Despite being just an hour’s train ride from New York City, I only head in a few times a year. My last visit was when my daughter and I joined hundreds of thousands of people to participate in the Women’s March.
It’s definitely been a very long (and surreal) seven weeks since then.
It’s been hard to know how to move forward in this strange new world. How much to ignore. How much to resist. How much to engage and try to find common ground. How much to do normal things.
Even with none of this being normal at all.
But life goes on.
Museum exhibits come and go.
So on a gorgeous almost spring day this week, I ventured in to check out “From the Collection: 1960-1969” at MoMa.
On my walk from Grand Central I was struck by the bold electronic New York Times ads scrolling on the bus shelters.
Subscriptions to The New York Times have surged since the election as people try to determine The Truth amidst a sea of alternate facts.
I then meandered around Rockefeller Center for a bit before wandering a few blocks over to MoMa where I immersed myself in the various galleries for the next several hours. As always I was stuck by how many different languages were being spoken by my fellow visitors.
For some strange reason, rather than making my way back to Grand Central, I found myself heading over see what things were like at “White House North”. It appears that immigrants are welcome across the street from the gilded tower.
And then I saw another one of those New York Times ads. This time with a special addition. Wow!
Apparently these were put up all around the city for National Women’s Day which had taken place just the day prior. It looks like someone tried unsuccessfully to remove the sticky poster.
Even this guy looked pretty shocked by it all!
Despite the huge blocks of concrete everywhere, things seemed relatively normal on the block. I asked one of the police officers stationed across from the entrance if the situation is much different when Trump is in town. He said that he hasn’t been back since the inauguration, so things haven’t been too crazy in the neighborhood.
Oh right, it’s been golf season in Florida.
It was getting dark, the spring-like weather was turning chilly, and the time had come to catch a train back home.
But something about this scene made me laugh. I kept wondering why the “Interior Demolition Specialists” were parked inside the barricades in front of the Trump Tower.
Who knows.
It is indeed a strange time in which we are living.
Maybe someday I will find more eloquent words to better express the wide range of emotions that I am feeling. But for now I continue to grapple with the non-normal nature of the situation.
And muddle through.
Trying to capture some of the strange times in which we are living.
The time leading up to an election is always super stressful. A gigantic cloud of suspense permeates the air causing everyone to feel uneasy. Presidential elections are their own special breed of agitation inducing tense fests. I often find myself forgetting to breathe.
Well, obviously I still inhale and exhale enough to do the business of surviving.
But they are not the deep breaths of truly living. They are the strained and shallow breaths of someone feeling a bit anxious about the future.
Just trying to “get through” this. As someone who tries to make the most of each moment, living the past several months in a state of suspended animation feels like a giant waste of precious time.
I have tried to the best of my ability to innoculate myself against all of the negativity of this campaign. With the exception of the debates that my daughter had to watch for her Government and Politics class, we have not had the TV on all season. (Each week we record our guilty pleasure show “Survivor” to watch at another time).
I could only stomach approximately an hour of the Republican convention before I decided I had to make plans with something other than my TV for the next few evenings. Checking out The Record Company was a much better use of my time. Luckily I was able to escape any temptation to watch the Democratic convention the following week as I was away from outside communication at a Quaker gathering up in Lake George.
I’ve also tried to limit my social media, but not as successfully as I would have liked. So I have read a ton of articles from various sources and watched more than my fair share of videos. While there have been a few funny pieces, they have been funny in a surreal kind of way. Like no one can believe that we are really in this situation. Is it all just a bad dream that we will wake up from?
In fact, I’ve recently had multiple dreams with Donald Trump in them.
That’s pretty scary, right?
In last night’s episode he was hovering around in a blimp-like thing that was shaped like a backpack/suitcase. It kept flying around in descending circles while picking up speed until it crashed into a tree right outside my window and exploded like a blown transformer. Bizarre.
This whole thing is like a train (or blimp) wreck. I keep trying not to look, but I can’t help myself.
All of this election chaos is pervasive and it’s really hard to live a media-free life.
I finally figured “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” and found a somewhat productive way to tap into the election energy that is swirling around me.
I signed up for a 5-week seminar at Fairfield University called “Media and Democracy: The Press, Public Opinion and the 2016 Presidential Election”. It was billed as a series of talks that would go beyond the headlines and escape the echo chamber of punditry in order to understand how media impacts public opinion.
I really enjoyed the first few weeks learning some history of media as it relates to political coverage. The lectures were super engaging and the readings were really informative. An added bonus was getting a sneak peek at some cutting edge academic research taking place to better understand the influence of social media.
It felt really good to stretch my brain to take in a lot of new info.
I felt very optimistic.
As the course continued, it became clear to me that most of my classmates consume way more media than I do. They were obsessing over polling numbers and FBI investigations. They brought all of their frenetic energy to class last week and I just felt the stress ooze all around the lecture hall.
Everyone was interrupting and talking over each other spouting the latest breaking news and talking points. It felt like people were addicted to the very echo chamber of punditry that we were trying to escape. It was like being part of a CNN panel and it was almost too much for me to handle. I started getting agitated and unsettled.
I had to remind myself to breathe.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Repeat.
(actually a friend had to remind me about the repeat part).
We have our final post-mortem class on Thursday.
I guess it all depends on how tomorrow goes.
I think we will learn lots of lessons from this election.
Hopefully.
My favorite by far is still this lengthy one with Van Jones conversing with a group of Trump supporters who approach him as he walks down the sidewalk during the Republican convention. They proceed to have an open and honest discussion about a variety of topics and manage to find some common ground in the process.
“This is beautiful… This is what we’re supposed to do… We can argue back and forth. But if we’re going to get through this. The next president is going to have an ungovernable country. I don’t care who it is. Hillary won’t be able to govern and Trump won’t be able to govern. Becuase we have stopped listening to each other. There is a complete lack of empathy”.
What is so abundantly clear is the need to listen to each other and find the common ground. And that takes time. And patience. And an open mind.
It’s messy. It’s not neatly wrapped up in a 2 minute segment.
As someone who grew up with parents who cancelled each other’s votes nearly every election, I know that life goes on after the votes are tallied.
We survive our differences.
We suck it up.
We get through this.
Life goes on.
And as this beautiful song illustrates, we are in a temporary state. It’s all a big repeating cycle and we are only here for a short part of it. We need to embrace the time that we are here and not get too caught up in all of the drama.
Easier said than done for sure. But this should help a bit.
“There’s a darkness upon me that’s flooded in light In the fine print they tell me what’s wrong and what’s right And it comes in black and it comes in white And I’m frightened by those that don’t see it
When nothing is owed or deserved or expected And your life doesn’t change by the man* that’s elected If you’re loved by someone, you’re never rejected Decide what to be and go be it”
* or woman
And this is just an added bonus that I found. So cool.
And with that, I press “publish” and head up to bed – with 2 minutes to go before it’s finally Election Day.
Every now and then I go down the audio wormhole and find myself binge watching old music videos (that I never saw in real time on MTV since my parents didn’t get cable until I moved out of the house in my mid-twenties).
The journey often starts by hearing a long forgotten tune on my favorite public radio station – Fordham University’s WFUV. By the way, I’m super happy that ‘FUV expanded its playlist a few years back to go beyond its former baby boomer nostalgic staples. I love that I now hear stuff from my heyday, while also getting introduced to a wide variety of new artists. If you’ve never checked them out, you should! I’m lucky enough to have them play through my oldschool car radio at 90.7, but you can stream them here.
Yesterday I was chillaxing to one of their noon “mix-tapes” on Spotify when the opening harmonica of Flesh for Lulu instantly brought me back almost 30 years.
It’s amazing how that happens. One minute I’m eating oatmeal in my Connecticut kitchen listening to a virtual mixtape on my laptop, and then – BAM! – I’m back in Silvers 148 standing at my dual cassette deck making an actual mixtape for an upcoming party.
I’m pretty sure that I first heard all of these songs on WDHA “The Rock of New Jersey” back when it was playing a mix of hard rock and more alternative stuff. Not sure they all translated into hits everywhere, but I know that these artists made it onto some of my late 80’s mixtapes.
Enjoy the blast from the past.
Wasn’t that fun? I can’t tell you how many times I played this song over the past several days. My teenage daughter can attest to this; I even made her watch it so she could fully embrace some 80’s.
It really made me happy.
Although I’m sad to say that while tracking this video down I learned that lead singer Nick Marsh recently passed away after a fight with cancer. But his music lives on for many of us!
Back in the day, this song just grabbed me and took me somewhere else. I’m not quite sure exactly where it took me, but I do know that it did motivate me to wander down to Cheap Thrills to pick up a copy of the cassette.
And I didn’t even wait to make sure I liked three songs before purchasing it. Very few bands passed that threshold. I think the previous one was Crowded House with their debut album back in the spring of ’86.
There was a better quality version of this on Vimeo, but I liked the effect of it having been taped from MTV’s 120 Minutes show.
I couldn’t resist including this one, because I like it even better than their first single – and when else in 2016 are you going to hear back-to-back songs by Dreams So Real? Their sound still sounds fresh to me and I could totally picture them rocking out at a millennial music festival somewhere.
I don’t think I realized at the time that these guys emerged from the same Athens, Georgia music scene of REM and B52’s. Unfortunately they were just a smidge ahead of their time. In just a couple of years, bands like Gin Blossoms and Better Than Ezra would be all over main stream radio with a similar sound.
Not everyone can wait for fame and fortune and these guys ultimately all moved on to non-musical careers. Although there have been a few reunion shows here and there…
I think this guy also caused me to break my “like three songs before purchasing” rule. There are so many Peter Himmelman songs that I love, but I chose this one because it had the more quintessential late 80’s music video. Band. Barn. Birds. Big Hair.
If you like this, you can check out more of his stuff here. He’s a really busy, but somewhat elusive guy about to embark on a tour to promote his newest venture – a book about unlocking your creativity. I think I might need to check that out; I’m always searching for ways to let me creativity out. Catholic school tends to lock it in there real tight.
Peter Himmelman might not be a household name, but his father-in-law is. You might have heard of him. Bob Dylan.
This concludes today’s trip down the musical memory lane.
OMG, they just played this:
“Rush” by Big Audio Dynamite II was my absolute favorite song from 1991! Wow, brings back memories of being a young newlywed living and working in Waltham, Massachusetts while listening to the now defunct WFNX in Boston.
It’s still a bit surreal that I am actually the parent of high school daughter. Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was shuffling through the halls of my Catholic high school adorned in a sassy plaid skirt while hiding from the Dean of Discipline for wearing cool suede Minnetonka moccasins instead of my quite unfashionable (but regulation) maroon shoes?
In between worrying about getting caught for uniform violations and whether the cute guy in my Latin class liked me back, I managed to learn a few things. I learned about sine, cosine, tangent and all of that trigonometry stuff. I discovered that I didn’t really like Shakespeare much, but that I loved Statistics. (I know, pretty bizarre?)
I also learned who my friends were. The real friends who had my back.
When I started high school, I hung with a bunch of girls from my middle-school crowd. We were all from the same “poor sending district” and we kinda stuck together surrounded by the “rich kids from the fancy towns”. Until I found out that they were stealing money from my purse when I got up to get my lunch.
Random aside – I can still remember in great detail the little moments spent purchasing my favorite lunchtime treats. First I would get french fries with ketchup from the ladies in the lunch line, then hit the row of vending machines for either a 10-pack of Caramel Creams or an ice cream sandwich from the 3-door freezer. (Sometimes the machine would be loaded wrong and you’d end up with the strawberry eclair bar instead. Ick).
All of this yummy goodness would be washed down with a cup of Sprite from the machine that first spit out a clear plastic cup, then the crushed ice (no ice if you wanted more soda), followed by syrup from one side and seltzer from the other. As this video demonstrates, you always had to make sure the cup landed squarely in the proper place or you would stand there helplessly watching your 35 cents go to waste.
Make sure your cup is in the right place!
It’s kinda blowing my mind how retro these vending machines look. I know it’s been over thirty years since I plunked my change into them, but these look like something out of the 50’s (although I’m sure my typography nerds will inform me exactly what era these fonts date back to). Who knows, my school always looked (and acted) a bit stuck in the post-war decade of its founding, so maybe these things were original to the cafeteria…
But I digress. A trip down memory lane can do that to me.
Back to friends.
After the lunch money stealing discovery, I relocated to a new lunch table and became part of a different friend group. I’m not really sure how we all connected in the first place but we ebbed and flowed as a group for our remaining three years together. Activities, boys and other influences tested our bonds, but we somehow managed to survive the turbulent high school years as a fairly cohesive bunch.
Although we did have a a few break-ups in the group. And they were definitely not pretty.
But sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe in and let the collateral damage fall around you as it will.
Like the time when I finally got fed up with a friend who would not pick me up on the way to Great Adventure* even though it required driving right by my house. It was so frustrating to constantly find a way to get to her house 15 minutes in the opposite direction from mine, only for us to then drive right past my house. Her reason – “my parents say that I can’t drive to your town because it is not safe”. Was that code for “there are black people who live there”? I’m still not entirely sure, but I have my suspicions. All I know is that I had finally had enough of the crap. Unfortunately all of the years of fun times we shared together (and we definitely shared a lot of them!) just fizzled out. Potential fun times were not worth putting up with coded racial undertones any longer.
So yeah. A big part of the journey is determining who your friends truly are as you navigate the daily grind; pushing through to the other side where college and brighter futures beckon.
But an even bigger part is figuring out who you are and what kind of person you’re going to be when you grow up. Not what you’re going to “be” based on your occupation or what kind of car you drive. No – this part goes much, much deeper. And not everyone is willing to look into their mirror and ask themselves these tough questions.
Who are you going to be when it comes to things like integrity? What are the things on the inside that make you who you are? What things are you going to stand up for? What parts of yourself are you not willing to compromise in the name of “friendship”?
Whether it’s lunch-money stealing or racist behavior, it’s important to take a stand for things you believe in. Even if it means losing friends.
Because as Joan Jett sang back in my high school days –
“Ya got nothin’ to lose Ya don’t lose when you lose fake friends”
Truer words have never been spoken.
High School can definitely suck at times. You’re all growing up and finding your way through this thing called life. And in my case, while wearing a daily dose of maroon and grey – colors that I still can’t bring myself to wear today.
That’s me at the end of freshman year with some of my friends. I’m the one in the dorky glasses.
* Yes, that’s what it’s called in Jersey. If you’re from somewhere else you probably (incorrectly) refer to it as Six Flags.
Yeah, so that every day thing didn’t really work out for me.
I’m not sure what I was thinking when I set a goal of daily posting. Possibly the only thing I do daily is brush my teeth. At this point I’ll be lucky if I can handle sharing something weekly with my mythical audience.
Part of the problem is my lack of discipline and structure; I am just not really good at routine. I can barely get up each morning to make sure my high schooler gets to the bus on time (in my defense, the bus comes friggin’ early!), let alone figure out how I’m going to eat breakfast, go for a walk, take care of the things on my to-do list. And I’m lucky enough to not have a full-time gig that eats up my time.
Although I do have a teenager who still requires a decent amount of care and maintenance. Primarily of the “ubering” sort. Until the driver’s license comes (but that’s a topic for another day).
Another big issue is my inability to focus. I’m quite easily distracted. So many thoughts bop around in my giant head, but actually sitting down and putting them into writing is painful. It’s easier to just let them swirl around out in the ether and… “Wait, what day do those Lumineers tickets go on sale?” “What’s the admissions rate for Georgetown?” “Is it going to rain today, because I really should mow the lawn?” All of those answers are just a Google search away. Hence my love/hate relationship with my electronics.
A different matter all together is my lack of confidence in my writing for public consumption. I was a statistics major not an English major for crying out loud. I think I took one formal writing class in college – way back in freshman year. All I remember from high school English is diagramming sentences and reading Beowolf. My grown-up writing has been limited to some powerpoint presentations back in the 90’s, and more recently some persuasive emails and a few successful grant requests. I’m sure I’m really mangling all sorts of proper elements of writing and that makes me a bit nervous.
Oh yeah, and that whole perfectionist version of procrastination fits in there somewhere. Overthinking, internal criticism, the sudden urge to clean out the refrigerator. You know the deal.
Plus, I’m not really sure what I’m doing. I’ve never really done this before. I’m still figuring out the technology piece. For all of the power of digital, I still tend to be a bit analog.
So if I were to run a regression analysis on why you are not seeing much output from me, those variables would probably soak up a good amount of the variation.
“And I’m giving you a longing look… Everyday I write the book. Don’t tell me you don’t know the difference Between a lover and a fighter. With my pen and my electric typewriter Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal I’d still own the film rights and be working on the sequel“
p.s. Happy Anniversary to my husband of a quarter century!!!
Every year on September 21st we celebrate International Day of Peace. It was founded by the United Nations “to provide an opportunity for all humanity to come together, in spirit and in action, to forward the ideals of and conditions for peace”.
I first learned about this day when my daughter was attending a quirky little Quaker school in the woods of Connecticut. I loved participating in the simple and heartfelt ceremonies designed to better connect us with each other and the world around us. One year the gathering was larger than usual with many guests present at the school’s new campus on the site of a former summer theater and its surrounding 18 gorgeous acres. As I stood in silence holding hands with a circle full of school children, fellow parents and neighbors, I was filled with inspiration. Sharing this beautiful campus and the ideals of this wonderful school with the wider community gave me hope for the future.
Seven years have passed since that gathering. The quirky little school is now closed and the beautiful property sits in limbo (but that’s a whole other story for another day). Every day I see things that upset me and make me doubt the goodness of humanity. I do not always feel as optimistic about things as I did back then.
But I must move forward.
I am grateful that my favorite radio station (90.7 WFUV) paused this year to commemorate this aspirational day with a set of songs about peace. I often find my solace in music.
Peace out.
“And as I walked on
Through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong And who are the trusted? And where is the harmony? Sweet harmony.
‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry. What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding?“
You can take the girl out of Jersey 