Snaggletooth is King of the Stupid...too much of anything is bad...pride is what comes before

Well, gentle readers, the following is an admission never once before truthfully uttered by the good Dr. Science: I have simply reached the limit of how much stuff I can do at once. That's it. No more. You want proof? I got proof.

First, despite my dentist's repeated warnings to this effect, I have, in those few hours of sleep I get a night, been grinding my teeth so hard that I broke off the corner of one of my fillings. And over the next few nights, I ground down the jagged edge to a smooth one.

Second, with my unceasing "i can do anything all the time and don't need to eat well or sleep well or focus on a few things" behavior, I could not stay on top of all I had going on. Between new experiments at work causing me to spend weekends in the lab to classes 5 to 7 days a week to trying to have some sort of social life and not be lonely and deal with the fact that I am in the most active and strange city in the world, I flat out missed one of my weekend classes. Yep, just missed it outright. I thought it was next week. It wasn't.

Thankfully, my advisor, the teacher, and I were able to work something out (their exact words were, "hey, stuff happens."). I realized my horrific screw-up at eight in the morning on Monday, while I was preparing the last bits of data for a presentation i had to give to the head of my dept. that day.

Threre's good news and bad, therefore. The bad news is that I can't do this anymore, this whole school and work and living in a new place thing. I just can't do it anymore. My emotions and nerves are a wreck, and the littlest thing can ruin my day now. My health is in the toilet (which phrase is extra-funny for some of you who know me). I just can't do this. The good news? I don't have to. As of today I have two more 1-weekend classes, and I'm done. No more weekday classes screwing with my job. I have (most of) my nights and weekends back, I will have FAR less stress, and I'll be able to stop digesting my own body in lieu of eating food. Soon I'll even be able to have fun without feeling horribly guilty afterwards!

It was my own pride that did me in, honestly. I took on too much. I'm not looking for absolution; I just wanted to write this down and post it publicly in the hopes that I'll actually believe it and remember it for the future.

Well, if you'll excuse me, I have to go prepare the apt. for the arrival of Jaina, our new roomate, with whom I have arranged to have a slumber party to make smores, talk about boys, and paint nails. You know better than to think I'm kidding.

Clowns are Nature's Terrorists

I'm in the middle of a crazy week, but wanted to relate the following:

Sunday I happened into a street fair on 7th avenue, one long block from home. There were stalls with vendors and food. And clowns. One very nervous little girl's parents brought her up to a booth where some clowns were standing around. "Come on, honey! Clowns!" said the parents, dragging their child. One clown approached the family. "And who's this special shy girl?" he asked, in a voice that, for some reason, made me instinctively put my hand on the knife in my pocket. "Don't worry," the clown assured the parents, "kids just LOVE clowns. Hey, Bill!"
Bill was a much larger clown, fully made up, who responded to the call to action. He smiled at the little girl, towering over her, and then began to - and I am not making this up - dance around her, cackling. It was like watching some sort of horrible voodoo ritual: the girl held helpless by her smiling parents. Finally, she had had enough, and erupted in screams and tears. That was enough to drive the foul painted monster away, but the girl kept screaming and crying until her parents took her from the clowns' booth and bought her ice cream.

Exciting news from the sideburn state

Who is the strongest man in the world?

If the first answer that came to your mind was "Artie," then boy, have I got good news for you. Much to my tremendous joy, one of Nickelodeon's strangest shows ever has had its first season released on DVD: The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Among its fans the wacky stories of the brothers Pete are revered with an almost fanatical zealotry usually reserved only for marvels like the Goonies. I bought the first season and watched several episodes while trying fruitlessly to write more pages for my play (which, like an 800 pound gorilla, has been successfully doing whatever it wants and avoiding my efforts to stay on schedule). The writers for Pete and Pete somehow manage to create exactly the kind of strange, off-beat world I try to come up with whenever writing (I adduce the dancing bear play, or the pirate play, etc.)

Anyways, these DVDs are calling you like a giant funk magnet, and you need to check them out.

would you say I have a plethora of news?

There's big news from the boys on the fourth floor, and here it all is, for you. Just for you.

1) The Fanciest American has moved out of his Fancy Cave and into a new place in Manhattan with his sweet baboo. As a result, Andrew and I have searched a great deal to find a new roomate, because more and more it looks like I'll be here until at least January, and Andrew's here for at least another three years. For those of you who have ever spent time with Andrew, Jim, and I, it can be a little frustrating and unintelligible, so finding someone to fit with us was tough. After interviewing several candidates of varying coolness, we selected Jaina, a recent college grad from St. Louis. She came to the interview with her mother, which was nice, and mentioned that she really liked that Andrew and I seemed like such good friends. We're glad to have her onboard for a July 1st arrival.

2) Speaking of Andrew and things being onboard, Andrew is going into the Navy for the summer! He's been accepted to a summer chaplaincy program through his rabbinical school, and our littlest rabbi makes his way to boot camp either tomorrow or the next day. He'll be gone about two months, and it'd be nice if y'all could send him good wishes and whatnot. I intend to torment him by sending inappropriately addressed letters, for which he can receive all sorts of punishment.

3) I'm making the trip home to Michigan for a week, July 10-17. It's been far too long since I've seen the parents, and had some decent mexican food - which I have yet to find in NYC. If any of you cats on the homefront read this and want to hang out, let me know!

And that, I believe, is all the news I've got.

Danger Dancing

I'm going to guess that there are a few of you out there - although I actually have very little sense about who sees this stuff - who recall a time when I was romantically entangled with a dancer and costumiere named Angela. Unquestionably one of the most creative people I have ever met, she will forever be represented in my mind by a single piece she did called "the danger dance." An interpretive dancer by training, she used to perform at this open mic thing called the Wide Open Floor, and one night she danced on this really precarious stack of objects - chairs and blocks and whatnot - playing with how she could move right there at the edge of causing the whole thing to come crashing down. The audience was totally silent, as I recall, and I don't really remember breathing while her dance was going on.

We'd fallen out of contact over this past year, and the last time I saw her was at her wedding - which was the first wedding of someone I'd been involved with that I had been to (a very odd experience, to be sure). Subsequently, she moved to Tennesee and opened a bakery with her husband. Well, I got a message today from her, and it seems the danger dancer has had herself a baby boy!

I'm telling you this perhaps in large part because it's 6 o'clock on a sunday morning and I'm still awake and thinking about how the exemplar of youthful daring goes from dancing precariously on the edge with a sort of morbid curiousity to settling down and having a baby (which, of course, has new dangers, but certainly not the same kind). It happened, this change, and I see it now happening to other peers of mine. One of my friends owns a house. Somehow it has come to be that If I were asked to list words to characterize my closest friends, one of the first words would be "responsible."

It creeps in on you, I guess. Am I next? Am I behind the curve already? How many days remain for yours truly to go to sleep unable to remember where I've left my pants? How much would the circus have to offer me today to run away, and how much six months from now?

Malirhubarbie Dreamhouse: where I am right now

I finally found some rhubarb this weekend at the farmer's market, thereby allowing me to silence with deliciousness the inexplicable and nagging sense that I really wanted to have this rhurarb dessert my mother makes. It turned out really well - although, of course, not quite as good as my mother's. The story of my finding rhubarb and making the dessert is really boring, but I'm including the recipe in the comments section because making it is both easy and the right thing to do.


...."silence with deliciousness?"

The slick get weird

A few months ago I was on the subway, when a rather disreputable-looking fellow - what some might term a "player" - approached a respectable, well-dressed young professional woman and asked her where her stop was. She responded, somewhat unsure of why this guy was asking her. He replied, "how about instead you get out at the next stop with me and we go get some kentucky fried chicken?" Her reply? "Yeah, okay!"

I assumed that what I'd witnessed was an odds-maker's nightmare - that outcome you could only get once if you asked the same question twelve billion times. I was comfortable in that assumption, until yesterday.

As I walked to my class from the subway I passed a Wendy's. A really attractive, professional, well-organized-looking woman was walking the other way, and this guy just walks right up to her and says,"Hey! Let me holla at you! You need to come with me and get some wendy's." Her reply? "Um, sure, sounds good!" And off they went.

This makes me think even more that I'm just not understanding something. Sadly, if my confusion drove me to drink, I could find the same inexplicable oddity there: on saturday I came across flasks at a chinatown dept. store that had, engraved on the front, the words "YOUR FISH SAMPLE." Is that like, "your feet stink, your feet sample," or "here in this flask is your fish sample," or what?

Sigh...

One sister..TWO sisters?

In a slightly belated celebration of my birthday, I was taken to brunch at Balthazar- a New York institution, I am told - on saturday by not one but both of my sisters and their significant others. This, dear readers, was a most unusual event - so much so, in fact, that it escapes my memory as to when the last time was that the three of us kids were in the same place. It is incredible how time passes here - it's like no other place I've been in that regard. Weeks and months pass by in a flash, and brunches such as the one on saturday can give rise to a moment's pause to consider how much time has passed.

Oh, he waxes philosophical, does he? No need for that, when there was a parade in chinatown worth mentioning instead. Admittedly, it was the first time I'd heard chinese drumming combined with bagpipes, but hey, it worked surprisingly well. Hilary and her beau wanted to walk around chinatown, so we did that (with the assistance of one Fanciest American) and then I went to work. On the way home i stopped by little Italy only to find - gasp! - another parade. What is it with that part of town?

Today Hilary, Luke and I walked the Brooklyn Bridge and I got to show them the apartment.

At a time of great school, work, and personal life-related stresses, this was a great weekend. And now to ruin that weekend by staying up late doing homework! Huzzah!

Dearly missing the Russian

Not all change is good. In fact, I'd go so far as to say most change is bad. Change bothers me in myriad ways: he is no longer alive, she is no longer in love with you, it is now an expensive high-rise, and so forth. One of the things that bothers me most, though, is when construction claims my normal walking route. I get used to my routes for walking places, and I do a lot of walking. These routes become my havens of mental decongestion and it is while walking them that I carve out my history.
I used to walk past this building on U of M's campus where I could see directly into a man's office. I did not know his name, but he looked very much like a mole with glasses. And he had, on his desk, a miniature russian flag. So, in my mind, I called him The Russian. I'd see him every day when walking from home to work and back again, and over the years I invented dozens of stories about who he was and where that flag came from and so forth. Then, one day, he just wasn't there anymore. His office was empty, and within a week or so his building was torn down. I was mortified - where had my comfortably predictable russian gone? I would never know.
Just the other day construction workers started tearing up the street on which I walk to work now, and it made me think of the Russian and how much I don't appreciate change. On the way back from work, there was new cement poured, and these two little kids were talking about how they were going to write their names in the cement so that "people in the far far future would know them." Impractical though their plan may have been, for a brief second it was really appealing. So I stooped down, and, with the cap of my water bottle, wrote a big, deep "G" in one corner of the newly-poured area. That was the first time I'd ever done that, and now I kind of hope this kids are right.