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?

The NYT declares Guangzhou to be the hottest new place to visit. Why does everything I read and do make me want to go to China?

Some post-apocalyptic landscapes and machinery from Terminator Salvation.

hypochondriac society

These are the new values of our enlightened post-embodiment hypochondriac society as set by the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health:

Masks carry both physical and psychological benefits, said Dr. Julio Frenk, former health minister of Mexico and current dean of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Masks are a "reminder to people that they should avoid close contact with other persons," he said. "They also have this effect of isolating people and reminding them that they should not be kissing people, shaking hands, things like that."

'inspired by music'

I love the new line of furniture by Diesel and Foscarini. One of each for me, please.

Tiffany lights

If you know me well, you probably know my social aspiration to one day own a Tiffany lamp. Well, in the meantime we can be green and a bit more thrifty by getting a Tiffany Flowers lamp for me. Yes, that means you.

A California vegan on the FBI's most wanted list? It seems a bit ridiculous for both parties involved, although I do have to admit this vegan gives us veggies a pretty bad name.

iTunes prohibits terrorism

OMG somebody please enter me in this totally legit contest to win a $2 million house in San Francisco. Benefits go to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. How'd they swing this one?!

Who woulda thunk that Stewart Brand would give the best Keynote/Ppt-type presentation I'd ever seen? There were so many slides I felt as if the whole thing was advancing with a life of its own. Lesson learned.

Who wouldn't want this nuclear reactor lamp? I'd put it up over the photo of me devouring a sandwich in front of the Doel nuclear plant.

"If you haven't watched The Matrix, you'll have a hard time understanding this course."

I have to give up a new media course with a professor who can say that? *sigh* What I do to pursue the carillon... Feld's course is going to be amazing, though. The electric excitement in the room throughout the morning foreshadows as much.

"Happiness is an organized closet." That's the headline of my receipt from the Container Store. I do like Santana Row in the end.

Rockabye Baby

Tinkly instrumental renditions of Radiohead songs meant to serve as lullabies for babies? It's a wonderful idea for adults but sure seems like a terrible thing to unleash on our young. I do suppose the removal of the lyrics makes the listening experience the ultimate double-entendre. Peter Szendy would be fascinated by these arrangements. We can listen to makers of children's music listening to Radiohead and then babies listening to the innocent instrumental versions while the adults fill in the ominous words as they listen.