life has been incredibly dramatic and hectic lately.  i want to put a picture of something cute and nice to counter-balance that.

from 100 layer cake

this book was eye-opening and a bit chilling.  hard to believe it was published not too long ago.

sometimes love is a beautiful thing.

i live on the third floor of a family home.  the brazilian family lives on the second floor and grandma lives on the bottom floor.  i call this post "the antics" because she is a really particular woman.  even though her son owns the building, i think she really wears the pants in this family.  so in no particular order, this is why i find this grandma so interesting.

she has a beautiful garden which she arduously attends to.  she's the only person i've ever seen who shoos away sparrows...with a broom.  it's funny because i can see the garden from my patio, and while i'm enjoying this idyllic scene, a bird will land and i will see a broom or a hand shoo the bird right out of the picture.  once, when i was leaving the house, i noticed that she was hunched over her flowers, moving with very slow tai-chi-like movements.  then out of nowhere, i would hear this awful zapping sound - but no movements from either the grandma or anything in the immediate vicinity.  i finally caught of glimpse of what she had in her hand...a zapping net.  i've never seen one of these before, but it's literally a battery-powered, racquet-shaped wand used to zap bugs.  so she was actually zapping the bugs in the garden.  this always makes me chuckle because apparently a beautiful garden has nothing to do with birds and bees for grandma...only beautiful flowers.

when i first moved in, i found out that grandma doesn't speak any english - or so i thought.  after a month of fumbling awkward hello's and goodbye's, i finally downloaded a portuguese translator onto my iPod so i could find out how to say "ola."  one time, when i was coming back, i saw her sitting on her bench and said "ola" and she said something long and complicated in portuguese.  upon coming closer, she realized that i was not a portuguese-speaker, and in brilliant english, she said, "o!  sorry!  i thought you were my son!"  the english teacher in me broke that one down...past tense, double construction, exclamations.  this would put her in my advanced esl class...so i guess it's not so much that she can't speak english as it is that she doesn't want to speak english.

finally, i sometimes wonder if this grandma ever sleeps.  i came home pretty late the other night, and almost screamed when i noticed a figure sitting on the dark under the stairs.  it was grandma.  i don't know if she saw that i saw her, so i pretended i didn't, and snuck up the stairs.  the next morning, at the crack of dawn, she was out in the garden zapping those bugs again.  i know because the sun came into my room, and i had to close the shades before crawling back to bed.  yes, this is one unique grandma...

maybe it's because i'm a newbie, but everything that happens to me in new york city amuses me.  i figure it will start to annoy me soon, and then i'll start to ignore everything, so i'm trying to write down as much as i can.  because as r says, "i don't make this stuff up!"

while getting on an elevator today, an exasperated man yelled, "there are other elevators!!!"  he was going to the 18th floor and everyone else was not.  "now i have to stop 5 times before i get to my floor?!"  i looked at him straight in the face and said, "well, that is kind of the idea of an elevator."  no response.  score: mina 1, man 0.

after lunch, i got back on the elevator and a handle-bar mustachioed man asked me, "what floor?"  i told him, and then he proceeded to ask me, "are you alone?  are you a stewardess?  where are you from?  from japan?  from china?"  i told him, "i'm from brooklyn."  score: mina 1, man 0.

on a very crowded F train today, a man signaled me to his seat and insisted i take it, even though i was fine with standing.  his sincerity reminded me of the seated people on the cairene subway who would point to and signal the people that they wanted to take their seats after they got off the train.  later, when the F train kicked everyone off the train (again), he found me and asked, "where are you from?"  this time, i said, "new jersey."  then i ran upstairs to take the A.  score: mina 1, man 0.

so i guess my total score is 3 for today.  not that this is a game or anything...or is it?

p.s. next time someone asks me where i'm from, i'm going to say, "my mother."  i haven't had the guts to do it before, but now i think it'd be funny.  what do you say?

---

o!  i just thought of another one.  last week, i was walking to the UPS store in my neighborhood wearing my old chuck taylor's.  mind you, these are the SAME converse sneakers i've had since i was in 9th grade.  i have pictures and writing on them from my high school years.  when they came back into fashion, it was natural just to wear them again.  in fact, everyone and their mother seems to be wearing brand new chuck taylors these days.  so while i was walking back (with iPod buds in ears) i noticed a man was mouthing something to me.  he repeated the same thing again, and i heard him say, "old chuck taylors!" which i thought was weird because everyone wears them.  anyway, i just ignored him, but what was that all about?!

r says i have been a little bit "in love" with dave eggers these days.  how can i help myself?  away we go wonderful.  zeitoun wonderful.  so i indulged myself and got three more books from the library today either written, edited or prefaced by dave eggers.  the first one, the autobiographer's handbook, had an introduction by dave eggers which i found to be so profoundly at the core of who i am as a writer.  i crookedly (in my excitement) scanned the introduction for you, in hopes that you'll want to go get the book and start writing for yourself.  one of the best things eggers says in this introduction is that everyone should write a memoir - not so that it will be published, but so that you can leave your legacy.  so that your children and your children's children will know that you lived an incredible life.  no matter how mundane the details, each human experience is imbued with thoughts, situations and people who other generations will find profoundly insightful and interesting.  do it because one day you will die, and without that record, all we will know is your name and the number of years that you lived.  just as we wished we knew more about our grandparents and our great grandparents before, we write to know where we came from, and maybe where we are going.

my favorite from the day:

hyderabad, india

i can't wait to get my hands on this...i might break my book-buying ban and buy it!

from McSweeny's:

AN EXCERPT
FROM ZEITOUN.

- - - -

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a
prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through
the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days
after, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing
on supplies and helping those he could. But, on September 6, 2005,
Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Dave Eggers's riveting nonfiction book,
three years in the making, explores Zeitoun's roots in Syria, his
marriage to Kathy − an American who converted to Islam − and their
children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United
States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun became
possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in
close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research − in
this case, in the U.S., Spain, and Syria. To order a copy, please click
here.

- - - -

Zeitoun woke with the sun and
crawled out of his tent. The day was bright, and as far as he could see
in any direction the city was underwater. Though every resident of New
Orleans imagines great floods, knows that such a thing is possible in a
city surrounded by water and ill-conceived levees, the sight, in the
light of day, was beyond anything he had imagined. He could only think
of Judgment Day, of Noah and forty days of rain. And yet it was so
quiet, so still. Nothing moved. He sat on the roof and scanned the
horizon, looking for any person, any animal or machine moving. Nothing.

As he did his morning prayers, a helicopter broke the silence, shooting across the treetops and heading downtown.

Zeitoun
looked down from the roof to find the water at the same level as the
night before. He felt some relief in knowing that it would likely
remain there, or even drop a foot once it reached an equilibrium with
Lake Pontchartrain.

Zeitoun sat beside
his tent, eating cereal he had salvaged from the kitchen. Even with the
water no longer rising, he knew he could do nothing at home. He had
saved what he could save, and there was nothing else to do here until
the water receded.

When he had eaten,
he felt restless, trapped. The water was too deep to wade into, its
contents too suspect to swim through. But there was the canoe. He saw
it, floating above the yard, tethered to the house. Amid the
devastation of the city, standing on the roof of his drowned home,
Zeitoun felt something like inspiration. He imagined floating, alone,
through the streets of his city. In a way, this was a new world,
uncharted. He could be an explorer. He could see things first.

He climbed down the side of the house and lowered himself into the canoe. He untied the rope and set out.

He
paddled down Dart Street, the water flat and clear. And strangely,
almost immediately, Zeitoun felt at peace. The damage to the
neighborhood was extraordinary, but there was an odd calm in his heart.
So much had been lost, but there was a stillness to the city that was
almost hypnotic.

He coasted away
from his home, passing over bicycles and cars, their antennae scraping
the bottom of his canoe. Every vehicle, old and new, was gone,
unsalvageable. The numbers filled his head: there were a hundred
thousand cars lost in the flood. Maybe more. What would happen to them?
Who would take them once the waters receded? In what hole could they
all be buried?

Almost everyone he
knew had left for a day or two, expecting little damage. He passed by
their homes, so many of which he'd painted and even helped build,
calculating how much was lost inside. It made him sick, the anguish
this would cause. No one, he knew, had prepared for this, adequately or
at all.

He thought of the
animals. The squirrels, the mice, rats, frogs, possums, lizards. All
gone. Millions of animals drowned. Only birds would survive this sort
of apocalypse. Birds, some snakes, any beast that could find higher
ground ahead of the rising tide. He looked for fish. If he was floating
atop water shared with the lake, surely fish had been swept into the
city. And, on cue, he saw a murky form darting between submerged tree
branches.

He was conflicted
about what he was seeing, a refracted version of his city, one where
homes and trees were bisected and mirrored in this oddly calm body of
water. The novelty of the new world brought forth the adventurer in him
− he wanted to see it all, the whole city, what had become of it. But
the builder in him thought of the damage, how long it would take to
rebuild. Years, maybe a decade. He wondered if the world at large could
already see what he was seeing, a disaster mythical in scale and
severity.

In his
neighborhood, miles from the closest levee, the water had risen slowly
enough that he knew it was unlikely that anyone had died in the flood.
But with a shudder he thought of those closer to the breaches. He
didn't know where the levees had failed, but he knew anyone living
nearby would have been quickly overwhelmed.

He turned on
Vincennes Place and headed south. Someone called his name. He looked up
to see a client of his, Frank Noland, a fit and robust man of about
sixty, leaning out from a second-story window. Zeitoun had done work on
his house a few years ago. The Zeitouns would see Frank and his wife
occasionally in the neighborhood, and they always exchanged warm
greetings.

Zeitoun waved and paddled over.

"You got a cigarette?" Frank asked, looking down.

Zeitoun
shook his head no, and coasted closer to the window where Frank had
appeared. It was a strange sensation, paddling over the man's yard; the
usual barrier that would prevent one from guiding a vehicle up to the
house was gone. He could glide directly from the street, diagonally
across the lawn, and appear just a few feet below a second-story
window. Zeitoun was just getting accustomed to the new physics of this
world.

Frank was
shirtless, wearing only a pair of tennis shorts. His wife was behind
him, and they had a guest in the house, another woman of similar age.
Both women were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, suffering in the heat.
It was early in the day, but the humidity was already oppressive.

"You think you
could take me to where I can buy some smokes?" Frank asked. Zeitoun
told him that he didn't think any store would be open and selling
cigarettes this day.

Frank sighed. "See what happened to my
motorcycle?" He pointed to the porch next door.

Zeitoun
remembered Frank talking about this motorcycle − an antique bike that
he had bought, restored, and lavished attention on. Now it was under
six feet of water. As the water had risen the day before, Frank had
moved it from the driveway up to the porch and then to his next-door
neighbor's porch, which was higher. But now it was gone. They could
still see the faint, blurred likeness of the machine, like a relic from
a previous civilization.

He and Frank
talked for a few minutes about the storm, the flood, how Frank had
expected it but then hadn't expected it at all.

"Any chance you
can take me to check on my truck?" Frank asked. Zeitoun agreed, but
told Frank that he'd have to continue on a while longer. Zeitoun was
planning to check on one of his rental properties, about two miles
away.

Frank agreed to
come along for the ride, and climbed down from the window and into the
canoe. Zeitoun gave him the extra paddle and they were off.

"Brand new
truck," Frank said. He had parked it on Fontainebleau, thinking that
because the road was a foot or so higher than Vincennes, the truck
would be spared. They made their way up six blocks to where Frank had
parked the truck, and then Zeitoun heard Frank's quick intake of
breath. The truck was under five feet of water and had migrated half a
block. Like his motorcycle, it was gone, a thing of the past.

"You want to get anything out of it?" Zeitoun asked.

Frank shook his head. "I don't want to look at it. Let's go."

A few doors down, Zeitoun and Frank came upon a house with a large white cloth billowing from the second-floor window.

When they got closer, they saw a couple, a husband and wife in their seventies, leaning out of the window.

"You surrender?" Frank asked.

The man smiled.

"You want to get out?" Zeitoun asked.

"Yes, we do," the man said. They couldn't safely fit anyone else in the
canoe, so Zeitoun and Frank promised to send someone back to the house
as soon as they got to Claiborne. They assumed there would be activity
there, that if anywhere would have a police or military presence, it
would be Claiborne, the main thoroughfare nearby.

"We'll be right back," Zeitoun said.

As they were paddling away from the couple's house, they heard a faint female voice. It was a kind of moan, weak and tremulous.

"You hear that?" Zeitoun asked.

Frank nodded. "It's coming from that direction."

They paddled toward the sound and heard the voice again.

"Help."

It was coming from a one-story house on Nashville. They coasted toward the front door and heard the voice again: "Help me."

Zeitoun
dropped his paddle and jumped into the water. He held his breath and
swam to the porch. The steps came quicker than he thought. He jammed
his knee against the masonry and let out a gasp. When he stood, the
water was up to his neck.

"You okay?" Frank asked. Zeitoun nodded and made his way up the steps.

"Hello?" the voice said, now hopeful.

He
tried the front door. It was stuck. Zeitoun kicked the door. It
wouldn't move. He kicked again. No movement. With the water now to his
chest, he ran his body against the door. He did it again. And again.
Finally it gave.

Inside he found a
woman hovering above him. She was in her seventies, a large woman, over
two hundred pounds. Her patterned dress was spread out on the surface
of the water like a great floating flower. Her legs dangled below. She
was holding on to a bookshelf.

"Help me," she said.

Look closely at the beginning because you might miss the first character.  I love the Chinese public telephone.

his korean is better than mine!

"so we look like some simon and garfunkel look alikes who don't look like simon and garfunkel?"