NYCweboy

Down East

Apparently, I decided to take some time off.

I feel better about these occasional pauses if I make a decision ahead of time - plan ahead, that's what I prefer (which, objectively, I also disapprove of in myself - I'd love to be a more "seat of the pants" kind of girl/weboy... but it's just not happening). Instead, life just kind of catches up to me... and something's got to give.

There's this debate, each time, in me: do I write about the not writing, or just move on as if everything just resumes normally? I hate to just leave the breaks unacknowledged, and sometimes writing about not writing is all I've got to give. And blogging, after all, was something I started so I could write about what's happening. Or not happening. Sometimes, not writing is all.

The past week was hard, but satisfying - a lot of productive time at work, a chance to show myself as someone seriously interested in management. I wasn't always like this; it's a recent development. For a while, I figured being a writer/barista was enough; then writer/shift supervisor. Now, maybe some sort of manager. Maybe that's the best I can do on spontaneous plans: I'd rather not have a career with goals, just let it unfold as it unfolds.

I'm weird that way.

This past week also marked the beginning of serious rehearsals for my summer foray into musical theater; last year, I reawakened my theater interests with a local production of Annie. This year, I'm happily back in the thick of my summer troupe doing Curtains. It's much fun... but a week of rehearsals only to get up at 4:30 to open the next morning does take a lot of a person.

So, here I sit, a week or so later, ensconced in my Aunt and Uncle's house in Maine, back for a slow summer weekend, and a chance to decompress. As usual, the relaxed air - and reduced heat - makes contemplation a little easier. 

Yesterday was an easy day, with a relaxed lunch, some time on the internet, and an amazing dinner at one of our favorite local restaurants. Tonight, it's a cookout after this morning's breakfast at the local maple syrup store. And probably a trip to the local museum.

Starting Tuesday, it's back into the thick of work and rehearsals, and who knows how that will go; another short break may be in the cards. For now, it's a nice break Down East, and a chance to reconnect. And that's pretty good.

Friday Field Trip: Whole Foods And PF Chang's

I tend to leave Fridays to J and his lovely pictures. It gives me a chance, among other things, to go out and do things in the world.

Yesterday, I worked early, but not a full 8 hour shift, which was a relief. Still, by early evening, I was pretty much worn out, and Mom got home too late for any early show of Midnight in Paris, the new Woody Allen film (yes, I never miss Woody Allen. Sue me). Instead, we decided to take a little field trip.

Whole Foods has been slow to expand into Westchester, which strieks me as puzzling, since the high-end grocery chain feels like a perfect fit for Westchester's large number of pampered elites. It's fittingly ironic that their initial touchdown in the county, in White Plains, was the former site of Saks Fifth Avenue, which abandoned the space when The Westchester, an upscale mall prjoect, failed to connect the store to the mall as promised (Leaving them staring at Neiman Marcus and their first arrival in the area). Saks now has no Westchester location... which is also very odd.

Lots of people - including my Mom - might think I love Whole Foods; in truth, I find them exasperating. When I first met them, still living in my Manhattan apartment, I too was blown away by the luxe-ness of the goods, the absurd prices (I don't subscribe to the "Whole Paycheck" humor, but walking out with a small grocry bag with $60 in purchases was a first), and the crowds. (One famous memory is one blizzard-y day when the line in Columbus Circle stretched through prepared foods, past the meat department, around frozen foods and back to seafood.)

By the time I moved to Boston, I tended to use Whole Foods as an occasional backup to my main shopping in more traditional grocery stores. Boston, though, is lttered with Whole Foods - one by Symphony Hall on the edge of Fenway, one in cenrral Cambridge, one by Mass General at the edge of Beacon Hill, just for starters. And their promximity to much of my everyday life made visiting them too easy and addictive.

My Mom joked last night that she could envision a lifestyle where she had the money to only shop Whole Foods. Me... I don't see the appeal. Over time, in Boston I came to realize that what the store sells, really, is a kind of snob appeal: you're not just a grocery shopper, you're smarter, hipper, and probably healthier, the stores seem to say. Whole Foods doesn't bother popular, mass produced foodstuffs of ordinary stores - no, it's all artisanal this, and farm-raised that, organic and expensive and exclusive and hard to find. I always know that, if it comes to it, I will be able to find Creme Fraiche, Clotted Cream, and fancy infused olive oil at Whole Foods. Just not, say, Diet Pepsi. Or Wheaties. And not every department opf Whole Foods can claim absolute dominance - their coffee choices, I've come to realize, are haphazard and incomplete (in part, because they've no use for Starbucks, but they also overlook good small houses like Kicking Horse).

The truth is much of what Whole Foods brought to the grocery experience - the high-end items, the hot food cafes, the luxe presentations - have been adopted widely by competitors. Those with the square footage - like Shaw's in downtown Boston at the Pru, or Stop and Shop in many of its suburban locations - have similar sit down eating spaces, luxurious produce displays, and a lot of fancy olive oil. Even so... Whole Foods continue to have them beat for sheer over-the-top indulgence. As I walked past the refrigerated case devoted to nothing nut rare German and other artisanal beers, I realized  that so mcuh of what Whole Foods offers is class confirmation - come here, and you'll know you've made it. I like to think I don't need that kind of reassurance, and I can't be had for a slice of cheese (though a bottle of infused oltve oil and some fancy tortilla chips did follow me home, inexplicably).

Afterwards, Mom and I dined at PF Chang's, a similar experience in upscale mass appeal. Chang's is a fancy chain of Asian eateries, basically, a Chinese restaurant in a sleek dress. Try as they might to dress up the concept (and they're strying a lot less, these days), Chang's is every bit the aitport hotel chain store it seems to be, with a slight Asian twist. Since the economic downturn, Chang's has had to economize a bit,and they tend to feel dingier, and less epcial, if still a slight cut above, say, Applebee's. If it weren't for my endless devotion to Chinese food, I'd have completely given up long ago.

As it is, we endured one of those silly, pointless waits these chain restaurants seem determined to deliver - forced waits with handheld joy buzzer "pagers" and the promises of tables in 20-25 minutes (we wound up at ours in less than 10). It's an artifical kind of buzz creation, mostly leaving grumpy groups and annoyed dates standing around parking lots, and since the downturn began, it just feelssilly. The demand for this kind of dining has softened tremendously, but the urge to seem "special" can't be shaken.

Still, dinner was pleasant, the food reliably good, the air conditioning a nice respite from the beginnings of clingy summer heat. And overall, not that expensive. It's a weird world where luxury comes so cheap.

I Even Have A Note From The Doctor...

The story of my silence thus far:

• Thursday the 17th: work a really hard, ugly middle shift in my old store.
• Friday the 18th: Have a man come to the house to see if we have mice - we don't, it's probably a raccoon. Attend a difficult meeting in said old store. Then go to see No Strings Attached (and want to review it), buy a new mattress for my bed, and dinner out with mom.
• Saturday the 19th: Have a man come to the house about the raccoon. Attend Red's baby shower, which runs well into the evening. Come home from that (in a raging wind storm), and go straight to bed.
• Sunday the 20th: Open at my new store, come home and meet the wild animal guy (the trap nearly blew away in said wind storm), go to see "I Am Number 4"... then spend 2 hours in the Emergency Room (and I want to write bout that too). Get sent home, go straight to bed.
• Today: Off to open the old store. And it's snowing.

I don't like to make excuses... but can you see why I might be having some trouble keeping up with the posting?

Seriously, I even have a note fomr the doctor. In the Emergency Room.

More later, barring any more disasters. :)

Friday Evening Flotsam

 

jinb

Owned

One of my favorite things about visiting my Grandmother - which, sadly, hasn't happened in years - was catching up on her magazine subscriptions. My grandmother subscribed to both the "traditional" kind of women's magazines (usually Good Housekeeping) and the magazines of the black community - Ebony and Jet, and occasionally, as I recall, Essence. Between them, I had a good sense of my grandmother and her life and her views of the world, as a black woman.

And, to this day, I think, combine Good Housekeeping or Woman's Day with Ebony and Essence... and you have a pretty good picture of just what Oprah Winfrey's media empire looks like, and what it sees.

The new year marked the launch of OWN, Oprah's new cable network, advertised by the woman herself with a lot of balloons and herself towering over the everyday proceedings of mere mortals, befitting her move from player to playing field. And, as usual, many people were awed by her accompishment... though a healthy sprinkling of doubt has started to creep in.

If it's now becoming slightly more hip to be critical of Oprah, a little less thrilled by her power and control... I find myself less critical over OWN than amused. OWN will probably do fine. And when it was called Lifetime and Oxygen... that was fine too.

There's this perpetual sense - perpetuated by that crowd of awe - that Oprah has created something revolutionary in television, magazines, everywhere she looks. But O, the magazine, is easy to place in the mag market - it's a standard women's bible of self help, food and fashion and household style aimed at a young-ish, probably stay at home mom (or a young working woman who, soon, will be). Oprah, her TV show, is standard issue, after soaps programming for women, of talk and advice.

And now OWN, the Oprah network is women's television, focused on advice programs and chat shows and style guidance and cooking demonstrations.

Time will tell if she succeeds - the success of OWN is definitely not a given - but mostly, I think, it would be nice if we finally admitted the obvious: that nothing Oprah does is especially new, and not necessarily especially daring or positive in terms of what it says about how media treats women and their concerns. Spiffily packaged, self consciously multicultural, Oprah and O and OWN (see a pattern there?) dress up traditional "women's programming" and content, but the result is frutratingly, depressingly the same.

And that criticism is a lot more concerning than the fact that she's rich, or famous.

When The Fog Lifts

The last few times I've had the flu - which have not, despite my theatrics, all been in the past month - I've noticed the change from "well" to "sick" mostly by my head: the minute I start to feel, um, "fogged up" in my head, I know there's something wrong.

The fog that descends, I've discovered, is when I can no longer pretend to be just "muddling through", it means stop, rest, take it easy. And I try, honest, I do... but I hate downtime, and I hate having to slow down... as I've said here, more than once. But I listen, I stop, I rest a bit... and just kind of hate life for a while.

The fog makes me feel stupid. It leaves me lying in bed for half a day, watching favorite TV shows on DVD, or catching 3 hours of reality television (I've gotten strangely hooked on "Tabatha's Salon Takeover" on Bravo - eek!), trying to decide which of the bums on that episode of Maury actually is the father of the baby, or seeing for another hour if Oprah really does know the secret to leading a better life (so far... no. Or yes... be rich like her). I forget how to cook, how to shop, how to eat sensible meals on a regular schedule. And my hair looks like hell.

Even more striking to me is that, once I rest and let the illness run its course, there's a moment when the fog lifts. It's usually a day or two ahead of the other physical symptoms - the cough, the stuffy head - but once the fog lifts, I can pretty much resume my normal life, kind of where I left off. I can by some groceries. I can wash my hair. It's a miracle cure!

If there are things I wished I figured out sooner in life - aside from the one where people will pay you to seem dumber than you actually are - this is probably a big one. If I'd figured out this "foggy mind" stuff, I feel like I could have saved a lot of wasted time over the years.

I don't generally go through life with regrets - my own feeling (I swear) is that if I'd done things differently, always done what people expected, or the way I was told... I wouldn't wind up where I am... which, despite the various economic hardships, and the occasional illness, seems like a pretty damn fine place to be. I like my life, I like myself. You can ask for more.... but I think it's kind of greedy.

In any case, the fog has lifted, and here I sit, with a bunch of things I meant to write: a clutch of movie reviews, some discussion of the current state of television, some politicval stuff. And then there's stuff that's been sitting in my browser, which I meant to get to eventually - musing on the irony of Ezra Klein chiding Peter Orszag's acting in his own self interest, or writing about this one, or this one, both of which I think coud use some discussion.

The nice thing is... I can do that now! I'm feeling better! Life doesn't suck! The fog has lifted... and really, after that, you can see for miles. And that's the view I really like most.

Tomorrow May Never Come... For All We Know

Families can be a little... weird.

Also, they can be entirely wonderful, as I am discovering up here, just after New Year's, in Maine. My cousin - in many ways my closest cousin, emotionally and age-wise - is home for a few weeks from her current work/life arrangement in Mozambique. My cousin is every bit her parent's daughter - international, cosmopolitan, dedicated to doing good work, and raising her own son the best way possible. And I miss her terribly.

It only took minutes for the two of us to resume our frendly, easy way of talking. Our lives have taken us in all sorts of directions, but I still remember the smart, brave little hooligan who helped me dominate our younger siblings (her brother, my sister), stage our childhood theatricals, and craft all sorts of games and adventures (the best: spying on our babysitter after supposedly being sent to bed, discovering her using my parent's shower). Now here I sit, teaching her son checkers. And telling not-so-naughty cat jokes.

I am grateful for my family for many reasons, most of all because they serve as my reminder that I am not the only one of my sort out in the world - a little wierd, a little different, a little creative and trying to get the spotlight. Coming to visit is remembering that I come from somehwere - not from Maine, necessarily, but a state of mind - and that I can, always, come home.

So maybe our family is much like yours, even if I think not. Maybe you too would sit in a pitch dark, beautifully decorated living room - my Aunt has superb taste and years of international acquisitions to display - while your Uncle plays a selection of the 10 or 20 different versions of "For All We Know" by some of the greats of pop music and jazz, while the rest of your family listens along, noting every gifted interpreation, every turn of phrase. Maybe your cousin's son would contribute his new light up ladybug to the proceedings, projecting a seas of moon and stars on the walls and ceiling. And maybe you too would get to discover one of the best Aretha Franklin performances you've ever heard in your lifetime, so engrossing we had to play it again and again. While your Aunt and Uncle share a slow dance, and your Aunt sings along in her own graceful, ovely fashion.

Maybe, for all I know, you do all that too. I have my doubts.

For us, it was heaven. A chance to connect and reconnect; for me, it was like some wild gay dream (for all we know... this may only be a dream): torch songs and candlelight and witty repartee... and I'm related to all of the participants. And we may never get this chance again... for all we know.

But damn, I hope we do.

 

Merry Christmas, Darling

In the end, the snow was not so bad; a Sunday, the day after Christmas is pretty much a day no one wanted to be traveling anyway, and digging out on Monday just means extending the days off another day.

And so I did, mostly.

I usually write a bit on Christmas Eve before we start our festivities; this year I was (literally) too busy playing dress up dolls with my friend Jennifer (I can reveal, now, that I bought her yet another Barbie for her collection). It helps us to practice for our preferred fantasy careers as fashion stylists. Seriously... I was doing that when I was 12.

So Christmas Eve was lovely, a traditional Swedish festival, candles and cold supper followed by presents and pleasant conversation. Christmas Day I did an early morning at work and then Mom and I saw The Tempest (review to follow... but don't bother) and had a fabulous Chinese lunch in Hartsdale (which I think continues my development as an honorary Jewish man, at least by marriage).

The day after Christmas? More work - and not the best day - but I did get home before the storm was in full swing, and the Most Adorable Nephew in the Universe's Birthday had to be postponed, at least for family celebrations. And here we are.

It's all so good... it's hard to explain why the especially wistful tune - best known as Karen Carpenter's, yet another example of her pristine voice doing it's best on the saddest lyrics - followed me across the holiday. I've only recently come to fully appreciate it - for a long time, it was the whitest of white bread, up there with Perry Como and Bing Crosby. Under the precise guidance of my friend J in B, I've come to see the jazz and the melancholy in Karen Carpenter, and now it seems like a modern day "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas."

I can dream, and in my dream... well, Christmas never ends. Holidays are joyful. I hope yours were. And now, back to the writing.

(Photo of my Barbie in a pink satin bolero in front of our tree, by Jennifer. Price on Request.)

Sabado Gigante!

There are various ways to assess the health of retail sales leading into Christmas - my own tends to be the kind of unscientific observation of just trying to be out and about, watching shopper habits. How hard is it to find parking? How many people laden down with bags? What's on sale in the stores?

My sense is that this is an okay, but not great, Christmas, nowhere near the retail madness of the bubble years. People seem to feel a little less economically insecure, but retailers were banking on a real explosion of pent up demand, and so in the final weeks therehas been a lot of desperation selling. There are insane markdowns. People crowd around sale items, but a lot of regular priced items sit undisturbed. Things are crowded... but not wildly uncomfortable.

I've been working a cash register in the final days of holiday madness a few times (okay, a heck of a lot), and this year... is not so madness. I've seen worse, much worse ("The Christmas Wars", this week, on History), and though some of my newer baristas are a little freaked out, most of the expereinced hands aren't getting more than they can handle.

And so, this past weekend, the last weekend before Christmas, came and went without much fuss. I closed Friday and Saturday night - usually two of the most hectic, least organized nights of the year... and not much happened. We were a little busier than last year... but not off the charts. Sunday night, I spent the evening with my friend Red, darting through Soho (like a lay-ser), picking up a few last minute things. As bad as Soho has become - it's all tourists and bargain hunters - we weren't especially crushed, and the whole thing was over pretty quick.

So why am I telling you all of this?

Just to tell you that Saturday, as I was getting ready to start work, Bill Clinton walked past my coffee shop on his way to his car. He looked in, smiled, and waved at me. Bill Clinton.

Yeah, it was pretty awesome. Merry Christmas!

The Minutes Seem Like Hours, The Hours Go So Slowly...

Finally, I am feeling better.

I hate being sick; thanks to my upbringing, it's not just illness... it's weakness, and weakness is not allowed. Thus, I have this tendency to try and muscle through my illnesses, never admitting weakness, never accepting the need to stop and rest... until I simply can't go any further.

Still, as I get older, I've learned a few things - though that thread of Protestant Work Ethic never leaves - and I listen to my body. By Saturday night, it was entirely clear that I was quite ill, and most likely, not getting better by pushing myself too hard.

I didn't get home from work til after midnight, and I slept in until after 9:30 the next morning... still, it was entirely clear that things were not getting better. Stuffy, ache-y, a dry cough... not good signs. But even worse was the mental fog which had descended.

It's the fog - that feeling, as I can only put it, of trying to think through layers of cotton gauze - that I've learned to recognize as serious. It's probably the sign of a fever (I remember complaining to my Mom, shortly after college, that my brain was in a fog, and she had me take my temperature - 103), and, I've learned, also a sign that the body needs some time to rest and recover. Ignore at your peril.

And I didn't want to ignore it... but I was still scheduled to go in and close a Starbucks. Thank heaven it was Sunday (an early close, compared to the rest of the week), and grey and rainy (which slows down business), or I probably wouldn't have made it.

As it was, I was mere shade of my usual self... which is hardest with customers - especially, in this store, a number of familiar regulars who I know fairly well. Supervising things was nearly impossible. Trying to break down sections of the coffee making apparatus to clean and restock was challenging (that lack of coherent thinking... how little we appreciate it on a daily basis). Every minute seemed to take forever. Every hour was an eternity.

Still, aided by some able and sympathetic coworkers, we managed to pull it off, even brilliantly. I stuck to tasks I normally avoid, like trash collection, bathroom cleaning and mopping. And while I don't think these things are demeaning, necessarily... I was struck by how much easier they were to accomplish on half of my normal brain power.

It wasn't unitl I got home, in the driveway, that I managed to relax and let go of some of the tensions of work... which was a mistake, because the extent of my illness made itself known full force. Just from the car to the house sent me into chilling shivers, and I could not get warm even in the house. I was hungry, but the thought of food sickened me. I wound up on a half bowl of soup and crackers, made by my Mom, who isn't always sympathetic, but was this time. The it was off to bed, still shivering, hoping for either death or recovery. Possibly in that order.

Around 5 this morning, I woke up, sweaty and alert. The moment has passed. I may still be sniffly, the cough still irritates... but I have my mind back... which to me makes all the difference. It's not that we go through these illnesses... it's that, hopefully, they pass. At least for now.