People who help people, and the rest of us

The Irish Rose in Waikiki is surprisingly hard to find at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday. I've only ever gone there on my way home from other bars on payday, when it's very dark, very late, and it seems like a very good idea to eat too many Louisiana hot links with spicy mayonnaise.

"Yeah, I'll eat the street meat from here." ~ Rachel making good decisions.

Mum seems to have been secretly drinking there--with MY friends!--in the years since I left, because like a homing pigeon, she walked us right up to the stairs and into the only bar in Honolulu where it's still acceptable to smoke. The blackout curtains were drawn to keep away the sunlight and the shame, and we were the only women in the place. It was Veterans Day, so Mum bought a round of drinks for a biker gang that came up to the bar after one of their bikes broke down on the street outside.

Dean mixed us his famous bloody marys, which we felt okay ordering because there weren't that many people there on Tuesday morning and he had time to mix specialty cocktails for us. He even brought out his special stash of super-spicy olives, because it was my birthday week and he expresses his affection through alcohol.

For you, my friend.

 Dean and I had worked together at Honolulu Weekly, back when newspapers were still a thing. The Weekly is gone now, as is the magazine I wrote for when I moved to New York. So now, I work at a college and he works in a bar. There's an odd symmetry to our career choices. We're catching the youth at both ends.

He's also going to open a bookstore, the natural habitat of the misanthrope. We came up down a lot of possible names for the store for him, each funnier to us than the last, on account of the bloody marys. We laughed for an embarrassingly long time about "Hard Backs and Soft Covers"--or maybe it was "Hard Covers and Soft Backs." We also liked "Book 'Em, Deano," "Books on Beretania," and "Hana Hou Books," though I think he'd stopped listening to us by then.

I get along with Dean because he's one of the very few friends in my life who, like me, doesn't much like other people. I'm not saying we don't have friends. Dean actually has a very wide social circle, with many people who love him enough to come down to his workplace and tell stories about their worst, sleaziest acts ever done in theme parks. He'll even officiate at your wedding, if you're dying to have the officiant read the most violently misogynistic parts of the Bible during the ceremony.

I myself am moderately popular, especially in Honolulu, where the slower pace of life made it easier to nurture human relationships. But while I like individual people, humanity as a whole kind of freaks me out. I dread meeting new people, and even having people I know over to my home makes me nervous. What if they want to use my toilet? What if they want to spend the night? What if they never leave? 

So I was surprised, on my whirlwind of visits to Honolulu friends and colleagues, to learn how many of my loved ones have careers in health care and social services. Sunday night, I ran into the old president of my college hiking club, who teaches high school science. Monday, we spent several hours visiting with a good friend who does social work in an oncology unit (though she's taking time off for her new baby). Tuesday night, after spending a few hours day-drinking with Dean and then wandering through Ala Moana Mall trying to make bad shopping decisions, we had dinner with a high school friend who's studying nursing. Friday night I met up with college friends, one in nursing and the other busy preserving watersheds with an environmental non-profit. (Mum and my sister had no idea how close they came to being dragged out into the wilderness for a guided hike with him. I love hiking.)

My feet hurt, I'm tired, I'm getting sunburned, can we take a cab?

The BF preserves neighborhoods, my brother-in-law is a drug abuse counselor,  a college friend teaches high school English, another high school friend is a psychologist for troubled teenagers--all these people in my life are Pinky Thompsons, and I can't take a cab home without wondering if I should have the driver drop me off a block away so no one will know where I live.

And then we have Dean, who has alienated every employee at Disneyworld, though they should have known better than to put "Sit On My Face" on the karaoke machine. There's just something about his black and shriveled heart that calls out to my own and reminds me that it's okay to be a private, anti-social asshole.

On Saturday, Mum, my sister and I were drinking at the airport bar, surrounded by our luggage. The vacation was over and it was time to bring back souvenirs and Liliha Bakery coco puffs to our respective partners. My sister looked at our heap o' crap and worried aloud that no one would be able to sit at the table next to ours.

"Fuck em," sneered the person on her way back to New York City. 

More Summer So Far

Crap, summer's almost over, isn't it? I'm going to resist the urge to open my work email on my home computer. I've already slept in late, watched excessive amounts of cartoons, and sat about the apartment in my own filth like an aged cat--I'm not about to start being responsible just yet.

Maybe I could read more Game of Thrones for an hour or four...

I did make it back down to New Jersey to pick berries, but there were no berries to be found. I did see an excessive amount of little wild rabbits, though. Appropriate, since I re-read "Watership Down" this summer.

Oh, and R sent me the pictures of our July hike in Wawayanda State Park!

I'm never going to wear the band shirts I own to an actual performance, so here I am wearing one out in the wilderness where no one can see me buy the bears. And bears are into dubstep anyway, so who cares what they think?

The BF and I had some time off together, so we took Metronorth up to New Haven, Connecticut. Metronorth is pretty fun. You get to leave from Grand Central Station, not Penn Station, and if you don't know what that means, let's just say there's a reason the evil aliens in "The Avengers" trashed the beautiful, elegant edifice of Grand Central instead of the dank, dystopian tunnels of Penn Station.

Aliens: "We're destroying this!" Everyone else: "Good."

Yale University is in New Haven. The campus and its immediate surroundings are quite nice, a bit like Cobble Hill with the little restaurants and bookstores and outrageously priced fair trade clothing and accessories. The rest of New Haven is like Spokane but with slightly better-dressed pedestrians.

I don't have pictures of them. The BF was camera-master that day and he took over 100 pictures of buildings, but nary a one of unfashionable townies.

Yes, so much more interesting than that guy with the top hat and the feather vest.

So that is the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which the BF would have me tell you was designed by Gordon Bunshaft and completed in 1963. I would make a crude joke about the architect's last name, and was thinking up a pretty good one, but then we went inside and--

Guh...

Beinecke Library is this hollow white cube. In the center of the cube is a smaller glass cube full of books. 

Spu...

The building is make of these slabs of marble that are thin enough for sunlight to leak through, but there are no windows or skylights. 
 

It's a little like being underwater.

The rare and ancient tomes, which include a complete and intact Gutenberg Bible, are protected from excessive light, heat and humidity in their glittering glass tower. 

nuh...!

There are these cool Mad Men-era seating areas with low leather chairs and marble tables, where you can sit at the foot of the tower and just stare up at the books resting behind the glass, like the jewelry box of some enormous, nerdy Titan.

I'm spent.

I don't want to read them. I don't even want to touch them. I just want to sit there forever in their presence.

Mostly because they're classics, so they'll be really slow and boring and have those "s" letters that look like "f" letters, which give me a headache. And that right there is why I'll never be a classics scholar. What else is going on in New Haven?

Smash cut!

The BF took this picture from across the street. As soon as he lowered the camera, I disappeared inside without even waiting for him to join me. When he finally made it across and came inside, I was already handing my money over and ready to leave. I found a Catwoman book. It made me happy.

Speaking of cats, the BF and I went to the Brooklyn Museum at MY request (gasp!) to see the Divine Feline exhibit in the Egyptian wing. It's a small exhibit in a side gallery, featuring cats and lions from their permanent collection.

awww...

The BF liked the bronze mother cat with kittens the best.

AWWW...

 You can't see it in this picture, but that little one looking into Mom's face has an open mouth. He's meowing at her! It's so cute, I can't stand it!

I went to the dentist yesterday and got my teeth spackled. Then I went to the farmer's market in Grand Army Plaza, because I'd hate to have a summer where I didn't go at least once to the biggest farmer's market in Brooklyn. But I had to make the trip into Manhattan to the Union Square farmer's market, because nobody in Grand Army Plaza was selling purple potatoes.

I got to Union Square just as the vendors were starting to load up their trucks and take down tents. But most were still open and about three booths in, I spotted a laminated sign with some authentic frontier gibberish name for what we in Hawaii call Okinawan sweet potatoes. A heavily bearded man with a waxed gray mustache took my money and said, "You're looking happy." I replied, "It's because I found my purple potatoes!"

I cooked some last night with fancy purple and yellow carrots in a curry paste I bought at Pearl River. The curry paste kind of covered up the flavor of the funny-colored roots, but I have lots more of each and will make many delicious dishes with them.

And when I go back to work tomorrow, I will sit on the lawn in the rose garden and eat cold purple potatoes and purple carrots from my pink Hello Kitty lunchbox. Like a proper grown-up.

Neil Gaiman at Brooklyn Academy of Music

 "Why are we here? Obviously it's to suffer and die and create art." Neil Gaiman, 2010.

Last Tuesday, Neil Gaiman's new novel "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" hit bookstores. I was fortunate enough to be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a live reading, followed by a Q&A with the author.

If I could go back in time and tell my wee thirteen-year-old Big Island Rachel self that she would live to see her favorite author Neil Gaiman speak not just once, but twice, I'd slap myself at the decadence of the suggestion.

And then engage in a fight to the death, because I'd watched enough scifi at 13 to know that future selves are almost always Terminators.

Regular readers remember that I saw Gaiman speak at the New Yorker Festival in 2010, which is where I got that great quote above. The format of this event was a little different. Since he was launching a book instead of just rambling on (awesomely) about things that interested him, the setting was more formal and structured. The house lights were turned off like it was a proper performance, the Q&A session was much shorter, and at the end, instead of just coming down off the stage directly into the swirling crowd of his fans, he was shunted off to a little room to sign book after book for a massive line of people that went out the door of BAM, down the front steps, and wrapped around the outside of the building.

I didn't end up staying in that massive line to get my book signed. R and I decided by 9:45 that getting up for work the next morning was more important than standing in the rain for another three hours to get three seconds of face time with the author, so we just got copies of the pre-signed books and went home. Sometimes being a grown-ass woman means you have to sacrifice your nerd-cred for your career.

My boss told me I can't wear my Catwoman outfit to the office anymore. Sorry, Past Self.

We were both kind of bummed that we couldn't stay to meet Gaiman. R even had a hand-made mask she was going to give him, because Gaiman accepts tributes from fans like he's Lord of the Nerd-Manor, and I was going to take a picture of him wearing the mask to put on tumblr so everyone would be jealous. Oh, such plans we had!

But I got to see my favorite author read from his new book, talk about writing his new book, and tell a story about a teacup in the town of Gaiman, Argentina. Nothing about the experience was spoiled because I didn't actually get within spitting distance of the poor guy, who had already done a week's worth of publicity in England before his appearance at BAM and was leaving at 4AM the next morning for the American book tour.

Besides, as Peter Aguero said when he introduced Gaiman that night, "He's just a dude who wrote a book about sand."

Speaking of which, I'm reviewing "The Sandman" series over at Big Island Rachel's Books. You can read along with me!

Best use of a dog leash ever

I get weird looks from the clerks when I'm browsing the comic book store and reject any hardcover editions they try to sell me because hardcovers are too difficult to read in the bathtub. They're big, heavy, awkward and painful to hold aloft for too long, and the expense and quality is so high that I feel really bad when I inevitably drop them in the water. Book-n-bath time is very important to me, I can't have it marred by sore hand muscles and damaged artwork.

See this person up here? This anonymous Internet Edison, with their seashell shower curtain and their pink dog leash, solving the problems that plague the discriminating reader who values both literature AND cleanliness?

This person understands. This person gets it. Bless you, random tumblr user (tumblr-er?). You're the reason we can have nice things.

Tea, Chocolate, Gasoline

New York City is slowly grinding towards normality after the hurricane. Yesterday, R and I went walking around the East Village and the Lower East Side, and despite a somewhat higher-than-usual amount of blocked sidewalks and backhoes, I think we're going to be okay.

Except for the gasoline situation, which remains terrifying. One of our student workers said there was a line of cars outside her apartment waiting for a gas station two miles down the road.

Helicopter attacks have skyrocketed on the Long Island Expressway.

As of Friday, we're on Jimmy Carter solutions: odd and even numbered license plates get gas on different days. (Incidentally, I saw the movie "Argo," so I may be throwing in a lot of Jimmy Carter references until I see "Wreck-It Ralph.") Of all the things I imagined going wrong in my Hurricane Sandy worst case scenarios, a gas shortage didn't even crack my top ten worries list, one because I don't drive a car, two because NYC has the best public transportation system in the country, and three because nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic.

I'd like to believe that a car-related clusterfuck of this magnitude, in a region of the country that is supposed to have the public transportation infrastructure that would prevent this from happening, will lead to an honest conversation about our dependence on fossil fuels and solutions to combat said dependence. But I don't think it will. Too much money on the other side of the argument.

With that fun thought, onto the weekend round-up!

R and I visited St. Mark's Comics in the East Village and said hello to my friend there, who used to work at the St. Mark's Brooklyn location, but got a bit of a promotion to Manhattan, so good on her. We also checked out Forbidden Planet's new location, which is right next door to their old location but has a hard-wood floor and higher ceilings. Anything that makes a comic book store feel like a legitimate place of business and not a front for the one unpopular mob family that nobody ever invites to parties is an improvement.

We walked down to Allen Street to Bluestockings Bookstore, a fair trade cafe and radical activist center that sells menstrual cups and Marxist literature. My kind of place. I've been meaning to go there for a while, because why live in New York City if you aren't going to avail yourself of the awesomely specific sub-genre bookstores? It was everything I ever dreamed of, down to the guy with dreadlocks who served me my fair trade Ceylon tea au lait. I was actually scoping it out for a location for my upcoming birthday party, but not everyone I invited menstruates or is a Communist, so party favors would be a little difficult.

Instead, I'm going to celebrate my birthday at The Chocolate Room, right here in Brooklyn. Everybody likes chocolate! R and I went there after lunch to sample truffles and order a chocolate pecan pie, to be served in-house at my birthday party.

I was hoping I'd come out of there smelling delightfully of chocolate. But the BF hugged me and said I smelled like hamburgers. I had to remind him that when there's a gas shortage, death is listening and will take the first man that screams.

Just another Saturday night on the East River.

About Time

Spring took its damn time.

It's finally nice enough to hang around outside, but it looks like we're going to go straight from frigid winter to sweltering summer without much spring in between. Shame. I like the low- to mid-60 degree weather: silk scarves, little leather jackets, French novels in translation.

Does weather affect what you want to read? I like English novels in the winter, French in the spring, Japanese or Latin American in the summer, and local New York literature in the fall. Comic books I just read year round, cuz there's no seasonal limits on asskicking.

I just finished reading Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids," which isn't French, but she spent time in France and was heavily inspired by French poets, so it sort of counts. I've reviewed it on the other blog. But don't read it. Instead, go outside and view the dogwood blossoms if you have any.

http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2011/04/just-kids-patti-smith.html