Surpriseless

Late this afternoon our doorbell rings. Because our intercom is broken, these days I hit the buzzer to enable the front door to open, and then I walk out of my apartment to see who is entering our building. Nine times out of ten it is a package courier who shouts up hello and places a package on the bureau we have in the downstairs hallway (unless, of course, they need a signature). So imagine my surprise, today, when the guy carrying the package into my building was not only not wearing a uniform, but he came bolting up the stairs to meet me.

Holding out a small-ish Amazon.com box, he starts rambling, "I live next door and we got this package and since my mom's name is Cathleen I didn't even look at it carefully and just opened it, but then I realized it wasn't meant for me, and so I'm sorry that the box is opened but it's a Garmin sportswatch and it's all in there."

I looked at him, blankly.

He extended his hand, "I'm Justin." I think he said Justin. He just ruined the surprise of the birthday gift that Cathleen got for me; why the fuck should I care what his name is? As he descended back down the stairs, he apologized again for opening the box, and then added an enthusiastic, "enjoy that Garmin sportswatch!"

This is December, right? Justin might not have known that it's my birthday in five days, but it's my impression that lots of people are ordering gifts for other people for other reasons at this time of year. I kind of wish he had taken that into consideration before ruining the surprise.

Not that anything was truly ruined for me. Most of the enjoyment of the actual surprise is all for the surprisor. Hell, I'm gonna be really psyched to have that Garmin watch whether I know about it now or first learned about it five days from now. But Cathleen has been robbed of the joy of watching me unwrap and discover the cool, thoughtful gift. Stupid Justin.

Intimate moment

Hey blog, I miss you.

I miss you, too, rick.

After Thanksgiving. I'll be back. I promise.

Sweet.

Poop Game Revisited

Cathleen and I were chatting in the kitchen this evening, when we looked over and witnessed the kids playing the following game:

Max was laying on the floor, and Eliza would walk over and step on him, at which point he would yell out, "you stepped in poop!" and they would collapse into each other, laughing hysterically, before repeating the entire scene again.

I mean, even if we were to magically find a way to completely housebreak our dogs, it is just too damn late. Our kids are indelibly warped.

There can be little doubt now, right?

I mean, you have to be a true believer at this point, one with unshakable faith in the greater power, to deny that capitalism is a complete failure. After years and years of deregulation, what do we get -- the greatest financial catastrophe since the catastrophe in the 30s that prompted us to start regulating the banks in the first place. You don't have to get caught up in the fact that capitalism inevitably creates class divisions, concentrations of wealth and deprivations of wealth, winners and losers. Shit, we've known that for years and are little bothered by it. But with every capitalist on Wall Street running to the government for help right now, and only the monied reactionaries in Congress adamantly holding out for a market correction (i.e., grand-scale suffering for those who do not have money or are about to lose it all), there can be no doubt now. Capitalism is a failure, and the only way that we can continue with our capitalist system is by propping it up, again, with government intervention.

Anybody feel like whipping out the "socialism" card in our next discussion about universal healthcare?

What a fungi am I

It has been a bizarre six weeks for this guy's body. At the end of July I wound up with ringworm all over my torso. Ringworm, for the uninitiated, is the most misappropriately named medical condition out there. Worm? Not at all. It's actually a skin fungus -- the tinea fungus, to be exact. If you get the tinea fungus on your feet, it's called athlete's foot. If you get the tinea fungus on your crotch, it's call jock itch. Anywhere else and it's called ringworm. Granted, it does end up forming a ring-like patch on your skin that itches a little, but the very name ringworm makes it that much skeevier an experience.

It turns out that ringworm is wickedly contagious, and you can spread it all over yourself by scratching it (which I wasn't doing) or by something as innocuous as rubbing a towel on your body to dry yourself off after a shower. By the time I had figured out what was going on, I had it all over my stomach and back. Fortunately, they do amazing things with topical ointments these days, and within a couple of weeks it was gone.

Then, about a month later, I woke up with an earache. It was pretty severe, so I made an appointment to see my doctor the next day. He looked in my ear, declared it an ear infection and put me on antibiotics for ten days. Of course, I hadn't had any congestion leading up to the ear infection (or any other typical cause), so my doctor told me that if it hadn't cleared up within a week to call him. Well, I saw marginal progress at best by week's end. Although the ache had subsided from "chronic" to only "most of the time," my head felt like someone had pounded my left ear full of clay. I was half deaf and felt like I wanted to clear my ear out with an awl. I called my doctor, and he referred me to an otologist (ear specialist).

The ear guy peeked into my ear and said "antibiotics aren't going to take care of that." Turns out that I have, you guessed it, a fungal infection. This one is called aspergillus, and is treated with the same stuff you put on the ringworm, except in eardrop form. One week of the drops later, and the fungus is almost entirely gone.

A couple of thoughts, of course, come to mind. Ahem, why the hell am I suddenly so vulnerable to every little fungus? According to the doctor, and based on my own obsessive online research, it's just one of those things that happens.

And it's bad enough to get ringworm, but a fungus in the ear? The ear? I basically had the equivalent of a yeast infection in my ear. I mean, if that's not some sort of bizarre twist on a Nantucketian limerick. I have no idea what to expect next.

The Hiatus is Over

So I haven't posted a blog in almost two months. Does that make me a bad blogger? Perhaps.

I've been busy...vacation in Canada, sleep-depriving Olympics-watching addiction, unhealthy Democratic National Convention watching, swamped at work, etc., etc. Sure, there was plenty to blog about. Hell, rarely a day went by where I didn't think that X or Y would be good blog fodder, but then I'd find myself waking up the next morning, postless.

But it is time to move on. Last week marked the one year anniversary of this blog, and damn if I don't feel a year older for it.

Dinner at our house

Cathleen cooks up a savory dish of sauteed organic vegetables (from our Community Supported Agriculture share) over pasta. After a few bites, Eliza starts placing her pasta into her glass of chocolate milk. Cathleen and I glance at each other and silently shrug. Eliza then picks up her glass and drinks the milk.

Moments later, Max starts talking.

Max: This winter I am going to find two snowflakes that are exactly alike.
Cathleen: You know, Max, that there are no two snowflakes that are exactly alike, just like humans.
Max(without even looking up): You'll see.

Still here

Wow, it has been 19 days since I last posted. I'm finding it more difficult to find the time to wax poetic in this forum. I typically post at night, and lately I've been consumed with watching baseball, playing ultimate, and going to sleep, all of which seem to preclude a certain amount of blogability.

Not that I've been without thoughts and experiences. July has been a busy month, with highs and lows.

I flew out to L.A. by my lonesome on July 6th to attend Sameer and Shruti's wedding. It was a marvelous happening at a semi-exotic locale. It was a traditional Indian (Gujarati) wedding, or at least as traditional as I could tell, which made it a fascinating cultural experience for me, on top of the fact that I was so damn happy to watch Sameer get married. I felt a little bit of the outsider all weekend, given that I was "the high school friend" who did not fit neatly into any of the larger groups of friends, but Sameer, not surprisingly, has surrounded himself with warm, sincere and interesting people, and they welcomed me into their fold with open arms. Very good time for me, though I missed Cathleen and the kids. This past weekend Cathleen and I attended a larger Connecticut reception hosted by Sameer's parents. Mike also attended and we were most interested in hanging out with each other (something that we don't get to do too often anymore, certainly not as adults).

I then had to return to my office to fully confront the reality that Bloomberg and the City Council, in what can only be described as an odious and cowardly move, completely gutted HIV Legal Services funding as part of an approximately $70 million wack at human services programs. Sure, they managed to find a way to keep the middle class property tax rebate in the budget (thank goodness I'll still get my $400!) but they abandoned the City's most vulnerable residents. My program took a $111,000 hit -- I'm not only at risk of having to lay off two-three employees, but unless I find alternate funding we are going to be without funding to provide housing legal services (eviction prevention work), which just happens to be the most important issue our clients face. Needless to say, I was pretty depressed for a few days, but adversity kind of gets my juices flowing and I'm resolved to find alternate funding. Game on. We already completed a grant application that I feel pretty good about it, and we're pursuing a couple of other avenues.

SLIPPING has been garnering great reviews. We don't know yet how well it has bee selling, but there's an incredibly positive vibe about the book lingering in the air. Maybe that's a bit naive, but Cathleen has been receiving such overwhelmingly positive and supportive feedback that I feel confident in saying that some identifiable level of "success" has been achieved. So far two otherwise-unconnected young readers have emailed her after having read the book to express how much they enjoyed it. Fanmail! How cool!

Finally, for reasons I need not get into here, I was recently forced to confront my father's death in a way I had not had to do in years. And you know what? Twenty-three years later and his death is still painful for me. As difficult as it was to be taken back to that time and encounter those feelings of loss and grief, it was strangely reassuring, like I hadn't lost my connection with him after all of these years. In a choice between feeling something or nothing, I'll always take the something.

Slipmania

It's here. And there. And somewhat everywhere. SLIPPING is out. June 24th was the official release date, which mainly meant that amazon.com shipped out it's pre-orders. Our pre-ordered copy arrived the next day. Yes, I said our pre-ordered copy. Cathleen's contract with Bloomsbury guaranteed her 25 author's copies, but she was so excited at seeing the book listed on amazon a few months ago that she ordered one.

A day or two later Lorri emailed around photos of Ari standing in a western New York Barnes & Noble pointing to copies of SLIPPING on the bookshelf, and holding it in the store. Very cool stuff.

Around mid-week, Cathleen's editor forwarded to her a PDF from Publisher's Weekly with their forthcoming review. SLIPPING received a "Signature" review, and it was fairly glowing. Here's a clip from a New York Sun article in 2005 explaining the significance of such a review:

PW reviews are important because they can jump-start the publicity for a book or can, just as easily, push a book a lot closer to oblivion. PW claims that its policy of unsigned reviewing is done not to shield reviewers but to ensure a consistency of standard and tone.

The magazine's new editor, Sara Nelson, who is making major changes in the publication, said, "We hope to have a signature review in many issues. We want to match up a fairly prominent book with a fairly prominent reviewer. Frank McCourt is, of course, a very prominent reviewer. We will still have non-bylined reviews. But certain books just seem to scream out for special treatment."

So, you know, it was pretty exciting to see that review. It was published in the June 30th edition of Publisher's Weekly.

Last night we hosted a book release party at Pacific Standard, a great little pub around the corner from our home. We had platters of food from Fairway, I had ordered custom-made M&Ms in two different shades of blue that had "Slipping" printed on them, and there was an employee of a local bookstore, Book Court, hawking copies of the book. Approximately 30 friends and family showed up to celebrate with Cathleen and listen to her read from the book, but she had laryngitis! Are you kidding! Thanks to drastic measures, she had enough of her voice to socialize, but I had to step in as her reader proxy. On one level it was disappointing for her to not be able to read to this crowd; on the other hand she really enjoyed listening to her book being read out loud. And I had a lot of fun reading it. Woohoo, we were all having fun!

We still haven't seen it in a bookstore ourselves. Maybe we'll do that this weekend. It's pretty good times right now.

I am fuel, you are friends, we got the means to make amends

Hey look at me, titling consecutive blog entries with song lyrics. And hey, look at me, writing consecutive blog entries about Sameer.

He and I went to the Pearl Jam concert in the Garden on Tuesday night. Eddie Vedder has to be the most essentially cool person in the world. Could not take my eyes off of him, no matter what was going on in the concert. The band played for three and a half hours, and it was sensational. I was particularly psyched that they played "Leash" and "Given to Fly"; was kind of hoping to hear "World Wide Suicide" and "Jeremy" but didn't. The concert featured a healthy mix of old, new and everything in between. There are few experiences that approximate the energy of 20,000 people singing along in unison to a completely electrified band. It was so loud that I would not have been able to tell if I was singing along or not had my throat not been hurting from the effort.

Delight, delight, delight in our youth...

All summer long, we sang a song

Sameer Ashar and I have been friends since the 8th grade. At the end of the 8th grade, some high school kids came to our middle school to recruit folks for the debate team. Sameer and I attended that meeting, listened to their nerdy pitch, and decided we would be debate partners the next year. We spent the next four years of high school developing a debate partnership that turned us into a nationally competitive team (arguably a top 10 or 12 team in the country)(arguably...get it?), while cultivating a deep, deep friendship. Since high school it has seemed, with some exception, like we've never been farther than 20 minutes apart from each other: we went to colleges 20 minutes apart from each other, law schools 20 minutes apart from each other, we worked for a while in downtown Manhattan near each other, and now we live about ten blocks from each other in Brooklyn. He is terrible at returning phone calls, is almost guaranteed to be late to any appointment, is a frickin Yankees fan, and is one of the very best people I know in the world. And, finally, that boy is getting married.

Last Saturday I gathered with four other of Sameer's friends (Ajit, Deepu, Tito and George) to engage in that right of passage called "the bachelor party." We drove up to Cornwall-on-Hudson and kayaked on the Hudson River. It was a gloriously sunny day, and I could not have imagined doing anything better than kayaking on that expanse of river (and off through a marshy tributary). When we finished the kayak trip, I had to teach Tito how to use his keys to get into his car, and then we dined on pizza and ice cream at a local joint. We drove back to Brooklyn, dined at a trendy but middling Mexican restaurant in Red Hook called Alma, and then headed to a karaoke bar.

I've never done karaoke. Honest. It's not just that I've never sung karaoke; I've never actually been to a karaoke gathering of any sort. The bar that we went to (the Hope 'n Anchor in Red Hook) had the kind of karaoke where it is basically open mike at the bar. You would peruse a book that listed the 15,000 different songs that you could sing, and then submit a post-it with your song on it to the 7-foot trans woman who was hosting the karaoke. Really, she had to be 7 feet tall, and she wore a glorious blonde afro wig. Sameer led off for us with Pearl Jam's "Elderly Woman behind the counter..." and then it was game on. Deepu, Ajit and Tito sang a range of pop hits (Sweet Home Alabama, I'm Just a Gigolo, etc.). Sameer and Ajit performed a duet to The Killers' "All These things that I've Become" ("I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier..."). The pressure on me to sing was mounting.

I don't know what other karaoke scenes are like, but with the exception of our little crew, this seemed like a fairly serious karaoke scene. Every member of the bar's staff, including our 7-foot hostess, would take turns singing a song and they were all amazing. There was another woman in the bar who simply had a professional-sounding voice. When she belted out "Me and Bobby McGee," you almost believed that Janis Joplin had been resurrected. I was intimidated, yes.

But a couple of whiskeys in me, and singing became an inevitability. I searched for a short song, and came up with Sinatra's "Summer Wind." I started in a bit late on the song but ended admirably -- heck, a drunk couple even got up and danced while I sang. When it was over, sure, I felt like a man. A man, that is, that doesn't need to sing any more songs in a bar for quite some time.

Sameer's wedding is in L.A. in a little over a week, and I'm looking forward to partying with those crazy boys again.

Hey, drunk lady

One of my dogs is taking a crap.
The other one is barking hysterically at you.
And I'm not making any eye contact, while trying to walk away.

What is it about this set of circumstances that leads you to believe that I want to have a conversation with you about anything, no less your aunt's five dogs?

Thank you, however, for repeatedly telling me that my dogs are beautiful. Not everyone appreciates them, like you do, when one is squatting and the other is yapping his head off.

Cruisin'

On Friday we headed up to Bloomfield so that Cathleen could run in a Run for the Cure 5K (re breast cancer) with some high school friends in Hartford on Saturday morning. Cathleen and the kids drove up to my office school and arrived at around 4:30. There was some trouble with the car, Cathleen informed me, that had developed in the latter part of her drive to the Bronx; there was a bad bumping noise coming from around the front passenger side tire.

Oh. That's right. A few days earlier, while driving home from summer league, I encountered a horrendous patch of newly-scratched up under-construction roadway on the BQE that had not been so scratched up the week before. The car had gone bang and bop, and then I seemed to be feeling every bump from every piece of gravel on the road. By the time I awoke the next morning, however, I had forgotten about it, and Cathleen had not noticed anything driving either to or from school in the ensuing days.

Now we were in the Bronx, with all of our stuff, shortly before dinner time. We took the car to the local Midas guy near my office, whom I've used before and trust. At 15 minutes before closing time, he put the car up on the rack and showed me where the right-front spring was shattered. Well, that would explain that. No spring in stock; he could get one and repair it Saturday. When I told him we were actually en route to CT for the weekend, he recommended we go to the Enterprise rental place half a block away. So we did.

I never know what to expect from the service sector in the Bronx. Rude? Shoddy? Perfectly fine? It can be a gamble of sorts. The Enterprise on East Fordham Road was interesting: there were six guys in suits walking around, only two of whom appeared to be actually servicing any rental customer at any given time. The other four would take turns asking you what you were there for, and if you had signed in yet. Everyone was nice and friendly and seemed to be accommodating, but it didn't look like anything was getting done. And the place was packed with customers. My wife and I, with our two young kids, and our two small dogs, spent an hour there. To all of my small creatures' credit, they all did quite well given the circumstances: the dogs were under control the entire time; Max was incredibly well-behaved, but for periodic whining about how bored he was because it was taking so long (neither of which I minded, because it gave me an opportunity to audibilize patient, yet needling responses, that the men in the office were working as fast as they could to get us a car); Eliza became antsy after a while, so Cathleen took her outside for a walk. It could have been a lot worse.

When it was time for me to pick out a car, I was led into an adjoining garage. I told the guy I just wanted the cheapest rental they had available. Well, he told me, the cheapest they normally have is a Ford Focus sedan, but he'd give me a PT Cruiser for the same rate.

The PT Cruiser has been around for, what, a decade or so? Let me tell you something about that car: I have never liked it. A car that looks like a miniature hearse? Who the hell came up with that design idea? I have been so convinced of the absurdity of the Cruiser's appearance that to this day I cannot believe that there is anyone who takes that car seriously. One year I played at the Poultrydays ultimate tourney in rural, western Ohio on a combo Haverford-Swarthmore graduates team. One of the Swat grads, whom I of course did not know, had rented a PT Cruiser as his car for the weekend. I eventually learned that he was very excited about this rental, and had paid a lot in order to get it. Indeed, while everyone else camped at the fields in tents that weekend, he slept in the Cruiser (like a cadaver?). Not even giving a moment's consideration that someone might actually think that the Hearsemobile was cool, I started making fun of it from the get-go, and quickly alienated this complete stranger. I have a talent for that kind of thing. All was made up when, early in our first game, I cut deep and laid out to catch a swilly, overthrown huck that the guy had put up (most interpersonal conflict, I have learned, can be resolved if you simply catch someone's crappy throws).

So, standing there in the Enterprise car rental facility at 6 pm, I grabbed the Cruiser. I am all about maximizing the irony in my life.

The PT Cruiser is pretty much as ridiculous on the inside as it is on the outside. We were in a 2008 model, and yet the dashboard display was in old-fashioned dial readout form. The only digital display was a function where you could observe what kind of gas mileage you were getting, a piece of information that you'd think Chrysler would not want to make readily available given that this car was topping off at 20 mpg on the highway. Although the car handled the road quite well, it had the turning radius of a large elephant.

Eliza spent much of the drive up to CT, and much of the ride home yesterday, asking about and discussing why we were in this car.
"Why are we in this car?"
"Our car is broken."
"Our car is broken?"
"Yes, a man is going to fix our car, and then we'll get it back."
"Man going to fix our car?"
"Yes."
Pause. "Why are we in this car?"
At first I thought it was just her two-year-old brain processing the entire experience, but then I realized this is Eliza, my brilliant daughter. She is not asking why are we in a car that is not our car; she understood that the PT Cruiser was an absurd vehicle. "Why, Daddy," she was basically asking, "are you driving me around in this asinine joke?" Geez, I do love that little girl.

The balance of the weekend was great: Cathleen had a great run on Saturday (did the 5K in about 30 minutes flat), the kids road on the local carousel, we took a long hike in the sweltering afternoon up a nearby mountain (at Max's insistence; he is really into hiking and did not waiver once in his enthusiasm for the experience), took a cool dip in the neighbor's pool, had a terrific dinner and then drove home at night. This morning I went out for a 4-mile run and nearly died in the heat, and then we went to Max's classmate's birthday party in Prospect Park, before coming home, installing the AC in the livingroom window (mercifully!), grilling and bedtime.

Up and running

One of my new favorite websites: cathleendavittbell.com. Check it out.

The Break-In

Woke up a little groggy on Saturday morning, having stayed up late to watch the Mets lose in extra innings. When Jose, the Executive Director at Bronx AIDS Services, called me at 7:30 I had yet to consume a needed cup of coffee or even attempt to communicate in full sentences. When I heard his voice on my cellphone, my brain couldn't even compute that it was him calling. "Why is Jose calling me, at 7:30 am, on a Saturday morning?" This three-part question could have been answered rather immediately had I been listening to him and not groggily formulating that three-part question in my mind. Gradually, I regained communication cognizance, I understood him to be telling me that someone had broken into the BAS offices and had done a number on the legal department.

Hey, that's my department. My pride and joy. My homely home away from home.

I showered, brewed that much-needed cup of coffee and jumped in the car...zoom to the office.

BAS "main office" is at 540 East Fordham Road. It's a busy road, even by urban standards. Our offices are on the second floor of a two-story building. The legal department occupies the eastern side of the street-facing portion of the building. We have four windowed-offices, with the secretary/senior paralegal office at the easternmost end, then a pair of two-attorney offices, and then there's my office. Opposite these offices, in the interior of the building, is an alcove where our two other paralegals sit.

My would-be burglar entered BAS through one of the windows in the secretary/senior paralegal office via a glass-smashing crowbar. He proceeded to spend some time trying to get into our safe - he managed to break off the door handle and the number-dial thing, but couldn't get the door open. Not sure how we're going to get that door open now, but I suppose that's for the locksmith to figure out. Burglar dude then played around with the computers in the office, knocking them over to see what he could easily transport out of the place I suppose. He rifled through cabinet drawers, spilling all sorts of paperwork on the floor, looking for items of the value (none to be found). I imagine he was in that office for a good 10 - 15 minutes or so, before heading out into the hallway at around 4:15 am. That's when the motion-sensor alarm system discovered him.

Not sure when he decided to fnd the alarm keypad and smash it off the wall, but I suspect it was soon after the alarm went off. He then (or before then) went into the two attorney offices and tried dismantling the computers. He made some more of a mess as he continued his search for valuables. In the third office, he actually took a pair of scissors and cut the cords that connect the monitors to the computers. He then wrapped the two monitors in that office in a brown hooded-sweatjacket and took them into the secretary/senior paralegal office. That's where we found them.

He then probably headed down to my office, stopping at the supply cabinet outside my office where he rifled through the supplies, spilling many of them onto the floor. In my office, he took almost all of the loose change I keep in a dish on my desk (hey, how the hell am I going to pay for that afternoon package of Skittles, asshole!), and he opened a cabinet where I keep all of my funding binders (the government contracts, correspondence, data reports). These binders have often given me the urge to want to flee the building, but I bet that it was right around this time that the cop cars, responding to the triggered alarm system, finally appeared, because lame-ass burglar dude bolted out of the legal area towards the back of the agency, where he escaped via a roof hatch in the ceiling. I've worked in that office for seven years and never knew that there was a roof hatch.

Well, when I arrived at the office at around 8:30 am on Saturday, surveying all of the damage was a bit shocking. Here's a tip for all of you asiring legal directors out there: staring at a ransacked office is about the only time that it is OK to say "that dirty motherfucker" in front of your executive director.

The good news is that, with the exception of about three dollars in loose change from my office, it does not appear that he got away with anything. Some of our computers might be damaged (at the very least we've lost those two monitors), but insurance will cover that kind of loss, and all of our data/records are on a network so the hardware is completely fungible. He made a mess, particularly in the secretary/senior paralegal office, but clean-up should not take much more than an hour or two on Tuesday morning. Bozo the burglar left behind his sweatjacket (duh) and no doubt a bunch of fingerprints, so I'm optimistic that the police have something to work with. And we have a good story to tell.

Booooooooook!

The real thing -- Slipping, in it's hardcovered glory -- arrived the other day. It won't be in the bookstores for another four weeks, but Bloomsbury sent Cathleen a copy from the first batch they received from the printer (she'll get a handful more "author's copies" soon as well). The cover looks excellent, the blue a bit deeper and more metallic looking than that in the advance copies, and pieces of added text are well-placed.

If you take it and wack it on your head, as I have done, it feels like a real book.

Swab the Rick, matey

Ever since the summer of 2005, in the wake of an attack in the London subway system, the NYPD has been conducting "random" searches of travelers' bags at the entranceways to various NYC subway stations. When the policy was first announced, I still retained a shred of naivete about the protections afforded by the US Constitution, and I figured that there was no way that this practice would stand judicial scrutiny. Well, in a "post-9/11 world" there is no measure of civil rights that can't stand to be sacrificed at the altar of "making us safe" and so here we are, three years into the bag-searching regime.

I live near one of the larger subway stations in the city -- the Atlantic Ave/Pacific Street Station-- and I pass through it twice every day during the week. At least once a week during the morning rush the police are set up at the Pacific Street entrance (where I enter) conducting random bag searches. For three years I've walked by them, never quite knowing how to play the situation. Somewhat to my relief, I think, after three years I remain irked by the trappings of a police state, but I never figured out in my mind how much my consternation should influence my conduct if I were to be stopped for a search.

Two mornings ago I entered the subway station with Dinosaur Jr's Start Choppin' blaring through my iPod headphones. Sometimes, depending on the song and my mood, I likes to hear the music loud. A police officer stood in front of the turnstiles, and as I walked towards him he beckoned me towards a table on the left, behind which stood three more officers. One of them said something to me, but I was still fumbling with my iPod in an attempt to turn it off. I placed my bag on the table and defiantly stepped backwards. You want to search my bag, open it your damn self. Instead of searching the contents of my bag, however, the police officer took a small piece of paper, swabbed it across the top of my bag a couple of times, and then stuck the paper into a small machine that resembled a small credit card machine that you might find in a bodega or a dry cleaners. They were testing my bag for explosives.

Did the high-tech screening make it any less invasive? Was the relatively de minimis extent of the inconvenience supposed to render me more complacent? Is anyone feeling safer? Was anyone feeling that unsafe to begin with?

Scared into war, and eventually war becomes the state of being. Scared into giving away some civil rights, and eventually the absence of civil rights becomes the state of being.

Oh there's no goin back to that, I'm so numb, can't even react.

Transporta-zen

For my daily commute home, I take a Metro North train from Fordham to Grand Central; there I take the Grand Central - Times Square Shuttle (the "S" train), and then the N or Q home from Times Square. The S train, as the full name implies, runs exclusively between Grand Central and Times Square, with three trains operating pretty much every two minutes during rush hour. At these times, the S is always packed like a cattle car because, as it turns out, many a New Yorker passes between Grand Central and Times Square during the business day. I have learned, however, that if you miss one S train, you'll really only have to wait two minutes for the next one -- and I mean two minutes for it to be fully-boarded and leave. It is not a long wait.

Nevertheless, commuters who would think twice before hastening their pace to save their mothers from an oncoming vehicle suddenly feel compelled to break into a full sprint in order to make it into whatever S train they see sitting in the station. I have seen fat people, old ladies, groups of friends holding hands...all running for their lives to make it into a train in order to avoid the two-minute wait for the next one. I have seen folks of all sorts shove parts of their bodies (or their children's bodies -- once I saw someone propel a baby stroller forward as a door jam) or their possessions into the closing train doors in order to buy themselves a spot on a train. Before today, I had never seen an elderly Tibetan monk make that effort. To his credit, when the train left him standing on the platform, he didn't curse or yell. He barely looked anguished. That's called being at peace with yourself.

Half, as fast as I could have imagined

Ran the Brooklyn Half-Marathon this past Saturday. Having trained at a 9-minute per mile pace, my goal was to finish in under two hours (9 minute pace translates into 1 hour and almost 58 minutes). I am proud to report that I finished in 1:53:26, which is an 8:39 pace per mile. I placed 2,553rd out of 5,832 participants. But the race, obviously, wasn't about me against the other 5,831 runners; it was about me against the 3,279 slobs that finished behind me. No, I mean it was about me running against myself, challenging myself to do my best.

The morning had not started so well -- I made it to the subway platform as the N train was pulling out, meaning I'd have to wait for more than ten minutes early on a Saturday morning for the next train to arrive. I made it out to Coney Island about 20 minutes before racetime, had to put my bag on a bus for pickup later at the finish, had to use the port-a-potty and then get in the race corrals. The lines at the potties were long, and I basically had enough time to do about a quarter of my normal stretching routine before the gun sounded, and I was able to slip into the race corrals as the horde began to move forward.

The first 2 1/2 miles were along (and double-back again) the Coney Island boardwalk. That was cool. I mean, the weather was chilly, but the sight of the beach and ocean to the immediate left, the creaking and thumping of the wood underneath you, the occasional sand hazard to run through or around...a whole different "race" experience. The beginnings of these long races are always so cool...everyone's in a good mood, optimistic about what lies ahead; there's a folksy comaraderie. Did I spell comaraderie right? It looks funny. In any event, I was at exactly nine minutes at the first mile marker, which surprised me, as the crowd was thick and although I was attempting to weave through the thick parts to get some sort of pace going, I assumed I'd be behind the mark until we hit the more open streets. I was still on pace at two miles, and by the fourth mile marker, on Ocean Parkway, I was slightly ahead of pace. Interesting.

Ocean Parkway is a grand boulevard of Brooklyn -- large median down the center, beautiful homes line the sides. A friend who had run the Brooklyn Half in the past had joked that the Ocean Parkway run is frustrating because the cross-streets are all lettered in reverse alphabetical order ("Avenue Z" and then "Avenue Y" and so on), and so you spend time trying to figure out what number letter "M" is in order to calculate how much longer you have until you make it to Prospect Park. Lo and behold, by the middle of the alphabet I was stumped as to how much more Ocean Parkway lay ahead of me.

By the sixth or seventh mile I was more than a full minute ahead of my nine-minute pace goal. On the one hand, this was great. On the other hand, I was concerned about gassing out at the end. The last four miles of the run are in hilly Prospect Park, and I did not want to be the idiot who tanked with a mile to go. But I was feeling exceptionally well. Without a running partner for the first time in a long race (you know, of the two other long races I've ever run), I was able to focus exclusively on my running, making myself relax my body, maintain a pace and good form on hills, etc.

I entered Prospect Park at the nine-mile marker, and I was about a minute and a half ahead. Now I could turn on the psychological games: this was my park, where I run all the time...get out of my way, shitheads. I know, it's a bit simple and juvenile, but I'm not a very sophisticated runner. When I hit the big hill at the northern end of the park, I was practically laughing to myself -- I own this hill! Around the bend to the west side of the park where I knew that Cathleen, Max, Eliza and my mom would be waiting for me near the Third Street entrance...and then I saw them from about 50 yards away. Such a lift! I kissed them all, and then ran away with a new bounce in my step. Literally. I had about two miles to go, and I was psyched. Down the big hill at the southwest corner, and then the last big hill (in the unchartered, for me, interior part of the park). As I ascended the final hill of the run, some guy on the side shouted out "the 13-mile marker is right around the corner." That's all I needed; I bolted into a full-out sprint to the end, weaving in and around folks ahead of me as a I flew to the finish line.

I often use the experience of the two marathons I've run in other contexts: the mental determination I employed in those runs to overcome physical pain and fatigue in order to finish...it is helpful to look back and know that I have the ability to dig deep in the face of challenges. The half-marathon -- a dramatically more humane and less punishing distance to run -- provides me with something different. Not sure yet what that is, perhaps something about what it takes to exceed a goal, but I'm filing away the 1:53:26 of moments that were that race, and they'll be there when I want or need to use them.

Hold My Hand

In March 1996 Cathleen and I flew down to West Palm Beach, visited my grandmother (Kahn), and then spent a few days in the Keys. Of the four or five nights we spent in the Keys, we dined twice at a little restaurant called Mangrove Mamas. It was the lone structure on Sugarloaf Key to have survived The Hurricane of 1919, or something like that. Half of the building lacked a roof, and the other half looked like it was a shanty that had been assembled with pieces of scrap earlier that afternoon. The seafood was out of this world, their Key Lime Pie had been voted "Best in the Keys" by the Miami Herald for several years running, and the place had a magical ambience that I can still feel when I think about it. The first night that we ate there we were directed to the bar while we waited for a table to open up. We drank beers out of mason jars while listening to two guys play guitar, and whenever I hear Hootie and the Blowfish's "Hold My Hand," I am immediately transported back to that place. If the sum of one's life boils down to a collection of moments, for whatever reason -- youth, the first vacation with the woman I loved, the beer -- that was one of my moments.

I had another moment today. On the heels of a productive weekend at home (built shelves in the livingroom for our TV components; assembled shelving unit for storage room and organized a portion of the mountain of crap in there; grilled a whole fish Saturday night), the four of us were pretty spent by the end of the day. Helen (with Grace) came over for a playdate with Eliza, and Max was finding himself the object of nobody's attention and none too happy about it. So I dragged him out to run an errand with me. We drove to the local CVS for soap, shampoo, sunscreen and some other odds and ends. As we walked around the store, I was holding his hand, a not unusual arrangement when we are out. This time, however, as we walked through the aisles of the store, I felt Max blithely stroking the inside of my palm with his thumb. Comforting himself, connecting with me, or just enjoying the texture of my hand...I'll never know. But when we approached the cashier to pay for our items, it took a great deal of willpower for me to let go.

Evil, and the people who take it

I went on a home intake today in the Baychester area of the Bronx. The client was a 30-year-old woman in a wheelchair who lived with her son (approx. 10 years old) in the bottom of a two-family brick rowhouse. The landlord of her building lived upstairs until February, at which time a fire burned out his apartment. He turned off the gas and water in the building and moved out. My client's apartment was undamaged, and because a decent, affordable, wheelchair-accessible apartment is hard to find, she stayed in her apartment. But she hasn't had any water or gas (and thus heat) in the apartment for two months. But only now did she call for legal assistance.

No gas, no water for two months. And she's in a wheelchair. And living with a young kid. I kept repeating questions to her during the intake, as if I couldn't believe what was going on.

So you had no heat during the end of February and throughout the cold days of March? How have you been cleaning yourself? (Bottled water). How have you been cooking? (On a hotplate).

Unasked: what the hell finally angered you enough to want to do something about it?

I find that many of my clients suffer from what an old coworker of mine referred to as "battered tenant syndrome." They are poor, and are so used to being poor and the substandard quality of everything that you get when living in poverty that they don't expect to live in an apartment that meets the minimal requirements of the City's housing code. They accept fourth-rate living as a fact of life. So they'll live, without much complaint, with broken windows, peeling plaster, ceiling leaks, rat or cockroach infestations...but then there'll be that one thing that they just can't take anymore, that pushes them over the edge, like a ceiling collapse, and they'll finally seek help. This severely-disabled woman lived two months without gas or water.

And get this -- her scumbag landlord...he shows up a couple of times a month to get his mail out of his mailbox. My client never sees him, but she knows from her Social Services worker that he is still dutifully cashing his rent checks every month.

We're filing an emergency application in court tomorrow morning, seeking an order compelling him to get the gas and water back on.

A Rat ran into my Foot

It did. I was walking the dogs tonight, and everyone had set their trash out on the sidewalk for pickup tomorrow morning. On late, warm nights when the trash has been put out, I've occasionally seen rats scurry from buildings and across the sidewalk to the trash bags and bins that sit curbside. But never too up close. And certainly never so up close that the fucking rat ran smack into my foot. I sort of yelped and did a little awkward jig, and the rat ran back towards the building and down the stairs to the basement. For those trying to do a little mental mock up at home, it was a big rat, such that I felt it on the side of my foot and ankle.

Walking back down the block towards our home, Oprah stopped to sniff at something. I tugged at her leash and said, "c'mon, I'm scared." She could identify with that.

Ready for the race

The Brooklyn Half-marathon is in three weeks and I think I've finally gotten my body to a point where I can run it. I ran 12.5 miles today and felt reasonably well enough in doing so. I've managed to maintain a 9-minute pace throughout the past few weeks of long runs, and now I have the next couple of weeks to "rest up" by tapering my distances (10 miles next weekend; 8 the next). I've been experiencing some calf and hip tightness on my left side, and had a severe lower back spasm for about 48 hours after last weekend's 12-mile run, but no serious injuries. I think I'm ready to take this one on.

It's not the real thing

A Billy Joel quote! Anyone reading this blog would have the most distorted sense of my musical tastes. I know a lot of Billy Joel lyrics because I was alive during the 80s, but the only person that I know who still listens to Billy Joel is my sister-in-law Theresa. This blog entry title is for you, T.

I have not posted in a while (almost two weeks) and although it might have been because I had nothing to say, the truth is that I always have something to say. I generally write posts late at night, but lately I've been spending those late-night hours obsessing over the at-bat by at-bat performances of my baseball fantasy team's west coast players.

Oh yes, I am in a fantasy league.

Last year, Mark coaxed me into joining a fantasy league with him. Mom always told me to stay away from friends like him. I had always suspected that I'd enjoy participating in a fantasy league because I am a huge baseball fan, I love stats, and I can be as OCD about something as the next guy. But I resisted joining one in the past precisely because I was afraid that the OCD in me would take over. Little did I know.

So Mark and I joined this league last year where, among the other 11 team owners, two of the guys are producers for a major networks sports' programming (yes, we are competing against guys who do sports for a living). Mark and I literally did not know what we were doing as draft night approached. We did not have a full grasp of how rosters were slotted, how the salary cap worked, how the scoring worked, how the free agent pickup rules worked...hell, we didn't even know how much the league cost. And yet we were steamrolling into the draft like we had a chance. The draft took place in a bar in midtown, but Mark was at a medical conference in Baltimore and so we communicated by cell phone for two hours until my phone battery died. In a straight draft situation, this would have been an abysmal setup; matters were made worse by the fact that our league has an auction draft, and so by the time I had communicated to Mark what player was on the board for bidding and we had decided whether to bid $5, the bid would already be up to $8. And so on. We compiled a terrible team and by May it was clear that we were far out of the running. We spent the remaining four months of the season trying to trade for "keepers" (you get to carry 12 guys over to the following year's roster, and so we were trying to get good players with low salaries). We set a record in the league for lowest number of points in a season (the league is scored in four offensive and four pitching categories).

This year, armed with the knowledge of, oh -- the rules -- we began our research on players during the winter. By January we were reading articles and top ten lists, and by February I was spending my entire lunch hour on baseball and sports websites. Mark and I sent dozens of emails back and forth debating the merits of keeping this player over that player, whom we should be targeting in the draft, etc.

I am, at heart, a competitive mother. I'm not a claw-your-eyes-out-so-I-win kind of guy, but I do not like to lose. It is why I loved debating in high school, it is why I still love to play ultimate frisbee, and it is certainly part of what I like about lawyering (preventing my client's eviction is rewarding, but beating the crap out of that landlord attorney in oral argument is its own reward). Now that I'm playing a lot less ultimate (and almost no truly competitive ultimate), fantasy baseball is where I can get my competitive jones up.

The draft this year was a far better experience than last year. Mark missed the first half because he was teaching his meditation class, but he was there for the end when my brain was beginning to melt (the draft is a four-hour experience). The draft did not go entirely to plan (and we had spent many an email and phone call hammering out an overall strategy), mostly because I was a little gun-shy early on to spend big bucks, but we put together a reasonably-balanced team. Two weeks into the season and it is unclear exactly where we stand. The baseball season is, as they say, a marathon, not a sprint, and so I can't read much into the fact that we went from 3rd place to 10th place over the course of this past weekend, though I can be concerned that we're not getting stolen bases and our pitchers can't seem to record any wins. But we're in it. Oh yes, we're in it.

Fiver

Five years. Max celebrated his fifth birthday yesterday. He looks so much different than he did five years ago.

Sleeping on the floor next to my bed (will that end before his tenth birthday?), he bounced up from his sleeping bag at a little after 6 a.m. and proudly declared, "it's my birthday!" Whipped from less than five hours of sleep, I pulled him into bed with me in a desperate effort to keep my eyes closed. At five, fortunately, he still likes to cuddle. That didn't last too long, and we eventually made our way to the livingroom where a brand new bicycle sat underneath a bedsheet and ribbon. Upon pulling off the sheet, Max looked over the new bike and asked, "why did you get me a bike? Why didn't you get me something I wanted?"

Ummm, a week ago your mouth was agape looking at a bike in a store window. Five years, and it just doesn't get easier, does it?

He realized before the morning was over that he actually liked the bike, but not before Cathleen had engaged in some serious self-flagellation about our decision to make this his gift. Later that morning Cathleen brought corn muffins and honey to his class for snack (the healthy option was his idea), and I left work early for us all to hang out together. We sang Happy Birthday and consumed local bakery-made cupcakes (oh, sooo rich), and then we headed out to the courtyard of a local elementary school with the bike. Max did a pretty good job for his first riding effort, and even after he fell over once he was willing to get back on for a final ride. We walked home in the rain, rested for a bit and then headed out for sushi for dinner. Max is very into sushi these days, and although he basically sticks to eating rice, shrimp tempura and eel-based maki rolls, I think it is pretty darn cool of him.

It is so fascinating to see him at five...such a real little person, and yet so evolving and unformed in so many ways. He bubbles with sophisticated thoughts and philosophies, and yet there is so much that he can't wrap his brain around. He is beginning to formulate a sense of justice in his (and the) world, and yet he practically has "id" stamped on his forehead. Sweet, loving, rebellious, rude, giggly, funny, angry, needy, independent, creative....you see all of it within any 30 minutes you spend with him. And few things in the world make me happier than when I see his sincere and unfettered smile breaking across his face.

Sugar, We're Goin' Down

If I use a Fall Out Boy song as my entry title, does that make me young, hip and cool? You betcha, much in the same way that my using the phrase "you betcha" makes me young, hip and cool. As an aside, I just bought the Fall Out Boy cover of Michael Jackson's "Beat It," and I'm not sure how that affects my youngishness, hipsteration or coolocity.

In any event, here I am. A week removed from single parenting. As noted earlier, Cathleen went to western New York for her first "Slipping" reading. She took Max, they both had a great time, and she learned a lot about what and how to read "Slipping" passages to a young audience. Eliza and I spent some quality time together. The only crisis moment occurred on the first night at bedtime when I sat down to read to Eliza. Normally, I read to Max and Cathleen reads to Eliza (a system that grew out of the fact that I could read but not breastfeed), but now it was just me and E. It was only at that moment that she came to terms with the fact that mommy was not there, and she promptly burst into tears. She got over it, and by the next night bedtime was no problem. Of course, on the second night after the lights were out she tried pulling out all of the tricks to get me to come back into her bedroom. "Max hit me on the head." "Umm, Eliza, Max is not here. He's more than 300 miles away from here right now." She stares at me. "Max hit me on the head."

Cathleen and Max returned on Thursday, on Friday we baked hamantaschen, and on Saturday morning we packed up the car and drove up to Bloomfield for Easter weekend.

Claudia and Walter live on a few acres of mostly-wooded property, and I had long noticed the abundance of Sugar Maples around the area. Always one to think of gifts that give back to me, I came up with the idea of giving Waler a maple sugaring kit for Christmas. We enjoyed our first jar of homemade maple syrup last month. When we arrived at their house on Saturday, I could see that the gallon jugs that Walter had hooked up on the trees were filled with sap, and by midday we were collecting the sap from six trees and boiling it down over a fire on an outside grill that Walter had constructed for the task. We basically filled a tin lasagna pan with sap and stuck it over the fire; when it boiled down a couple of inches we'd add more sap. The trick was to keep the fire as hot as possible to keep the sap at a rolling boil. I split wood on Walter's wood splitter and fed and stoked the fire all afternoon. We boiled 8 1/2 gallons down to about one gallon or so. By then it had taken on a slightly amber color, sort of like a weak iced tea. When Walter collects enough of the ambered-sap, he then finishes the syrup-making process inside, in a pot on the stove where he can carefully monitor the process to prevent under- or overcooking (he purchased a hydrometer to aid in the process). We didn't get that far on Saturday, but that didn't matter. I still came home with a jar of homemade syrup from an earlier batch.

I ran 9 miles on Sunday at a nine-minute per mile pace...crazy fast for me, and I've begun entertaining the idea that I might be able to finish the Brooklyn Half-marathon in under two hours. Speaking of which, they moved the race date from April 26th to May 3rd, and now Mark and Elizabeth can't do it. So I'm flying solo, which increases the odds of me running faster, as I will focus on running and not socializing the entire time. I'll have to see over the next few weekends if I can keep up a nine-minute pace as I extend my distance to 10, 11, 12 miles, but I'm mildly optimistic.

After my run, Sam and I "hid" the Easter eggs around the yard while everyone else was at church, and then there was a huge luncheon (26 people, I think) and Easter egg hunt. I am always surprised to hear when kids believe in the Easter Bunny. It seems so absurd to me that I can't imagine how anyone would buy it, and so when I hear Miriam excitedly proclaiming that the Easter Bunny got her a particular book on Pets because he must have known how in to dogs she is these days, I assume that Miriam has an incredibly sophisticated and sardonic sense of irony. As it turns out, she doesn't. Last year Max figured out that Cathleen and I hid the eggs in our backyard and I was all Jewishly proud of him, but this year he was pulling Peep after Peep out of the eggs he had collected and he was wondering out loud why the Easter Bunny hadn't given him any jelly beans. Yeah, I wonder.

Five Years of Love and War

The war turned five today, just under two weeks before Max also hits that milestone. Five years of violence, death and hate, sharply contrasted with five years of unadulterated joy and love.

After the war began in March 2003, a very pregnant Cathleen and I marched against it in Manhattan, and I coined my favorite rally chant: "the war is stupid, you dumbass motherfuckers" (sing it in a cadence, you'll get it). Just before Max's first birthday, we again marched in Manhattan, right outside our apartment, and I affixed a poster to Max's stroller that read, "War bad, pacifier good." Later that year, I again marched in Manhattan in protest of the Republican National Convention, but naptime I think precluded Max's attendance. We didn't march again until last year -- the almost inconceivable fourth anniversary of the war -- when Max and I traveled down to D.C. in a minivan with Joseph, Miriam, Claudia and Joseph's father David. Max and Miriam ran around on the lawn in front of the Capitol while the rally speakers denounced the impending "surge." This year Max is with Cathleen in Rochester (her first "Slipping" reading!), and I was trying to figure out a way to get back to D.C. while setting up childcare for Eliza, but when I realized that I stood a decent chance of getting arrested at the day of action and civil disobedience that United for Peace and Justice had been planning, I figured that I couldn't risk that with a two-year-old waiting for me in Brooklyn. I then thought I'd leave work early and take Eliza up to the march and vigil at Grand Army Plaza, but rainy weather interfered with those plans. And so here we are, five years into this debacle, and I'm alone with my rage tonight.

We try to teach Max about the inherent good in people, and the value of life, and across the globe we are locked into a war that has taken over half a million lives.
We work to instill in him an understanding of the importance of telling the truth, and we are mired in a war that was begat by one long lie after another.
"No hitting," we say. "If you are angry or frustrated, we talk it out in this family. It is OK to be angry, or to be frustrated because you can't have what you want. It is not OK to hurt someone else."

Every day I tell him I love him at least two or three times, and it is the last thing he hear's from me before he goes to bed at night.

I hope the war ends before he can even understand that it began.

When I was in law school

I never imagined that I'd have a client say to me, in reference to an ex-boyfriend from whom she believes she contracted HIV, "and so one time he cock spit in my mouth."

Rick 1, Florida 1

In the new-millenia competition between Rick and Florida, the score is now tied. In 2004, I ventured down to said state to work as a lawyer on the Kerry team. Basically, the Kerry campaign was asking for lawyers to come down to monitor the elections to ensure that the democracy debacle of 2000 was not re-lived. As history sadly knows, Florida went red again, and I flew home on the day after the election with my head hung low. Florida 1, Rick 0.

Almost three and a half years later, I returned to the land of Ponce de Leon (one of my favorite explorers as a child, if indeed children are allowed to have favorite explorers), and this time I came home with my head held high. I had a great time -- heck, my entire family had a great time -- and so Florida and I are now even.

Here's my write-up on the trip. It is not a short write-up (or, having not yet written it, I anticipate it to be not a short write-up). But I'm writing it more for me than for you, unless you want to pretend that I am writing for you, in which case, eat your heart out.

Thursday.
Cathleen and I arise at 5:30 am and after having packed the car, we confirm with Sophie that she can actually move our car in accordance with alternate-side parking rules if we leave it there, so I unpack it and we call a car service. Wake the kids, pack them into the car service and off we go to the airport. We do alright getting through check-in and security with two kids. At boarding time, as we descend through the tunnel towards the airplane, Max grips my hand and says, "I'm afraid." I tell him, as I've told him innumerable times before, "you are with Mommy and Daddy, and as long as you are with one of us, we will protect you and keep you safe." I, of course, have not flown on an airplane in over two years, and I too am experiencing some pre-flight anxiety and so, like the time Max and I were both having heart attacks on the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, I am really just talking to calm me down in the hopes that he gains some derivative calm. It seems to work. We have three seats in a row on the plane, and one in the row behind. I sit in the one. While Cathleen has to entertain two kids, I get to finish the Times crossword. Parenting, sometimes, is about sacrifices. Max does great on the flight and Eliza, never one to be happy in her carseat, does generally well in her carseat on the plane. Some folks in neighboring seats might beg to differ (her occasional screams, arguably, could be construed as "not cute and charming"), but it could have been much worse for them.

We get to the car rental place and though we've reserved a compact car, they upgrade us to a mini-van. Suddenly, we're hanging out in an incredibly spacious Kia Sedona. It becomes obvious to me why people like mini-vans: they're enormous. Max insisted that he and Eliza sit in the back, and it was almost like Cathleen and I could pretend they weren't even there. Within minutes we have covered the available seat and floor-space with garbage, proving once again that no matter the size of available space, you can cover it with kids. I set up my GPS (finally able to use it in unknown territory) and off we go to South Hutchinson Island (in Fort Pierce). We quickly realize that it is lunchtime, and if we wait until we arrive at the hotel, we'll all be starving. So we have the GPS direct us to the nearest McDonalds...and it takes us to the Burger King across the divided highway. WTF? It might as well have driven us into Lake Okeechobee. These tasteless potato stalks are what passes for french fries in the world of the creepy looking Burger King? C'mon.

After Eliza naps for a whopping 20 minutes, we finally arrive at our hotel -- the Dockside Inn. It is a series of I think four buildings of rooms situated on an inlet of sorts (South Hutchinson Island is a barrier reef island, and the hotel sits on the interior waterway). The water is about 30 yards from our hotel room, with various docks situated about, and pelicans hanging out on the docks. It is a big fishermen's place, and so most of our fellow hotel residents are retirees or salty dog fishermen (aye, matey). Our room is a one bedroom with efficiency; in the front is a small living area with kitchen (and sofabed), and through a door is a bedroom and bathroom. A decent-sized place, but Max spent the entire time questioning why the hotel room was so small. Because Mommy's book isn't a bestseller yet.

The kids run around outside the room - Eliza became obsessed with running up and down a wooden ramp, almost as if she normally spends her time in an overcrowded, rampless urban environment. We walked around the docks and down a little sandy beach nearby, and then we got ready for dinner. By then, the skies had clouded up and rain was a coming. We dined at Chuck's, a local seafood joint where the outside tables are inside a large tent. Eliza is totally hyped-up on sleep deprivation, and she spends most of the meal jumping up and down in a small puddle of water next to our table, as I chow down on fish n' chips and Cathleen eats some yummy muscles. After we've put the kids to bed, Cathleen and I watch some bad television.

Friday.
We arise too early, Cathleen goes for a run, and we eventually pack ourselves into the minivan and head over to an orange grove called Al's, which purports to have a restaurant on-site. The restaurant turns out to be a roadside shack that serves Mexicanized breakfast fare and freshly-squeezed orange juice. Is there anything in this world that is better than freshly squeezed orange juice? Let me tell you something -- there are exactly two ingestibles in the world that I ever get cravings for: Watermelon Jellie-bellies, and freshly squeezed orange juice. I, therefore, am enjoying every drop. The grove is not a pick-your-own place, so we head into the store/packing plant, we sample all of the citrus fruits that they're selling there, and we buy a half gallon of juice and a sampler bag of citrus. The oranges, honey tangerines, grapefruits are as sweet and juicy as you can get. This was a brilliant move.

We then head back to the island and over to the beach. The sun is shining, but it is wicked, wicked windy. Max plays in the sand (he LOVES to play in the sand) and a very tired Eliza tries to bury her head into whatever parent is holding her. Cathleen and I take turns swimming in the fairly warm, but fairly violent windswept water. Eliza falls asleep in Cathleen's arms, so we all head over to a bench to eat PB&J sandwiches and to watch these crazy guys who are kite surfing on the other side of the inlet. This is some crazy shit, as they are literally doing 30-foot jumps in the air. It was quite a show.

We head back to the hotel, eat some more food, the kids run around, and then we get ready for a dip in the heated pool. Max is reluctant to get into the water until he sees Eliza jump into Cathleen's arms, and so he agrees to jump into mine. Over the next 30 minutes he makes great progress in terms of his comfort in the water -- it was a very rewarding experience. After swimming we get dressed and then head down to the little beach where the kids play in the sand.

At around 4 pm, Mark, Elizabeth and Zachary arrive! The kids run around like mad while the adults drink Florida Gin & Tonics (I added a wedge of fresh orange with the wedge of lime). Max and Zach were pretending that Eliza was a monster, a game that had the potential to be exclusionary and cruel, were it not for the fact that tough little Eliza took immense pleasure in roaring out loud and setting them off running from her.

We head into downtown Ft. Pierce for a street fair, assuming that there will be something that our vegetarian (but seafood-eating) friends can consume, but we are wrong! It is too late to sit down at a restaurant so we head back to the hotel, feed the kids our leftovers from Chuck's and eventually put them to bed, at which time Elizabeth and I went out obtain dinner for the adults. We wound up at Mangrove Mattie's, a severe step down from Mangrove Mama's (a spot in the Keys that still ranks among my top five favorite eating places I've ever been to), where we ordered a couple of fried seafood platters, and where Elizabeth regaled me with a story about floss (moral: buy the cheap stuff). She's one hell of a date.

Saturday.
Mark and I go off on a five-mile run together where we plot fantasy league draft strategy and discuss insurance policies. Oh my god, are we incredibly dull together. After everyone has breakfasted, we drive over to a playground and hang out there for a while, and then we pack into the minivan and head down to Port St. Lucie. It is time for Spring Training. Mark and I both sport shit-eating grins as we walk towards Tradition Field and although I can't quite explain why, I am just feeling giddy. Our seats are in the top row of the stadium behind the first base line near home plate, but we are as close to the field as we ever get at Shea. It is still wickedly windy and so we are forced to wear sweaters. Although the game starts at Eliza's nap time, she is way too stimulated to sleep and doesn't nod off until we are on our way back to the hotel. Only three or four Mets regulars are in the lineup, and their pitcher is Mike Pelfrey who is fighting to perhaps steal the last spot in the team's starting rotation, but he gets smacked around by the Florida Marlins and the Mets lose badly. With two kids at the game, it is almost impossible to really experience the baseball, but I'm just enjoying the atmosphere of the stadium, the crack of the bat, the aura of the game. After the seventh inning stretch, by which time it is almost impossible to recognize anyone who is left playing in the game, we decide to head out. We pass the players parking lot and spy Jose Reyes on the other side of the fence; I get a nice photo of his white Mercedes coupe.

Back at the hotel, some guy is feeding shrimp to the pelicans, and so we head over to watch. In an effort to get good photographs, I wind up standing in what turns out to be the landing zone for the pelicans. These are large birds, folks, with beaks that look like gigantic rotisserie skewers. I am shitting my pants, but I get some good photos. That's called professionalism.

We dine at a Greek restaurant in Fort Pierce, and twice during our meal Greek music starts blaring from the speakers in the restaurant and a belly dancer appears. The boys hardly notice her, even when she is gyrating next to them at our table, but Eliza is transfixed, partly out of fascination and partly out of substantial fear. When the dancer appears a second time, Eliza insists that I hold her, and she alternates saying "I scared" and "I wan dancer." So true, so true. During the meal we have a phone conversation with Miriam (at Max's behest, because he misses her) and learn that she has lost her first tooth that day!

Sunday.
Cathleen, and then Mark and Elizabeth go off for runs. After breakfast, we head over to North Hutchinson Island, to a nature preserve where we go on a two-mile round-trip hike among mangrove trees. The kids do a lot of running, and we get to see some extraordinary foliage, as well a scenic view atop a wooden tower.

After the hike, the women head back to the hotel, and the boys head back to Tradition Field for Day 2 of baseball. At the game, I meet up with my home-town friend, Rich Handler. Hey Rich, you've made it into the blog. Rich and I spent a lot of time together in high school on the debate team, but we haven't seen each other in around 15 or 16 years. I was a bit anxious at the idea of seeing him -- what would we say to each other? But the moment he and his wife and son arrived, I was really excited. He may be a big-wig Florida nephrologist these days, but at heart he was the same Rich, and it was fantastic catching up. There are more regulars in this game, and the Mets shut-out the Astros, 3-0

After the seventh-inning stretch, I turned to talk to Mark about our departure plans just as the pep squad on the field began shooting t-shirts into the stands. Suddenly I hear the folks around me shouting and WACK, I am knocked in the hip by a t-shirt, which bounces off of me and into the hands of some guy two rows away. What kind of asshole gets hit near the buttocks by a promotional t-shirt?

By the eighth inning, Max has quietly gorged himself on pizza, a hot dog, hot cocoa, some french fries and ice cream. Although he resisted sharing in my Taco-in-a-helmet (hey, it was called Taco-in-a-helmet -- how could I resist?), he finally tells me that his tummy hurts. It is time to go. He then chastises me for taking him to Spring Training two days in a row. This trip is a learning experience on many levels.

Driving home, we meet up with the ladies at the Manatee Center in Fort Pierce, where Elizabeth had spent the latter part of the afternoon hanging with some local manatees. By the time we arrive, the manatees are less interested in surfacing for the benefit of watchful humans, and so we are only able to catch passing glimpses of these marvelous creatures.

We head back to the hotel, and down to the little beach where the kids play in the sand while we drink Lone Shark beers. We order in food from a recommended restaurant (Blue Water Grill?) and the food is amazing -- finally some delicious seafood. The adults stay up late talking (though not too late because we are all just wiped) and then we bid adieu; they are leaving an hour before us tomorrow morning.

Sunday.
Get up, pack. Max is unhappy about the encroaching end of the vacation. We head off to West Palm Beach, return the minivan, get to the airport. It appears that our flight might be delayed three hours, but then suddenly it isn't. We figure that Eliza will nap on the flight but, guess what, she doesn't. No, she falls asleep in the sling as Cathleen carries her from the plane to the baggage claim area at LaGuardia. Max has another good flight -- he tells me that he used to think flying would be scary, but that it wasn't scary at all. Once on the ground, however, he is a bit anxious about the baggage claim, and when his booster seat emerges from behind the rubber curtain and onto the conveyor belt, he is so purely overjoyed that he starts jumping up and down with unabashed glee. I have had a great vacation, but that was one of my favorite moments.

Half, my goal

I just registered to run in the Brooklyn Half-Marathon (13.1 miles) on April 26th. The race begins in Coney Island (where you run on the actual Boardwalk) and finishes in nearby Prospect Park. I sort of did that run while training for the marathon in 2006 -- I had set out to run an 18-miler to and from Coney Island on a day when it was around 80 degrees outside, and I had been suffering from a vicious sinus infection. I was lightheaded at the start of the run, but felt well enough until I hit the 10-mile mark upon leaving Coney Island; I then struggled for five more miles before throwing in the towel because I was so gassed and lightheaded that I was seriously concerned that I might fall on my face. Was not a pleasant experience. Can't wait to re-visit most of that route.

It's funny, 13.1 miles is, by most standards, a fairly long distance to run. But having done the full 26.2 a couple of times, training for the Half-Marathon seems like a cakewalk. Hell, it's eight weeks away and I've barely been doing any training. Ha ha? Yesterday while in the shower I started doing the math to see if I could reasonably train over the next seven weeks to get my distance long enough to survive a 13.1 mile run. Beyond smaller runs (at least two each week), I'd need to do long runs of six this weekend, eight the next, then ten, then twelve, then even thirteen or fourteen. Oh my gosh, I could be in shape to run the race in some form in four weeks. It would be poor form, but I could do it. With another three weeks of training, I might actually not feel like total crap at the end of the race.

So I ran six miles this morning in the frigid, windy cold. Temperature was in the mid-20s but the windchill made it feel worse. The wind was really bad at times up in Prospect Park and I vowed to break off my friendship with Mark and Elizabeth, as it was those fools that wrangled me into running this race. Because, you know, I have no free will.

Always on my my my my my my mind

Last night we went to BAM and saw The State Ballet of Georgia, featuring its artistic director and principal dancer, Nina Ananiashvili.

We live within walking distance of one of the top cultural institutions in this here city, and in the past two years we've barely, barely utilized it. We saw a cool production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" last year, and I think that's been it (other than to see a couple of movies at the movie theater). So I got us a spring subscription (four shows) as a Christmas gift for Cathleen. Yes, "got us" ... "for Cathleen." I'm clever that way. When you get a subscription, you choose four shows out of their smorgasbord of options. A couple were no-brainers for me: Patrick Stewart in a modern adaptation of MacBeth; John Turturro in Samuel Beckett's "Endgame." I threw in an Alvin Ailey Dance Troupe performance, and I figured that Cathleen, at the very least, would really enjoy the ballet. I had never been to the ballet, and I at least had an intellectual curiosity, though I wasn't sure that that curiosity would hold for a more than two-hour performance.

Oh. My. God. It was amazing. First of all, it turns out that Nina Ananianshvili is some sort of international ballet star...she dances with the Bolshoi Ballet and was recruited by the Georgian president in 2004 to take over the State Ballet of Georgia in an attempt to restore that country's ballet to its former glory (you know, from back in the 19th century). Last night's show consisted of four performances, broken up by two intermissions, with music provided by a full orchestra which travels with the ballet company. A full ensemble piece (Chaconne by George Balanchine), then only two dancers accompanied by a pianist and violinist (Duo Concertant by Balanchine), then a piece with six dancers (Bizet Variations by Alexei Ratmansky) and finally a lively set where a dozen or so men and women danced to Georgian folk songs (Sagalobelli by Yuri Posskhov). The show moved from traditional to more contemporary, and so we were able to experience a variety of music and dance. Nina danced in the first and third of them, and as good as the other dancers were, she was noticeably dancing on another level.

But they were all on another level from normal humans. Perfect body control displayed with unimagineable grace. Even their bows at the end of the performances made me feel clumsy. As they danced, it was as if the rules of gravity and friction did not apply to them. Not that they were jumping particularly high, but that as they flitted about, it was as if the floor was resisting them. And it all appeared as if it was effortless for them, whether they were spinning, dancing on their toes for outrageous periods of time (how do they do that??), leaping about...but then they'd stop, and you'd see these small signs of heavy breathing only in the top of their chests, or strains of sweat on some of the guys, and you realized that you were gazing at truly gifted athletes. It was entrancing to see these beautiful people moving that way.

Victory? Defeat?

I am sure that someday I will look back on this bedbug experience and laugh a mighty guffaw. I am sure of it.

Although I've been quiet on the bedbug postings of late, they have not been far from my mind. Even after we had our third extermination six weeks ago, I was still seeing bedbugs everywhere. Well, as it turns out I was never seeing bedbugs, but every small dark speck anywhere in the apartment posed the immediate concern that a bedbug was apparent. Then there was the Hoy (Spanish newspaper) cover story: "Chinches!" with a ten-inch photo of a bedbug. I was tempted to cut out the picture and accompanying declaration, frame it and hang it in the hallway, but then that struck me as a little bit off -- kind of like if you had an intestinal polyp removed and then taped it to your computer monitor.

I've also been suffering through an annoying body hyper-awareness: is that a bug I feel crawling on me? Is this itch from a bite? Is this a new welt or, oh wait, it's my thumb.

And, of course, living out of ziploc bags is taking its toll. I miss my polar bear boxer shorts (how did they not make the cut?), my fraying khakis, and the roughly 75 tee-shirts that are sealed in a large contractor bag in the top of our closet.

But the light at the end of the tunnel seemed like it was dimly coming into view after five bite-free weeks. We were reluctant to declare victory, especially after Cathleen's friend told her that she had heard that six weeks was the big hump to get over. Sure enough, at around six weeks, Cathleen asked me to look at her face -- three barely perceptible bite-markish bumps in a row, on her left cheek. It didn't make sense -- me, Mr. Canary in a Coal Mine, had not the slightest hint of a bite, and Cathleen, who had barely evidenced a bite reaction over the course of more than three months, suddenly has one? But they were undeniably bite marks.

I had had enough and I reckoned we needed to bring in a bedbug dog. These dogs are trained to sniff out bedbugs (their pheromones, it seems), and my guru on www.thebedbugresource.com was quite high on them. So I hooked us up with the folks at Advanced K9 Detectives, and last Thursday we were visited by Jada. Sadly, I was at work and missed it. For $250, Jada sniffed all around the apartment and alerted (whining and barking) at our wrapped up bedframe and headboard.

On the one hand, it was a relief -- the bugs were nowhere else in our room (anymore) and had not spread through the apartment. On the other hand, we still had bugs, and despite our best efforts to encase our bedframe and headboard in plastic wrapping, they (or at least one) were still getting out. Cathleen spent Friday on the phone and located a container fumigation place where they take infested furniture and gas the hell out of it. With pickup and fumigation, this was going to cost us $500, and then we'd not be able to use the bed for another month or two until we were sure that our bedroom was 110% bug-free. The other option was to toss the bed and eventually get a new one.

Now let me tell you something about this bed. Cathleen and I have a long history of crappy sleeping arrangements. From cramming our bodies onto my twin bed when I was in law school, to the leaky waterbed when visiting Mike and Theresa (yes, I woke up befuddled, wondering if I had peed myself and, if so, how come it seemed to be that I was peeing out of my hip), to the compromised air mattress at Lorri and John's (brrrrr, I'm cold and, ouch, this floor is hard), to the basement at my mom's when we were the only childless couple in the family. When we moved in together in 1995 at 4 Lexington Avenue (the Sage House), we bought a cheap, wooden frame at Ikea to hold the full-size mattress that Michael bought for us on the car ride home. I remember putting that frame together with Michael, neither of us able to bend one of our knees, and so we were screwing it together from some rather odd angles, with a lot of strange grunting going on. Cathleen and I slept on that full-sized bed with two dogs, and then intermittently with a child, for a decade. When we moved to Brooklyn, and that cheap wooden bedframe splintered in the move, we decided that enough was enough, we're getting a real bed, a queen-sized bed. We spent a morning at West Elm down in DUMBO and ordered what we thought was a comfortable and handsome bed for a pretty self-indulgent $700. We lunched at Garibaldis and, afterwards, as we waited to pay for the bed and arrange for the pieces to come out for us to load in the car, I told Max the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" for the first time, and wound up having to tell it to him three or four more times over the course of the afternoon because he loved it so much (nowadays he only wants me to tell the "scary" version, where the bears are viciously violent, and throw furniture and dishes against the wall in order to emphasize their disgust). Cathleen and I put the bed together that night, and I remember feeling like it was this humongous sea of furniture. As much as one can, we loved that bed.

And on Saturday night we hauled that mother out to the sidewalk. Yeah, bedbugs, you wanted that bed from the beginning. You got it.

We beckoned the exterminators back yesterday for a fourth spraying of all things good and poisonous, and spent last night sleeping in the basement again (the allure of which, for Max, has faded quickly). But for the first time in four months, I feel like we have finally conquered the bugs. They won the battle, but we won the war. They won the bed, but we won the right to make really bad metaphors.

Our clothes will remain bagged up for at least another six weeks, but I'm optimistic. Again.

Spring Break

It was 60 degrees today, and I took full advantage of it. After Mike and Jacob ended their brief visit (a 36-hour trip to NYC to take in a Rangers game), I went out on a 6.8 mile run, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and then back across the Manhattan Bridge, and over to the Lincoln/Berkeley playground where I rendezvoused with Cathleen and the kids. I hadn't done a bridge run, I think, since training for the marathon in '06, and it was magnificent. Running up the Brooklyn Bridge, with a view of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty to your left, the sprawling majesty of downtown ahead of you...I can't imagine a better view for an urban run. Coming back across the Manhattan Bridge was a little tougher -- early on at one point I had the N train passing next to me, and as I turned my head away to the other side for fresh air, I caught a wave of raw fish smell arising off of a Chinatown side street. But I needed the challenge of that run (and given my current level of conditioning, it was a challenge), and as I descended off the bridge I could feel my face radiating heat...one of those "I'm alive" feelings you get from a hard workout.

For dinner, we grilled (grilled!) spice-rubbed chicken parts, and ate them with potato salad and a green salad. All of me felt like it was two months hence, and it was revitalizing. Although this winter has been disappointingly tame weather-wise, it has felt long and hard, no doubt as a result of how sick I (and we) have been. Tomorrow aims to be cold again, but today's weather should keep me going strong right up to our Florida trip (a mere 17 days away).

Ahrs Go to Eleven

She coaxes me into watching Jane Austen movies on Masterpiece Theater.
She often suggests that we "split" a bottle of beer.
She sometimes throws all of the leftover Chinese food into a baking dish with rice for dinner, and then distributes this as a casserole recipe to friends and family.
She takes my suggestion that we go to Florida in March and embellishes it into a "Rick duped me into going to baseball spring training" story, and tells it to others in front of my face because she knows that I'll laugh along with her.
No matter how hard she tries not to, she still laughs at my jokes.
She laughs even harder at her own jokes.
She supports me in whatever I do, no matter how noble, constructive, peculiar, or fantastical my endeavor.
Today we've been married eleven years.

V-Day

You're supposed to do a blog entry for Valentine's Day, right?

I woke up at 6 today and went for a run. It was frickin cold -- low 30s and windy, especially up in Prospect Park. My iPod battery died without about a mile and a half to go in the run which forced me to focus on my thoughts, and my only thoughts were, "who are these other assholes running in this cold?"

I have fluid in my left ear. This has never happened to me before. I mean, sometimes I get water in my ear when I go swimming, but then I do some crazy "get-water-out-of-your-ear" trick, like hopping on the foot on the opposite side of your body from that of your water-logged ear, while shaking that ear down towards the ground, and eventually I feel this warm trickle come out of my ear, sort of what I imagine a brain hemhorrage would feel like, minus the pain and paralysis. I think I learned that ear-clearing trick in the third grade, around the same time that I learned my "get-rid-of-hiccups" trick (light match, put it out in a cup of water, drink water). You learn one of these tricks at an early age, I think, and then you are stuck with that one for life. I, however, in my highly-evolved state, learned a new anti-hiccups trick about five years ago maybe and it is unbelievably good, but it is one that I can do on others, but not on myself. Darnit. You should be so lucky to have hiccups around me. But the fluid in my ear now is not swimming related, but congestion related I guess. Now I have to sit around and hope that it doesn't become an ear infection. And they wonder why I'm going bald.

I think I consumed around 40, maybe 50, Necco hearts today, and I didn't read a single one.

I did, however, read the book Pretzel to Max tonight. It's the one about the extra-long dachshund whose affection for another dachshund, Greta, goes unrequited until he is able to use his length to rescue her from the bottom of a ditch. Then, after having snottily rejected his romantic overtures for the previous six pages, Greta consents to marrying Pretzel. There, I ruined it for you. I hate this book because a) it has a terrible message about relationships and what makes a person virtuous and appealing and b) like in real life Greta is going to be disinterested in the guy who is shaped like an extraordinarily enormous penis.

Happy Valentines Day.

Not so Terrible

Eliza turned two yesterday. Her birth -- the tense drive to the hospital, the rapidly-developing realization that there would not be time for an epidural, Cathleen's bone-rattling screams, Eliza's emergence -- the entire experience is crystal clear in my mind. I can distinctly see her under the heat lamp, and I can feel the swell of emotion I felt talking to her for the first time. But everything between those moments and yesterday are mostly a blur. I will match my memory up against anyone's, but I can barely remember where the hell I have been for the past two years. Some day, some day I will sleep.

Eliza had a pretty good birthday. She loved the small, wooden toy kitchen we bought for her (and which I allen-wrenched together the night before). Max was refreshingly excited for her, and not jealous as he himself had predicted he would be. We had a decent-sized but smallish party of friends and family. Smoked fish platter and bagels from Fairway. Lots of coffee. To honor Eliza's recent "cow jumping over the moon" obsession, we played "pin the moon underneath cow" and we ate a fantastic ice cream cake that Cathleen had made (with Max's able assistance) in multiple stages the day before. She decorated the top of the cake with a cow jumping over a moon, drawn out in sprinkles (having rejected my idea of a cow jumping over my butt imprint in the icing). The candle ceremony was right out of the book for a two-year-old and an almost-five-year-old: as we sang, Cathleen tried to put a party hat on Eliza; the elastic band grabbed her hair and she began wailing out loud as we were in mid-verse. Max was so anxious to "help" blow out the candles that he was practically hyperventilating before "...dear Eliza, Happy Birthday..." and he obliterated the two flames before Eliza could even manage an unintended breath between her sobs. She recovered in fine order once a spoonful of cake was placed in her mouth.

Eliza is a ray of light, and I do not hesitate to declare that truth. She has such a zest for life, an excitement for the happenings of her daily existence, and an infectious laugh that she employs at every possible opportunity, that to be around her is to enjoy your own life that much more. Yeah, I love her a little.

Year of the Rat

We celebrated the Chinese New Year tonight by ordering in Chinese food for dinner. We don't need much of an excuse to order in Chinese food, but one was available and so we jumped. Cathleen had read (or heard on the radio?) that you're supposed to eat dumplings (I forget the reason) and lo mein noodles (for a long life). We threw in some egg rolls too because, well, the Kahn boys like their egg rolls. They are, after all, the perfect vehicle for transporting large quantities of duck sauce to one's mouth.

This Chinese New Year is notable because this year begins the first year of the 12-year animal cycle on the Chinese calendar -- it is the Year of the Rat. As the first year in the cycle, the Rat Year is supposed to be one of renewal, or one in which to make a fresh start in some aspect of your life. Sounds like a plan to me.

I, however, am not a big fan of the Rat. Sure, I always get a little warm feeling whenever I see a giant, inflated rat sitting outside an office building, the centerpiece of some union's protest or picket line. But my affection for anything rat-like pretty much ends there. It is hard to live in a city where there is an estimated rat population in the neighborhood of 60,000 critters and feel any love for them. When I stand on subway platforms and spy a rat crawling around the tracks below, my first instinct is to scout the vicinity for an exit plan for myself should one become necessary. And then there was that episode with the mammoth dead rat in our backyard a few months ago. That still gives me the willies.

Max, in his tender innocence, likes rats. This misguided affection derives solely from watching Ratatouille, a good movie for sure, but a deceptively propagandizing one it turns out. Late one afternoon, as we walked down our block, we passed by the garbage storage area of one of our neighbor's buildings. Much to my horror, a large, hideous rat was sitting there in the open, staring at us, his face rendered that much more repulsive by virtue of the fact that his nose was somehow disfigured or bloody. Max exclaimed, with a note of glee and fascination in his voice, "look, a rat!"

Not, "ahhh, a rat!", but, "look, a rat," much as one might expect a young child to say "look, a koala bear" or "look, its Dora!" I was so stunned by his reaction -- I think I would have been less stunned, and more pleased, had he said "holy shit, a mother fucking rat" -- that I lurched into a lecture on how rats actually are not talented chefs in upscale restaurants, but are repulsive creatures that bite and carry disease. All that he heard, however, was Miss Othmar. A couple of weeks later, when he made some other favorable remark about rats, I concluded that the power of Disney is much greater than the power of Rick.

Superduperbowl

It is hard to get excited about a championship when your team isn't in it, especially when your team had the sixth-worst record in the league, but as a dedicated Patriots-loather, watching last night's game was about as much fun as I could have in a game that did not end with a Jets victory. The Tyree catch was crazy nuts amazing (I get to tell my grandkids that I was one of only about 97.5 million people to have seen it!), and I fell asleep with warm images of Bill Belichiks deflatedly dour expression dancing in my head. No larger classless boar could deserve to have his undefeated team lose the big one. It's been nauseating with all of the pro-Giants hype buzzing around the city, but I'll take it.

Pitchers and catchers report in what...a week? We booked our plane tickets and hotel reservations today for an early March trip to the vicinity of Port St. Lucie, Florida with the Bertin/McGoldricks. Spring training baby! I cannot wait!

Going with Obama

With Tuesday's Primary coming up tomorrow, I have been forced to make up my mind as to whom to vote for. It was surprisingly difficult. Months ago -- many months ago -- I had pegged Edwards as my candidate. Kucinich, of course, was really my candidate, but Edwards presented an electable option for me: straight-up-progressive on pretty much every domestic issue (hell, he set the domestic agenda for the entire Democratic campaign); made a regrettable war vote in '02, but understood enough to apologize for that vote, and to advocate for a modestly-aggressive withdrawal plan. Not perfect, but I was very excited about supporting him. Knowing that he had not been coronated by the media, I figured he was a longshot but I also figured that I would be pleased with pretty much any one of the dozen folks who were standing on the Democratic debate stage. But now that we're down to Clinton and Obama, two candidates that I desperately want to be excited about, I find myself decidedly unexcited about both.

Hillary is too hawkish, too poll-driven, too Clinton for me. On the other hand, given her political skills and her incredible command of the issues, she is probably the person still standing in either party most qualified to assume the presidential mantle. She is on target on many issues (health care, global warming), but her war vote, her campaign handling of her war vote, and her continued war-ish votes concern me deeply. Finally, she's a woman, the significance of which should not be dismissed, and cannot be overstated -- what a radical change it would be in our society if the President was a woman! I would love for Max and Eliza to grow up in that kind of society. But four (or eight) more years of the Clintons? I would listen to Bill give State of the Union addresses, and I would hang on every word, feeling truly inspired. And then there would be the inevitable letdown (Don't Ask Don't Tell, Welfare "reform"), and the squirming over every little controversy, no matter how true or contrived (by the vast right wing conspiracy which, by the way, certainly existed, you were dead-on about that Hillary). I'm not sure I can stomach another term or two of that if there's a presentable alternative.

Barack is too centrist, way too centrist for me. It seemed to take him forever to come out with a platform on anything, and everything seems like a compromise (Paul Krugman explained in The Times today that although universal healthcare may not be achieved under a Clinton administration, there's no way it could happen under Obama). Much to his credit, he was against the war from the get-go (though, having been out of office, had less of a political consideration to make in opposing it). And he's a person of color -- talk about radical changes in society, and the world that I want Max and Eliza to know and understand. But the guy can give a speech. I feel like not only could he lead this country through difficult times and perhaps make great headway in restoring this country's credibility, but he could inspire a whole generation to greatness. Oh, and my friend David's father, Richard Danzig, is an advisor to the Obama campaign. Given that Danzig's name was bandied about as a possible Secretary of Defense had Kerry won the election (he was Sec'y of the Navy under Clinton), I can only assume that he would be up for similar positioning in an Obama administration. Having a connection to someone like that, no matter how wafer-thin and tenuous, can't hurt if, for example, they reinstate the draft and expand it to include myopic 38-year-olds with bad knees.

So, tomorrow it's Obama for me. I wish I was more pumped about it, but maybe my excitement will grow over time. After 7+ years of the current nightmare, I crave an option to be pumped about.