An Army of Millions: Inauguration

This is slightly belated, but I am going to try to write something anyway because things like this need to be documented.

We woke up a little later than we had meant to, perhaps betraying the single major flaw of a generation: we try to care, we try to make it to the front lines of history, but as often as not, sleeping in seems equally as attractive. So, we woke up a little later than our already later than necessary planned departure, hopped a bus and made our way to the mall. The streets of capital hill were all blocked off by large tour buses in order to create channels of pedestrian activity. Thousands of people filled the streets. We looked like zombies converging on a boarded up town, aliens responding to the call of the mother ship. And, as strange as it might seem, in many ways, we were.

Most of the 1.8 million or so people who marched on the mall that day to see a symbol of hope become a real decision-making world leader have been living half lives (zombies) or eccentric lives of political dissidents and minorities. We have been either building lives outside of society or refusing to live for the past eight years, and for a person of my age (22) that pretty much qualifies as eternity.

So, what now?

How does an army of millions, an army of zombies and aliens, become an active, informed citizenry? How do we cope with the fact that the establishment is giving us less and less reason to rail against it? Perhaps more importantly, the zombie masses must ask themselves how to stop complaining and start acting. It seems, right now anyway, that insulting the powers that be is a counterproductive move. Let's face it, we are in way too much shit to get ourselves out of this one. Really. So, what we need is for the man in the big white house and all of his little neighbors in the building on the hill to get together and bail us out. But, see, this is where things get all touch and go again.

We hate establishment. We hate society. We hate the media and government jobs. We hate it all. But in this, our most desperate moment, the symbol of hope, our messiah, if you will, insists that joining the evil forces of capitalism and government into one pretty little package is our only hope.

I mean, if it comes down to it, I'll join some WPA inspired government initiative.

Hell, I need the money and, as we all know, money comes before morals in this great country.

Office Work

Is tiring. Is boring. Is everything everyone has ever feared or hoped.

God bless office work.

Parks in Bushwick

The parks in Bushwick are a lie.

There are several "parks" near my apartment in East-Williamsburg-Bushwick, none of which, as far as I can tell have more in common with a playground than they do with a parking lot.

In Bushwick, "park" is code for an empty lot paved over with asphalt, demarcated by a chain-link fence, and hung with a sign commemorating some historically important ethnic minority. That, my friends, is not a park. It is a lie.

Living in NY is something of a lesson in socio-economic disparities in America. The parks, in my opinion, are the perfect manifestation of the inexcusable disparity between rich white New Yorkers and poor Black and Latino ones.

There are also several parks by my work in Cobble Hill. Cobble Hill is home to some of the first low income housing in New York. These walk-up Brownstones were built in the mid-nineteenth century, where rooms were let for mere dollars a week. Today, the same Brownstones go for 4 mil. The parks in Cobble Hill, needless to say, are very very nice.

Maybe some day the low income housing that surrounds my Bushwick apartment will be declared historic. Maybe someday the parks board will decide to tear up the asphalt lots and plant grass. Maybe.

But by that time all of the black and latino residents will be long gone and rich white women with 3,000 dollar strollers will be taking their kids to play at Rosa Parks Playground.

Somedays in the Park

Every morning for the past month and a half, I have taken the train to work. Yesterday, I took it to Central Park. Working seven days a week is not difficult, it isn't exhausting, if anything it is strangely hypnotic. A person, without any free time, is more of an automaton than a human being. You are a worker, a commuter, an eater, a sleeper; a machine with many capabilities simply churning out the daily quota.

A person in central park on her first day off in a month and a half, however, is all flesh and blood. The park, in case any of you didn't know, is beautiful. It is meticulously designed and obsessively maintained in order that New Yorkers might forgive the oppressive concrete forest that is the rest of the city. And it works.

The park is the city's playground. People feel free to climb, jump, run, don a batman costume and breakdance--in short, they do what they want. There are trees and winding paths and big rocks. There are ponds posing (almost convincingly) as lakes. Dogs. Jugglers. Roller-discos. It's awesome.

The libertine attitude fostered by the park's sheer openess was reinforced this past Sunday by the presence of, what my sources tell me is the best Fall New York has seen in 75 years. The leaves having turned brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and red. The beautiful people of the upper east side sporting their best Burberry attire in honor of the dazzling sunshine and crisp Autumn air.

This is all very cliché, I know. Fall in Central Park is beautiful--it's pretty much like saying Micheal Jordan is athletic. And my jaded, post-everything self should resist buying into cliché because that's just what I do. But today, I am resisting the temptation to inject bitter skepticism into everything. Today I am saying, I love central park.

Tomorrow, we'll talk about the parks in Bushwick.

A Defecit.

I just finished reading a rather lovely book by Nick Hornby called the Polysyllabic Spree. This collection of essays put out by the people at The Believer traces Hornby's book purchases and book readings.

Hornby approaches his own patterns of reading and book buying with equal parts contempt, fascination, and pride. He makes us (other readers that is) feel simultaneously superior (Oh, you're only just now reading Nine Stories, how old are you again?) and inexcusably inept (Really, you read twelve books this month? How many children did you say you have again?) In other words, it makes us realize that even a published author, a man who lives and dies by the books he reads, writes, and reviews, is only human and, therefore, can only read so much.
Hornby's column works because, unlike most other "What to read" epithets, Hornby's book refuses to either adhere to or fully reject the canon. He does lie to us every now and again, whittling down the list of books bought or tossing out a cheesy paperback (by his own admission). But isn't this what we all do as readers? Hornby makes the reader comfortable in his or her own taste, his or her own personal idiosyncrasies.

So, I guess the point of this little blurb review is that most of us literary types are scared out of our fucking skins. We spend just as much time trying to seem like we've read the right books as we do reading books that we actually love. We keep notebooks filled with the titles of books that we should read and mentally note any book that has appeared in Oprah's book club in order to avoid seeming ignorant or (worse) in bad taste.

Hornby, on the other hand, loves what he loves and hates what he hates. He doesn't tell us all, but who ever really does. His book gives the reader courage to follow his or her own interests, idiosyncrasies, and bad taste. Honestly, I probably wont take that advice, I'll probably keep pulling titles out of my little black mole skein, but if I ever to do happen to read some grocery store paperback, I might not feel so bad about it.

Nothing to Do

With anything. This post, that is.

I was just reading an article in the New York Review of books about our current situation in Iraq and (more broadly and perhaps more importantly) the Iraqis' situation in Iraq. "Is this 'Victory'" strives to deliver an easily digestible explanation and assessment of the theopolitical and military situation in Iraq. The situation, as it turns out, is a hopeless mess. The current "surge" is dependent on American allies that happen to be Iraqi enemies, the oracle has foreseen the birth of a new era tyranny.

This reminds me of a night when my parents left the house. They left the house together then, fairly often, come to think of it. In any case, they had left the house and my sister, brother, and I were left with a sitter. Bobby had gone to bed hours earlier (I imagine he was actually still wide awake laying in his bed, eyes fixed at the ceiling, his brain reeling with plans for world domination). My sister and I had been tucked in some time before, but, as often happened, we refused to fall asleep or even pretend to. On this particular night, we were fighting over whose limbs were on whose side of the bed.
The babysitter had heard enough of our fighting and came in to make us shut up so that we didn't wake our little brother (who, I am certain was not asleep). She told us to build a wall out of pillows. I thought it was a stupid idea and probably told her so. Then something very strange happened: Randy, the babysitter, told me that I was Iraq. I was Iraq and my sister was Iran and we were having a border dispute. She told us that we could fight it out, like we had been, but that it would lead to injuries, maybe even death. Then, she told us that she was the UN, that she had come to negotiate a peace treaty. I apparently found this argument compelling (I remember today, even though I am almost certain that at six years of age I had no idea what Iraq or even the UN were). I think we decided to stop talking and fall asleep, in order to stave off the fight until the next night.
This may have been my first lesson in diplomacy. I wonder what stories John McCain's babysitter told him to make him fall asleep at night. I wonder if Obama ever shared a bed or settled a domestic border dispute. I wonder about the little lessons we all learned before we were old enough to understand. I wonder how many of them have simply become us and how many of them were forgotten too long ago to ever be remembered.

NEW MAPS

Or rather format...in fact I am getting tired of all of this map talk. It's pretty fucking cheesy, don't ya think?

I have peeps in the header for christsake.

Okay, so I decided last night that I want to be a magazine writer. Yeah, I feel kind of like six year-old me has crept up again and one day I want to be a ballerina, the next a fire truck.*

So the new plan for the blog is as follows:

I will live my life. I will eat foods, watch television, listen to music, read books, go to bars, etc.

I will review as many of these items/experiences as possible. This will mean that I am going to have to get some form of internet in my apartment (which, I will of course, review).

So, be prepared to find out what I am doing, whether it was a waste of time or not, and hopefully be entertained by my burgeoning journalistic voice.

The fun begins immediately.

*Actually I don't think I was ever this type of kid. In fact, I am fairly certain that six year old me had a much better idea of who she was and what she wanted to do, which was, for the record to write and illustrate children's books. I wanted a Caldecott Prize and a Newbery (yes I was pretentious and ambitious even before I could ride a bicycle).