In my Book Group we just finished reading and discussing The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mahja Kahf. It’s about an Islamic girl growing up in Indianapolis in the 70’s. Born of Syrian parents, fundamentalists, who teach Muslim ways to their people in middle America, Khadra is like the child of missionaries growing up in a strange land. She, like most adolescents feels like neither fish nor fowl. She is picked on for being “different”, a “raghead”. It’s a coming of age novel, but our protagonist, being a child of missionaries, fundamentalists of their Muslim faith, instead of rebelling, becomes as rigid and overcontrolled as her parents; a “perfect muslim” until of course her two cultures finally collide and things cannot be reconciled any longer. Ah, but you will have to read the book to learn what happens. The author does a wonderful job, she is a poet, and a professor of comparative literature. She is Syrian and also writes an online sex advice column for Muslim women. I heard her interviewed on NPR.

I felt an unexpected kinship to the main character, Khadra, in this novel. Like her, I was raised in a religious fundamentalist (Christian) family. As a child I felt keenly the difference between my mother’s fanatic religious ways and the mainstream culture mostly because of TV and of course my friend’s family’s and school. We weren’t allowed to do many things that other kids took for granted, like playing cards, and dancing. Interestingly, some of these strictures were relaxed by the time I was a teenager and I was spared some of the worst of feeling “different” by High School. (Yes, I danced at my Senior Prom). But you know, I’m glad I had a mother who had strong, if radical beliefs and convictions rather than one who didn’t know what she believed. It taught me to question things and to think about what I believe.

The thing is, as I got older I got over being embarassed about religious differences and learned to question and learn about how we are the same in wanting to love something or someone greater than ourselves. (God?) I’ll never want to be like the fundamentalists of any religious stripe…too rigid for me, too bound up in fear for my taste. The core of just about every religious way of thought throughout history has the golden rule or some facsimile of it as part of it’s teaching, and that’s good enough for me. I understand it’s out in a “new” book now called “THE SECRET” and Oprah is all hot for it. There’s nothing new there. It’s been taught through the centuries; focus on the positive, let go of the negative, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and so on and so forth. I believe it.

The girl in the tangerine scarf, Khadra, though a fictional character, and I came to the same conclusion eventually. We found our own voice and our own God. A God of Love, not of fear. A God of intelligence and humor, not of mean judgement. And, a God who still loosely fits with the One in the faith tradition we were taught from childhood. So, whether you were brought up as a Muslim or a Christian, (or whatever) God is big enough to be in all of us.

Ever since I wrote this last semester, I’ve been walking around with the vague idea in my head that I could expand and write a series of “myths” based on stories from my family. As the youngest child, a lot of the accounts I have growing up are not just my own, but those reported to me by my parents and older siblings. It’s strange feeling that your history is not entirely your own, but something that is partially constructed in the minds of others. I hope that one day I’ll have the time to expand on this idea and write about the stories I’ve grown up being told. Some of them are pretty funny, and I just know there are some underlying moral/literary themes in there that are just dying to come out. I’ll let you know if anything ever comes of this idea. Aside from *hopefully* turning out well, it would also be a great writing excercise.

In the meantime, though, I’ll stick with this first story I wrote. The goal here was a little different than what I’m talking about doing, but the story itself is an important one. The idea here was to find a way to talk about myself, as in a personal statement, in a such a way that would convince my audience that I am the right person for the project I’m proposing. In this case, of course, the project was this- the momblog. Since, to me, the momblog is really about communication, not just talking about our lives, but, in a way, telling stories about them, I thought the best thing I could do was tell a story- the first story, really- that would relate how important story telling itself is to my family and how it affects my life.

There’s a story my mother likes to tell us. By us I mean my sister and me. And by story I don’t mean so much an account of factual incidents as a rendering of isolated historical events and permeating ideas strung together, over time and through much retelling, to resemble a tale so solidified that its events very well could have happened all in one day. It goes something like this:

As a child, when my sister wanted to learn to swim, she dove right in. She didn’t know how to swim, of course, so she just flopped around for a while, struggling and working, frustrated and tired, until she finally figured it out. When I wanted to learn to swim, I stayed by the side of the pool. I waited and I watched, for so long in fact that my parents thought I may never actually jump in. I shrugged off any attempts of the older and wiser people around me to teach me what to do, contemptuously, in fact, as though offended by their offers and their lack of faith. But eventually, after much observation and contemplation, I jumped in, when no one was looking, and swam straight to the other side of the pool.

The story itself isn’t so important, as the context in which I retell it to myself, and the fact that it’s taken on such mythological meaning. Perhaps I shouldn’t put so much faith in the perceptions of others, but I can so clearly remember my own accounts of the life that’s come afterwards where, looking back on this story, for all of its flaws and exaggerations (was it really a pool or the ocean?), it seems perfectly analogous, almost prophetic.

My family collects stories the way most collect photographs or certificates of achievement. But, like all artifacts of the past, it is the stories themselves that become the memories, and telling them reminds us of who we think we are. I often observe my own actions in the present tense and wonder how I will talk about them once they are in the past, as though just living them isn’t enough. Whether this is indicative of some grandiose literary perception of my own life or just some leftover childhood paranoia, the notion that your life doesn’t really exist unless it’s being observed, I’m not really sure. But perhaps it really is just the retelling of events that breathes life into them, and if you’re lucky, someone will be there to listen.

But this isn’t the only story of my life, and it certainly isn’t one that I retell often. Maybe to my sister now and then, when we look to each other for advice or feel the need for reassurance in the different ways we live our lives. But over the years I’ve consulted my family’s myths as their own literary form, and I’ve taken some comfort in the fact that the stories I use to describe myself don’t need to be factual, so much as true to who I am. More than the events retold, it’s the telling of the story- the cadence, the peaks and the pitfalls, the lessons learned, the context of it in our daily lives- that really matters.

Washington Square Hotel, very old, storied domicile of past inhabitants of this Village.
Henry James lived in the neighborhood, both Dylans stayed in this Hotel, hung out in this park, made some music, some poetry. Why not, it’s a beautiful neighborhood, a wonderful city, feet beat on the sidewalk like music. The first thing we do is leave our luggage with the too fast talking doorman and walk to a coffee shop he directs us to, Joe. Our slow southern ears haven’t yet adjusted to the hyper cadence of the fast-talking, fast-walking high energy of New Yorkers. At the Joe coffee shop we get the first taste of heavenly ambrosia which is the latte’s served in REAL coffee shops we will frequent over the next several days. Starbucks will never be the same. At the Joe, academics, yuppies, Sunday brunchers, hung over students, lap top hunchers, friendly tank top wearing waitress, and everywhere in this neighborhood, professors grading papers, or students reviewing final theses, “gotta get it just right”. Ah, caffeine, and intellectuals, just the energy we need to walk the neighborhood where we end up like magnets drawn to a beautiful old Episcopal church, The Church of the Ascension, to catch the end of the Sunday service. A wonderful thing about Episcopal churches no matter where you go in the world, they all smell the same, like a potpourri of old candle wax, old incense, old sweat, and old furniture polish. If there’s a heaven it must smell like this.

Meeting Zoe back at the Hotel, she’s glowing, beautiful with short dark hair and tall dark boots. Brunch at a Venezuelan restaurant in the East Village is spicy, and then the parental handoff as we meet up with Christin at the Tisch building at NYU. Christin, my youngest progeny, the tall cool blonde. No sleep, but still looks beautiful, and has two projects to show. Artfully explains the technology of We Rock NYC and Telebunny, so cute! So like her to come up with music, heart and soul.

The rest of the ITP show, amazing! Meeting the brainiacs of ITP, the Artists and Techies all brought together in a creative aquarium of invention was quite a happening to behold. Putting faces with names, Tikva, Josh, Josh, the girls with the creative clothes, the prof.’s and students, who could tell which was which?

The next few days was what? Well, there was food, and then there was the food, and the MOMA, and the food, and the stinky metro trains, and the food, and walking, and walking, and “Ground Zero” and the food, and, well, you get the idea. But, the day in the Burg was cool. “Like Old New York” some say about this part of Brooklyn, Williamsburg. My patient who was a bomb squad cop in NYC said that back in the 70’s he took a bullet in the hand on Havemeyer St., and that Serpico was killed in Williamsburg. A Dr. I work with said, “Williamsburg, we used to say, if you go walking down there, you deserve what you get”. He should see it today. It was bohemian, the savvy independent shops, the great little tea bar where we ate lunch. Zoe and Christin’s apartment was clean and airy and the style was all their own. They are smart, strong, energy in motion, full of life and ideas, a part of moving the world forward. They are drawn to this wild and energetic city.

They said the weather was unseasonably mild those few days of visiting my daughters in New York before Christmas, 2006. They put down the first steel beam for the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, the day we were there, the day we left to come home. Flying home that night, happy to leave the cold northern climes for sunny 80 degree winter in Florida. The beach is calling me to see the wide open ocean, to leave the ocean of human faces and feet, walking, walking, going, where? I go home to put down my roots again, to prepare for the girls to come home for a brief Christmas holiday.

The Polk family reunion was the last Sunday in September at the Pioneer Park in Zolfo Springs.  That’s the little park with the “Cracker Trail Museum” and the pitiful little animals in small cages.  maybe you recall years ago when you were a small child I think we went there once for a family reunion.  It’s held there every year, but we rarely attended.  Well, I decided to attend this year, because I heard it is “in danger of dying out”.  It turns out they expanded the animal exhibit, and now the animals (indigenous to Florida) are appropriately displayed in their habitat, and you walk around inside their domain on catwalks.  Alligators, panthers, black bears, otters, and so on.  It was certainly better than the pathetic display we had seen there years before, which if you remember, made us want to open the cages and set them free. 

So, there were distant cousins and great-aunts and uncles and to tell the truth, the greatest number were those from our part of the family.  (Grandpa Polk was proud.)  I was wishing you and Katy were there, but I did my part, and bragged about you like the proud mother that I am.  Caroline brought her brood and your cousins Sarah and Samantha were there with little Thomas and Jasmine.  I took pictures, I’ll try to attach.

One of the best things about a family reunion of course, is the food.  I had some delicious food that I never get to eat at any other time, and certainly don’t ever cook.  Like swamp cabbage, and black eyed peas, and guava cobbler.  Now for those who aren’t from the South, and don’t know this, swamp cabbage is heart of palm cooked like regular green cabbage except with salt pork and a big piece of fresh butter thrown in at the last part of the cooking.  And REAL black eyed peas don’t come from a can, nor are they reconstituted from dried peas.  No, they are picked fresh from the garden and cooked with “snaps” and ham hock for a long time til they’re very soft and delicious.  And guava cobbler is a hot cobbler dessert made from fresh guavas that in this case, my aunt grew in her back yard. Yum!  The thing about swamp cabbage is that to get that heart of palm, a very strong person has to take an axe and cut down a medium sized cabbage palm tree to get to the core of the thing which is the “heart”. That is hard work and one only does that for really special occasions, like a family reunion, that’s only once a year.  The old folks are getting worried about who in the next generation is going to bother with such things in the future.  hmmm.  Uncle Gilbert cut this cabbage and cooked it.  He’s Dad’s youngest brother.  He’s 78 years old and still looks pretty healthy.  I can’t see myself cutting down great husky palm trees, but I can cook.  I did volunteer to help send out invitations for next years reunion.  I’m going to move them into the new century and use email.   

It’s Friday evening, and I’ve had the contents of your last post simmering in the back of my mind all week. As you know, I spend many hours of my work week thinking about, talking about, and helping people sort out their feelings about the relationships of their lives. I’ve found myself re-examining some things in my family-of-origin, looking for clues to my own behaviors. Why DO we judge each other’s choices of lovers/partners so harshly? There’s many reasons of course culturally that that’s the case, but we’d like to think the people who are closest to us would understand us and love us unconditionally and accept our choices without question, right? In fact, if we love a person, we automatically think, of course, that the other people we love are going to love him/her too, and overlook their faults and flaws as we do, out of love. But, they’re not in love with that person, you are, so they can only see the behavior, or the outside appearance, and if it’s questionable or harmful to you (who they do love), well then, it’s hard not to say something. So friends or sisters might share their concerns about each others choices, but it’s cruel when it turns into a weapon used against each other in a fight.

You said “we can be so cruel to each other and ourselves when we mistake our relationships for our lives”. How we treat each other IN Relationship to Each Other is one of the most important things about who we are as individuals. It is not the totallity of who we are, but it is in the top three most important aspects of who we are I believe. Not for nothing did Jesus say when asked what the most important of the ten commandments were, “Love God, and Love your neighbor as yourself”. That’s about being nice to one another, and yourself. I can’t say I always live this goal, but I’m still trying.

Christin, it IS “enough to love someone and have a life with them…without having to justify our relationships with them…”, once you really get it that you aren’t accountable for the man in your life. You are accountable for yourself and only yourself. But if you really get that, then you are going to choose a partner who treats you well. If you love yourself you know that you are worthy to be treated well and loved well by the man in your life. Someone once said, “you teach people how to treat you”, and I’ve learned that this is true. Let it be clear to those around you how you expect to be treated. With respect, as you respect yourself. When someone treats you disrespectfully, you exit, or protest. It’s taken me a long time to get this. You girls know I used to put up with bad behavior from the alcoholic(s) in my life, and I tried to deny it was happening, or control them. I stopped being accountable for him, and he became accountable for himself. He has been sober for 3 years now and I have relaxed and let go controlling. Our life is good and we’re happy together. He has made true, deep changes with his recovery program, not just temporary, surface changes. (We’ll be married 15 years in December.)

Maybe you girls wonder why I didn’t “get” this when I was with your addicted father and “save” him and our family. Come on, the obvious answer to that is, I can’t control anyone else’s behavior, not your Dad’s and not Bill’s. If I’m lucky, I can save myself, and at the time your Dad was destroying himself, I felt I had to do just that, and protect you girls from that destruction as well. I gave him three or four opportunities to change (stop using/selling coke) and get help for his addiction, over a period of several years, and finally, even though I was in my first year of graduate school (that will soon be 20 years ago) it became clear I was on my own. I’m sure you’ve read the letter I wrote to Katy about this, I told her she could share it with you.

I’m so sorry you girls have had this (addiction/co-dependency) as a legacy. I never would have chosen this for you consciously, but as I’ve said in my letter to Katy, it’s time to create new voices in your head, make your own life what you want it to be. Your parents divorced nearly 20 years ago! You may need to grieve that and finally move forward, even if one of your parents can’t. Yes Christin, it’s a blessing you have been able to “let this shit go” to some degree, because you can focus on other things, but you’re right, the anger is a sign that it’s not entirely “let go”. It’s your time to shine little star! Don’t waste time and energy on your old parents’ mistakes, and don’t repeat them. There’s some good things to learn from us too. (And I’m getting better all the time.) But mostly, you are the future, shine on, and do better than we did!

The reason I talk about my Dad in the Momblog with you is because I have made peace with the things from my childhood that were difficult between my parents and I. I finally learned to accept him for who he is, not who I wish he was. As a result, I am able to see him as he is. And I love him and appreciate many things about him. What a surprise.

I guess I need to start this post with a small disclaimer and a huge understatement: I’m not in the best of moods right now. It’s been raining for several days, my last year of grad school, while off to a good start, is already proving a strain on my life off the floor, and, as you know, my situation with Katy has been rocky, even before she went to Tampa the other weekend. I saw her on Sunday night, and I proposed the idea that maybe the Roman Empire wasn’t working out as well as we’d hoped, and that maybe it was time for me to find a new place to live. I didn’t so much as lay eyes on her after that, until last night.

I just wanted you to know that I’ve talked to her about her visit to Tampa and that her version of the story was slightly more gut-wrenching. We’ve had several conversations about it actually, as it’s proven to be a pretty complicated situation. At any rate, I don’t really want to get into it here. I know Katy will read this, and I know she wants to talk to you, so I’ll let her do just that.

But the whole thing’s really been making me think about dad. It’s crazy, but I think what happened between you and her in Tampa actually had a lot more to do with dad than it did with you, and the whole thing’s made me realize just how much I’ve avoided even talking about him on the momblog. It’s pretty hypocritical. One of the things I love most about your writing is hearing you talk about your father and your relationship with him. Maybe you feel free to do that because my relationship with Calvin isn’t terribly weighted, and maybe I avoid the topic because your relationship with Rudy is.

Katy’s really upset about the way that she treated you. I’m really upset about the way that we treat eachother. Katy judged you, and harshly, on your relationship with dad. She feels like I’m hypercritical of her and her relationships, though mostly with Peter. I’m currently seeing someone and feeling the constant need to justify myself and my relationship with him to others. It’s a horrible feeling. So why do we hold eachother so accountable for the men in our lives? Why is it not enough to just to love someone and to have a life with them, without the burden of having to justify our relationships with them as well? We can be so cruel to eachother and ourselves when we mistake our relationships for our lives.

And where are the men? Well, I can tell you where my father is. He’s still contemplating the intricate ways his parents, both now dead, have affected his life, and childishly refusing to admit to the ways he has affected his children. It’s not like I enjoy harping on these things, in fact the best bit of advice I gave Katy last night was simply to let this shit go (the fortunate bi-product, I’ve discovered, to being the space-cadet of the family is an amazing ability to do just that, and it’s proven to be an excellent defense mechanism). But it’s hard not be angry sometimes, as you must know by now, and it’s sad that the anger is so misplaced.

I guess that’s all for now. I wish I could express this all a little more eloquently. Do you know what I mean? I feel like you must. You’ve been baring the brunt of your daughters’ frustration with an all but absent father for a while now. I’m so sorry for that. And I promise I’ll have a more enlightening post tomorrow. Things really have been going well. I want to let you know all about it.

I hope you won’t misinterpret the double post as a cop-out. This was deifinitely one of those rare situations where I honestly couldn’t decide which blog to post this on!

From itpblog:

There have been a lot of articles going around lately, and everyone just seems so excited to start finding out WHO bloggers actually ARE. The statistics as it were. Now I admit to a bit of initial excitement myself. Everyone likes to read about a group that they feel they are a part of. Not to mention that given the previous state of things, the demeaning ways the New York Times is usually given to portraying bloggers and blogs as information sources (read: untrustworthy, echo chamber, etc.), it’s nice when some good things start coming out (in respectable print, no less) about the blogosphere. (Thanks, Alex and Caleb.)

SFGate

NYT

Washington Post

But here’s the deal: I’m over it. I’m pissed off and I’m disappointed and I don’t really understand what everyone is so surprised about, anyway. I mean, did we really think that blogging was a revolution, or that every blogger would be tearing apart the latest political scandal? I mean, I respect Dan Gillmor. Hell, I’ve MET him and I LIKE him, but but at the end of the day (well, at the end of the book) I just couldn’t help but feel that it was too politically-centered, that there must be more, equally as important uses of the blog than just making little citizen-journalist gumshoes of as all. Up til now, politics has been the best example of the importance of blogging, but it’s become tired and over-used, and I have to suppose that this is what’s partially been behind the latest rash of new ways to look at the blogosphere. Hence the numbers.

But the numbers are not enough! That’s just not the value that I see in blogging, and not just my own, but in most of the blogs that I read daily. When are we going to stop looking at the blogging statistics as simply empty demographics? Who is going to start evaulating the emotional value that blogging has for people? The way it makes them feel about their voice? Everyone’s so intent on proving that blogs are mostly used to keep friends and family in touch, as though they’ve found some fatal flaw, and nobody is bothering to ask those families and friends how it has improved their lives.

Par example: Nowhere in these articles has anyone mentioned the number of bloggers who are women. When I attended the Beyond Broadcast conference in Boston this summer, I was so pleased to look around at the number of women who attended and, for the first time since the magic of my first few days at ITP wore off, felt COMFORTABLE being part of a discussion that revolves around technology, and (call me sexist because I’m sure that I am!) confident that the issues that arose from such a group would be valuable and emotional, not just a bunch of geeked-out tom-wankery. But, again (focus, Christin), it’s not just about the numbers. Even if any of these articles HAD mentioned the percentage of bloggers who are women (actually, upon 2nd reading, NYT reported that roughly half of the bloggers surveyed were women) I would still not be satisfied. The question in my mind is how have these women enriched the media space in which they write, and how has being a part of this space effected their lives? What is the value that the presence of the feminine voice has instilled in this new medium? I imagine it is a lot more than any statistics could describe.

In the future I hope to see a new set of bloggers statistics. Not the numbers themselves, but the value of those numbers on peoples’ lives. Maybe the value that peoples’ lives instill in the numbers. Not so much who the bloggers are, but WHY they are. What qualities does the blogosphere posess, what opportunities does it provide, that make them want to blog? In what ways do they evaluate their success, since it has been proven (not at all surprisingly) that monetary gain does not suffice? How does blogging improve their quality of life (I mean, isn’t that what technology is for anyway)?

So here, without any supporting evidence, just a 14 year old girl writing about her cat, is the beginning of MY blogger stats. If anyone else cares about this, hell, if anyone else is even READING this, please feel free to add on. At the moment I’m just too upset to write anymore.

1. validity and self-empowerment: As ubiquitous as we techies like to think the web has become, sometimes we need to stop ourselves in our disillusionment and recognize that, for most people, there is still some mystery to it. It is still a magical place. How else do you explain the wild popularity of sites like My Space? Has anyone compared the amount of time that the average last.fm user spends looking at her own profile to amount of time she spends reading through others’? I guarantee that even with all of the social networking the web is capable of most users are still just entranced with their own stats. To clarify, I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing. On the contrary, the validity of the web in turn instills its self-publishers with a sense of vaildity in their opinons. Why does Jonny Goldstein teach inner-city kids to video blog? In part, because media literacy is becoming increasingly important as the web becomes more ubiquitous. In part because it teaches them to think analytically about the media that they consume. But the most immediate, and, to me, the most important, result is a sense of empowerment that most people, even adults, don’t often get to feel in their lives.

2. communication: When I started the momblog, it was with the purpose of determining wether the new technologies we are becoming accustomed to using are really helping the ways we communicate. The perfect control group? A fifty-year old woman who, in over ten years of using the web, still mostly uses it for email. What I’ve found, however, is much more interesting than what I set out to. I’ve learned more about my mother and have felt closer to her in the past 6 months than I have in possibly my entire adult life. The blog has not only proven to be an effective communication tool, but a rich one, as well.

3. RSS just rocks! Think about it. In any new technology there is a ratio of usefulness it provides to the barrier of entry it imposes, and, let’s face it, this ratio is historically low. Not so with RSS feeds.

How ironic that after I had recently been introduced to Dave Egger’s McSweeney’s from Christin’s ITP blog,my book group chooses his memoir for our August soire’.  It’s titled  “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”, hereafter referred to as AHWOSG.  If you haven’t read it you must, simply must go out immediately and purchase a copy of it.  It’s written in his grandiose, tongue-in-cheek style, and is quite manic in spots as you can guess.  But it is his own story, and is quite a poignant, dare I say, heartbreaking story.  His parents died of cancer just five weeks apart when he was 21 years old and he took on the raising of his 9 year old brother.  He takes it on bravely, and milks the situation for all its worth, but does genuinely try to be a good stand in parent to his younger sibling.  He seems to try to “be a better parent than his own parents were” to make up for the loss.  I guess that’s what we all try to do, that is, be a better parent to our kids than our parents were to us.  That being the case, each generation should be getting better and better at parenting, right?  I’m not so sure.  I think maybe we get better at some things, and then we screw up things we didn’t notice that our parents did well.

It’s interesting that this month our book group read the two books, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Secret Life of Bees.  We seem to be on a run of books about parenting.  Huh? you say.  Yes, parenting.  In Both those books, the little girls were motherless, and they were being raised by their fathers.  There’s where the comparisons begin.  Scout had a wonderful father in Atticus!  Who wouldn’t want Atticus for a father?  He was wise, loving and kind, and he allowed his children to be their selves.  Then there was Lily’s horrible abusive father, there’s nothing good to say about him.  But they both found substitute mothers with the wonderful black women who took care of them.  In Secret Life of Bees, Lily found a whole hive of mothers, and God knows she needed a lot of mothering after being raised by her awful father,TJ.  More importantly, these fictional girls were taught important life lessons that shaped their character by the parents or substitute parents who raised them.  They were taught tolerance, and to see the dignity of all people regardless of race or color or religion, or wealth, (or sexual preference), and the value of personal integrity.  We can learn much about parenting from their mentors.

Today, I look at these right-wing, Fundamentalist, so-called, Focus on the Family followers of James Dobson, and I think they have a lot to learn about parenting!  This James Dobson sets himself up as an expert on the Family, and he is the biggest homo-phobe known to man.  He needs to learn something about parenting from Atticus Finch, he needs to read To Kill a Mockingbird, and learn about love and tolerance!  His politicizing of the “Defense of Marriage” act, and all that nonsense is more about hate than it is about any real christian values.  Hate is not a family value!

I saw a cool bumper sticker the other day.  You know the thing, WWJD, (What Would Jesus Do?)  Well this bumper sticker said,  Who Would Jesus Bomb? 

It’s officially hotter than hell outside. The weather said 94 when I left the house this afternoon, but in reality, when you add in all of the exhaust and what I’m sure must be an extra dose of greenhouse effect reserved just for Manhattan, it feels a lot hotter. Having grown up in Florida, at 16 I quickly realized the importance of parking your car in the shade. Even if it meant an extra 20 yards of walking across a hot parking lot, it was always worth it to find that one tree still standing amidst the pavement and park under it. Now, I’ve taken to planning my walking routes based on where the shade covers the sidewalk. It’s quite an art, the sometimes strange and broken path woven depending on such variables as the time of day, the heights of the buildings on one street versus another and, of course, the side of the street where your destination is located. I’ve gotten pretty good at it, and it gives the more neurotic side of my brain something to occupy itself with as I’m walking.

So today as I was getting dressed in what’s now become a very cosy little air conditioned apartment (a much needed change from last year’s summer misery) I stopped to check the weather before I got too suited up. 98 Was the high. Making the most of it, I took this as an opportunity to finally wear that little sundress (you know, the blue and white one with the red stripes?) that mom bought me at Anthropologie earlier this summer. Well as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one dressed for summer, all up and down the street were some of the cutest little shorts you’ve ever seen (mostly worn with flowy peasant tops and tied off high with a belt) and some sundresses that I fear may have rivaled my own. Summer is in full effect.

It made me think about one of the things I love most about living in New York. Before I moved here, and when I was still slinging drinks at the Waterworks till all hours of the morning, blistering my feet and killing my back, it was pretty much a weekly ritual, usually taking place on a Sunday, and sometimes, but not always, involving a girlfriend or two. I would head to my favorite coffee shop for an iced cafe con leche, then to the nail salon for a relaxing and much needed pedicure. But on the way, if I needed to refuel, I stopped at the Borders to pick up a magazine, usually Flaunt, sometimes Nylon if my tips from the night before couldn’t afford me a $10 magazine or, when it was available during it’s short run, Suede. But since I’ve moved here over a year ago, I don’t think I’ve bought more than a couple of magazines, one of the few expenditures that I felt really brought me joy and improved my quality of living. But it’s not money that’s a factor. The truth is, who needs to buy a fashion magazine when the best and newest styles, some of which you won’t find in Vogue anyway, are walking down the street?

My friend Tikva just went to Seattle for a conference with Microsoft. Being a cute and busty little thing, she was concerned about her clothes, and wanted to make sure she looked professional enough. I lent her a couple of items- a little black vintage cardigan to help her reign herself in, and that beautiful suede Cole Haan bag I got a couple of winters ago (don’t worry, I intend to call her the day she leaves to come back to New York and *gently* remind her not to leave anything behind). First of all, I think it’s really unfortunate that women are always having to second guess what they wear for the sake of a how a man who (poor thing!) may be forced to sit at a conference table and not be able to focus on what his female colleague is saying for the sake of keeping tabs on what her breasts are doing. I also recognize that it’s necessary. Fortunately for me, I don’t ever have to worry about my own chest demanding too much attention and can get away with some things that, probably, I shouldn’t rightly be able to. I just made sure to support her (literally) and remind her that people from Seattle are boring dressers anyway. You can cover up your cleavage but for the sake of the world, don’t down play that New York style!

So what’s another way to beat the heat? Well, in Tallahassee, it was the Saturday afternoon Reggae hour. Today, it was the Sam Cooke version of Summertime that I was so surprised to hear pop up on my iPod as I walked down the shady side of Broadway. (If you’d like a copy for yourself, ctrl+click the link and it will download to your desktop. Then just drag it onto iTunes. Enjoy!)

Summertime