turning 90

"You know how to bake cake. Your cousins can't bake it because they don't have a cake pan. Me, I'm the dumbest. I only know how to eat cake." So says my grandma when I show up with a frosting-covered cake on her 90th birthday. Don't be silly, granny. That's the smartest situation of all!

Happy 90th birthday to my grandma, and here's to many more!

Returning to the Jung typology test (a light version anyway), I discovered that I am now ENTJ (not what I recall being before, although I really don't remember what I was before--probably INTJ): extraverted, intuitive, thinking, judging. Thus I join the company of Patrick Stewart, otherwise known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise. Considering that captaining a Federation starship has been my dream job since childhood, I think I've just achieved one small part of a lifelong dream.

Last night, the full moon was gazing at me through the blinds again.

It's after midnight. I'm typing at my computer when I realize a round, bright white light is piercing through the closed shades over my window. It's the full moon, glaring unrelentingly at me with some unspoken message. In the 1.5 years I've inhabited this room, this has never happened. How did the moon make it through tonight?

The defenestration of an icon. An act of sacrilege or an everyday technological activity?

musicians kicking the bucket

The media makes such a fuss speculating about the causes of death for musicians like Michael Jackson and now Mozart. You'd think specifying the precise way they went was more sensational than what they left to us.

alms

Male panhandlers in the subway are easy to pretend to ignore. But today a middle-aged black woman hobbled her way onto a crowded subway train. One of her eyes was screwed half shut and she had the most tragic and hopeless and crazed expression of anyone I'd ever seen in public. Light blue clothes hung off her body like ill-fitted hospital robes, and a single key was tied to one of the drawstrings, perhaps put there by someone who feared she'd lose anything that wasn't securely attached.

"Won't somebody please help me?" she uttered, and it was somewhere between a plea and a wail.

"Won't somebody please help me?" she said once, twice, thrice. Her cries, quivering with desperation and resentment and alarm, were identical down to the slightest inflection. A well-dressed young asian woman held out a dollar bill, which she accepted silently. She then made her way down the aisle in the opposite direction. I was unwilling to decide if something particularly horrible had happened to her today or if this was simply her routine.

The last time Andrew and I were headed to Penn Station, he was accosted by an angry young man who wanted to start a fight. "You stepped on my shoe and you didn't apologize. You were too busy looking at your pretty girlfriend. You're a tourist, huh? Somebody should teach you some manners." The strangest things happen on the 1-2-3. We came into the evening light on 7th Ave, but for a while I walked around Midtown South with a sadness headache, unable to forget the voice of this haunting, haunted woman.

Did someone seriously just go by shouting in a fake Irish accent, "I am the f*cking beer master!" to the hooting accompaniment of his friends?