It Takes Two (Wheels) to Tango

Portland is a lot like Camp Granada: They say we'll have some fun if it stops raining.

And this weekend, it/we did.

We *could* have had our fun at Portland's Pride Festival. But that seemed a little mainstream.

Bear in mind, the Cheez and I did live in West Hollywood for six years.

(and when I say "bear" I do mean this guy:



No, wait, I mean *this* guy:

)

(note to self, where do you place the ")" to close a parenthetical statement that ends with a photo of a topless hairy gay dude? That's an issue they didn't cover in my high school copy of Funk & Wagnalls)

So anyhow, instead Cheez and I did something utterly Portland: Pedalpalooza. Which, if you are too lazy/cautious/immobilized-by-your-mobile-device to click the link, is a two-week festival of biking events in and around Portland. This being Portland, "bike events" can mean things you never dreamed. Mostly soggy things.

But not this:


Yes, bike tango.

The ride met up in Jamison Park, then we biked with tango music blaring (okay, maybe that's not such a big deal) and with portable ballroom dance floor (okay, definitely that is a big deal, albeit one disassembled and folded into neat stacks, then loaded onto a damn sturdy bike trailer) to the waterfront, assembled the floor, and Cheez and Macaroni got their first ever tango lesson.

If you are looking for my usual bike in that film, note that for Sunday at least the leopard had changed her spots, and Cheez and I were riding the tandem.

Because when we left the house, he misheard and thought I'd said we were going on the tandem ride, not the tango ride.

Of course, it takes two to tandem. And to tango. And in fact it took two tandems to tango ride, because another couple showed up on tandem for the same ride.

This is, after all Portland. In any group of forty people, you will find at least 4 (aka two sets of) tandem riders.

Reminds me of the Kinsey report statistic that 10% of the population is gay.

Of course, that was only a general estimate.

In West Hollywood, it was slightly higher, maybe 110%.

In Portland, the lesbian moms also throw the statistic off in terms of 10% homo. But at 4 out of 40 we are certainly 10% bi squared, as in bi-seated bi-cycles.

In other news, I also had a piece in the New York Times this weekend. Because, as usual, war profiteering is breaking news.

Even if it's Civil War profiteering.

But the real news that's fit to upload is in this tango video:

Yes, catch the woman wearing red lacy peds.

Sexy peds, people. Who knew?

I can just imagine Allan Sherman commemorating it in song:
You remember
little Stacey
She's sporting peds that
are red n lacy
on the dance floor
quite a sight
but now the dance floor's
loaded on her bike.


Fun when it stops raining indeed.

If You Make It Out of Ironic Materials, They Will Come. And Buy It. Maybe Buy Two, If You Will Cut a Deal.

Get out your glue guns, hipsters. It's the most Portlandish time of the year.

Gray and rainy and Craftywonderland!

For all my out of town readers, Craftywonderland is, well, it's a wonderland of craft. Or more precisely, a Convention Center hall of hand-crafted wonders you can purchase to support some local artiste's PBR habit.

One of the hottest items was the Portland Bingo set.

Actually so popular that it sold out at Craftywonderland, (though it will soon be available for purchase at Powells).

Still, I was inspired enough I figured I'd play my own game of Portland Bingo as I made my way among the crafty wares.

What to wear to the next kale sale down at the vegan co-op?

Organic cotton and hemp stretch denim!

(Warning, could lead to one of those embarrassing Honey, I smoked my stretch pants incidents.)

Speaking of functional objects out of favorite substances:

Duct tape wallets.

So Portland. So Portland 2004, actually. Been there, stored my PBR money in that, as the hipsters say.

But wait, here's something new:

Duct tape flasks.

For when you're a little too suave to swill down a can of PBR, yet still feel the need to keep your booze in a metal container.

Notice that both the duct tape wallets and the duct tape flasks come in the ever popular mustache style.

Because the FREE SQUARE on Portland Crafty Bingo must surely be the facial hair frenzy.

Keep Portland Beard cards.

Fabric Mustache flags

Mustache ring

(note macaroni ring included only as scale indicator, not for sale)

Mustache shotglass

(for when you need to pour something out of your mustache duct tape flask to toast the bride and groom as they exchange their mustache rings)

Here's a nice enviro-friendly art form:

Recycled skateboard jewelry

Sort of a hair-of-the-dog potential here, what with slipping a skateboard bangle on that arm you've just broken doing a Wallplant that came out looking like one of my dying houseplants.

Christmas is coming up, so no surprise that the crafters are ready for Old Saint Nick.

Or perhaps that's more Old Milwaukee, given its hipster cred.

Others hadn't forgotten that Jesus is the Reason for the Season.

Our friend Rachel B. picked up some hedgehog notecards for her stepmother, who apparently loves all things hedgehog. Alas, it's a pity Rachel didn't see this in time.

Because nothing says, Happy Birthday Prince of Peace like the hedgehog brass knuckles.

If only her stepmother were actually a man, she might have picked up this lovely set of gay man's fantasy potholders.

Potholders were in surprising profusion at Craftywonderland. Though as Cheez observed, they did not seem to hold the kind of pot the majority of the crowd seemed most familiar with.

Among my favorite items were the beautiful old suit jackets that had been remade into what I like to think of as Portland's sartorial take on the mullet.

Business up front

Hoodie in the back

There was a lot of working with recycled materials. Old Sony Walkmans made into bookends. Old books made into journals. Old beer caps made into

well, I actually have no idea what that is they were made into. But dude has figured out how to deduct his beer purchases as business supplies, that's pretty artful right there.

And for those of you who are ready to ditch your old-fangled duct tape wallet, may I recommend the latest in nostalgic materials recycled into a moneymaker, er I mean money holder:

The lawnchair webbing wallets. Note that the display stand included actual photos of lawn chairs

presumably because the twenty-somethings cramming the sale had no firsthand knowledge of such things.

It does make you think. What 70s decor item can't be recrafted as 2010 fashion, when you get right down to it. Those plastic covers my parents still have on their sofa? Peekaboo robe to go with the shag bikini cut out of the living floor treatment. Stick a fondue pot on your head and call it macaronimaniac, as the old song says.

They really had decked the convention hall with boughs of 70s nostalgia. This lovely velvet painting of an AMC Pacer, for example, was going for $100.

Which is probably more than the Kelly Blue Book value of the Pacer itself.

The ultimate Portland moment, though, was when I spied this vendor on the crafty kids aisle:

Yes, at nine years old, he's already sporting the airbrushed trucker's cap, churning out ironic artwork, and exuding aloofness at the presence of shoppers.

Best of all, just moments after I snapped this shot, he began unconsciously playing air guitar to the song blasting out of the nearest speaker. Which, in the true spirit of the holiday season, was Don't Fear the Reaper.

A lovely sentiment, though perhaps not as apt as the one of which I had to remind our pal Cynthia and her daughter Jackson, who were fleeing the Convention Center after being traumatized by the Craftywonderland crowd: Don't Fear the Hipster.

Kicky, Kikey Camp Vamp. And no, I don't mean Samuel Clemens.

Mark Twain.  Dorothy Parker.  Erma Bombeck.  Brilliant and talented all.  

But let's face it, they never really amounted to anything.  

No Oprah Book Club.  No Twitter feed.  And no reading at Powell's City of Books.

How sad and tragic and empty and leopardless their lives must have felt.

Filmed by the devoted Cheez, June 30, 2009.

Eat Your I ♥ NY Out

You know how sometimes, though you've eaten enough, and maybe more than enough, you just can't help but go back for more?   Even though you are already really, really, really full, and whatever else you intake is just going to make you feel sick? 

(If you have no idea what I am talking about, you clearly are not Jewish.  Not even a little bit,  three generations back, on your father's side)

Well, that going back for more even though you have clearly already had too much—that's what I did last week.

With the whole city of New York.  

Yes, I (swine) flew back from the Big Apple in May, then turned right around in June and took another bite.

And lest you think gluttony was my only indiscretion, I also am guilty of balling students. Plural, I know, how bad is that?  Older.  Younger.  Male.  Female.  How can MacaroniManiac do such things?

I'd like to blame it on the Martinis, and the Mets.

The Martinis being the Pink Martinis, who were playing Carnegie Hall.  And the Mets being the baseball team that even though I grew up thirty miles from Shea stadium, I'd only gone to see twice in my entire life, until a certain Joey Smallwood-wannabe convinced half of Portland to trek across the continent to celebrate his birthday.  

And while we were in the neighborhood, I figured we might as well have a knish.

(for those of you who do not order your meals with a side of Maalox, let me just explain that knish is a two-syllable word, beginning with a hard "k" and ending with the most nostalgic case of heartburn)

So between attending the swanky concert and the soggy ball game, I took a passel of Portlanders and their stray pals on a nosh n shlep of ethnic eats across lower Manhattan.  

It was a light midday grazing, at least by Jewish standards:

• three flavors of falafel    
• north Asian dumplings  
• arepas (for the Maalox-swillers in the audience, arepas are like an Andean hamantaschen.  Except they're made with corn meal instead of white flour.  And savory rather than sweet filling.  And not meant to be reminiscent of chewing anyone's body parts.  In other words, nothing like hamantaschen)
• kasha knish 
• the world's greatest doughnuts (listen, when you live with a Canadian, doughnuts count as ethnic food)
• and the piece de resistance: takoyaki, just like Mama used to make.  

Provided you had the kind of Mama who'd whip up octopus balls whenever you needed a nosh.

Perfesser, will this be on the test?

Only on the taste test, Joey, only on the taste test.

I did enjoy the food.  And the concert (despite lack of martinis in liquid form).  And the fact that the baseball game ended early due to rain.  

Still, I was glad to get back to Portland.  Where, while you can't just walk from arepas to octopus balls, you can bike to almost anything, (including to the annoyance of snobby New Yorkers, who can damn well kiss my hot knish).  

And so, home from having octopus ball-ed Joey Smallwood,

 I proceeded to hop on my favorite two-wheeled conveyance to seedball the city.

Seedballing being not, as the picture on the right might suggest, a chocolatey snack,  albeit still a quintessentially Portland pursuit.

in which a woman who proudly boasts of wearing vegan shoes (you can always tell a Reed graduate) instructs a gaggle of do-gooders in the ins-and-outs of guerilla gardening.

Because while we may not have anything as fancy shmancy as New York's new High Line way out here in provinces, we do have a bunch of high on life along with, well, let's just say that what that vegan shoe trods upon is not the only grass to be found in Colonel Summers Park young persons, willing to flout the law just to make the flowers bloom.

So yes, I've been balling my students.  

And spreading my seed.  

But still, there are worse crimes to commit.

Like having that second donut.  

Forget the Martinis and the Mets.  I'm going to blame it on the Canadian version of the Twinkie defense.

Loud Pushy Author, Deal With It!

I have a t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase

LOUD PUSHY JEW—Deal With It

It was a gift from my friend Kent's boyfriend.  I think he meant it as an insult.  But screw him. Because I love that shirt.  

When I used to wear it in LA, people would go wild.  I'd get compliments on it constantly.  I remember the time when a woman stopped me on the street and tried to buy it from me to send to her daughter.  Or the evening the guy behind the counter at the frozen yogurt store loudly announced when my turn came, Can I help the next loud, pushy Jew, please?

Actually, when you work at a dessert-selling establishment on the border of Beverly Hills, there is pretty much always another loud pushy Jew waiting to be served.

In Portland, alas, people plotz when I wear the shirt.  And the worst part is, they don't even know what plotz means.

There are so few Jews here, merely identifying someone as Jewish is presumed to be an act of anti-Semitism.  Even if you are the Jew you're identifying as a Jew.

Actually, just the word Jew itself freaks people out.  They seem to think it is a slur.  So in case anyone of you reserved goyim are still confused about this, let me set you straight:

The word Jew is perfectly fine WHEN USED AS A NOUN.  

When used as a verb, no.  Under no circumstances should you EVER say Jew someone down. Unless of course you want to be anti-Semitic, in which case, go right ahead.  But trust me, you'll pay for such prejudice.  

And I do mean pay retail.

Also not so kosher is using Jew as an adjective.  As in Jew lawyer or Jew neighborhood. Let something like that slip out, and chances are, you are going to offend.  Maybe not every time, but play it safe. Go with attorney of the Hebraic persuasion, or geographical enclave of the former Israelites, and you'll probably be better off. 

I guess it is confusing when a perfectly legitimate, non-derogatory word gets dragged down just because some people use it as a slur.  I once spent a whole summer working with high school students, trying to get them not to use the word "gay" as pejorative, as in that shirt is so gay or that song is so gay.

Years later, I moved to West Hollywood, and let me tell you, it is a city packed full of men in gay shirts blasting gay songs.  

They are, in the words of a certain Jew author, quite regularly gay there.

West Hollywood, that is so gay.  

Not to be confused with San that is so gay by the Bay Francisco.  

Or Vancouver  that is so gay, ay? British Columbia.

Every place I have lived since graduating from college is so gay.   Including, of course, lesbiriffic Portland.  

Today, my squeeze the Cheez and I spotted the same two sensibly-shod women biking together three different times across southeast Portland, with a canvas Pride Festival tote bag dangling proudly from one set of handlebars.  During the final sighting, Cheez overheard the women speaking to each other in what you know I cannot help but describe as a foreign tongue.  

They're German, he said.  That explains their (lack of) fashion sense.

Oh I said.  I thought they were just lesbian business casual.  

Those German lesbians are so gay.  

But what is even gayer than German lesbians (aka dykes auf bikes), or a WeHo gym bunny in a metallic shirt gyrating down Santa Monica Boulevard to the extended dance remix of I Will Survive?

Well, according to the Oregonian:  me!  To be fair, they actually meant me and the rest of the contributors to the new Portland Queer anthology.   But I'm a loud pushy Jew, why shouldn't I elbow (glove) my way to the head of the line, just like it was the fro yo of homo?  

Anyway, if you want to know more, I'll be reading my piece not one, not twice, but thrice (that amount is so gay) in the coming weeks:

Reading Frenzy – 921 SW Oak St, Portland – Tuesday June 16, 7 p.m. 

Powell’s City of Books on Burnside – Downtown Portland – Tuesday, June 30, 7:30 p.m. 

Q Literati! – Q Center – 69 SE Taylor,  Portland – Wednesday, July 8, 7 p.m.

I promise, if you come to any or all of the readings, you'll be entertained.  And I guarantee that once you hear my piece, you will surely proclaim, that is so Jew.  

PDX v NYC, a Catty Analysis

I love New York. It's the sort of place where you can hear a resident assert, This is the cultural capital of the world with no hesitation. And no irony.

Even if that person has never lived anywhere except New York and Waltham, Mass. Not to diss the fine cultural assets of Middlesex County (sorry, typo there . . . should have been asset singular), but maybe a broader perspective is in order.

Sure, New York has Broadway theaters, the Whitney, MOMA, Carnegie Hall, countless galleries, and of course the Met of the opera persuasion and the Met of art museum persuasion (not to mention the Mets of baseball playing persuasion).

In a week, I saw work by Jenny Holzer, Chuck Close, Pablo Picasso, Claes Oldenberg, Sophie Calle, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, and zillions of others. My feet hurt just thinking about all that art I shlepped around seeing.

And my throat hurts just thinking about all the friends in NYC I told about seeing it. On account of they never get a chance to cash in all that cultural capital for themselves. Because their time is spent elsewhere.
Like standing on line to get into the Trader Joe's.

Now, no one is mistaking Portland for the cultural capital of the world (well, no one who hasn't also mistaken an architectural landmark for a good place to put a minor league baseball stadium, a car turning right for a car turning left, and a seventeen-year-old for a consenting adult).

But still, I want to proclaim the glory of the arts in Portland, even at the risk of sounding like a rube from the provinces. Or a reporter from the New York Times.

Because everyone in Portland is a freaking artist. We may not have the Algonquin Hotel, but still, any friend of Dorothy (Parker) can be moved by my musings in the new Portland Queer anthology. My squeeze the Cheez is singing in the flash choir. The neighbor who was caring for our cats while we were in New York? She was also frantically finishing up the paintings for her first demi-solo show. The gallery had actually offered her a solo show but she didn't have time to do enough work to fill the space; apparently showing an empty kibble tub and a well-scooped litter box did not suffice as art.

But, you may be thinking, the artistic endeavors of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Perhaps you're wondering about the rest of the city, the public servants and the transportation advocates and the newshounds and the like. Can they too really all be artistes?

Keep your hat on, Humphrey, and cast your peepers on this:


Yes, that's Metro President David Bragdon, Bicycle Transportation Alliance Executive Director Scott Bricker, Oregonian reporter Peter Ames Carlin, Deputy Secretary of State Barry Pack, and (er, I don't know what he does for a living and I forgot to bring the program home so I can't check) James Harrison, donning cat toys on their heads and dancing to the choreography of the inimitable Linda Austin at Cabaret Boris and Natasha at Performance Works Northwest.

For a bunch of guys with no dance training and only two rehearsals, they were pretty good. But what made the evening purrfect was the festival of feliness fineness known as Cattitude.

Transgenderd.
Transpecies.
And apparently big fans of transfats.




This is what it looks like when doves cry. And the audience laughs so hard they nearly pee their pants canary bird yellow.

I'm going to quit my day job and follow them, like people used to follow the Dead I remarked to a fellow audience member.

Then I remembered I don't have a day job. Because I live in Portland, the where-we-work-just-enough-to-support-our-creative-endeavors capital of the world.

Rhymes with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Day 14 of the Obama Presidency, and my government-issued unicorn still hasn't arrived.

I know, he has a lot to do, what with restoring the Constitution and achieving world peace and enacting job stimulus and all.  

But think about this for job stimulus:  UniCorps, a sort of domestic peace corps, employed to clean the poop from all our brand-new unicorns out of the streets.  

Really brings new meaning to the phrase make work project.  And since unicorns poop gold nuggets, the economy will go from in the dumps to propelled by dumps in no time at all.

So what has been slipping through my mail slot, if not gold-pooping, government-issued unicorns?  

Poems!  Yes, I have signed up for a Poetry Pyramid Scheme.   Or, as those of you who were paying a little too much attention during 11th grade English class might think of it, iambway.

But it's not all just sitting around waiting for the mailwoman (speaking of job stimulus, there's a title which sounds very trans-trans; at least it's less apocalyptic than calling the carrier a post-person).  If you want to be part of Ponzi poetry, you have to pen the poems too.

Which I have thus far done in several manic moments.  I'll spare you the first result, a rant against cancer and the ironic timing with which it killed off my friend Gloria, who was a professor of Africana history, the day before a certain unicornilicious president took office.

It's not a bad poem, but this is after all a humor blog. So here's some of the more light-hearted verse I've dashed off.

Genetic Indisposition

In my family

having kids

is like a disease

that skips generations

Well, I thought that was funny.  Of course, in my family, killing off the relatives can also be funny.

And speaking of dark humor, here's another ditty:

The Patient Rooms

When I ride my bike

past the Alzheimer

care facility,

I wonder

about the mementos

lining the windows

of the patient rooms.

I sense I'm not the only one.

My squeeze the Cheez said those were both kind of depressing.  But the Canadians have no sense of humor.  Or, as they would put it, that's humour, and it's not funny.

Of course, some people believe poetry should be more obscure, less narrative.  

For those of you who have been diligently reading this blog for a year, just hoping for an obscure, less narrative poem, today is your lucky day!

Philology Recapitulates Poetry

Professor

Donka Minkova,

world's leading

export on the

schwa.

That's an A-B-C-B-A rhyme scheme, if you pronounce the as thə (those of you too prosaic to enjoy the obscurity of poetry can read up on my obsession with Donka Minkova elsewhere).

But clearly my best postcard-poetry product so far was the truly inspired verse. 

Inspired by me thinking what the hell shall I wrote a poem about now, then looking out the window and writing about the first thing I saw.

Walloon at Walgreen's

Nobody loves the

24-hour

neon-lit drugstore

more than the

Belgian immigrant

next door.

Okay, so I admit, my efforts so far are more chapstick than chapbook.  But at least I am reading great poetry, if not writing it.

And not just reading it, I am teaching it.  In the perfect course:   fantastic topic (Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and the invention of an American poetic voice), motivated students, glamorous setting, and no grading.  

The very antipode of academia, to use a word I had to look up when I came across it in Song of Myself.  (If there really is an afterlife, I can only hope that somewhere my friend Gloria is teaching such a class herself; after years as a department chair, she earned it). 

Yes, it is nice to dwell in the highbrow world of literature.  Which for me means obsessing about the shopping mall and singing the Gilligan's Island theme song.  Both of which I managed to cover in the first class meeting.

By the second class meeting, which was last night, we had moved on to Dr. Seuss.

Portland does seem ripe for a Green Eggs and Ham parody

I am Sam.

Sam-I-am. 

 

I am in a 

political jam.

I did not do Beau here or there.

I did not do Beau anywhere.

Well, I guess I kissed him in the john,

But only in the john with clothes on.

I did not do Beau when a minor!

I did not do Beau dressed as a Shriner!

Okay, so maybe that isn't exactly Whitman's Calamus.  

I guess it's less poetic when there is an entire media frenzy documenting who you've soused with spray.

But the real reason my poetry is so wanting may be that I've never taken a poetry-writing class.  Which is hardly my fault.  When I was in graduate school, the department's poetry professor was also the department's most egregious sexual harasser (although academia being what it is, he had plenty of competition for the title).   

In addition to teaching poetry and sexually harassing every female under the age of his-own-age-minus-twenty-years (which on the campus of a large public university gives the aging professor an awful lot to do), his job duties included judging the annual poetry prize.  One year I considered making an anonymous entry, entitled Do All Great Poets Sleep With Their Students?  

The original is, alas, lost to posterity, but I think I can whip up something that will give you the basic gist:

Do all great poets sleep with their students?

Is the genus of genius

such a drive undeniable?

O how the pen is 

a tool to be reckoned with!

And what is spilled 

upon pages, unto the ages?

When gripped by the muse,

what doth the poet grip and use?

It's no small feat to coerce

true genius in verse

When he goes about it

he needs sexual outlet.

Tis a measure of talent

to be so carnally spent.

So do all great poets sleep with their students?

Or only the mediocre ones?

If It Quacks Like a Duck

I know I'm behind on blogging.

Really, I'm behind on everything.

Just last night we finally got around to having the neighbors over for latkes.

Sure, we missed Hannukah.

And Christmas.

And Kwanzaa.

But damn, we got those latkes out in time for celebrating the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

As it happens, it really was a proclamation of a woman's right choose: Edith, not born into the Tribe, chose to put ketchup on her latkes.

This is a slippery slope. You let the convert put on ketchup, next thing you know, the Newfie will be putting on scruncheons.

Still, it was a lovely evening. Don tried to goad their son into saying Copacetic, but the wily three year-old refused.

How are you? Don asked, in that smug parent-of-a-kid-with-an-impresssive-vocabulary way.

Ducky! Adiv answered, in that oh-for-a-moment-I-thought-I-was-Noel-Coward way.

Not only was it freakin' adorable, it was also the perfect opening for me to segue this blog entry into the requisite Martin Luther King, Jr./Civil Rights Movement/Barack Obama-is-about-to-be-president content that any media produced in this country in the past 72 hours has had to hit.

So here goes.

Yes, Adiv, ducks are adorable. But it hasn't all been ducky for kids who love ducks.

Cue the NPR excerpt:



I'd like to say it was the onions I was shredding for the latkes that had me all weepy last night. But that would be as phony as pouring ketchup on a potato pancake just to celebrate a Supreme Court decision.

I was weepy because I was listening to all the NPR coverage on The Profound Symbolism Denoting How This Nation Is Not As Totally Whacked When It Comes To Race As It Used To Be.

Yes, in Barack Obama's own lifetime, there were segregated fountains and segregated restaurants and segregated housing and even segregated duck ponds, apparently.

Here in Portland in 2008 things are different. Little black children and little white children not only get to see the ducks in the park together—they get to make art about the ducks in park.And, super bonus if you are five years old, they even get to give the grown ups guff about the ducks in park.
Yes, , as we discovered when we took a walk in the park yesterday afternoon, Portland is so wholesome kids who shouldn't even know how to write yet are posting public service announcements to protect the water fowl.

It may seem like innocent fun, but parents be warned: environmental awareness is just a gateway drug . . . to human rights activism! Let your child protect the ducks in kindergarten, and the next thing you know, she could be running with this crowd:
Although not running very fast with that crowd, since moving around in those boxes is rather cumbersome.

Pardon me, I said upon noticing the box-clad gaggle of teens, I couldn't help but notice you are wearing boxes.

Yes, the teens said, we are.

Might I inquire as to why? I inquired.

They're book collection boxes one of the teens answered, waving her arms emphatically. Or as emphatically as the cut-out armhole allowed. Do you know about the Christmas massacre?

I was tempted to point out that I am only just now getting around to the Hannukah gluttony, surely I shouldn't be expected to be up on seasonal slaughter as well. But instead I just shook my head while she explained about Uganda and mass murder and child soldiers and . . .

Well, actually, explained is the wrong verb. She vocalized about all those things. And about the book drive her school was doing. And how they were in the park making a movie to promote the book drive. Which is why they were all wearing book-drop boxes.

It seemed awfully sweet and wholesome, even if I still have no idea how book drives will help child soldiers.

What I do know is that all those kids doing their intrapark public service inspired me to try to find some service project to volunteer for today.

Please don't tell Barack.

Or Michelle.

Because really, I am not a bad person.

I volunteer! I am a board member on a non-profit! I try to do work that makes a difference in the world!

But yeah, I was kind of a slacker about the whole National Day of Service thing, and by the time I logged onto all the sites with volunteer opportunities, every damn thing was full to capacity.

The best I could do was some spontaneous trash pick up as I walked past the library on the way to Fred Meyer. Of course, since I was wearing a full-length fake leopard coat accessorized with the wacky Japanese mittens my college roommate gave me for my birthday last year, well, I realized as I walked down the block in that get-up carrying handfuls of garbage, I pretty much looked like a crazy homeless lady.

When as everyone knows, I am not a crazy homeless lady. I am a crazy lady with a big green house called Dutchboy.

Anyway, I was going to the Fred Meyer because I figured if I couldn't save the planet I could at least make a nice gift for the friends who are having me over at 8 am to watch the inauguration.

And since we are all planning on balling like [red diaper] babies at the momentous occasion, I figured I should commemorate it appropriately.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Official Barack Obama Inaugural Tissue Holders!







Also marketed under the alternative name I Have a Sniffle.

Can You Picture This

Seriously, I never, ever, in my sweet macaronic life, even knew those end-of-year-recapping-how-accomplished-our-family-is Christmas letters existed, until I started receiving them when I was in my late twenties.

Presumably, I never knew because I am a Jew.

And Jews don't send end-of-year-recapping-how-accomplished-our-family-is Christmas letters.

Not because we don't celebrate Christmas.

  

Because there is no way Jews are going to wait months and months and months just to brag about ourselves.

I spent the past three weeks opening those damn letters and wondering how anyone can be so self-absorbed as to believe the rest of the world cares about every picayune detail of her/his life.

It was so time consuming, I haven't been able to blog you with every picayune detail of my life.

So instead, here's a little pictorial overview of the year past.  These are some of the digital photos I took in 2008 (my camera is the size of a pack of cigarettes—easy to carry and just as addictive).  

Random moments, in random order:

Here's hoping your 2009 is full of picayune details of whimsical weirdness.  

'Cause heaven knows, this blog will be.