Non-phenomenon

I've been meaning to write this for a long time. You know all the fuss about Joshua Bell's unheralded rush hour performance in the DC subway system, and how everyone was gasping for days about how they couldn't believe such a travesty could take place and how it was a sign of the apocalypse, the deadening of the senses of the modern age?

Joni Mitchell wrote a song about it THIRTY YEARS AGO. It's call "For Free," it's on Ladies of the Canyon, and the most salient verse goes:

Nobody stopped to hear him
Though he played so sweet and high
They knew he had never been on their TV
So they passed his music by

Next, Gene Weingartner is going to do a sociological experiment involving Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts and is going to be clucking for hours when someone gets shot.

slow times at ridgemont high

Infrequency of posting can be blamed on Time Warner. The internet at my apartment is still out -- it's been about two weeks now -- and will be out until maybe Thursday. I think the bastards are trying to win. They won't.

Meanwhile, I have an elusive sense of how slow things are in general. A friend I hadn't talked to in a little while called me, breathless, from a subway platform for a quick update. She gave me her exciting news and then asked for mine. I had nuthin. Nothing that could be reported in a chirpy tone of voice, anyway, before the train arrived.

That's the trouble, isn't it? Not telling your friends about the bad stuff feels dishonest, but telling the bad stuff requires their time, their attention, their energy and their sympathy, even when conversations happen away from the forced constraints of commuting -- and by the way, if you haven't read that New Yorker piece on commuting, you must. Basically, it's more presumptuous to share bad news, and I am somewhat shy of it.

By the end of today, I should be able to feel better about one serious thing. Until then I need distraction, and so I loved this and recommend it, even for people who aren't crazy about R. Traister &/or Salon. It rings very true for me: Harry Potter and the Sopranos are my modern epics, serialized entertainment I could get passionate about. There is something about the time span over which both have unfurled that adds to the sentiment. I started watching The Sopranos in my old house on Unicorn Lane with my father several episodes into the First Season. I remember acutely those early Bada Bing scenes, wondering whether to avert my eyes.

Harry Potter introduced himself to me soon after, while I was in Israel with my high school class. The boy I liked, at that point, handed me his paperback copy and though I had wrinkled my nose at the phenomenon up to that point, there was something about this boy's puppydog eyes and his scruffy hair. For him, okay, I guessed I would read this sure-to-be-overrated kids book.

Now when the new volumes come out, Mr. Ben and I are first in line at little NYC bookstores to get a shared copy and stay up all night devouring it. This last volume will be my 25th birthday present and I'll probably get it to myself, since Mr. Ben will be only days from taking the bar. And then ten days later, we'll get married. Considering the presumed fragility of that future emotional state, for my sake, NOTHING better happen to Harry.

I-minus

You know what drives me crazy about this Don Imus craziness? The way everyone who in any way defends him makes sure to call him "an equal opportunity offender" (one example here).

They mean he has insulted:
Gays
Women
Jews
Blacks
Asians
(as Timothy Noah has aptly demonstrated)

Who's missing? The people in power.

How is "Don't worry, he hates EVERYONE (except people his own size)" a defense? How is it better to be an *indiscriminate* demeaning thoughtless loudmouth?

While I don't have much love for that ambulance chaser, Al Sharpton, and I don't necessarily think Imus should be removed from the air, I'd like us all to stop and agree for a moment that spreading ones hate around does not making hating better.

Sigh.

Any day on which Kurt Vonnegut dies is guaranteed to be sad, but the cold driving rain outside and the other bad news that keeps piling up isn't helping. Here, in Vonnegut's honor, a poem of his that appeared in the New Yorker:

JOE HELLER

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!

- Kurt Vonnegut

Still kicking

Barely.

A nasty virus toppled me and I lay toppled about a week. One of my days off from work coincided with the first seder so at Mr. Ben's urging, I dragged myself up and made it to Washington Heights, where we did the traditional Passover thing with his family. Mr. Ben and I were called upon to lead; I did my part, hoarsely.

It was the first time I've celebrated the Endless, Breadless Holiday (TM) stateside but not with the Blooms. My family goes all out -- china, crystal, 25 people each night, a grand multi-hour event, complete with dinner. This year, they went all out without me. Luckily both my brothers were there to help ease my parents through this painful process that we call Ester Beginning to Spend Some Holidays & Important Times With the Future In-Laws.

And who is there to ease me through that process?

Nevertheless, I made it through seder, and Mr. Ben's father sent us home in a car with not too much harm done. Passover always makes me think about odd things. For example, isn't it funny that Easter -- which, of course, coincides with Passover -- is about Jesus ascending to Heaven, whereas Passover is the holiday of nothing leavened? Which is to say, for the goyim, "He is risen!" so they get to eat chocolate eggs; for the Jews, everything is by mandate flat and dry.

In addition to (clearly) lots of deep thinking, a fantastic production of Company on Broadway and the Sopranos helped me get through the week. And some generous NY hospitality afforded me access to the season premiere yesterday. Bless this city.

the shoals of the NYT

This NYT article about how Jane Austen looked is both dumb and a complete misreading of her texts. The author -- a, you guessed it, MAN -- bumbles around for a bit at the beginning, talking about Austen must not have been pretty and how that's a problem. He goes off the cliff at the end:

We’ve watched them so often that we think we really do know what Austen’s people looked like, and the men — the good ones, anyway — are all hunks and the women are all adorable, with just a hint of gingham-gowned sexiness. That their creator might not be part of this club seems unfair. We can accept that Austen might have been a Cinderella — underappreciated, with an elusive beauty of character and intellect that maybe took a little getting used to — but the dreary spinster of the Cassandra sketch isn’t anyone we recognize.

That's WRONG. I don't need to have taken an Austen seminar to know that. Pride and Prejudice makes a big deal out of the fact that Elizabeth Bennett isn't beautiful, "not half so handsome as Jane," the family stunner. Her sister Mary is not considered worth describing; Lydia is merely cute, mostly a flirt; and Kitty is a follower.

As for the men! Bingley, to be sure, is described as "wonderfully handsome" and Darcy as having "handsome features" and "noble" bearing. But it could be argued that the whole damn point of the book is that appearances aren't objective. As soon as the crowd discovers Darcy has more money than Bingley, they declare him far better looking. Yet he's still an ass.

Here's the famous passage dear Mr. McGrath should have consulted before blithely going on his Week in Review way:

``Come, Darcy,'' said he, ``I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better dance.''

``I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this, it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with.''

``I would not be so fastidious as you are,'' cried Bingley, ``for a kingdom! Upon my honour I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life, as I have this evening; and there are several of them, you see, uncommonly pretty.''

``You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,'' said Mr. Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.

``Oh! she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you.''

``Which do you mean?'' and turning round, he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, ``She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.''

Very pretty, very agreeable, says the nice guy; tolerable, retorts the more fastidious. By the end of the book, of course, Darcy has remarked that that "tolerable" woman has grown on him. Voici:

``I remember, when we first knew her in Hertfordshire, how amazed we all were to find that she was a reputed beauty; and I particularly recollect your saying one night, after they had been dining at Netherfield, "She a beauty! -- I should as soon call her mother a wit." But afterwards she seemed to improve on you, and I believe you thought her rather pretty at one time.''

``Yes,'' replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer, ``but that was only when I first knew her, for it is many months since I have considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.''

Ooh, snap! (I love that scene.)

In Sense and Sensibility, all three Dashwood daughters are at least relatively good looking, it is assumed, but in Austen's descriptions of them at the beginning, their appearances aren't even mentioned. Marianne, the more romantic daughter, of course falls for a dashing and ultimately worthless Willoughby. Later, following more sober counsel, she ends up with the good-hearted but old, plain Colonel Brandon. Elinor, by contrast, wiser to begin with, falls for the good-hearted and not sparkling Edward Ferrars. Here is how he is described:

Edward Ferrars was not recommended to their good opinion by any peculiar graces of person or address. He was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy to make them pleasing. He was too diffident to do justice to himself; but when his natural shyness was overcome, his behaviour gave every indication of an open, affectionate heart. His understanding was good, and his education had given it solid improvement.

Now, does that say hunk to you? No. Willoughby is the hunk and he turns out to be a paper doll of a man.

On the basis of this evidence, I suggest to you, Jane Austen did not like hunks, nor did she entirely trust beauty. She understood, as many of us have come to (and as my brother will, eventually,) that the hottest girls are very often the bat-shit crazy ones and that the hunks are often arrogant fools. To judge a woman, an author, by such shallow measures -- calling her "plain," "homely," even "dreary" (!) -- and saying that that must disappoint her readers -- is insulting in its shallowness to her AND us.

Maybe if Austen had been a beauty queen, she would have been married at 15 and never written a word. Would that be better for anyone? Maybe if Fran Lebowitz, Roseanne Barr, Margaret Cho, Eddie Izzard, and Woody Allen had been captains of sports teams instead of social outsiders who were no doubt made fun of as children, they wouldn't have needed to cultivate the talent that has made them such priceless entertainers. If I do believe in a God, it's one who has consciously given us, fair or not, people who range from hideous to Lohan, and all for a reason: nerdy types (to disappear into labs and invent things), malcontents (who forge revolutions), the weird (who write poems) and the wacky (who paint). And the Simpsons and Spears for the schadenfreude.

In P&P, what recommends Bingley ultimately isn't his face, it's his character, and what recommends Darcy ultimately is that he's willing to admit he was wrong, that a person can learn to see a kind of beauty -- whether entirely inner or merely subtle -- they originally overlooked. I would like to hear that Mr. McGrath has learned a similar lesson. But since he seems to be very much a product of our Good = Beauty, Bad = Ugly society with its starkly mistaken and unsubtle ideas of what makes women worthwhile, I'm not holding my breath.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

It's time for an important news bulletin, from my mother:

"Lest history be denied this extraordinary news, please be informed that Paul L. B___ [pictured, left, with two of his three children, including the blogger -- ed.] won the DC Metropolitan Award for dancing in the newcomer category this past weekend at the Sheraton Premiere Hotel at Tyson's Corner, Virginia.

The event was attended by about 450 people and for the first time since birth, Mr. B____ was struck dumb when his name was announced. His instructor, the lovely young Daniela Garau, graciously escorted Mr. B____ from his seat to the judge's stand where he accepted his award with obvious pleasure. Unfortunately, Mr. B____, usually a man of many words, was not afforded the opportunity to make a speech and therefore he was unable to thank his instructor, his wife and his mother-in-law publicly as no doubt he would have done.

When interviewed casually on Sunday morning about his achievements from the night before, Mr. B____ proclaimed himself "triumphant." If he cannot wear the plaque comfortably around his neck, Mr. B____ may have it mounted on the front door of his luxury apartment in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Mr. B____ was confident that the Washington Post would announce the award today in the Style section. Mr. B____ will be accepting congratulations by telephone at [redacted]."

Three cheers for B____!

Society

For a while there, I had a dearth of things to read, especially novels. No one could recommend something -- or better yet, plunk something into my hands -- that I got really excited about, and that left a hole in my heart.

So I overcompensated.

Scattered on my bed currently are:
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Midnight in the Dragon Cafe
Devil in the White City
and two by Colson Whitehead:
Apex Hides the Hurt
and John Henry Days.

The glut is the library's fault, really. I requested a number of things that all arrived together. I have three weeks to finish four of them (the fifth, Apex, was leant to me by workfriend Stephanie).

After a Scrabble game this morning in which I put SQUIRE on a triple-word score for 83 points and got IODINES for another 60-something, I started Midnight in the Garden and went all googly-eyed for it. Yes, I know I'm years behind everyone else in the country in this respect. It's just so charming! It's all stories! I love stories. I love Americana. I love Magnolia trees and piano bars and gay-seeming, rakish gentlemen. Clearly this book and I were made for each other.

I hope the rest of the list lives up.

Meanwhile, I had a lunch at Morimoto that did indeed fulfill expectations. Sumptuous sushi arranged like architecture; really good service. The guests of honor, the author and his wife, regaled my two workfriends and me with stories from their life in Utah. They've lived in Vegas, Phoenix, and Tuscon, so they were braced for Mormon country, if not entirely prepared. At their first dinner party, when the wife poured herself a glass of wine, the neighbors they'd invited said, "Oh! We've never met an alcoholic before."

Crucially, they seemed to have a sense of humor about it. I told them, for extra hilarity and solidarity, they should read Dooce.

After the wife visited the bathroom, she whispered to the rest of us that we had to try it. Obediently workfriend Laura and I trooped downstairs. The toilet, as reported, was studded with buttons, and while sitting but without thinking, I pressed one of them.

"Jesus!" I shouted, jumping to my feet.

"Are you okay?" asked Laura from the next stall.

I would have answered but I was too busy trying to dodge the forceful stream of water shooting out of the toilet bowl right at me. Damn thing was a bidet. If I'd been prepared I might have enjoyed it; as it was, I just got wet.

oh so quiet

It's oh so still in here today, empty enough that I could take off my headphones and listen to Brian Lehrer out of computer speakers the way god and WNYC intended, if I were so inclined. Everyone from my department is at CCCC (aka, 4C's). Although I don't get to enjoy those specific festivities, there's a company-sponsored bash at Tavern on the Green this evening, and before that, the small team I've been working with on a project gets to take our author & his wife--in town for the conference--to lunch, Iron Chef style. Yes, that's right: we're going to Morimoto!

I am too excited. I keep hearing the Chairman's voice in my head. Funny, I didn't have this problem before I had lunch at Bobby Flay's restaurant, Mesa. There's something about the idea of top-notch sushi that sings to my stomach like nothing else. That must be why Japan is on tap for the honeymoon.

Labyrinthine

I celebrated a snowy St. Paddy's Day here in New York the only logical way: I enjoyed Burmese food in the company of Mr. Ben and a couple of his friends, and then (finally) saw Pan's Labyrinth. To kill time before the show, the group of us wandered around the upper-LES a bit, eventually venturing into Katz's Deli to see what there was to see. Although, like 3/4 of those assembled, I'd never been there before, I felt an odd sense of deja vu scanning the huge crowded cafeteria, attributable either to my connection to a Jewish oversoul or to my having seen When Harry Met Sally too many times.

I think I mentioned, I'd been afraid to see Pan's Labyrinth -- it turns out I had good reason. It's a beautiful film, really well-crafted from the sound effects on up, and, like Children of Men, it's a serious punch to the gut. In fact there are a number of similarities between the two movies, and um, *SPOILERS AHEAD*:

- violence, of course, the random senseless kind;
- the grim realities of life under fascism;
- the necessity of underground resistance movements, although that's dealt with with more complexity in COM;
- both have main characters who die at the end of the film while
- a baby lives on.
- COM is sent in the near future while PL was set in the recent past. Both arguably are about risks of today.

PL upset me more. It was harder to watch. A grown man giving his life for something, even one as lovely as Clive Owen, can't be as harrowing as a little girl giving her life for nothing. It took me a few minutes to get past my original emotional reaction to that and be able to appreciate the artistry and the creativity, the way that the same themes emerged in the real life storyline as did in the fantasy one. Not to mention the wonderful actress from Y Tu Mama Tambien for whom, at least, the movie ended well. That's some comfort.

New mantra

New mantra
Originally uploaded by shorterstory.

A couple days ago, I had to use my lunchbreak to have a follow up doctor's appointment. I didn't have terribly high hopes: I expected to tell the doctor, yes, the pills work -- I was beginning to have an anxiety attack and they forestalled it, just as they should. (Well done, pills!)

Being a doctor, however, he couldn't help asking me more questions. At first I was somewhat embarrassed, being unused to this "therapy" thing. But he kept asking "Why?" to whatever I said and before I knew it I was telling him about my monster ex-roommate and how she made me FEEL.

It turned out that what stressed me out about her is not so dissimilar from what's stressed me out about the wedding: both relate to the very cliched sense I have that I'm not quite ready to be an adult yet. (I know! So rare among my age group.) While chiding me gently on this point, the doctor reached over and started scribbling something on a pad; then he handed the note to me.

I burst out laughing. "It must be true, 'cause it's on letterhead," I said.

We'll see how well my magic feather works the first time I really have to fly. But for now, suffice it to say that the idea of it -- and its presence in my bag -- makes me absurdly happy.

Like-Minded Companions

B: Oh no! The bathroom's locked.
Es: That's okay. I guess I'll just pee in my stockings.
Em: That's much worse than peeing in your pants. The stockings will trap the urine.
B: Although stockings will be easier to clean than pants would be.
Es: But what about my suede boots?

I've been gloriously spoiled lately in terms of society. Friends abounding! Friends everywhere! Look, there's one hiding the bushes, waiting to play breakfast Scrabble. And look, over there, a cluster of them -- they have the table all set for a dinner that will last until the restaurant closes. Behind you! Watch out! That one's going to make you spend the entire afternoon walking in the sunlight, down the spine of Boerum Hill and back and then over through Cobble Hill to Carrol Gardens for pizza and back to Brooklyn Heights so she can pass out in your bed. (Here, map.)

And on top of that, Mr. Ben, on his way back from a party in Williamsburg Saturday night, bought a hardcopy of the New York Times. I woke up like Sara Crewe, astonished to discover that, overnight, someone had effected such an important change in the room: there it sat, waiting for me, the huge darling paper bundle! I could pick sections, and spread out across my bed, and lounge in the warm light, turning pages, and for one all-too-brief moment not be looking at a computer screen.

It was a bliss in a blue plastic bag.

... Looking over that link to the story "Sarah Crewe" -- which FHB expanded into his fantastic children's novel, A Little Princess & which I read way too many times growing up -- I realize it was even more formative than I thought. Consider the following exchange between Sara and her somewhat dim friend Ermengarde:

"It sounds nicer than it seems in the book," [Ermengarde] would say. "I never cared about Mary, Queen of Scots, before, and I always hated the French Revolution, but you make it seem like a story."

"It is a story," Sara would answer. "They are all stories. Everything is a story--everything in this world. You are a story--I am a story--Miss Minchin is a story. You can make a story out of anything."

That's, like, my motto! It came from FHB and I didn't even consciously realize. Amazing.

I also realize, in retrospect, that Sara was a bit of a snot, and I'm completely in love with her over again.

baby's first wedding!

I didn't mean to write about Ann Coulter the last time I sat down to blog; I meant to say Congratulations HeidiRob! Mr. Ben and I spent two packed days in Delray Beach, Florida counting BMWs, enjoying the sunshine, and celebrating with our Very First friends to tie the knot. As you can tell from Mr. Ben's pictures, they did so in old world style.

Our friend K. Ross, much improved since getting knocked around by that renegade car several months ago, joined us, as did several other college folk I hadn't seen since graduation. We had an all-around lovely time, except for that moment when I let my guard down and was shanghaied by a drunk pot-smoking, menopausal relative who proceded to regale me for what felt like hours with stories of her pot smoking and menopause.

Still, overall, it was a vast improvement over the last wedding I attended as a nine year old, when I saw the priest keel over and die in the middle of the ceremony. The imposing Catholic Church had already been spooking me a little, what with those Stations of the Cross murals on the walls; seeing a man go down, and then a whole congregation fall to its knees while my family remained awkwardly seated in our pew as if we were somehow to blame, was nearly traumatizing. The HeidiRob wedding had no body count at all. Way to go, guys!

Obviously their wedding made me think about mine, but I won't bore you with those details. I just hope I remain as graceful under pressure as they did.

a modest proposal

Instead of banning a word that no one is allowed to use anyway except black people and Quentin Tarantino, why doesn't New York do something useful and necessary like banning Ann Coulter? True, she probably wouldn't set foot in our slanderous, treasonous, godless city, but in case she were tempted to have a meeting with her publisher or a wax and yet another micro-mini, I would love to have it on record that should she cross city limits, should the sun set on her presence in this sane corner of America, we will boil her in oil and feed her to the homeless.

What's that you say? My rhetoric makes me almost as bad as she is? Oh, my friends, if only that were true. Ann Coulter drinks of the fire of Mordor the way you or I might enjoy a lemonade. Her skin is synthetic, pieced together by sweatshop third-world labor, and her soul is made of the ash of Rome on which Nero fiddled. Nothing I could do could put me on the level of Ann Coulter. Seriously? She called John Edwards a "faggot." Seriously.

It's time for action. Big Apple! I call to you. AC is at least as harmful to my heart as trans fats, at least as toxic to my lungs as cigarette smoke. Let's start a nationwide trend, making it clear we have no room for such horror in our city.

"only Gay screen call"

Best news item not picked up by the press: before Anna Nicole Smith was Anna Nicole Smith, she had a lady lover! A serious one too. Observe:

Powledge recalls their first year together as one filled with happiness. The two exchanged vows of commitment on the diving board at Smith's home in Spring, and Smith gave Powledge a diamond ring. Smith avoided wearing a ring herself because of the questions it might raise, Powledge said.

They shared some wild times, frequently going out on drinking binges and not knowing how to get home. Smith once stopped her car and asked a passing jogger to drive them home after a particularly lively spell of inebriation.

The pair also got tattoos to declare their love for one another. Smith paid for a tattoo of her face and name to be inked across Powledge's shoulder blade, strategically placed to cover another woman's name there. Smith later received a tattoo of Powledge's initials below her bikini line, unable to display such art anywhere else on her body because of her career as a model.

Powledge blushes, giggles and covers her face with her hands when asked if Smith reciprocated her affections in the bedroom.

"She was very considerate. Very sweet. Very," she said bashfully.

Yikes! And: awesome!

Of course, the article's spin on ANS's lesbian liason is pretty dippy. It has to go out of its way to call Powledge "the plainer looking and less feminine of the pair" -- because God forbid we wander off the Butch Meets Femme page. And "affections in the bedroom"? Is there a less kinky way of refering to sex? Can you think of one? I'm really asking.

I'm impressed Powledge toughed out the relationship as long as she did, what with ANS making her wear "wigs and dresses to give herself a softer look in New York" once they moved to the Big Apple, not to mention ANS's "Real World"-type behavior: cheating, drinking, drugs. Eventually of course the women split and the article notes, wistfully, "No matter what the cause of Smith's death is ultimately determined to be, Powledge shares others' assessment that she likely died of a broken heart."

One of the things I find most fascinating about this story is that it adds complexity to ANS's performance of hetero desirability. In the same way that in M Butterfly, Song, the male lover disguised as the ideal woman, explains, "A man knows best how a woman is supposed to act," it makes sense that a queer woman would know how best to play the epitome of a straight woman.

But is this story threatening to her image somehow? Embarrassing? Overkill? Why hasn't it been picked up more broadly?

Will win, should win

The Oscars are tonight! I wish I cared, but friends, there's history here. The Oscars of 06 were an acid wash. And anyone else remember being run over by the LOTR: ROTK "choo-choo-choose me!" train in 04?

Still, I'll watch. Of course I'll watch. I'm the sort of viewer on whom Oscar depends: skeptical, vaguely irritated in advance, sure that redemption and understanding aren't going to be found at the bottom of this three-hour bottle but ready to drink to the last gulp anyhow. I'll find solace in forming opinions on the dresses and hoping Ellen says something witty, and I'll wish I'd had the stomach to see either of frontrunners Babel or the Departed.

But! One can always prognosticate:

WILL WIN BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Little Miss Sunshine (as a "thanks for playing!")
SHOULD WIN: Little Miss Sunshine (in sincere appreciation for how poignant and hilarious this take on the American family is)

WILL WIN BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: The Departed
SHOULD WIN: Borat. I am all about the funny and I don't care how much of it was scripted.

WILL WIN BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Eddie Murphy
SHOULD WIN: Jackie Earle Haley, who has never appeared in a fat suit.

WILL WIN BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Jennifer Hudson. She has the best story and the most momentum. Still, I don't believe in giving Oscars for a person's first good performance. God knows it has done less than nothing for the careers of Kim Basinger, Halle Berry, Gwyneth Paltrow, Helen Hunt, Cuba Gooding Jr., Mira Sorvino ... In retrospect, aren't all of those choices ridiculous? What the Academy was actually doing there was rewarding someone pretty for trying, like giving a standing ovation when a dog rears up on its hind legs.

SHOULD WIN: Abigail Breslin, because I've never seen such an impressive, dare-i-say-inspiring? little kid performance; or Cate Blanchett for going toe-to-toe with Dame Judi Dench in a movie where the ferocious DJD sucked all of the oxygen out of the room.

WILL WIN BEST ACTOR: Forest Whitaker
SHOULD WIN: Clive Owen for Children of Men. Ryan Gosling was also good in his quiet, quiet way.

WILL WIN BEST ACTRESS: Helen Mirren

SHOULD WIN: This one's really hard. Kate Winslet put her all into Little Children, and WInslet's all is really something to see. Similarly Meryl Streep made Prada the delightful, shiver-inducing snarkfest that it was. But it really comes down to a contest between the British heavyweights, Dame Judi and Helen Mirren.

Sorry, DJD, but like everyone else, I have to go with Helen Mirren on this one too. Although as I mentioned, you were spellbinding in Notes on a Scandal, the best monster in a monster movie I'd seen in years, and I couldn't take my eyes off you, Mirren made me feel like I understood the Queen of England. That I even sympathized with her as she struggled to realize how she had become disconnected from her time and place, or rather how time and place surged forward without her. It was a strong, silent, bravura performance, full of inner conflict and grace and self-respect without vanity; and DJD, this just isn't your year. I don't blame you for staying home.

WILL WIN BEST DIRECTOR: Scorcese because blah blah legacy-cakes. Give the man an Oscar already so we can stop having this conversation every other year.
SHOULD WIN: Alfonso Cuaron for the harrowing, soulful Children of Men, especially the battle scenes of the last hour.

WILL WIN BEST PICTURE: Babel, in a repeat of the "See? We're Serious" phenomenon that brought us last year's utterly undeserving winner Crash. Unless voters really just wanted to be entertained and distracted this year, in which case The Departed

SHOULD WIN: I don't really know. Nothing completely thrilled me this year the way Hotel Rwanda, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Adaptation, recently, did. My top five for this year ended up being: Little Miss Sunshine, the Queen, Notes on a Scandal, Children of Men, and Inside Man. Oh Clive, when will the world love you like I do?

Note: How cute are these skirts? I wish I could buy every last one of them, except they're each so cute, I'd be as upstaged wearing one as I would be walking an adorable golden retriever puppy. Should I really pay $60 for that privilege? Or should I just get a puppy?

Look!

Someone else ranks and rates the Vows section too!

I'm don't 100% agree with the ratings system -- why do you couples get bonus points if the man is Jewish and the woman Asian? Also if David Denkins officiates, why does that not confer bonus points? Can you enlighten me?

Edited to clarify: I think the Vows section also requires two different ratings systems, one to measure how well each couple matches up to Antebellum Standards and one to measure Pure Eccentricity, because the Times, being a silver fox of a Grey Lady, appreciates the importance of both. When Hearsts marry Astors, when the girl is younger than the guy, when she's a teacher and he's in finance, the AS meter rises; and when bohemians/ethnics/gays/old people come together, the PE meter swoons and the NYT gets to feel virtuous for being so open-minded.

In both categories, however, some of the same rules apply: Ivy League diplomas are a must; famous ancestors help; Jews OK; send a face pic, and no fatties.

Queens for a day

You might not think it possible, but I assure you, it is a real -- if enjoyable -- condition: an overdose of honey. It can afflict you when you throw together pancakes for breakfast but forget the syrup, and are forced to resort to what other sweet things you have on hand, and then at the opposite end of the day, you dine at a Cretan restaurant whose name, S'agapo, translates to "I love you" and whose appetizers and desserts alike come preserved in delicious, delicious amber.

In between doses of honey, how did Mr. Ben and I celebrate turning six? By going to PS 1, of course! and then to the Museum of the Moving Image, where after playing around with the interactive exhibits we saw a 35mm print of the last film Orson Wells made, a Godard-ish essay/documentary called F for Fake.

The best part about the day though was that we were blessed with Good Subway Luck. If ever you have need to burrow into Queens, make sure you first appease the right spirits, because if the G comes speedily, and then the R does too, and then again, and THEN, to top it off, the 3, you will have a completely different day than if you're stuck waiting 20 frozen minutes for the privilege of riding on each.

On another note, I now have an rx. I haven't filled it yet, but I will, and then I will be SuperEster, or so I'm told. If I only become Ester-Who-Can-Make-It-Thru-the-Wedding-Planning, that'll be good too.

the kind of love

me: i want streamers, pink streamers that go all the way across the ceiling and all the way down to the floor. i want pink bears, four huge pink bears, one in each corner of the room, and a pink disco ball sprinkling pink light all over the room, and a stereo playing Carrie Underwood. ... what do you want for valentines day?

him: not to have to do any of that.

me: done.


little did i realize when i was a moony thirteen year old, upset that all my friends were "falling in love" while i wasn't -- while, in fact, the only boy who had professed love for me was a tall drink of water at summer camp who didn't know how else to say "please take your shirt off," the dumb punk -- that the ideal valentines day is when you feel no pressure to do anything. in fact i'm going drinking with a couple girls from The Nation after work (sugar-free cranberry juice for me, please!). maybe i'll learn something!

technically, i guess, i'm also cheating. i don't have to care about v-day because several days thereafter, mr. ben and i will turn six years old. that seems much more significant to me. six years old, ready for first grade and, apparently, marriage. and if, on a valentines day six years ago, some girl hadn't coldly turned down a rose offered by mr. ben, none of this would have happened. imagine.

hi friends.

I have nothing of serious interest to report, except that I'm okay. And maybe that's worth saying. Once I stablized last week (it actually took a few days to feel normal again) I had a week like many other weeks: I went to my friend Erin's house in Queens to play cards Wednesday;

spent Thursday evening with the remote, shuffling from Ugly Betty to The Office to Grey's Anatomy to Thirty Rock, wondering why the only shows I watch are packed into a two-hour time block;

had dinner with friends, saw a really cute new Spanish film, then hung around in the village drinking expensive tea on Friday;

and Saturday evening, Mr. Ben and I had pizza under the Brooklyn Bridge with his dad and his stepmom, and then listened to Barge Music from the last four seats available -- lined up on the side of the stage. I had a perfect, and perfectly surreal, view of the inside of the grand piano.

Sunday I did laundry, errands, cooked.

At no point did I mourn Anna Nicole Smith. At no point did I feel a twinge of satisfaction that I least I was demonstrably less crazy than the Astronut with the diaper and the pepper spray. I did however appreciate everyone's good wishes, and do. It's nice to feel supporting when you start taking steps.

tentative of stomach

Home sick. Again. Lately, what "sick" means is that I've recently had a panic attack that kept me up all night and I'm in intense recovery.

Even though I've been having the damn things semi-regular for over six months now, I've resisted medication. Why? That's a good question to ask yourself when you're shivering on the bathroom floor at 3:00 AM. The trouble is, you won't be able to answer it, since the cutest thing about a panic attack is how you can't make any decisions at all. My poor older brother -- who had flown in from UCLA for my grandma's birthday -- kept patiently asking me: "Do you want a blanket? Do you want some Tylenol PM?" To which I reasonably replied, "Um," and then, again, "um." And they say white people are articulate.

The funny thing is, my brother was supposed to be the sick one. The same airlines that won't let you take more than three ounces of shampoo on a plane let him fly with gastritis AND mono. You figure it out. He, as it turned out, looked and acted relatively normal; I was the one still in my pajamas the next day at 1:00 PM, shrouded in the blanket he'd finally coaxed me into accepting.

All of that is to say, I went to DC for the weekend to do some wedding stuff and celebrate my remarkable grandma's 94th birthday, and I succeeded in thoroughly freaking out my family. For my brother's various ailments, he has resorted to acupuncture, doctors in Beverly Hills who require valet parking, and a nutritionist; he's insisting I too try every option. Of course, since he's in LA, he's just doing what the LAkers do. But now that my family's seen my crazy up close and personal, they agree.

I finally made it back to Brooklyn and was prepared to sleep forever. Three hours into that plan, I woke up and realized: Mr. Ben wasn't here. Mr. Ben, who had decided to go yuppie for the weekend and ski/bond with law review folks in Utah, was due into JFK at 12:30 AM. Surely then by 3:30 AM he should be home; and yet he wasn't.

I checked the JFK website and CNN.com: no shampoo-related airplane crises to report. Not having any more detailed flight information than "he gets in at 12:30 from Utah," I couldn't get much help from anyone including Mr. Ben himself, whose phone had mysteriously died. There was nothing to be done but stay up all night, occasionally watching NYOne or old Grey's Anatomy episodes for company, and try not to panic overmuch about ending up one of those pre-widows on the news.

At 7:15 he came stumbling in, smurflike from the cold. Had he said a 12:30 arrival? Oops - he had meant he was taking a red eye, getting in around 5:30. Oh god, had I really waited ... ?

The remarkable thing is after all that I got dressed, put on my heavy coat, and actually left the apartment to go to work. Then I remembered two important details. One, I'd forgotten my Netflix envelope inside. And two, I had hardly slept now for four nights running; hadn't eaten in 36 hours; and if I even made it to the subway, I would doubtless end up falling onto the tracks and having to be saved by a future State of the Union attendee.

I made it back inside and slept past noon. Now I have to figure out how to make my life better.

Primary colors

I knew this (pre)election season would be exciting: what with Obama AND Hillary in the race, it's going to bring the racism and sexism out of everyone, even the people who think that the 21st century has parched them of both.

Case in point. Today, Joe Biden decided, fuck this exploratory committee nonsense -- he's going to straight out declare his intentions to run for Presidents. Five points for verve and style, Mr. Biden, and minus seventeen-hundred for substance:

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

But—and the “but” was clearly inevitable—he doubts whether American voters are going to elect “a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate,” and added: “I don’t recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan or a tactic.”

Awesome! Well done, Mr. Biden, especially in the use of the word "clean." Perhaps Obama can use that as a tagline for his campaign: "Vote Barack! He's not nearly as dirty as those other black people. Like, you know, Frederick Douglas. And Martin Luther King, Jr."

Here's a guess. Joe Biden has macaca'ed himself right out of the gate. From here, his presidential ambitions with sputter, eventually die, and he will buy a yacht to share with Ted Kennedy and Gary Hart. They can name it "So Close, Yet So Far."

ETA: When I reported this to my brother, he responded, "That's not -that- racist." Is this something about which reasonable people can disagree?

death cannot stop true love

For continuity's sake, I should mention how amazing the Erin McKeown show was, although it feels like AGES ago, darling. E McK is as smashing as a tiny, adorable, Brown graduate with folky-jazzy sensibilities and a sharp sense of humor should be. When she cross-dresses, she's even cuter.

I've been wedded to Erin ever since I saw her a weekend-long folk festival even longer than ages ago. When I gave her my notebook to autograph, I'd forgotten that I had written my impressions of her performance at the top of the page. Naturally, seeing her name, she took the book from me and read what I'd written: "She's Bjorklike!"

Erin looked at me from across the table, as sternly as her babyface would allow. "Anyone who says I'm Bjorklike," she said, "is my Best Friend."

There ended up being a small army of us smashed into Joe's Pub to hear her, and she, there with the Little Big Band to promote her new Retro Redux album Sing You Sinners, did not disappoint. In short: every straight person has a list of people they'd go gay for. Erin McKeown tops mine.

On another note entirely (or not?), I've been thinking a lot about Bodies. Also last week, a friend persuaded me to see a Fat Activism documentary at NYU with her -- "fat" being the word the panelists themselves used, although apparently the word "size" has its proponents. FWIW, I'd prefer to use the word "size" because "fat" has such negative connotations to me. One panelist explained, "Fat is what I am, and it's who I am." While that may work for her, I found it disquieting. I'm very used to thinking of myself as a Self and my fat as the Other. If it's not quite a parasite, it's pretty close.

The documentary itself was short and simple. You can be fat and fit! (I know.) People of all shapes are deserving of respect! (I know.) And then it was over. Irritatingly, the discussion afterwards was moderated by a shameless gay bottle-blond gym bunny in a t-shirt that looked like it would have to be peeled off. He stood in the corner and tried to be all Oprah, nodding sympathetically when the panelists recounted experiences of discrimination. I wished I had darts to throw at his biceps.

The word "pride" came up more than once, and it really made me think. Why is it, in America, that we have to have these relationships with our bodies that come down to cycles of intense animosity and self-indulgence? No one ever says, you don't have to love your body -- just figure it's Good Enough. Possibly because that doesn't sell any products, either for dieting or for pampering. Possibly because it feels easier to go to the opposite pole than to settle down with Hillary in the lonely middle. (That should be a folk song.)

Michael Pollan's much-emailed NYT Mag piece this past weekend perfectly summed up what I wish the prevailing attitude was toward food/fat/bodies. Although I don't think it's perfect -- for one thing, he suggests picking one ethnicity and eating it:

Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around.

But what about those of us who love Thai food and Korean food and Japanese food and the occasional slice of pizza or dish of guacamole? Isn't the point of living in America that we don't have to be restricted to what our great grandparents ate? Mr. Ben also points out: "What about the Russians?" Not all surviving diets are worth emulating.

In general though I think he's so right we ought to throw him a parade. You don't need to obsess about food! Since we don't fully understand a carrot works, we can stop thinking we can get what you need from the carrot some other way; we can just eat the damn carrot. Our waists will forgive us, and hey, maybe we won't get cancer. It's not love or hate, pride or fear: it's fact based, it's reasonable, it's straightforward. I should read his book, I guess.

media overload

It's a little much for all of us, I have to imagine, when the Oscars are announced in the same week as the State of the Union speech is delivered. (In case you were playing a rousing game of strip poker last night and missed President Cornflower Blue, the state of the union is "strong.")

I have to say I was more pleased than expected with both results. Two of my favorite movies from this year, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen, were both nominated for best picture, while Jack Nicholson gets to stay at home -- no doubt in white jockeys and a stained brown bathrobe, facing the TV in an armchair with sunglasses to shield him from the glow, grinning at nothing, stoned out of his gourd, scotch in hand and three illegal immigrants rubbing his feet. Oh, Jack, you Hunter Thompson wannabe.

On a more somber note, I guess now I really should see The Departed. And Babel. Unless someone reliable wants to see them for me and just give me an opinion I can use? Anyone?

The SOTU was made somewhat bearable by the presence of my favorite grandmother and yours, Nancy Pelosi, is a very nice mint green suit on the dais. She made Cheney, next to her, look even more like the Dark Lord he is, and when Bush said "Madame Speaker," he got the biggest roar of the night. Pelosi herself had to gavel for silence. It was awesome.

Other than that, he just said "terrorists" a bunch of times and "freedom" once or twice and he called it a night. His intention seemed to be to come off as bloody but unbowed; really, to me, he just seemed neutered, which is how I like my Republicans.

Tonight: Erin McKeown at Joe's Pub!

Wrong, wrong, wrong

For years I've been telling people about what I called "the Ms. test for movies," ever since I first read about it in a Ms. magazine when I was a summer intern at WIFP, a 1st amendment nonprofit. Is my memory muddled, or was Ms. quoting it from the place it originated, a Dykes to Watch Out For strip? The world may never know. At least I can attempt to set the record straight here: all credit belongs to A. Bechdel, friends, for this brilliant 3-part movie test:

1) Is there more than one female character? If so,
2) do the female characters talk, and if so,
3) about anything other than men?

You would be amazed at how many movies don't pass this test. Good movies. Great movies, even -- go ahead, count.

I don't think you need to self-flagellate over this, for what it's worth. A movie can flunk the Ms. Test -- I mean, the Liz Wallace via DTWOF and Ms. Test -- and still be quality. But for what it's worth, one of the reasons I've never been crazy about Scorsese is that virtually none of his movies pass the LWVDTWOFAMT Test. It's all-macho-all-the-time with Marty, with the glorious exception of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, which you could say is the only Scorsese movie he's only made once and which almost no one talks about.

Is it so hard to have women be real people in good movies? I mean, even master-of-macho, Russell-Crowe-worshipping Ridley Scott has Thelma and Louise AND Alien on his resume.

Children of Men, I am happy to report (finally!), does not have this problem. There are three major female characters, one of whom is named "Kee." The name is something of a pun: the character herself is "key," and she also does represent, in a very real way, the energy and lifeforce -- you know, the qi -- of not only the film but the dystopian near-future in which the film is set. In 2027, the human race has stopped reproducing and is either grimly awaiting, or actively courting, death. It's all very Emily Dickinson.

The world is in chaos and, British propoganda claims, "only Britain soldiers on." Or so the government would like to pretend: the only advertising anywhere is for home suicide kits, and you know a civilization has really given up when it can't even be bothered to hawk beauty creams and liquor. Cuaron's direction uses the same narrative efficiency he displayed in Y Tu Mama Tambien, where he made every glance out a window educational: every British flag hangs limp, every street and car and building is crumbling at the edges, every billboard you see warns of immigrants or reminds you that "avoiding fertility tests is illegal."

That's the first third of the film: mood, setting, understanding. The second third is Clive Owen's journey from disaffected post-activist to a person who's alive and cares again, a progression the film accomplishes by, perversely, taking from him everyone he loves or depends on. The last third -- a fierce fight for survival -- is cribbed from the Battle of Algiers, as my fellow-filmgoer Bobby describes well enough that I don't feel the need to go into it (thanks, Bobby!) It's a punch to the gut, as visceral and important as anything I've seen in years.


As long as I'm gushing, I'd like to say how happy I am for America Ferrara, who rocked the Golden Globes by (a) winning, (b) looking fantastic, and (c) giving a short, eloquent speech that made everyone cry. Hat trick! And for a worthy cause, too: I really like her show, maybe even more than Gray's Anatomy at this point, b/c Ugly Betty serves its melodrama up with a spoonful of campy, campy sugar.

Day of Fun

Some people have weekends. Others have Days of Fun that begin in the village and end at Build a Bear!

His name is Krackden. I know because I have his birth certificate, and also because, when the computer made a mistake, I had to re-dictate his name to the chipper fellow at the cash register. That's K-R-A-C-K-D-E-N, with a K. And the scowl the chipper fellow gave me was absolutely worth it.

My friend Becca named hers The Best Little Bearhouse in Texas. Bearhouse for short.

pop quiz, hotshot

Q: What's better than a lingering dinner at Babbo to celebrate, at long last, an engagement or two?

A: Maybe Heaven. I don't know. I can't vouch for the quality of their cranberry upside-down cake with nutmeg gelatto.

how to have brunch

the best thing about living in new york city is the surfeit of new brunch places to discover. as a child, i was groomed to be a brunch-lover by my father, who set up camp in the kitchen on weekend mornings, spreading two newspapers across any available surface not covered by plates of smoked fish, bread, or fruit. while my brothers ran in and out, occasionally stopping -- to my horror -- to turn on and mindlessly watch some sports game, i learned to linger over food in companionable silence, at least until the paper turned up a detail to delicious not to share.

one always prefaced such sharings with, "listen to this," so as to introduce noise gently into the calm.

my routine has changed, of course, now that i live in the City of Brunch, where the custom is more to venture out for and make an event of the meal. but the spirit of thing remains constant: weekends are a luxury that should be appreciated; good food should be savored; a good bloody mary is a very fine thing.

today's outing to Downtown Atlantic (364 Atlantic Ave., if you're local & curious) was quite successful. i have high standards for brunch. the ideal place will combine relatively low prices, usually fixed at about/under $10, with a drink thrown in and if you're lucky french fries. the DA entrees were listed at a reasonable $8 without drinks, but they came accompanied by a basket of amazing sliced zucchini-carrot bread, and my veggie-n-ricotta frittata was huge enough for two meals -- and so much fun to say!

the alcoholic drinks they do offer are standard & on the expensive side; and i do believe that if one is going to partake before noon, one should never have to pay extra for the privilege. the soda, however, is bottomless. before you start partying too hardy about that, remember: the house always wins. drinking $3 worth of diet coke is not for the faint of heart.

of course, brunch is hardly brunch if it's not enjoyed in good company. mine was stellar. my neighborhood, once-college friend R., who has made much more pedestrian activities such as laundry & grocery shopping worthwhile, and i got to debrief about our respective holidays. i mused to her about why december was such a stressful month for me, what with family, travel, buying/receiving presents, realizing that the previous year i'd been unceremoniously canned, work stuff, and mr. ben's finals. she looked at me like i was nuts and said, "how could that NOT have been stressful?"

but now it's january. things are fresh, even the oddly springlike weather. thanks to R., i have, for the first time, my very own scrabble board. i plan on starting yoga this week, and seeing Children of Men (and A Prairie Home Companion, which i have from Netflix), and generally taking things slow. also, i plan on giggling periodically when i remember that saturday night i got dragged to what was supposed to be "burlesque" and was, in reality, topless amateur go-go-dancers -- as in, go go gadget pasties! yikes.

resolved

- to replace the battery in my computer (which is dead)
- to replace the battery in my phone (which is near dead)
- to go to the dentist (it won't kill me)
- to go to a therapist and deal with my anxiety so that it doesn't kill me
- to go to yoga, to help deal with both my regular anxiety and the anxiety that surrounds Actually Going to Therapy

phew! further:

- to revise Part 3 of my book so that more readers are satisfied with it. er, i mean, so that >i'm< more satisfied with it
- to start sending the book out
- to be in good emotional shape for the wedding
- to actively look forward to the wedding, if for no other reason than because it's an excuse to import friends from all over the country and put them in one room and say, "eat! dance! look at my dress!" and also kiss ben in public and have people clap.
- to feel more like an adult. i do believe it's possible. if i were living 150 years ago, i'd be married with 3 children by now and suffering from consumption. i can do my own taxes, okay? i pay my own rent, i take pills, i use tampons, i light matches, i clean bathrooms and dishes, i take out the trash, i read newspapers and listen to npr. i read Salon.com, for christ's sake!

more like an adult, ester. you can do it.

wow! blogger = google. weird.

happy 007, everyone. i'm less bleary than yesterday, my day-of-reentry after the drive down and over from the gloried adirondack town of Wanakena -- which, itself, was quite a journey from sandy, sunny Sanibel Island, FL. it was taxing on my delicate system to go from [family] to (friends), [south] to (north), [hot] to (cold), [cable] to (no-tv-at-all), [seafood] to (eating Fifi, the house mascot, a large, photogenic leek, about whom we sang: "Fifi, oh, Fifi, oh Fifi / the queen of our table's delight / we love you to death, our dear Fifi / and that's why we'll eat you tonight.") to make matters worse, a friend lent me her nasty cold; i've had it for over a week now. but it was all worth it, i'm pretty sure.

now that i'm back i'm more excited to see Children of Men than i have been to see anything in a long time. except the new version of Company on broadway which, heaven help me, i WILL get to, and soon.

hallelujah! hallelujah! and so on.

Handel's Messiah is a three-hour long experience, a little dazzling, a little painful. There's no story to speak of, no arc to follow; it just goes stanza by stanza until the last Amen (which lasts and lasts ...) So here's my arc, as an audience member seeing it for the first time: for most of the first act, I found myself distracted and unsettled at points by the focus on little baby Jesus, as predicted (sort of) by Isaiah. By the time the second act started, I had stopped swimming against the current. By the famous Hallelujah Chorus, when the whole audience rises to their feet as though to take the pledge of alliegence, I was saved.

By the end of act three, that Indy 500 loop of an Amen, my head was on the verge of exploding.

I emerged feeling like I'd been dunked in Christianity -- baptised, if you will. The soprano making her Metropolitan Opera debut really gave it all she had, as did everyone else, but I had to wonder: out of the 150 or so people on stage, counting orchestra, choral members, and soloists, how many actually believed what they were singing? How important were the words, per se, to them; and how important did they have to be to me?

Dinner at Outback Steakhouse with Mr. Ben's family felt equally strange, yet somehow appropriate, considering we were all gentiles.

Tomorrow morning, however, I turn back into my little jewish self. Mr. Ben and I wing it down to Florida to spend a week with my family, and then wing it back only to ditch the plane for a car and drive all the way up to our friend K-Ross's house in Wanakena. It'll be pretty packed, for a vacation, but hopefully a good start to the new year.

Happy 07!

"air is the enemy of spice"

Glum. Why glum? Perhaps it's Maureen Dowd's fault. She actually started her column today like so: "The only sects that may be more savage than Shiites and Sunnis are the Democratic feminist lawmakers representing Northern and Southern California." (I know because I can access Times Select at work, courtesy of an assistant in the Boston office who sent her username and password to the entire company.)

Setting aside for a moment the fact that Dowd didn't specify "Sunni" or "Shiite" TERRORISTS, that she thought it sufficient merely to name a religious denomination and assume that her readers would figure "mass murderer nutballs" was implied -- following that sensationalistic, racist, and horrifically untrue intro, did the column proceed to explain why Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman compare unfavorably to religious fundamentalists on the verge of civil war? Did it even ultimately RETURN TO THE SUBJECT of California feminists once Dowd moseyed on to her real hobby-horse, Silvestre Reyes? No! Because you know why? Because Dowd is *actually* Michelle Malkin. And Hitler. Rolled into one! And given the best real estate in Manhattan for some reason because life is very very fair.

Really, I can't blame MoDo. She's just an awful person doing what awful people are paid much too much money to do. My glumness began shortly after we hired a new Assistant to join my department. She was quite shiny, and lo, we dubbed her Shiny.

After accepting our offer, Shiny asked for two weeks before she began; and then, the day before she was to start, Shiny jumped the ship she hadn't even boarded in order to work at some other publishing company that will remain nameless and thinks it's so cool just because it publishes Harry Potter books and can pay her a lot more money. Well, we publish grammar, okay? And grammar is way cooler than magic. Ask any ... English professor.

However, I can't complain. I am very fond of my office. In my post-college life, I have moved from the equivalent of Oliver Twist's orphanage (wherein his asking for more gruel was analagous to my asking whether it would be ok to attend graduate skool classes at night) to the equivalent of hanging out with Fagin and his band of thieves (wherein my having to clean the bathroom, take out the trash, and listen to coworkers discuss US Weekly all day was analagous to having to pick a pocket or two). This job is like living with the rich old lonely guy who adopts Oliver and gives him an iPod and then the entire Series of Unfortunate Events box set, AND a bonus, AND (supposedly) a raise.

Still -- a little glum. I'm working on that.

arts, lately

Not long ago this year I found myself increasing distressed with my literary options -- Special Topics in what? Fortress of who? Why can't you people stop being so exhaustively clever and just WRITE? Lately, however, I have experienced an uptick in quality. The trick, apparently? Switching from longform to short. Essays/stories read fast, and often funny; and best of all, if you find yourself despairing of one, you can flip to the next.

In this fashion, I have read:
- The Ladies of Grace Adieu (Clarke, Susanna)
- I Feel Bad About My Neck (Ephron, Nora)
- Shiksa Goddess (Wasserstein, Wendy)
- How To Be Alone (Franzen, Jonathan) (thanks, Yanni)
and a little earlier this year,
- Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (Lamott, Anne)

In general, I am very much a girl of novels. Some memoirs sneak in now and again, as do some "serious" books, but in both cases, usually those written to resemble novels. It's been interesting to focus on the small, the concise and self-contained.

With movies, I've had less luck. Stranger Than Fiction and Little Children, my most recent theatrical experiences, are both entertaining in the moment, well-directed and bursting with well-acted pathos. But neither has enough substance, really, to compare to the Queen, the only truly, 100% worthwhile thing I've seen this year. (Little Miss Sunshine runs a close second, with 49 Up in third.)

I have to admit I preferred STF's ending to LC's, which I found predictably disturbing. I hope it's not giving too much away to reveal that STF, being a darkish comedy, chooses to pursue a happy ending, while LC, being a literary tragedy, revels in an unhappy, supposedly redemptive one. Frankly, part of me wishes they'd swapped. Who needs all that resolution? Let the wrong people die! Let the good-hearted sinners be rewarded!

Apparently the Departed and the upcoming Letters from Iwo Jima are excellent. But why do they have to be so durned, well, masculine? Like Apocalypto, the testosterone emanates from the screen when I watch previews. First I'd have to grow loins and then gird them to watch either flick, and who has the energy, or the stem cells?

Babel and Volver remain on my list. I'm not terribly optimistic that I'll have a horse in this race that I'll be as passionate about as I was about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

citizenship rights

How horrifying is this? Sen. Tim Johnson is hospitalized, maybe (but not) for a stroke. Or could it be Polonium 210? Those damned Republicans -- who would benefit from a Senate retilted -- are in totally in league with the KGB; after all, their fearless leader did say he looked into Putin's eyes, saw the man's soul, and pronounced the president of the most corrupt, bullying, autocratic administration in the Western hemisphere "Good."

Even if Sen. Johnson is incapacitated, I hope he retains hold of his seat. It's hardly even required of him to have a beating heart; he just has to vote occasionally. Strom Thurman was functioning on a lung and half a liver for three years and he kept his seat. I think they rigged up a thing so he could vote from his hospital room. You have to imagine he sometimes registered a "Yea" for an appropriations bill while trying to get his bed to go down.

In cheerier news, I've been wondering how long a person has to live in NYC before s/he can claim NYer as an identity. Having started as an east coaster born of a city AND as a card-carrying member of the worldwide conspiracy, I feel like I must have a leg up. So, another two years? Another four? Is there a court I have to appear in front of? Cuz I even know what I would say:

Ladies and gentlemen of the panel, thank you for taking the time to hear my appeal for citizenship. Allow me to state my credentials.

- I happily overpay to share a studio in Brooklyn.

- I'm on chatting terms with my Egyptian grocer and my Korean tailor.

- I can list several places that Carrie and the girls visit on Sex and the City, and I've been to lots of them, not just Magnolia Bakery

- Also, I know that Carrie's apartment was supposedly on the Upper West Side but the building facade is actually from the West Village, not far from where SJP herself lives. I can also tell you where Heath Ledger lodges and can list the various brooding, bookish, boyish authors that live in Park Slope

- Since I've been in the city, I've had close encounters with James Gandolfini, Michael Imperioli, Gabriel Byrne, Paul Giamatti, Mary-Louise Parker, who showed me her ass, Ice T, Coco & Little Ice, Sarah Chalke, Lili Taylor, Rip Torn, Cynthia Nixon, and Jeffrey Tambor, who I called "Jeremy" and who called me "Rachel." Then he kissed my hand. True love; AND a true story

- I have close friends in four of five boroughs, and a creative writing buddy from Staten Island. I asked him if he was Republican and he said, "Very."

- I have ridden back and forth all night on the ferry. Well, I've ridden it. And I've crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot in both winter and summer

- I survived the transit strike

- I have reservations at Babbo for January

- I've never gone to see the ball drop at New Year's Eve or the Rockefeller Center Xmas Tree

- I have an opinion on the Atlantic Yards project, the potential 2nd Avenue Line, the Disneyfication of Times Sq., the Yuppification of the Lower East Side, & whether singing should be allowed at Strawberry Fields

- I've been to all sides of Central Park, to the Zoo, and to the Bronx Zoo too

- I listen to New York Public Radio WNYC about two hours a day. I give them money; they give me the New Yorker and I read that on the subway

- I say "subway," not "metro," even though I grew up in DC

- I've eaten the pizza at Grimaldi's, Lombardi's, Patsy's, Totonno's, Joe's, Ben's, and John's. (Also the fabulous Pizza Napoletana)

- I've ridden the Cyclone

- I've taken yoga

- I've gone in for one of those $10-for-10 minutes quickie acupressure sessions that leave you feeling more sore

- I carry an overly heavy bag

- I read the New York Times and I can do the crossword puzzles through Thursday. Friday's too tricky. But I can make inroads

- I was an underpaid, underappreciated peon in Entertainment; now I get the same money to be, more respectably, in Publishing

- Did I mention how happy I am? In general?

What other bona fides do I need? Is a like signing a lease, where I'd have to get a guarantor who's been in the city long enough to qualify?

blogging the sunday papers

Wherein I laze around for two hours, eating a cranberry scone and browsing the Washington Post and the New York Times, so you don't have to.

What topics focus the attention of the intelligentsia this weekend?

** Diamonds **
The NYT covers Hollywood's faddish interest in conflict diamonds, and then makes clear that the gray lady herself couldn't care less.

** Blond ladies of show **
The NYT favors chipper cherub Kirsten Chenowith with a profile, while the WPost chooses the no-less-bubby Dolly Parton. Both tiny but pneumatic and powerful entertainers bewitch their respective interviewers. The NYT's Jesse Green wins the prize, however, for describing Chenowith as being "like a bag of puppies" and for making her so darn likeable! Much more so than her doppleganger on Studio 60.

** The rich, mating habits of **
When readings Weddings & Celebrations headlines, you often see an entry that makes you think, for example, "That Hearst? That McInerney?" In this case, you can finally nod in relief, realizing, "Yes, and yes." And wow. Though you have to read down to figure it out for sure, the fact that Guiliani officiated should be an early tip off.

Consider yourselves enlightened! You're most welcome. Enjoy your Sundays.

one big fairy tale

Nothing I wear fits. My bras are the wrong size. My underwear sags. The waistbands of my jeans hang around my hips like hula hoops. Even my beautiful new coat, which makes me look like le petit prince, only better, is several inches too long.

Then there's this ring. It's the ring Mr. Ben bought me for Engagement, Take Two, and now that the awesome jewelry store from which he obtained it has resized it for free, I can finally wear it. It's not too loose, not too tight.

In the six months of ring-less engagement, I fielded lots of questions about why I wasn't wearing anything and spent a decent amount of time thinking about whether I wanted one. For sure I didn't want a diamond. Nothing that flashy & problematic belongs on my hand. Nor did I think I wanted to deal with gold. I didn't want to be high-maintainance; I don't want to show anything off or be tagged as someone's property. In short, if I wanted anything at all, I didn't know what. It was all too loaded with symbolism.

Except I liked the idea of being able to look down and be reminded, This is happening. This is good. This is what we want.

Last night I dreamt that someone, possibly one of the twins from America's Next Top Model, told me to turn the ring over. Sure enough, the back of the band had a box of Nutrition Information, and it listed the ingredients: tin and glass.

In actuality, the ring contains neither. It's vintage, and it looks like a crown. My hand has a crown! Weird! I haven't worn it outside of the apartment yet. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel brave.

oh, turkey. i never eat you.

Another Thanksgiving is behind us. I have been up to Westchester and back again, which is not exactly like going into the heart of darkness or the heart of Mordor. It's more like being in the suburbs and being well-fed for a while, and getting to watch a lot of the Office. Funniest show ever! Who knew? I moved Season One to the top of my Netflix queue so I can make sure that the six or seven hilarious episodes weren't a fluke.

I got to see my three first boy cousins, all of whom are very tall, and my little brother, who is also tall. In the car with my family driving me back to Brooklyn my grandma reflected with satisfaction on the fact that all five of her male grandchildren are around 6 foot. "None of them is short," she said. "Good." I sat next to her, slightly awkward in my 5-feet-1-and-3/4-inches, until she added, "It's lucky you're a girl!"

Back here, I saw Stranger than Fiction. All of the reviews feel compelled to mention that it's like, Charlie Kaufman lite! Which it is only in the sense that any movie that involves an ensemble of characters who sometimes talk at the same time is an homage to Robert Altman, or anything misanthropic, stylized, and anti-American is Lars Van Trier-ish. Film critics need to expand their imaginations, or at least their repertoires.

Stranger than Fiction is about a guy who realizes he's a character in a story and has to determine whether his life is tragedy or a comedy. It's not mindblowing, but since it has the courage of its convictions, it ends up being really enjoyable. I even cried a little. So what if it doesn't approach the films in the Kaufman pantheon? It's cute! It showcases Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Thompson AND Dustin Hoffman, all of whom are on my eternal crush list.

The Egyptian grocery store clerk where I bought ingredients to cook tonight thought it was weird that Jews celebrated Thanksgiving at all. "It's not a Christian holiday?" he asked doubtfully.
"No," I told him. "It's secular. American."
"What about the Orthodox Jews? Even they celebrate it?"
"No, they probably don't, you're right."

He peered at me. "You're not Orthodox?"
"Nope, we're just regular."

As his family's back in Egypt and he seems to work at least part of every day, he said he didn't celebrate at all. I don't know if he's Christian or Muslim. I felt a little funny asking, even though he knows Ben and I are Jewish because, several months ago, he asked us (!). And then asked if that meant we were Israeli. It weirded me out a bit at the time, but he still smiles at us and makes small talk at the register. Egypt and Israel do have a peace treaty, you know. Maybe that extends all the way to Brooklyn.

Ys is good

I've meant to update practically every day this week. I would be a really bad participant in that Blog November thing that Mrs. Kennedy has going. Sigh. Since I've written, Rupert Murdoch's empire threatened to reintroduce the blood-sucking tick that is OJ Simpson back onto the body of the American public; AND he has apologized like a chagrined little boy and replaced the tick in his pocket.

Considering the depths of esteem in which we, as a country, seem to hold Murdoch and OJ to begin with, they could hardly have fallen further. The person who seems to have really lost face in the "If I Did It, Here's How" debacle was Judith Regan. Even her friend Nora Ephron politely disapproved of Regan's by turns scattered, illogical, and sanctimonious defense of her decision to inflict OJ on America in book form. Everyone else reacted as though Regan had exhumed the body of Joseph Stalin and dragged him around the floor of the Senate, taunting Senators and demanding kisses.

A lot has happened in general. Since work has been slow, I've had lots of time to catch up on my world happenings: TomKat weds in Italy; Kramer reveals a frightening racist streak; but most notably, Robert Altman dies. Should I wait several days before I admit I was never crazy about Altman's movies? That I walked out of Nashville, turned off Short Cuts, and couldn't make it past Act 1 of The Player? In fact, the only one of his movies I've enjoyed from start to finish is the least Altman-esque of them all, Gosford Park.

Perhaps I should return my Film degree. Or does having seen Borat at last redeem me? I laughed. I laughed and I laughed and I had to drink water or I might have puked too; that movie is Gross with a capital Gagging Sound. What made it grosser was that the seat directly in front of me contained a four year old boy. I'm not kidding. His father, who was maybe my age, had brought him. It's not all his fault; why'd the theater let him? Regardless: outrage & disgust! Although some of the humor was perhaps more suited to him than to me (viz., nude wrestling; feces at the dinner table).

The movie itself made me feel pretty dirty afterwards for that reason, not on behalf of the Jews or those (litigious) citizens of Glod who are the stand-ins for the people of Kazakhstan. Those parts were so over-the-top, so silly, it's inconceivable to me that anyone would be legitimately offended. & I actually thought they were brilliant send-ups of 1) anti-semitism in this day and age, and 2) dim American ideas of what the developing world is like.

On a note of higher culture: when I spending that cheery evening in the ER with Ross a week ago, I missed a concert I was supposed to see with the fire boss and my friend Lana, both of whom reported back that Joanna Newsom, in my absence, proceeded to give the best show ever in history since the burning of Rome. To make it up to me, Lana, amazingly, bought me Ys, Newsom's latest CD. As reported, it's fantastic, like a harp-playing, warbling lovechild of Bjork and Joan Baez developed an album around an obsession with Mists of Avalon. Give it a try. You may never get past Newsom's distinctive voice, but if you can, it's mesmerizing.

how the mighty have fallen

**NOTE - I've now been given permission to name my friend by my friend. His name is Ross, and he is recovering nicely. Thanks for all the emails and phone calls I got from the expert worriers.**

Mr. Ben and I intended to have a fancy dinner at Babbo to celebrate our (re?)engagement. Instead we ended up feasting on reheated veggie burgers & fries in the Bellevue Hospital Center Cafeteria because a friend of ours (and Ben's best man) Ross, visiting from Philly, got hit by a car.

We had all been standing at the corner of 12th and Broadway at about 6:00 PM, in front of the Strand bookstore. Ben and I crossed the street to escape the rain; Ross waited for the light to change and then attempted to join us. Two steps into the intersection, a speeding car caught him, carried him forward and onto the sidewalk, dropping him there before careening into a store and down the sidewalk, finally coming to a stop at the end of the block.

It was the most horrific NYC street scene I've been a part of. Ben and I had turned away, so luckily we didn't see the collision; but we heard the panicking and the screaming, and when we turned back, Ross was gone. "Where is he?" I asked Ben. "Where is he?" I called his cell phone and Ross picked up, sounding dazed and incoherent, and then we saw him, a heap on the sidewalk, about thirty feet from where he'd started.

He was lucky. The guy the car hit next was bleeding from the head, immobile, covered with glass. The sidewalk seemed littered with people who I couldn't focus on because I was holding onto Ross. "Ow," he said from time to time, and, "I can't see very well. It's getting dark. I can see lights. The lights are cool."

When the ambulance came, Mr. Ben and I rode with him strapped down to a stretcher alongside a very reassuring EMT. The EMT even told our friend how to avoid getting his much loved sweater from getting cut off.

We landed at Bellevue Hospital Center and there we stayed for about seven hours as our poor friend was poked, prodded, bandaged, x-rayed, x-rayed again, casted, slung, and told repeatedly how lucky he was. Lucky indeed: aside from the two fractures (elbow, ankle) and lots of scrapes and bruises, he was okay. But the night wore on and the ER doctors showed no signs of running out tests to perform on him, and the poor guy showed no signs of being able to hobble all the way to Brooklyn. Finally Mr. Ben and I tagged out at 1:15 AM, when another friend came to relieve us.

The experience was exhausting, in part because we spent most of our time hovering by Ross's makeshift bedside in the ER where there were no chairs. Once the nice orthopedic doctors let us follow our friend to the x-ray room, where we sat on the hallway floor marvelling at the various pieces of bad art someone had hung to try to dispell the hospital gloom. Then a nurse sternly instructed us to get up, wash our hands, and burn (all right, wash) our clothes. God knows what contamination lingers on hospital floors.

We did manage to chase down a balloon for our friend that read "Aliviate, pronto!" And I think we managed to make him more comfortable. And at least, thank god, he's okay.

the fiancee proposes

After a great, if hectic, weekend, Mr. Ben finds it in himself to get up at 6:00 this gray monday morning and is gone to get more work done by 6:30. I leave for work at the more human time of 8:30 but stop right outside the door to the building. Mr. Ben is there. Why is he there? And why is he carrying those flowers?

At first I'm confused, thinking it's some Day of Importance that I've forgotten. Meanwhile Mr. Ben is grinning that boyish grin. He hands me the armful of blue-purple flowers and before I understand what's going on he gets down on one knee right there in front of our apartment building and pulls a small black box out of his bag.

Instead of going to school this morning, he had gone to Fassbinder's and gotten me a ring.

"Will you marry me?" and "It's a sapphire," he says helpfully because I'm laughing and crying. I don't know what I'm reacting to: the pageantry, the ring, the surprise. He takes the flowers & the ring to bring inside and we finally stop kissing so I can go to the subway. I'm completely happy.

Christmas for the Jews

I'm so happy that I almost can't take stock of how happy I am. It's almost unfathomable. For sure I've never been this happy on a rainy Wednesday in November.

Let's list the top five, shall we. In order of Exactly How Exuberant This Result Makes Ester:

#5) A moderate Muslim man in Minnesota makes it into Congress. First ever, and, oddly, not even in Michigan. (Bonus points for alliteration.) Lots of firsts, actually:

First woman to serve as speaker of the house: Nancy Pelosi

First Muslim elected to U.S. Congress: Keith Ellison

First Democratic Socialist elected to U.S. Congress: Bernie Sanders

First Jewish governor of New York: Eliot Spitzer

First African-American governor of Massachusetts: Deval Patrick

And, according to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, 67 openly gay candidates were elected to state and local offices (more than ever before)

{full list here}

#4) We won the House decisively AND a majority of the governorships! We are Master of the House, master of our domain, kings of the castle. Even our Dear Leader had to admit it. I would have loved to listen in on his call as he made nice to Pelosi, the woman who, previously, he could only refer to as "that liberal lesbian who's gonna steal your children, bus them to the nearest ghetto for abortions, and then sell them to illegal aliens."

In the process of taking the House, we #3) wiped Santorum off the floor of the Senate. His son cried; that was sad. Otherwise, wha-hoo! Take THAT, you brown-shirt in a suit.

#2) The ballot initiatives country-wide didn't do badly at all. It looks like stem cell research got approved in Missouri, the gay marriage ban failed in Arizona, and, most excitingly, the anti-abortion bill imported to South Dakota straight from Nicaragua was voted down. Three cheers for choice, and for the voters in South Dakota!

#1) We're within spitting distance of the Senate. In fact we may as well start acting as though we have it. Allen doesn't seem to be fighting hard for his seat, which is the deciding one -- he hasn't insisted on a recount, for example, if the initial poring over the votes doesn't discover an extra 7,001 for him in a box somewhere.

Webb seems to have gotten this memo: he's acting confident. We should follow his lead. Although, honestly, even a 50/50 split in the Senate feels like a huge victory to me, especially when coupled with the other huge gains of today. God bless Rahm Emanuel. God bless Chuck Shumer. And god bless America: thanks to you, now I can see Borat!

... On that note, I should add that I'm also deliriously happy about my office. Finally, I'm in a place where people are politically engaged, friendly, funny, eager to talk about what's going on while they congregate in the kitchen over free, company-supplied snacks & the free, company-suppled copy of the New York Times. Finally, I'm home.

ETA: Rummy. Yes. The first head to fall.