Why

Why does my PMS make me fucking suicidal?

Why are you back with that asshole who beat the crap out of you?

Why do you assume that everyone is a Republican?

Why must you stand in front of the subway doors?

Why do hangovers hurt so fucking much?

Why you look so scared in your driver's license picture, Mom, so scared and old, like an owl who forgot her library card, as if you knew one day I'd be crying at work trying to figure out how to transfer the car title to my name, and as if you feel guilty that "the title" has been transferred to me, in that now I am the oldest, and one day will be my own poor child's mystery to parse?

A Shocking Surprise

Which NICOLE KIDMAN Character Are You?

"Satine" in MOULIN ROUGE!You're not just a star in your own mind, you're the real deal. Beautiful, talented, and gorgeous. But life is short: stop worrying about money and fame. Above all things, life for love.
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Hi Neighbor!

On my way home from work last night I ducked out of the pouring rain into Treehouse, a new "boutique" on Graham Avenue. I had been meaning to ask if a lamp in the window was for sale.

As I was poking around a girl came in and asked, "Do you have any black yarn? I'm in the middle of this scarf and I totally ran out!"

The owner regretted that had no black yarn at the moment, but suggested that the girl check out the fabric store on Grand. "Naah, it is so rainy -- thanks anyway!" She left, and I left as well.

I noticed that she and I were both walking down Graham towards the BQE, and so I turned to her and said, "Excuse me, but I couldn't help but overhear that you were looking for some black yarn?"

Surprised, she answered, "Yeah, I am in the middle of this scarf and totally ran out!"

"Well, I hope this doesn't sound too weird, but I have a bunch of black yarn at my house and I know what a pain in the ass it is to not be able to finish something and I have five non-black-yarn projects to do before I get around to the black yarn ones, so if you want one you can have it."

"Wow, ummm sure! Okay!"

It turned out she lived two blocks away from me, so we went to my house, made small talk about the neighborhood on the way over, commiserated about all the ugly new buildings blighting the area, and I invited her in. Trey was cooking dinner.

"Hi honey! I met this nice girl who ran out of black yarn so I am giving her one of my black yarns!" I dug out the ball of yarn and handed it to her.

"Awesome, this is exactly what I needed! So, if you want I will bring you some yarn next week? If I just put a bag of yarn through your mail slot or something?"

"Oh yeah, sure, whenever! Good luck with your scarf!"

And we said our goodbyes/seeyouarounds and she went home with her yarn.

One ball of black alpaca is an infinitesimal forfeit in the face of the joyful and serendipitous neighborliness that is why I fell in love with New York.

Ceci N'est Pas Une Guerre

We all need to stop using the word "war" when discussing Iraq.
Because it isn't a war, it is an occupation. Calling it a war conjures up a) the possibility of "winning", b) the humiliation that we all associate in one way or another with "losing" c) implies that there was some instigation by Them, some sort of First Cause, which we all know is a lie.

In America everyone loves a winner, but no one wants to be an Occupier: a word that evokes everything from being the last one picked for dodgeball to waiting for that lady to get out of the airplane bathroom already!

People will squander money to "win a war." Framed as "Why we are pissing away trillions of dollars and put our troops at risk to OCCUPY a country that clearly does not want us there?" reveals the sad, incontrovertible facts.

Occupation, occupation, occupation.

Vote! Vote! Vote!

And please do NOT vote for Hillary.

[I was so happy to see Jimmy McMillan on the ballot. The Rent IS Too Damn High!]

My Friend Tiger

Tiger is my friend. His person is the contractor overseeing the gut renovation of the crazy house next door. Tiger is a good guard dog, as he gets quite barkety. I befriended him through lots of head scratches and treats -- although he is a pitbull with uncastrated balls the size of tangerines, he is very nice to me and we are friends.

Last night I felt a major depressive episode surging, one of the really bad, idiopathic, box-self-and-send-to-dead-letter-office ones. Nowhere to go but to the backyard and to bed: no cause to blame save the full moon, shining nickel-bright and pitiless on a dumb girl and a very nice dog.

Graham Avenue Halloween

Sound policy for every day of the year, if you ask me.

"The Discontinuous Mind"

I spotted this inked on yesterday's "things to do" page in the notebook I keep on my desk at work. I can't remember where I read it. It came to me just now upon overhearing a conversation between three people behind me in the elevator.

The elevators at work are outfitted with little TV screens playing an absurd loop of current events, advertisements, words-of-the-day. Evidently the screen had just flashed something regarding the Michael J. Fox/ Limbaugh incident, and a guy behind me said "It's enough to make you turn liberal, you know? When something like that affects you -- I mean, forget religion, you would do anything if there was a cure." His two companions murmured assent.

Aside from the idiocy of the phrase "turn liberal" -- wanting people to not suffer from crippling diseases makes one a pinko lefty? what I was struck by was the sentiment of you care about it once it affects you. There goes the pesky discontinuous mind again!: I just couldn't quite make the leap to thinking what something must be like for another creature, until it was happening right in my living room. Who knew that empathy was so taxing: I picture Evel Knievel not quite being able to jump all those buses, so many! laid end to end!

I wonder what they had for lunch? A turkey club with crispy bacon? Ham and swiss on rye? Do they have a "Support Our Troops" magnet on the car? The discontinuous mind sanctifies a clump of cells with a soul, said clump of cells whose development has not yet even reached the stage when it has gill slits [tuna sandwich? anyone?] as they bite into the charred dead flesh of a creature with the cognitive abilities of a three year old.

This isn't sentimental. It's all fact. The question is what do you do, as a moral agent, with those facts, even if it is to say, "You know, I just don't want to deal with that." That was what I used to say. I used to love me some bacon, love me some steak, liked my cheeseburgers bloody. Bloody, meaning it is a once-living creature's blood dripping over my face. My discontinuous mind labelled it "juice," as it had been labelled for me since I was a baby, since my sister and I would joyfully pretend to be dinosaurs eating ribs at dinner.

I just finished Carol Adams' The Sexual Politics of Meat, a book I would have mocked ceaselessly as little as four years ago. Although I wish it were better written, it is dead-on.