sunnyside up!

(leave your worries on the doorstep)

amazing stories of survival

Anyone who knows me well knows there’s nothing I love better than true life sea adventure.  I’m talking, of course, about the Mexican fisherman who have been lost at sea since last November.  This kind of thing has happened before.  The captain and crew of the whaleship Essex lived through a similar ordeal — they were adrift for three months.  The story of the whale that rammed and sunk their ship was Melville’s inspiration for Moby Dick, but the non-fiction accounts (one first-hand account by Owen Chase, first mate on the Essex; the other a more recent NY Times bestseller by Nathaniel Philbrick) are thrilling enough!

busy at work

A good description of Web 2.0, for those of you who might have been wondering.

on time traveling

One of the things I’ll be grappling with here on Sunnyside Up! is my experimentation with — and on-going attempt to understand — the notion of time travel, which I am 100% sure is possible. I am sure it’s possible because I’ve done it. It’s not like you see in the movies where you need a special vehicle or device to get your there. It happens with a shift of consciousness, a slip into a certain state of mind that allows you to be in the same place but in a different time. I can not make it happen at will, but I am getting better at setting up the circumstances for it to occur on its own.

Slipping into the past or into the future are both possible, but it’s harder to recognize when you’re in the future because you have no frame of reference for what you’re seeing since to your conscious self it hasn’t happened yet. For me, I’m only starting to realize that I’m time traveling at all and I feel both lucky to finally recognize it for what it is, plus bothered by the fact that I’ve only learned about it now as a middle-aged person. Had I realized it earlier, I might have put some effort into developing the skill.

Anyway, now that I know what it is I do a lot of time traveling: at lunchtime, in lower Manhattan, and on the weekends, when I go for long walks in northwestern Queens. I don’t really even think about the mechanics of it anymore. I leave that to the physicists and geniuses.

Of course, I love to read and watch movies that involve time travel, and one of my favorites is Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée, which many people know in it’s expanded, reincarnated, feature-length form as 12 Monkeys. An homage to La Jetée in the form of interactive Shockwave can be found here. Pretty cool.

where to begin?

It’s been so long since I’ve blogged I hardly know where to begin. I figured I’d begin at the end, which for most of us means death, for some of us, burial, and for a lucky(?) few of us, interment in a sprawling Catholic cemetery like Calvary. Sometimes I walk or ride my bike around Calvary, the cemetery most of you know from passing over it on the LIE or BQE on your way into or out of Manhattan or Brooklyn.

Walking along the BQE service road, you come upon four or five monument shops.  The largest of these is Riley Bros., a good name in monuments since 1883.  But I ask you, what name doesn’t look good when it’s chiseled into highly polished black stone?

Eleven of my ancestors are planted here, in this large plot with the big cross, right inside the entrance nearest the office.  My dad discovered them while researching our family’s genealogy, which he’s been doing for the past [too many] years since his retirement.  The dust and bones that were once their bodies lie in the ground but eight blocks from where I make my own home.  Anyway, the one who interests me most here is great-great-great-uncle Dan Sweeney, who seems to have done stints in three different Army divisions and the Coast Guard before calling it quits at age 38.

la crise de foie, ça n’existe pas!

The phrase “lung crisis” reminds me of my old friends Paul-Jacques and Anita — a French couple I knew from my film school days.  I attended their wedding (as Paul-Jacques’s witness) in Paris when I was five months pregnant with R Jr.  It was quite a weekend.  The same night I arrived in town, I fell down the stairs of the apartment building they were squatting in (no heat or hot water, no lights in the corridor — which is why I fell down the stairs).  Deciding that a dillapidated, cold-water flat on the fringes of Paris was NOT the best place to care for my unborn child, I was happy to discover my dad on a business trip staying at the Meridien Etoile.  The rest of my visit was spent luxuriating in a massive bubble bath, watching color T.V. (in English!) and letting my dad bring me to lunch at swanky places like Le Train Bleu, which sits at the top of a big marble staircase in the Gare De Lyon. No sooner had we left the restaurant when I fell down those stairs, too.

It was also a challenge trying to eat healthy: everything I came across was drenched in butter and cream.  Paul-Jacques gave me a couple of tablets to swallow before the wedding reception.  He said that what with all the rich foods and champagne, one must be careful or one might suffer a “crise de foie” or “liver crisis.”  Which brings me back to my original thought.

Trying to figure out what a liver crisis is, I ran a search on the French phrase “crise de foie,” which returned a bunch of amusing pages about this common complaint and whether it is something real or imagined.  It helps if you can read French, because if you use the Google “translate this page” feature, you get this:

“Too much eaten, of chocolates in particular… Et paf! you slaps a bilious attack! Sympathetic… But with the fact, the bilious attack, it is what?”

Some English language links on the liver crisis…