Tom & Alissa

After class ended last night, I met up with Sarah and Matt, friends from forever ago, and a few more recent friends and went to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a lovely night, and we caught the sunset just right. We walked from the Manhattan side to Brooklyn, then had ice cream at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, which sits on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights and looks directly toward downtown Manhattan. Good ice cream, lovely view.

Though walking across the Bridge leans toward the touristy side, I had a good reason for wanting to go: the aforementioned Waterfalls in the East River, which “opened” yesterday. They are lovely and fascinating to watch, and at night they’re stunning (see the pictures in that article). If this is the future of public art, I heartily approve.

Tom left early this morning to meet up with his father in New Jersey and head south to Virginia. I’ll join him on Thursday. In the meantime, I am traipsing home to Albany tonight, and will be back in town Sunday night, ready to start learning about the modern British novel. I have a seedling of an idea for my paper for that class, which is more than I can usually say. Maybe that means I am starting to catch onto this humanities stuff.

Have a good weekend, and in the meantime, if you are one of the ten people who haven’t, check out Garfield Minus Garfield.

Hey kids.

Well, what a weekend. I was feeling rather under the weather on Friday, so I took a sick day. I pounded out most of a paper as I sat on the couch and drank copious amounts of water. We don’t really have any food at home - no time to shop lately - but thankfully, our neighborhood is full of wonderfully healthy and moderately-priced eateries, so we had brunch at Olea and dinner at Lil’ Pig. We spent the evening watching Hellboy - the first one - and it was, well, awful, though made a bit better because it does not take itself seriously at all. I’m all for movies with very vague plots, but not in that genre. But I try not to demand much from movies based on comic books; that way, I’m delighted with things like Batman Begins and Iron Man. (By the way, I am totally psyched for The Dark Knight. Moving on.)

I was feeling much better on Saturday, and because I got so much done on Friday I was able to tag along to the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island, along with Tom and a few friends who we met up with there. It was everyone’s first time, and it was certainly . . . interesting. On the one hand, I enjoyed the whole borough pride aspect. Brooklyn is proud to be Brooklyn, diverse, nutty, and happy. People from neighborhoods where you can have a house and garage brought out their antique cars, which were really cool. And some of the costumes were fantastic and well thought out. On the other hand, lots of people like to use marching in the parade as an excuse to get tipsy and wear very little clothing, and that’s their (legal) prerogative, but it gets old after a while and isn’t something I feel the need to experience repeatedly. So it was a one-time must-see event, but probably not one that will get any better year to year, and I don’t think we’ll do it again.

After the parade we went back to our apartment and cooked hamburgers for everyone, which was good fun, and watched trailers for scary movies. An excellent end to a Saturday.

After church on Sunday, we went back out to our ‘hood and had brunch at Red Bamboo, a vegan Thai restaurant (you won’t believe it’s not meat, etc.) with friends and ended up at Brooklyn Flea for a bit, where we did not buy anything but admired lots of things, including some imported and salvaged furniture. We wandered over to Smooch, which I immediately adopted as my coffeeshop, because it has really, really good coffee, great decor, eclectic decor, and a relaxed vibe.

We headed uptown shortly afterwards for the “Jesus Hopped the A Train” benefit reading, which was simply remarkable. Original cast plus Stephen Adly Guirgis, who is fast becoming my favorite playwright because he’s so remarkably profound. His plays are messy and profane, but somehow grace and forgiveness always explicitly slip in.

Our seats were good - on the floor, but near the back - and we were serendipitously seated directly across the aisle from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s perch at the soundboard as director. He still laughs, despite having heard this play and these actors a mind-bogglingly enormous number of times, and it was fun to be that close. I could have reached out and tapped him. He’s the most refreshing kind of famous New Yorker - still strolls around outside the theater and smokes before performances (this was the third time I’d seen him doing it), frequents the same random coffeeshops that I do. When we saw “The Little Flower of East Orange” a couple months ago, he got in an elevator with a bunch of the audience as they were going up to the theater on the third floor. They looked a little thunderstruck.

But! Our brush with celebrity was not complete. Yesterday I woke up with one of those stark-raving-mad headaches, and as this is not a week in which I can afford to be sick, I called in sick again and slept in very late. I had a dull headache all day, even after lunch at Pequena down the block, but I worked a little more on my paper and then went to class.

After class I took a few painkillers and dashed across town to met up with Tom at Madison Square Garden for the Coldplay concert. Coldplay gave away all 30,000 tickets for this performance, which was kind of awesome, because it was the first time they’d played through that set, which included a bunch of songs from Viva La Vida as well as some older stuff. They came into the arena seating - three rows behind us!! - and sang “Yellow”. And they didn’t play an encore - vaguely disappointing, but I’m kind of glad. I find encores a little pretentious. Everyone pretends they’re special, but it happens every time. Let’s save the encores for truly spectacular concerts. This one was an experimental concert, they flubbed a bit, but they were good-natured about it and very funny, and everyone enjoyed themselves. The only black mark was the drunken people to our left and in front of us who decided to get into a fight, just short of throwing punches, during “Fix You”, which is probably my favorite song. Oh well.

I’m finally back at work today and swamped, but tonight I’m planning to meet up with our dear friends Sarah and Matt and bring them up to the NY Philharmonic’s free concert in Central Park, as long as it doesn’t get rained out. This is my last week of the Moby-Dick class, and next week starts “Modern British Novel”. I admit that I’m a bit dubious about how I’ll manage to read all eleven novels and write two papers in the six weeks, but they don’t call it a “master’s degree” for nothing, I suppose.

The dark spot on my weekend is that it looks like I won’t get to see Wall-E on its opening night. Alas.

What I am discovering:

- I am interested in technology only to the extent that it affects people’s lives. I am curious about how technological advances and products change social interactions and contribute to the development of a culture, but not at all interested in how the technologies work or develop, in and of themselves. This is probably why I leaned more toward software than hardware in my undergrad; software is what people usually know they’re interacting with.

- I am not interested in the minuteness of academic literary or cinematic criticism (as opposed to what you read in the newspaper). I can’t really get into dissecting each tiny bit of a passage and scaring up every bit of symbolism therein unless i know, or reasonably suspect, that’s what the author intended. What I am interested in is the social and historical context of the book/film, and how it affected the book/film - and how the book or film turned around and affected literature, film, and the greater society around it. This means I’ve done the right thing in not going directly into an English or Cinema Studies program.

- I am fascinated by history, particularly North American history - seeing as I live here - and I know precious little about what was really going on in the US in relation to writers/artists/politicians who were contemporaries, and almost nothing about Canadian or Mexican history. This I must remedy. Are there any comprehensive North American books that don’t segment the histories of the three countries?

- I am very fascinated by culture studies and media studies, which seem to focus more on how humans interact with their surroundings and each other. I love to see how ideas develop in a social context (read: coffeehouses and pubs). And I’m passionate about art, especially the performing arts, and how they have developed and grown with their historical context.

- And I am especially interested in how history, culture, art, and media intersect with religion, especially in the United States, and especially with Protestantism, since that’s something I already know a little about.

So basically, if I were to go on to a Ph.D., it would be in American studies, which tends to be interdisciplinary. And even if I don’t, I can see myself researching these things and writing books someday. Well, good to know.

I have meant to blog, but my life seems to be devolving into madness owing partly to badly written technical documentation, partly to crazy Captain Ahab, and partly just to the limited hours available in the day. No real end in sight. Bring on the caffeine!

I love long weekends, though this one is a little too busy for my taste. I have forty chapters of Moby-Dick, half of a biography of Melville, a John Winthrop sermon, and a long article on Calvinism to read for class on Wednesday, and a paragraph to draft on one of the Moby-Dick chapters for Tuesday night, plus a screener of an Iranian film to watch and review. There are also a stack of publisher’s catalogs next to my couch that I need to wade through to find books for the Sept/Oct issue of RELEVANT. Oh, and Indy 4 out this weekend. I’m not complaining, exactly; I’m just a little tired and the weather is too lovely.

Luckily, the Melville biography is quite interesting. Did you know that he spent many of his growing-up years in the general Albany area? He lived in Albany, Greenbush, and Lansingburgh. Just a like a certain other New York-dwelling writer. :)

Happy Memorial Day, Americans, and everyone have a great weekend!

Exception to the no-coffee-during-the-week idea: when I am reading a lot for class. It helps me stay awake when I’m slogging through, say, Puritan sermons. (Yes, at NYU!)

We have watched two real classics in the last two evenings - Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Groundhog Day. Yes, I am catching up with all kinds of 80s-90s-era comedies. Andie MacDowell, where did you go?

I also grilled lamb skewers from Whole Foods yesterday, which ended up being slightly less awesome than they should have been (the cut of meat was a little fatty), and also some portobello mushrooms, on our cute smokeless electric grill. But alas, we had no rice, so risotto it was. This seemed far more interesting when I started writing this paragraph.

Meanwhile, my class is small (four students) and seems like it will be interesting. Any class that ends with watching a segment from Animaniacs is bound to have a sense of humor. Plus, we don’t have class on Monday (I become more and more grateful for national holidays each year) and so after tonight it’s already 1/6th over. There was a fairly copious amount of reading to do, but thankfully about twenty-five chapters of it were from Genesis and Jonah, and so it wasn’t overwhelming.

And in related news, grades were posted for last semester, and I got an A. Yay! Auspicious!

In the continuing Moby-Dick saga, I got an email yesterday with an outline of the class and I think it shall be fascinating. It’s going to include an exploration of the uses of new media in teaching and scholarship, and though that sounds fabulously incongruous, it’s not, as I’m discovering as I actually read the book. Editors have been tweaking and changing Moby-Dick over the years, much as you might tweak, say, a wiki. Also, something about religion in American cultural studies. I can’t believe I almost didn’t take this class. It will be work, but hopefully good work, and I am all about all of the above.

It’s a grey day - so grey, in fact, that I had a cup of coffee when I went out for my break instead of tea. It’s almost the weekend. It wasn’t very good coffee, though. What is Starbucks’ issue with brewed coffee? I tried the Pike Place roast and it was not yummy. I should always stick to Kenyan coffee at Starbucks - granted, I always drink it black, but I maintain that you should not have to add milk to your coffee for it to be drinkable. Milk is for sops.

We watched Enchanted recently and enjoyed it, though I suspect our favorite part may have been seeing all kinds of familiar names in the credits (Tom’s current project is also Disney, and also includes many of the crew). I watched Spellbound last night - oh my word, I am so glad I am not an eighth-grader any more. Actually, come to think of it, I skipped eighth grade. Anyhow, all the braces just made me wince at the remembrance of being a tall, retainer-and-lip-bumper-laden, gawky teenager who talked too much and used big words and got quizzical/patronizing looks from adults. We have only two episodes left in BSG Season 3, which we’ll probably watch very soon. And I’ve been watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on Hulu whenever I can, and man, I am way too in love with that show.

We may get to see Altman’s Thieves Like Us tonight over at Film Forum (love Film Forum!), and tomorrow is brunch with the lovely Amanda, who is in town for a few days from Aberdeen, and the Zoae Series at night. And after church on Sunday, we’re off to an engagement party for two of our favorite people. And then, on Monday, I start the summer session. That was all too short of a break, but then again, I’m kind a junkie for school. Okay, so I’m still a nerd.

I haven’t got much to say; I went out for a run around 7am today and Tom was home when I got back. Long night at the Guggenheim for him!

And I’m looking forward to a long weekend of paper-making, in the hopes of putting my own feeble little brick into the wall of scholarly knowledge within the week. Long live the academy.

Rather than being at Calvin like, oh, pretty much everyone in the universe right now, I’m still at work, hoping to have the magazine packaged at at the front desk for the printer to pick up on Monday. Hurrah!

So I’m going home once that’s done to start trying to gather research for my paper. Not to jinx it, but I’m postulating something along the lines of how the “new” evangelical film, produced by filmmakers from outside “the church”, has a lot in common with the classical definition of kitsch. I think I’ve got a lot to draw on for that. (If you’re in IAM, you know what I mean, but I do have a lot of scholarly work to back it up as well.)

Happily, today was delivery day at the house; the cable guy came to hook up our internet, the new bookcase was delivered, and the refrigerator has finally arrived (hurrah for groceries again!). Oh, and yesterday we got a coffee table, so now I finally have a place to scatter all my papers and set down my cup of tea while I work, since I don’t have a desk. Tom uses our desk and his job requires a lot of papers to be around all the time. I don’t really mind. After sitting in front of a desk all day at work, it’s nice to work from the comfort of the couch.

I have grand plans to spend most of tomorrow writing reviews for three books that only just came in the last couple days, watching a film and writing a review, wading through the five scholarly books I have from the library and tagging what’s useful, hopefully getting the skeleton of an outline down, then heading off to a pre-Tribeca Festival press screening and a friend’s staged reading. It’s times like these that I have a love-hate relationship with being a writer; on the one hand, it’s pretty easy for me to start writing a paper. I’ve gotten past the whole fear-of-the-page thing by now, since I’m always under the gun. On the other hand, it’s surprisingly hard to write scholarly work when you’re used to turning out Paste-worthy snappy writing. Academia seems not to look kindly on wit. My academic prose will never be too dry, but I have to kick myself into big-word mode.

It’s nice to be able to use big words, though. I’d gotten out of the habit.

Off to see My Blueberry Nights tonight! I have no idea what to expect, partially because it’s Wong Kar Wai’s first English-language film, partially because it stars Jude Law, partially because it also stars Norah Jones (yes, that Norah Jones), and partially because the release date was pushed so many times that it’s hard to know whether it’s really great or bad or just confusing. One thing is for sure: it will be visually stunning.

I’m sipping Bolero and plotting out my next few weeks of work. I worked three hours at the coop this morning, stocking produce starting at 6:00 am, then came home and threw on the blooper reel for season 3 of The Office while I ate my breakfast and ironed my clothes. How I do love that show.

Speaking of, I also love Battlestar Galactica, but unfortunately I haven’t seen season 3 yet and so I’m not watching the premiere tonight. But! I have caught inadvertent wind of some of the plot developments in 3 and WHOA. Dude. I am dying to get our hands on the DVDs. Not having cable is generally great, but occasionally it’s bad, and this is one of those occasions.

Anyhow, I made my very first venture into the actual book areas of NYU’s Bobst Library at lunchtime in search of some volumes for my term paper, which is (I think) about the specialized arms of big movie studios aimed at evangelical audiences, and more generally, the American evangelical box-office power recognition phenomenon since The Passion of the Christ came out in 2004. Also something in there about aesthetics and critics. Can you tell I haven’t really ever had to write a bona fide research paper in the humanities? I found some interesting-looking scholarly volumes and reveled in the fact that when you check out academic books, you get five months till you have to return them, which can also be a curse when the one book you really want is checked out until the end of June (yep). Yes, interlibrary loan, blah blah blah, but unfortunately I’m late to the game and the paper’s due in a month and I don’t have a NY Public Library card and I applied for one but it could be a month before it gets here. Anyone have a copy of Shaking the World for Jesus by Heather Hendershot that they want to mail me? I’ll pay postage.

This weekend entails a swap at Carey’s (yay for getting rid of old clothes and maybe picking up some new ones), possibly Leatherheads (George Clooney! Renee Zellweger! John Krasinski!!!), lots of reading, maybe some games, hopefully some relaxing.

Tom discovered One Million Monkeys Typing this morning - a “collaborative writing experience” akin to Choose Your Own Adventure, except you write your own adventure. Too cool.

Last night my commute took about twice as long as it should have - I can only blame St. Patrick - and I proceeded to try to read as much of my textbook as possible, which is taking far longer than it should (the fact that I have too many other things to do probably isn’t helping). Somewhere in there, I realized that we had almost nothing to eat in the refrigerator, so I made a dash over to the coop and bought a lot of veggies and fruits, and also got a tin of Burt’s Bees Therapeutic Bath Crystals. I drew a bath to spend more time reading when I got home, and what do you know - they work! Our bathtub isn’t full-sized, but hopefully the next apartment will mean that I have a deep, long tub in which I can full soak my poor twisted, knotted muscles. Hurrah!

RIP Anthony Minghella.

Last night I made pumpkin ravioli in melted butter (with a little fresh sage and garlic) and asparagus, blanched for a minute in boiling water, drizzled with olive oil, and seasoned with a few cranks of the salt and pepper grinders. The asparagus (which I made up out of my head because I didn’t have enough pots to melt any more butter) was actually kind of brilliant. I will definitely be making it that way again.

And we watched Catch Me If You Can, not because it’s particularly Valentine-y but because we just wanted to. The last time I saw it, I was in Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea (if memory serves me correctly, it had Finnish subtitles too). And Tom had seen it before. But it was great, and I now agree with him, probably one of the better endings to a Spielberg film.

Tonight is Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart! And I have Monday off. I am not sure if we’re doing anything in particular this weekend. I should think we may try to see Atonement since we still haven’t seen it. Also, I have many books to read (one for a RELEVANT piece, three for fun) and about a hundred pages of readings by such estimable folks as Jurgen Habermas and Susan Sontag about “The Critic”, which should be fascinating since I am kind of a critic myself. Our assignment, in fact, is to write a critical review of something - and a film is on the list.

Lastly, and I think this is via Annie - sage advice for writers looking to get published from an agent.

Hooray, I just registered for the second summer session of class, and I’m taking “Modern British Novel”.

Seriously. How fun does that sound?

I chatter a little about books at Conversant Life.

It took about five hours of work, but our apartment is now clean, relatively brick-dust-free, and has half a brick wall on one end (which was intended - it’s the chimney). Our landlord stopped by and we got to talking about the building. Apparently it was built in 1890, and at one point in the past there was a family with seven children living in the building, both apartments. Even with both apartments, though, you’d have to be impressed. That totals about 800 square feet. For nine people.

The brick is very old and all different colors, probably because bits have been replaced in the last hundred-and-twenty years, but I love it. It has so much character and it looks great against the blue walls and adds a lot to the room. Maybe I can get a picture up at some point.

Tonight I have class. I’m looking forward to it. The readings this week were long and arduous but interesting, and I’m one of the few who doesn’t have a background in art history, so I think this seminar format really helps me learn and explore what I’ve read. Also, having class around a table is so much more fun than a lecture hall or one of those hideous industrial classrooms at RPI (which gratefully did NOT include the IT building, but unfortunately did include pretty much everywhere else I had class).

As part of next week’s work for class, I have to make it either to MoMA or the Met. I really need to go early in the week so I have time to write about it, but unfortunately they both close at 5:30 pm until Friday, after which they are opened in the evenings and more crowded to boot. I’ll probably end up at the Met on Friday night or Saturday morning. It’s just bigger, and therefore less annoying when it’s crowded.

I’m reading Slow Food: The Case for Taste (by Carlo Petrini) in my spare moments, and I’m really enjoying it. , I think you’d really like this book. It’s not a cookbook. It’s a history of the slow food movement and a case for thoughtful, flavorful, healthful meals and eating as a communal activity, which is a rather Biblical idea, when you get right down to it.

Which, of course, I say as I’m about to finish up at work and wolf down a Clif bar on the way to class. But though I long for a really yummy meal, prepared with love and served around a table with friends, I’m okay with the Clif bar for now. It’s just a phase of life.

I got home quite late on Wednesday night. I’d been at back-to-back screenings (Run, Fat Boy, Run and Sleepwalking) in midtown. The first one ended about an hour before the second one started, which meant I had an hour to kill in possibly the most boring neighborhood in town. I elected to stay in the waiting area of the screening room, which meant that everyone assumed I was the PR person and asked me all kinds of questions when they came in. Whoops.

But! This place had four nice plushy leather easy chairs in the back of the room (and very nice theater-style seating in front of that), so being early meant I got a good seat. Twice. More comfortable than my own living room. All I lacked was a cup of coffee and a blanket.

Yesterday was a crazy day at work. We’re finally pushing a new product into production, which means my group is busily finishing the training manuals and documentation. Thus far I’d been blissfully uninvolved in the project as my boss and co-worker worked on it, but now he’s gone on vacation, so I’ve been editing and fixing things. Not difficult work, and pretty rewarding. People are so nice to work with here. But in any case, I was up early working on the document, then uptown for a meeting, back here to finish the document.

I left early for me (about 5:30) and went home, where Tom was watching Days of Heaven after a day that started very early, meaning he got home at a decent hour. I finished watching it with him - when it got to the end, we both simultaneously realized why neither of us actually remembered what happened at the end, and if you’ve seen it, you know what I mean - and he went to bed pretty early because he had to be at work at 4:30 this morning.

So here I am, working half a day before running off to catch a train to Albany. My grandparents are celebrating their fiftieth anniversary tonight. Fifty years! So wonderful to see people stay together for fifty years, through thick and thin. My grandparents are very different people, and they’ve certainly had their share of rough times, but it’s good to watch them still having fun after fifty years.

I’m staying in Albany tomorrow to hang out with my mom, who’s back to an empty house now that Sean is back at Messiah. Sometimes it’s hard to go home. We miss Dad a lot. But I’m so glad I’m close enough to go home for twenty-four hours.

I’ll come home Saturday night, and on Sunday, I’ll probably come home right after church for some relaxation. I’m feeling burnt out this week. I have a bunch of movies and Six Feet Under discs from Netflix, and a host of great books to read (I’m reading On the Road right now), so I think an afternoon with a cup of tea sounds great. Then again, plans change.

Next week is exciting. I have an advising meeting with my department (first actual personal contact with Draper!) on Monday, after which I should be able to register for class and will officially be a graduate student. I believe I’m going to a screening of U2 in 3-D (yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like!) on Tuesday night. And on Thursday I have an orientation of some sort at Draper. And then, joy, a three-day weekend.

And then I start school. I’ve been looking forward to this for, oh, about a year, so it’s surprising to me that I’m only starting to freak out about it now. I’ll admit it, it’s a bit nerve-wracking. I haven’t been in any kind of intellectual setting in which I’m being evaluated on my performance since I graduated in 2005, and it’s a little scary. I’m fairly confident, but then again, I’m totally not. What if I screw up? What if I fail? What if everyone in the class knows exactly what’s going on except me?

But what I am confident about is that I’ve been led this far, and I can trust that I’ll be given enough grace to keep going.

I got in! At Draper! I’m officially in!

Tom, who isn’t feeling well, got home relatively early last night - before me - and had to be back at work at 3am this morning, and he had gone to bed early, so when I came home I just turned on a tiny strand of twinkly Christmas lights, put some of the barbecue chicken from the Crock-Pot in a bowl and ripped off a piece of a baguette, and watched Masculin feminin on my laptop, which I thoroughly enjoyed (plus, I was like, “Hey! That’s the kid from 400 Blows!” and felt all smart and savvy). Am obviously a huge sucker for the French New Wave. Thank God that I live in New York, where you can still regularly see Truffaut and Godard on the big screen.

Also, the chicken was yummy, if a tiny bit overcooked. It was dark meat, though, so it worked out fine.

Tonight I am heading to a screening of Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. My Van Sant watchage is relatively low, but I’ll remedy that before writing the review.

My last grad school recommendation came in this morning, after a lot of finagling and biting of nails. One huge load off my shoulders. Also, after reading the HR guide, it appears that the tuition for my first semester of class may not be counted as taxable income, which would make me very happy. (Tuition is entirely tax-free if the class relates to your job, but in my case, that’s unlikely.)

Was excited to unexpectedly see a mention of our friend Danai’s 2005 play in this New York magazine article this morning. I usually read New York while I’m doing other things in the morning. And enjoyed this short piece on Ellen Page, star of the upcoming Juno, which I am dying to see. She sounds like the kind of actress I can admire.

Heading to the office to run over the proofs, but by lunchtime, the magazine will be out the door and in the hands of the printers. Hurrah!

And bigger news, kids: I am going to grad school in January. The admissions office at Gallatin called this morning to let me know. Still waiting on Draper, but the good thing is that I know I am going, and that in either place, I’ll be studying twentieth century American literature and cinema. This is the culmination of a lot of longing . . . and I’m so excited.