the world and I

inspired by Robin, I tried the "world" version. This makes me look a heck of a lot worldlier than I actually am. I visited Montreal, once, for perhaps two days. Yet checking the "Canada" box gave me the entire landmass of Canada! China and the United Kingdom are equally deceptive; I have visited tiny corners of those huge honkin' pieces of land. But more astonishing is all the places I haven't been. All of Africa, all of South and Central America, not to say Australia and Central Asia -- completely untouched. It's a depressing prospect for someone who, as a child, dreamed of seeing the world.

In New York, it's a cliche, but the world comes to you. Just walking the dog, I can hear workmen speaking Mandarin, Russian and Spanish, or can stop to order takeout from Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian, Middle Eastern, Italian, Peruvian and French restaurants. A short subway ride in several directions can take me to locales where no one on the street is speaking English.

That's very fortunate, because I have no money, no vacation time, and a dog too psychologically fragile to be left in the kennel. I don't think I will be going anywhere for a while. New York will have to do. Forunately, it does.



create your own visited countries map

But then I have also hardly seen anything of this great nation of ours.



create your own visited states map

where i been

Here's something fun and sort of MHA-related. Thanks in part to all the cross-country travel, here is a visual of all the states we've visited:



create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Vermeer, Mister Softee and J. Alfred Prufrock walked Into a Bar...

Last week it snowed, big fat flakes without consequences, like a dream of snow, falling on the magnolia and the forsythia blossoms. Now it's warm enough to walk around without a coat, but refreshingly cool and breezy on the shady side of the streets. The flowering trees and the Mister Softee ice cream trucks are both out; afternoon light like something in a Vermeer painting. The blocks of historic town houses in Brooklyn Heights date back only to the middle of the 19th century, yet walking around this afternoon I had the strange sensation of having stepped into one of those 17th century Dutch cityscapes. The streets looked just about right, and I somehow managed to tune out the cars. The people were dressed wrong, yet engaged in the timeless customs of city life: children were playing, dogs were being walked, people were washing windows from the inside, squishing white cloth against the clear panes.

It felt, in short, like coming unstuck in time, painfully beautiful and somehow paifully painful at the same time. The beauty of the flowering trees is so transient! A memento mori stark as a skull in the middle of a still life, to continue with the art history metaphors. When am I going to get serious? I thought. Half my life gone and nothing to show for it.

What did I think I should have accomplished by now? People write novels, they raise children, they build business empires or sequence DNA or save lives. Some people do, anyway. The rest of us kind of hang around the margins and comment on the action. Perhaps part of getting older is recognizing your own ordinariness and dealing with it.


No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.


The problem with this is I always felt that T.S. Eliot was protesting too much. He attempts to appear very much taken with the plight of the ordinary person and the tragedy of modernity and all that, but in the end, doesn't he secretly think he really is Prince Hamlet?

I guess, in the end, don't we all?

the "real" world

Sigh. This is just what Denver needs -- more twentysomething trendoids breathing the rare air in LoDo. Why don't you put them out in an old, funkily redone farmhouse? Make them shovel cow plops in a field somewhere? Now, that would be novel. Oh, well. Let me guess: They'll all schlep to work in a climate-changing, blinged-out SUV and work at a ski resort or some such.

Clearly, I am feeling too snarky and irritable to be worth much today.

true confession

Now it can be told: I never got the whole basketball thing. It perplexed me on first arrival in North Carolina and continued to do so all the time I lived there, making me always an uneasy outsider, the vegetarian at the pig-pickin. How did so many seemingly rational people care so passionately about something that had nothing to do with them?

Part of the puzzle is that I don't find watching sports very exciting. Although I can sit and watch a baseball game with mild pleasure -- its slowness has a certain allure, the way nothing happens for long stretches and then suddenly lots of things do, as well as the psychological combat between pitcher and batter -- in reality I almost never do. Watching other people play a game just seems too silly, too passive.

But that is obviously not how the crazy basketball fans of the world view it. To the people who deck themselves out in entire outfits of that pale Carolina blue, the Duke students who spend weeks sleeping in tents to keep their place in line to get basketball tickets, the people who can be heard screaming at their television sets in Match all over peaceful towns in central North Carolina, the experience seems to demand their participation, indeed would fall apart without them. Yet it's just some very tall and soon to be very rich young men putting a ball through a hoop; who play on the teams they do only out of chance; who are heroes only because people decide they are. What's up with that?

I spent a lot of time wondering about this when I lived in North Carolina. Is it simply a human longing for transcendence, the desire to belong to something bigger than yourself, the same feeling that has driven people to join the priesthood or enlist in the army or take part in torchlit rallies? I think it must be, and for this reason I can't really mock it; the desire to belong to something is so fundemental to what makes us human. Yet I can't help feeling this is a truly bizarre manifestation of the tribal urge, so mass-produced, so far away from any actual meaning.

But then I have never understood lots of things about the world I live in, like why people go to DisneyWorld, or stand for hours in the cold winds of Times Square on New Year's to watch a ball drop. Could it be because we don't have God anymore and must seek him somewhere else? (You never saw the Taliban wasting their time on basketball, for example.) But wait, that can't be it; people in North Carolina also tend to be very religious. I give up.

to hate like this is to be happy forever

This is something people here just don't understand. Nobody talks about hoops here. Only in North Carolina do you find a large concentration of people who, quite literally, cheer louder for Duke's losses than for Carolina's successes. (Or vice versa. But those people don't count.)