Un-suck

   I can't take credit for the title. I flagrantly stole it from Anthony Bourdain. It don't recall his location in the episode when he said that, but I do know mine - Miami, and more specifically, the Doral resort.
   The room is the size of my apartment. The pool area is labrynithine, and the body wash in the enormous shower is an intoxicating blend of orange and ginger.
   It smells like flowering trees and ocean breeze outside. I smell like coconut suntan lotion and contentment.
   I found out yesterday that Florence and the Machine will be opening for U2 tonight, which is a total bonus.
Last night, I IM'd with the dear Nadia for a bit whose Wednesday at work at an internet company in Siberia was in a serious day of suck.
   She IM'd looking for a bit of reassurance and comfort during a rough day, and I think I helped with that, but I did feel a little guilty enjoying myself. I was assured, however, that my guilt was unnecessary.
   That's certainly accurate, of course, but for someone as inherinently empathetic as I am, a proverbial grain of salt must be added to a good time when one of my friends is having a tough time.
   While I am writing this, there are people in the world having a rough time. And there are other people having an amazing time. And there are many others simply having an okay time. We all, I suppose, live on a large sliding scale of experience and I should not feel guilty about my enjoyment today.
   Today completely un-sucks... and that's okay!

Hug Theory

   I have an aunt, bless her, who might be the worst hugger since the dawn of time! Perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement, but it might not be! I may be willing to concede that "dawn of time" could be a slight stretch, but I'm pretty confident that she is the worst hugger since the discovery of fire-making, at least.

   Or the invention of the wheel!!

   Hugs are obligatory greetings at my mom's family gatherings. In a family whose skills are more in the areas of gardening, quilt and biscuit making, canning, judging, criticizing and being nasty - rather than in areas like warmth and affection - getting through the gantlet of hugs can be a bit of a chore. 

   This particular aunt, however, seems to have neither talent nor interest in the art of hugging. Her technique seems to be guided by a philosophy that hugs should be accomplished with as little actual bodily contact as the laws of physics will allow. A dictionary definition would mandate the arms encircling the one being hugged - and this occurs! - but her arms don't actually make contact with the victim's body. Just the pointed touch of fingertips briefly on the back let one know that one is being involved in a sham and mockery of all things Hug!

   I dislike receiving these "hugs" from this particular aunt, filled as they are with distaste and borderline contempt, almost as much as she dislikes giving them. If this Ebenezera Scrooge were to receive any bit of justice, she would be visited this next Christmas by three ghost to show her the grave errors of her hugging ways.

   In stark contrast would be my three nieces - 10, 8 and 6 years old - who are visiting this week from north California. They take hugs and cuddling as a given. It's as effortless as breathing to them and a source of simple comfort like a warm jacket and a mug of hot chocolate on a cold day.

   Given these two approaches, I'm definitely on Team Niece! 

   As another example, last week I did a camera gig for two days at Epcot's World Showplace. I hadn't worked at Epcot in a while and was glad to see friends I hadn't seen in a while. Among them was the dear Kristen, a self-admitted "hug-whore". She is, in my estimation, an absolute connoisseur of hugs. She hugs with all her heart and from the depths of her soul. When you get a Kristen hug, you know that you have been good and hugged!

   Apparently, she thinks I'm pretty decent myself because she told me once that I am one of the best huggers on Disney property. That was seriously high praise, considering the source! That's like James Beard telling you your dinner was amazing! That's like Miles Davis saying that your trumpet playing is really cool! That's like Stephen King telling you that you're scary!! 

   Hugs, at least good ones, live on a sliding scale from friendly to intimate. One-armed, off to the side hugs are friendly and easy. Friendly hugs, even the two-armed variety, are usually high up on the body (shoulders and neck). The more intimate the hug, the lower down the body the arms go (middle and lower back). At least, that's my theory.

   Generally speaking, I think that, like kissing, hugging has an almost infinite variety of things that it can communicate. Some, like my aunt, approach hugs as a nasty but necessary task to perform, not unlike lancing a boil. Others, like my nieces, see hugs as an integral part of life, like breakfast and cartoons. And others, like Kristen, express sweetness and affection through hugs with people she really cares about.   

   Anyhoo, that's what I think about all that.

   Anybody need a hug??? :)

Vintage Tiffany in the Window

   I hadn't looked at, or even thought about, this picture in a while but ran into it the other day and got a little sentimental.

   I shot this last summer I think after a bit of cajoling on my part to talk Tiffany into a photo-shoot. At the time, if memory serves, she was dating a redneck guy in Auburndale, Florida whose family ran an auction house. Judging from the eclectic content of Tiffany's then-boyfriend's double-wide, he had a hard time throwing things away. It was an absolute wreck, but since I kind of like visual clutter anyway, it worked out well.

   During the actual shoot in the stuffed trailer, the boyfriend kept inventing reasons to come back to the trailer to "look for things". I thought about saying to him that I was not there to hit on his girl but simply to do some pics, but I was enjoying a perverse pleasure in watching him watching us.

   This picture of Tiffany was a re-created spontaneous moment. We were in their bedroom (a study in post-modern gypsy carnival design as far as I could tell), Tiffany was shrugging her shoulders forward in a slightly uneasy manner, and I said, "Wait! That actually looks kind of cool. Do that again."

   She did and I think the resulting picture has a feel to it of both confidence and insecurity.

   If memory serves, the vintage pic that I photoshopped her into was either from shorpy.com or from the Library of Congresses online photo archive. Once I placed Tiff behind the window in black and white, I picked colors from the original picture and painted the original colors back onto her.

   Also, I think I had a certain amount of lighting and contrast tweaking to make it blend a bit better as well as a scratched texture on top to make it a bit more coherent. 

   Anyway, I had forgotten about this and had a bit of a moment. :)

Brew Dogs

   A couple days ago, I was at a large beer and wine store just north of downtown Orlando with a lot of specialty micro-brewery beers. I picked up a couple bottles that I had been curious about, including this one. I have really liked the different beers I have had from this brewery, which is called Brew Dogs. They are in Scotland and they came to my attention when I heard about one of their beers called "Tactical Nuclear Penguin". With a name like that, how can you go wrong?? :)
   Anyway, I saw this beer at the store and was drawn to it. It is a limited release and was literally the last one in the store. The price for this one beer was absolutely stupid, but I had faith in the brewery and threw caution to the wind.
   That was about a week ago. I had dropped this beer off, along with several others, at some friends' house to be enjoyed later.
   And later came tonight. :)
  
   Wow. :)

   Several months back, a friend had taken a trip to Paris. She brought back some cool chocolates including one perfumed with thyme. She also brought back some macarons. All of them were amazing, but one was flavored with roses. When I ate it, I was in awe because the beautiful essence of the rose -the heart and soul of the rose - was distilled into that small pastry. It was deeply beautiful and I was in silent awe at the mind and heart that could make something so extraordinary.
   I will never forget that moment.

   Tonight was not in that some level. But it was in the neighborhood. :)
   This beer was one of the most deeply complex and perfumed beers I have ever experienced. Even before I tasted it, I was impressed! There was a deep hops smell, but it was amazingly fruity and flowery.
   When I tasted it, there were 3 distinct phases.
   The first was a pleasantly bitter bite on the tip of the tongue. It tasted like juniper and eucalyptus and mint.
   After that, the big taste in the middle of the tongue was that hop-flower-fruit perfume that was in the smell, with a nice physical weight because of the alcohol content.
   At the back of the tongue, once it was swallowed, was a dark, smokey oak taste rounded off with the bitter-sugar taste of molasses.
   When I pulled air in through my mouth after I swallowed, the whole series of tastes happened again all over again, but lighter and sweeter.
   An extraordinarily crafted beer. I was really impressed.

   

   Here's the label:

Segments of the Whole

   Where does a story actually begin? Stories, in essence, are specific segments of lives. They are highly edited, specifically focussed accounts of the riot and mess of lives, either real or imagined. So, does it quite matter where I start here? Probably not.

   It's Sunday morning - Father's Day for those who are tuned into holidays more than I am - and the first day of my work week. And I am tremendously fatigued, body and soul. I am bolstering myself with a Rock Star energy drink and the determination to be upbeat and engaging when I actually begin to interact with my fellow human beings today. 

   The sensation of being an empty tank is partially from family difficulties and demands, partially from an unusually busy work week, and partially from having no safe place to stop. All of that is not whining, I don't think, but simply observations of the current situation.

   Additionally, I realize that "everything always changes". The rhythms and rules of the current flow will be completely different this time next year. To quote the 1939 British poster, "Keep Calm and Carry On".

   I'm reminded at the moment of an idea I developed with my Siberian email buddy that we refer to as "the illusion of routine". Each day and moment, while it may seem mundane, is actually quite rare and precious. And, I suppose, boredom could be a symptom of being unaware of this.

   And, speaking of my Siberian email buddy - I'm picking up a bit of Russian. Having had an approximately six month period of a vivid, lively exchange of long emails and scores of instant chats with a lovely woman from Kemerovo who I will refer to here as Nadia, I was shocked, when we chatted about Skyping, when she told me that she could barely speak English. Reading and writing were fine, but she simply had little opportunity to listen to and speak English.

   After I picked myself off the proverbial floor from the shock that someone so articulate in written english, who had such a command of shades of meaning and complex ideas, couldn't actually speak the language, I decided to do something about it. 

   First, I began recording what I alternately refer to as "audio notes" and "Radio Joey", along with the transcription of what I said. I had to get over my microphone-phobia, but all things considered, I'm doing fairly well with it.

   Second, only after sending several of these audio notes did it occur to me that my learning a bit of Russian would be cool for at least two reasons. First, it would be a gentlemanly way to verbally meet Nadia "in the middle" so that effortless spoken conversations could happen a bit sooner. Second, learning a new language is learning a new way to see the world. In my fledgling initial efforts, I have made a few observations.

   Specifically…

   The American mouth making Russian noises is both pathetic and funny, but, I do seem to make progress. I've just about got the alphabet ("alphabet"/"azbuka") and can almost sound out most words, without, of course, yet knowing the meaning and where the stress lies in the word. And I do have a small but growing vocabulary. When listening to Russian online, there are times when a word I recognize will pop through the noise like a lighthouse beam shining through a dark, foggy night.

   One subtle but important differentiation I discussed once with Nadia is the difference between "house" and "home", the first denoting more the physical structure and the second implying a bit more about the emotional and relational connection. From what I can tell, and from what Nadia said, there seems to be no differentiation in Russian. Both seem to be covered with the word "дом" (doam).

   And one other interesting non-differentiation I found just the other day is the word "рука" (roo-kah) which is the word for both "arm" and for "hand". 

   One function of language, I think, is to differentiate one thing from another. That may seem overly obviously at first glance, but without language - without the labeling of objects and activities - the world becomes more homogenous. The advantage to that would be a sense of the connectedness of everything, but the disadvantage would be a perpetual ignorance of the properties and functions of separate items. 

   I could be incorrect about the word "рука", and I will check on it, but I was fascinated that something I took for granted - a linguistic difference between my arm and my hand - was something that not everyone on the planet does differentiate as automatically as I do. 

   And I thought that was cool.

   One final thing - Having so many things going on in my life can be wearing, but I guess it's better than being bored. I have found myself, in periods of a long grind, to enjoy things on purpose. A day may have kicked my ass, but there are bits that were pretty cool, so I enjoy those for all they are worth.

   In that vein, I appreciate the following picture taken during the Vancouver hockey riots. Destruction may be all around, but that doesn't mean you have to stop having fun!