Underscore v. Cursive

Dr. Seuss is smart, and quite beloved in my house. How many times have I read Marvin K. Mooney to my nephews? And no birthday passes without a quote from Happy Birthday to You!

And yet the wise lessons of our favorite Theodore don’t always hit home, at least not for me. That’s why I want to share a small incident from a few weeks ago:

A young girl with autism lives near my seven-year-old niece. One day this little girl was passing by with her home health aide, and my niece asked her where she was going. The woman explained that they were going to buy the little girl some nail polish.

My niece ran into her house, came out with all her bottles of nail polish, asked the little girl what her favorite color was, and gave that little girl a manicure.

I couldn’t be prouder.

A person’s a person, no matter her diagnosis, her age, or how she looks while walking down the street. And my niece, for one, knows that.

(The quote, by the way, is from Horton Hears a Who, published originally in 1954.)

I went to the Met today. Haven’t been there in years, but I’m on vacation and it’s a Sunday and it’s muggy in New York (shocking, I know). It might have been a mistake to pick today —  there’s a Met’s game, and Yankee’s game, and the Puerto Rican Day parade. That equals a lot of ruckus on the 4 train.

But I made it there mostly sane and safe, and HELLO! Did you see the size of the Met recently? Seriously, I thought steroids was for baseball, not art! Was the building that big when I saw it last? I paid the $25 admission (yes, the woman at the counter told me it was a suggested fee, but I would feel terrible if I gave less — like I’m gypping a generation of school children out of their arts education) and hopped on an elevator (see below) to the fifth floor.

The exhibit I came for is called “Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City” and in all honesty, I was a bit disappointed. Sure, the exhibit is funky, and I loved the mirrors and the use of steel wires, and the view was great, but…is that all?

The exhibit

I mean, it was fun. It was pretty. But…but…so is a roller coaster. So is Maz Jobrani (OK, he’s funny. Not sure about the pretty part; I’ll let you know after I do a Google Image search). So’s my nephew when he quotes Diary of a Wimpy Kid (he told the doctor his butt has a crack and he would like a new one). But art? Art should inspire. Art should uplift. Art shouldn’t be just a cheap but expensive (I’m looking at you, twenty-five bucks) thrill. Art should be more than looking at the city from five floors up. That’s fun, that’s beautiful, but that is not art! Or am a I being snobby? I like to think of art as culture. And culture is more than taking in the (gorgeous, green) sights of NYC.

Pretty, isn't it?

Of course, there is a price that we pay for culture. You can’t wait on the left side for the elevator — “Please wait on the right side, folks.” And once in the elevator, you can’t press the button. Some poor dude in a suit and hat has to press it for you. Really? I’m 22. I can work my way around an iPad (OK, so can an 18-month-old). I graduated college (OK, so did about a million other students in Brooklyn College). I have a job, for heaven’s sake! You’d think I can press a simple button. It’s not that hard. If you want to go to the fifth floor, you simply match it to the button that says “5” — no jive.

But it’s not just that. You can’t kneel or stand on benches in culture. They are for sitting only. And the only appropriate way to look at a Picasso is to gaze at it intensely, nod seriously, and take a photo of it (NO FLASH, SIR) with a large, clunky black “professional” (touristy) camera.

Not taken with a cool/oversized camera (alack!)

I’m really not being consistent here, am I? Art is uplifting culture, but I apparently hate culture. I’m turning into one of those angry cynical bloggers (but without the viewers) who thinks that all art is b.s. and the only culture involves food and/or barely dressed women with STDs.

My apologies. I don’t “understand” Picasso, but I’m quite all right if you love his art work. I like landscapes, and paintings that are so realistic they look like photographs, but are even clearer. I like lots of colors and I like historical artifacts and I like things that don’t involve collages of trash or toilet paper or the artist’s own hair.

This was cool, but do I like it as art?

I like cool exhibits and fun house mirrors, but I don’t like them as art. I like them as fun.

I guess in my sad little mind, art can’t be fun. Isn’t that sad?

Folks, I have solved it! I have figured it out! I have reasoned, divined inferred, worked out (I give up. Where is my thesaurus?) for good — the difference between the Upper East Side (previously known as Old Money) and the Upper West Side (aka New Money).

Upper East Side: Jamba Juice.

Upper West Side: Starbucks.

It’s that simple. And no, it’s not about how Jamba Juice symbolizes wheatgrass, smoothies, and good digestions, and Starbucks represents a loose stomach (milk + coffee), muffins, and free WiFi. It’s not about how the East Side drinks up its wealth and the West Side eats over their laptops (laptops=children, food=work). It’s as simple and straightforward as it can get. In the Upper East Side, people drink Jamba Juice, and on the Upper West Side, people drink Starbucks.

Do I get a Nobel?

On a side note, the Upper East Side also has apothecaries (ahhh, for the days of Lydia Pinkham’s tonics, barbers who chopped off legs and pulled out teeth, and polio)…

the apothecary

A Scientology place where you can get a personality test (for free! Sign me up! Do I also get to jump on a famous celebrity’s couch on live TV? [Yeah, cheap shot, I know.])…

Scientology

And also? Public garbages on the Upper East Side have plastic liners. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but it’s certainly not environmentally sound.

It keeps out the rats. And the kids.

I think I can subtitle this post, Or Why Dassa Will Never Be Rich or White. 

Grrr…I hate spelling errors and grammar mistakes out in public. Not that I don’t make ’em myself, but what’s life without a bit of hypocrisy?

This sign was hanging from the back of a yellow school bus:

Fluor. E. Scent. Not that difficult, you know.

Boro Park, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, has — as do all areas of the borough, I believe — its own unique culture. And, as you will see, its own unique signs.

A cheery bathroom sign at the 18th Avenue Park (aka Gravesend Park):

Say cheese...and keep your legs crossed until you get to the front of the line.

And the moral of the story: Don’t litter!

A smattering of the more interesting ads seen on the subway in recent weeks:

A close-up of the handwriting a straphanger added to the ad:

In part, the handwritten portion says, "...give her support while she made a positive decision to control her life..."

And a more cheering, if no less controversial, advert:

Bicycles! Bike lanes! Williamsburg, anyone?

And now some adverts from the World Wide Web. This next one came off a website I was browsing.

Real men real long-sleeve white t-shirts and have hair like a teenager.

And this next one came off a Hulu ad I saw while watching a clip of a show in which the supporting character is a strident, lecturing vegetarian. Isn’t it ironic?

Meat eaters wear dorky shorts. I'm going vegan.

And finally, we have Justin Timberlake, who is now a walking, talking, real-life ad for…NPR. Who woulda thunk? Photo credit: NPR.org. While you’re at it, read the David Letterman-esque “Top Ten Speculative Reasons Justin Timberlake Might Be Wearing This NPR T-Shirt.” It’s amusing for those of us who crush on Carl Kasell and can give an excellent po-mo argument in defense of Twilight.

He's bringing sexy back/Them other radios don't have a classy act

And finally, a Facebook ad that goes hand-in-hand (or foot in mouth) with the first ad of this post. I was afraid to “like” this ad, lest I be bombarded with all matter of infor that be potentially embarrassing if my mother ever hacks into my Facebook account. Not that, like, I think she will. But you never know.

This is my second post about clothing sizes in Brooklyn; are you beginning to see a pattern here? But this post is less about my righteous indignation on behalf of people who wear anything over size 6, and more about the people who are under age six. That’s right: I’m going for the little kids.

When I was in fourth grade, I met a first grader — a girl who attended the same school I did, and was a neighbor of my very best friend — who was on a diet. Or that’s what her mother told my mother, with a hint of pride in her voice. I still remember the conversation (or rather, the monologue) nearly verbatim:

Mother with sparkly shoes and too much makeup: Oh, yes, I can’t get Sarah to eat at these parties [we were all at the celebratory party of a couple who had just given birth to their first child]. She’s always telling me that food they serve here is fattening.

[Pats her stomach.] It’s so cute, think of it, she’s on a diet.

[With great pride] She’s very selective in what she eats. [Looks askance at the little boy sitting next to me, who is happily chewing his way through a fairly innocent-looking peanut butter sandwich.]

They become teens so early nowadays [sparkling laughter].

Me: [to self] What’s a diet?

—

I admit, my part in the little sketch above is not entirely accurate — actually, it’s not at all, since in fourth grade I am sure I knew what a diet was — but it did reflect what I would imagine is the general thought pattern of the average nine-year-old. The incident always struck me as a tragic one, but also as an aberration, something reserved for only the most horribly unprotected children, kids whose parents tell them they are fat and worthless.

I was wrong. Two years ago, I went to babysit a young girl I know. She was showing me around her new apartment, when she stopped outside the bathroom. There was a scale tucked in a corner near the door. She took off her shoes, stood on the scale, looked down at the numbers, and asked me naively, “How fat am I?”

I don’t know how I got out of that one, how I managed to deliver an explanation on the difference between weight and fat to this little girl with the already-mangled sense of self. How much longer, I worried, until instead of asking her babysitter, she asked her peers? And how long until the answer would always be — no matter her true weight — “Too fat…too fat.”

Like parent, like child?

To paraphrase Martin Luther, King, Jr., “I have a dream that my little nieces and nephews will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the weight of their bodies but by the content of their souls…I have a dream that one day, down in homes across the country, with their vicious parental doubt, with their mothers having lips dripping with the words of self-loathing and judgment; one day right there in your typical house, little fat boys and fat girls will be able to join hands with little thin parents and thin siblings as friends and supper comrades.”

Photo credit: Shakesville

If you live in Brooklyn, you’ve probably rode (ridden?) the Q train on occasion. And if you’ve ridden (rode?) the Q train recently, you’ve probably noticed the construction on the Q line. Currently, the Coney Island-bound side of the Ave M station is closed and under construction; Ave U and Neck Road are completely closed. Ave J was just recently re-opened, though there is still construction going on there, too. Right now, the two sides of the Ave J station (the Manhattan-bound and Coney Island-bound sides) are not connected: One is on one side of the street, and one is on the other. Inefficient? You bet. Surprising? Not at all.

But while the MTA wastes our taxes building giant staircases (BUT NO ACCESSIBLE ELEVATORS!!!) on Ave J, the workers themselves seem to spend a lot of time drinking coffee (can’t blame ’em — it’s cold out there!) and making their makeshift workplace more homelike. A stellar example: On the Coney Island-bound side of the street, there is a little office shack made of metal and wood that takes up a great deal of the sidewalk under the green station rail. I assumed it was a bathroom, and in fact, above it was a handwritten sign — “Fred’s Burgers” — that seemed to imply some sort of gross, masculine humor about bathrooms.

But bathrooms don’t normally have windows, do they? Nor do they often have chairs and desks, which that little shack did, as I saw one day when a worker opened the door while I passed by.

So it’s not a bathroom. But it’s still a fun sign. And its humor makes the obvious lack of accessible lifts a little bit less harsh to bear.

This blog post is dedicated to Joe Ugoretz, who told me I don’t post often enough. Hi, Joe!

OK, so how absolutely awesome is Macaulay Honors College at the City of University of New York?? Full tuition, Mac laptop, advising, cool seminars and meetings, stipend for internships and study abroad, and a beautiful building (currently undergoing asbestos removal, by the way) in the city.

And if that is not enough, Macaulay recently sent a bunch of its students to the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) Conference. I was one of them. We roomed at the Grand Hyatt in WASHINGTON DC!!! *cue shock and awe*

The NCHC is this national thingamajing, as you can tell from its name. Every year they have two conferences, one of which (from what I understand) is open to students. So we Macaulay students showed up. We were there to present posters, to speak, or  (like me) to observe. There were posters on genetically modified foods (apparently that group attracted all the farmers), trees, amoeba something-something (OK, I totally did not understand that one, but it was impressive nonetheless — or at least the titles was). There were also presentations on peer mentoring, campus-as-text, e-portfolios (Hi again, Joe!), Snapshot NYC, featuring our honorary Macaulay student from Louisiana. There was also a roundtable session about literary magazines, and I was inspired to find out if there is more I can do for HARL.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Or is it a head? Hmm. Anyway, chronological. Chronological. Yes.

My first adventure begins at what must be sometime after 1 o’clock on Wednesday, October 28, 2009. Armed with a map, a little black book of DC, and my trusty Flip, I meander down Tenth Street. Sun dappled light color. And look, Fords Theater! And across is The House Where Lincoln Died (seriously, that’s what it’s called).

Then I move to gawk at the J. Edgar Hoover building — so impenetrable, so vast, so blank, two empty sides that are tan with dark windows set in. The front faces a cheery walkway with trees and benches. It’s also lined with US flags, each one differing from the next, a historical marching band of our changing country.

Across is the National Archives, which has three entrances. The one I’m supposed to enter through is ruined by long vertical posters — the type they always have at the Smithsonian — hanging between the pillars. Once inside, I nearly cried when I saw the letter written to General Douglas MacArthur, the one that fired him. The photo I have of it is probably the greatest historical treasure ever saved in my hard drive.

And there’s a video of Teddy Roosevelt — why, he gesticulates so violently he reminds me of descriptions of Mussolini and Hitler. Or course, in the gift shop I gawk some more. It’s the first souvenir spot I’ve been to in DC, and I just have to bring something home. I get  a Rosie the Riveter metal thermos bottle.

(to be continued in another post)

(or possibly a Macaulay student at Brooklyn College)

IF…

1. You know what Common Events are. And you only go for one reason: those cookies.

2. You half jokingly (or so we hope) moan about how your Mac/Flip/other cool freebie is not updated to the latest version.

3. It takes you about twenty minutes to explain to the uninitiated what MHC is, and how it is actually a program and not a college, even though it is often called CUNY Honors College, and you take classes on your home campus  with the option of taking some classes at Macaulay Central if you want…

4. You spend half your college life filling out forms about what you did/want to do/will do with the other half of your college life.

5. The Opportunities Fund Quiz is something you prepare for the way others prepare for the CPE.

6. You think you’re smarter than everyone else, including me. And you probably are.

7. You’re pre-med.

8. You’re annoyed by the stereotype that all Macaulay Students are pre-med.

9. You are not aware of any such stereotype. Can’t everyone just hush so you can cry over your orgo lab homework in peace?

10. You have an adviser who knows your name, your graduating year, your major, and your entire life story, including that time in high school when you accidentally fell down a flight of stars and the entire senior class saw your underwear, which severely affected your mental development and brought you years of therapy sessions, half of which are conducted by your adviser anyway.

11. You think this list is too long and uncreative.

12. You write a letter to your Congressperson, start a Facebook group, and write a ten-page research paper, all on how long and uncreative this list is.

13. You know that even if you don’t get this list, you can still be a Macaulay student, because since when can we all be pared down to a list of thirteen random character traits, anyway?

(14. You mentally add a number fourteen to the list. It may be superstitious, but, hey, you never know. Don’t forget to knock on wood before you go out to your next class!)