I Offend the Tweedle Man

A few nights ago, I was cruising around in the Fine Fare trying to find the few weird things that are on my new diet plan (don't get me started on that) when I started to hear a very pronounced "Tweedle!" It sounded for a hot second like a bird had gotten trapped in the store somewhere, so I looked this way and that and, not seeing a bird in distress, I went about my business.

There it was again - "Tweedle!"  and it didn't stop.  About every, oh, fifteen or twenty seconds - kinda like torture - there was this "Tweedle!" that was disturbingly sparrow-like and yet... the sparrow would have had to have weighed around eight pounds to produce a "Tweedle!" of that magnitude.  On the richter scale of tweedle, it was an 8.5.

It couldn't be real.  Was it some sort of alarm system, or Hartz-Mountain bird-seed display, or maybe a Christmas decoration gone horribly wrong?

And then I figured it out.  There was this weird dude giving me, and all the other shoppers, furtive glances.  Checking us out.  And... pursing his lips in a very telltale way.  A very "I'm about to tweedle" way.  Uch.  Some sort of weird, practical joking bird-imitation guy.  He was doing it himself somehow, with his annoying pursed lips - and then looking around to see who thought his imitation was a "real" bird.

Okay, I said to myself.  Nice one.  Now cut it the fuck out.  I started picking around in the dairy aisle, looking for fat-free yogurt, when there it was again - the over-amped "Tweedle!" that I now knew was coming from some weird, furtive Tweedle Guy as a symptom of his arrested development.  Tweedle Guy had seen me looking around and - was FOLLOWING me so he could tweedle AT me.

"Will you cut that out please?"  I'd wheeled on him and stared him straight in the face.  He looked like I'd just caught him, well, doing something inappropriate.  And then he decided to act as if he hadn't done it.

That would be the end of it, I thought.  So I headed over to window-shop in the lemonade and iced tea section, wondering whether to give in to the temptation of a carton of Paul Newman's sinfully good and over-carby lemonade, and... "Tweedle!"

"Look, I know you're making the stupid bird noise.  I know goddamned well there's not a bird in here.  Cut the crap, okay?"

He skulked away, and I went off to the frozen vegetable aisle to make my appointments with brussels sprouts and green beens.  I know he didn't stop, because though he was no longer stalking me, I distinctly heard a distant "Tweedle!" coming from the direction of produce and lunch meat.  God, I thought, this city...  this freaky deaky city.

Last night, I walked into the same market and grabbed a basket from the bag check area, where one of the managers was standing around with... Tweedle Guy.  Tweedle Guy apparently works at the Fine Fare in some capacity or other, although all I'd seen him do so far was stand around and... and...

"Tweedle!"  Uch.  Motherfucker.  Stupid tweedly motherfucker.  I put down the basket.  I addressed Mr. Manager Man.

"Can you ask him to stop making that bird noise?  It's fucking annoying."  Yes, I have a potty mouth.  On special occasions, when the potty is just THE place to be for finding vocabulary words.  I don't think he understood me completely.

"He making that noises." says Mr. Manager Man, and points to his colleague, who is staring off into space.  Yes, I knew that.  I knew somebody was making the noise.  I wouldn't be telling an actual BIRD to cut it the fuck out, would I?

"Yes, I know he's making the noises.  He's always making the noises.  And it's really fucking annoying."

Triumph, no.  Because the manager then explained to me that the Tweedler couldn't help it.  "He something wrong with him." the manager whispers.  Oh, Jesus.  Nice one, Palumbo... the Tweedle Guy has tourettes.  Or something.  Something bird-related that makes him mute but for the sound of an eight pound urban sparrow.  He's mentally challenged, and practicing this birdy noise for hours each day, trying to trick people for a cheap thrill, is all he's got.  Tweedle, tweedle, you heartless bitch.

I would like to say I acquitted myself well by apologizing to the Tweedle Guy and buying him an ice pop.  If my life were a movie on the Hallmark Channel, that's probably what I would have done.  What I actually did do, since I'm a dyed in the wool New Yorker, is take off for the Entenmann's display and brace myself for the inevitable.   The phrase "don't make the noise... don't make the noise... please don't make that fucking annoying horrible awful I-want-to-strangle-and-kill-you-noise-" was on a loop inside my head.

"Tweedle!"

Uch.  Oh God.  It was like an icepick to the brain.

So I skipped the Entenmann's section.  Not because of the diet but because of its proximity.  Paper products was far enough away, so I started my shopping over there and hoped for a relatively tweedle-free experience.

As I tried to reach for the toilet paper with my short little arms, I thought about thousands of infinitely more annoying things this city has to offer than just a bird noise, albeit a freakishly loud bird noise.  People who save up their morning gaseous emissions and release them on a crowded subway car.  22 year old girls eating cupcakes on the street because they think it makes them look whimsical.  Bloomberg.

This did not make me feel better.

But, if getting "Tweedle"-d at is the worst thing that happens in the course of a day, I'm doing fairly well.

Planet Unfitness

I'm not one of those people who finds working out some sort of odious chore.  I try to go as often as I can, and Planet Fitness offers a pretty good deal for me - there is one a block from my apartment in Inwood, and another one at Duffield near where I work.  For twenty bucks a month, I can't complain.  Oh, no, wait - I CAN complain - because for the second time, today I had to walk the fuck out of there because the music was loud enough to interfere with the instrumentation of low-flying aircraft.

I'm not a person who's opposed to loud music.  I have a friend who I sometimes call the human tuning fork because he's as sensitive to noise as a person possibly can be.  I'm not in that category, although I do have a good ear if I do say so myself.  But there is a point at which a person has to say ambient music is turned up too loud to be comfortable.  In my gym, that would be so loud that a person can't hear their iPod through their headphones even when it's cranked up to the maximum and they're at risk of a seizure.

Usually I don't have this problem at the gym, but the first time it happened I was blithely told by the gym staff that they had obliged a customer who was working out by turning the music up "so he could get really pumped!"  Indeed.  Wanting to be collegial, I went upstairs, got on the elliptical machine, and, sure enough, could not hear my iPod no matter what bleeding volume I turned it up to.  I finally whipped out my cell phone, called the downstairs from the upstairs, and screamed into the phone "I'm upstairs on one of your elliptical machines - tell me you don't think this is too loud!" and then I held it up and let them listen for a second.  When I got back on the phone, they agreed to lower the fucking volume.  Case closed, or so I thought.

Today I get in there looking for my usual workout, and I hear Annie Lennox.  So far so good.  But I hear her from outside the front doors, which is not so good.  I go upstairs and find that, yes, the volume is so loud that I can't hear my own tunes.  When I go downstairs to the counter, the 19 year old running the place tells me that she doesn't have the authority to turn the music down and, anyway, there is a "standard setting" that they're told to put the music at.  I told her this was funny, since I work out there five times a week and it's almost never that loud.  She quickly explains that, well, they keep it lower than normal.  Oh, why is that I wonder?  Because people fucking COMPLAIN perhaps?  I asked the chick when someone with authority over the radio is planning to come in, and she says she is the only one there.  So, apparently, she has the authority to lock and unlock the place, and monitor the safety of patrons on three commercial floors, but has no dominion over the all-important tunage.

To the rancid tones of the ubiquitous Coldplay, I walked out.  I was pissed that I had to walk out, pissed at myself for not working out, and pissed enough and depressed enough to just go back home and spend the rest of the day watching movies and sleeping.  I watched the Atom Egoyan movie "Chloe" with Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, and the (also ubiquitous) Amanda Seyfried.  Worth watching I would say, as are most of Egoyan's films.  He's the only filmmaker deeply invested in the human emotional landscape.  We're never going to see a 3D movie from Atom Egoyan.

I also watched an animated film called "The Secret of Kells" which was really beautiful and well done, and didn't get wide release here because, well, it wasn't in 3D.  You know, if we're raising a whole generation of kids watching 3D, I wonder if it will make it even harder to get them to listen to adults - in addition to screaming at them to clean their rooms, their parents are going to have to swing their crooked fingers in and out of their kids' personal space and nearly poke them in the eye to get their attention.

Anyway, besides fucking around writing in this blog, I did fire off a nasty note to the folks at Planet Noise Pollution asking them to check the OSHA rules on decibel levels in the workplace.  Ambient music should be just that - the definition of ambient is "surrounding" - it doesn't mean overwhelming, distracting, or fucking balls-out annoying.  And speaking of my upstairs neighbor, she's been out all day and doesn't seem to be home even now, so perhaps I'll take advantage of the relative peace and go back to sleep.  I have to get ready for an upcoming week of work - talk about fucking annoying.  And if I go to Planet Fitness tomorrow and the music is still outrageously loud, perhaps I'll get 3D on somebody's ass.

St. John the Divine - Back to My Favorite Cathedral

Is it pretentious to have a favorite cathedral?  Probably, as I didn't have one growing up in suburban New Jersey.  We had malls, not cathedrals, although malls are religious mecca for people who shop at Forever 21 and Spencer Gifts.  In our home town mall there was a store someone very unfortunately decided to call "Little Elegance", and that's precisely what it had.  Plastic flowers did abound.  But New York city, particularly my 'hood, is not devoid of stores with silly names.  In Washington Heights, there is a store called "Everything Stationery" - which, of course, my first glance told me was "Everything Stationary" and I envisioned walking in there and seeing everything, including the humans, glued to the floor.

Anyway, I finished the latest draft of my play earlier than I expected to this week, and was faced with some actual time to myself, so I thought I'd go grab some late lunch at 1018 and then hang around the cathedral at St. John the Divine in the hour or so I had before it closed.  I hadn't been down to SJTD in a while, and wanted to check in, light a candle in the poet's corner (more pretentiousness, right?  Can you be a girl and still be a wanker?) and take some pictures with my newly repaired digital camera.  Imagine my delight at finding this very cool and creepy video art installation set up in a tent in one of the chapels there.  It was fascinating - I took a little video clip.  It made up for the fact that SJTD has no air conditioning - at least not during regular weekday hours.  I can't imagine the priests and deacons running around in full drag with no AC and 91 degrees out.  They're not exactly the Cistercians.  I tried to upload the video in here but am having a bit of trouble.

The heat is really getting to people, too.  There was some dork on 42nd and 9th trying to navigate his mini cooper past a traffic cop who, like most traffic cops, was creating more of a problem than he was solving.  Anyway, he was motioning for this guy to drive against the light - why they do this I have no idea - and the guy refused.  So the cop kept waving him ahead and waving him ahead until he finally relented and? nearly got clipped by a bus.  So the guy screams "Fuck you!" to the cop at the top of his lungs.

My friend Aash has been in L.A. the past couple of months, and she asked me if people in this hood are still acting like knuckleheads - chicken bones in the lobby, loud music cranked out of cars they can't afford etc. - I assured her that things here are the same.  In L.A. apparently everyone is pretty fairly civilized.  She says she will miss it when she comes back here.  I have to say, I live in this 'hood for one very basic reason - cheap rent.  If I had to worry about the behavior up here, you know I'd be in trouble. I wish I could afford to live near the Cathedral, but alas...

Alas.  Pretentious again.

Somebody's Butt-print

There are a lot of things about this neighborhood that I find a little less than normal.  But this morning I actually saw something I hadn't seen before in nearly 24 years of living here.  Somebody left an ass-print on our glass front door.

The logistics of doing this vulgar thing must have been a little complicated - the glass part of our front door is about six feet off the ground, so it not only means that someone had to drop their drawers in my lobby, it also means that someone ELSE had to spray paint their butt, and then lift them up and stick them, cheeks out, up ONTO the door.

Weirdly, I looked for a picture on google images to illustrate the concept of "ass print" and found too many to count.  This one, aside from the color choice (ours was yellow) pretty much says it all.  I would have taken a picture of our own objet d'art, but the battery on my Canon just died.

Seeing all of these butt pix made me realize how little imagination human beings have.  From the invention of the Xerox machine all the way back through the Renaissance, the human response to the question "what is art and, yet, funny?" was "butt cheeks!"  It makes me wonder why archaeologists haven't unearthed the imprint of some Egyptian tomb-worker's bare booty, done up in burnt ochre, right up on the wall with the hieroglyphics.

Speaking of butts, just came back from the Planet Fitness up the street from me.  I'm still steadily losing weight, but not really fast enough to get me back in normal-sized clothes before the end of the summer.  I only seem to drop about four pounds a month, and for someone who's as overweight as I am, that's really kind of glacier speed.  But I have to keep telling myself this is just the way I have to take care of my health now, and there's no return to the telly-booze-pizza life that almost put me in the hospital.  Gotta keep trying.

I was going to go out and get the new Jules Pfeiffer book.  Almost done reading the Joe Papp biography "Free for All" which is totally amazing - my favorite format for a biography nowadays, which is the David Hajdu method of gathering interviews and then editing like a madman.  This one was written by a guy named Kenneth Turan, and it's a fascinating look at the work of a fascinating man.  As I say, I was GOING to go out and get this book, but the skies are darkening and we're supposed to get a huge thunderstorm.  This is unfortunate for a couple of reasons, but most unfortunate because it's 3 PM, there's no food in the house, I'm starving - and I always feel TERRIBLE if I ask a delivery guy to come out in the rain and bring me something.  I guess Jules Pfeiffer and food will have to wait.

So since I've already put in some hours this morning on rewrites, and already gone to the gym,  I'm going to be putting my butt-print on the sofa for a little while, waiting for the rain to come and go.

Great Fire burning

I can't believe the last time I wrote in this blog it was snowing - and not just snowing but a huge blizzard.  Today it was 96 fucking degrees out, and I had to alternate running errands and going to the gym with just staying home and having a lie down.  Thank God the air conditioner has been holding up, or I would have been completely freaking out.

They've just opened a new restaurant and a new wine bar, both on Dyckman street, in the past few weeks.  I checked out the restaurant, "Papacitos", and was pleasantly surprised.  I read online that the service was crappy and the food just run of the mill, but the food was actually pretty good.  Not a lot of healthy choices, but once I'd scraped the "Oaxaca Cheese" - (I didn't know Oaxaca was known for its cheese) off of the grilled corn on the cob, the chicken mole was moist and fab, and the guacamole was absolutely perfect in my opinion.

Guacamole is the perfect food if you're on a diet - as long as you don't eat it with corn chips.  I know that sounds weird, but that's the way I live my life lately.  If you just dive into the guac with a fork, it's just as nice, and all the fat is the good (monosaturated) kind.  Unlike the vile over-spiced mole at chains like Chipotle, this was perfectly spiced, cut with just enough lemon, and full of red onions and tomatoes.  And mole sauce is just as legal - there's no fat in it at all, just a load of flavor, and it goes great with chicken of course.

When it's this hot, eating is the last thing I want to do, and when I don't feel like eating it's newsworthy, trust me.  The hood is very much a ghost town, and I love that about July 4th weekend.  I can get into any restaurant I want to go to, the stores aren't crowded (unless you're stupid enough to go to Macy's which is always tourist central), and even the movie theaters are empty.  Unfortunately, this is probably the worst weekend for movies I've ever seen in my life.  We have the requisite selection of kiddy movies, all now in 3D.  Pass.  Then we have the latest Twilight movie, which provides the perfect combination of execrable dialogue, paper-thin characters, and the horrid grey-wash cinematography that seems so in and hip these days.  And let's not forget Robert Pattinson, the romantic hero character who's dark, poetic, troubled, and virtually humorless - he'll be fucking up an entire new generation of young women by fixating their burgeoning libidoes on the emotionally unavailable young men in their lives.  Great.  Thanks Stephanie Whats-her-face.  They should send her their therapy bills.

And then there's "Cyrus", which stars the guy I think of as "The other fat guy."  Please.

I was thinking of bagging the gym this morning in favor of walking down the West Side Highway - but then I checked the temperature and, at 7 AM, it was already almost 80 degrees.  Forget that.  Air-conditioned gym for me.  I've lost two pounds this week, which is great - except, with temps in the 90's for the rest of the week, it's probably all water.  Oh well.  I'll take what I can get.

An Inconvenient Snow

Snowploughs were out unburying Inwood again after an even more annoying snowstorm than the last one.  It snowed for something like 36 hours, and though the streets are clear for cars and taxis, the sides of the streets, as you can see here, are clogged with snowdrifts.  Each corner has it's own man-made lake of coffee-colored sludge - all of New York turned into a giant dirt Slurpee.

Just the same, the trees look pretty covered in snow, so I took this shot standing on the corner of Dyckman and looking down Broadway toward Fort Tryon Park.

I've been pretty pre-occupied with getting my knee better after surgery, so I haven't been doing a lot of writing, but I'm please with myself today for getting through four hours of work on "Knock", the new play I'm working on.  As is usual with me, I've written the first 20 or so pages, and the last 20 or so pages, and now I'm working on graduating and balancing the tension in between so that it becomes a cohesive draft.  Which makes picking through this middle section like picking through Manhattan after a blizzard in a pair of cheap sneakers.

I heard about some guy that got killed yesterday walking through Central Park.  He was hit by a huge tree branch that collapsed under the weight of all this snow.  The first thing I thought was "Oh, well, I guess when it's your time to go it's your time to go"  And then the second thing I thought was that the Earth was trying to kill us.  Finally.  Seriously.  Think about it.

Killer whales at Sea World are not just suddenly eating their trainers - we recently discover that they've actually made a habit out of it.  Trees are attacking passers-by.  Haiti, Chicago, and Chile each has an earthquake, D.C. gets four feet of snow, and 15 countries are, as of this morning, on alert for a tsunami.  I think the Earth may just be sick of our shit.  Any second now they are going to discover that the Earth has started rotating in the opposite direction and flung everybody in Australia into the Pacific.

And why is the Earth trying to kill us?  Republicans.  The Earth has been watching the Republicans on CNN saying stupid shit like "If it's global WARMING then why is there so much SNOW?" and the Earth has been sitting back going "Holy Christ, they STILL don't get it!  I thought they were getting it when I saw that Gore guy get the Oscar, but they STILL don't GET IT!  I am SO going to VOLCANO their asses.  AAAARRRRRGHHHHHH!"  Cue the ride of the Valkyrie while the Earth blows molten lava all over the Southern half of the United States.

One of the things I do dislike about getting this much snow on weekends is I can't easily get out to the West Side highway to take a long walk.  Last weekend I was able to get through four miles, and follow it with 40 minutes on the treadmill at home the next day, but I kind of rocked my knee too much, and my physical therapist gave me a little shit for it.  I've revised my regimen so that I'm just doing the 40 minutes at a time (the four miles usually takes me over two hours) and watching Battlestar Galactica on the portable DVD player.

Maybe that's why I'm feeling kind of apocalyptic lately.  Between Battlestar Galactica, Caprica (which I Lo-Ooooove) and the lack of sunny skies, I've been quite a crab-ass.  Lucky I got to see Robby last night because he always makes me laugh.

When I got home last night, I discovered something in my front courtyard that I've never seen before - for those of you who are wondering what an apartment-sized snowman looks like, here you go.

I'm not sure who's responsible for el Frostinito, but in the 23 years I've lived here it is an original idea, so thanks, whoever you are.  It certainly is cute.

Another good thing about NYC when it snows is that it's really not all that cold.  I don't know what I'd do if I lived somewhere like Minnesota, where it's 20 below all through March.  Or in Maine, where my buddy Wanny lives.  She loves Maine, and it really is, as she puts it, "seductive in the Summer' - but in the winter you have to be really into the snowsports and the cold.  Luckily, her kids were all born in Maine or Michigan, so the cold doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest, and her husband is a Coloradan.  Me, I'm a klutz, so better the dirt Slurpee on the corner then a patch of ice that's going to take me and my endoskeleton down hard and nasty.  Bring on 40 degrees or more, for God's sakes - it's almost Easter.

I'm going to jump on the treadmill now and get my walk in - when we last left Battlestar Galactica, Captain Adama had just completed the hyperjump from the middle of the Cylon Battle and announced the colonies sojourn to Earth.  I'm hoping when they find it in the last DVD it won't be covered with molten lava, cockroaches, and dead Republicans.  That would suck.

Snowbombed

This is what it looked like outside of my fire escape at around noon today.  

Yesterday I walked into work, oblivious to whatever the news had to offer as I like to start my mornings quiet - no tv, no news, no music, just get dressed and get the hell out the door - and I took it with a grain when my co-workers told me I'd be smart to stay home today because we were going to get SNOWBOMBED.  Well, as we all know, we got snowbombed and I worked from home today and am  now going stir-crazy from being stuck in my squalid apartment for 25 hours and counting.

When I got home last night I stopped by the Park View and grabbed some dinner, because I hate going grocery shopping on an empty stomach.  I also knew that since I don't cook food in this apartment, it would probably be my last hot meal for a day or two.  Since we were expecting today's snow event, I figured I'd stock up on some supplies.  Most normal people were buying milk, bread, eggs, normal stuff. I came home with my version of supplies, which was Skaansen pickled herring in sour cream and onions, black olives, fruit cocktail, tunafish, Mug diet root beer, and a couple of cans of LeSeur peas which are good because they don't taste like regular peas.  Nothing works better to combat a case of cabin fever than a good jar of pickled herring in sour cream and onions.  Okay, nothing works to combat a case of cabin fever.  Sleeping, maybe.

Since I screwed up my knee, running around in the snow, particularly since I don't own a pair of boots, would be incredibly stupid of me.  So until the sun comes out again, I'll be working from right here - day job by day, messing around online at night.

My friend Robby told me that when he arrived home this evening he saw that the pub on the corner was filled to bursting with happy, snowy drunkards.  One of them decided to show his whimsical side and lie down in the street to make a snow angel.  Unfortunately, he was in the bus lane.  His drunkard friends barely got him slid over to the gutter before he was happy, snowy roadkill.

I really wish I could ring up the Garden Cafe and ask them to deliver some dinner, but I would feel like it would be incredibly bad karma to expect some poor delivery guy to come out in a foot and a half of snow just to bring me a seared tuna wrap and some field greens.  And besides, I'd have to tip the guy a ton, and I'm not feeling all that generous right now.

I was actually just in the Cafe on Sunday with my friend Aina, who was over from Ireland this week.  Say "hello" to Aine:

She was only over for a little while to take a course out in Jersey in cranio-sacral massage, and now she's back in Dublin, where I hope she's tucked up beside a nice roaring fire with a blanket around her and a hot whiskey.  I really miss her a lot since she's moved back over there.  She's a great one for an "auld chat", as she says, and she's always having adventures.

I'm hoping to get over to Dublin to visit with her in the spring.  Another reason to be a bit tight with money for once in my life - I need a real vacation soon.  Two weeks to just hack around and have some fun.

It's easy to dream about spring when you're under a pile of snow up here.  I can hear the ho upstairs yelling at her four year old grandson right  now.  The kid is hyperactive at the best of times, and when he's stuck inside four walls on a snowy day he's your worst nightmare.  For the past hour he's been basically tear-assing around the apartment like a demented goose while his grandmother tries to grab him, hold him down, and force feed him some Nyquil to get him to go to bed.   I've said it before and I'll say it again right here and right now - if she'd just gotten her silly ho daughter some birth control pills...

This weekend coming up is Valentine's Day, and this year's celebration is going to be just as exciting and heartwarming as last year's was - last year, of course, I was battling the flu, a broken computer, and my Mom's obsession with Lifetime Television for (Elderly) Women.  This year I plan a whirlwind weekend doing Mom's taxes.  It's also time to trim down the four rose bushes in her back yard so they won't grow like totem poles this summer, and make home made broth and soups for her so that she doesn't have to cook as much.

Yeah, okay, I don't mean to sound pathetic.  I would love to tell you that me and my Insignificant Other are planning something cheesy and fabulous, but everyone who knows me knows I'm a bad liar so I won't even front.  And I've never been the kind of woman that men buy flowers and cards for anyway.  On the rare occasion I've been given a gift I generally just feel like a deer in headlights and start speculating about ulterior motives.   The nicest thing a guy ever bought me was the perfect accompaniment to a dinner I was cooking for him - he brought me a "bouquet" of broccoli.  Quite an adorable fellow, that Dan Jetter.  But we weren't dating, we were just hanging around together. I hope he's married to someone who appreciates him.  And who appreciates broccoli, of course.

It is ever-so-slightly disappointing not to have someone buying me flowers, though.  (The picture on the right is the window of the flower shop up on B'way, north of 207th)  I do love flowers, and I'm glad I can grow them out in Jersey at Mom's because I may never have a house with a yard for myself.  I buy other people flowers for their birthdays because I love choosing them - choosing the arrangements and the blooms and colors.  I love the scent of flowers, too, but I can't grow hyacinth or lily-of-the-valley in Mom's yard anymore because she can't stand the "reek" she says.  Honestly.  Lily-of-the-valley reek?  Mom likes daisies.  They don't assert themselves with vulgar things like scent or wild colors - they just look pretty and cute and kind of sit there brightening up the side of the road as other people race by.  She would have liked me to be a daisy, I think.  She would have liked all three of us sisters to be daisies.  My older sister is a rhododendron - brightly hued and round and impossible to ignore.  My younger sister is a tulip, I think.  Always appropriate in any situation.  Always welcome.

It's been snowing now for fourteen hours, and the part of me that's desperate to get the hell out of the house is now fighting with the part of me that is already in flannel pj's and wondering what's on tv tonight.  Perhaps the world will roust itself out of hibernation tomorrow, go to work, and I'll be able to get a seat at the Park View for a nice, early breakfast.  I'll take a picture of the Christmas tree, which they've inexplicably left up in the median between Dyckman street and the entrance to the Henry Hudson.  What the hell did the Groundhog say again?  Six more weeks?  Jesus.