you got to learn to retro'spect yourself

apologies for my extended absence. i wish i could tell you i was off making something of myself, but in truth i was mostly speaking to my dog as though she were a person, overeating, and cavorting around the greater pittsburgh area in red-and-white "bear-in-a-snowglobe" pajama pants (thanks, martha!) since the last posting, i have travelled from maryland to pittsburgh, where i had "baby's 1st christmas 2004," back to maryland, and again home to new york, where you find me now.

for those jews among you who wish to know what christmas is like, if it's really true that we've been robbed of our american commerical culture, if all those tears we cried as children when we were told that jewish families' chimneys were too narrow to accomodate santa's goy girth were for naught, the answers are fabulous, depends, and hell no. christmas rocks. a glowing tree! candy! well, i mean, you put chocolate and shiny things in front of anybody and they're sold. but the whole experience is something i can now recommend to any tentatively bedazzled non-christian. find a nice christian (or quaker!) family to take you in for the holidays & you, too, can experience baby's 1st christmas 1st-hand.

tonight adrienne has been kind enough to offer up her brooklyn above-ground apartment (as opposed to the queens below-ground apartment she formerly inhabited) to a bevy of people. i will be one of them. my goals for the evening are:

1. have no more than 2 drinks. in a bold "remember the titans" move, i will attempt to have a pavlovian response to alcohol regarding my last hangover.

2. refrain from exhibiting dislike toward any persons in attendance who i may, ah, dislike. a curt sneeze in their face should suffice for not crossing the line.

3. not to say "happy new year" when the ball drops in the annoying manner of one person with whom i used to be friends: "hyyyyyyyAPpy new yahr!" this starts the year off all wrong, on a rather booyah, welcome to the year note. but the practice is contagious.

4. not be convinced by abby, or others, to do any of the following:
a) tell the story of chaunticleer/crow like chaunticleer
b) rap any part of, including or besides the prologue to "the canterbury tales"
c) do an impression of a drugged, growling bear (usually brought on by abby reliving a 2003 statement by one e.ross by saying, "tell me, kara, what is it that interests you about bears?")

here i shall insert a brief complimentary flashback of the year 2004, for those of you who haven't the time to make one of your own.

ah, 2004. a year of struggles, a year of triumphs. 2004 began in prague, freezing my ass off & on the point of death. i watched people shoot off dangerous-ass fireworks along the vltava that nearly singed off whatever eyebrows i may or may not have had. i had a lovely goodbye party with josef, petra, and vendula (vendy). vendula gave me a czech copy of "the chosen" that i am still trying to read. (it's hard to read when you can't conjugate the past tense.) petra cried. i cried. josef sped off in an indoor-climbing bound fury. later i wrote a story about them which a certain person in my workshop called "a classic threesome." oh.

bella italia, a somewhat evil maryland store of fine italian imports, employed me. i pretended to dust a lot. i gift wrapped a lot. i said "just let me know if you need anything" alot. retail blows.

i moved to new york, into an apartment with ted & into a shared cubicle at scholastic with steve. i proofread. i learned how many books about young girls with ponies there truly are. i caused office scandals by not "sufficiently neatening pages" & made copious passive-aggressive enemies. also i met exactly the person i wish not to turn into (some of you may know her as my AOL (archnemesis of life) -- she turned out not to really be as bad as an internet company, but my dislike of her remains useful).

i started the mfa. i fell in love. i mean with the mfa program. i am still in love. don't come a-knockin'.

but mostly i thought often on all of you, the interesting people of my acquaintance. have a good time tonight, and if you get the urge to teetotal (yes, i just wanted to try it out as a verb), think of me.

domo arigato, mister roboto

also, speaking of running into brick walls (in the context of reading the flaneur, a project which i may leave to ted, then apply heat to our connected heads in order to gain the knowledge that way), i ran into a brick wall. a real one. well, i myself didn't, but my poor sister, who doesn't even have her license, did. we went to the grocery store last night in search of milk. parking, she stepped on the gas instead of the brake and we were catapulted over a cement barrier and into a brick wall. interestingly, she was unhurt. the car, a champion of japanese engineering, suffered only a cracked bumper and i, also a champion of japanese engineering, only a bruised chest.

obviously, it's not my time to go. only the good die young, and, well, you can figure out the rest.

before crashing into a brick wall, i went out to dinner with chris k., best friend of olden days, boyfriend of olden days. my first boyfriend, in fact. we realized we had known each other for something unreasonable like eighteen years. there are dogs that do not live eighteen years. most dogs, in fact, do not live as long as we have known each other. now we know each other not as well, not so much. but i am very glad we know each other at all, because as i have always known, chris is a quality person. a grade A person. friends, if there is one person you have left to meet in beijing this year, chris k. is the one.

chris k., at the age of fifteen, blindfolded me and put me into the backseat of his dad's car (this sounds really bad, but hang in) and toted me all the way to his house, where, knowing how i had always loved christmas trees and never had had one, he had decorated a tree in his backyard just for me, with a present underneath it -- a story he had written himself. since then, no one has ever done anything nicer for me. i think i'll never forget it, partly because of the embarrassment of having his parents and sister watch me be pleased from the bay window ten feet away. there is nothing more embarrassing than having adults watch you be pleased.

the cud of passive aggressiveness

it's still not entirely clear, after a less-than-24-hour visit with jen, whether it's desirable to have cows living in your front yard. but it's definitely desirable to be living with jen, and so, wayne, i envy you. apparently guinea hens are also in residence on the property of jen & wayne's farmhouse, but i was not honored by any appearances of these choice creatures. only the cows. i sensed that the cows knew i was pretty much the only non-vegetarian on the premises, and that that was the reason they glared at me with such pointed ennui. it is, after all, dreadfully boring to encounter someone who probably has eaten someone of your species. all i could think to do, for one, would be to chew on my cud and blink repeatedly.

jen & wayne were kind enough to drive me to 30th street station today. this is about as much time as i've spent in philly since college graduation. part of me cried out, "philly, hold me!" and part of me was like, "see you, bastard son of new york." i got onto a train next to an inordinately polite young man. i'd say he was probably 14 or 15. he kept saying things like "thank you very much" to me, and, "are you absolutely sure you have enough elbow room?" i wanted to inform him that i could go to jail if this went any further, but he probably either just thought that i, too, was 15 (as everyone else seems to think) or that i was a member of mrs. simpson's dancing school anonymous grading spies, and that all of his future debutante ball invitations rested on his behavior toward me at that moment. poor guy.

once safely home, the passive-aggressive combination of guilt tripping and overeating began. ah, home for the holidays. the idylls of home. the hearth. let the bickering begin.

fernand braudel is a brick wall & other dramatics

and so ends the heretofore best ever chapter in the life of.

the exam, as i expected, was nowhere near as big a deal as i made it out to be in my studying. if i had never seen that study sheet of ariana's (which, of course, made an encore freak-out performance this morning as we were waiting in the exam room to take the test), i probably would never have spent so much time on it. however, the rewards were reaped later in the day, when i was able to write an e-mail to veronica, my italian "sister," without stopping my typing or looking any words or tenses up in the dictionary. i feel near, oh, creepily near, to my goal of domination. you probably won't believe me, but there's lightening crackling over my head.

i wasn't able to get all my crap together in time to make it to mara's in new jersey tonight with caitlin. too much packing and et cetera-ing to do before leaving in the morning for kutztown. i am saddened that i will not get to see the wise and benificent mara, though, who is greatly missed by me. there is a hole in my heart for mara. indeed, whenever i gaze upon a perfect piece of chocolate cake, whenever i listen to one of her choice musical selections on a mix CD, whenever i see a pair of umbro shorts or a golden retriever, i cannot help but think of young mara and the void she has left in new york city and/or its boroughs. i hope to see her soon.

i'll tell you the truth: all this stress, i think, was not about the exam, or about packing, or about cleaning the putrid apartment (no, ted, i'm not suggesting that it was you, and you alone, who made it putrid). the stress is about leaving new york. i feel like i'm hooked into something good here. this program is like a drug, i'm telling you. i mean the m.f.a. program. (i almost sounded like an artificial intelligence devotee for a second there... juuuust a second.) i feel strangely abandoned now that the semester is over. and with the additional absences of cardio/sculpt! and italian, well, oo-ee-oo-ee-oooo. but to leave new york! why, that's just too much! you can take away my program, you can take away my muscle tone, but you cannot take away... new york!

granted, my absence will be only a month long, with a three-day "you-cannot-take-away-...-new-york" new year's visit in the middle. do you ever get the feeling that teams of carefully placed "drama police (crackdown on excessive drama for nationwide good)" have been stationed all around your apartment? i feel that way right now.

the good thing about this break is that i'll get a chance to read all the books i have been saving up for the occasion. these are all books that are sitting in my apartment waiting to be read, but please add to my winter break reading list by posting a comment, if you can figure out how to do that. it seems easy, but then, so did using my broiler.

the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay, michael chabon
dress your family in corduroy & denim, david sedaris
pastoralia, george saunders
the flaneur, edmund white

this flaneur business seems a little suspicious to me. it's only on the list because i bought it at the strand this summer for three dollars after completing the monumentally triumphant paris to the moon by adam gopnik, who it is no secret that my life's aim is to become. (but i ain't gonna do it with sentences like that one, am i?) i figured that my quest to become adam gopnik, while substantially helped by participating in the program, would be bettered by obtaining some familiarity with paris. (oddly enough, this idea occurred to me way before the idea of getting a sex change.) so i saw this book, which is part of the "writer & the city" series, and thought, "oh." i started reading it and was profoundly bored within instants. therefore i am trying again. sometimes rereading things you originally found boring can be like running over and over into a brick wall, head first (hello, all works written by fernand braudel!) hopefully this will not be that. if so, i will cease.

l'organizzazione

never having been the one with all her papers in order in a neat stack, all written in neat handwriting with the same excellent pen, everything filed in chronological order and organized according to theme, it was a familiar feeling to show up to my italian study date this morning and find that ariana, my impressive study partner, had a complete, neatly written out study sheet & that i had not yet even reviewed. it was a moment that brought me back to college, and um, high school, and middle school, and every year before that, and my TEFL training course, and my bat mitzvah, and um, everything else.

ariana, who is a person who has always had such a study sheet -- for every exam since the seventh grade, she told me -- is certainly reaping the rewards of her hard work and careful preparation. only 22 and already about to receive a master's in music performance from julliard, she already has her own annual tour circuit, on which she travels internationally, playing her violin for money, with the cost of the travel and hotel included. money! money for art! truly ariana has reached a level to which some of us -- er, some of us of the less organized sort -- can only dream. in addition, she is splendidly lovely and pleasant, speaks fluent korean and very good italian, and always wears color-coordinated clothes, but not in a corny way. i knew many people like ariana in high school -- more there than in college, where people snarled and bit at the air while twitching and running in circles drawing math problems on trees with their fingers -- and i always liked and envied them very much. usually they did not speak to me so much. ariana speaks to me, though, and in italian.

so did i run home and create a study sheet right away? no. no, i did not. i purchased hanukah presents for my brothers, had lunch with helene, spent a good deal of time on the internet doing, again, who knows what, and stared wantonly at insieme, the book on which i will be examined at 9 am tomorrow morning. also i slept. also i watched the director's commentary on the special edition of "the office" dvd. somewhere in the middle of the commentary, ricky gervais wonders aloud to stephen merchant, "who even watches these things anyway? somewhere out there it's the middle of the day and some bored, unemployed loser is watching the director's commentary because he's already seen all the episodes." oh, ricky gervais, you get me!

oh, well. if all else fails, i can just remember the nifty trick that ariana taught me for remembering the use of the congiuntivo: NUDE.

got your attention, didn't i, david?

NUDE.
necessity, uncertainty, doubt, emotion.

in case of nudity in the main clause of a sentence, use the conguintivo in the subsequent clause. well, now we've all learned something. who says the organizationally-challenged can't contribute anything to society?

the jewess burger

for some, the goal is to climb every mountain, ford every stream. (mainly for julie andrews, given.) for ted, the goal is to eat all the 100 best burgers in manhattan as described by time out new york. this evening we began our quest with a very fine burger. this was at fanelli's, a bar near my work. not that i was at work, but i went down there anyway for the sake of this burger. the highlight/lowlight of my meal was when a man at the table next to us (six inches away) described someone to his fellow diner as a "jewess." a jewess! now, i suppose that's all very witty and everything, but this man went on to place the so-called jewess in all sorts of environs such as female-only hanukah parties and female-only synagogues (are there such things?), just to reinforce to his friend that this woman was -- no, no, not a jew -- but a jewess. that's like saying authoress. to call oneself an author is bad enough. an authoress is worse.

the highlight of the day, however, was seeing laura wo., not to be confused with laura wh., the one who is newly engaged. laura wo. lives only twenty blocks from me, but we have been very delinquent about getting together. i have a feeling that i am the one who is more delinquent, while she is the one who is busier. laura is a bona fide medievalist. medievalists, as we all know, are always either busy, or, as one of our college professors used to say, "lost at sea." (this is how he described books that could not be found in the library because they were being hoarded under his desk where no one could access them but him, or otherwise books that had been ordered from bryn mawr college and, two months later, had not yet arrived. needless to say, there is no "sea" between bryn mawr and swarthmore colleges.)

as we were parting, laura wo. was on her way to the pet store, to buy litter for her clever and interesting cat, medievally named. i have never met her cat, but i tend to assign the same characteristics to strange animals as i do to their owners. i think this is a common phenomenon. many people who have not met bis'l, my dog, believe her to be overly dramatic and surly. actually this is true. however, bis'l bears little physical resemblance to me, weighing in at approximately 130 pounds less than i do. (you're imagining a huge st. bernard now, aren't you. you uncharitable bastards.) in addition, she sports copious, one might even say plume-like eyebrows. whereas i have none. also unlike me, bis'l is in every way a hospitable and friendly being, and enjoys eating food off the floor and pissing where she shouldn't. oh, i can't wait to get home.

the alliteration marriage

a momentous and very adult thing occurred today. well, it didn't occur today, but i found out about it today, which makes it feel to me like it occurred today. it occurred this past weekend. laura, friend since i was sixteen, is engaged to lance, runner of new york city marathons, chocolate experte, and he of the alliterative first and last names. i had already become accustomed to the idea of people around my age getting married; i even went to andrew & katie's wedding this summer, where i drank copiously & dodged at every turn being found out as andrew's long-ago ex. but laura is almost exactly my age. engaged!

i met laura at a summer program my high school sent me to. she was from texas. we studied creative writing. (jesus, what were we thinking, right?) we were poetry majors. (here i could insert the last parenthetical thought & be serious.) laura wrote very simple, accessible poetry, the kind i like to read now. i wrote enigmatic, strangely worded blarble-dy shmarble-dy poetry, the kind no one likes to read. our teacher told us that if we were melded into one person, we could write perfect poems. granted, this teacher was kind of a crackpot -- she smelled of incense and had us commune with the dead, and to get into the classroom you had to walk through the inevitable curtain of "fun-colored" beads -- but we thought this was an interesting sort of idea. i thought it was more interesting than laura did, since people already liked to read her poetry. but now, instead of becoming one half of an unsuccessful poet, she is going to get married. since i am an even worse poet now than i was then, i think she has made a very wise choice of alliances. many fine congratulations. many many.

arriving kosher-style

how do you know when you've truly arrived? shrimps, apparently. piles and piles of shrimps.

the cleary gottlieb steen & hamilton office party was like a little taste of the most lush, shrimp-filled, open-barred hell on earth. but delightful people watching, to be sure. to set the scene for you: imagine an entire floor filled with conference rooms decorated to the nines in this red, burning coals motif. okay. open bars abound. each room is filled with large tables of food of every sort. there is the heaping shrimps table (you've arrived!), the sushi table manned only by japanese "chefs" in japanese "chef costumes" (although all they did was arrange the pre-made sushi on ice blocks, and did no cheffing at all). oh, and ice sculptures all over the freaking place. pastries. did i say open bar? open bar. with chimay beer. (you've arrived again.) and a fountain out of which liquid chocolate flowed to greet your outstretched skewer of strawberry. (i had heard about this fabled fountain ahead of time and had already resolved to stay close to it all night, making small talk with it until i felt open enough to put my entire head under it, mouth agape, and roar, "you make-a me craaaaay-zy!", shaking my lava-coated hair back and forth, while chocolate covered every inch of my hair and face and fell in ghastly rivulets from my mouth.) unfortunately, others had the same idea and i was forced to abandon the project.

skeevy drunk lawyers danced to beyonce. like, i'm not kidding, maybe 1000 lawyers. if anyone out there is thinking of abandoning their m.f.a. for the land of the chocolate lava fountain, okay, think about it. i don't blame you, because there's chocolate involved. but these people were weird. it's amazing how arrived weird lawyer-like people can be. they practically looked like shrimps themselves.

but that's not what you're wondering about. you're wondering, did i get the plaster-of-paris philip roth mold? well, no. not exactly. first of all, what i said about his head being small? that was utterly wrong. his head was huge! but in a good way. he said some extremely interesting things, i thought, during the question & answer session. he told us that when he got stuck writing the plot against america (which i finished victoriously at 2 am, thank you), he would just say to himself, don't create it, remember it. good advice! interesting! i feel enriched. i do. afterward i waited in the philip roth line and met him. he shook my little loser hand. and in that moment, i received something from him. i have to keep a secret from you what it is for now, but i'll divulge it later. it was not, sadly, a rabbit or bear.

other interesting items of note from the day: this morning, on a quest to find a suitable top to wear to ted's office party (i.e. not a t-shirt), i was recognized by courtney w. (i will not use her real last name because it was aptly pointed out to me that using real last names on the internet is something only terrible persons do -- thank you, nameless adviser, since i did not know this, not being a person of the internet world and its manners.) courtney went to high school with me and was two years ahead of me. but i knew her because when we were in elementary school -- i in third grade and she in fifth -- we carpooled together to senora miller's (here i said senora instead of her first name, so i still preserved her anonymity... va bene cosi?) pottery class. i think we carpooled because we were the only jews and not because we lived close to one another, because she didn't live close to me. what i remember about courtney is just that she used to have melted farmer's cheese when she came home from school, and i thought that was the most deli-ci-ous snack ever. the problem with it is, though, you can only have a mouthful if you don't want to eat like 50 grams of fat. so you feel kind of cheated. but melted farmer's cheese is still the best. after seeing courtney, i kind of wanted some for the first time in years. sadly, there was no melted farmer's cheese at the cleary fete. if i ever become a lawyer, the first thing i'm passing into law is that the new "food of arrival" shall be melted farmer's cheese. you make-a me crazy.

miss appropriation

it is extremely easy, as many of you know, to "misappropriate one's time," or, in lay parlance, procrastinate -- but i am here to tell you that it comes as a terrible shock to find that utterly unbeknownst to you, you have been procrastinating all weekend ... in other words, that you had more work than you thought you did.

i did. i do. i spent the better part of an afternoon photocopying handouts that i had failed to pick up, since i got off work after the writing division office closed on friday. the only boon in this situation, besides getting in my daily dose of cursing at machinery, was seeing helene's apartment in daylight for the first time when i went to borrow her handouts. (thank you, helene!) this woman has a stellar apartment. you can see la guardia from there. this is truly a case of the forces of karma having gone right in the world, as they so rarely do.

but the misappropriation of my time this weekend went deeper than that, because i was supposed to spend a good deal of it with ted & instead spent friday night getting overly riled up about an interviewer (sorry to all of you who had to read my senseless blatherings on that subject -- surely that is not what the internet is for; it is for porn) & then the rest of the time mired in work for the program. ted, i am sorry. your excellence is known worldwide. mine is not. mine is not known worldwide because i am not excellent, because i misappropriated my time & that's no euphemism for procrastination. i am sorry.

the plot against america is about 60% finished in preparation for the momentous event: philip roth's visit to my lecture class tomorrow afternoon. to the person who asked me to try to get a plaster-of-paris cast of his face in the q&a section of the lecture, i'll try, but he might become suspicious when i begin forcefully propelling his small bald head towards a tray of wet plaster. to the person who asked for a lock of his hair, judging by the jacket photo, that's going to be extremely difficult. to the child who did not yet know how to ask, it is because of what my ancestors did for me when i went out of yirushelayim... well, you know the rest.

everything you say is wrong

the "everything you say is wrong" interviewer, who masticated an hour of my friday night into small dribbles about answering questions on the uses of literature and even had me "answer" a math problem (i don't think i need to even tell you how that turned out) called back this morning and hired me.

wha-what? not for math, mind you. nor, i think, for test prep, since i was utterly baffled by a simple problem about common multiples, and even at one point suggested that nine can be made of multiples of two and three. o, yes, writers of the world! o yes. there is not hope for our math skills. well, maybe for yours, but not for mine. i work for him, he grandly allowed, as a writing tutor, but no more, since it is apparent that this is all i can competently do. he will call me when someone feels they need to learn how to write. well, okay.

i went onto the website after we spoke and found that it's one of these hoity-toity "we all went to ivy league undergrad" places, which i should have known by its name, which involves the title of a particularly unsavory such school. no wonder he asked me such stupid "think-i'm-smart" questions such as -- get ready: "If a book does not change my life, it's useless." okay. in my opinion, anyone who agrees with this statement is an imbicile, but more importantly, anyone who asks this question is an imbecile for assuming that he is talking to an idiot. then, oh, so cleverly!, after I had answered, he tweaked the question to see how I would change my answer: "If a book changes my life only minimally, it's useless." "Ummmm..." I said. "I'm going to maintain my original answer to that, since it's essentially the same question." He wanted to know how the nuances had changed. I said they hadn't changed. The assumption of the question is that the highest objective of any activity, be it books or otherwise, is usefulness -- this in itself is problematic, since semantically if you don't agree with the assumption, you can't accurately answer the question based on your opinion. It's like if I said to you, "Have you stopped drowning kittens yet? "(Hello, Abby. Hello, Ted Fernald.) If you say yes, that means you once were drowning kittens. If you say no, it means you still are. There's no clear-cut answer to articulate that not only are you now, but you never were, drowning kittens. This is the same problem, but with less drastic consequences for your answer... 'cause, I mean, if you were drowning kittens at any point, well, sorry, but I mean, that's just fucked up.
(I did refrain from using the choice phrase "fucked up" in my answer, showing commendable restraint.)

To this, the guy said, "Fair enough," but quickly followed it up with the quip about the middle ages that I posted last night, in response to my joke (joke! joke, i say!) that we did not have math in the middle ages -- only trying to beg off the math question seeing as I haven't had math since 1998 when i failed out of twelfth-grade calculus after having had gall stones and prescription-drug-induced hepatitis at 17. (no, i didn't add that either.)

well, whatever. i sort of have a job, although i don't actually have a job at the job. this is, as many of you know, probably the only non-complete rejection i've received in the past few months. so that's just grand.

it looks pretty cloudy, but i think i'll go for a run in the park anyway. they did have running in the middle ages, you know.

everyone's an expert

more on this tomorrow, but i'd just like to say for now that if any interviewer ever tries to tell me lies about the middle ages again, i'm going to stuff a cabbage up his ass. please, sir, do not tell me things like "well, you know, a PhD in math in the middle ages would have consisted only of long division. and that was only in the middle east." do not tell me things like this as though you know. you do not know. please, if you feel the need to assert some superiority over me, do it in a subject about which you know something.

explanation to follow.

goodnight.

dopo mezzanotte

the new metro twin theater is just as shabby as it used to be, and perhaps or perhaps not more weird. i can't say, since the reason i was there was slightly weird in itself: picture a rehabilitated rundown theater with "jump" (the pointer sisters, i think?) playing grocery store-ishly in the background, only yourself and your italian class in attendance. yeah, it's weird already. we saw "after midnight," "dopo mezzanotte," which our instructor pronounced "bellino" at the end but i thought was way better than that. a lot of it was filmed in the film museum in torino, which i went to in 2001 when i went to see roberta there. i have very vivid memories of being in that museum with roberta and thinking, "shit! my italian is so good!" this was false, obviously, since there were tenses that i wouldn't even know i hadn't known until i got back to the united states, and even now my italian could not be classified as "so good!" so i guess my memory is of something false, but it's pleasant nonetheless. you should all go see this movie. plus, the lead guy is attractive beyond all measure. not in a, oh, jude law, you're pleasant to look at kind of way, but a serious, deep down attractive type of way. well maybe some of you know what i'm talking about.

today also marked the momentous and faux-tearful end of cardio/sculpt. alice, revered instructor, revealed to us that she used to be a principal with the alvin ailey (sp.?) dancers. in the presence of greatness! i guess it kind of sucks that cardio/sculpt is over, but because today was the last class, she made us do all this freaky high-impact shit, and i was not loving life. there's definitely a difference between being in shape and being in shape. to make matters worse, shuba brought an extremely high-octane friend along today, who actually hooted while jumping up and down on a step twice as high as mine and faking punches to an invisible chin in front of her. she hooted. all i have to say is, if you're in better shape than everyone else, fine. but don't hoot, for god's sake. when we left the class i thanked alice and she shook my hand and told me in a secretive way that she thought i'd lost a shitload of weight, but she didn't say "shitload." alice seems pretty genuine but i can't believe that she could really convince herself of such a falsity. no, i didn't, i said, but thanks. don't judge by the scale! she told me. judge by your clothing and the way you feel! ... well, all right, fair enough and everything, but the scale, the clothes, and the feel are all in accordance that no, i did not lose any, much less said shitload, of weight. thanks anyway, though, alice, wherever you are.

The Crying of Latke 49

Finally having gotten my wish for an undisturbed day at home to get work done, I used it by watching The Price Is Right, reading my classmates' stories and some Raymond Carver, and consuming an entire frozen pumpkin bread. This might sound good to you but it isn't.

Adrienne should be here shortly to consume the "fine meal" I have promised her, which will be frozen "beans, rice and cheese style" (style!) burritos and salad. I plan to unfreeze them, since this is a special occasion. I think I have not seen Adrienne in several weeks, and definitely not alone for a long time, since there is always someone else there when we are there, even if it is a favorite person such as Ted or Abby. I am looking forward to seeing her & I know she has no problem with frozen burritos. Adrienne does a thing I very much enjoy when she sees or experiences something she likes. She pulls her eyelids down to half-mast and says, "Mmmmm..." and then something like "Much enjoyment" or "So excellent." Coming out of anyone else this might be suspect, but it is not when it comes out of her.

She will have to witness the first night of Hanukah as well. I wasn't going to do Hanukah, since it doesn't even matter to me unless my family is there, and they aren't (here), except that when my mom was in town this weekend she casually dropped off an oversized brown bag containing a full-size menorah and 45 Hanukah lights, as well as two enormous dreidels. Hint, hint! Mothers can be so subtle. It appears I'll be celebrating Hanukah this year, then. (Also in the bag was a pistachio bundt cake that is sure to meet the end of the frozen pumpkin bread, which was also her doing. In other words, I'm being fattened up for the killing, although not by her -- no no -- by my lack of self-control, as Ted told me so graciously last night).

Speaking of Adrienne, it seems I may get to go on a magic carpet ride in her Honda in a week in a half, down to Hamburg, PA where El Jarsone is having a party. Jen, Wayne, a farmhouse, Mara, Adrienne, even, dare I say it -- dare I even speak it? -- Caitlin? What could be better? It is certainly worth putting off my reunion with Bis'l for an additional two days. I hope there will be tomatoes there, and a pony. Oh, how I've always wanted a pony.

Give your svivon some little spins for me, Jews.

garbled messages

i left work today a little after noon and found i could not go home. i spent three hours wandering around soho and union square under the guise of looking for my mother's birthday present, all the while knowing what it would be and the only place on earth i could get it. (i cannot say what it is here, in the event that someone who would *tell her* (pointed glare) would do so before i could give it to her. let us just say it is extremely original and perfect, and i knew what it would be immediately, and felt proud of myself right up to the moment where i gasped at the price tag, dutifully bought it anyway, and came home, feeling now a mixture of pride and horror.)

no, for those of you who are wondering, i did not quit today. i thought about it, but felt that i was already being disapproved of. it is hard to quit when you are being approved of, and hard when you are being disapproved of. i wish i could send a singing telegram.

there was a garbled message on my phone by the time i left work. "garble, shmeee... mark, workshop. garble flagh flagh sick today no meeting. gardble musta been the party last night flough. garble helene shmarble jae. bye." from this i understood there would be no meeting with mark today about the story that got workshopped yesterday. i was slightly relieved to hear this, since i was a little nervous about this meeting considering the last one, even though i like mark a hell of a lot and hold his opinion in the very highest esteem. i tend to retreat a little bit in personal meetings, in a sort of "oh me" way that would be appropriate to a forest gnome but not to a short story writer. the gnome personality comes out when either praise or uneven criticism is given. it says either, "gee, thanks," or "yes, yes, i take your point." verbose, the gnome.

so, for anyone who was wondering if my current titleholding of the "rejection man" superhero identity is still in play, it is. i applied to teach an undergrad writing class next year and i got nixed in the first round! as in, they had absolutely no interest in me whatsoever. pretty excellent, hey? i'm really getting ahead of myself on this rejection thing, particularly considering that the things for which i'm currently applying are things i'm very qualified for. in an e-mail to my dad, i let out a gaseous musing about the cru-el, cru-el world. there was no reply, which leads me to believe that this is a tacit affirmation of the "cru-el world" theory. although, once i told my dad that i thought people were fundamentally evil, and he disagreed vehemently -- and he isn't someone who's vehement with me very often. i've come around to his view on this matter, but i still think i'm a damn good teacher.

tonight i shall be cleaning at the abode in preparation for the coming of the family tomorrow morning. they aren't coming to see me, but in order for dan & ari to see their camp friends. whee diddle. i shall be given some token windows of time, however, so the apartment must be tidy, particularly since this will be its first viewing by all but my dad. ted, if you are out there, you have left an unseemly pile of shirts on the floor.

algerians in parma

wei, if you're out there.

last night i spoke to amy for real. after calling her several times in an effort to dispel the echo, echo, echo, i finally learned about the way of things in shenzhen, and the wei (sorry, couldn't help it) seems to be good. amy is a hero of the teaching abroad stories. it's kind of amazing that almost uniformly the people who did it the right way, through like a program and whatnot, have done really well. well, except for poor adrienne, who is probably still being pursued by the turkish mafia.

my essay for tomorrow, currently entitled "algerians in parma," excuse me, but blows. i'm not trying to be coy or anything here. it's really not very good. i guess that's what you get when you pop out a ten-page personal essay in a day. how, you're asking, could something called "algerians in parma" be about me, the whitiest white jew that ever walked the face of manhattan? well, i'm not the whitiest white jew that ever walked the face of manhattan; i know this because i've met my sister's jappy camp friends. but the answer is, you'll have to read it to find out. and since it sucks, you'll never read it. therefore, you'll never know.

the real story is that while studying abroad in parma in college, i went wandering one day in the algerian neighborhood, where the elderly parmesan couple (somewhere ted is laughing now at the idea of the parmesan couple -- no ted, they weren't made of cheese) who headed our program told us never to go. so, little red riding hood et cetera, i went walking there and answered a window ad for a job in a translation agency. the long and the short of it is that i secretly frequented this, well, agency, "translating" these random pamphlets in a windowless room and getting paid wads of cash. yes, watson, it was a drug front. or that's what i think, anyway. my mom let me read nancy drew when i was little.

the essay is about that. will phillip lopate, my teacher, believe that this is true? no. will he care? no. will he read it? no. aaaah, life.

happy late birthday to my mother, who is 52 and one day today. she might not be pleased that i'm advertising her new age, but age is nothing to be ashamed of. happy late birthday also to amy, who is 23 and one day, and also, i understand, to nixon? that's nothing, sharing your birthday with nixon. i share mine with will smith and meatloaf.