Ruminations from the Terrordome

Oct. 16 will mark three years since my mom died, and I've decided it's time for my dad to get a girlfriend. He's 74, but a pretty vibrant and healthy 74, and he's always been a people person. He's a little overweight, but still has a lot of hair and looks pretty good for his age, and he is a great guy who keeps up on current events, remains curious about life and always has a lot to say. He's also a genuinely nice person and has always garnered a lot of interest from the ladies, even those much younger than him, so I think he wouldn't have any problem finding dates if he was out there looking.

I didn't get him anything for his birthday this year (it was Aug. 19) so I think I'm going to sign him up for a dating Web site and show him how to use it. I did some research and it looks like this site called Senior Friend Finder (http://seniorfriendfinder.com/go/g740699-pct) is supposed to be pretty good. If he's up for it, the next time I visit him in PA -- which at this point is scheduled for Sept. 28, the day my sister is scheduled to give birth to her fourth child and my first niece -- I'm going to sign him up and show him the ropes. He's seemed a little depressed lately, and I know he'll feel a lot better if he had someone to share his life with. And since my sister is going to have her hands full with four kids, and she does a lot of care taking for my dad now, I'm sure she'd appreciate if he had a special someone to spend time with so he wasn't in her hair all the time.

If anybody knows anyone I can set my dad up with in suburban Philadelphia, don't hesitate to let me know!

I got a last-minute invite to see The New Pornographers last night at the Bowery Ballroom from my friend Jennifer, and I am so glad that happened, because it was the best live show I've seen in a long time. 

I'd been a fan, but not a big one, and I had seen them ages ago when they first started out, but it had been awhile since I'd been acquainted with their music or their live show.  I absolutely adore the solo work of Neko Case, who sings with them, and saw her about a month or so ago live in Central Park.  But The New Pornographers had dropped off my radar, so I wasn't sure what to expect.  And I must say, even though the show started off slowly and the band bantered way too long between some of the songs (I'm a fan of the indie-rock banter, but these guys sometimes took it a little too far, I must admit), it was totally and utterly an amazing experience.

The show started with a false start, with A.C. Newman kicking off the first song on guitar and then stopping everyone to tune up and correct some feedback action that was happening.  Several snide comments from band mates and about five minutes later, they finally got going for real with the first song.  For about the first half hour of the show, Neko was having some problems with not being able to hear herself in her monitor -- as someone who has played music and sang in bands, I know it's really hard to hit the right notes if you can't hear anything -- so she appeared flustered and didn't even sing all of her parts on some of the songs.  Even with all of that, the band's amazing power and utter professionalism when they get right down to the music emanated through the muck, and whenever they actually got around to playing a song it was pretty fucking awesome.

Then about halfway into the show everyone hit their stride, and it became a completely transcendental experience.  I nearly wept a few times.  Seriously.  I think I love The New Pornographers not just for the wall of sound they put up, but for how they're really a vocal-driven band.  I love that they don't necessarily have to harmonize every time Neko and A.C. and Kathryn sing together, how they can all be singing the same melody line.  It really gives the vocals a fullness and impact you don't get with just one voice.  And when they do harmonize, it's even more haunting.  I also really dig all of the wordless vocal lines they do, all the "oohs" and such.  It adds a playful element to a sound that is pretty fierce at times.

So it kicked ass.  I had to post about this immediately when I got to the office, before checking the wires or the blogs or figuring out what I'm going to write today.  I don't know where I would be if it wasn't for great music, especially a live show.  I never regret seeing music I like live, even if it's not the stellar kind of show The New Pornographers put on.  I'll always get something out of it.  But last night was truly something special, even with the kinks and foibles. 

It's so good in fact that I posted my oh-so-sexy Xena, Warrior Princess-like photo of me at the waterfall I visited while in Maine last week. It's a bit of a vanity shot, I know, but hey, sometimes you need to remind yourself how fabulous you really are when the world is handing you lemons. And the waterfall is very pretty and reminds me of the nice day I had.

So the other day I was reprimanded (albeit gently) by my very cool boss about coming into work on time. I work 10-6 officially, and am the only person in my NYC "bureau," so it's not really like anyone knows what time I come to work. (Except for that little problem of the time clock of the new millennium, instant-messenger.) So I have been making an effort for the past couple of days to be at work at 10 on the nose, or at least a few minutes after, not 10:30 or even 10:40 when I usually drag myself into the office.

Despite my best efforts, I didn't make it in until 10:30 today because I saw my friend Aibhinn on the street on my way over, and she was walking to her office, which is a restaurant she co-owns and manages, which just happens to be near my office. She also lives right near me. So we got to chatting, and the dear girl bought me a coffee and a muffin at Once Upon a Tart, which was so nice of her even though it's HER 30th birthday tomorrow. (She said it was because she didn't return a text message I sent her Tuesday. Everyone should be so nice about not returning texts!)

Anyway, we sat on a bench for a bit and drank coffee and ate our goodies and had a lovely talk about life and its pitfalls and pratfalls and how sometimes you get a series of crazy things happening all at once not only to you, but around you, and it's a wake-up call to assess things in your life and take control over what you have control of, blah blah blah. And just like that -- just because I had a nice, unexpected moment with a new friend on what could have been a regular old walk to work -- I felt as if the Universe might be swinging back on my side. Not that it has to! Not that I EXPECT it to! Nope, no attachment here, I swear. But it raised my spirits and gave me, if not a real burst of hope, than at least a glimmer of it. And I'll take what I can get right now.

I have been trying not to watch the date lately, just hoping that this shitty, shitty month will be over and I can pretend that it was all just a bad dream. If I can get through today, I will have survived. Yay. I never really have good stuff happen in my life in the summer. For some reason, autumn is always a far better season. I'm a Libra; my birthday is in that greatest of months, October. I had an intuitive counselor/energy medicine healer in the SF Bay Area (yes, I had one, and he is awesome) tell me autumn is a powerful season for me. Summers I just usually hunker down until autumn, and then the weather changes and things get hopeful again.

Of course, I've also had some what I thought were great things happen in autumn that I'd rather now soon forget, so September has become a bit of a trigger month. And my mom died the day before my birthday in mid-October (it will be three years Oct. 16), so now that month is tainted. Shit. Does autumn suck, too, now??

And don't even get me started about spring. My three major break-ups in my life have come in the March/April time frame. So spring sucks, too. And winter is cold and contains the winter holidays, which I can't seem to summon much energy for anymore. So forget about winter.

OK, it's official. I don't have a single good season anymore. My life sucks! Wah. It can't be this bad...can it??

Let me try to be optimistic for a second, though--if something bad has happened in every season of the year, then that means something good can happen at any time, too, right? There. That's better. I'm feeling so much better now. :) August is going to be a great month, damn it! It HAS to be. I'm going to make it so.

In other news...anybody wanna buy a two-year-old West Elm coffee table? I'm selling it for $85. It's just too big for my apartment, and I purchased a lovely old piano bench yesterday to replace it. (I love the idea of having a heavy, weathered piano bench as my coffee table. And it's so much more spatially economic.) Here's the link for what I'm selling on CL: http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/fur/385586736.html

I found out today that LaGuardia airport shuts down at midnight, only because my flight from Boston Logan was delayed from 8:30 pm until 10:00 and before anyone knew what time we might take off people mused (in that doomsday way travelers have when a flight is delayed) that we may never get out of Logan if the flight can't meet the LaGuardia curfew. Luckily, we met it, and I'm home (is NYC home now, some nearly 11 months after I moved? I guess so) and free to blog.

I've been having a rough go of it these past couple of weeks but today I had one of those little moments of serendipity that gives me a tiny ray of hope in the otherwise bleak landscape of my emotional life. I'd been feeling pretty emotionally raw all day and had even peered over the edge of the abyss, worried that the disoriented sadness I'd been feeling since Christian passed and my ex stomped on my heart (for the last time! i swear!) would turn into a full-fledged depression.

To keep myself sane, I've been reading books about spirituality lately as part of my mission to continue to work on myself and find my own happiness. On my quick flight back tonight I had two books on my lap, a book about Buddhism by Thich Nhat Hanh called "Teachings on Love" and Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," a light-hearted yet philosophical memoir about one woman's journey from depression to enlightenment on a trip through several countries. As the flight attendants were coming through with the beverage service one of them (male, gay) who saw the books when he was getting me ginger ale said I was reading the kinds of books he loved and suggested I read an Indian motivational writer called Robin Sharma. (Not sure if the guy sounds like my cup of tea, but I am open to doing some research.) He then divulged to me that he'd recently had to put his cat down (aww, poor guy) and had been told to read "Eat, Pray, Love," so it was next on his reading list. I almost handed the guy my copy, since I'd finished reading it, but there are still some passages that resonated with me that I'd like to read again, so I selfishly kept it for myself.

Anyway, I know it's a bit corny to think this way, but it was kind of nice that on a day when I'd been pretty down about the stuff going on in my life, I had a little moment of over-sharing and with a flight attendant who shared my taste in spiritual self-development books, and it made me feel a little less alone. Yeah, that's kind of silly. But the more I study Buddhism, the more I think about the self in relation to the rest of the world, so the moment had its own little significance to me. (OK, you can laugh at me now. Go ahead. I don't mind.)

Ugh. I must really be reaching the end of my rope to be having moments of communion with flight attendants when they serve me ginger ale. I think I really need to get some sleep!