Of Masons and Moon Launches

For the long President's Day weekend, the BF and I went to stay with his brother, Big Scientist, at his new apartment in Washington, D.C. I always like taking a little trip on the train, though the tracks from NYC to DC take you through a pretty awful part of the country. Baltimore, for instance--I haven't seen such a shitheap of a city since I was in Lima, Peru in 1992. We're talking the worst kind of dilapidation you can get without bombs. Philadelphia wasn't much better. I guess that's the thing about neighborhoods on the wrong side of the tracks: you see them when you ride the train.

But DC is always nice to visit. Readers may recall my last visit to Washington DC for the National Postmaster's Convention in 2009. I have this idea in my head that DC is a cold, gray place because I keep going there in late winter/early spring, even though I'm sure it has other, much prettier seasons. At least there are very few crowds when you go in the middle of February.

The first night we were there, BS and his GF took us out for seafood and then to see the Oscar-nominated animated shorts. I pushed hard for the animated shorts rather than the live action shorts, because the live action shorts are always terribly depressing and there's usually at least one film about the Holocaust. The animated films always put you in a much better mood. One short was about a mouse looking for a nut in the forest, and I'm pretty sure I remember reading the picture book when I was a wee grom (The Gruffalo, does anyone else remember that?). And Pixar's stuff is, as always, delightful, though I'm hoping their entry "Day and Night" loses this year to a lovely Australian entry called "The Lost Thing," which was soft and quiet and hopeful and included giant octopus/hermit crab inside a red tin can. And there was one terribly depressing short that began with a dead goat and ended with a dead mother. Thanks, Germany.

The next day, the BF and I went to the Air and Space Museum so we could be astronauts. It was awesome, though my neck hurt from looking up at all the planes, satellites, and rockets hanging from the ceiling.

We had lunch at the National Museum of the American Indian, which is widely regarded as the best museum for eating on the mall. The food stations are regional, so we had tacos at the Mesoamerican section. Runners-up included salmon at the Pacific Northwest station, and buffalo burgers in the Midwest section. And I saw an outrigger canoe.

Our last day, President's Day, was a bit rainy and cold. BF said that he wanted to tour the Big F*cking Thing we'd seen in the car the day before, when we were going to the grocery store. It looked a bit like a pyramid on top of a tower, and the BF said something to the effect of, "Look at that Big F*cking Thing! Can we go inside?" An Internet search and a phone call confirmed that it was the George Washington Memorial Masonic Lodge, and one can, indeed, go inside for a tour. At first we thought that we were going to be the only people going, but it being President's Day, there was actually a fair-sized group of about 20.

We learned a lot about George Washington and the Freemasons that day, but I'm going to share my favorite little factoid. First, some background: The Freemasons is a fraternity--a gentlemen's club--of men who want to improve their minds, bodies, and spirits. One in five men in Washington's day was a Freemason; today it's more like 1 in 200, but they're still an active organization worldwide, especially in their charitable offshoots, like the Shriners. Lots of notable dudes were and are Freemasons, including 4 US presidents, and...

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, also known as the guys who landed on the moon.

See how this whole trip is tying together?

Those three men happen to be Master Freemasons. To set up a new Freemason Lodge, all you need are three Master Masons to open and close a meeting in the new lodge location. So, during the Apollo 11 space launch, the three astronauts established the first and only extra-terrestrial Freemason Lodge. If you're a Mason, you can join the so-called Moon Lodge, and go to their party every year in Texas.

So, this is what I gained from my trip to the nation's capital: a burning desire to know why someone hasn't yet made an off-off Broadway musical called "Masons in Space!"

Happy VD

Work is often unintentionally funny. You have to be so chaste and polite and careful to conceal what a true bastard of a human being you really are that sometimes weird stuff slips under your radar. You'll say something like, "Happy VD!" on Valentines Day and won't realize how dirty and strangely appropriate that is until it's already out there and you can't take it back.

I didn't say that, by the way. It seems like something I'd say, but I can't take credit for it. I just recognized the phenom and took quiet pleasure in the joy of knowing that it happens to other people, and not just me.

New Glasses!

I bring my sunglasses to work every day, because even when a cruel, indifferent G-d is raining his icy wrath upon us from above, the light from the office's floor-to-ceiling windows can get a little intense, and no one's allowed to put up curtains or shades because eff you, that's why! My sunglasses came with a nice, roomy glasses case, big enough to fit both my regular glasses and my sunglasses. They nest together like tender lovers when I'm in my yoga class. I like doing my yoga in a gentle, fuzzy haze of blurred faces and diminished depth perception.

But after last week's class, I opened my glasses case and found that the sunglasses had done a Pac-Man on the regular glasses and engulfed their slim metal frames--waaka waaka waaka--they were broken beyond repair.

I've worn glasses since I was four years old. They are a very big part of my identity. Sure, I flirted with contacts, everyone did in the late nineties, even people who didn't need them and just wanted to look like Marilyn Manson, but ultimately my laziness won over my vanity and I just went back to the specs. Why mess with what works, right? Also, I had eye surgery when I was fifteen, and contacts irritated the stitches on my corneas. Take a moment to enjoy that tactile image.

The point being, new glasses time is a very important moment in the life of a glasses-wearer. I'd had my glasses for almost four years; I got them right before I moved to New York, the last time I was fully employed and had health insurance. They were blue Guess glasses, metal, rectangular, with a little design cut away in the frame, my big girl glasses that replaced the glasses I got when I entered college, which replaced my high school glasses. You can see how this works: major life change=new glasses

Fortunately, with me being a gainfully employed, fully functioning member of society again, I have proper health insurance. Major life change often coincides with a change in health insurance situation. On Monday, I took the morning off work and toddled down to my friendly neighborhood optometrist for new glasses--new New York glasses!

Doctor was a great old Jewish guy who told me that the doctors had done an exceptional job on my eye surgery, and that the Brooklyn Dodgers got their name because trolley cars used to run all through Brooklyn, but the tracks were in the middle of the road, so when you got off the trolley, you had to dodge traffic to get to the sidewalk. Great guy. He liked me a lot. I picked my frames and was ready to go back to work and squint at my computer for a week or so until the lenses could be made, but wait! They'd have them ready in about an hour and a half. Did I mind waiting?

Let me tell you something about ordering glasses in Hawaii. Again, I've been doing this since I was four. I have certain expectations, one of which is that the frames will have to be shipped four islands over to get fitted with the proper lenses, and because one of my eyes is near-sighted and the other is far-sighted, they are rather difficult specimens, so I will get the glasses when I get them and be damned happy for it. I have never in my life received an eye exam and new glasses on the same day.

Lots of things surprised me when I moved to New York: the crowds, the difficulty of mastering the subway, the lack of alleyways for Spider-Man to change into his costume. But I don't think I was ever so shocked as when I picked up my new glasses less than two hours after my exam. It was like crapping in an outhouse all your life and suddenly discovering one of those fancy Japanese toilets that plays nature sounds to cover up the shameful sound of your tinkles. It's civilization, baby, and it rocks!

Now I'm in the stage of new glassesness where my new prescription is so much better than my old one that the clarity of the objects around me actually makes me nauseous. That pleasant fuzziness that haloed everything on Friday was completely gone by Monday, replaced by the raw, unadulturated scream of reality. And those shadows in the corners of my apartment? Dust bunnies. Clumps of filth.

Who comes in here and makes this mess while I'm gone?

Cold Wet American Winter

We're getting another 6 to 8 inches of snow today here in New York. The officemates are speculating that as soon as we can't see the main campus from our windows, we should all just go home. Manhattan already disappeared in the cloud of white, as did the dome of the Greek Orthodox church in Williamsburg, about a mile north of us. The Big Boss is blaming me. He says I brought it here from the islands.

This is easily the worst of the three winters I've experienced in New York. Normally it doesn't snow this much. We get one, maybe two big messes dumped on us a season. This will be the sixth or maybe even seventh big mess, and that doesn't count all the days that it's been snowing but not sticking. I'm starting to feel a bit like Benicio Del Toro in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" when he tries to open the salt shaker of cocaine while speeding through the desert in an open convertible and it all blows away in the wind.

"Did you see what GOD just did to us, man?"

I wonder if anyone is surfing down in Jersey today.

Man vs. Parking Space

So while I'm at work soothing the jangled nerves of this great country's future tempers/part-time indie filmmakers (which is pretty rich coming from me, considering the path my career took during my first two years in New York City), I have to wonder: what's going down in Cobble Hill? What happens in my neighborhood while I'm sitting high up in my sixth floor office, gazing out the window and wondering if the guy in the window across the way is wearing a shirt or if his bare chest is really that alarming shade of maroon, and should I call someone for help in case it's the latter, or would that just result in awkward inquiries and possible legal action?

On my walk to the subway this morning, I passed a car trying to pull away from the curb, but because there's currently more snow on the ground than on the bathroom floor of Studio 54 on New Years Eve, it was going nowhere fast. The first couple guns of the engine, I figured the driver would give up and go back home for a smoke and another cup of coffee. Even as someone who's never driven anywhere other than the Big Island, I knew that car wasn't getting out of that snowdrift. But the dude just kept gunning that engine, even though steam was coming up from where the wheels were melting the snow and the street stank of exhaust. I actually turned around and walked backwards on an icy sidewalk to see how far this was all going to go. Dude was still standing on that gas pedal before I had to turn around and go about my day.

Ten hours later, I'm walking the same route back home from the subway, and damned if Dude still isn't trying to get the car out of that same parking space. The car hasn't moved an inch as far as I could tell. And now he's got about five or six friends gathered around him giving advice. They've wedged a bunch of flattened cardboard boxes under the wheels to try and get some traction. These are my neighbors, toiling away under the streetlamps, undaunted by the cold, probably trying to get the project done before we get another three to six inches dumped on us tomorrow.

Here's the thing: I know that Dude wasn't trying to get out of that parking space the whole time I was at work. That's just silly; he had to have taken breaks, gotten some lunch, maybe called a cousin with a garage in Sunnyside to get advice, otherwise he'd have run out of gas and burnt the motor out. But in the movie of my life, from my limited little Big Island Rachel perspective, that man devoted his entire day to getting that car away from that curb, slowly adding and losing friends and comrades on his mad quest for glory, trying hot water and sand and sawdust and salt and all manner of schemes to lose his car from winter's vile grip--to no avail. Many were the times he sank down to his knees on the sidewalk and cursed the cruel fate that doomed him to this exercise in futility. Perhaps he reflected with keen awareness the hubris that led him to own a car in New York City. Perhaps, even now, at this late hour, he struggles on, dauntless (what is daunt, by the way, does anyone know?), unswayed by the dark and the cold and the exhaust fumes. A lonely warrior, a brave soldier of Cobble Hill.

He stands as a beacon of hope and perseverance to us all.

And Tartuffe?

Americans don't really do farce. We do great satire, but I think we take ourselves a little too seriously when it comes to comedy. At the end of the day, even the stupidest sitcom has one or two moments where the characters turn into real people, have a heart-to-heart, and remind the audience that for all their crazy schemes and outrageous situations, they're just like us: flawed, but fundamentally human.

Farce, on the other hand, is basically a live-action cartoon, and relies on unrealistic, somewhat one-dimensional characters who are just too stupid or greedy or awkward to generate sympathy. Farce lacks self-awareness and sentimentality. "Seinfeld" and "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" are the only two American TV shows that I can think of off-hand that could be called farces, because the characters don't invite empathy or even feint toward personal growth and development. They aren't humans, they're caricatures.

I happen to love farce. I feel that outside of a really good sitcom like "Roseanne" or "Community," sentimentality in comedy is unearned and unwelcome. It always feels like it was thrown in at the last minute because logic dictates that 1) comedy makes you laugh, so 2) comedy makes you happy, so 3) comedies must therefore have happy endings for the characters (hence the old writer's expression, comedies end in weddings, tragedies end in funerals). It's sound logic if you're a good person, but I'm actually kind of a bastard and I like to laugh at the stupidity and suffering of those hapless on-screen idiots.

One of my favorite purveyors of farce--besides most of the comedy lineup of the BBC--is Moliere (real name Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622 - 1673), a Frenchman who Wikipedia calls "one of greatest masters of comedy in Western literature," so you know it must be true. Last night, a friend took me to see an off-off Broadway production of Moliere's "Tartuffe," presented by the Workshop Theater Company, and a grand time was had by all.

"Tartuffe" is about a con artist who pretends to be a devote religious man in order to worm his way into the household of an aristocratic gentleman. The gentleman thinks the sun rises and sets out of Tartuffe's ass, but everyone else in the house knows the man is a hypocrite and a fraud. They just can't convince the master of the house to see the truth, and Tartuffe's influence is wrecking everyone's life. Will the gentleman force his daughter to marry Tartuffe? Will Tartuffe succeed in seducing the gentleman's comely wife? Will that sassy servant ever shut up? Are they really going to do this whole thing in rhyme?

The cool thing about a Moliere production is that even the English translations of his works can be set to rhyme. If you have actors that can commit themselves to what basically amounts to bawdy Dr. Seuss dialogue, the whole thing really pops. In college, I saw a production of Moliere's "The Miser" that wasn't in rhyme, and it was good. But the surreality that's the bedrock of a good farce gets a chance to shine when the characters speak in rhyme. See what I did there?

And here's a tip for the out-of-towners. Off-off Broadway shows are surprisingly affordable, less than $20 a seat, with professional actors and everything. I highly recommend going to an off-off Broadway show rather than a Broadway show if you're coming to visit me. The terms "Broadway," "off-Broadway," and "off-off Broadway" just refer to the number of seats in the theater, not to the location of the theater itself. You can see an off-off Broadway play without leaving the safe and shiny tourist ghetto.

New Years Redesign

I rather like the Buddha and Lady Liberty together like that. Not a lot of people realize how many Buddhists live in Hawaii. Mum and I were once in Hilo, on the east side of our island, for a Christmas concert with the children's chorus (we were music geeks together for a brief time, Mum and I, she in the adult and me in the kiddy chorus). We decided to drive around the neighborhood after the show and look at Christmas lights, but we didn't see a single display. Took us twenty minutes to remember that Hilo is mostly Japanese people, who are mostly Buddhist, an equation that results in a net total of zero Christmas displays. Lovely gardens, though. Rains quite a lot on the east side.

This Christmas I was back on the Big Island for holiday, visiting with Mum and Sister. I managed two days of work in the Sister's office--my customer service stories pale in comparison to hers, she works with addicts and youth offenders--one trip to the beach, one moonlit walk around the cow pasture and coffee orchards with the cat at four in the morning, one day of ironing quilt material, and three days of yardwork in my nightgown with no underwear on.

All in all, a successful vacation. Good to be back, everyone. Hau'oli Makahiki Hou!