The dog days are coming

I have three dog stories from today

1. I was walking to yoga and I saw a middle-aged man walking his dog and carrying a hand full of dry-cleaning on the hanger. At the crosswalk, the dog just sort of crouched a little bit and let out just a golfball sized amount of poo. The light changed and the man started to walk. I was walking towards them, and I believe that it really isn't cool to leave dog poop on the sidewalk, especially not the sidewalk on my commute.

So when we met halfway across the street I said, "Your dog just shit on the sidewalk back there."
It was a little bold of my. I considered just letting it go. He was all clean with clean laundry and no free hand and I thought thats why he didn't pick it up. But, really, are those excuses? No.

He said, "Not my dog."
I said, "I just saw her squat down."
Then he looked back and said, "Oh."
Then he went back and picked up the poo. That was cool of him.

The dog had done a little sneaky poo job. In retrospect, I sort of wonder if that man had trained his dog to sneak poo so he could legitimately pretend he didn't know. But he was so cool about picking it up that I suspect this is not the case.

2. I was at the park and I saw a man on a bicycle carrying a bag on his back and in that bag was a dog. He stopped, got off the bike, took off the bag, and the dog just got out and ran around. It looked a little stiff.

3. I saw a man walking a cat that looked just like Pook, on a harness. What!

Because no mater how much you hurt me I will always take you back

Thingsiboughtthatilove.com is back open to the univited public. I'm excited, really excited.

And while we are on the topic, The Office episode Heavy Competition was super pleasurable.


The writers of The Office seem to love The Wire, and I do, too. After several false starts (I watched the first six episodes like three times each before committing. Hey, sometimes its hard to commit, what can I say. But when I fall, I fall hard.) I have just finished Season Two, and I am hooked. Even for those not that into cop dramas, I recommend this show. There are a crazy number of characters and they are all pretty well filled in, and some are habit forming. Like most great modern television shows, the setting has become a character and this Baltimore is fun to watch. In fact, the fun factor is increased by how little you would actually want to be in this city. Last week's Modern Love was about The Wire, and that was great. However, I believe that there are better odes to the show, Baltimore, and the complex characters residing there. Maybe later this summer, after the MCAT, I'll put some serious time into writing one. I'm so glad I have three seasons left to watch. Please, no spoilers.

The reason this The Office was so good was that it was a pastiche of The Wire. Watching the fierce Idris Elba (aka Stringer Bell) play the boss that pitted Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute against each other in underhanded dealings was awesome. If you are a writer for The Office and the main story line has come to resolution what do you do? Apparently, you think of the best show you know and just copy that. It is a sweet little feat given the total disjuncture in material. I just felt all my University of Texas RTF vocabulary come flooding back. Some graduate student could have a ball with this. Which brought me to the conclusion, wouldn't my life be better if all those graduate students just spent their time and energy making great tv instead of writing about it?

Well, its been a good week nonetheless: a fun website back up (to me) and some great television viewing, so I'll take my winnings and walk away.

Rainy days and Mondays Part duex

It is raining buckets here. Real sheets of rain, Houston style. Whoa!

Also, it is a nice Spring rain, the smell of dirt is in the air. I am so ready for summer I might burst.

Rainy days and Mondays

Today is a very rainy Monday and the day of my last Orgo lab, the last lab of my pre-medical career.

I arrived on time, but just barely. I took out my pencil, pen and lab book and put on my lab coat before locking the rest of my belongings into my assigned lab locker.

Then I realized that instead of my lab book what I had was my lab manual. I went back to the locker and stared at my lock with a vague idea of what the combination was, very vague. Because it was written down in my lab book, I hadn't bothered to give up any valuable real estate in the memorizing crap part of my brain, things are pretty tight in there this year.

The combination included a 15 and a zero, and either 30 or 35. I tried several permutations of those three or four numbers, but success alluded me. There are at least 12 possibilities and it is possible that in my cold sweat I repeatedly tried the same three.

Lab is stressful enough: time constraint, grading for mixing chemicals, ugg, and without the book I would not be able to do the lab or turn in a lab report. It was bad news. I chose not to panic, but it was a hard choice. Panic was looking good. So were tears.

I walked into class and told the lady who runs it what happened. First, she thought I had lost my book and tried to give me an orphan edition. Then she pointed to the lock cutter, and said that they had it for a reason. She is a petite woman and the other lab tech is a tall water polo player. She told me that she had never used the bolt cutter before because he always did. But he wasn't around. It took a few attempts, and after the second, she told me that the cutter was heavier than she thought. Imagine a small woman holding a bolt cutter over her head. The lock kept slipping, but the cutter prevailed.

She was pretty happy with herself for cutting a lock. I was pretty happy to get my lab book.

Word from the Slope

Yesterday was the absolute prettiest day of the 2009 so far. It reached 77 degrees fahrenheit in Brooklyn and the sun was out until almost eight pm.

I spent the better part of the afternoon in the park (yeaaay), studying (boo).
While sitting on my awesome portable bamboo mat, I observed a teenage boy hit a baseball, and that baseball fly straight into the face of a five-year-old who happened to be cutting across the meadow with his mother. The kid got hit dead on.

My first thought was that the child might drop dead (think Owen Meany, people). Instead, he started to cry, hard. Perhaps there was a quick apology from the hitter. But the mother started screaming at the hitter. As soon as she did, a middle aged man who was playing with the teenagers, maybe the pitcher, started screaming back.

Mom yelled a lot. Dad told her that it was all her fault for cutting across the field instead of taking the path around. Mom told him to look around, that the whole park was crowded and people were sitting all around his game (it was super crowded). Mom told Dad that he didn't own the park. Dad told Mom that she didn't own the park. Dad said he was only yelling because Mom had started yelling. Mom asked why they didn't even apologize for hitting her kid. At first, I was definitely on the mom's side. People should be apologetic when they accidentally hit little kids in the face.

As the mom was yelling the little kid ran away crying. Well, crying and cursing the baseball players. He just kept calling them A-holes. It was sort of funny see a little kid with such a filthy mouth.

The hitter walked off and got an icy from the helado cart.

About the point it looked like the parents might start throwing punches, a police SUV drove by on its regular patrol of the park. The lady realized she had lost her kid and made a half hearted attempt to call him back. But instead of actually finding her kid she ran over to the cops. I couldn't hear what she said.

Once the Mom lost her kid, she also lost my sympathy. Keep your priorities straight, lady!

So the cop drives into the meadow and tells the dad that the game is over. This dad doesn't just move on like a rational person, he argues with the cop. He asks why the kids on the next meadow can play soccer. It was crazy, I thought he might get himself arrested. Finally, the kid with the icecream comes over and tells his dad to chill, repeatedly.

It was an exciting day in the Slope.

Epilogue

The mom left and I assume she found her bruised child. The baseball players walked by me on the way out the park. One of the other players kept yelling, "He did it. He did it." and pointing to the hitter. When he said it to me, I said, "I know. I saw." Then the dad jumped in to tell me how unfair it was that they had to quit their game. The dad started talking about all the other kids playing sports in the park, and I regretted saying anything. He blamed that woman for being so mad and crazy. I said, "I think she was mad because her kid got hit in the face."

The dad pointed out that they were playing with a wiffle ball and that the kid was just stunned. That was the piece I needed to put the puzzle together. Had it been a real baseball that kid would not have been running around cursing, he would not have been moving. If they had been playing with a real ball, as it had appeared, in a park that crowded, they would have been on their way to committing manslaughter.

The dad just kept repeating that the kid was only stunned. I'm not sure that made it all OK, but it made him seem less unreasonable. Also, it made that mom look like a worse mom.

Then the hitter told his dad that that was just how white people had to act about things. One of the other teenagers looked at me and pointed back to the hitter and said, "He's the one who said that."

After that last comment you might be wondering, and because this is Brooklyn, if I didn't tell you you would have no way of guessing:
Dad: grumpy old jewish guy
Mom: white affluent Park Slope stroller mom
Both the hitter and the kid who got hit in the face: that A-Rod/Jeter hard to guess look
All the other baseball players: black teenagers

It was a great day of people behaving badly in the park.

a foreign land of big steaks and bold Tex-Mex, and Texas ladies

Frank Bruni visited Houston and wrote up Feast as one of the bold new restaurants making the US a great place to eat. In the review, he refers to Houston as "a foreign land of big steaks and bold Tex-Mex". Maybe foreign was written in regard to the Britons running the restaurant but foreign might as well refer to the New Yorker's take on Texas, a whole 'nother country. What I thought was funny and notable was that these restauranteurs had landed in Houston because of the "American" (let's be honest, Texan) women they loved. It is known that people come to Houston for the energy and medical industries, but Texas ladies are an underrepresented asset as well. Yes, we leave, but then we come back, and apparently not alone.

It is f-in' snowing in Brooklyn right now, on April 8th

I was just at a coffee shop and it sort of looked like it was snowing outside. I though, "No, this is April. Those must be little white flowers falling."

Then, the lady next to me asked the waitress if it was snowing. The waitress said that it was just little white buds from that tree, and she pointed. The lady looked very relieved.

But, guess what! I just got home and those white things that I can see falling outside my window that overlooks an alley are definitly snowflakes. Nothing is sticking but there are no trees with white buds around.

The snow just lasted a few minutes. But, really, what is that all about! It is April, people.

Spring is here

It was a beautiful day here in Park Slope and I spent the afternoon (studying) in the park.

I was sitting on a wonderful bamboo mat, just one of many spectacular purchases from H&M, when a girl ran by with a man who was carrying a costume unicorn head. Someone yelled at them to slow down and wait, and I, too, waited to see what that was all about. A few more nondescript adults followed.

A while later, a man in a furry white suit came up to them and asked what the plan was. They replied, "We've just been standing here waiting for you."

I thought it was funny. Because if you are at the park with a unicorn head, who else could you be waiting for?