monday

and that's what i'm talking about.

What time is it?

Last night the BF and I went to see Morris Day and the Time at BAM. If you are too young to remember "Purple Rain," then you likely don't remember Morris Day and the time (o wee o weee o). They were part of the same minneapolis music scene that produced (or perhaps I should say "spawned," meaning that in the nicest possible way...) Prince. In fact, I guess Prince actually put the band together, but I don't really know the genesis of Time (heheh). Prince happens to be an idol of mine. In fact, I look like him. That is, I would if I were male and black. Or even if he were just clean shaven. Anyway, that has nothing to do with Morris Day.

The concert was AMAZING, if you like your concerts interactive. If you like to sit back in your seat and "appreciate," then this ain't for you, they MAKE you get up and dance. In fact, they made a lot of women get up on the stageand dance. I was not one of them (I actually hunkered down in my seat due to an attack of bad-hair related shyness). The band sports a retro old movie gangster look, Morris Day fronts in velvet pimpwear, and Jerome Benton...what can anyone say about Jerome Benton? He's the court jester, the trickster god, the ...whatever. He roams through the audience insulting people and flirting, flings himself into athletic contortions, grabs his crotch with alarming frequency, and has an ongoing, onstage battle with a basket of drumsticks, which are dropkicked, tossed, caught, juggled, broken, thrown, used as props, and used as weapons against the drummer (Jelly Bean)'s wall o' sound beats.

I liked also that the music was somewhere between funkadelic and prince, with some led zepplin tossed in there for good measure. The opening song sounded seriously heavy metal.

In all, it was pretty awesome. 3 hours went by and I thought it was about 45 minutes.
And, yes, they played "jungle love." O wee O wee O. If only the Lexingon Ave subway would change its tune. sigh.

miracle on the lex ave line

well there's this thing i've noticed for a long time now, on the lex ave line, actually happens on the 4 & 5 mostly. No, the virgin mary's face doesn't appear magically out of graffiti (especially since there isn't any more graffiti, graffiti is now as scarce as virgin marys as a matter of fact.). No, the doors don't chime "repent". No, jesus doesn't appear, walking on the third rail. in fact, there's nothing religious about it at all, unless your'e a musical theatre freak. and if you are a MTF, i don't wanna know. I hate musical theater.
Nonetheless, it is, in its way, a small, pleasant, secretive, old new york sort of miracle.
It is this: when the 4 and 5 pull out of a station (any station) the squealing gears or wheels play the first three notes of "There's a place for us" from West Side Story. They do. Yes they do. "THEEEEEERE's AAAA Plaaaace......" and then the gears catch and all you get is that whir of accelleration.

It's not like i haven't got anything better to do with my time. It's really not... just thought you all should know.

the agony of my seat

ow ow ow ow, my butt hurts! I hate sitting all day. Gads. how do people do this? And I can't believe i'm sitting in front of the computer at home now. Ridiculous. I have to go get horizontal.

this could get ugly

kissin' cousins...

new camera test pix (belated friday cat blog)

new images of the wee ones.





odd, how each seems to choose a flattering background color...

the triumph of the morning-nazis

my first week of work over, this is my first saturday as a wage slave. Ain't it sweeeet? why i remember when saturday was just another day of mindless pleasure.

Howz the job? Well, glad you asked. The JOB itself I cannot particularly write about. Top secret and all that. heheh. No I won't be outed soon by the bush administration. At least I hope not. Suffice it to say that i am gainfully, legally employed. I have found a use for my law diploma, other than covering the cracks in the tenement walls.

This is the FIRST time I've had a real job where you are supposed to be there from 9-5. Here are several things I have learned about 9-5.

1. Running after work is harder than running during the day.
2. One gains weight working 9-5, and one isn't sure how, because one eats less b/c one is not near the refrigerator all day.
3. The gym is more crowded at 6 pm than it is at 11am.
4. Blogging is harder working 9-5.
5. Kittens feel deprived, and pee on things when everyone is gone all day.
6. Everything is crowded, all the time, wherever you go, because everyone else works 9-5.
7. The main thing is, getting up this early every morning is very hard. 9-5 is really the TRIUMPH OF THE MORNING-NAZIS.

I was so depressed this week b/c running really doesn't feel good to me after work. I hope this changes! I mean i like running about noon, or even as early as 10 am. as long as I've been up a couple of hours. But sitting on my (fat) ass all day and then trying to run on a treadmill surrounded by every other (fat) assed 9-5er is singularly uninspiring. my body does not like it.

The times had an article a while back about the tyranny of the morning people. Apt, i think. We are never far from our puritan heritage in this country anyway. (That goes for our obsession with porn too!)

sigh. Here's my ideal day:

wake up 9am.
flop around reading emails & stretching for a while.
run about 10am.
eat about noon.
flop around for a while, stretching and reading emails.
go out for errands.
at about 3, get down to some kind of work.
work until about 8 or 9pm.
eat, watch tv.
maybe do a little more work
read.
zonk out at about 12 or 1.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

eve of destruction

oh ok, perhaps i'm being a tad overdramatic, but I START WORK tomorrow....

Yeah, I'm excited, but i'm also bemoaning the loss of my days of getting up late, running when I feel like it and flopping around the apt. all day with my kittens. After all, it ain't like i'm 22 and this is my first job.

nonetheless, i suppose i should feel good about finally putting my legal education to good use. hope to hell I can do the job. Hope to hell I LIKE the job.

prosperity preachin'

I've been hearing about Creflo Dollar and his wife Tammy for ages. So it's kinda surprising that the Times just ran an article on him and the "prosperity gospel" phenomena (linked to above). Prosperity gospel is loosely described as "God wants you to be rich." So if you make money, you must be doing right. Well, aside from the obvious problems with that (uh, hello? totally does not query the means of making money), my all too human habit of inferring the opposite from any statement makes me think that this doctrine is saying that if you are poor, you ain't right with god. Now, that seems odd, since jesus said "blessed are the poor" or something like that. But maybe he was just playing to the masses (no pun intended) at the time.

Seriously though, i understand that this "gospel" comes as a natural extrapolation of the notion that god will provide. Jesus also said "I come that not only that you have life, but that you have it more abundantly" or something like that (i can't really quote the bible right. Although I grew up having it crammed down my throat, it's been years since i memorized any of it, and i don't have one at present), and that could be interpreted to mean that you have money more abundantly (but "life" isn't really money, is it?). But the whole thing is suspect because it is way too simplistic, i.e. doesn't take into account the disparities in society that create lack of wealth, etc. I remember when I was a dancer, occassionally I'd try to read a self help book with a loud, sweaty, exitable title something like "you can get what you want!!!" or "10 secrets to absolute success!!" (I'd hide them though. Usually under a comic book). They were all the same, some good notions aimed at changing your mind and empowering you, but in the end given to all too simplistic, all too unexamined, all too obviously illogical platitudes "proved" with ridiculous examples. I couldn't get into the self-help thing.

Religion and self help always have had an uneasy relationship as far as i'm concerned, i mean religion does "help", i'm sure, but if you REALLY think about it, what's good from a universal POV (which is supposedly what religion has) is not necessarily good for YOU as an individual. OR, conversely, you may not even recognize what's really good for you. The flat screen TV and hummer may be BAD for you, and maybe even in ways that are pretty direct.

Anyway, I'm ranting. Guess it's a slow day in bloggrrilla land.

shopping with bloggrrilla

I am a strange woman. Shopping for clothes, talking on the phone, and beauty parlors fill me with dread and the need to avoid them at all costs. (and, no offense to the breederishly inclined, but i don't want a baby either...) I mean, all these activities take up too much time and the end result is never as good as you wanted it to be. Hence, I am generally prone to avoiding infants, wearing well-worn clothes from 1992, sporting bad hair, and returning calls only when missing them threatens economic or reputational ruin.

Although hair was always a problem, clothes haven't always been. When I was a dancer, I mostly lived in jeans and workout clothes, and the annual pilgrimage to the gap to buy jeans took all of about 10 minutes: Enter store, find guys section, pour self into the smallest straightleg 501s you can, pay, and leave. that was before "relaxed" entered the vocabulary of jeans for people under 78 yrs old and 300 lbs, before manufacturers started deciding that every woman has a 22 inch waist and 85 inch hips, before the dizzying array of "boot-cut," "low-rise", martin/jimmy/ellwood /harrison/ford/chrysler/honda "fits," before "pre-ripped" jeans, and before jeans cost at minimum 50 bucks and max out over 5 benjies. Now, men's jeans are too baggy, women's jeans have those HIPS, and i cannot afford to go to diesel or baby blue or prada or whoever else wants me to pay 3 digits for a ripped up piece of denim. gads.

So today i was almost irrationally elated when I ventured into the gap to buy some bras (yes, bras at the gap, sigh, I have NO style), and found a dark pair of jeans that had not been pre-washed, ripped, ground-in-dirted or stressed in any way, which FIT me the way jeans should, i.e. none of that overly curvy shit, STRAIGHT in the hips which is how I'm built, AND which cost less than 50 bucks.

And by the way, how about that Alito?

Yes, I've been listening to the hearings. I don't have anything smart to say that hasn't been said about Alito, he's a very smart man, and his hyper-conservative views should come as no surprise to anyone, given his judicial history and opinions. What is surprising is that anyone in congress actually expects him to give a straight answer about roe v. wade. However, I will say that there are things that frighten me about Alito, such as his much-inquired into CAP membership (ok so he was a member, but why was he proud of it at 30?) AND the fact that he actually said he admired Bork. The latter admission would be enough for me to keep him as far away from the Supreme Ct as possible...perhaps assigning him a district judgeship in Guam...

There. the sacred and profane in one blog. You decide which is which...

the will to blog

odd how looming employment has taken away some of the will to blog. Since this is my last vacation week, soon my life will be filled with new people, and more importantly my life will be FILLED, in the sense that I'll have literally no time. I'm anticipating that filled-ness by suddenly wanting to do nothing more this week than sit in front of the TV and eat chips.

pink update

Well, the ex-husband, who discovered and maintains the feral colony that pink and abby hail from has posted a rebuttal to my assertion that pink lost his eye due to an eye-infection. Since he was there, i guess he knows best. I maintain that he never told me the eye story, he says he did. i mean i knew about the fall, but not the eye-poking in the garbage pile. Poor little pink! I thought his eye problem was due to the same kind of infection that attacked the left eye of the original rescued kitten, betty, but then subsided, causing her eye to gain a strange, sparkly aspect when viewed from certain angles. (The ex rescued betty and her sibs Annie and William when they were about a day old, and he and i totally hand raised them. They are now hale and hearty 7 yr old cats ...)

fast forward to now. at any rate, the Pink one is doing fine. His eye looks a little frightening, all sutures and shaved skin, but he's chowing down and running around like a maniac, tormenting his sis/cousin. Yay pink!

pinkeye-- friday cat blogging

our male kitten
just got home from being fixed. poor tyke. In a perfect world, male cats would get to keep their balls, but female cats don't buy into the Nancy Reagan formula. Apparently, because female cats don't ovulate until the male cat withdraws, different kittens in the same litter can have more than one daddy. Gives new meaning to the phrase "who's your daddy?"...

Pink (our male kitten), also lost his eye due to an infection in his babyhood, so the vet had to operate to take out the useless eye material, clean up the eye, and sew it shut. We were worried he'd be kinda freaked, but he came home from the vet hungry and raring to go. He's already jumped on every cabinet, gotten into the sink, run back and forth investigating the apartment, and sparred with his cousin, abby (seen here airborne chasing her favorite toy, a feathered stick), so i guess he's feeling ok.

gainfully employed

hmmmm, employed at last! I start week after next. Wow, between blogging, running and kittens, who has time for work?

oh, word to da wise. do not EVER eat bean patties for breakfast prior to an important interview...unless you enjoy that clenched feeling...

style and content

in the very early days of my marriage, my husband (now ex) and i would sometimes amuse ourselves by doing "free writes." we'd take 10 minutes and a beginning phrase and write whatever fell out of our mind and onto the page. Some of these free writes wound up as stories, some were really funny, some not. One of mine became a sci-fi story i called "the rat game."

in the desperate and confused days after i quit dancing and before i became the worlds oldest law student, i flopped around a lot trying to figure out my next move. I found myself in a writers' workshop, and, not understanding the need to reinvent any fictional wheels, i trotted out "the rat game" as my work in progress. I thought it was good sci-fi: rats had taken over the world; spoke a colorful, fast-paced, highly william gibson influenced argot, and amused themselves by knocking people out, putting extremely poisonous scorpions ready to strike on their bellies, and waking them up. The idea was that if a human could come to fast enough to whip up and knock the scorpion off before it struck, they'd win something. Ok, ok. tame by today's standards i know, but i was going for a burroughs-esque weirdness, and the plot mattered very little to me. i was only interested in my descriptions of speed and sweat and the smells of rat lairs.

well, predictably, the writers workshop ripped "the rat game" to shreds, along with another story i called "the passion of betty" about a woman with stigmata. the basic message was that i had a lot of style, and zero content. I never went back. Funny, after years of choreographers yelling at me, dance teachers ripping my ego to shreds, and reviewers damning me with faint praise, I couldn't even take one bit of constructive criticism on my precious stories. apparently, i had an ego problem after all.

rare and brutal -- news you can use

Today the Science Times has an article on cuteness, and why humans respond to visual cuteness cues. A friend who is herself "cute" in that mini-cooper way, used to tell me that cute can get away with a lot more than beauty where men are concerned. Another friend disagreed..."beauty rules" he said. The Times states: "Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness." The article goes on to talk about the human response to the cute, why it feels cheap, why some cultures (Japan) seem to crave the cute more than others. Then predictably it de-constructs some fuzzy animals' cuteness, (a baby penguin's wobbly walk, a panda's 2 toned face) into their survivalesque components.

The article is cute itself. But what i really liked about it was the phrase "beauty is rare and brutal." you don't find a phrase that nice in most news articles. I mean, Bush's latest idiocy or connivance (depending on your view of his iq) inspires nothing so poetic, and rightly so. Of course "cuteness" is not serious news. But hey, maybe it should be.

i'll drink to rare and brutal any day.

cold hard light of day

This is the week of The Big Job Interview. The interview for the job I want, that is. Also, let's face it, the ONLY job interview I've had in recent weeks (ok months. jeez.) Let's all keep fingies crossed that B gets her job and re-enters the world of viable humans who have reasons to live.

Speaking of reasons to live, and lest I wallow in more and greater melancholia, here are some of the big highlights of 2005. Lowlights (and lives) are excluded.

Jan. 2005: I join the YMCA even though I am not young, a man, christian, or an associate. No one seemed to care.

March 2005: I move from inwood to ossining, and in with the boyfriend. BF and I go to see LAURIE ANDERSON at BAM.

May 2005: I graduate law skool highly honorably. The boyfriend drags me to graduation. On the way we stop off at a B&B in Clearfield Pennsylvania, where I run on a great trail made from an old railroad (Clearfield to Grampion, PA).

July 2005: I sit for the NY bar. (ok not a highlight. But, like a massive zit before an important interview, it took over my mind.)

Aug. 2005: Ex-husband and I do a trap neuter return (TNR) on a feral cat colony in Staten Island. We trap 6 cats, have them spayed and neutered, take care of them, then release them back into the vacant lot behind ex's home. One that is too pregnant to trap gives birth to 4 kittens behind my ex-husband's toilet. I get my hair straightened.

Sept. 2005: The bf and I go to Paris and Bordeaux to visit friends. On our return, we are rewarded with KITTENS (links to follow). Two of them, from my fave SI feral colony. We again find ourselves buying massive amounts of cat litter and feathered rubber toys (for THEM. get your mind out of the gutter.).

Oct. 2005: I am informed that I have been elected into the Order of the Coif. Too late, I've already spent a fortune straightening my hair and am not about to don one of those curly white wigs.

Nov. 2005: I am informed that I passed the NY barzam. I try to tie one on to celebrate but am promptly floored for the better part of 10 days by some kind of bird flu. (i don't know if it was bird flu. Just said that because it was in the national zitgeist.) More TNR with a huge (30 cats) colony in Staten Island.

Dec. 2005: The bf and I go to see PATTI SMITH at BAM. I reluctantly enter my 7th month of unemployment. The ex-husb finds a girlfriend. (I wasn't aware he'd lost one.)

As I said, i've omitted the maudlin, sad, painful and depressional aspects of 2005 in the interests of not feeling any worse. The NY Times recently published an article saying that introspection was bad for you. In the interests of a better 2006, I hope to stop some of my quantum naval gazing, and go with my gut. (wait, isn't that contradictory?)

bloggrrilla 101, or the chronicles of ugly

New year, new bloggrrilla. or so i hope... Let's see, what's going on? Well, I'm still unemployed for one. This is NOT good. And, I seem to buck the odds, as usual. I graduated in the top 5% of my law skool class (despite my insistence on misspelling "school"). I went to LS on a full scholarship, so I have very few student loans to pay off. Most other folks in this position are employed with big firms or in some cool public interest job. Me? I was just turned down for a paralegal position...

What gives?

Ok. I'm a tad (well perhaps more than a tad) socially inept, read phobic. This characteristic does not lend itself to ease of interview style. In fact, it doesn't lend itself to lawyering at all. It will take a lot of work on myself for me to be a decent lawyer, school is easy for me.

Second, I am constantly in my mind apologizing for being the age I am, and for graduating from a 2nd tier school (TOP second tier, mind you! heheh), even tho my decision to go to the school hinged a lot on the full scholarship, and I actually got in to a couple top 15 schools. Not a great decision in the long run, but as I said, I'm not terribly well educated, wasn't up on the ratings game and didn't know no better. Oh let's be honest, I wanted the scholarship, and the school wooed me like a basketball star. It's also a good school, with a very good regional rep, and had I wanted to live in the midwest, I'd be gainfully employed and sitting pretty.

I need to remember what Eleanor Roosevelt said: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent," or something like that. Well I hand my inferiority around like a business card before I open my mouth. "hi there, look down on me please." I do this so automatically in job situations that it is frightening, and of course when I try to cover that feeling, I come off as arrogant and abrupt.

Lastly, I didn't manage to get excited about law, although I have to say that is changing. I recently figured out what I want to do with my degree, or a broad area anyway, and that's good. I don't want to work for big firms and help rich companies, I actually want to work in housing or employment law, helping poor and working people keep their homes and not get screwed on the job. I came by this interest recently, by volunteering in housing court. I like what the pro se attorneys there do, I like it a lot. I want to do some good in the world. REVERSAL! The folk wisdom about law school is that people go in idealistic and come out wanting to work for the biggest firm possible and make a ton of money. I didn't exactly go in to make money (although that possibility wasn't a deterrant), but I came out feeling bored and bleak about big firm law, and yes, dare I say it, more idealistic than when I went in. But then again, I seem to do everything backwards, so there it is.