My maternal grandmother is at or around 90 and quite spry. Â She deftly dodged my attempts at pictures and was able to mock my dad for having dropped a large jar of pickles. Â She told a few stories about what was going on in her care facility but at one point said she still refused to have spaghetti and meatballs.
Me: Why no spaghetti?
Her: Terry, you need to understand my first encounter with the stuff.
Me: Ok, what was it.
Her: I had just gotten off the boat from Ireland and there was this man eating something out of a can. Â He put his spoon it, and it came out with strings on it and a ball of meat. Â He looked at me and asked “would you like some? Â It’s spaghetti and it’s good” and the strings were stuck to his face and he had a wild look to him. Â I think he was a Scot. Â And since then, I swore I would never be like that man.
A friend and I met up in New York City to take in the Whitney Biennial, one of the largest and most highly regarded shows of contemporary art in America. Â I consider myself a fan of art and eagerly awaited the wall of amazing pieces the Whitney would contain. Â What ensued was a two and a half hour odyssey of confusion and farce.
Again, I like art well into the Modern period.  I don’t mind Jackson Pollack and enjoy Mark Rothko and even have a soft spot for Kandinsky but the biennial contents were largely an emetic.  Modern art was allowed to not make sense as it reeled from the horrors of World War II.  Contemporary art has no such excuse as “the world is moving too fast” is a complaint not an observation.  The pace of change at current is understandable and while you can talk about your feeling of alienation don’t expect that to be the norm.  Value systems aren’t suddenly breaking down, they’re being challenged, and some people fall into ennui when there is no clear winner.  I find this scenario exciting and neat and there were no pieces that in any way reflected that sentiment which mildly irked me.  There was a lot of cardboard, a lot of string, a lot of blather on placards but nothing that either spoke to me or reflected what I considered to be the “now”.  The reflective pace of art is somewhat slow compared to essays, photographers, and even architecture as the community collects, defines, and then creates.  I will hopefully go to the biennial in two years and see if the contemporary art community has at all gotten its shit together.  If it hasn’t, then figurative art of this kind may be left behind as social commentary.
1/2 a bagel with a 1/2 oz of cream cheese
A bottle of juice
An English muffin
2 cups of strawberries
A 1/2 can of ravioli
1/2 a salami sandwich
1/2 of chicken wrap
A small caesar salad
2 oz of cheese and crackers
An apple
A banana
A Fiber One bar
A Reese’s chocolate Easter egg
I ate constantly today but nothing over about 250 calories.
I miss the days when I could have three square meals consisting of two cheeseburgers and consider myself at par.
Me: Jon, which of the following should I do, learn to eat fire or learn to jump onto a moving freight train?
John: Easy, moving freight train. If you really want to get around, try learning to use speed stilts.
Me: Speed stilts?
John: Yeah, they’re huge in Prague. Speed stilts or become whatever species Taylor Swift is.
Me: What do you mean?
John: Think about it, she’s got 40 inch legs no larger than a guard rail.
Me: Normal bones could hold that.
John: She could probably get going pretty fast. She also has fatty deposits around her eyes, she’s probably from a desert planet. And everyone likes her.
Me:Â Pheromones?
John: No, it works through television. I think it’s probably some form of hypnosis. *coffee sip*
John: Terry’s banana bread is pretty good. You should try it, Tihn.
Tihn: Nah, I’m waiting for him to bring meatballs in again.
Me: You could solve that problem by bringing in something.
Tihn: But my wife doesn’t cook.
Me: Neither does mine…
Contentment as a feeling is somewhat alien to me. The feeling of “this is nice” is usually tied to some other emotion like a need for me to do something to maintain that state like when I’m running a Scout event or hosting a get together. It’s something I experience rarely and only with a select group of people and the last four days have probably been the longest stretch of it that I can remember outside of the blissful simplicity of childhood. Our memory usually on remembers peaks and the end rather than averages and I suppose in this regard I am lucky. I crave that vast middle of experience and can remember it.
Over dinner on Saturday, the server asked how we were and I gave my standard response of a slightly loud, slightly excited “ok”. A dinner companion glared at me and said “after today you can only muster an ‘ok’?” She was right in her joking indignation. My emotional half-life from peaks seems to be faster than most but a slightly longer lingering period. In 2009, Pat, Joe, and I took a camping to Acadia National Park that I still ruminate on fondly. While considering it, I will have a notable improvement in my mood assuming I can prevent myself from falling into the trap of “so why haven’t you done it again?” and I remember both the interesting bits like meeting CJ and the more quotidian aspects of lounging in the campsite. This extended weekend provided me with about a dozen of those memory touchstones. I’m curious which I will often call upon and which will fall away.
Our destination for the day was to see The Mythbusters live show in Releigh, NC and, after the first shift of driving, Kacey volunteered to drive next. She was unfamiliar with some of my car’s quirks.
Kacey: Is that vibrating a problem?
Me: No. Tires need to be aligned.
Kacey: And when it shakes when I hit the brakes, is that a problem?
Me: I need to get my brakes replaced.
Kacey: Hm… what’s this light on the dashboard?
Me: I need to get an oil change.
I tried and failed to sleep but we got there on time and started watching the show.
They went through a collection of what I’d consider standard science tricks like how to lie on a bed of nails.
The principle here being while one nail is sharp, many nails with a distributed weight will not puncture skin.
They did some more impressive pieces and one focused on how quickly one can get used to a changed perspective. Using Bluetooth cameras, they had created a rig that shows you in a modified third person perspective and had audience volunteers do an obstacle course. The second person also was subject to some scale changes that involved midgets.
I felt I was too far away to get good pictures and during the intermission creeped my way up front. An usher asked what I was doing there, not having the premium seating pass and I proffered my notebook, camera, and student ID as bonefides that I was part of the Temple University Press Corps and was there to take pictures. She let me in and I was now close enough to get awesome shots of Adam Savage’s moobs.
The finale of the paintball gatling gun pointed at a man wearing armor was impressive and had a Mythbustersiness to it that was appropriate.
All in all the show suffered from the same problems as a lot of live shows. Difficulty transitioning between pieces, uninteresting audience questions, and a scale that was limited by venue. Was it worth the ticket price? Yes. Would I go again to a repeat performance? Probably not.
After a late dinner, our vacation was officially over and it had been a good one.
[flickr album=72157630035346470 num=10 size=Thumbnail]
We slept in a bit and Mike and Kacey basked in mutual adorability followed by lunch at Perkins and then the beach. Â Cocoa Beach is immediately east of Orlando and one of the nicest plain beaches along the Florida east coast. Â It’s where families go to the beach and I presumed that I’d be able to find a stunt kite here. Â Along the Jersey coast every beach has one to two kite shops or at least shops that sell two line stunt kites but Florida does not yield kites so easily. Â The closest store I could find was 30 miles south on A1A which translated to a 45 minute drive each way. Â Suzie and I found the kite store, I got a stunt kite, she got a Batman kite, and we returned to Cocoa Beach.
I like beaches mostly as places that are bright and windy. I haven’t swam in the ocean without scuba gear for well over a decade and today I did not break that streak. The wind was wonderful and I remembered more about stunt kiting than I thought I would. For the next two hours I was lost in wind and sky.
I wasn’t able to get the kite to do multiple loops which involves pulling fast enough that the kite’s momentum helps maintain a spin while the lines are crossed but I only crashed twice. Everyone else had a hand at it with more or less success. Suzie’s Bat Kite broke from its line and became a bit of a rat’s nest when ultimately recovered. As is her way, she gave it a swift death rather than letting it linger.
Mike buried himself.
The few hours at the beach were nice. Back at the hotel, there was a crocodile in a pond below the pool area and some English major said “I just like to sit and consider the mind of the crocodile”. My normal response would be “don’t anthropomorphize animals, they hate that” but rage welled up faster than wit. Animals are not humans and at no point should we forget that. They do not have conscious processes in the same way that we do and much of what they do could be described as simple equilibrium seeking. So say that they hate, love, think, etc is a disservice to both their and our uniqueness. Sure, you can argue that this is a short-hand, but I say it’s not a useful one.
I stomped around a bit and then we got changed for dinner.
Dinner that evening was at Mitchell’s Fish Market and it proved delicious.
This was my first go at salmon that didn’t come out of a bag. It didn’t taste like it came from a bag unless the bag were possibly gold or maybe like satin or something. The wilted spinach was also quite good and this is a trick I plan on stealing. Kacey’s friends were nice and as the evening wound down we started hatching plans to run into each other again. I’d say that is a sign of a good first meeting.
Our first stop of the day was Fat Matt’s rib shack and after going to the wrong venue I had a bonding moment with the menu.
The prices were about the same as I’d expect to pay at local rib joints but with the benefit that here it was fast food-style and one didn’t need to consider gratuity. Â Quality ribs to me are about scale and how to get a consistent result when going through large quantities as there’s at least a 4-hour lag between preparation and presentation. Â Southern baby back ribs tend to be fattier and use a spicier and sharper sauce compared to Northern ribs that generally have a sweeter sauce with earthier flavors to them. Â The fat provides a superior mouth feel when combined with a thinner sauce that creates a flavor that coats the mouth. Â The pork was well prepared but I think my preferences lie north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Atlanta Botanical Garden
My passes to the New York Botanical Gardens have paid for themselves in legion ways thanks to their reciprocal membership program through the American Horticultural Society. Â Atlanta’s gardens offered free admission and discount parking bringing my total savings with my passes to about $200 for $100 in initial outlay. Â The gardens themselves were varied but small, only clocking in at 30 acres but this made the entire place viewable in one day. Â Reuben didn’t have a camera so he found other ways to amuse himself.
This was one of my first trips where I tried using my 100mm macro lens as a walk around lens and I was happy with the results.
They had an array of indoor greenhouses and the Flickr album best shows these. After going through the green houses, Suzie made commune with what looked like an anole.
Grant lives not too far from Atlanta and I wanted to go ice skating so we went to his place only to find that he was busy doing lawn maintenance. I wouldn’t have minded this for a casual trip but he had literally a month’s notice and we had driven 800 miles to be there. Suzie and Reuben yelled from the car while I swept the driveway and Grant took a 5 minute shower lasting 20 minutes. We had missed skating and went to dinner. My fusion tacos were unremarkable but Suzie received a bowl of pho large enough to swim in and I’ve shopped it to this effect.
After mediocre Asian food, we continue to get frozen yogurt from Menchie’s which had closed moments before we arrived. Undeterred, I stood by the door holding my thumb and forefinger in a heart pattern until one of the attendants came to the door.
Attendant: We’re closed.
Me: I understand, but we have literally driven 800 miles to be here and after shit-talking all other froyo places arrived here to see it closed. If you don’t let us in, you’ll be putting us in the position of having to call your ex-girlfriend for a handy on a Sunday night after you shit talked her to your new girlfriend that just abandoned you. Don’t put us in that situation.
Attendant: Do you just want frozen yogurt?
Me: Yes.
Attendant: Ok, here are some free waffle cones.
I did not have frozen yogurt so much as the sweet frozen rewards that come with an ability to bullshit.
We dropped off Grant and headed back to Reuben’s playing the stereo far too loudly going through a progression of songs we all turned out to know the words too across My Chemical Romance, Green Day, The Killers and P!nk. Â So for 45 minutes we sang loudly while silently judging each other.
Suzie and I wanted to meet Mike and Kacey in Orlando for dinner but the roads were moving slower than we wished so where I could I drove quickly. Â About 110 miles out, I was pulled over for speeding.
Officer: Why were you going so fast?
Me: We’re trying to make a friend’s Masters dissertation in Orlando this evening.
Officer: Where are you from?
Me: PA.
Officer: And you’re driving?
Me: Yes.
Officer: *pause* *returns to police car* *returns to my car* Sir, please get out of the car.
*We walk to behind my car*
Officer: She yours?
Me: Mine?
Officer: Yours.
Me: Sure?
Officer: Ok, please drive slower. Â You want to make it to Florida in one piece.
We made Orlando in time to take a night time tour of a cemetery.  The guide mentioned that it was the only cemetery in Orlando County and then did so again every five sentences.  The tour ended, thankfully, and we returned to the hotel for a proper night’s rest.
