"Of all fruit the best is the mango, of all meat the best is the pork, and of all leaves it's the lahpet (tea)."

Tonight after sumi class Nikki and I wandered down to the lower east side for Burmese food at  a place she found called Village Mingala.  Salad of glass noodles, peanuts, cilantro, sesame seeds, soy beans,  a simple broth soup with wood ear mushrooms and cucumber, roast pork loin with tamarind sauce, and a "1000 layer pancake" with beef and potato curry.  Although most of the time I didn't even know what kingdom the thing in my mouth once belonged to, and that the number of layers in my pancake was, at most, 67 or so, we really enjoyed the food. It was cheap,tasty, simple, and filling.

So I came home to read up on Burmese food and managed to stray onto the article about the ruling  military junta and its penchant for extortion, torture, and cremating living dissidents.  The World is a poor digestif.

For Easter I ate

a rabbit. 

Corrupting the Youth of New York

I could hear little mouths drop followed by the clenching of maternal fists when I topped out on the boulders of Rat Rock in Central Park, puffing on a cigar, surrounded by the impressionable  youth of several nations.  A group Taiwanese tourists wandered onto the ledge to photograph the skyline and had to descend on their butts, cameras held high, laughing.  I played and they played and I left muddy and slightly bloodied, and very happy.  Ecorche was cancelled today, so I'm home waiting on a garlic miche to rise while trying to balance my espresso consumption with a reasonable human sleep schedule.  

Week XII

I heard my first gunshots (2) in Brooklyn today, followed by an dismayingly long interval of silence between their echos and the swarming of sirens headed toward either the origin or destination of the bullets.  

Not much to say other than that it's more to think of and about.  Nikki and I visited Walt Whitman's grave in Camden and I still haven't lost the mood of the place.  After painting my 211th stalk of bamboo with leaves I finally made something recognizable on my news scrap in sumi-e class today.  Then I celebrated by doing 32 or so more.  Next week is a different bamboo shaft on rice paper and maybe 20 people in the world know how oddly exciting that is.  

North Brunswick Refugee

Today a crane fell off of whatever cranes rest on and crushed a building on the east side of manhattan, missing me by just a few miles.  I am in North Brunswick visiting Nicole and Nicole's parents and Nicole's parents' refrigerator...  Tomorrow I will be meeting with my former philosophy  professor at his home in Plainfield, NJ and then gorging myself at a secret society meeting place of sushi consumers.  

in Spain Somehow

Visited the Cathedral of St. John the Devine today.  Hard to say if it is indescribable or if it just leaves me too exhausted to try.  I did however find the energy to finally clean my room in the apartment.  I am sitting cross legged on a burlap coffee sack using my guitar case as a makeshift desk while wax from the wine-bottle candle and flakes of dollar store duct tape rain down around me.  content.

positive paranoia..

On the same day (3/3/2008) I was informed on consecutive hours that I have been accepted both to dartmouth and for the Bobolink (www.cowsoutside.com) internship, which has caused me to feel a bit of a lot like poor Kilgore Trout in Breakfast of Champions meeting Vonnegut and being told that he will win a Nobel Prize etc.  Or maybe one of those people from the original Matrix who died because they rejected the programming of the perfect world.  

Anyway.  Today I returned to the New York Academy of Medicine, this time with my camera as promised.  After a longish nap I went to my first of 10 guitar lessons, which left Redemption Song in my head for the need hour or two.  Tomorrow I bake ciabatta, do my godforsaken laundry, and start Sumi-e.  

the 366th day of the year

was a more or less adventure filled and certainly more upbeat day than the previous. The weather still sucked, but in a less cold way. For the first time in my life I was glad to feel 33 degree sleet/rain. Before the fall/flood, I rode uptown to the New York Academy of Medicine, which looks like an Egyptian temple, to the Rare Book Room, which looks like the Gryffindor Common Room. I was then shown an original 1543 copy of Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica. I'm too lazy to even try to describe the experience right now, but I will take and post a photo after my second visit which is scheduled for next Tuesday.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesalius

The second adventure of the day involved roasting the green sumatra coffee that I bought at McNulty's the other day. More or less a successful undertaking, plus I learned that my smoke detector is completely nonfunctional.