Miserable on 34th Street

Last year, when I went downtown to see the Christmas decorations, I was seized with a bout of Scrooginess and jumped ship after taking a picture in front of the tree at Rockefeller Center. It was too cold and there were too many tourists. This year, however, things were different. Maybe I've gotten used to the icy winds and the crush of people that typify the holidays in New York. Maybe I'd been charmed by the garlands, trees, and other decorations around the city.

Bryant Park, where there is now an ice rink, a series of stalls selling handicrafts, and a temporary winter restaurant (really).

Plus, I'd already seen the Rockefeller tree with Shannon a week before, and, while it had been a crowded nightmare, it was over. My friend Chrysta was taking the train in to hang out for the afternoon, and so while waiting for her I decided to go to Macy's to see the windows and whatnot. (Plus I had to exchange something.)

The tree.

The crowd that arrived to gawk at the tree.

My Scrooginess didn't take long to return. The windows, done in a yes-Virginia-there-is-a-Santa-Claus theme, were nice and all, but I couldn’t get a very good picture of them because of the glare, and people kept bumping into me. One woman actually hit me with her stroller in her enthusiasm to get her one-year-old closer to the displays. I'm pretty sure the one-year-old did not know the back story about the letter to the editor and was not interested in the explanation either.

Yes, Virginia, there is a reason people avoid department stores the week before Christmas.

Inside Macy's, I was dismayed to find that there was a one-day sale occurring, and what was usually a busy crowd of holiday shoppers had been whipped into a frenzy. The decorations were indeed spectacular, but navigating the crush of people occupied so much of my focus that I hardly noticed them. There was, I learned, no section dedicated to returns, and I was told by an unsympathetic security guard that I would have to take both items back to where I found them. "But they were gifts," I protested. "I didn't find them anywhere." He pointed me in the vague direction of the Monet counter in the jewelry section. It took me over 15 minutes to find it, even though I wasn't far off, because the crowds made it difficult to move or even see very far in any one direction. The employees I asked didn't seem to know what I was talking about. There was a long line when I finally got there, and I kept getting pushed aside by women who wanted to paw through the boxes of baubles arranged along the counter that were going for 50% of their usual sale price.

Finally at the front, I was told that I could return only one of the two things there because the SKU code had been ripped off the second item and the woman didn't know the original price. She gave me a store credit, then sent me to the "gift" section. I had to go down a set of stairs to get there, which made the impression that I was descending to another circle of Hell even more vivid.

The gift section was a nightmare. It was even more crowded than the jewelry department because the sale prices were even more dramatic. I waited in a line that had no more than 5 people in it but that took 20 minutes to pass through. At one point, a beaming saleswoman approached me. "If you're just buying one item, there's an express lane," she chirped. "I'm returning it," I said. "Oh," she replied, looking tragic, and drifted away.

Finally at the front of the line, I passed over the box and heaved a sigh of relief. Next stop: bathroom. The cashier pointed out the missing SKU sticker and looked accusingly at me. "I didn't take it off. It was a gift," I explained. "And you don't have a receipt?" she asked. "No. That's funny, I could have sworn I just mentioned that it was a gift..." She consulted several other salespeople, but because the ravenous crowd of shoppers had cleared the shelves of all similar items, she didn't know how much it had cost and therefore couldn’t accept it back. "There are no more on this floor," she said. I'd now been waiting over half an hour, and I wanted to tell her to make use of the phone that was sitting inches from her keyboard to talk to someone on another floor and figure it out. Or else to guess. Or do to any number of things that might have persuaded me that, if given the choice between having either me or a rat infestation in their store, they'd pick me.

Instead, I took the wooden escalator down a level to find the bathroom, where the line reminded me of Splash Mountain at Disneyland. And that is when I left.

Deep Thought

Maybe we've got pigeons all wrong. I know they're supposedly rats with wings, but I wouldn't bathe outside when it's 20 degrees. Something to think about.

Just Another Day in the Life

Last night, after my last tutoring appointment, I went out to Brooklyn to hang out with a college friend who recently moved to New York. After spending a few pleasant, uneventful hours there, I was headed home when I got a text message from my friend Jeremy inviting me to come hang out with him. It was 12:30 and I was a long way from home, so I said I was probably going to pass. "Come on," he said. "I'm hanging out with international male supermodels." Right. But then he said he was in Brooklyn, not too far from where I was, so I figured I'd stop by. He gave me the address, and I took the train, then walked a few blocks. I found myself in front of a nice building and called Jeremy to get the buzzer number. "Hit 4," he said. I was buzzed in, and I rode the elevator, somewhat annoyed that he hadn't told me the apartment number. I knew only that it was somewhere on the 4th floor.

I was partly right: He wasn't somewhere on the 4th floor, the apartment where I found him WAS the 4th floor. The whole thing. The doors opened into a huge, airy living room. To the left, was a kitchen with granite countertops. And sitting at the granite countertop was a grinning Jeremy and the two most handsome men I have ever seen in my life.

Danny Schwarz, 9th most highly-paid male model in the world.

Jaime Jewitt, not doing too badly for himself either.

Re-enactment of the dignified way I conducted myself upon entering the apartment.

One of them cheerfully stood up and shook my hand. "I'm __________," he said in a British accent. "I'm __________," said the other in an equally British accent. "Want a beer?"

After about five minutes, I collected myself enough to actually listen to their names. Throughout the night, Jeremy filled me in on their backgrounds. Both have been featured in billboards, magazines, and websites for top designers like Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, etc. Danny was on a billboard in Times Square and can now be seen on the side of the red double-decker buses that tourists ride around in to see the landmark sights in New York. He was a very well-known DJ in England before Jaime pulled him into modeling. They joined Jeremy's acting class, and he found himself out for drinks with them somewhat unexpectedly and decided to invite me along for the ride, for which I will be grateful to him until my dying day. Ten minutes after I arrived, we were in a cab headed to some swanky club in Manhattan, with both models talking a mile a minute. They're really very nice guys, quite personable and funny. They had to pay me back for the cab ride later in the evening because all they had were piles of $100's - Jeremy says they're both multi-millionaires - which the driver didn't want to take. At the club, we got a prime table immediately and I didn't pay a dime for one of the most fantastic, surreal nights I've ever had. We closed the place down, heading out at 4:00 A.M., and both squeezed my hand, told me how nice it was to meet me, and kissed my cheek as we said our farewells.

Just, y'know, another Thursday night in New York.

Frozen Harlem

When I got out of class on Monday night, I headed to Harlem to visit my friend Ferran before he headed off to Spain for a month for the Christmas holiday. Last year, we were together for the first big snow of the year, and so to honor what has become an unintentional tradition, we went out to take a few pictures.

Believe it or not, this is the least blurry picture of me that Ferran was able to take. It was very windy and absolutely freezing, and I couldn't hold still for even a second.

We were just about the only idiots not huddled up inside.

As you can see, there was no diving into snowbanks for us. Ferran did manage to make a snowball, but it took a while and resulted in a large patch of naked sidewalk. The roads were all salted the next morning, but it hasn't been warm enough for anything else to melt, so it's still on the tops of cars, bushes, and trees.

Crossed Fingers, Lasts, and Firsts

This afternoon, I submitted my application to ISS, the placement company who will help me find an overseas teaching post if they accept me.

Then tonight I attended the last instructional class period I'll have as a student at Teachers College. Near the end of the period, I started to feel sort of fluttery, and looked around to share the sentiment with someone. Every student in the room had at least one semester to go, and they looked detached and distracted.

And later, leaving school to head home, I was sprinkled with the first snowflakes of the year, which settled on my black coat so that I could see them clearly in all their crystal, feathery perfection before they disappeared one by one.

It's easy to fixate on something that is just beginning, something I'm leaving behind, or something I'm hoping might lie ahead. Getting all three within a few hours of each other makes one realize that, actually, they're always happening at the same time; something is always coming to an end just as something else is beginning and something even further down the road might happen. Life is, indeed, good.

Out: Old, In: New

Ch-ch-ch-changes.

Yesterday I finished the last final paper I'll have to write for TC, and after an exam on Tuesday night I'm done with grad school. It feels both like it's been a long time coming and that it crept up on me. When I come back to New York in January, after a two-week trip to enjoy the blissful dullness of Visalia, my day-to-day life will look pretty different.

No school, obviously, so I'm going to be filling my hours in different ways. I wrapped up my practicum work with Miguel (he made great progress with me, but I've come to think that he might have a long term memory deficit and wonder how much he will retain before he begins work with a new TC student in January) and one of the kids I tutor is moving to Seattle.

I've added two new kids to the roster, however, and I'm really excited about both of them. One, Andy (pseudonym) is a darling sixth grader who wants to be an actor when he grows up; he's rehearsing for a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in which he'll play Puck. Apparently he has problems with reading comprehension. After our initial assessment yesterday, I decided that he's not great a picking out details, but there don't seem to be any glaring problems, so our hours together should be pleasant rather than frustrating. The other, Eddie, in 7th grade, needs pre-algebra work. Luckily, I know just enough math to be very slightly ahead of him. He's a sweetheart, and when I asked him what he thought after our first session he said, "That was fun!" Fun? Algebra? God help us. I'm delighted to spend an hour a week being handsomely paid to work with such fantastic kids and their parents, who are just as lovely. Another perk: both kids live blocks away from me. It's great to leave the house 15 minutes before I'm supposed to be anywhere - a rarity in this city. I'll probably pick up at least one more kid in January, and I'll most likely start seeing one of my current clients twice a week, so that'll keep me at least somewhat occupied. And it's coat check season again, which fills my Friday nights/Saturday mornings with, well, coats.

There's marathon training to fill my hours as well. I'm taking about 10 days off because of a tendonitis flare-up in my left foot. While I miss my daily training, it's 28 degrees out there at the moment. This happened very suddenly, and I think I need a bit of time to adjust. I saw the first snowflakes of the year on Monday afternoon, but they didn't stick. We'll see if we get some of the real stuff in time for Christmas.

Gee, Again

Yesterday I decided to get a bit nostalgic about my time at Vanderbilt and went to a talk by E. Gordon Gee (pronounced with a hard g like "go," not a soft g like "giraffe") at Teachers College. Gee was chancellor at Vandy during my four years there and now he's the president of Ohio State. Turns out Gee is an alum of TC, having earned his Ed.M here many moons ago. I always liked him at Vandy, even though many of my friends wrote him off as a phony. No question, he's got the air of a politician about him. But I've read interviews with him and heard him on the radio and like what he has to say about higher education. And it's hard not to like him the second you see him. He has a high, cheerful voice and a face that can only be described as elfin. He's always cracking jokes, and bow ties are the only kind he will wear. At Vandy, we had an annual bow tie tying competition in his honor, and he used to hand out bow tie-shaped cookies each Valentine's Day to all the students with a heart frosted in the center where the knot should be. Honestly, what's not to like?

The room was packed, although mostly with older audience members. During his 35 minutes, he had a lot to say about what the role of the American university system should be but hasn't been recently. In his opinion, it's broken. He said universities should not be run like businesses, and that they need more partnerships with the community and other institutions within the community. He's in favor of abolishing departments and changing the role of tenure. He said community colleges are the most important educational institutions in the country.

He delivered all of these controversial statements with a lighthearted tone and a steady stream of jokes, but from what I know, Gee's track record is pretty serious. He's not afraid to put his money where his mouth is. He's gotten a lot of heat for this kind of thinking from the press, and cheerfully brought up lots of it during his talk. For example, one of his biggest quests upon arriving at OSU was to take an axe to all the bureaucracy that he felt was unwieldy, inefficient, and expensive, and a lot of people weren't happy about the changes he made within days of beginning his new post. He said that leadership requires three things: a thick skin, a sense of humor, and nerves like sewer pipes.

I learned another reason to be a fan of his: He chaired the committee that decided to add a writing section to the SAT test. This was a sorely needed addition in my opinion, as one can learn a lot more about the way a student thinks from reading something they've written than from looking at patterns of bubbles they fill in. And its addition has ensured that ambitious kids and their often more ambitious parents don't relegate writing to the back burner in favor of vocabulary flashcards.

I had class immediately after the talk, but on my way out I shook his hand and told him I was a Vandy alum. He beamed at me and asked what year I graduated and what I was doing these days, then said it was great to see me again. I'm sure it probably wasn't. But the last time I shook his hand, it was on stage at the Vanderbilt graduation when he handed me my diploma with his signature on it, and it was awfully nice to relive that again.

Knitting in a Winter Wonderland

Baby, it's bloody freezing outside. This time of year, I find I have the urge to buy a bunch of sweaters. (Thanks to H&M, I can do this without plunging into debt.) I do not, however, have the urge to buy scarves and hats. This is because I enjoy knitting my own so much more, and I predict many happy hours curled up knitting this winter after I finish classes. I hardly knitted a stitch from about March until October, but now I'm back in full swing. I've been scouring websites for designs and have come up with a few of my own - still in the abstract realm, I'm afraid, so no pictures - based on what I see in stores and wrapped around people's heads and necks. I've drawn some chilly glances from fellow subway riders when they catch me staring at them, trying to figure out how to replicate that diamond pattern on their scarf or that fetching alternating stripe that zig zags down the side of a hat. I wonder if my health insurance covers subterranean fist fights...

So far, I've got just two completed projects to show off. First, in need of a simple scarf that I could wear with anything, I did this one in a seed stitch, which is one I've been wanting to try for a while. It was very simple to do, obviously, and required very little concentration on my part. No pattern necessary here, I just dove into it.

Detail of the seed stitch, and my super-cool tassels

I'm rather proud of this next one, which I finished just tonight. It was my first attempt at lace. I made tons of mistakes - one has to be very attentive when knitting a lace pattern and I mostly wasn't - but by a happy accident I bought yarn that was slightly too thick for the needles I used, which yielded tighter stitches which are harder to see clearly. In other words, even I can't tell where I messed up, but I assure you, there are many, many places. I love the way it turned out, but doing it was a bit of a pain because I had to refer to the pattern, which I found online, constantly the entire time I was working on it. I never managed to memorize it, even after repeating it 20-something times. So I couldn't do it while watching a movie or even talking on the phone because I needed to keep track of where I was. Still, I think the result is well worth it. I'm working on a matching hat now.

Detail of the lace scarf

Let it snow!