this is neil, the fish at my temporary desk

absence.

I haven't posted in over a week, which is, I think, the longest I've gone without doing so since I started this blog. Instead I've been lately writing a good deal more in my journal, which is a bit odd; of the two personal writing outlets, the journal is usually where I find it necessary to write apologies, promising to be a better contributor in the future.

Anyway, some of you had written to me wondering if everything was ok because there wasn't any activity here, particularly after I'd promised to regale you with tales of The Donald's Slovenian arm candy and how the head of Revlon made eyes at me. Unfortunately, I'll have to save most of that for another post, or maybe in person, but the point is that I am sorry for being gone so long.

Here's why: my beloved "second mother" has fallen ill again. On the Saturday before last, I brought produce from the farmer's market to her Lower East Side brownstone, where she'd returned to rest and recover from major surgery. I found her, bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, holding court at the long creaky dining room table, frequent home to steaming pots of Sunday fare, and stage for countless nights of counsel and laughter over the years. I told her about my new job prospects (she told me what she thought I should do) and my siblings. I touched her hands, rested my head on her shoulder, savored the cadence of her laugh as it echoed in the old house. I couldn't help myself. I was feeling affectionate, and she was looking so well, as though she'd never had surgery at all. A day later, she was re-admitted to the hospital where they told her family she would not make it through Tuesday night.

It's been a full week and she is still here, fighting. All the while I have been thinking about how very fragile we are, how easily our lives can change at the drop of a hat.

parasite blogging?

I'd never heard the term "parasite blogging" until my friend Josefine used it in the comment she posted to my entry, "I Shouldn't Wear High Heels," but I'd like to direct your attention to it because it's just. so. damn. good:

Josefine, on what makes her smile on the Swedish subway system.

More tomorrow on the PEN: Beyond Margins Awards, and going to the Pierre today for lunch with Melania Trump, Claudia Cohen, Ron Perelman and waiting on a coat check line with Carolina Herrera.

cold feet

You know the first morning of the season when it's hard to rustle out of the warm cocoon of your bed, the first morning when you touch your feet to the floor and feel the cold wood panels, and think, 'yes, fall is here'...?

That was today.

I shouldn't wear high heels.

I hate to admit it, but there are times when even I can't handle the subway.

Yesterday I could have stared holes into the heads of the people sitting in front of me after I'd staggered onto the last car of a rush hour F train, looked around desperately for a little space to wiggle a seat for my tired feet, and finally had to settle for a standing position in front of 3 people spread out in a space for 4.

So I was wearing high heels. Yes, that's my fault. I'd had an informational interview that afternoon and was nervous getting dressed in the morning and I threw on black pumps, stupidly forgetting to bring backup shoes (which I usually don't even wear because I have too much fashion dignity to be caught in an after-work flip-flop situation by artsy, stylish types who share my commute home). But for godsakes, people! Have a little charity! Make room for a limping Chinese woman.

I stared and stared at the three offenders, but one old dude was editing a will, another middle-aged balding guy (with a surprising amount of hair where he *wasn't* balding) was reading the arts section of the New York Times [and taking up plenty of elbow room with his unrefined page-turning antics] and the woman sitting between them kept holding out her nails to see if they'd changed in the minute or two since she last looked at them. Needless to say, they didn't notice me.

I suppose I could have asked them to move over. But I'm from New York. I don't confront. I only stew.

At home later that evening, our dinner guest, Annie, told a story, unprovoked, about obnoxious people on the subway, loudly and purposefully imitating each other 's British and American accents, betraying their good looks with pure inaneness. It got me thinking about other things that people do on the subway that I find upsetting. They include:

* clipping nails

* eating smelly fast food (e.g. McDonald's or chinese takeout)

* flashing (this happened to me when I was in middle school)

* playing music so loudly out of headphones that everyone in a 5-foot radius can also hear your bad 80s music or your hardcore rap

Things that make me smile on the subway:

* anyone who gets up for someone with a pregnant belly or pushing a stroller

* kids on their way to school, with heads that fall to their chins and jerk back violently in an attempt not to fall asleep

* those kids' peers who remove their backpack from their backs and place them on the floor in a considerate gesture that makes room for us fat adults

* kids who sell candy and say, "I'm not trying to raise money for my basketball team, or feed the homeless, I'm just tryin' to keep it real."

on the corner of 49th and 5th.

e.b. white writes about television, July 1938

At the suggestion of my friend Emerson, to whom letters are no stranger, I am reading E.B. White's *One Man's Meat*. This is from the first essay in the book, entitled, "Removal":

"...The news of television, however, is what I particularly go for when I get a chance at the paper; for I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television--of that I am quite sure...

"...Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote..."

One can't help but smile at White's foresight, at his belief that television would change the way we consume information forever.

I know I've referenced this before on this blog, but growing up, television was the sixth member of my family. It was switched on a lot of the time as background noise, but more often served as the centerpiece of any gathering in our Spring Street apartment, formal or informal. When we got home from school, my mother or grandmother would microwave a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli for me and each of my siblings, and sit us in front of the tv, where we'd watch afterschool specials. When my father got home from work for the IRS, he'd flip to the evening news. On nights when I couldn't sleep, I'd wander out into the television static and darkness of the living room where my father would warm me some milk on the stove, and we'd watch Letterman together. And on Sundays, behind folding stools laden with sandwiches and sodas, we'd sit on the sofa as a family and watch the New York Giants play, as our parents screamed at the television set and hit their foreheads with the heels of their palms.

These moments, blurred and soupy in my memory, incline me to disagree with White's assertion that we'd forget the "primary" while entertained by scenes far away on dude ranches, in news studios and on football fields in New Jersey. Yes, the television allowed us to see lives happening in the same moments as our own, but I can recall what I was doing when I was looking at the television. For me, it was a kind of facilitator of family interaction -- still is, to tell you the truth -- and I love it for having been there.

What it means that I don't have a television in my new apartment is something else altogether.

hand-holding headline worthy?

Many years ago, when I was a freshman in college, I wrote about the popular culture/media obsession with death and dying. Sounds morbid, I know, but if you take the front page of any newspaper (and I really mean ANY journal published frequently), more than your fair share of headlines will have something to do with deaths (e.g. fatal plane crashes, celebrity deaths, scuffles between the law enforcement good and the drug-dealing bad) or sickness [and how to avoid it]. Since my primary news source is the NYTimes.com, I thought I might use today's "Most Emailed" articles and "Most Searched Terms" to illustrate my point.

Exhibit A: It's a strange, common thread that runs through these pieces, once you're looking for it. Just take a gander at the top 4 results: Aging (71 year-olds running 10ks in under 45 minutes!); arranged marriages for dead people (you can always count on the Chinese); hand-holding (boy do I have thoughts on THIS. Holding hands help protect you against pain hormones? pff.); fish oil after heart attacks (Omega-3s rule!). Until today, another article that was included on this list was written by a man who survived the airliner collision in Brazil. Death? Danger? Health risks? This is all part of my theory. Why the obsession with death and dying?

Exhibit B (Terms most searched on the website): Brazil? (Horrible plane crash.) Iraq? (I think this one's pretty self-explanatory, though I'll admit I'm surprised people are still searching this, given the indifference of the American public.) Bush? (A morbid thought, just in general.) Amish? (Horrifying school shooting this week.)

I'd rather not draw any broad sociological conclusions from this observation, but on any given day, you will find that truth to what I say just by visiting your local newstand, or news website. A couple of other interesting questions raised: how well do the "Most Emailed" articles represent the demographic of a newspaper's website readership? Could it be that only middle-aged, at-risk heart patients email articles to one another?

Probably not. But for what it's worth, do check out the Dead Bachelor article. It's weird and kind of amazing.

an AmeriNese wedding banquet

This weekend, my mother was really hoping to take her uninitiated Italian boyfriend to a genuine (delicious) 10-course Chinese wedding banquet. What they got instead was some strange hybrid of America and mainland China, with an MC that screamed into a microphone for the entirety of the four-and-a-half meal, and sing-alongs in Mandarin interspersed with choruses of the Black Eyed Peas, 'N Sync, and Vanessa Carlton.

I should point out, before I start, that I grew up attending one banquet or another for the majority of my childhood Saturday nights. Too difficult to invite hundreds of people to weddings in small Chinatown churches, the banquet was where the community could celebrate the couple, and when I was little, many of my parents' siblings, cousins, 2nd cousins and family friends were getting hitched. And while all of this may seem like a "treat" of some sort -- who doesn't want to eat Chinese banquet food every weekend? -- it was a tedious and drawn out affair for the toddler that I was, or the 'tween that I was becoming.

Four hours. Imagine FOUR hours with your family, no games, no entertainment, no English, for that matter. After a while, my mother and father took their cue from other benevolent parents and allowed me and my siblings to bring our handheld Gameboys to dinner (they were clunky plastic things with black & white screens, back then). They let us drink as much soda as we wanted (mistake), as long as it kept us from whining. They packed tea cups full of fried rice and turned them over on our plates, lifting them gently to make little "rice castles," which we'd eat, wide-eyed and giggling.

Needless to say, we always knew what kind of food we'd be seeing and the exact order in which it would be served, which is why this Saturday came as such a surprise. The meal typically begins with cold plates of meats and jellyfish, and evolves into large pieces of shrimp fried in batter garnished with walnuts, huge ceramic bowls of shark's fin soup, slimy abalone on a bed of bok choy, a "bird's nest" of fried noodles housing stir-fried vegetables and scallops, crispy-skinned roast chicken, whole fish of white meat, fried rice, long-life noodles, fruit, sweet red bean soup, wedding cake.

I wish, dear readers, that I had a photograph available of the first dish that we ate. Imagine a shallow bed of shredded iceberg lettuce, covered with large haphazard cubes of canteloupe and honeydew, on top of which lay two, whole, lobsters in their shells, with squirts of mayonnaise laced OVER the red-hued shells and claws. This is what they called "lobster salad." (Well, that's what my uncle called it, and in seriousness.)

There's much more to say on the topic (read: fire-swallowing performers in slinky black gowns, conga lines, crab sticky rice with [gasp!] raisins in it), but I will spare you the details. I think my mother's boyfriend was a little disappointed with the food, and perhaps not prepared for the length of the affair. I just had a good time sitting, giggling with my sister and my aunt, waiting for, hoping for, smelling the dishes we'd grown up with, and laughing at our red-faced 2nd cousin ("Drunk Cuz"), full of cognac, who reminded us that banquets are about more than just the food.