But I mean – you can’t believe everything you read over there, anyway.

* * * * * * * *

The process is virtually instinctive now: You graduate from college, move to New York or L.A. or some other big city, and assemble the gang that takes you through your 20s. Only it’s not just your 20s anymore. The transformations of family life over the last few decades have made friendship more important still. Between the rise of divorce and the growth of single parenthood, adults in contemporary households often no longer have spouses, let alone a traditional extended family, to turn to for support. Children, let loose by the weakening of parental authority and supervision, spin out of orbit at ever-earlier ages. Both look to friends to replace the older structures. Friends may be “the family we choose,” as the modern proverb has it, but for many of us there is no choice but to make our friends our family, since our other families—the ones we come from or the ones we try to start—have fallen apart.

“So many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship, that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries.”

“We are nothing to one another but what we choose to become, and we can unbecome it whenever we want.”

The young looking black mail lady sorted silently as I grabbed my mail from the upper left corner box, without the key, as she had all the boxes open. I’d always thought they’d placed the mail in from behind, not in front, despite having seen this woman at work before. Her eyes tracked my two letters as my expression asked permission to take my mail now, before she was done. I looked at the mail, disappointed Matt’s letter hadn’t yet arrived, but pleased to see another Matt’s wedding Save The Date. I really hope my Fed-Ex has arrived.

“Oh, miss, there is one more,” Mail Lady said politely to my back as I tapped the elevator button twice long. I turned to see her holding my letter from Matt, pleased, momentarily distracted, I studied the deliberateness with which he drew my name on the front. We had recently decided to become pen pals – two aspiring writers enamored with the romanticized avenue of keeping in touch, like all our favourite writers. Maybe if one of us makes it “big” we can look back at our handwritten hopes and dreams, penned in the past, and compare to what we’ve actually achieved. The alternative is of course being held responsible for unfulfilled and unrealized aspirations, but that serves as motivation. I can’t say for sure he agrees with my motives, but for me it’s hard to ignore. My internal reflection is interrupted by the elevator doors groaning open. I step in, still studying the unopened letterm dreaming of possible futures.

“Excuse me, miss?” Mail Lady asked again. In Brooklyn Heights and this building in particular, there are unobstructed manners everyone seems to hold in such high regard. It’s contagious, really. I find myself speaking much clearer and enunciating, as though I were Natalie Wood or Audrey Hepburn, but more uncouth. I stuck one foot out of the elevator and braced myself for the collision. The elevator in my pre-war building is ancient. The thing about senior elevators is that along with being painfully slow, they’re incredibly impatient. The sensory device that was put there to detect whether or not anything or anyone might be in it’s way has long since given up. So when I stepped halfway out, I knew to brace myself for a shoving match to get the darn thing to realize I’m there – leaving it up to me to push against it with all my might as one might lean against a stubborn horse who refuses to lift his foot. My smile less genuine, my mind now back to the phantom Fed-Ex, I make myself available to her.

“Yes?”

“Do you…” She studied my strained face as though my name might be written in freckles, or hidden somewhere in my eyes. She gestured toward the box that holds my mail, the one she had so closely watched me pull the letters from. “Are you related to the woman who lived in that apartment?” She looked concerned. I stepped fully out of the elevator.

I currently live in the apartment in which my grandmother once lived. She was a young divorcee, and her children were among the assets divided. My father was appointed to her, and her daughter to my grandfather. She lived alone the rest of her natural life, happily. She traveled to her flat in Paris every summer with friends, proof from which I found in one of at least 6 crowded bookshelves in the penthouse – full of novels in French. She worked when she felt like it and traveled at every opportunity, including visits to her son’s west coast family at Christmas, once he had one to visit. She developed dementia when I was in high school, before I was intellectual enough to think of her as anything other than the woman who always corrected my grammar and told me to read more. Living in her home and among her things has brought me closer to her than I ever was, but she still remains largely a mystery. I am told constantly by those she knew that I remind them of her, which makes her all the more strange.

I am used to people asking about her, since she lived in this building for decades. But they stop asking after she died. I felt rusty in this speech. My social armor fell clattering to the ground, and I felt vulnerable. In conversations with her neighbors after she moved, they always wanted to prove that they knew her well, that they could be trusted, she was a sort of matriarch of the building and they wanted to be a part of her history. What they didn’t know was that with every smile, every thank you for your words, each remembered story exhibiting proof, I treated like a puzzle piece and cherished their contribution to the unfinished portrait I was attempting to build every day since her mind began to disintegrate.

“Why, yes, I am. I am her granddaughter.” I smiled, noting I’d used the present tense. I prepared for the next question.

“How… how is she?” The Mail Lady asked, again very gently. If she knows basic math she’s probably aware of where this conversation is going. My smiles are becoming more obviously fake and I pretend I’m used to talking about it.

“She actually passed away about a year ago now. She moved to California – that’s where I’m from, you see – and she moved to be closer to the family.” The Mail Lady nodded, concerned. From here I began to ramble. “She had dementia, as you probably know, so she moved out, and then she was healthy for a while, well her body was, she made it to 92, I think, about, last year she died, well about a year ago now, before Christmas, I was gone, out of the country, I didn’t come home, there was no funeral…” I trailed off talking to every object and space on the main floor besides her, this inquiring woman.

“I’m so sorry to hear it.” She was quiet. The she said, “She used to sit right here, and talk to me while I worked.” With an empty hand she gestured toward the stairs that led to the first floor, right by the mail boxes. I looked at the empty space on the stairs as the Mail Lady placed the last of what I assume to be many envelopes in the last box and locked it up. I swear I could see her sitting there. With her appropriate length skirt and too dark for her skin tone nylons, and wools sweater and orthopedic shoes. She always had a tissue in her pocket or crumpled in her hand, and I saw that too. I suddenly felt tremendous jealousy, and nostalgia, wishing I could have sat in on one of those conversations, or been able to have one myself. I had always been too young and selfish to value her opinions.

A confusing combination of envy and sympathy washed over me as I fluxed between the two, combined them, embraced and resisted them. I smiled once again, out of confusion, unsure what to do, suddenly weary, my eyes welled up with tears. I wanted to sit down and talk with her, I felt it was my duty to do what my grandmother did, wondered what they talked about, if this woman was closer to her than any of the neighbors claimed to be. Mail Lady packed up, and was ready to go, so I remained standing stupid and in her way. I asked for her name, and gave her mine. We shook hands, and I placed mine over my heart after. I boarded the patiently waiting elevator.

When I got to the top floor, the Fed-Ex package was waiting. I entered my apartment, and felt totally different. This was her apartment. I say it almost every day. I always give her credit. I thank her and my lucky stars and good fortune and everything that is beyond my control for how blessed I am to have what I do. But it only now just occurred to me to think of her – as a person, living like I do, or maybe not like I do at all, what would she think of me if I met her now on the street? Would she approve of how I’m handling her things? Her place? Am I doing her socially constructed legacy justice? What would she tell me if I could ask her advice now, in the pinnacle of my confusion on life and limitation; what would her thoughts be if I could have just one conversation of the possibly hundreds Mail Lady had? She might be more dismayed with my seemingly paralyzing obsessions than with my blatant inaction. But, the thing is, even the investigation of the subject is so absurd. For someone who revels in not worrying about other people’s opinions, why waste time worrying about a dead person? Maybe I don’t care what she would have thought, but I am upset that I don’t know what she would have thought. And, that the Mail Lady does.

St. Valentine’s Day

by Norah Pollard

My father was unable to hug me
or talk to me. He could never say
“I love you.” He was too shy.
Too, his mind was in
another world.
But whenever he came home from his journeys,
he’d bring me presents—Little Lady Toilet Water,
that grand midnight blue Stetson,
those many Waterman and Parker pens,
the pocketbook with the brass eagle clasp.
And for all occasions, overblown cards
with the puffy scented satin heart or rose
on the ront. Inside, his scraggy signature,
“To my Paddy, from her Daddy.”

When you did not give me
a Valentine today,
I was undone.
And I wept in the shower
even though I am an adult and know
gifts are materialistic shallow
commercially driven wasteful crap.

But why, why could you not have
Wasted some mute love on me?

“St. Valentine’s Day” by Norah Pollard, from Death & Rapture in the Animal Kingdom. © Antrim House, 2009

A Man Alone

by Steve Orlen

I hated breaking up and I hated
Being left, finding myself in an apartment
With an extra set of silverware and a ghost,
Impatient to be gone. Then to summon up
Who I was before the bed was full with woman.
To shift the street-mind from getting to
To slowing down and window shop. In the bar down the street,
To let my eyes simplify again, and make no judgments,
And breathe in the smoke that drifts
Through one body then another,
And find myself close enough
To whisper into a woman’s just-washed hair
And inhale that ten thousand year old scent.
To memorize a phone number.
To learn to say goodnight at her door.
To keep my hands in my pockets, like a boy.
To open the heart, only a little at a time.

Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

by William Shakespeare

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

This Year’s Valentine

by Philip Appleman

They could
pump frenzy into air ducts
and rage into reservoirs,
dynamite dams
and drown cities,
cry fire in theaters
as the victims are burning,
but
I will find my way through blackened streets
and kneel down at your side.

They could
jump the median, head-on,
and obliterate the future,
fit .45′s to the hands of kids
and skate them off to school,
flip live butts into tinderbox forests
and hellfire half the heavens,
but
in the rubble of smoking cottages
I will hold you in my arms.

They could
send kidnappers to kindergartens
and pedophiles to playgrounds,
wrap themselves in Old Glory
and gut the Bill of Rights,
pound the door with holy screed
and put an end to reason,
but
I will cut through their curtains of cunning
and find you somewhere in the moonlight.

Whatever they do with their anthrax or chainsaws,
however they strip-search or brainwash or blackmail,
they cannot prevent me from sending you robins,
all of them singing: I’ll be there.

In a Time of Economic Downturn, I Gaze Up at The Sky

by Michael Blumenthal

The sun came up this morning, just
as I knew it would. My morning coffee
tasted exactly like yesterday’s: a tad bitter,
but nonetheless revivifying. The faces
of our dead Presidents on Mount Rushmore,
are still there, speaking of their trials
and tribulations from their scenic outlook
of granite. Tonight, when I get home from work,
my lover will make her way downstairs,
wearing my favorite underwear. We’ll lie
in bed, pretending to watch a movie, both
knowing what we really want. The Dow,
no doubt, will continue its slide, just as the moon,
that lozenge of indifference, will continue
its path downward among the clouds. All of us—
sun, moon, coffee, clouds— might feel a twinge
of guilt: such indifference to profit and loss!
Yet, all over the world, tiny birds with broken wings
and injuries of all sorts are making their way
back to their nests, even the waterlogged anhinga
is drying its wings in the sun. It’s good to know
so much keeps going on, despite everything.
Come closer, sweetheart, let’s put the film on pause,
let’s profit from whatever we’ve got— before
the closing bell, before the riffraff of recovery
finds us and brings us down again.

adorable. spring: please spring.

me: what’s this Google buzz I keep hearing about

Friend: dude I don’t know? I should, um Google It to see? Haha no It’s more like the ambient kind of communication that a facebook feed is

me: I mean I guess I ask if I need to turn anything off to privatize my email. I’m traumatized from facebook always publishing my information publicly and constantly changing their TOS, so I’m just making sure I don’t have to disable some shit that Google is automatically putting in this new buzz whosItwhatsIt

Friend: Yes totally. It’s basically Google’s play into the same kind of communication we are seeing now “the status update” although this is like that on steroids, being able to share or broadcast, relay status messages, photos, videos, whatever

me: yea with people you already communicate with via chat and email. ugh

Friend: yes. so they are kind of de-contextualizing the email contact and re-purposing it in a format we are used to now– the ‘friend” contact which implies a richer, kind of ambient relationship with them meaning on facebook you see photos, vids, messages etc that are published and you sort of passively get them you know about your friends in this very asynchronous ambient way unlike an email which Is an overt, proactive form of communication Google owned that form for years and now are trying this other form.

So, are we going to have to opt out, as we did when facebook changed their sharing policy in December? What is the default system here? Is it going to be more successful that Google Wave? Is this pretty much like Google Reader, but facebook-ified? Twitter-ized?

Here is a video posted on youtube and brought to you via Mashable on how to use GoogleBuzz. I’m still sketchy on the privacy issues.

: )

Saturday, February 6th, a few of us rallied the bravery and energy needed to forge to another borough and spend the afternoon at the museum of modern art, in queens (it might sound dramatic unless you’ve survived a new york winter – the lethargy of february leaves you with just barely enough patience to deal with the mta’s weekend service changes, rendering you short fused and freezing when you find yourself in an unfamiliar borough at the end of the journey. “This better be good” is not the overall attitude you’re trying to achieve on a saturday).

I had never been to p.s.1, the museum, only the summer warm up, a much different experience indeed. The exhibition we were loosely aiming to visit was a live action visual arts performance, comprised of three separate groups.Of the three, Cheryl (will ruin your life) was by far the most impressive. 4 kids who all went to Emerson college in Boston, they describe themselves as “a video/performance collective that explores the themes of mortality, mania, the feline-human connection, the limits of shoulders, the flammability of dollar-store hair extensions, and the staining power of fake blood.” Or, in my friend Bethany’s words: “basically they like cats, gore and dancing.”

Now, I don’t like cats, I do like shoulders, or at least what my shoulders allow me to do when I dance, and I have little to no experience with fake blood (my halloween costumes ranged from ballerina to princess as a little girl, and sexy ballerina and sexy princess as a college girl), but I do like me some modern art and I love me some performers who know how to entertain and involve. Cheryl did both. To set the scene, I should mention their act was preceded by a guy who got a hair cut from his father to the tune of war drums, and a girl who wailed un-melodiously on an electric guitar with colorful static projected behind her, for about ten minutes too long. I for one felt uncomfortable because I didn’t ‘get’ what these people were trying to ‘evoke’ in me as a ‘spectator’, and my occasional stifled snicker was met only with glares from unsympathetic ‘serious art goers’, a group of which I apparently am not a member. I can appreciate the previous artists’ inner expression or whathaveyou, and the guts it takes to show said emo’s to a room full of strangers. But I personally was not moved in any way, shape, or form by what can only be rumoured to be Dadaism Personifed, in the room floored with records, this chilly Saturday afternoon. So you can imagine my surprise when my friend bethany handed me a cat mask. “Put this on.” I did. Why not? We moved over to the corner where a video was apparently about to be screened for us. People wearing cat masks on their faces and heads and around their necks idled facing the general direction of the wall, uncertain of what to expect. Why are we wearing cat masks? Does it matter? What was displayed for us was a compilation of 3 videos from past cheryl events, similar to the one below. More can be found at Cheryl’s tumblr.

Strange, funny, and just as off the wall in principle as the guy who’s dad made a hair helmet for himself from the artist’s freshly shaved head. But something about Cheryl makes them more provocative. Maybe it’s the humour, or at least self awareness, that allows the viewer access to the artists endeavours. There were stifled snickers alright, but without the glares of disapproval. These performers *had* to know how silly they looked, they are in cat suits and capes for cryin out loud. But it wasn’t just being silly, the seriousness to the performances, the professionalism of it all was contageous. I want to know what they know, I want to have as much fun with fake bodily fluids and glitter and have a disco in a washing machine, as they are. Herein lies the difference, what sets Cheryl apart. They want to make you see, and feel, changed with their dance parties, and in effect, ruin your life.

There was a tenseness in the air, like in the first row of a comedy club – you’re hyper aware of your surroundings and searching for non-verbal cues that might prepare you for the breaking of the theatrical 4th wall. The 4th wall came crashing down right after the video montage. A few plants in the audience rushed the stage after a few rounds of a choreographed set, I posit they were plants because they knew the dance routine and simultaneously got on the stage. Shortly thereafter, all spectators were encouraged to join the dance party, a feat made easier by the members of the group running around the stage and audience and room, leaving no corner safe to stand without feeling like you were in the middle of a dance floor – rendering every bystander helpless to resist the beats. Making eye contact with my fellow museum goers, with a shrug of the ever limiting joints that are our shoulders, we were soon all dancing in our cat masks, summer warm ups seeming not so far off after all.

Unfortunately, the one topic we didn’t delve as deeply into as I would have liked is that of social media today. Surprisingly so – as it was the 6th birthday of the beloved Facebook, and these two ladies gracing me with their presence are essentially experts on the industry. I did get a chance, however, to talk with Alisa one on one about the industry that has consumed 71% of the under 3o set and 75% of everyone else in America. With all of it’s users voluntarily submitting personal information, such as age, relationship status and history, tendencies and location, it acts as a giant census for Marketers. Basically there are ex government “data miners” who sit on the facebook board, using our information that we’re volunteering for free. meanwhile, there are these “miners” of sorts, or data collectors, who harvest our volunteered information and turn around to sell it, “to the tune of $6 billion a year.”

This is why we should care when Google saves our search information, and why we should pay attention to Facebook’s changed privacy settings every few months.

You can learn more at http://www.dataportability.org/