and the oscar goes to...

I was pleased, for the most part, to see which actors and movies were nominated for Academy Awards this morning. In the same weekend last month, I saw both Capote and Junebug and had the distinct feeling that I was witnessing a couple of the best supporting performances ever from both Catherine Keener and Amy Adams. And this after already being wowed by Michelle Williams in Brokeback Mountain a few weeks earlier. I think the Best Supporting Actress category will give the Best Actor category a run for its money for the most pins-and-needles on awards night.

Crash, on the other hand, is a bit of quandary for me. There were many strong performances in the movie, especially Matt Dillon and a surprisingly seriously bitchy Sandra Bullock. But the plot, oh the plot! It was the kind of plot that Hollywood thinks is clever and poignant, especially when the writers and producers are either young or coked up or making too many films to step back and criticize their own work. Honestly, I am willing to be surprised and moved when lives intersect in a good complex story, but the intersecting in Crash became ridiculous. People in the theater began to laugh long before the last of the intersections were revealed. I half expected to discover that the person in the row behind me and the theater usher had also been at the tables next to me at dinner earlier and would later be the ones who stole my cab and hired me for freelance work the next day. I kept thinking, "Okay, okay, I get the point! As human beings we're all interconnected! Tell me a little more about what that means. Be a little more subtle and nuanced, would ya!"

Then again, subtlety and nuance aren't Hollywood's strong suit. That's why I'm thankful they have Ang Lee (Hulk notwithstanding). Brokeback Mountain haunted me for several weeks after I saw the movie and read the short story by Annie Proulx on which it was based. I am very critical of gay movies. Most of them disappoint me to no end. Gay film makers seem to be too caught up in the fact that they're making a gay film to be self-critical. The plots and characters are often unbelievable or preachy or übertragic. Even when gay characters are introduced into mainstream films that are not particularly gay themed, they are usually cookie-cutter representations of something--the really, really good gay guy, the loveable-but-lonely friend, the perfect adoptive parent, the closet freak, the tragic queen with the heart of gold, the sexy hip lesbian--and their humanity crumbles under the weight. I never believe it.

What worked for me about Brokeback was that the story seemed very, very true for these two men. They weren't icons--not gay icons or Old West icons or early '60s icons--and they didn't have to bear the weight of any of that for me. They easily could have been presented as any one of these, but they weren't. The movie simply made me believed that life happened this way for the two of them and I felt that pathos. This is in part because the short story was written in this manner. And to a large part, it is because Ang Lee, as he did in The Ice Storm, kept it subtle and emotionally controlled. But I think Jake Gyllenhaal and especially Heath Ledger's performances are what made the film honest and true. I have known men out West so much like each of their characters, gay or straight, that there was a knot in my stomach, and the knot would have been there even without the gay theme.

Ledger's subtle performance would be a shoe in for the Best Actor award if it weren't for Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote. I'm just old enough to have seen Truman Capote on television talk shows in the '60s and I was blown away by Hoffman in the film. Even the tiniest details, like the way he moved his upper lift in one moment of the film, made me feel like I had seen a ghost. I believe that Hoffman will walk away with one more award on Oscar night, not only because of this performance, but for every performance he has done over the past decade and half. A true character actor in every sense of the word, his performances in films like Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski, Magnolia, Flawless, Almost Famous, Cold Mountain, and now Capote, to name a few, are unforgettable. I think Hoffman's peers in the movie industry really love having this opportunity to award him for his talent and hard work, and this performance is very worthy of it.

overwhelmed

I feel like I should lock my office door today so I don't snap at anyone, which is not common for me. I'm the kind of guy who can usually rise to the occasion and ask others how they're doing even when I feel like shit, or hold the door for the person behind me when I'm tired, or think clearly enough to negotiate, even when I'm pissed off.

But today that's not me at all. I'm cranky. I'm frustrated. I'm tired of dealing with coworkers who are lame and bitchy, and legal battles with our first contractor, and all the stuff that's still not done around our new apartment, and finances, and the hole in my tennis shoe that's been soaking my sock on rainy days because I can't get to a shoe store with shoes my size, and....

It could be just that its Monday, or that I'm tired of the diet Bob and I are doing. Or maybe, just maybe, all this would overwhelm anyone on any day of the week or on any diet.

Anyway, I'm still somewhat my usual "people-person" self. Notice that I began this post with wanting to shut my office door so that "I don't snap at any." Here I am feeling miserable and I'm concerned with protecting others from my feelings, rather than protecting myself. Oh, brother!

Hmmm.

Maybe I should go buy shoes at lunch.

man in the mirror

Blog friend and fellow photographer chriskomater wrote about the terror he's been feeling as he is facing the 40-year-old man in the mirror. Relating to his experience, this was my comment to him:

You may come to know the man in the mirror, even if you don't know him as yourself.

I've gotten use to the 47-year-old man in my mirror. He's like a friendly older neighbor that visits me daily. He looks tired to me and isn't aging as well as I hope to myself, but at least he's honest about it. He's kind of world wise. He seems to look into my soul and I have to look away.

Still, it's sometimes hard to leave him in the mornings. I know he'd prefer that I stayed home and talked with him until noon. He sometimes needs me to trim his eyebrows or pluck a whisker from his earlobe and I do it quickly before I rush out for work.

At least, when I finally do leave him there in the apartment and head for the street, I know that I walk with a younger bounce than he does and I'm a little more open and foolishly uncertain about the world than he is. People around me relate to me differently than they would to him, unless, say, the lighting in a restaurant is bad and the young waitress mistakes me for him and calls me "sir." But I quickly rectify her misunderstanding with a laugh and a little banter that he couldn't possibly keep up with if he were there.

I know one day he'll move in with me and I'll have to follow his schedule and his rules. But for now it suffices for me to look him in the eye each morning and ask him if there's anything I need to know before I go out into the world for the day.

skinny vegetarian

Bob and I have started a diet. Now that the worst of the move is over with and we're living in a part of the city with good, fairly cheap vegetarian, vegan and health food restaurants, it is easier to commit ourselves to losing the excess we comforted ourselves with during the past year. The weight has been affecting our health for a while now. Bob is pre-diabetic and my cholesterol is way up. And granted we're both in our late forties, but our joints have been aching way more than they should. So for two weeks we've been eating healthier and walking in the evenings, and the pounds have begun to come off.

Last night we ate at Angelica's Kitchen, one of the most popular vegetarian restaurants in the East Village. It is a classic vegetarian restaurant in every sense of the word. Men with thick heads of hair, beards and Birkenstocks, women in macramé vests, tall white guys with tiny Asian girlfriends, cat hair on everyone's coats: if it were 1978 and Vermont or Berkeley I might understand, but these were 20-somethings in New York City in 2006. Where did someone in his or her twenties learn to wear macramé?

What struck me the most was the number of patrons who were bone skinny. I mean Karen-Carpenter-in-her-final-weeks skinny. I felt compelled to do an intervention on the whole crowd. I wanted to stand up and yell, "Eat something! Everyone of you! Order at least two more things from the menu."

At the table to my right was a gaunt man and his girlfriend in a puff-sleeved, high-button-collared "Victoriana" sweater that she must have hand knitted from a pattern she found in a Portland, Maine thrift shop, circa 1974. And (I'm not joking), she wore her hair up in a bun with spit curls on the sides. Each time I looked at her, the edges of my vision went gauzy and Pachelbel's Canon in D Major played in my head. They spent a half hour looking through a packet of photos of his cat and his sister's new baby, ate only half their food and had the rest wrapped up to go.

There were two small women at the table to my left who were each no taller than 4' 8" and whose weight together couldn't have added up to my target weight. They both spoke with little girl voices to the waiter as they ordered the mixed sprouts and the "Wee Dragon Bowl" (I kid you not), which they were sharing. You have to cultivate smallness of these proportions, I thought. I was waiting for them to sing the "Lullaby League" song.

But I was particularly distracted by one extremely gaunt woman as she and her boyfriend waited for about ten minutes to be seated. She had rail thin legs, sunken cheeks and boney fingers. I wanted to scold her and her boyfriend for even walking in the door. "You get out of here and go eat some meat, damn it!" I wanted to march right up to them wagging my pudgy finger. "And you, don't you let her come back in here until she's put on at least twenty pounds!"

There wasn't much humor in the crowd either. People were polite, smiling, friendly, like librarians at a particularly good OCLC seminar. But there never were any real bursts of hearty laughter or wise cracks from the wait staff.

When I asked for seltzer with lemon, our skinny waiter replied, "We don't have seltzer. Nothing with bubbles."

Before I could think, I replied earnestly, "Bubbles aren't bad."

"Who said bubbles are bad," he replied humorlessly. I didn't know how to respond to that. I just assumed that in vegetarian restaurants omissions from the menu are made for some good PC reasons, like, someone discovered that bubbles affect leaf digestion or fish are force-fed beans to produce carbonation in captivity.

At any rate, the important thing is that the food is very good at Angelica's, if stereotypical. Spices and herbs are a little over used to mask the taste of soy products and the house salad was big enough to choke a cow. The three bean chili was tasty, so I left feeling full. But I realized that part of my problem, and Bob's as well, is that we love good food: foie gras, confit, tandoori, osso bucco, hasenpfeffer and all. The skinny vegetarians will not be able to save us from ourselves. Their pallets are not ours and I'm not sure they'd have the energy to do so on their diets anyway. We've got work of our own to do.

moore goode dick

Arkansas Razorback players
Clarke Moore, Brett Goode and Casey Dick

men i would like to photograph - luis figo

A while back I decided to start a recurring entry in my blog titled "Men I Would Like to Photograph" with the first entry being Italian soccer hunk Angelo Peruzzi, and the second Serbian strongman competitor Ervin (Erwin) Katona. Anytime I see a guy that I would like to photograph, I will post his picture here, with a request to anyone who knows him (or someone who looks like him) to pass along my open invitation to sit nude in front of my camera.

Last night, I couldn't sleep because of the legal battles with our first contractor, and so, as I often do, I turned on the Fox Soccer Channel. After midnight this cable channel runs foreign soccer and, even better, rugby and Australian football. As I've said before, I can watch these sports with the sound turned down the way straight guys watch women's volleyball with the sound turned down. I don't care whose winning, I'm watching for something else.

This time around Portuguese soccer player, Luis Figo, who plays for the Italian soccer team Inter Milano caught my attention...over and over again. Dark, hairy chested Figo has a great smile, intense eyes, strong athletic body and nice hair on his torso (of which we got sneak peaks each time he wiped the sweat from his face with his shirttail). And as you can see from the photograph at right, he's already no stranger to the camera.

So once again, I'm serious about this invitation. If you know Luis (or a close facsimile) have him contact me through my photography web site. (Caution: photography site may not be work-friendly.)

miracles

One January, when I was a young seminarian, many, many years ago, one of my classmates and I were assigned to take a census for the Catholic parish in a tiny town outside of Boulder Colorado. The task was an attempt by a failing parish to find out where all its former parishioners had gone. If the pastor had earnestly wanted to change the way he did things so that people might feel motivated to come back to church, it would have been an easier task. But, instead, the "lapsed" parishioners had good reasons to walk away from a church where the liturgies were absolutely deadly, the parish had no community services or outreach, and the alcoholic pastor gave more attention to his mentally deficient "handyman" who also shared the pastor's bed and credit cards.

But I was 18 years old, clearly in denial on several levels, and sincere about any task I was given, so my classmate and I went from house to house on the parish register asking what the parish could do for them. Most of the parishioners were hard working people who had fallen on hard times in other parts of their lives and simply couldn't be bothered with the mess their church had become. Others did not even know how their names had gotten on the list, other than that their parents had gone to the church or they had been married in a Catholic church somewhere else.

A few were old faithful parishioners who loved having visitors from the parish. They were the ones we really didn't need to visit because they were always there every Sunday morning, sometimes even on weekday mornings, in the front rows faithfully droning back "and also with yous" and "amens" to the bald pate of the priest slumped over the alter. They were the ones that threw their doors open to us as we walked up the snow-covered path to their doors, took our coats and served us coffee and leftover Christmas cookies, fruitcake and pitzels.

One such parishioner was an old Mexican immigrant who took us through her house and showed us her entire collection of saint statues. They stood like commuters waiting on subway platforms of mantles, folding TV trays, window sills, bookcases and end tables. Some were big gaudy hand-painted plaster cast statues, with flowing red robes, teary eyes and deep red blood. Some were small cream-colored plastic statues like the ones found on car dashboards. But they all had their place. One in particular, she told me, a plastic statue of Saint Jude, would come up missing from time to time and then reappear several days later.

"He's just gone for awhile and then he comes back," she told me. "I don't know if he makes a miracle or what? But he just disappears." She looked to me for encouragement and repeated, "I don't know if he makes a miracle or what?"

I had nothing to say to her, but I noticed her cat eyeing the end table where St. Jude was standing. Her little grandson seemed as interested in her statues as he was with his army men. And later when we had coffee she had a hard time finding the sugar bowl.

When she located the sugar, my classmate who was a little older and sassier than I was at the time murmured, "another miracle!"

She smiled and said distractedly, "I suppose so," as she opened the cookie tin and set it before us.

what four

Work is hard right now and memes are easy. This one came from my buddy Dot, and my answers are below.

Four jobs you've had in your life: Head Usher and Head of Concession at the Parkway II theaters (it's now something like the Parkway 25); Giftware Sales Associate for a cokehead wholesale rep; Temp Dispatcher for a temp agency during the worst unemployment slump in NYC in the past 20 years; Catholic Priest (for real).

Four movies you could watch over and over: To Kill a Mockingbird; Tootsie; Big; Singin' in the Rain.

Four places you've lived: Hickman Mills, MO; Wheeling, WV; Creve Coeur, MO; Berkeley, CA.

Four TV shows you love to watch: My Name is Earl; HBO's Rome; Seinfeld reruns; M*A*S*H reruns.

Four places you've been on vacation: Italy, France, Austria, The Rocky Mountains.

Four websites you visit daily: Google (maps, dictionary, local businesses, images and general searches); NYTimes; Amazon; eBay (selling, not buying).

Four weblogs you visit daily: I honestly check each of the blogs and journals listed in my "Links" column at least once daily. Four that are particularly well-written and entertaining on a daily basis are: Ornithology for Beginners; Fried Green 'Maters ~ Idgie's Place!; Navel Gazing 'R' Us; Tales of Post-Twinkie Ennui. (This list might change weekly, depending upon who's on vacation or who's life drama is keeping them away from the computer.)

Four of your favorite foods: lobster, parmigiano reggiano cheese, any main dishes served with figs, plums or prunes, desserts made with espresso and chocolate.

Four places you'd rather be: home snuggling with Bob; lying on the beach in the little hillside coastal town of Cornelia in the Cinque Terre, Italy; lying naked on the massage table of a big furry masseur; photographing a couple of big hairy nude models somewhere warm and outdoors.

Four albums you can't live without: James Taylor's "JT"; Joni Mitchell's "Court & Spark"; Vince Guaraldi's "A Charlie Brown Christmas" Soundtrack; Elmer Bernstein's "To Kill a Mockingbird" Soundtrack.

jay needs

The inimitable Madame President posted an interesting meme yesterday. Here's how it works:

Go to Google and search on your name followed by the word "needs" (for example, I searched on "Jay needs"). Then take the first ten entries and comment on them.

Here's what I got:

1. Jay Needs Snow
This winter has been unseasonably warm and I could use a good romp in Central Park snow with Bob right now.

2. Jay needs redemption
Oh my, yes. I'd like to redeem the Jay that was relaxed, taking photographs, planning vacations and enjoying life before we started apartment hunting. If I could do that, I would truly feel "born again."

3. Jay Needs Help!
Yes! Yes! Help unpacking. Help completing the work on the apartment. Help with legal battles with our first contractor. Mental Help! Oh yes!

4. Jay needs a home where he is the only child or the other siblings are male.
I have six sisters and my one brother left home when I was seven years old. In a way, I have been trying to make the above statement a reality for most of my life. I've got it now!

5. Jay needs to focus on getting people off the shelf instead of worrying about some party.
This came from a web discussion about some hip-hop music producer who wasn't doing his job well. I can only relate this to needing to getting back to my photography, now that the move is over.

6. Jay needs to dump Maia because Maia is such a cow.
Poor Maia. I would never dump her over her weight issues. In this case, Maia's Jay needs to get better friends and better advise.

7. Jay Needs to Sharpen His Sarcasm.
Oh really? Does he? Really?

8. Jay needs more information on filter strips and how effective they would be on his farm.
I really would like to give this one a naughty spin. Feel free to make up an innuendo-laced interpretation of your own for this one.

9. Jay needs to check his PMs [private messages].
This is rarely a concern, but it is at present. I try to keep up with my emails, but I have missed a few important ones recently.

10. Jay needs a very special home.
In so many senses of the word "special," yes! Bob and I have been working on making a very unique home for ourselves. But also, right now, with the way everything is has been going, I may also need to "check-in" to a "special" home, if you get my drift.

I'd like, in particular, to see what Dottie, poetrytoweasels, kitchenbeard, and allsmilesbear come up with for this one, but anyone is welcome to play along.

song tag

I suffer from a condition that I call "song tag." I am highly susceptible to this condition and there is no quick remedy. Simply walking past someone on the street or visiting a convenience store for less than a minute can set it off. I can even get it from a commercial on TV.

The condition is this: all I need is to hear a few bars of a song and it will stick in my head for days. There is no telling which song will set it off or when it will stop. I can even try to counteract the condition by playing some other song that I would prefer to have stuck in my head, but when that song ends, up comes the song that won't go away.

Over the weekend we drove back to Bob's sister's house outside of Pittsburg to drop off one more load of stuff that won't fit into our new apartment. We stayed at Bubba's house, (that's Bob's mom) as we did at Christmas time, where Bubba keeps a little transistor radio playing in the bathroom at all times. The radio was tuned to the Christmas music station throughout our previous visit and I came home, not with a sweet rendition of a classic like "I'll Be Home for Christmas" or "The Christmas Song" repeating in my head, but with "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas." It stayed through New Years. I swear this was used as a form of torture during the Korean War.

This time the radio was stuck on the country music station and now I'm back to my desk at work with "Achy-Breaky Heart" battering the inside of my cranium. It's nightmarish.

Furthermore, a side effect of the condition is "bogus lyrics." Too often the song is one I don't know well enough to know more than a line or two of the words, and so, as the condition progresses, my mind starts making up lyrics to fill in the blanks. By this afternoon's commute, I will be humming something like "Don't cut a fart, a stinky-winky fart, you don't want to stain your underpants...."

And bogus lyrics come on more quickly when the song is in another language. I cannot hear "Guantanamera" without singing "One-ton tomato, I ate a one ton tomato...." because of this condition. Bogus lyrics happen with symphonic pieces as well. The pastorale ad libitum of Arcangelo Corelli's "Concerto Grosso in G Minor" now tells the story of our friend Sara making dessert. It goes something like: "She baking a tart tartan. She's baking a tart tartan. Not pudding or flan, or pears from a can. She's baking a tart tartan." And for me, the theme song to "Il Postino" begins with "So anyway, I ride around, upon my bicycle all O-ver town...." I have ruined entire CDs for Bob who now cannot listen to most instrumental pieces without hearing my made up lyrics.

There is no cure and it's getting worse. I can only imagine what I will be like in the nursing home.

Okay, back to work and Billy Ray. Now how does that song go again? "Don't shop Wal-Mart, with-a broken shopping cart, you'll never make it to the checkout stand...."

the waking giant

At work (my day job) the new semester has kicked in and like a sleeping giant the entire school community has awakened, groggy, fumbling in a stupor, limbs flailing dumbly left and right, realizing they needed to have put something on the web site before the new semester began. They're all insistent. It needs to go up now! The fact that it wasn't up yesterday is suddenly and inextricably my fault the moment they have hit "send" on their email request today.

Is it lead in the water? Back home in KC I use to blame it on cousins marrying. In the Brooklyn fast food chains and grocery stores I counted the years back to the height of the crack-baby epidemic and tried to gage how old the younger salespeople were.

But I am always amazed at how thoughtless and brainless people in education can be. They stop me in the bathroom to tell me about an edit to a web page. ("Excuse me, professor; as long as I have my dick in my hand, if you'll just pass me a sheet of toilet paper under the stall I'll make a note for myself in piss.") They type a page-long submission and bring me the paper print out to type all over again. Their secretaries ask me if I'll make an update to their database because they haven't used it since I last showed them how.

Anyway, I've been at it long enough to know that it will all die down next week and we'll be back to a more manageable pace. Patience. Patience.

i can do that for you, part 4

So what was the worst of our renovation saga? What made us go from patiently waiting out the I Can Do That For You delays and fibs?

Well, frankly, it was incompetence, dangerous incompetence. I mentioned the electrical errors in my previous installment, but there were structural errors as well.

When Diane's crew began to build large sections of walls, their incompetence became most apparent. The new walls were not at right angles; obviously crooked to the eye and confirmed with a level or straight edge. On a couple walkthroughs, even Fred (the big-deal contractor who had referred Diane to us) confirmed what we could easily see. Furthermore, within weeks of construction and plastering, the new wallboard began to bow so badly that this too was apparent to the eye--frighteningly apparent. If these were collapsing, what else would? What was going on inside the walls?

Diane and Mahesh had difficulties seeing the problem or, infuriatingly, blamed it on the original construction of the building. We actually were reduced to reminding them that these walls were new walls that they themselves had built where they had demolished old walls, closets and doorways. Instead of seriously considering our real concerns, about structural issues, for fuck sake, much less the service her men were providing, Diane made us feel that we were hurting their feelings by complaining, and then finally made excuses for their shoddy work by saying that this was an "economy job."

Despite continued attempts to have them correct these issues, several of the walls had to be repaired by subsequent workers, not only for the visual issues, but also for cracking plaster and deterioration that began to occur even before we moved in.

Time and again throughout the final months of construction, we requested that Diane and Fred provide us with better skilled workers, especially for the fine detailed work, and while Fred was willing to do so and on a few occasions provided better workers for discrete projects at additional costs to us, Diane resented the suggestion that her crew was not skilled enough to handle our project, and in several instances (e.g. plastering, skim coating and tiling in the kitchen) foiled our good efforts to get better craftsman from Fred's crew.

And the last straw?

First, she tried to get more money from us by fudging on an expense spread sheet, which we sent her back to the computer to correct three times before she realized she couldn't hoodwink us out of another penny.

Then at the end of August, our landlord in Brooklyn found new tenants for our Brooklyn apartment and requested that we vacate the apartment by September 12th. So we met with Diane on Sunday, August 21st to go over the final two weeks of work so that she and her crew could complete the unfinished work in time for painting all the rooms and finishing the floors before we moved in. We thought the meeting had been effective. We thought she got it.

But despite our efforts to impress upon her the tight schedule, despite her promise to be on top of the job, over the next two days she pulled all but one unsupervised secondary worker from our apartment to complete another job. On Monday a friend of ours stopped by and discovered this one worker there who confirmed that no one else was working with him that day.

On Tuesday morning, we met at the apartment with Diane and Mahesh (the fuckup upon whom she had relied as her "foreman"). During this meeting we were taken aback to discover that Mahesh was not at all aware of the issues or the urgent schedule that we had discussed with Diane two days earlier and we had to go back over all of these details with him. When we returned a few hours later, Diane and Mahesh were gone, again leaving only one unsupervised secondary worker for the rest of the day. When we called Diane, she could not promise that anyone else would return to the job that day, but kept insisting that the job would "get done."

But by the end of the week we were so far behind schedule that she admitted that we might not be able to keep to the schedule discussed at the beginning of the week. We blew up. We panicked and contacted Fred for assistance. Despite his best efforts to get Diane and her crew on track, several errors and omissions on Diane's part, including an unannounced seven-day vacation in the last week of our job, led to our final termination of her and her crew.

In the termination letter, we wondered why, on the many occasions that we had discussed our urgent deadline for completion of major work by September 8th, that she never once told us that she was anticipating being gone from September 1st to the 7th. We wondered why she waited until 5:25 p.m. on the 1st to send an email announcing that she was no longer available as of 5 p.m. And we were outraged to find that the person she was leaving in charge of all operations until her return was Mahesh, someone whom we had repeatedly and clearly said we did not trust to manage his own work, much less anyone else's.

Despite the presure we then were under to find new workers, as soon as we fired Diane and her crew, we were instantly relieved to have them out of our apartment and our lives. And, thankfully, the tenants who were to move into our Brooklyn apartment backed out and our landlord allowed us to stay indefinitely until repairs and construction could be completed.

Now Diane is suing us for the rest of the money she thinks we owe her, and has put a lien on our apartment and our co-op for the money. Never mind that, in order to complete and repair her mess, we ended up spending nearly three-times what she's demanding.

To the end, she is as unrealistic as she was throughout the job.

And already the lien has cost us time and money to get it bonded so that the co-op isn't held responsible. Even her lawyer is a real piece of work, i.e. when I spoken to him on the phone a couple times, I pictured a bulldog with a stinky cigar and a disheveled pin-striped suit, in a side garage office somewhere in Bayridge.

Our own lawyer keeps, inadvertently, referring to Diane's company as "I Can Do That TO You." We'll let you know how this turns out.

crush

Tomorrow is my best friend from high school's birthday and I've been putting off sending him a simple email. It's 30 years later now and, even though he now knows that I'm gay and have a boyfriend and all that, I'm still afraid that if I slip and tip my hand he (and his wife and kids) will figure out that for four full years of my teenage life I was madly, wildly, deeply, tragically in love with him. 30 years, and a few good relationships and therapists later, and I still weigh my words when I write to him to make certain my email seems appropriately caring, warm and friendly, but also laidback and, yeah, manly.

My calendar in Outlook keeps popping up the annual reminder for his birthday and I keep hitting "snooze."

un-boxing days

I am struggling to come back to the everyday stuff today: work, sitting at a desk, making small talk, caring about my responsibilities, only getting to talk to Bob once or twice by phone. I haven't done this for a while. I'm still coming off the weeks of moving, unpacking, taking more stuff to storage at Bob's sister's house while visiting his mom over Christmas weekend, cleaning, unpacking, the legal battle with our first contractor, unpacking, building shelves in the closets, unpacking, sending out our combination change-of-address/holiday cards, unpacking, unpacking, unpacking.

I took all of last week off work and together Bob and I nearly unpacked everything and found a place for it (even that meant a place on the last pile of boxes that will go to Bob's sister's house this coming weekend). Slowly, ever-so slowly, but surely, we are making our way through it all and the apartment is feeling more and more like home to us. And although we put in long days, we did manage to sneak out of the house a few times and take advantage of the movie theaters and restaurants near the apartment, and that too hinted at what's to come once we settle back into the neighborhood.

We definitely look forward to the Saturday morning that we sit with our coffee in bed and ask one another, "so what do ya' feel like doing today?"