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Dear long-neglected blog, once again we meet, and this time with such big news: in six days, I close on a house.

It seems inconceivable to me that this is so, for it's something I've wanted for a long time, and feels so, well, adult. And while adulthood is a concession I know I've long ago made, it honestly never seemed possible that I could own something, never mind a house I already love so much. It makes me nervous, and excited, and anxious to share this news with all of you.

And after years of landlords - some good, some hideously awful - I am bristling with excitement about not having to ask anyone's permission to do anything, living with walls that are not painted a glossy, industrial white, and finally having a space big enough to properly entertain and cook. Most of all, I relish the day when my desk is in a different room than my bed. There are a lot of sweat and tears and repair and so forth between now and then, but room by room it will get there, and I will complain about it sometimes but love it nonetheless.

Last week I wrote my last rent check, possibly ever. I started thinking about a blog post idea I'd had a long time ago but never followed through on: writing an entry about every apartment I'd ever lived in. Not counting dorm rooms and sublets I tallied nine apartments across four cities over the course of the last seventeen years. It's a real stretch to recall much about the earlier ones, but I have a few pictures in front of me and that helps a bit. My scanner cables are nowhere to be found, but I rephotographed these pictures and will include them here.

It will probably take me seventeen more years to work my way through nine blog posts, but here we go: my first apartment.

The word decision is so deliberate, and so sure of itself. So, too, is the verb - decide - it suggests that the decision-maker has sat down and really weighed all the options and arrived at the most sensible one. It leaves room for error - one can make a bad decision - but it doesn't account for the complete surrender of free will that, looking back, accompanied my late adolescence and early adulthood. At the time, I might have described this as "going with the flow" or "winging it"; I might have thought of everything as an adventure that should be experienced in the most visceral, immediate way. But the choices that led to my first apartment were simply elections to not do something else - I didn't want to be in college anymore, so I dropped out, and then I didn't want to be a college dropout living with my parents, so I hopped a train to Georgia to move in with a fellow dropout. Both these decisions were made with a concentrated determination and stubbornness, but underneath all of this bravado I was deeply ambivalent about all of it.

On New Years Day 1997 I boarded a midnight train to Georgia, not because of my romanticization of train rides, or for the obvious hilarity of so doing, but because it was the cheapest way to get there. A woman who eventually got off in Columbus, Georgia walked the aisles offering everyone slices of pecan pie. I dozed for a short bit, and woke to the sun rising and marveled at the color of the soil - a deep, red clay unlike anything in the north. I emerged, groggy, in Atlanta, and though it was January it was so hot, and while I stood mesmerized by the baggage carousel I shed layer after layer of winter clothes which I rolled into a gratifyingly large, warm ball, stuffed in the trunk of roommate M's car, and my life in the South began.

We started the day with breakfast at The Flying Biscuit, and I fell in love with grits. On our way home, there were wide streets and lanes that change direction at rush hour and big porches and complete strangers who say hi to you even though they don't know you and the gas station that nobody patronized because it sold Pepsi and a women's college that looked like my high school and my first foray into a Target to buy a dresser that I later had trouble assembling.

The apartment was in a basement of a house that M heard about through a friend of a friend. The owners, who lived upstairs, had recently bought the house and had big plans for a backyard pool and apartment upgrades and all that. They let M choose paint colors for the walls and the living room / kitchen floor (those rooms had cement floors), and M selected an earthy palette: terra cotta beige floors and light green and blue walls, and I liked all of it.

Though underground, some of the apartment got great light, particularly the living room and kitchen, which had this great glass ceiling with unpainted wood beams and vines creeping up the exterior that made me feel like I was in some sort of remote cabin or summer house. I had spent so much time in colonial New England homes that I was taken back by its open floor plan. Likewise, the second bathroom - though windowless - seemed so grotesquely huge to me, with a jacuzzi tub and a shower so big you could almost lie down in it and a rolling counter that could have fit four sinks with those fancy lights above that, at the time, felt lavish and made us feel like movie stars. Throughout, there were lots of built-in shelves and cabinets that would have been really useful had I brought more than a suitcase worth of stuff with me.

M had been busy scraping together furnishings, and the place felt warm and cozy, if mismatched, when I arrived. The women's college had recently disposed of a bunch of furniture, and M dumpstered a lot of it - wooden, seventies dorm "common room" chairs with naugahyde forest green and rust orange cushions, a matching coffee table, and two bar stools for the kitchen counter. This may also be where she got a cot for my bedroom - I can't remember. The couch was a big investment by our minimum-wage-earning standards: a hulking orange velour boat of a thing tinged with irony and purchased from a hip second-hand furniture place in Five Points. It was on sale, but still a stretch, and only when it arrived did M notice that it had a giant black cross burned into its back behind the cushions. It was the centrepiece, and we spent a lot of time sitting on it, drinking beer someone else bought for us and talking about nothing.

My friend R, who I knew from high school, was in town visiting her family, and she came over that evening while M was at work. We toured the apartment, and then curled up together in my creaky cot, quietly having one of those profoundly deep, meaningful conversations that one does as a teenager on the precipice of adulthood. Right before she left it was pouring rain, and we just stood by her car for a long time, completely soaked through, still talking. I begged her to come over again the next day, and when she couldn't, I lay alone in my creaky cot and cried.

It was winter break at the women's college, and one of M's friends (V) who went there couldn't go home for the break, but was not allowed to stay in the dorm, either. So for three weeks she stayed in our living room, inexplicably in a giant tent we'd pitched for her (presumably, this was fun?!). She had a part-time job at Starbucks, so we got a lot of free coffee and sugary treats, which was especially helpful because I hadn't gotten a paycheck yet.

After V left, M and I started spending a lot of time in the tent, first watching movies, and then sleeping in there, and then sleeping in M's bed. We were never a good match, but we pretended this wasn't so, at least for a while. My bedroom - which was the darkest and least accommodating, anyway - was largely unused, except for when M was at work and I would hook my computer up to the internet (think back to days of Earthlink and dial-up web service and Geosites and AltaVista and AOL chat and Hotmail) and write long, heartfelt letters to friends up north while listening to mixtapes they'd made me on a tiny, salvaged boom box.

Our stove never worked. The landlords kept promising to send someone to repair it, but this never happened. Looking back as someone who now knows a lot about buying a home, I don't think these people quite knew what they were getting themselves into. We never had a lease and they were always asking us to use fewer utilities, even though they'd concocted a "utilities included" living arrangement in the first place. At some point in April, they discovered some huge structural problem with the house, and were in complete distress. It involved redoing a large part of the foundation, which of course would not be possible with tenants in the basement. At this point they gave us thirty days to move out, and that summer M and I parted ways.

We barely knew how to cook anything as it was, but without a stove we were really in trouble. Food that could be prepared in an oven or microwave included a lot of veggie burgers, which for my first two weeks there were slowly fed to M piece by piece with a fork because she'd just gotten her tongue pierced. Following suit, on my birthday I got my navel pierced, and many nights I woke myself crying out in pain because I'd rolled over onto my stomach in my sleep.

Some time around our third month there, M and I protested the broken stove for the nth time, and the landlord placated us by inviting us up into their house to cook some pasta (read: mac and cheese). They were minimalists - like, really minimalists - no furniture in sight. The husband was a writer, and when we emerged through the door to the basement we found him sitting on the floor of an otherwise empty living room in a sweatsuit hunched over a typewriter, pounding away on the keys. At one point he paused to spill his guts to us: they were trying to adopt a kid but couldn't because of the lack of furniture; his wife thought that having a typewriter was in conflict with their value system but he didn't want to part with it. We listened quietly, and later vowed never to cook up there again.

On my third day of work, I came home to hear some high-pitched squeaking emanating from the lower kitchen cabinets. Mice, I thought, and like a cartoon character, or like a teenager who knows nothing about killing mice except from tv, I silently crept up to the cabinets wielding a frying pan. I whipped the door open to discover that the stray cat we'd recently taken in had given birth. I scooped mother and child up and gently placed them in a comforter-lined cardboard box and put them in the warmest part of the apartment. M and I stayed up all night with them both, and first thing the next morning took mother and litter of one to the vet. The kitten was orange, which delighted me because I'd always wanted an orange tabby cat, and delighted M because she matched our decor. Once mobile, the kitten would climb up into our living room ceiling rafters, then mew to be lifted down. Five minutes later, she'd be up in the ceiling again, and I'd find myself teetering on a bar stool, cradling the tiny squirming cat in my arms as I struggled to keep my balance. As I type this, that cat snoozes next to me, now frail and docile and almost seventeen years old.

When I think about that apartment, I gloss over all the things about it that would bother me now - dark rooms, cold floors, cheap carpet, bad linoleum, mirrored closets, broken stove. I do not marvel at how I struggled so much to pay even half of the rent, which amounted to a mere $250 per month - minimum wage was so brutal and I never want to lose sight of that. But even this fades away a bit, and in its place I'm just left with a very general feeling of everything feeling possible even while nothing was certain. I had approached life in that apartment like one would approach a semester abroad, not yet realizing that my hiatus from school would drag on for almost six years and that the South would remain my home for a significant chunk of that time. I hadn't fully absorbed yet just how unbelievably hard it would be to make ends meet and not have health insurance and haggle with landlords and care for a pet and care for myself and make good decisions. Apartment #1 cradled me, slowly easing me into the chaos of adulthood. It was a false sense of security, and I know that now, but at the time it made everything feel so safe, and so right. It's how home should feel - that's what that apartment taught me. It allowed me comfort in the face of so many unknowns, and I hope to be able to recreate that feeling - even knowing its flaws and falsehoods - in my new house.

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

Floor crêpes, and other Parisian adventures

This will be a long blog post, and it will hopefully compensate for my conspicuous blog neglect.

*

I just returned from nine days in Paris - a work trip, with intermittent moments of play and discovery, and intense bouts of an abundance of companions and then none at all. It was busy and exciting, and afforded me some real space from the day-to-day here, even during the part of the trip spent with co-workers. And I would have honestly blogged about it every evening, but I had no reliable internet. So here we go - day by day - little thoughts on my surroundings. Some longer than others. Enjoy.

*

NOV 4:
A slow acclimation after a long overnight flight and an early morning power nap. I speak French decently, though slowly, and I understand most of what I hear. But it's always the little differences that accumulate to a mountain of strangeness, and that leave me fumbling a little, as one does in dreams. I've been here before so I know the drill, but there is nevertheless a lot of quick on-your-feet rekindling of old knowledge, which is hard enough on its own but while jetlagged is mind-boggling. I almost forgot that the Metro doors don't open automatically. In fact, all doors are strange - giant things, often with ancient locks and latches and bizarre knobs to turn and twist and click. Grocery store options are many and all new, and oh, the produce is weighed before one pays. Coins involve a clumsy fumbling - no intuitive sense of shape and weight. A general adjustment of tempo.

In a matter of days, this will all feel resolved. But not yet. Right now I need to accept these awkwardnesses, and focus on staying awake so as to fall in step with my new time zone. And thankfully I have eleven companions here today to help me, supplying me with coffee, macarons, walking around looking at beautiful things, a good dinner, more coffee, wine, and laughter so hard it brought tears.

NOV 5:
I am staying in a darling little apartment in the 5th arrondisement. I stayed in this same apartment in 2006 when last I was in Paris, that time for almost a month. It's Paris, so most everything unsurprisingly looks just as I left it on my street, but there are strange absences. The internet cafes are gone, largely thanks to a wireless hotspot-type system provided by the French equivalent of Comcast, which of course I can't tap into. First the internet drove a lot of shops out of business - bookstores sometimes, video rental places often. But it's funny that now one form of internet seems to be bankrupting another. Last time I spent a lot of time in two internet cafes just a block apart - one, a dusty little hovel run by two very kind Indian men. The machines in there were old, but one of them had an American keyboard, which I appreciated as I paid by the hour and the French keyboards required a lot of the "searching and pecking" typing method -- very slow. The other cafe was more of the "cyber cafe" variety - geeky, sleeker, and full of awkward, bleary-eyed French boys in their mid- to late- teens smoking cigarettes and playing World of Warcraft for hours on end. This one was cheaper, and the owner sold me a phone card nothing short of magical, as it seemingly allowed me an endless number of minutes.

The last time I was in Paris I spent much of my trip with a dear friend, with whom I am not really in touch anymore for reasons unknown - but in the way that doesn't preclude me from still calling her a good friend, if that makes any sense at all. We were both in college and on very limited budgets, and did a lot of cooking at home and ate a lot of the cheap street food (a rarity in France) on the street next to ours, rue Mouffletard. My friend learned English as a teenager, and I am always in awe of her complete and rapid mastery of it - the kind of language intuition that leaves few traces of its secondary (or in her case, tertiary) order of acquisition. But there were these endearing moments of slippage - following the course of most languages, she occasionally referred to the ground or the street as the floor. In English this was always very charming to me, and so in my head I always thought of the street crêpes we'd eat on some evenings as "floor crêpes."

I had high hopes that by the time I returned to Paris, I'd have enough disposable income to eat out all the time and avoid succumbing to the temptation of the cheap floor crêpes. What a joke! I'm as broke as ever, and so it was floor crêpes for me again. I can't say that I really minded all that much, secretly, for really what's to hate about a crêpe filled with Nutella, Gran Marnier, and bananas? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

NOV 6:
Accents are a real bitch. It seems perfectly reasonable that when someone from Italy speaks English to me I know they are Italian, and that when someone from France speaks English to me I know they are French. Yet it nevertheless blows my mind that a well thought-out sentence and a half tumble out of my mouth en français at an art museum and I am immediately singled out as an English speaker. I can't conceive of how my French sounds to a native French speaker at all, and how I wish I could, because it would probably help me out a lot to know this.

I've realized that with French in particular, it's not only the accent, but also the intonation. American English, I've come to realize, is not very animated. But French is - it borders on songlike at points. Take the following sentence:

English: I would like a crepe with Nutella and bananas.
That's more or less how one would say it - just as it's typed up there. And if it were phrased as a question - Do you have a crepe with Nutella and bananas? - you might not know it in English. It's just so monotone sometimes.

In French, the whole thing cascades. And not necessarily with the flow of emphasizing the most important element as the sentence, as one does in German. But more as if it's following some sort of secret rhythm:
Je voudrais un crêpe avec Nutella et banane sounds more like:
Je voudrais un crêpe avec Nutella et banane.
I don't know how quite to type it, this crescendo. But I think it's key to my outing myself as a native English speaker over and over.

NOV 7:
My apartment overlooks a little square which is home to many cafés and where nightlife seems to converge on a regular basis. I've learned to love falling asleep to the noise of it, and skulking around among its (drunken) ranks with my iPod Touch, stealing internet from one of the cafés silly enough to make their password the name of their establishment. From my apartment I can always single out the Americans, not even by the very obvious - that they are speaking English - but by the way they laugh. It's hearty and boisterous and loud. Here the French hold back. Maybe laughter compensates for the lack of affect in our daily speech. Or maybe it's all posturing, and not genuine at all. I don't know. But it's different.

I cringe as I make sweeping generalizations like this, and I should say that I don't mean by this that the French aren't funny, because they can be absolutely hilarious. The differences are not universal, but they are significant enough to warrant mentioning and notice.

And on a side note: I am exploring strange new foods. Fig yogurt: surprisingly good! Take note.

NOV 8:
Today while walking along the Seine I saw something fantastic. An epic garbage collector drama unfolded before my very eyes!

I'll preface this by saying that I find French garbage fascinating for two reasons. One is that they do garbage pickup every day. I had a moment where I said, isn't that kind of excessive? But then my French friend pointed out that Paris smells a fuck of a lot better than American cities, and so I retracted my skepticism. The other thing is their outfits are hilarious to me - they basically look like deflated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-inspired raver outfits - baggy and bright, green and yellow, and covered with reflective tape of all kinds.

In any event, as I was walking along the Left Bank I was keeping good pace with a garbage truck (which, because they collect trash daily, is not the smelly behemoth that it would be in the States, so I didn't really mind). I'd get ahead by about a block as they collected trash, and then they'd catch up.

At one of the Ponts the truck stopped and the man riding on the side hopped off, gathered two bags of trash, tossed one in the back of the truck - and - the driver took off without him! The collector - still carrying one bag of trash - yelled a desperate-sounding "Non! NON!" up the street and then proceeded to do this odd, slow trudge up the block dragging a bag of trash with him.

At the next corner, he tosses that bag in the back and grabbed two more. Until this point, I had assumed that the incident on the last corner had been in error, that the driver thought the thud of the bag landing in the back was the man clambering back up on the truck. But oh how wrong I was, for at this corner the driver did the same thing again! This time he was called after not with a "Non! NON!" but with a slue of other words I shall not reproduce here, and some of which I can only guess at the meaning of, but I'm sure it was absolutely foul. With one bag of trash in hand, the garbage collector started up the hill again to meet the driver.

At this intersection the driver got out. He was doubled over with laughter - what a funny prank he thought he'd pulled. But you know who had the last laugh? The collector. Because he walked right up to the driver and punched him in the face!! The outfits, I must tell you, made this scene all the funnier. I'd show you, but googling "French garbage" called up some very disturbing images.

NOV 9:
The French are boisterous drunks, especially the young men. But unlike American college-age drunks, they aren't (for the most part) out streaking or stealing street signs or acting like total fucking assholes in any number of other ways. Instead they sing. I mean, French music is ghastly, and a bunch of inebriated French men trying to make it through as much caroling as they can before they pass out or go home means that success is a tall order. And if American men were out doing the same thing - in their case, probably singing some sort of sports song - I'd be all "shut the fuck up!!!" out the window and demand quiet sleeping time. But there is something stubbornly endearing about the French dude version of this, and sometimes I can't fall asleep for laughing at them from the safe distance of my apartment.

Lately there have been a number of songs that - what with the distance, their drunkenness, and my sleepiness - I have only understood fragments of. One night there was clearly a regional battle - a faction singing some tune with a deep, gutteral, choral "Ly - yon - naiiiis" followed by some rivals belting out a song that seems to be called "Paris, c'est magique!" More enigmatic is this other song that gets sung just about every night, and that I find so hilarious I can't pay close enough attention to the words. It appears to have the word "dix-huit" in the chorus, but I'm probably actually wrong about this. I just want to hang on to the idea that the song goes something like, "Dix-huit! Dix-huit! Blah! Blah! Blah!" In fact, I've made up tons of variations on the blah blah blah part, and I like to sing the dix-huit song to myself often and with enthusiasm as I make my coffee the following morning.

NOV 10:
Today's thoughts are brief, for I am drunk and full, and I have to knock out before I become entranced by the dix-huit song. This evening brought a culinary adventure for me - a five-course, authentic French meal with all the scary components that make this lapsed vegetarian think many a time, "Are you sure you want to put this thing in your mouth?" These moments of pause were tamped down by free-flowing red wine, and then white wine, and then the promise of a renowned cheese plate and some sort of flaming dessert with rum in it, as well as by the "when in Rome" promise I made myself when I sat down at the table. Neither before nor after (and especially during) my vegetarianism was I ever an especially adventurous carnivore, and so it felt rather odd to be willingly eating tête de veau and not just pushing it around on my plate. Same goes for the paté de foie gras and the mysterious game bird that definitely wasn't a chicken. I can't say that I'd ever do it again outside of France, and truly the reason behind the consumption of such things in the first place was simply to be good company in front of some polite company. But it's nice to know that when such situations arise, I can push the bounds of what I am normally comfortable consuming and bravely try something new. Plus, I'm not gonna lie: that paté was pretty out of this world delicious.

NOV 11:
It's Armistice Day, and just about everything is closed. I ran around all day trying to cram too much in - seeing people last-minute, seeing even more art last-minute, buying presents for my cat-sitters at the few shops open today. Now this evening is reserved for packing and a last stroll up to the Seine. Packing has afforded me the time to look at the books in the apartment I'm renting - a scholar's place, full of all sorts of interesting reading material. A quick skim of titles reveals very little overlap between my library and hers. I love this; so often I get entrenched in my field of study, and spend much time with people in the same boat - and I lose sight of just how much there is out there to read, how narrow my focus is. The apartment owner has all sorts of delightful-looking things I'll never have time to read - books about May 68, medieval chansons, gender studies, poetry, and more novels than I allow myself to buy. We have two books in common: one a book on medieval art, the other, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? -- though my copy is in English, hers in French. The last time I was here there was a copy of Middlemarch lying around, which I began to re-read. That would have been a third book in common, but it wasn't here this trip.

It feels oddly like I've been here in Paris forever, and yet, that I haven't been able to do half of what I set out to. And I've traveled enough to know that time plays even more tricks on the other end of my journey, and that this time tomorrow when I am back in the States it will feel strangely like I was never here.

NOV 12:
This was supposed to be a thoughtful entry about leaving this beautiful city, written on my forty-minute train ride to the airport, at which I would have enough time to wander about and find the most hilarious thing in duty-free, which I would photograph and post right here. As you can see, there is no photograph, and no thoughtful post, and that is because the train to the airport was not running today. No announcements, no signs, nothing. I was willing to foot the bill for a cab but I knew better - they are hard to flag down and the traffic situation around the edge of the city is unbelievable. So instead I crossed my fingers, made friends with a lovely British couple and a Danish girl who were in the same predicament, and boarded a train to another destination, at which a French man promised me there would be a shuttle bus waiting to take me to the airport. That there was, and it took just about every curvy, windy, roundabout, slow country road to get there, stopping at two points for a drawbridge and a cow that would not move out of the middle of the road. I got to the ticket counter just about when my plane began boarding, and then I was that jackass running through the airport to my terminal. And so my trip ended, out of breath and sweaty and stuck with the misfortune that is airplane food and fifteen dollars in Euros that was supposed to buy me snacks from the airport terminal. Never again, I tell you. Next time, I leave 16 hours before my flight. So next time, the last blog entry will be better than this. I promise.

On my way to Trust Market, part R.I.P. America, and other coming attractions (accurate and inaccurate)

1. I just checked out from the library the autobiography of Ella Young, a slightly looney-tunes mystic / folklorist who almost got turned down at Ellis Island in the 1920s for unashamedly professing her belief in faeries and elves. Don't ask. But the subtitle to this text is: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately. This might be the most honest autobiography title ever. Way to go, hippie avant la lettre!

2. I did not go to Trust Market today because I was at the amazing Mütter Museum all day looking at albumen prints of siamese twins and Civil War surgical results and daguerreotypes of rickets and the enlarged colon of a 19th-century gentleman known as Windbag. In a museum in which photography is strictly forbidden, this is the only image I was able to make on the d.l. Yes, they are real:

3. BUT on my way home - conveniently also the route to TM - I saw this new, exciting holiday décor. And so it will serve as a stand-in for my next TM run. I was so worried it wouldn't be there next week, because it's just too good. Halloween is HUGE in this neighborhood, but I can see someone rethinking the patriotic element of this arrangement:

R.I.P. U.S.A.

4. Inspired by the process of moving into my new place, I decided to write a short little blog entry about each of the apartments I've lived in, starting with the earliest one first. But then I started mulling over whether I wanted to start with dorm rooms. Either way, that's coming up. But not tonight. It's late, and I need to sleep. Cross your fingers that thoughts of the Mütter remain active only in my waking life.

On my way to Trust Market, part the backlog

Hi Readers and Lookers,

Two weeks of pictures for you, minus the one time my boss bought me lunch. Enjoy!

**An editorial note: In my layout here, the text looks swell. On the interweb, it looks like ee cummings mauled it. I'm okay with this, but mostly because I'm too sleepy to fix the problem and this blog post is already long overdue.

 I like this building.

 Partially uprooted tree thanks to Irene.

Bricks.

                      I was walking to TM with S.H. and she saw this.
                      I still haven't googled it to see what it's all about.
                      Maybe one of you guys will.

 Trust Market hatch.

                     So, technically this isn't on the way to TM; it's on 

                     the way to another deli I was going to with 

                     awesome co-worker J.R. I liked the many layers of

                     signage. 

              

                     Snapped in about two seconds while waiting for 

                     co-worker B. "R.K.P." R. to pay for his sandwich.

                     I mean, his hoagie. 

          

Window.

Moving Right Along

Hello from my new apartment! Moving is about 95% complete at this point - just a few things left to grab and to do at the old place, and I can relinquish keys for good to the slumlord management company that runs my first Philadelphia apartment. I am very excited about this.

I owe you, dear readers, a week of On my way to Trust Markets. I have been diligently and dutifully taking these pictures, but until today I had no internets over here, which has caused quite a delay. But a nice gentleman from Comcast came to my house between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. today (read: 11:35 am) and I'm all hooked up. Internet withdrawal - begone!

There are some really awesome things about my new apartment, the most important of which is that it is all mine. No roommate/s! In all my years I've never had my own place and I think it is going to be really good. From my bathroom I can hear some traffic noise and my neighbors but in every other room in the apartment it's whisper quiet. Since in theory I'm supposed to be writing a book and a dissertation and a few talks right now, this is the greatest thing ever.

Here is something else wonderful:

Look, it's taken with my laptop iSight camera, and it's a weird picture, to be sure. BUT CHECK OUT THE TREES! From every window in my living room, bedroom, and kitchen I see a whole lot of trees. It's amazing. I know that in the winter all the leaves will be gone and I'll just see a bunch of backyards. But it's sunny and green and pretty to look at now, and the cat is super stoked to finally be able to bird watch again after four years of apartments with crappy views.

The slumlorded place I just left looks like something out of a Jacob Riis photograph. Since one of my dissertation chapters is on Riis, I didn't mind this so much. The front of the building was a looming, imposing Victorian townhouse, but the back - where my apartment was located - was a maze of fire escapes and brick, and you could probably reach into your neighbor's window from your own if you tried. Back in the air shaft - as my housemate called it - every sound reverberated and you couldn't always tell if it was sunny or overcast. You always knew if it was raining, though, because the sound of it pounding down on the metal fire escape maze was deafening.

Before that I lived in a graduate student apartment in another town. It was a ground floor apartment that happened to be right next to the bus stop for the campus shuttle. So there was always a smattering of stressed out graduate students mulling over math problems or whatever and staring into space outside, except staring into space usually meant they were staring into my bedroom and living room. Also, the path of least resistance to a cluster of other apartment buildings entailed walking between the bus stop and my window, so there was always a lot of foot traffic about a half meter from my bed. That combined with the contraband cat in a no pets apartment complex meant that the blinds were always down. It was dark and sad in there - fitting for graduate school, but not good for me or for the cat.

The new place is not perfect - it is small, and it is really going to break the bank for me. It's on one of the Grand Boulevards of Philadelphia which is much less desirable than the cute one-way street the air shaft apartment was on. But I don't even care. I'm glad to be here, and without any further ado I shall resume listening to old episodes of This American Life and unpacking.