if I believed in reincarnation, I really don’t have any curiosity about other existences, because this one is just too good.
I’ve gotten to do so many of the things, big and small that I hoped to. And I get to be in touch, through this medium, with so many thoughtful, questing minds. I wouldn’t want to be alive any other time.
If you can read this, know that I value knowing you. Have a great day.
Tags: birthday, daily photo, gratitudeRelated posts
Today is the fifth anniversary of the creation of this journal. Seeing the date approaching, I’ve been trying to figure out some glamorous, clever way of marking it. No such luck.
So here are five lists of five things:
Five most recent things I’ve bought on iTunes:
- Suicide: First album
Various Artists: New York No Wave Anthology
Morton Subotnick: Subotnick Vol. 2 The Electronic Works
Israel Kamakawiwo’ole: Facing Future
Peanut Butter Wolf: Peanut Butter Wolf – 2K8 B-Ball Zombie War
Five ailments I silently worry about:
- Athlete’s Foot
Arterial Plaque
Halitosis
Senile Dementia
Multiple Sclerosis
Five books I’m currently reading stuck in the middle of:
- Robert Pinsky: The Life of David
Anonymous: Miss High Heels
Edward Tenner: Our Own Devices
Lynda Barry: What It Is
Tony Judt: Postwar
Five things I know how to cook but never do:
- Potstickers
Roast Turkey with prune dressing
Multigrain Bread
Hot and Sour soup
Fudge
Five bands I’ve been in:
- Da Funk Jive Disco Repertoire
The Samoanz
The Take Drugs And Fuck
The Reseda Ramblers
Waddle
Bonus musings:
It’s startling how much this activity, for all my diffidence about it, has come to occupy such an important place in my daily life. This year has seen my friend’s list take a decidedly multimedia turn, with more and more embedded video, flickr slideshows, audio posts and such taking the place of people’s writing or photography. I don’t know what I feel about this; for the most part I scroll past it even though the majority of my own posts have been photographs this year. If there’s one thing that peeves me most about about lj at this point it’s the rise of posts that are collections of “tweets”. Twitter, in both its formatting and compression seems to me to rebuff introspection and contemplation in favor of simplistic reporting. I like this medium because it gives me ongoing contact with so many thoughtful minds, not because it allows me to keep tabs on the individual latte purchases of semi-strangers. Anyway, all grousing aside I think I’ll be sticking around here for a while longer, and I look forward to spending the time with you all.
Tags: Blog Birthday, blogging, gratitude, music, twitterRelated posts
Nobody Touch ANYTHING…
A strange day at work where three problems that have been dominating my conciousness for weeks suddenly resolved themselves all in the same hour and in ways that are close to the best possible outcome. Which can only make me ask “what is going on?” and “when does the bad news arrive?”
Tags: gratitude, workRelated posts
A little different:
Five Small Joys From Today:
1 – The flavor of what Hale and Hearty listed as “Boston Baked Bean soup with Smoked Sausage”: it actually reminded me of the baked beans of my youth and the ones I have made.
2 – Hearing my friend George’s voice on the phone as we planned our trip together this weekend. It’s been almost a year.
3 – Actually filing the small heap of papers that had accumulated on my desk
4 – Receiving my dvd of “The Hypnotic Eye”: trashy, quirky, filled with screeching line readings and actresses tearing their own faces off
5 – Being asked to do a job I think is very important. I was surprised that the forces that be would even think to ask me.
