Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I'm borrowing an idea from commodorified, and looking for suggestions of journals to read.



"Why" is optional, but useful answers could be something like "you were readimg this person as exampleusername on LJ" or "has fascinating opinions about left-handed teapots."

We have seen the legendary wild parrots of Brooklyn, and I can put them on my lifelist!

More important, cattitude and I have spent a good afternoon with roadnotes and baldanders, drinking tea and nibbling chocolate and olives and cheese and ginger snaps and talking about musical theater and health stuff and life and people. The subway was being a bit difficult (no D along the section that would have been useful to us, no L ditto), and I had to climb stairs at Roadnotes and Baldanders's station, but we are home now, and the L not being available led to us getting a well-timed dinner at a diner on University Place in the Village, so that's all right.

The legendary wild parrots are an established feral population of monk parakeets; the ones we saw are living in Greenwood Cemetery and in an electrical substation across the street from the cemetery. The cemetery for the usual appeal of trees and grass, and the electrical substation is warm year-round, and has flat surfaces they can build nests on. (There are a few other groups of these birds elsewhere in and near New York City—and 100,000 or so in Florida. They are native to the Caribbean, and this climate is marginal at best for them if they don't find an electrical substation or, I suppose, a poorly insulated rooftop.)

Last night, livredor and I went to the VNV Nation show here in New York. (I was going to write "saw," but we're both short enough that it was much more "heard" and "danced to" than "saw," though Ronan's bouncing around on stage made him pretty visible.

This is not really a concert review (rysmiel wrote a good review of their concert in Montreal earlier in the week), so no attempt at a set list. But we did get one song that he said they'd never done live before, and therefore he had cue cards for: "Stillwater," which he wanted to do in New York because he wrote it in lower Manhattan.

Taking rysmiel's advice, we sat in a lounge area for both opening acts and saved our energy for VNV Nation. (We were near the actual concert space, and there were video screens, so if we'd disagreed with his opinion we could have changed our minds.) Instead, we sat, talked a little, and looked at people: there was a wide range, from seriously dressed-up goths to punk to band t-shirt and jeans. I was in a purple tank top--show off the tattoos--and black pants, figuring I don't have goth clothes or care enough, but could get the colors right. Liv's host had managed to get her up as a goth despite not being one. The band did a mix of material, and a long show. Near the end of the main performance, it felt short. Then they gave us three encores. Before starting the third encore, Ronan said that when they were done, this encore would make it the longest show so far this tour.

Ronan did some working the crowd that I didn't entirely like: urging us to sing along, cool. Saying "I can't hear you," not so cool. (My throat was too tight for much noise, though I was happy to clap and wave my hands and jump in the air.) But it works, and it's part of the show. At one point, he said he wanted to see us dancing "unless you have a medical excuse" and I was thinking I did have a medical excuse (knees not quite recovered from earlier in the summer) and wasn't letting that stop me. Slow me down a bit, yes: I swayed more, and jumped less, than I otherwise would have. And then, near the very end, having spent the show not singing along because it wasn't sensible, I joined in shouting back lines from "Judgement."

One unfortunate thing: either Ronan's voice was going, or the people running the sound board didn't do a good job, and the instruments (and crowd noise) overwhelmed the vocals.

You're never too old to rock and roll, but I'm starting to feel a bit creaky for this form of it. Or maybe it's the combination of timing—I bought our tickets before I hurt my knees—and timescale. It was fun in the moment, but I was fretting a little by the end of the evening that I might have overdone it. But the walk home from the train was fine, and my feet, which felt a little tender from all that bouncing, didn't hurt at all this morning, nor did my knees. And either they used more strobe than last concert, or my sensitivity to strobes was higher than last time (it seems to vary somewhat, non-monotonically).

This was also a nice chance to catch up with Liv. Our friendship has been almost entirely electronic (we've never lived on the same continent, and she's been in Sweden for the last three years), and it was nice to sit together over tea and on an A train and to be dancing in the same place ("together" doesn't apply in the usual sense: in the only way it does, we were both dancing together with hundreds of strangers). She was delighted by my going ahead and doing the organizational work here, both getting her ticket and mine while she was in Sweden, and picking a place for dinner last night (Excellent Dumpling; I'm not aiming for dinner in Times Square at that hour on a Saturday night, even if I were still familiar with the area).

Wednesday evening, cattitude and I had dinner with roadnotes and baldanders. It was a good chance to talk with both of them--I'd not seen Baldanders in a while--with the excuse of turning over our spare housekeys.

Wednesday and Thursday were both quite slow at work, so I left an hour early Thursday to meet Lise, to provide moral support and company. We dealt with some errands she'd needed to do, but mostly I wanted to get her out of the house for a little while during the day, and to talk. Or, mostly, to listen. That involved wandering around bits of Brooklyn, and a transit connection I'd never made, from the E at 23rd-Ely to the G; the last time I'd used the 23rd-Ely station, you had to go to Queens Plaza for the G.

Today my office was closed altogether. I headed out when Cattitude did, and got in a reasonable workout in the morning, which works better for me than afternoon or evening. I finished early enough that the Thai places on Ninth Avenue near my gym weren't open yet, so I went down to my usual place in Chinatown. I had another nice meal, and chatted with strangers about this and that, including education and travel, in the course of which I again defended the honor of Parisians, and wrote down a recommendation for a Spanish restaurant in the West Village. I also shared my scallion pancake with the people I was chatting with, since I'd ordered it after eating duck, vegetables, and rice, knowing I wouldn't be able to finish it, but wanting it as a sort of dessert.

Thence, I went up to Union Square for the Greenmarket. It's near the end of berry season, but somehow that translated into $3 or 5 for $10 on half-pints of raspberries and blackberries, so I got five after figuring out that even if I threw one away we were ahead. I got some interesting grapes, but the nice man didn't pronounce the varietal name clearly enough for me to note and remember it. I bought scallops, and chatted with the neighbor who was running the fish stall, as she had when that boat had a space in our neighborhood greenmarket. She double-bagged the scallops with ice so they'd get home in good condtion. I also have a small seedless watermelon, four cucumbers, a loaf of challah, and a bit over a pound of onions. It wound up being both heavy and somewhat ungainly to bring home, but it's tasty. (So far I've had grapes and raspberries; the scallops, bread, and a cucumber or two will become dinner in a little while.

( gym numbers )

Friday night was noteworthy mostly for an impressive lightning storm: pouring rain, at least an hour of frequent lightning*, and a thunder crack loud enough that cattitude heard it over the phone from Iowa.

I took yesterday easy, and kept to myself except for minimal commercial transactions, letting Heather hand me a bowl of apples, and IM'ing with my mother (briefly) and with adrian_turtle. And then didn't get to bed until midnight, I'm guessing in part because of Cattitude's absence. Slept all the way until 8:30 this morning; I may have managed 9 yesterday morning. That would have been enough sleep for the weekend if I hadn't gone into it feeling sleep-deprived. Northwest has been doing unkind things to Cattitude, and instead of landing at LaGuardia in about twenty minutes, he is in Minneapolis and scheduled to land at JFK at 11. I will not stay up until he comes in (or, at least, I intend to go to bed and turn the light out), but will wait up until he calls to say he's in New York.

This afternoon, I had a pleasant conversation with roadnotes at La Lanterna, a cafe in the Village that we've been going to for a long time. Usually I just get sweets; this time I felt the need of something restorative, and got a "bruschetta" consisting of pate (truffled, according to the menu) and chopped red onions on toast. Quite nice. Then I had strawberry-peach pie and vanilla gelato. And then, after brief stops at Porto Rico for tea, CVS for boring useful things, and Varsano's for chocolate, I went to the gym.

I've had better workouts. A bit of that was that I never remember until too late that the branch of my gym on Seventh Avenue South (which stays open later on Sundays than my usual) does have exercise bikes, but hides them two levels up from the other cardio gear, so wind up doing treadmill or such; another piece was that whoever washes the towels for that branch isn't using hot enough water; and a piece was that I shouldn't fill up that much before exercising. A brief amble doesn't take long enough to prepare me to work out. Ah, well. I did some exercise, then stopped what I was doing, skipped to my yoga balance exercise, and finished with stretches.

*at least because it was still going when I fell asleep

Tuesday evening, cattitude and I had a very pleasant sushi dinner with elisem and roadnotes. They kindly invited us to join them after Elise and Roadnotes ran into each other on the street Sunday and agreed to get together.

The fish was good, and the conversation excellent. Unsurprisingly, we talked a bunch about Mike Ford, because Elise misses him intensely and because New York was his city, so being here reminds her of him.

As it happens, I'd just picked up The Princes of the Air, which I'd not read before. (I'm still only halfway through the book, so will save any significant discussion.) The day after that conversation, I happened on a bit of scene description, set in a palace on a human colony world around another star, but between what's in the book and the reminder of Mike's connection to this city, I suddenly had a detailed and specific sense of place. A reader who didn't make that connection, or didn't know the place in question, wouldn't be lost, but it was a fine extra.

Because energy is finite, and because we'd had Adrian here on the weekend and then I'd been to the gym Monday night, both of which are worthwhile but both of which had used energy, I declined to join Elise and Roadnotes at the piano bar. It would have been fun, but as it was, I was leaning on the subway station pillars for support while we waited for an uptown A train. (And then I didn't get to bed until almost midnight, instead talking to Adrian and futzing around online--but I was home, not dealing with travel or people I didn't know.)

We've lost another of the good people: Mike Ford was an excellent writer and a real mensch.

My world feels a little smaller all of a sudden, and my heart goes out to elisem and the other people who knew and loved him well.

I left work mid-afternoon Friday, and my bus made very good time. adrian_turtle and I rendezvoused at Harvard Square T station, and then wandered around Harvard Yard until we found the building where Vericon was being held, to meet up with the generous ckd. He handed me a bag containing a Palm m150, charging cradle, and case, and advice on where to find a belt clip for said case. We chatted a bit, I said hello to another congoer who looked familiar in the "yeah, I've seen this guy in the halls at other cons" way, and then Adrian and I had Thai food for dinner.

We attempted to get dessert at Finale, a dessert restaurant that I remembered from downtown that now has a branch in Harvard Square, but they said it would be a 20-minute wait for a table, and I was just awake enough to realize that if "should we wait 20 minutes?" is a difficult question, the answer is no. Realizing I didn't want to stop in quickly at Toscanini's for ice cream instead was much simpler, so we went home and to bed, but not before I gave Adrian her Biodome membership card. She was pleased and surprised--I deliberately hadn't mentioned here that I'd bought a family membership, rather than a singleton, because I want her to have the membership card too and want to support the Biodome. (Technically, we are members of the Société des Amis du Biodôme de Montréal.)

Saturday included unsuccessful baking (none of the substitutions should have made the muffins tasteless, so I suspect the original recipe wouldn't have been terribly appealing either), and another expedition to Cambridge. This time, we spent some time at Pandemonium, where we ran into an old Yale/Story Reading friend of mine, David Wald [who as far as I know is not on LJ, but I didn't ask]. He introduced his wife, whose name I forget; I introduced him to Adrian; he asked if I was now living in the Boston area. A reasonable question, since I'm hanging out in a Cambridge bookstore with my girlfriend. I told him cattitude and I are still at the same New York address, and if he doesn't have it, we're both in the phone book (unusual surnames have some advantages). They then went home to cook and eat dinner, and we wandered a bit, failing to find a chocolate shop but catching up on a bit of conversation that had been left over from the night before, before making another attempt at Finale.

The original plan had been "eat dessert first", but it turned out Finale's menu includes light, savory foods--salad, soup, pizza, that sort of thing--in what the menu claims are "appetizer sized portions" so patrons will have room for dessert. Adrian had soup, I had a pizza--it was a fairly standard pizza-for-one size, and not terribly impressive otherwise; I ate about half, the waitress wrapped the rest up for later, and it's sitting in Adrian's fridge because I forgot about it this afternoon. For dessert, I had something called "Masari [sp?] mousse," a mousse cake served with a "Napoleon" of small, thin butter cookies and blackberry sorbet. The cake turned out to be basically good chocolate mousse with a thin layer of sponge cake around it, and a tall, curled piece of dark chocolate on top; it was similar to the sort of things that Bruno's bakery, down in Greenwich Village does. Adrian had molten chocolate cake and banana sorbet. The sorbet was excellent--she compared it with Maple Delight for quality, and I think it may live up to that; it was intensely banana. I also had a pot of English breakfast tea, because caffeine is good. The desserts were good, though overall it left me with a desire to get back to Chikalicious; the pizza was disappointing, and I don't know if I just picked the wrong thing, or if savories are really not their strength. If I go back, I'll have the protein and vegetable part of supper elsewhere, either before or after.

In between cavorting and lying around idly in bed, we talked, of course: life and work and people we know and books. I mentioned zorinth and Adrian observed that I have a cool nephew. I knew this, but like any proud aunt, I'm pleased to hear people say so. It also transpired that I almost certainly can't trace what, if any, distant biological family connection papersky and I may have, because her grandfather almost certainly changed his name when he moved to Britain.

Today, we slept late--well, Adrian did, I was up before ten--and eventually went out, had sushi for lunch after the Indian place we tried to go to was unexpectedly closed, and then I got a bus back to New York and Adrian went home to do laundry. Memo to self: yes, the Greyhound from Boston to New York always stops at the Roy Rogers in North Haven. That is not sufficient reason to get fried chicken there. A soda, sure--they'll give me lots of ice cubes to go in my water bottle--but the fried chicken is unimpressive and the "biscuit" is dire. Fortunately, I got home at a reasonable hour--my buses in both directions made very good time--and cattitude fed me ham steak and a baked sweet potato, followed by chocolate ice cream.

Do you ever have dreams where you wake up and have to tell yourself that no, that isn't the shape of the waking world? Not nightmares, not fantasias of living on Mars, just odd little shifts.

Rationally, I know that Singer isn't moving to New York; but I remember the long conversation I had with Lise about it, and how it would be cool to have him living nearby, but why would he, since he doesn't really like it here, and what happened to the gig in Maryland? And then I woke up, and had to resist the urge to turn the computer on so I could look at his Web site and make sure he didn't have a note about moving back to Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, out in the waking world, I have email from someone who has the same name as I do, and is astonished by this--neither of us thought there could be two Vicki Rosenzweigs in the world. I've liked having a unique (I thought) name--it made up for nobody being able to spell or pronounce it.