THE PART I EDITED OUT

How many old white men edit Reuters?

This headline about the world’s foremost female architect is so blatantly sexist I almost laughed:

Feisty architect Hadid challenges Rome skyline

ROME (Reuters Life!) - Iraq’s Zaha Hadid, one of the world’s most acclaimed architects, has given this ancient city that normally shuns modern intrusions another controversial building — a new museum dedicated to contemporary design…

Reminds me of the UCB quote that 30 Rock recycled: “She’s spirited — like a horse.” To be “spirited” or “feisty” calls up the image of an animal that needs to be tamed. In this case, it would be tamed by the fleet of all-white old men architects. I don’t call anything but a puppy or a tinny guitar “feisty.”

If I believe in Spiritual Moments, it was turning off the Hudson river jogging path today at a random intersection — I was bored — and the Townsend song “Let My Love Open the Door” coming on shuffle just when I, confused, came upon the glowing pit that was the World Trade Center, and could find no way to go around it.

Great First Line for a Memoir From the Future*

During the recession I was making out okay working out on Broadway, where me and a few kids were selling Obama condoms. They were condoms with the face of the president on them, and all the wealthy Russian tourists with bags from GUESS would ask to take pictures with us, and then buy a pack, as though in compliance for services rendered…

*Inspired by my jaunt to the bank during work. What a hilarious recession job!

What I Thought About Now That They're Banning Raw Oysters

It was Christmas day and Lane and I were in Biloxi, Mississipi. We had woken up in our car in the parking lot of a WalMart, with sand blowing in off the asphalt from the beaches we hadn’t been to yet, and we had gone for breakfast to a casino — a big, empty, ghostly place; one of the few that remained despite the hurricane. Feeling cheery and proud of ourselves, we ordered two bloody marys from a sleek, glassy bar. “Do you know who died today?” the bartender asked us; he must have been our age and lonely. It was James Brown and we talked to him about that and then the room fell quiet.

The only other sound in the bar came from the only other person there. A mushroom-shaped woman in a black straw hat and a black silk shift, she was hunkered over a short glass table, her face downward-looking and posed in serious, protracted concentration. She had ordered a bloody mary, too, and next to that sat a large, round plate of ice. Flayed outward on the ice were fat, glistening oysters in their black shells. We watched as, every few minutes, she would tilt her head up to suck one down, wait a few minutes, and do the next. She had no book, no distraction, just the oysters which she was watching as if they were her prey. The only sound in the cavernous, cold glassy bar was the woman sucking the oysters.

Looking down into our bloody marys we thought about gluttony, and the sadness of old age, and how the woman must have needed to give herself a gift on Christmas, and how it was the oysters.

Today, in front of the office coffee-maker, I zoned out and thought, inexplicably, of Xian — of being 22 and walking to the streets where my guidebook said all of the dried-fruit stands were. I thought of how I hadn’t learned anything since then, when I walked down the stone streets and ate the dried-fruit from the little baskets. Then, maybe, I had seen it all more hungrily — the glistening yellow fruits, dried into their little shells and dyed all of those vaunting colors. I didn’t have any of the things that I have now, and wanted them.

I had a discussion with my brother when we were traveling together. We had left a palace full of tourists and stopped on a balustrade, looking down on the poverty of the city. It was a post-card. I asked him what was the value of all this seeing, if it ever actually affected him. He said yes, of course, and I looked again and tried to see what he saw. I don’t feel affected by the things I see but instead this narrative flow in my mind that happens when I see them. My brother and I once stood on a balustrade and looked over the poverty of a city, I once tasted the singular yellow fruits of Xian, the parched discs of Kiwis. You see the things you don’t have.

I thought I was too broke to pay someone else to cut my hair, but it turns out that the HAIR ACADEMY near my work is only $20 dollars! Maybe I can even afford to have someone dye it jet black again!

And how great would it be if they remade the police academy movies about hair?