Bill Bowles is traveling the world, and the internet. After receiving an email from a mutual friend about Bill's impending adventures around the world, I checked out his site, and found a very cute intro video using the NYC Subway system as a visual (and auditory) metaphor for his planned travels of the internet, or rather, his world travels which will be posted daily on the internet. Bill sails this week for London aboard a freighter.
It's amazing how much sun and warmth affect my ability to be inspired and interested in the outside. Or to see the glass as half full, how much the cold and winter make me dwell on my own problems and necessities. In the past 72 hours of temperatures above 40 F, I have cooked my 2nd pot of lentils ever, gone to the gym twice, and started most of my homework for next week. Oddly enough the latter two are the astounding feats to anyone who knows me. Hopetfully this kick will continue.
Other moments of inspiration include when I pass by Ben Shahn's work quoting Maimonides (pictured at left) each time I walk to the Tufts Hirsch Health Sciences Library.
And finally, I have sung Psalm 118 Verse 22:
אֶבֶן, מָאֲסוּ הַבּוֹנִים-- הָיְתָה, לְראשׁ פִּנָּה , a thousand times during Hallel but somehow never knew that it was the meaning behind the Bob Marley lyric, literally translated "The stone which the builders rejected is become the chief corner-stone." Special Blog Points to the first person who can name the Bob Marley song. cuz, you know, so many people read this blog.
Several food-related items I intended to post in the past few months:
So about an hour after my post yesterday, nicole informed me that there was a shooting of a cop (by another cop's husband) on our corner in Brooklyn.
This Daily News report of the shooting is particularly ironic because one of the reporter is Veronika Belenkaya, who wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun with me, and was the reporter who did the inside investigation of the bouncer at that club in the E. Village where the college student was killed last year.
I miss New York.
It comes in waves, but when I'm in the middle of a wave, I miss it a lot. I don't know if it's the actual city of New York that I miss [and the city thus includes the sprawl around it, including Long Island, but as such: sprawl, and not for its own sake, in and of itself], or just the fact that that's the metropolitan area I'm familiar with. That is to say, [that's my new favorite turn of phrase, which I don't use nearly enough] if I was from some other city but had spent some time in New York, would I sill miss New York or would I miss the other city. Clearly impossible to tease those out.
My neighborhood in Cambridge is not entirely quiet, and the quiet/semi-quaintness of it is somethign I very much enjoy, but at times a wave will wash over me and I'll have a visceral image of some random smog and traffic-choke street in an outer borough, with non-english music blasting from a silver minivan, and I feel pangs of loneliness. I definitely more and more think about living in Northern California (maybe Marin county if I can afford it. or Oakland) or western Massachusetts, or maybe even somewhere more adventurous, but it seems like I may end up back in New York just out of sheer practicality.
Things that I take for granted, like the fact that I'm able to switch from my normal speech/dialect in the context of stories or quotations to a New York accent- this amuses people from other parts of the country to no end, and I don't quite understand why. Isn't it just like a bilingual non-accented English speaker being able to insert accented words from the other language into non-accented English speech patterns?
--Speaking of which-- I've received numerous comments of late, upon meeting new folks, about how I don't "sound" like I'm from Long Island. Life goal number 1: Check! --
But yeah, the way I explained it to someone recently, is that, you can easily find lots of diversity--cultural, economic, gastronomic, etc.--here, but you have to seek it out a bit harder than you would in New York, (at least the parts of New York, I'd be able to afford and want to live in) where it's just in your face, all the time. Which can get overwhelming, especially when combined with all of the development, gentrification and clear efforts ot marginalize that diversity and push it farther away from the "civilized" parts of New York that attracts the
throngs of tourists.
But any other place seems like sort of a joke, in comparison.At least any place that claims to be diverse and doesn't immerse you wholeheartedly in one particular culture, which as a different option would be fine, but this half-way, half-assed situation is just always a little depressing when you know what it's like to go all the way.
According to the Boston Globe, former Cornell prez Jeffrey Lehman had the highest salary of any Ivy League president in 2004-2005: $1,004,034
As Harvard is on the eve of selecting its first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust, maybe we should revive the investigation into Lehman's axing. Or at least until we find out the salary numbers on his replacement, David Skorton.
