Forgetting

For my job, I study Paul Strand. It's such a good job that sometimes I forget it's really mine and start to envy myself. I spend most of every day reading about him, reading things by him, examining his photographs, planning an exhibition about him that I hope you will see, and plotting the essays I will write about him that I hope you will read. For as long as I have studied the history of photography, he has been one of my all-time favorite artists. The more I learn about him, the more complex a figure he becomes and the more I want to say about his work. If I wasn't a little squirrely about safeguarding these ideas until they are published on paper, I would have a whole blog about Paul Strand. My mind is afire with ideas. It's crazy.

The job is pretty glamorous, but there are moments that are everything but. People always imagine me kicked back in a chair reading books about Strand and really living the life of the mind - at least when I'm not casually sifting through boxes of his photographs, doing nothing but pontificating on my own expanding knowledge of his practice. Well, that happens sometimes. But more often I'm scrolling through an unindexed journal on microfilm (Here's lookin' at you, Daily Worker!!) trying to find an article that may or may not even exist. Or, I'm cataloguing, which entails the meticulous recording of everything about a photograph from the type of photo paper I believe it's printed on to its dimensions down to the millimeter. That is what I was doing today.

At 10a.m. I spread eight photographs of Alfred Stieglitz out on the counter. All were taken by Paul Strand in the 1920s.

One looked like this:

Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz. ca. 1920 (negative and print). Coll. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Another like so:

Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz. ca. 1920 (negative and print). Coll. Philadelphia Museum of Art.


The essay I am presently writing on Paul Strand is about portraiture. Neither of these photographs are among the ones I consider most important, the ones around which my essay will be structured. But I would love to say that as I gazed at these photographs today, I thought about portraiture at least a little.

However, this is not what happened. Instead, I was scrutinizing the color and length of Stieglitz's ear hair tufts to figure out whether the portraits sitting in front of me were made on or around the same day or not.

You see, Stieglitz looked much the same in all of these pictures. His hair was a hot mess in the same precise way. It was thin and grey in the same places. His mustache looked equally dustbroom-like in each. They were printed on the same stock of photographic paper. In a few in which his shirt was visible, it appeared similarly rumpled.

But the problem is that artists are shit record-keepers, and art historians are often just as culpable. The pile of photographs sitting in front of me were variably dated: 1919, 1920, 1920s, ca. 1920, 1925, 1928, 1929. And I had to somehow figure out which of these many dates was the right one. See? See how boring this can be? I'm boring myself rehearsing all of this for you.

So it was off to the races - to the three binders in which I keep thumbnail images of all the Strand photographs in all the other museums, and to my Strand timeline I pieced together after reading his letters. I wrote some cordial e-mails to other photo nerds and got a few responses. I ran up to the library, consulted some books, and came downstairs again. I looked at the ear hair some more. I discovered that one of the pictures was published in Vanity Fair in 1924 and so I crossed off 1925, 1928, and 1929. I read about the photo paper and when it was manufactured and crossed off 1919. Eventually I concluded that 1920 was best but kept the "circa" in there because I couldn't really substantiate this claim with full certainty. Then the real work began.

Every time I change anything in our database, I have to explain myself. I can't just dump "ca. 1920" in there in place of "1928" and move on. I have to write a long note outlining my logic, then sign and date it. That way, scholars of the future times know why I made changes and have a reason to agree or disagree with what I've done. It's an ongoing process, one that involves a lot of justifications.

So there I was, typing over and over again why I thought what, including all the bits about Stieglitz's ear hair. After each such entry, I have to initial and date it. AB07/18/12. AB07/18/12. AB07/18/12. So to avoid looking at the ear hair for a moment, I got lost in those numbers. And the following thought gently elbowed its way to the forefront of my brain and whispered: I think that was my father's birthday, but I'm not sure.

At first it didn't seem true, that I could have forgotten. I stared at the numbers some more. The "18" looked right, but maybe the month was wrong. No, no, I was thinking of a friend's birthday in October. July was right. Or was it June? Was it in summer at all? Could I remember any birthday parties? Were they indoors or outside? Everything was so hazy. My brain ached from trying too hard and I felt clumsy and slow.


I closed the Paul Strand timeline and switched over to the internet. I am a scholar and my research skills would see me through this. I opened up the library server's ancestry dot com subscription and typed his name and place of birth. I clicked "find" and got a smattering of amazingly irrelevant hits. It was absurd, really, how the top search results shared neither his first or last name. I counted backwards on my fingers from 1999 when he was 58 years old. I entered the year of birth and tried again. Same results. I closed the ancestry site and tried google. I typed his name with "obituary" and got a bunch of other people who died. I tried adding the state in which his obituary would have been printed. Nothing. I then tried adding the day he died, a date that is easy to remember because it was my 21st birthday. Again, nothing. I closed the web browser as I anxiously watched my co-worker next to me, wondering how long it would take her to ask "um, so why are you over there googling your dead father?" I turned back to Strand.

Ask me anything about Strand and I can tell you. He was 5' 6 1/2", and his favorite author was D.H. Lawrence and he preferred blueberry pie to all others. At age 5 his last name was changed from Stransky to Strand, and everyone calls him Paul but he was born Nathaniel Paul. He once had a cat named Jeffrey and his friends Beaumont and Nancy Newhall had cats named Euripides and Chiquita. In the 1920s he made films to make a living, and two of them were burlesques. His F.B.I. file is 170 pages long. He loved Aunt Jemima pancake mix but hated brie cheese, he was a slow reader, he made bad puns that he thought up long and hard in advance of sharing them with his friends, he had kidney stones twice, he liked Elvis Presley and classical music, he smoked cigarettes his whole life, he loved playing pool. He made very few nudes but a lot of pictures of hands. I have held his pocket watch and his cameras and most of his photographs. I have watched all his films. I know his birthday, and his wife's birthday. Also his second wife's birthday. And the third's.

I walked around the rest of the day juggling numbers, mentally arranging dates in my mind to get the right combination to click. I talked to one co-worker about photography but was mostly occupied with days and months. I listened to another colleague talk about hitting a goose while rowing, which was entertaining but I was still picturing calendar pages, month after month, wondering whether July 18 was really it or not. I thought backwards from his last birthday to the first one I could possibly remember, but came up with nothing. Not one cake, one outing, one present, one card, one drawing I'd made, one ticket stub, it was all a blank.

There are a lot of things I don't know about Paul Strand. Most of these questions are the "why" and "how" ones. I'm glad I don't know these things because if I did I would be poised to write the most boring essay ever. How do Strand's politics matter? Why did he decide to present his work as collaborative book projects beginning in the 1940s? How did his polemical films shape American documentary practice? What was his theory of portrait-making? I have hundreds of questions like this, percolating, spilling out onto pages and pages. Arriving at answers to these is always an amalgam of guesswork and poetics and history and it's the best part of my job.

When my father died it was because a cancerous tumor grew in his brain until it could go no further. During the nine months he was sick the tumor expanded, contracted, expanded again. It pushed his brain up against his skull and devoured it bit by bit until it stopped working. During these periods of growth and retreat my father oscillated between lucid and incoherent. Sometimes he could hold up his end of the conversation, but the subject of these talks were often limited to a certain period of time because he would forget parts of his life. Other times he just talked gibberish. When the tumor wrested away parts of his brain that controlled his emotions, he would become enraged and yell and yell like a child but he was too weak from all the drugs to do much else about it.

Only in the last days did I realize that everything he would ever know about my life would need to be decided now. I watched his morphine drip and told him about how in two months I was going to England and how it would be my first trip to Europe. I told him I would like it in Europe and that maybe someday I would even live there. I told him about how even though I'd dropped out of college a few years back, that I would go back and finish at some point and do something important with my life. I told him about how much I hated my retail job. I pieced together a picture of what I wanted for my life and laid it out there like it was fact. He didn't say a word, but by this point he had lost the ability to speak and maybe also to hear.

He had a mustache off and on but never a beard. He had a tooth pulled in Paris in 1952. He learned how to make enchiladas with Georgia O'Keeffe in Texas in 1918. He was right-handed. Between 1932 and 1948 he wrote letters with a green fountain pen. He had a lisp and a New York accent and used the word "swell" a lot. He grew up on W. 83rd. Street. He never stopped working. He smiled gently.

The facts about Paul Strand stack up in neat rows in my brain. They stand at the ready for when I want to write, for when I give a talk and take questions from the audience, for when I need something to think about that isn't AB07/18/12. They supplant other thoughts that slowly crumble into something unrecognizable and unknowable without my ever having noticed them fall into ruin. And without my permission to do so.

Happy birthday.

Phreaky Phriday

In honor of Philadelphia, I am going to start spelling every "f" word with a "ph." No wait, just kidding. I won't do that to you.

Everything today has felt slightly off-axis.

*

On Wednesday I rearranged everything in my apartment, which in a 550 sq. ft. space involved a lot of three-point-turns and otherwise unnecessary shuffling to get things reoriented. Yesterday I was barely home, so today marks the first full day I have spent in what feels like an astonishingly different setup. I forced (er, phorced) myself to part with a desk I'd held onto for twelve years because I finally owned up to the fact that it is too large for my current place. The bed is where the couch was and vice versa, the cat is in full panic "things are different and a mess so we must be moving" mode, and I can't find a thing.

*

This morning I got a haircut, which makes looking in the mirror a little funhouse, as well. And on the way back from the hair appointment I had the following conversation with the woman who works at the coffeeshop next door:
B: Nice haircut
A: Thanks! I just got it.
B: Next door?
A: Yep!
B: It looks really good. [pause] Is that your natural color?
A: Yes.
Let me be clear: my hair color is unchanged. I have not dyed my hair since 2006. There is a smattering of grey in there, too, but thankfully it always seems to hide under other hair that is still brown. For now, at least.
But what was horrifying about this was not the dye mistake, but the realization that I am at the precipice where in a year or two or three being asked if my hair is its natural color mutates from being an innocent, curious question to being an inappropriate one. And I felt really old in a way that startled me.

*

Since the 4th of July or perhaps even before the 4th, I have been home alone. There are only two other tenants in the building and both are very quiet. The only reason I know if they're home at all is that from the stairwell I can sometimes hear my next door neighbor's TV and my downstairs neighbor's dogs bark when anyone opens the front door to the house. At first it was kind of cool but alone and quiet always feels slightly wrong in a city. When I went down into the basement to retrieve my laundry and saw a giant water bug scurry across the floor, I screamed like a girl. Then a few minutes ago when I was trying to make the kitchen somewhat presentable, I found myself with my back turned to the rest of the apartment, washing dishes to nothing but the sound of running water. I tried humming but that really ratcheted up the crazy. There I was, methodically scrubbing the inner workings of my French press and laying them out in a grid to dry. Next on to the carving knives. I felt like I'd accidentally stepped into the opening scene of a gruesome horror film.

*

All of everything giving me the heeby-jeebies is really just a redirect for my anxiety about traveling tomorrow. I love being in other places but I dread the getting there part and the prep time that goes into it. It becomes a perpetual "did I leave the stove on?" feeling that cannot be tamed by even the most precise to-do list. An epic series of what ifs parades around in my head starting a day or so before I depart somewhat against my will. What if my cat sitter loses my house keys? What if I read my ticket wrong and I leave from another terminal? What if I don't remember to pack something really important like shoes or a toothbrush or my passport? What if my alarm doesn't go off tomorrow? etc etc etc. This particular trip is the perfect storm of triggers for this behavior cycle: international trip (1) to a non-English-speaking country for which I know enough of the native language to try but not enough to feel totally comfortable (2) on a plane (3) for work (4).

I would like to say that most of this problem is having to make arrangements for my very old and very sick cat, combined with my seemingly uncontrollable trending towards the absentminded professor end of the organizational spectrum. But I was always a wreck about travel - even back when the cat was healthy and I had so many housemates that finding a cat sitter was a non-issue - and even back when I had many fewer obligations and fewer things to keep track of. Unsurprisingly I am a bad flyer (not like "STOP THE PLANE!! LET ME OUT!!" right before takeoff but definitely some white knuckles gripping the armrest during ascent and descent and any remotely significant turbulence). There were a few terrible years about a decade ago where I refused to go anywhere because I didn't want to deal with it. It has gotten much easier since then but I still feel like I lose a day or two to double-checking what I'm packing, cutting up pills for the cat, making phone calls, and taking antacids.

At the heart of it all: I am such a homebody. I like to sleep in my own house in my own bed and wake up in my own city. Travel requires me to put this nesting instinct on hold. I always enjoy these times away from home so much, and in the last two years I have been fortunate to see many places new to me because of my job. Every time I go somewhere I marvel at the unfamiliar sights, sounds, and smells and exclaim "I could totally live here!" And I could. But I just couldn't easily leave it.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia, you should have been my hometown.

It was a narrow miss. From what I understand, although I have (unintentionally) had very little contact with my extended family, they are all from here. At the end of the 19th century my great great great grandparents climbed off a boat from the Ukraine and headed here. Their daughter, my great great aunt, lived much of her long life just a few blocks from where I live now. I know much less about the rest of the lot but the relatives on both sides of my family as far back as my great grandparents lived in Philadelphia or within a fifty mile radius of it. I have never met most of these people but living here now makes me long to.

I have only lived here two years, much less time than I have spent in half a dozen other cities and towns. But within months of landing here I felt entitled to the rights of permanent residency - eagerly learning the city's history, defending it against all incoming jabs, extolling its virtues to anyone who would listen with a feverish, preacher-like urgency. I made fun of the tourists clutching their bags close as they waited in line for crappy whiz cheesesteaks at stupid Pat's. I stomped around in the freezing winter in the 2 Street Mummer's Day afterparty. I went to some baseball games and cheered for the Phillies. I ate my weight in water ice. Just now I looked into how to become my Block Captain, though I gotta tell you it is the possibility of getting the hydrant key that prompted this google search. Philly summer is truly a solid three months of swamp.

The first 14 years of my life I called Cape Cod my home. It was only after I left that I realized how wrong a fit that was. I don't know how to analogize this to anything but it was truly revelatory. Something clicked when I saw how much more comfortable I felt in a gritty city - away from the phoniness of a tourist haven and the (generally) embittered and surprisingly conservative cranky people who inhabited it year round. (please note: I've enjoyed living in places that felt pretty phony (Princeton NJ) and others that were very conservative (Georgia) - but as far as I'm concerned, the combination of the two is a lethal one) This profound uncomfortableness in my hometown was a feeling so overpowering that I never looked back. I have immediate family there but no roots of my own. I go back to visit sometimes but I've never had a pang of nostalgia for anything there.

When people ask me where I'm from I always say "Boston." I lived there for almost a decade - all of my 20s. It's not a matter of preferring to say that I'm from a city than from the 'burbs, but rather that Boston is where I think I actually grew up. It is where I had my highest highs and lowest lows; it's where I figured out what I did (and didn't) want to do with my life, it's where I met most of my closest friends, it's where I learned to love art. I know that city in a way that only someone who calls it home can - not just certain neighborhoods but all of them. I've amassed nearly every trade secret it could offer up - best hidden restaurants, cheapest watering holes, smartest bar trivia, prettiest stretch of the waterfront, coolest junk shops, and where to buy a typewriter. The family with whom I am close and the friends I consider my family all live there, or else have moved but still consider it home. Every time I go there to visit friends I am completely overwhelmed by the desire to pack up my things and move back. It's hard to face the fact that in my line of work this probably won't ever happen.

Boston will always be home, but Philadelphia will always be the kindred city that should have been home. When I was small my great great aunt Kathryn - the one who lived down the street from my current apartment - wrote me long letters about her love of Philadelphia. In her letters I learned everything I know about my family. I learned about my cousin who writes for the Washington Post (probably this guy) and another cousin who reports for the BBC. My great great aunt stayed in Philadelphia when others fled. She sent me picture postcards from the 1930s and 1940s of Phila landmarks and outlined their histories on the backs of the cards. She told me about her world travels and about why her family left the Ukraine. Unlike my immediate family, Kathryn was concerned with all the things I have come to value highest and to study - art history (she wrote incessantly about the Philadelphia Museum of Art), history, travel, languages, preservation, writing, reading. I may have only met her twice or three times in my life but I wrote and wrote and wrote to her. And when I walk through Philadelphia, and happen upon her old apartment building, or a building she mentioned in a postcard, or an antique shop bearing her last name (perhaps owned by another relative I've never met?), my sense that Philadelphia should have been my city swells until it bursts. When my fellowship is done this time next year I will not want to leave. I will try to get a job here but will end up elsewhere. I will come back to visit and marvel at the fact that I managed to leave. And I will open the hydrants with the Block Captain key I will keep.

Mug World

Mug World is what my friend A.L. and I call coffee shops that suck. It's a hybrid of our two least favorite coffee shops' names. People of Princeton and Philadelphia, you know what I'm talking about. And people of Boston, yes, this should really be called 1369 Central Square Mug World but that was a bit unwieldy. The sentiment is there nonetheless.

However, that is not what this post is about. This post is about the terrifying realization that I have an accidental collection of novelty mugs.

It seriously really wasn't on purpose. Secretly as a Real Adult I like my dishes and my glassware to match. Please don't tell anyone. But the mug situation is bad. It borders on crazy-lady bad, because I think I might be too old for it to still be perceived as ironic. And yet, what do I do about it? That's right. I tell the whole fucking internet about it. Great job. Brava.

In order of acquisition:

1. Feminism mug (1998)

Yes, I drank out of mugs before 1998! But this is the oldest one that none of my idiot roommates broke or lost over the years. No just kidding, you guys. I love you all. Anyway, at one point roommate and dear friend A.T.M. and I had joint custody of this mug. Her awesome mom M.M. gave it to our household and eventually it ended up with me. Honestly, I can't ever remember exactly what the quotation is yammering on about or who even said it. Ask me to tell you what words are on this mug and the only one I can come up with is "Feminism." I'm such a bad feminist! Seriously, though, I don't even look at the text anymore. I just say "Today my coffee is a feminist."

2. DORCHESTAH YAAHHHHHD SALE (1999)

I got these three mugs - plus more than a dozen others - when I lived in Dorchester. Dorchester - or Dottie, as it's fondly and mysteriously called - is a really fascinating part of Boston. I'll spare you its long history because really I just want to get to the heart of the matter, Mr. Executive up there. But it's enough to say that the neighborhood we moved into was largely white, Italian-American and Irish-American working class. I hate making statements like that but shit was a little bit The Departed up in there. In fact, much of that film was filmed in my neighborhood.

We moved there in 1998 in the thick of a period of real estate market over-saturation. There were only something like fifty vacancies in the entire city when we were apartment-hunting; half of these were overpriced fancy places we couldn't afford, the other half were overpriced slummy places we could. We aggressively sought out the latter and took the first one we found where we didn't hear gunfire during the real estate tour.

I have a whole other blog post planned about this apartment and I'm getting really distracted right now and want to tell you all about the smoke-stained wood paneling instead of the mugs. Focus, A.B., focus!

During our years there, a number of the local residents grew curious about our household. These were the many well-nested neighorhooders; guys who I remember as all named Jimmy and Joey and Johnny and Othah Jimmy. They were a little hardscrabble in a good way. Often they came by wearing Red Sox sweatpants and/or Red Sox t-shirts, and always seemed to have some sort of money-making scheme cooking. In and out of trouble types who had their licenses revoked in 1985 for a DUI or something but probably no felonies (however I'd bet they owed back taxes). Friends with all the cops despite breaking a number of rules along the way. In and out of handyman jobs. The kind of fellows I'd almost trust to do home repairs, so long as they didn't involve wiring. Maybe I'd also exclude plumbing.  OK, maybe I wouldn't want them fixing stuff in my house. They were good guys, though. They are probably all still living there.

They had a lot of questions for us, and were delightfully unashamed to ask all of them. We were a big flophouse with punks and other college-age hooligans coming in and out all the time. We didn't have a television (at least one that worked), and dressed oddly and sometimes had pink hair. When they asked us if we went to college, some of us said yes and the others no. It was unclear how we all knew each other and who was a resident and who else was a long-term guest. It was painfully clear that the Dorchester Guys often had heated debates about this. I mean, they spent all day on most days sitting on the stoop across the street from our house. If I were them, I'd have conjured up a bunch of narratives, too.

I remember one day my roommate H.W. and I strolled by and waved to Joey. Five minutes later he was ringing our doorbell (which he did a lot). I answered the door and he said to me in his thick Boston accent: So, aaaaah, me and Jimmy, we wuhre wohnderin: aaaaaahhhre you guhrls bisexual? I mean, who the hell rings their neighbors' doorbell and asks that?? These guys were amazing.

OK, OK: the mugs!! It was a spring day. A Saturday. REALLY EARLY IN THE MORNING. Again, the doorbell:

Joey: Oh heeey, aaaaah, aaaaahhhrree you guuhrls awake?
Me: Not really. What's going on?
Joey: Well, me and Jimmy, wwwweeeeeh're havin' a yaaaaaahhhrd sale today, and we thought you guuuhrls would like to come by and, aaah, check out ouuuuhr waaaaahhhrrres?
Me: Um, ok. A little later? We're still sleeping over here.
Joey: Yah, ok. I heeeeaah yaaaah. But we got some real good stuff, though. Some things I think you guuuuuhrls aaaaaahhhre really gonna like. And it's gonna go fast!
Me: Ok. Later Joey. We'll come by later.

An hour goes by. Then, the doorbell.

Jimmy: So, aaaaah, I'm not sure if Joey told you guuuuhrls, but we're having a yaaaaahrd sale today.
Me: Yeah, you know? Joey stopped by already to share the good news.
Jimmy: Oh, yah? Really? He didn't tell me.
Me: Really!
Jimmy: So aaaahre you guhrls gonna come by oohr whaaaaaaat? Wicked good waaaaaahres down theeeeehre. You need things foooohr your kitchen? We got 'em. Foooohr your living ruuuum? We got 'em. For your ....
Me: We'll be down in five minutes.

So off we went, probably in our pajamas, to find a three-legged card table propped up on cinder blocks with a real potpourri of coffee mugs. Nothing but coffee mugs. And we pooled a bunch of money and bought the lot of them. In part this is because we just wanted to go back to sleep. But I'm certain it was also because we liked these guys so much, crazy personal questions and early morning doorbell ringing and all.

At one point we had something close to two dozen of these. I forget what a lot of them looked like but I know there were at least three New England Patriots cups and a #1 Golfer. Pictured above are KAHULA, Mr. Executive (my favorite), and the rainbow mug that always makes me picture the Dottie guys in their Red Sox Nation garb sipping Sanka out of what could honestly be the gayest mug ever. We lost a lot of the Dorchester Guys mugs in a house fire in 2004. And by that I mean to say that we left a lot of them in that apartment. The kitchen was just about the only room untouched by flames but the silver lining of tragedy was the opportunity to leave behind a bunch of these mugs. The pantry had gotten really out of control.

3. Vikings! (2000)

 

This one was my entirely my fault, and there isn't a really great story here. I bought this when I was in Iceland because it is a giant ass, heavy, ridiculous beast of a mug that holds about seven gallons of coffee. I know I've provided absolutely nothing for scale in these pictures, but trust me this thing would hold about three Mr. Executives' worth of joe. This was a big fucking deal at a period of my life in which I was trying to hold down two or three jobs and keep a social calendar as if I had no jobs. I was drinking an awful lot of coffee. Thor and Friends ensured that I never had to go back for a refill.

4. Scary Sports Mug (2001)

Awesome roommate D.M.B.B. gave me this after accidentally smashing one of the Dorchestah Guys mugs. I'm gonna guess that it was #1 Golfer, given the theme of this hideous and terrifying thing that for some reason I keep making a part of my morning routine. At first I thought it might have been the rooster mug that had a plume as one handle and a head as the other, but then I remembered the poster-sized apology note other roommate R.F.B.G. III left me that reads: SORRY I BROKE YOUR COCK. So it must have been #1 Golfer. In any case, I still have this grotesque nightmare-inducing coffee vessel. I like to foist this one off on houseguests who overstay their welcome.

5. Rainbows and Hearts (ca. 2004?)

At some point, people otherwise known as my friends began to think that I had all these damn mugs on purpose. And they began to gift them to me! The nerve! This chipper day filled with rainbows brought to you by my great friend R.G. The provenance would look something like this: Hallmark Holidays Drawing Board > China > Hallmark Holidays Store > God-Fearing Christian > Other God-Fearing Christian as a Holiday Gift > Goodwill > R.G. > Me. It may be scarier than that perpetually grinning, spider veined, baseball face up there. And that's really saying something.

6. Plain white teacup (2006)

This is neither novelty nor a mug. I just saw it while digging through my cabinet and am telling you a story about it.

When my friend J.B. got married, there was a table overflowing with teacups and saucers. At some point we were each instructed to take one, plus a postage-paid envelope, plus an instruction sheet. The gist of it is that when the teacup breaks - as many of them invariably do - we are to mail the pieces to J.B. to bury in his yard. And we are to write a story about how the teacup broke.

J.B. is clever and an exceptionally brilliant writer, so none of this came as a big surprise, as unusual an idea as it may be. I took one of the plainest cup and saucer sets (saucer not pictured - too high up in the cabinet to get down today for the photo shoot). I figured that a plain cup would be more easily broken, more carelessly treated by a friend or a housemate. My friend and I drove many miles to this wedding in a pickup truck and honestly I wasn't even sure it would make it home in one piece.

It's now lived in four houses with six or seven different roommates. I never tell anyone to be careful with it or wrap it as one would a delicate heirloom when packing up the kitchen. And yet it is still in one piece. I'm not impatient for it to break - its time will come. But I have a vision of myself as a frail old lady poised to drop it from a second-story balcony, desperately ready to tell its long story.

7. Alma Mater Tomaters (2006 (R) and 2007 (L)

The dumb "welcome to the rest of your life as a doctoral student" giveaway mug from when I started grad school in 2007 and the soup vat style UMass mug I got with a surcharge and my B.A. the year before. Note that despite being the size of a kiddie pool, the UMass mug can't even contain the name of the state on one side. MASSACHUSETTS. That's a long ass word.

8. Darlene (2011)

I shouldn't have, but I stole this from some poor bastard at a White Elephant Christmas Party in December. Mug acquisition had come to a grinding halt in Princeton and I was comfortable with this. I bought some matching water glasses and sets of wine glasses and tumblers. I acquired a food processor and I really thought this closed the door on juvenile kitchenware. I was clean, I thought, and then I really fell off the wagon with this one. My mind said no but my heart said yes. 

I harbored secret fantasies that someone would put me out of my misery and steal this back from me at the party. I think I had #11 and there were 25 attendees. So the chances were good. There were two (!) inflatable turkeys and a grandma floral wrought iron and ceramic table centerpiece floating about and so I felt certain someone would try to swap out some of that junk for Darlene. This mug falls into the "so bad it's good" category that often attracts a cult following. Many people eyed it but nobody went for it. In a fitting turn of events, the people who thought hardest about taking this mug instead went for the gift I'd brought. Go figure.

This might be the ugliest thing I've ever consented to drink out of. It might be the ugliest thing I've ever had in my house. The "trompe l'oeil" beer barrel base is really that shade of puke green, and the naked lady handle actually is that neon lime color. Two hideous greens that look even more hideous together. And yes, when you pick up the mug your thumb is nestled right between her highbeams. I can't believe I just said that in a public forum.

Carved into the ceramic on its base is the name DARLENE. This is hands down the best part. Is this the title or the artist? I have no idea. But I mean ... Darlene? Seriously?! DARLENE? It's just too good.

9. Fucking Giraffe Mug (2012)

I have wanted this mug since I first saw it in 2004. It belongs to my pal B.F., who was my office neighbor when I worked at UMass and the source of about a thousand and counting amazing stories of times past and present. His office is borderline Hoarders, at least in terms of ratio of stuff to square footage. Need a Burger King Whopper playset from 1980? B.F's got it. Need retired office supplies? B.F. has those, too. How about a child's drawing left behind by her mother, a professor who quit the university a decade ago? That's there, too. And don't get my started about the box of pantyhose.

I love this stuff because there is always a memory attached to it, and in turn a story attached to that memory. Before the fire and before I started moving around lots for school and work, I had a lot of things like that, too. Now my life is more frequently uprooted and my belongings streamlined. Sometimes I wish I'd been able to hold on to more stuff in the way that B.F. has.

The giraffe mug came by way of another professor who left it behind in the 1980s. B.F. drank his coffee out of it just about every day at work. I'd coveted it for a long time. It's great how it looks so sweet from afar but then when you get up close the mug narrative takes a very abrupt turn south. There is also something so late 70s about its style of line drawing and the general palette of the giraffe hide. It's like a children's story from my youth gone awry. It's the giraffe mug that inspired this blog post.

I was back in Boston last month and visited B.F. for the afternoon. I asked him if I could have the mug, certain that the answer would be no. Instead it was an affirmative, and Fucking Giraffes flew back home with me, gently wrapped in a winter scarf and stowed in my carry-on bag. But before that I had a three-hour delay at Logan Airport, and I gleefully sat in Barely Legal Seafoods drinking root beer out of Fucking Giraffes and eating overpriced clam chowdah.

The unofficial agreement B.F. and I made is that I would return the giraffes if he missed them too much. Or else send "that green ba-zooms mug" in its place. I'm so happy to do either. But in the meantime, those mugs look great together. All of them.

A for effort, F for followthrough

OMFG dudes, I totally haven't blogged in forevers.

Before I reach the dreaded 90 days of blog inactivity, I promise a hefty post. I've already got something in mind. I just haven't had time to actually write it, what with my hectic Words with Friends and sleep schedule. I mean, my full-time job and my dissertation schedule.

In the meantime, please accept my humble apologies and also these two pictures of a shitfaced Mummer with a 2 Street tattoo.

xo