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?

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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:

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