Delayed Gratification

My connecting flight from Cincinnati to Milwaukee was one of those tiny planes that you feel instantly too close for comfort with the 20 other people on board.  We sat on the plane at the gate for an hour and a half after our departure time due to the door being too frozen to shut properly.  So, I got to spend an hour and half listening to 20 imbeciles hoot and guffaw at the jokes they continuously made up about the "situation."  Next to me sat an old woman with her hair perfectly tied into a perfect bun with her perfect shoes and her perfect manners.  She kept asking me what was going on and I perfectly explained our status about 6 times.  Then I said, TURN UP YOUR HEARING AID.  No I didn't.  An enormous Latino gentleman with his wife who was enormous but a lot smaller than him, took turns trying to fit into the seats and yelling at their 3-year-old chunker of a daughter who shrieked for minutes at a time.  One girl with a thick drawl thought it would be a good idea to tell everyone her life story, even though nobody asked.  Her husband, in Oklahoma, wouldn't ever buy anything not made in the USA.  She informed everyone that she hates her step mom, and "who doesn't?" (me). She loudly stated that she manages a McDonald's and wouldn't put up with any one of her employees who spit in the french fry grease anymore.  Comforting.  An old man next to her waxed poetic about how airlines used to serve free champagne.  I didn't even want to think about what this girl would spout off if she had any of the juice in her.

We deboarded after they told us the plane wasn't fit to fly, so we headed over to a different gate, and the McDonald's manager of the year did cartwheels down the vacant hallway, flopping backpack on her back, screaming "Merry Christmas, everybody!!!"

Amen

I came upon St. Patrick's Cathedral with great surprise, Madison Avenue was closer to the train stop than I had thought.  It reminded me of a cleaned-up Sagrada Familia.  I walked in because I hadn't been to church in over 6 years and also because I wanted to breathe in the warm smell of incense enclosed within thick pillars and stone statues.  Squeezing in between a gentleman who was emailing from is Blackberry and surreptitiously checking the Jets score, and a couple who wouldn't stop groping one another's thighs, I looked around at the rest of the crowd.  They looked uncomfortable, not too calm, squished betwixt their enormous fur coats and their bulging shopping bags full of consumerism.  Around the hundreds of people seated, there were people literally milling around the pews as 12:00 mass was in session.  Big boots, hats, and cameras flashing, as the words of Isaiah, Luke and the Thesselonians were being spoken.  The scene reminded me of Notre Dame, where I was appalled at the amount of loud, crazy tourists who hung out at one of the most sacred buildings in the world, screaming in mid-day drunkenness and scaring the pigeons. At St. Patrick's, a woman who looked and sounded like Toni Braxton did the readings, her strong voice shouting into a microphone.  The priest, clad in red, had a thick New York accent and had the tone and imposing inflection of Bob Uecker - instead of saying how many outs there were, he's telling people how important it is to go to confession, his voice reverberating, echoing off the long lines of the towering walls.  As the service carried on, I remembered when I was really young and my mom would bring a bag of stuff for me to do at St. James: coloring books, puzzles, snacks... I was really getting the word of God while eating Cheerios from a Ziploc and finding where Waldo was and yelping loudly as my sister repeatedly pinched my arm.  These are the real religious experiences that stick with you forever.  It's interesting how last weekend at this time,  I was at the Museum of Natural History, staring at exhibits of how monkeys turned into men, and this week, there I was sitting on a hard, wooden pew at St. Patrick's Cathedral, crossing myself in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit listening to a guy tell me about how God created all things and all men.  After exchanging "peace be with you's" and germs directly before receiving the body of Christ, I walked out, thinking that this holy visit would be sufficient for the next six years.  

Kindle

Kindle: Amazon's Wireless Reading Device

"This is the future of book reading.  It will be everywhere." Michael Lewis

USED AND NEW: Available from $349.00

Availability: Expected to ship in 11 to 13 weeks.  Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.  Gift-wrap available.

----

When the people at work started talking about the Kindle as though it were the holy grail, I took some time to figure out what I thought about this new phenomenon.  Then I began to see it all over the city.  People sipping coffees in parks, scrolling down their saucy romance novels.  Men in business suits, scrolling down their Wall Street Journals.  Children poking at words to have their definitions pop out at them immediately.  I don't know if it's the insane accessibility that throws me or if it's the fact that everyone seems to be picking this up and thinking nothing of it.  I guess this must be how music lovers felt at the onset of the iPod.  Yeah, you'll have any book that you want in front of your eyes for only $9.99 each with a simple click, but you have to pay $349 first.  It will only take 30 seconds after that simple click, but you have to wait 11 to 13 weeks for your Kindle to arrive at your doorstep first.  How about going to a half-price bookstore two blocks away?  Or have we become so lazy that we can't even take a leisurely walk to give patronage to the Barnes and Noble or the ... library?  Yes, the dictionary feature is nice, but what happened to flipping through that old volume that is getting dusty on our shelves?  Most importantly, in a time where most of us spend a good portion of our days scrolling, clicking, dragging and dropping, our eyes slaves to the screen, don't we need a break? Don't we need real bound paper in our hands, in our laps?  Doesn't it feel nice to get our eyes off that glossy abyss for an hour or two a day, to pick up something that weighs however many pages are in it, to lick our fingertips and turn the pages in anticipation of whathappensnext?  Don't we love to look at our stacks of books that have creases in the bindings and dog ears squished in between the leafs and scribblings and ideas scrawled by our own hand in the margins?  

It's green, yes.  Oprah endorsed it, true.  But until they invent a Kindle complete with the sweet smell of the paper within a book, I'm sticking to my old fashioned ways.

Slush

Will I ever be slush?  That sagging, loaded pile of words that have made their way into the offices of agents?  These words have been scribbled down by millions of wannabes, of hopetobes, of dreamedsincetheywere7tobes.  These piles are formed from far and wide.  From the cornfields of Iowa to the riverside towns of Saskatchewan, from the bellies of great cites to the Walden Pond cabins of Maine.  Stories, histories, oh-so-important memoirs are gouged from minds and placed onto paper.  People put their absolute hearts and their unremitting souls into these stapled and bound  masterpieces.  Their days are filled with anguish, writing these words.  Their wakeful nights are filled with tosses and turns about one sentence, one comma, one climax.  From the desks of these starved writers fly their lifetime achievements.  They fly Fed-Ex, or travel by UPS, or maybe even the snaily Postal Service.  From one hand to the next these pages are tossed... until they eventually land on another desk.  A more important desk.  And on that fine, oak desk, they sit for days, weeks, months until their corners curl up, aching to be noticed, to be read.  Lowly interns are instructed to pick them up, to peruse.  The lowly intern finds himself in a loathsome mood that day, hasn't had his coffee or his I love you or his espn.com yet and so he reads through the story quickly and pays no mind.  He isn't taken by the first few lines, he doesn't let the words carry him to the 10th, the 40th, the 190th page.  

NO.

He scrawls on the top of the cover letter.  

And those two letters, those two letters stand alone on the top of the pile of slush, and the fantastic dream of a house by the sea and a family of three and a rope swing on a big oak tree, dies.