At 7:30 a.m. we were on our way to pick up car share, and it was that zen weather that only comes to Philadelphia in September: air cool on our bare arms, sky a perfect cloudless cerulean blue.
“This is a perfect day,” I said to Elise.
Personal
Shoot The Stars
I am not a habitual taxi-taker. In fact, I’m the opposite – usually walking home with my guitar at 1 a.m. after playing at Lindsay’s bar of choice.
Every so often the need arises. Like a few weeks ago, heading home from work sick.
Months ago I meant to write about one driver in specific. He was the old, whiskey-soaked sort of driver you see in movies and not in actual taxis much anymore.
“I used to drive in Atlantic City,” he confided, “until one night I picked up this fare, and I knew something wasn’t right.
“Sure enough, at the first red light we hit he held a gun to the back of my head and told me to hand back all of my cash.
“I was sure he was going to kill me,” he said, as I stared at the back of his head, riveted. “But, he just waited until I had handed it all back to him, and then he just opened the door and got out.
“So I stopped driving in Atlantic City.”
As the numbers on Washington ave slid every-lower we talked about guns and people, and which is the real killer. We talked about how life is valuable.
When he left me on my step I half imagined that I would turn to find his cab nowhere in sight, as if he was some gossamer coachman emerged from the night just for that conversation.
This Thursday night on the way home from our band rehearsal my driver was Russian, and not sure how to get to my house from the Kimmel Center. Another recent transplant, perhaps?
After I pointed him in the right direction, he began to speak – unselfconsciously, not in a making conversation sort of way.
“My good friend from home played jee-tar,” he told me, turning onto Broad. “His mother, his father, both are deaf, and I think he not hear so well. But, he could play the jee-tar so well. His hands move so quick on… what do you say? The long part. For me it is [?].”
“The neck.”
“Yes, the neck. His hands move so quick on the neck. My friend’s jee-tar, made from before revolution.”
(I inwardly winced, remembering the t-shirt I had almost worn, but didn’t, knowing for certain that Gina would wear it instead (and she did).)
I found myself telling him how I like to play acoustic because I like to feel the music through my body, because you never need an amplifier that way.
“This week, the stars,” he said as we turned onto Washington. “How do you say? You have a saying.”
“Falling stars?”
“Yes, yes, but when they fall…”
“Shower?”
“Yes. A shower of stars this week.”
I told him about the time I laid in the middle of a football field in nowheresville, tucked into my sleeping bag, watching the stars fall. He corrected me, “not stars, Leonids.”
“You have to get out of the city,” I implored him. “They aren’t the same with the lights. You need to find somewhere where it’s really night.”
The ride seemed long for the conversation, but the fare was inexplicably cheap. Maybe he doesn’t know how to work the meter yet, i thought.
“Good luck with your show,” he said after i left him his tip.
“Good luck with your stars,” I told him.
This one I’m sure was real.
Getting Regular: OCD moms, Suck flashback, pop economics, APOD, and other think-provoking links.
In case you haven’t caught on, I have lit a bit of a fire under myself on the topic of Year 8 of Crushing Krisis, and part of that flame had extended to reading other blogs.
Blogs don’t exist in a vacuum, but if you pretend that yours does then its reality will conform to your whim. That’s been one of my biggest problems – I have plenty of regular reads, but beyond Rabi, Amanda, Jett, and Alison I don’t make much of a point of regularly reading, commenting and – most importantly – linking to my favorite compatriots.
I’m trying to surmount the first two difficulties by using Google Reader to aggregate my favorite RSS feeds. The reader has a handy “starred” feature to let me highlight my favorite posts, which will hopefully lead to many bounties of links such as the one you’re about to experience.
Okay, so I lied a little – I read more than just those four blogs on a regular basis. Like every other blogger on the face of the internet, I regularly read Dooce, ostensibly so I can chat about it with Lindsay over lunch, but more and more often because I love how she weaves in her OCD with her toddler stories.
(ps: Linds, I know you’re reading. Check out this post about photocamp. Spin any gears in your brain?)
On that same topic (the one before the parens), Whoopee is one of my favorite blogs from NaBloPoMo, as is Flotsam, with the terrifically statistically improbable phrase, “our embryos are the most beautiful embryos that ever underwent meiosis.”
I’m also a long time reader of Acerbia, which tricked me into thinking it was telling the truth for the first time in a while. And, I’m a devotee of Things That Make You Go Hmm, though TDavid often blogs faster than I can read, offering an embarrassment of rich links.
My favorite Hmm-link of the week was a brief feature on Whateverlife, a flashy-as-hell free MySpace layout website run by Ashley Qualls, a 17 year old girl living in Detroit. Oh, did I mention it gets roughly 60 million page views a month? For more interesting background, check out “Girl Power,” an article from FastCompany.
Not only is Ashley amazing, she’s saving us all from having to dumb down our web design skills just to satiate the beast that is MySpace.
God bless her.
Mlarson is another terrific blog for useful and/or thought-inducing links … without never ending commentary of TDavid or, say, yours truly. My favorite of his this week was a link to a diagram illustrating the difference between generalist and specialist approaches to problem-solving. That’s via Communication Nation and how could I not like a blog named that?
Speaking of things you can’t help but like, did you ever read Suck? Back in it’s late-90s heyday it was an utter addiction of mine – a daily dose of irreverence from a snarky group of anonymous writers.
Whether you recall it or not eZine Keep Going featured an amazing article about what they rightfully deem the first great website.
(What I love the most about the article is that it’s a whopping 15,000+ words. I love a piece of journalism that you can really sink into.)
That link was gleaned from Karl @ Paradox1x, proprietor of Philly Future, who has been reading CK a long-ass time. We’re talking early Year 2. This week he made an absolutely essential post (partially) about the problem with Facebook which I later commented upon. Also good: the power of tagging is as a byproduct, not a feature.
Jumping back one topic, another weighty article you might enjoy is The New Economics of Pop Music (via Smokler‘s del.icio.us). Oh, also, while you’re enjoying thing please enjoy my two favorite photos of the week, via Ugly Green Chair and Dooce.
Finally, randomly, the top ten most amazing pictures taken by Hubble. Trivial note: every desktop I work on has a background from Nasa’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, which draw endless complements. At home it’s stars, dust, and nebula, at work it’s blue lagoon. So, clearly I am a nebula fan, but, really, there are so many good ones that it’s very hard to choose.
One Astronomy shot i glanced at while compiling that sentence wasan illustration of the relative size of Earth, which is coincidental, as I had pegged this Debbie Millman post on planetary proportions as a must-link because it’s the first time I’ve ever truly been impacted by such a visual representation (probably because it shows depth).
As a rule of thumb, that’s roughly a fifth of the amount of great reading I’ve been missing out on in the past year just because I didn’t have an RSS reader. Scary.
Under the Chalk
I am so very behind the times when I need Rolling Stone to tell me that a tune from PJ Harvey’s forthcoming piano-based record Under The Chalk has leaked onto the internet a month ago.
What the hell?
Luckily, the internet forgives and provides. Check out a rather transfixing YouTube performance of “When Under Ether” and/or stream the leaked track below, and then head to Philly-based mp3 blog Some Velvet Blog to check out the cover and tracklist of Chalk.
I really like it. I’m looking forward to the huge, inevitable number of Tori comparisons PJ’s record draws, as if she is suddenly professing to be a pianist; the entire point of her is that every album is completely different.
(Also discovered in my mad PJ hunt – The Yellow Stereo. Very good music writing, and taste.)
I so did not violate any confidentiality agreements by writing this post.
How to write this post and not get fired? It’ll be tricky.
You all know by now I work in communications for a major Philadelphia company, and I love it. I get paid to do things I would probably be doing at home by myself anyway, as frightening as that concept is.
What you might not know (because I haven’t mentioned it in about seven years) is that I had a childhood obsession with the Price Is Right. I loved the One Bid, I loved the Showcase Showdown.
But, I loved nothing more than I loved Plinko.
I was obsessed with the way the penny slid into the board and plunked back and forth and to and fro down the pegs before it finally wound up in a prize slot.
You might not understand how those two facts are connected to each other. Here’s a hint:
Right now, somewhere in Philadelphia, there is a fully functional Plinko board.
I can’t tell you why there is a Plinko board, or where the Plinko board is, because it’s … well, it might be a trade secret? Like, if I were to reveal the purpose and location of the Plinko board, the reason behind my termination would be “dissemination of trade secrets on the internet.” I think.
What I can reveal is that within the last month my co-workers’ “duties as assigned” meant they had to acquire said Plinko board, and that when I walked one of said co-workers to the parking lot today I came within one hot second of climbing onto the roof of her mini-van like a fucking ninja and riding that sucker through rush hour to the location of the Plinko board.
I have been promised photos, and possibly even a video demo, of the Plinko board in action. Yet, pester, plead, and outright beg as I might I could not obtain permission to play, touch, or even view the Plinko board at its secret location. And, after tomorrow, it will be gone, whisked away by the cruel whims of fate (and/or the decrepit liver-spotted claws of nigh unknown game show dieties).
However, though I may be barred from visiting the Plinko mecca, or enlisting you to help me gain entry to it by some nefarious means, I have taken away one important thing from this experience:
I now know that there is a life-sized, fully-functional Plinko board that can be delivered to the Philadelphia metro area.
And, I’m pretty sure I have a high enough credit limit to rent it for the weekend…