*linnea's pita
email me
bring it
too much information?
you decide.
me: heh.
feeling:
running mileage
this month: 95.5
1/02: 57.75
12/01: 101
11/01: 65.5
10/01: 77.2
10/13/01: 26.2: the hartford marathon; mission: accomplished
9/01: 169.5
8/01: 181
7/01: 155
6/01: 126
listening to a lot lately:
the strokes' "is this it"
reading:
a lot of magazines
recently read:
"don't let's go to the dogs tonight" by alexandra fuller
book reviews: where i arbitrarily rate, rave, and rant about books i've recently read, including the one above
stuff i kinda want:
at amazon
at cdnow
coffee corner
my feelings about coffees from around the city
current fave: i'm frequenting the bellydeli the most but i still love pick a bagel best
runner up: europa (specifically their cinnanut)
decent:
the coffee pot (at 49 & 9)
oren’s
so-so:
new world
tahl bagels (86 between 1&2)
au bon pain
dean & deluca
crap:
starbucks (regular – I go there only for “specialty” drinks)
timothy’s
pax (and they’re mean)
stuff i've written
for lifetime
9/11: how you can help
basic elements of ice skating quiz
betty lennox
celeb hair
chris bohjalian interview
cosmetic surgery
destination weddings
diet do's & don'ts
emmylou harris
fall makeup
fit & fabulous guinea pigs
gay parents
holiday gifts
jeffrey nordling
missing kids
mother's day book selector
newish: nine new ideas for new year's
no ordinary baby synopsis
oscar beauty & fashion
pat benatar
rescue worker jasmin aviles
rescue worker lauren schwartz
sheryl crow
spa chefs
taj mcwilliams
virginia madsen
women in the military
and elsewhere
bar reviews
foreign service?
letter to christina kelly
myths about africa
sleeping kids
war room workplace
polls
entertainment trivia (5.16.01)
running title poll (7.3.01)
the archive
index
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march '01
april '01
may '01
june '01
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august '01
september '01
october '01
november '01
december '01
january '02
current
Monday, February 25, 2002
05:04 p.m. this is so exciting: earlier today, former net and alleged murderer jayson williams turned himself into hunterdon county investigators in flemington, nj, just 20 minutes from my home town. lil' ol' hunterdon county hasn't seen this big a deal at the flemington courthouse since the lindberg trial! go hc.
Friday, February 22, 2002
5:39 p.m. i'm feeling grumpy today (i think i have TMJ and the less socialized with parent is in town) so excuse me if this is all a little too negative.
first of all, i have to tell you that my dear dog, brisby, whom i told you about last week, died this week. poor guy. but, says my mom, "he was 101 in dog years!" true, true. RIP, mr. bones.
also, so much for suppressing that whole poppy/heroin production thing in afghanistan, i guess.
i am so sick of dave eggers, so i really appreciated this piece from the fairfield county weekly. but then again, even if the whole thing was very doesn't-he-think-he's-so-cool, with the un-interview and all, i guess i could have done without a mention of him today. alas.
ok, let's try for some better news. like, i'm going to see crosby, stills, nash & young tonight. that's good. and um, friends are in town this weekend. and i'm getting psyched to get a dog, though when is still the question. and well, it's been warmer and stuff. ok? i tried.
Thursday, February 14, 2002
04:06 p.m. ok, in honor of valentine's day, may i present willyoumarryme.com. that's right -- for only $99 you can email the love of your life a proposal of marriage using stock photos, crappy print, and cheesy lines. quite a deal they've got there. needless to say, this leaves me a little concerned about the state of romance in modern American society.
so, i haven't been watching the olympics really at all, just glimpses here and there. it's too bad, but i'm just not into it this year and i'm not really sure why. but now, with all this controversy over the pairs skating, i'm even more turned off. at first i was like, "how wrong of them to be hitting the talk show circuits and bitching -- how unolympic," but now i've seen the error of my ways. of course there's a conspiracy. isn't there always? i shouldn't have been so naive. i'm really slipping. but to get even beyond that, i don't buy that the french judge was "delicate" and easily pressured and all that. she had to have been willingly in on it. that's my bet anyway.
in related news, economists are predicting which countries will win the most olympic medals based on political and economic stats and analyses and such. their bets are on the germans (31 medals, 11 of them gold), followed by the russians (21 medals, 10 of them gold), and then the Americans and the Norwegians. i find this very fascinating. i'm definitely going to check on these predictions when it's all over.
Wednesday, February 13, 2002
6:11 p.m. do you know what a plushie is? do you know what it is to have a plushie fetish? you may not want to after reading this article, so i'll just tell you: a plushie is a stuffed animal and a person with a plushie fetish has sexual feelings and/or fantasies regarding stuffed animals and/or furry costumes, a la team mascots. some of them even get all hot over cartoon characters. some enjoy finding ways to have sex with their stuffed animals, while others prefer their partners to wear fursuits so they look and feel like a stuffed animal (very important distinctions here). only the orlando weekly could tell me so.
care of mike, we have the cool and very insightful colorgenics personality test. check it out. mine was pretty right. but don't be surprised if the thing is just, well, being polite.
Thursday, February 7, 2002
11:56 a.m. So, my 14 ½-year-old dog is sick. Sick with oldness. Well, at least on certain days. My mom says having an old dog is just like having a puppy, with his inabilities and incontinence and all. But of course, unlike a puppy, he doesn’t improve with time. He was supposed to die last spring – around march. I was home for the weekend and he was limping all around, incoherent and weak, and before I left, my mom took a bunch of pictures of me looking very forlorn with the dog, brisby, looking on his death bed spread across my legs. The pictures are actually quite good, very emotional and colorful. I’m not crying or anything, but the dog and I both look very concerned about the future. If I had a scanner, I’d even share them with you. So my mom at the time had said that she was prepared to put him down the next day if she had to, though it would be very difficult and sad for her.
Well, the next day, as if sensing his premeditated expulsion from the world of the living, brisby woke up all chipper and healthy-looking. My mom was shocked and called me ecstatic – "he’s like a new dog!” I almost didn’t believe it, thought maybe she was even in denial. But my next trip home, sure enough, he was walking around all able-bodied and even growling at his arch nemesis, the cocker spaniel dakota, aka koty, the youngest pet member of my family. We were so excited – he had looked death in the eye and said "no, thanks." Good boy, we all thought. After experiencing one run-over and two excruciatingly painful-looking pet passings, we were all happy to see him perk up.
At least for the time being. He did have a great spring and summer, with only a bout here and there with various maladies. He lost some weight and the muscles in his hind legs deteriorated, so he started having more difficulty walking on an everyday basis. He slept a lot more than usual. He started losing his cranky-old-man spark, even to the point of ignoring strangers and the perky, puppy-dog-eyed koty. His vision declined, as did his hearing. He began sensing things strictly through the tremors in the floor, not reacting to barks, knocks on the door, or his name. It became his habit to walk laps around the house at night – kitchen, living room, dining room, kitchen, living room, dining room, and on and on – which my mom dubbed his “mall walk.” Mr. Bones was getting old, and looking more and more like an old person everyday.
But then, a couple of weeks ago, my mom told me he was having more problems: walking into walls and objects, leaning to the left, being disoriented, getting stuck in various corners of rooms. He would sleep all day, but then do his mall walk all night unless she shut him up in the bedroom – where he would proceed to reveal his incontinence repeatedly. On her birthday, she called to tell me she was worried. Was this it? Was he dying? Was this his time? He was still eating like a horse, my mom insisted, so he couldn’t be in pain. But she couldn’t put him down on her birthday. She called the vet to make an appointment for the next day, and he told her poor Mr. B could just have an ear infection. Relief. That was it. The vet prescribed ear drops. But, he said, if this doesn’t work, it could always be a brain tumor.
I visited this past weekend and found that he hadn’t yet improved. He was sleeping all day, only to wake up occasionally to walk to the water, nearly falling over from leaning so far to the left, only to immediately piss on the kitchen floor, where my mom had now imprisoned him, using slabs of wood to block his exit. He could still stick his head over them and see what he could of what else was going on in the house, and the other dogs, koty and hadley, could easily scale them, but he couldn’t leave – his weakened state pretty much assured that. Except for the one night I was there, when he somehow toppled over it and imprisoned himself within the rungs of a rocking chair bottom. My mom found him crying there. He hadn’t realized he could have just backed out of the hole he'd entered. When I left on Sunday, my mom insisted Mr. Bonanza was getting better. "Look! He’s all alert and happy to have you pet him!" she said. I agreed. He really was.
But after talking to her yesterday, neither of us was so sure. I told her lifetime’s psychic claims he’s living to 15. "I don’t know," she told me. "It’s day to day with this dog."
she's already planning on getting another westie, like hadley, after brisby's gone. but i don't know -- he's been a cranky and stubborn yet soft and cuddly part of our family since i was 10. he's been in my life for longer than all of my friends and any other pet. could this really be it? poor Biz.
Tuesday, February 5, 2002
11:08 a.m. As zimbabwe’s government tightens its laws against the media and peaceful political gatherings – or even just people voicing an anti-Mugabe opinion – we get a great, laughable quote from the minister of information, jonathan moyo: "Thomas Jefferson said it was better to have newspapers without government. He was very, very wrong. It is far better to have government without newspapers." But is he trying to put himself out of a job or what? Without information, what will he be doing?
What an interesting essay about clinical views of self-esteem in new york times mag by lauren slater. I’ve now vowed to read all of her books. and this collection of essays featuring her, too, especially since I just interviewed its editor, the very intriguing joyce carol oates, last Tuesday. and there’s plenty of other good stuff in there that I should be reading anyway. God, don’t you hate it when you make all these reading assignments for yourself and yet you never have the time to complete them? And then you start feeling guilty, saying, “god, I’m so behind”? I hate that. I guess it’s not helping now that I’m supposed to be reading oates’ “we were the mulvaneys” for work, and it’s interesting (more so, though, after discussing it with her), but I’m annoyed that I’m expected to read for work outside of work. Why do we work again? If only to freelance and have my time to do with it as I want, but, alas, read this article and you’ll understand why that won’t work right now.
Friday, February 1, 2002
10:56 a.m. It takes a lot of rhythm to exist in New York City. Not that I have much, really (the only dance I ever perfected was patrick dempsey's in “Can’t Buy Me Love”), but I guess what I have has been growing since I moved here. Things, after all, move fast and it requires either considerable effort or innate skill not to fuck up the flow of the action. There’s a lot of timing to take into consideration – knowing how to properly weave through people on sidewalks and streets, picking up your step just enough to make the train before the doors close, dodging bicycle delivery guys (“guh head!” they always seem to yell at me), being a hair’s length away from getting hit by various buses and cabs, slipping into elevators before they close on your face (as the people inside simply stare at you, unmoving), calling out your order to the guy behind the counter at the proper time (say it too soon and he’ll ignore you, say it too late and he’ll move on to the next person), working the streets’ and avenues’ traffic lights as you navigate your travels, and on and on.
I can usually tell a tourist by this one characteristic, or lack thereof. Sure, we all have off days, but tourists tend to have this complete lack of rhythm that you can spot from a block away. You see them bumping into people, cutting them off, hesitating when they should push on, nearly crashing their umbrellas into innocent commuters – they’re all out of sync with their surroundings. But natives and others who have lived here for some time, or even not but have a particularly good sense of rhythm, can get in step with the beat of the city no matter the situation. These people are still a bit of a mystery to me, though, because in understanding the city in this physical, heart-beating kind of way, they are unfazed by much of the stuff that goes on around them. And unfazed is probably something I will never be here.
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