oh, so many things to wonder.

this image greeting me this morning brought up oh so many questions, foremost being, 'are deer antlers recyclable?'.

runners up: how the hell did deer antlers end up in my recycling can?, was there a deer on diamond street, shot from an apartment window? did one of the bearded hipsters so plentiful in williamsburg decide to wander over and do more than look the part, but take up hunting? does the weekly snow also come with reindeers?! oh, and since we're in greenpoint, was this deer polish?

oh, so many things to wonder.

they say good things come in three, don't they?

photo by kim and tristan's incredible and multi-talented doula

today my dear friend kim turns 33. so i guess it's an appropriate time to announce belatedly, that holy crap! kim now has 3 babies! which is to say, welcome loretta adeline.

she came at thanksgiving time, which makes her already seven weeks old. and in case you're wondering, yes, it's driving me crazy that i haven't been formally introduced.

big sister ginger

big sister rose, practicing her baby talk. loretta, not impressed.

i suppose this is also an appropriate time to share images from kim's baby shower, which jade and i were lucky enough to swoop into town for a couple of days to attend...

click here to see the full flickr set.

iphone photo of the day

catching these spontaneous moments was one of my favorite things about owning an iphone. but alas, it seems i'm simply not an adult enough to keep one alive (but hey-i've kept a cat alive for 12 years! knock on wood, i can't be that bad!).

my first iphone seemed to be so tough that after dropping it at least 80 times from my overall chest pocket while bending over at work, to no consequence, i became nonchalant. then one day i didn't even pick it up after dropping it absent-mindedly. instead, i stepped on it. one down.

so after over a year of hand wringing and withdrawl, i bought another one. used.
after three blissful months, it just mysteriously stopped working in the middle of hopping trains to cleveland. now don't laugh. this may sound irresponsible, but understand that this time i was so careful! I had it packed away in my backpack in a plastic ziploc bag and didn't even turn it on! but the genius at the apple store announced it dead on arrival due to water damage, data not even salvageable.

the conclusion to be drawn is that clearly, i'm not meant to have an iphone. so although my work takes me between two studios, and art gallery, a tattoo shop and all up and down the new york and beyond's waterfront, i pack this little green flip phone--a years old cast off hand-me-down from the williamsons. sometimes it just stops charging, but eventually it rallies. these days it's become a conversation piece. it seems there are two kinds of phone people use: the $20 disposable drug dealer phones or the iphone/blackberry/android smartphone. when i pull out my motorola pebl, it is met with laughter and wonder. as though instead of pulling out an ipod on the subway, i've pulled out an 8-track machine.

but i'm not afraid to break it, and hence, it survives.
this, by the way, is how i feel about expensive jewelry. terrified. gimme rhinestones any day and no thanks to diamonds.

being on the cutting edge of the trend, not so fun in this case

new york city is being overtaken by bedbugs. we all know this. in fact, the entire country seems to be, with 3 cities in ohio ranking in the top 10 for per capita infestations. you can't walk a half a block without having to carefully maneuver around abandoned mattresses speckled with telltale flecks of sleeping victims blood. can't step on the subway without having to see bedbugs in advertisements blown up to the size of your head. bedbugs are the new ever-present monsters of the city now. the new roaches. the new muggers.
everyone knows multiple people who have them. everyone is in fear. but it's now a group problem that is met with empathetic sympathy.

this wasn't the case four years ago when i had one of the worst infestations i've heard of. it was august, and i was wearing long sleeve shirts in an attempt to cover up my nasty devoured arms. bite on the eyelid? just leave the sunglasses on all day! bedbugs were something kept very secret. no one wanted to know you had them. and no one wanted to know you if you had them. oh, and have them i did. the elderly lady who lived downstairs worked as a maid at a 5-star that had to close down five floors for bedbug extermination. it seems the infested carpets and furniture were just too tempting to pass up, and she decided she'd hoard them in our basement. it took over TEN visits from the exterminators, complete decimation of any semblance of normalcy in my apartment and the development of full post-traumatic stress disorder before i learned of this key fact. she's lucky our building didn't turn into a riot mob and come to her in the middle of the night with pitchforks and torches. we probably would have, if we hadn't been so damn tired. in a turn of events baffling and SO unfair, her apartment was one of only two in the building that was not infested. you can read my delirious reports here and here.

but all of this preamble to merely report a silly memory: during our many exhaustive exterminations, i quickly entered the phone number of the extermination company into my phone as 'BEDBUGS'. seemed simple, straightforward. first thing that popped into my head. but sometimes when my phone would ring, sleep deprived and on edge as i was, it would be very startling to look on my cell display and see the words BEDBUGS CALLING. you can run. but you can't hide. they're even calling on the damn phone!

you can do anything but lay off of my blue suede shoes.

when my dad was young he pretended to hate elvis. pshaw, he scoffed. what's the big fuss about? later, he admitted to me that he'd just been jealous because the girls were so crazy for elvis. in flipping through my dad's old high school yearbooks, it seems that the girls were pretty crazy for him too, and the style he rocked was most definitely along the king's lines. and i don't mean white rhinestone-studded jumpsuit elvis, but the slick, young greaser, the elvis in blue jeans.

by the time i was a little girl, my dad had gotten over the stigma of liking elvis and no longer hid his full blown admiration of and devotion to the king. Rather, my dad embraced elvis as a hero, as someone who could animate his serious self to dancing in the car, pounding the dashboard as he drove and poking me with a big smile. in this way, i cannot think of elvis without thinking of my dad. fondly.

this morning i walked into pop's popular clothing, looking for some work boots. early saturday morning. bleak january sidewalks covered with a thin layer of treacherous ice and most of the roll down gates still locked down tight. the owner of the disorganized warehouse of a store turned elvis on the stereo and announced "the king would have been 76 years old today!" he looked an awful lot like my dad. and it made me smile.

31 march 2009

it's been a while since i've posted any of these images from my '98 pictures of 98 people' series. since i'm so busy/uninspired over here, seems like a good time to continuing sharing them.

happy new year hoppin' john!