A friend was telling me today that he's having something of a midlife crisis. I confessed that I've never really understood what that means. He said, "It's like I'm looking around at my life and thinking, Is this all there is?"

I told him that by that definition I don't expect to ever have a midlife crisis.

We were walking down Sixth Avenue toward Bryant Park. Being there reminded me, as it always does, of the year I spent as a secretary at BPRC, struggling in yet another job that didn't suit me, thinking This is it. I'm done working for other people. It never works. It reminded me of how miserable Josh was back then, how we desperately tried to find local friends and community, how Xtina and I wrestled with the transition from long-distance to medium-distance and wondered why seeing each other more often wasn't making us happier, how money was always tight.

And now I have everything. So much more than I ever thought I might have. I hear there are kids who plan their futures; I never really did, or not in any plausible way. (I wanted to be a detective. I wanted to live in a self-sustaining agrarian commune. I wanted to create a language that everyone in the world would speak. But those are dreams, fancies, not plans.) I'm not sure I believed in the concept of myself as an adult. Somehow, without a blueprint, this amazing life has built itself around me. Such riches, such beauty, such wonder, such love! To contemplate it is to be both uplifted and humbled. I look around at my life every day and I'm blown away by how much there is. I don't expect to feel the slightest bit different when I hit "midlife", whenever that is.

I guess I got my crises over with early. Can't say I'm the least bit sorry.


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Today is my grandma's 80th birthday. We're having a big party for her on Sunday--where by "we" I actually mean my folks are doing all the work--but today is the official date. I don't mostly put birthdays on here because I don't want it to seem like a statement if I miss one. But 80, 80 is a big, round number. Eighty is a thing.

Grandma is my last grandparent standing. I mean, I have Grandpa Lyzenga, but I married into him when I was full grown rather than having memories of walking with him when I was tiny; and as much as I will sometimes introduce Aunt Ellen and Uncle Phil as my Lingen grandparents, and as much as they are doing their darnedest, they are in fact a really really special great-aunt and -uncle, which is its own thing and not to be denigrated.

But Grandma has enough personality for four grandparents all by herself. (So, I know firsthand or hear quite vividly, did each of my other grandparents in their own ways. Lack of personality: not an issue in this family.) Grandma is an Energizer bunny. I wrote in her birthday card that she embodies the adage about blooming where one is planted, and I really think that's true. She does well with new people and new situations. She just dusts herself off and tries again, whatever she needs to try again, and I have never once heard of a situation she couldn't eventually make that work in. Never once. Her persistence inspires me. I hope it lasts long past 80.

Today April and particularly Simone had a hard time on the playground. There was a group of older kids at Mosswood, all related, who resolutely did not want to play with them. Eventually April just went off to play by herself, but Simone was devastated. She sat in my lap and wailed for several minutes. The parent of the older kids was very apologetic, but I was a little bit more sanguine about it all and let her know.

Eventually I pointed Simone in the direction of a younger kid and a soccer ball instead and that seemed to solve the issue. Later, she found a branch and "shot" all of her adversaries in dramatically staged fashion. The other parent thought that was cute, thank goodness.

I am beginning to think, by the way, that kids at some parks, somewhat independent of age, are more open to strangers playing with them than at other parks. Bird Sanctuary Park (not its official name), for example, is incredibly social. Startlingly social. Big Frog Park is on the friendly side. Mosswood Park varies, as does Splash Pad Park. Totland is not as social as I always expect it to be, but I think that's in part because the children are on the young end and generally don't have the social skills necessary for more than parallel play. I don't know any of the other area playgrounds well enough to make a firm diagnosis yet.

So what is with this new food trend of serving dessert in a Mason jar, parfait-style?

Today's rediscovered historical figure that I must remember to tell my children about: Mary Anning.

a.k.a.: Dinosaur Hunter Mary!

This ended up being one of my favorite photos from Hannah and Aaron's wedding, but it was also the one that took the most work to clean up. Generally, I don't do much photo post-processing. I fiddle a bit with the levels, maybe lighten things up a bit if the setting was dark, and decide if the photo would look better in black and white (due to high ASA, or lighting issues, or contrast and texture that I want to bring out). Very occasionally I crop something, if the subject of the photo is worth it.



It looks like she has a cybernetic organism erupting from her arm. The soft focus isn't really working here, either. But I loved the pose, and I thought the contrast could be brought out. I tried a bunch of different options to hide the weird rectangular photo effect, but most of them left a patchy appearance. Finally, I used a super-huge brush and just burned the whole area. Converting to black and white made it easier to do this seamlessly, and it also emphasized the light and shadows that make this an interesting photo. After tweaking the levels to bring this contrast out, I'm really happy with the result.

So, I've been reading Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which is a quasi-pornotopia. Sex is utterly everywhere in the book, and it's post-capitalist—no scarcity and quantity becomes quality. There's a lot of fetishistic counting of orgasms, doses of semen and urine, etc. Being a Samuel Delany novel, the sex largely involves sucking off dirty and/or homeless guys, dickcheese under foreskins, ass-eating, piss-drinking, and lots of happy strangers. I had to take a break for a while—not because of the incest or the discussion of licking dried shit out of assholes, but because of the nose-picking. And the eating of mucus. And the sharing of mucus. And picking other people's noses.

For a break, I read The Primal Screamer (a recent quote of the day entry!) by Nick Blinko, and Green Girl by Kate Zambreno, both of which were fantastic. They also had some similarities—the main character is observed and manipulated by the narrator; that action is seen in bits and pieces, as though through to hands worth of laced fingers; both are thematically obsessed with another creative medium (music in Primal, film in Girl); both are set in England. In these attributes, they are also utterly different than Spiders, which carries on in a straightforward manner, offers minute detail, finds non-libidinal activity suspicious, and doesn't just take place in the US, but is all about it. And eating snot for sexual purposes.

I'll get back to it in the morning. At 800 pages, I actually left it at work rather than carry it on my commute while reading the other titles. I'm told the mucophilia gets a break about 400 pages in. We'll see...

Regular readers may remember the time when my father met Tom Cruise and taught him how to fake operating a crane for The War of the Worlds. Well, yesterday, he met Katy Perry, also on the pier. She gave a private show for Fleet Week, and my father was involved on hanging a banner on one of the cranes—"Gloria" is the crane's name.

According to my sister who reported the claims of my father to me, Katy Perry managed the hanging of the banner herself and made him re-do it a few times to get it right. This was difficult work, as the banner was pretty high up. Later, he dropped a box of flags from the cherry-picker he was in, sending Perry running for safety. All went well though, and Perry got into her ridiculous outfit and put on a show for the sailors: