victory is mine! - Stewie Griffin

I feel vindicated at last by the New York Times!

bit of earth

If any of you have read The Secret Garden at some point in life (and if you haven't you should immediately), you'll remember the moment when Mary asks her hunch-backed uncle: Might I have a bit of earth?

I thought of this as the airplane I rode circled around New York before landing in LaGuardia some time ago. (It was at night--the only time to arrive in this place by plane.) New York is so tiny! (And when I say New York I really mean Manhattan, because that's what most people think of first.) It's a blip on a radar screen. A bit of earth. But an intriguing one all the same.

What is it about those little skyscrapers and flickering lights that attracts and disgusts people? After all, it's only a place. A mere place in a world of places. A place that will someday crumble into the earth like ancient Rome.

As the plane circled Queens, I saw the big metal globe erected for the World's Fair in 1964. Someone in New York explodes light on this somewhat ugly planet every night. When I first moved to the city, I searched for this globe. I figured it was in Manhattan--as everything worth looking at should be. I wasn't much of a web surfer then, so it took me awhile to find that it was in Queens, of all places. (I discovered YouTube not too long ago--a million years after everyone else.) When I finally visited the sight, there was this huge Ecuadorian festival going on all around it. A nice reminder that there are more places in the world than New York--or the US.

All of the sudden we were skimming the river to the earth. And just like that I was sucked into the beauty and grossness of this world of merely 8 million. A gypsy cab driver tried to seduce me into his cab when I left the terminal, but a New York-styled me curtly refused. A few years ago, I may have been persuaded.

no millions, but a good time anyway

I had my first New York reading--of my fiction--on Friday night, at the Lucky Cat in Williamsburg. I think it went really well. After much agonizing and a flurry of editing, I managed to get a piece of a story that filled the 12 minute slot.

Not that some of my co-readers tried to do the same.

One chick took at least 12 minutes preaching to us about the facts that had 'inspired' her to write her (unpublished) novel. Although the news of the treatment of prisoners during Katrina were horrible and need to be talked and written about, by the end of her diatribe I was just plain tired. She was completely self-righteous in her tone and had that I Know the Suffering of the Prisoners attitude. Now, how much empathy a white, mid-30s woman going to NYU (much more ridiculously expensive than Sarah Lawrence) can get for a population she hasn't met remains to be seen.

Only after a long sermon did she actually read her fiction. I must say I can't remember but a word or two. There was something about breasts rising and falling, I think.

But it continues to prove a theory a friend and I have cooked up for readings--there always has to be one amazing and one hideous reader. (This has only been disproved once--in October I went to a New Yorker Festival reading and both readers were beyond reproach.) This is not to say I was the amazing one, since there were five in all, but I didn't get the hideous rap.

There is something calming about a bright light in your face. As soon as I stepped up to the mic, I was competely covered in light and couldn't see a soul. So I felt comfortable reading words only a few have read and even fewer have heard out loud.

No agents or publishers came forth and pulled out a million dollar contract, but I feel pretty positive about the whole experience.

(Oh, and a drunk poet hit on me after the fact, telling me how much he liked to replace words like 'song' with 'thong.')

huzzah!

A student recently gave me what I think is a great compliment: Class seems to go so fast when you are here. The class before this one seems so long.

Is it more than an hour and a half? I said.

No, it's the same. It just feels longer than yours.

I thanked her. She practically skipped out of the room.

I've felt rather crummy these last few weeks about my teaching. So it was good to hear.

oh, tannenbaum

Last weekend we bought our first Christmas tree. A fake tree, mind you. (I'm sure my older brother would groan at this.) But Tom's allergic and the pine needles would make our already messy apartment that much more so and the fire hazard...if we ever get a bigger place with a fire escape, I'd get one of those little trees in a tub and put it outside in the off months. Real Christmas trees are kind of horrible, really. Cutting down a perfectly healthy tree so people can bring it inside for a few weeks and then dump it is a bit wasteful. Most people in New York (people actually somehow fit trees in their apartments) take them to the shredding place, but you do see them dumped in the gutter with wet tinsel in their branches. It's rather sad. The Christmas tree sellers take all of the unsold ones to the curb the day after Christmas.

But this was supposed to be about our tree.

We bought our little four-foot tree at a drugstore (the cashier looked at the box and said, We sell Christmas trees?). It was underneath a bunch of gaudy ornaments, just waiting for someone to take it home. We got some of the less-gaudy ornaments (even a nice glittering angel) and were on our way. The tree already has lights in it (so hickish, I know), so we didn't have to worry about that. It's all set up on two boxes in the corner (nicely hiding a coffee stain (yes, a coffee stain on a wall--long boring story)) with its little lights glimmering. I even found some fake snow to wrap around it's "trunk"--some scraps of fabric left over from my wedding dress. See, hanging onto things works out! Yay for Mennonites!

Tom and I always intended to get a tree, but since we lived in Menno House the first three Christmases (which had a nice huge fake tree), and last winter we just never got around to it. But this year, dammit, we were going to do it. And did. I'm also going to break out my nativity from Bethlehem--I just need to find a flat place to put it. When I opened the box the other day, the olivewood smell wafted up, and I remembered Tom handing it to me on a dusty road in Beit Sahour (it was my birthday present).

There is something comforting about a Christmas tree. I've been home all afternoon, trying to write but reading or sleeping instead, and every now and again I look to our tree. Fake though it is, it's doing its best. And honestly, that's the most anyone can do. When I was little, I'd lay underneath the tree and look up at the lights and our felt animal ornaments (some of which can be seen in the photo above). My brothers and I would play with our matchbox cars on the presents (my parents never fooled us with the Santa Claus notion) with nothing but the Christmas lights to guide us.