32 or 6 to 4

May 28

As of about 2pm cst today, I turned 32. But my birthday so far hasn't involved cake, drunkeness, or naked singing man telegrams. Though if you want to send me a naked singing man, email and we'll talk.

What it has involved is frantic, heart-pounding anxiety as Matt and I traipse all over town looking for an apartment. It all started when I registered with the Village Voice service to get the classifieds ahead of time. Suddenly, I was getting 5 emails an hour about new apartments...and man, there are a lot of apartments in New York. I don't know if the recession is driving folks out of here or if it's always like this, but there's a million places that might be right, and the most you can look at after work is two a day.

This forced us quickly to prioritize. At first we were so non-picky as to include all the boroughs except Staten Island and the Bronx, but we quickly had to narrow it down. We cut out Queens and stuck with Brooklyn and Manhattan. Then the closer parts of Brooklyn. Then Manhattan only...and now well, here we are. We expect to hear on two potential Manhattan apartments tomorrow. One is actually a nearly sure thing...but Matt freaks when I start counting the chickens. So I won't be talking in detail about it yet.

But if it goes through we have to take it this weekend. To prepare, I'm running around buying a futon, looking at a car rental so we can move our paltry belongings from our squat to...uh..the other place. Wherever that may be. And of course you good people will get to hear all about it.

My Tour de Testosterone is continuing...details to come.

May 5

Hey, I'm back. Sorry for the long gaps in updates lately. I know it's annoying to keep coming back to a page that doesn't update every day, hoping for a new crumb of something interesting. I'm actually working on getting a notify list set up, but since my computer time is limited this week, I'll do it later.

In fact, over the next few months, you may notice some overall changes to the site. They'll be pretty small, but I felt it was time to trim the hedges, so to speak, and improve some of the written bits. I want to get a wider readership, and so I'm going to try to tighten up the writing around here. Kind of a spring cleaning, as it were.

Also, we now have a computer that has a USB port (we're so modern!) so I can now use my digital camera, hopefully leading to more of those wacky New York City pictures you all love so much.

I even have a new special project for my Read/Delicious section...The Tour de Testosterone. I'm also in the process of updating my Delicious links, yet again. I want to make a separate section for the suddenly large amount of political sites I visit each week.

Outside, Spring is full-on here. This is the first week I've been able to go out without some kind of jacket every day. The trees are all green, and many are blooming. It's goh-jus out there.

My two books for my employer are all finished, and Matt's book for them nearly so. I should get my author's copies late in the year (maybe even December or so) and it will be cool to have something in print with my name on it, no matter how small and obscure (very) it is. And the money will come in handy, too. Meanwhile, my personal book project is proceeding in the research phase, which is really the most fun part. I am reading up a storm and walking around thinking, and writing notes, and boring the bejeezus out of Matt with talking about it. And sadly, being coy with you folks by not telling you all the details.

I will say it's non-fiction, about a writer that fascinates me, and how he deals with women in his fiction and nonfiction. But that's all I'm telling you about it for now. It's a big project, actually, and is likely to take a few years to complete. And I really have no idea if anyone will be interested in buying it. But it's exhilarating to be working hard on something and enjoying it.

A few years ago, when I was first figuring out how to be a writer, I had some projects that were just the opposite...books that just didn't seem to go anywhere and that I had to force myself to think about. I worried that I couldn't be a writer because I just didn't have the discipline to work hard enough at it. Now I know, those were blind alleys, and it was no crime to drop them. Your vocation may require hard work, but it's not supposed to feel like a grind. Or so is my philosophy this week.

I was in the park the other day, eating my lunch, and this large group of adults and preteens suddenly took over the bench next to mine. After a long discussion, most of them went off to walk around, except for one girl who looked about 15 and a boy who was probably 13 or so.

Now normally, I try to ignore other people in the park, or anywhere really, and think my own thoughts or read. But I was distracted by the boy. He was a chunky kid, maybe Hispanic, in the basketball jersey to his knees and shorts that a lot of kids wear. And he was so dang loud, and obnoxious, and so painfully, painfully clueless. It was obvious, his hormones had taken over his brain, what little there seemed to be, and he had stayed behind with the pretty girl hoping to....uh, something. He probably had only the vaguest idea what he was hoping.

He kept making painful attempts to impress her with a joke, or by bragging about something he'd done (like own a DVD of the Matrix), that fell totally flat. The girl was kind to him, but it was obvious, she was just humoring him. And he didn't know it. Or worse, he knew it and still couldn't help himself.

It was annoying on one hand...he was really loud, and had nothing to say that he hadn't heard in a movie or a commercial. He was the target audience for "Whaaazzzup" commercials and Carrot Top. I had a feeling he tended to say stupid things in class and get smacked around at school. Heck, I wanted to smack him.

At the same time, I felt sorry for him. His eyes were so wide, his face so sweaty and desperate, and his screechy voice had an undercurrent of panic to it. Puberty can really be torture, and I wondered if he felt like he'd been taken over by a monster that made him act all weird and freaky around girls. Maybe before it hit, he'd been a fairly normal kid. Maybe as he grew up, he'd be calmer about the whole thing. But for right now, he was just a complete mess, a crazed jumble of hormones. It was like watching a train wreck.

That time was painful for me in a different way. Like a lot of girls, I didn't know what to do about growing up or dealing with the opposite sex, and so I just got really, really quiet. I remember boys like him used to scare me, if you can believe it. I didn't understand why they were acting so weird, and I couldn't predict what they would do, so I just kept away from them, like you would from a barking dog. It was probably just as well. I wish I had been able to understand how it was hard for them too, and to know that they were mostly harmless. At the time, they just came to represent everything scary that I didn't want to deal with.

We don't deal so well with adolescence in our society, still. We leave the kids to their own resources too much. Deep down, I would really have liked for someone to help me understand what was going on, (and especially how much better it would get later) but I didn't know how to ask. The only advice I seemed to get from books or TV was all about dating (which I wasn't really ready for) and doing drugs (which wasn't one of my worries). There was nothing about the fact that your hormones make you and everyone else in school crazy for about six years, and that that is OK and normal.

Now go outside and get some sun! And if you're really my friend, you'll buy a CD from my husband.