It goes something like this. School begins in four weeks. I've got a phone interview this Wednesday and have just applied for a couple of other potential jobs through a local headhunter. I'm in a bad mood because I allowed my material needs get ahead of my brain to the tune of six-hundred smackers. Damn that's a lot of money to lose to some loser. But it could have been avoided and there seems to be little legal recourse due to the international aspects of the transaction as well as my own idiocy of using Western Union. I'm going to the bank tomorrow to see if there is anything they can do since I did use my Visa for the transaction. Friends in Romania are working the other end of the deal gone bad but there's little hope of catching the crook. I've got letters going out to EBay (where the said 'deal' began), AOL (the perpatrator's e-mail provider and Western Union, the vehicle of transmission. The point of my letter being that EBay should bear at least minimal responsibility for letting an otherwise reputable users' account being pirated, AOL since they should have some info on this guy in order for him to have an AOL account and hoping that WU will have a photo of the transaction. Have reported the occurrence to the proper authorities as well as the Romanian Embassy (shockingly, no reply from them). And as for a new laptop, which I still need, well it can wait a week or so. And I'll just take advantage of my educator status with Apple and get the IPod to store family photos and my ITunes.
On the work side, feel free to visit my seldom updated, often spammed Design blog for recent poster designs completed for a local Chamber Music Concert.
That's all and I need a nap. TTFN.
Blocked. Totally and thoroughly blocked on a creative level for the past few weeks. Barely a word or a design has been finished and this, my first blog in almost a month shows only that I'm still around. Many issues at hand, many irons in the fire. Many things to say or not be said. Life is that way. Read an interesting essay that took the position that stories are lies, and life is really the only reality. Stories, in the literary sense, are too clean and predictable. Why have not more authors taken the road of literary experimentation taken by Joyce in Ulysses? I've been awake for three hours and this is my moment of productivity and all too soon, the kids will awake and it will be gone. Rather, I'll be doing more important duties than computer related functioning. The laptop is basically becoming dysfunctional. If anyone comes across an IBook on the cheap, think of me and my now hinge-free PowerBook screen. Hey, but it does run OSX 10.4, so I'm not totally complaining. And as long as I run up and the down the stairs every hour to switch batteries, I'm fine. Yes, of course, I could work as I am now on the desktop. But for some reason the laptop is much preferred. It's all mental. It's the freedom of not being tied to a desk and a chair. It's the ability to move outside, around the house. Whereever I want to be. Down the street at the neighborhood cafe and its free wireless. I rant. I create. I border on wordy hysteria to escape the walls that have surrounded my creative self for the past month. Harken to the future where lays whatever may be there. It's word play, it's whatever comes to mind. It's dribble that only matters to me and you if you care. The call from the kids has come. Hats are switched. This is done for now.
I interrupt my travelogue and tell you of my star swimmer, one seven-year old girl. Now knowing my own history of swim team (I think I was scared to go into the cold water and that was it) and knowing that Izzy takes after me much more than her athletic mother, this makes me even more proud and astounded. Last night, at the first full meet of the season, my Isabella came in 3rd place (that would be a bronze medal if it had been the Olympics) out of six swimmers in the backstroke. She missed 2nd place by less than 1/10th of a second. I am so proud of her. I keep getting goose bumps every time I relive the moment.
(for prosperity's sake, the happenings of July 3-4, 2005)
We only got as far as the Yonkers Ave. exit off the Major Deegan, before I was convinced it was the right thing to do. Oh, convinced isn't the right word. I knew that seeing my late grandmother's best friend Estelle was the right thing to do. What I didn't know was how I might handle going back to Riverdale for the first time since losing Dad.
I have such a funny relationship with the place that I spent such a limited time in, yet left such a great impression on me. From visiting Engine Company 52 to the goodies at Mother's Bakery, every small memory of Riverdale stays with me in a bigger way than many of my years growing up in West Virginia. And of course, most of this being influenced through my relationships with my parents and their parents (both sets of grandparents lived within 4 blocks of each other in RIverdale at one time), and their own history with NYC. In any case, going back to Riverdale was going to be an emotional struggle for me in both the joy, and now sadness that I assumed it would evoke. But Estelle was still there, and for my own sake, my kid's sake and for doing the right thing, I got off at Yonkers Ave. and headed west and then south on the Henry Hudson.
Estelle lives on 231st Street. The apartment building hallways still have pretty much the same smell that they have had for the past 30 years. A combined odor, I assume, from the many years of cooking smells wafting out of apartments and making their mark on the narrow halls of the building. But for whatever reason, the overall smell doensn't change much and it's as familiar to me as was the smell of my grandparent's old building on the other side of the HH at 236th Street. (3rd Floor, apt. 3A). Note to E & D: The playground equipment is gone.
Our visit came as a big surprise for Estelle. (We had lost her phone number and had been unable to get a hold of her son who lives in the general area). Despite her recent loss of full vision and the screeching feedback from her hearing aid, she was so thrilled to see the kids as well as us, it was just a great thing. In her well-kept apartment, there are so many photographs of family. On her dining table alone, she must have several dozen photos of her own family. And to the right of that, a bridge table overflowing with photos of my Italian cousins, Isabella and Liam since birth, and of course, a picture of Dad with Mary Ann, his second wife. When I saw that picture, a small tear was the only external mark of the lighting bolt of grief I felt. And just like lightning from the sky, the moment rolled away with Liam's squeals of excitement as he discovered Estelle's L-shaped sofa, and what a nice diving surface it made.
(I'll have to continue this later since the Liam's now awake and there's work to do as well.)