I've been Simpsonized

I keep seeing these illustrations popping up, and it's genius marketing for the new Simpsons movie -- you upload a picture of yourself and out comes the Springfield version of you.

Or in this case, me.

Hey, hey Daddio!

My dad's booked his tickets. He's finally coming to visit in late September.

It's not as though Dad's afraid of New York -- he was a cop for nearly 30 years and I bet he'll still be packin' when he checks into his hotel in the Disney-fied Times Square. It's not even a matter of him not being interested in New York. He's road tripped here before, when he was on a mobster kick. He read all the books he could on Gotti, then went and staked out some coffee shop in Little Italy to check out the crime scene himself.

No, it's more that my stubborness is genetic and Dad just refused to come visit after I had the audacity to leave Michigan. And just as the economy is doing so well, too. Wonder what ever possessed me to want to go someplace else with a top 10 business degree and an interest in the media?

But apparently we've worn him down. John's been collecting these fantastic care packages since we moved here. He keeps enormous envelopes on his desk and every time he sees an article in the Times about something he thinks my dad would like, or grabs a menu for a restaurant that he thinks is Dad's style, or anything at all remotely interesting about our adoptive city, into the envelope it goes. Dad's probably gotten half a dozen of these piles of New York goodies so far, including cigars from a shop John was fixated on for a while and a review of A Chorus Line, which my straight-arrow Dad is really interested in seeing.

I'll be glad to finally show him around, including a visit to the AP, a walk around Central Park and a stop at our favorite coffee shop. Maybe he'll be the Tom Hanks character who meets his Meg Ryan on the upper west side and he'll move to the city ...

Not likely.

Dancing in the dark

This is about the coolest public art I've seen -- enormous screens in the courtyard at Lincoln Center, where each evening images of dancers are projected. Each screen shows a single dancer, doing anything from break dancing to classical ballet, in super slow motion so you can see each minute muscle movement, each way a costume flows or hair swings.

Even in a city like New York where everyone's in a hurry, on any given night you'll find dozens of people standing in the courtyard transfixed by these images.

http://www.nysun.com/article/58458

Another year at 2 Lincoln

Our building is poorly managed and maintenance is slow, if it's done at all, but John and I just couldn't stomach the idea of another apartment search, followed by boxing up all our belongings. We're finally feeling settled in here.

So we re-upped for another year's lease at 2 Lincoln. We figure maybe by next summer we'll be ready to look for something else, but it's kind of nice mostly knowing where things are and feeling a little settled. Besides, we didn't have to pay for the move from Michigan, and if we relocate within the city, we'll have to pick up the tab.

And by then, John will be making good coin from his paintings and prints, so we'll up the ante and move into something like this or this. (Wow, one month of that sort of rent would cover about a year's worth of our Ann Arbor mortgage payments.)

More to say, or just more ways to say it?

There's a great story in this weekend's Times about the confusion and frustration from having so many different ways to communicate -- some people rarely check email and only want you to call their cell, others hate if you call their cell and might want you to IM, some people only want email. How can you keep it all straight?

I've been peer pressured into signing up on Facebook, and I hear that young people think of email as something their parents do while Facebook is a primary means of communication. Likewise I got peer pressured into signing up for IM a few years ago.
So now you can call my work phone or my cell phone, you can email me on my work or personal address (my work email goes to my Treo, so it's always with me), you can IM me, message me on Facebook, send me a note through my LinkedIn profile ... and you know what I'm really excited about these days? I got my own personalized stationery and I like writing letters my with fountain pen. You know, letters that you put in an envelope, with a stamp, and they show up in the other person's mail box.

As I read many Facebook profiles, I'm struck by the content-free nature of many of the posts people leave. Is our human desire to connect with other people so strong that we can't resist saying something, even when we don't have anything to say?

Or maybe if you can call, email or IM any time you want, you just run out of things to say?

Still sorting it out

When John and I visited Michigan in December, we organized a few big group events -- we'll be at the Earle at 6 p.m. Tuesday, stop by if you can, that sort of thing.

The upside was that we got to see lots of people. The downside was that on our few nights in Ann Arbor, we basically said hello and good bye to many of those people. We were blessed with having maybe 20 people or so come by one night, over a dozen another time, and while festive and celebratory, it's not really conducive to real conversations. You just sit down to talk to one person and someone else is coming or going.

This time we decided to try a different approach. We aimed for more quality, less quantity. We thought about the people we missed most and the people who've made the most effort to stay in touch. We thought out who we wished we'd had more time with last time, and how much we could realistically do without feeling overwhelmed.

So this summer visit was much more about us hanging out with another couple or two than about big come-one-come-all gatherings. It was mellower. We even purposely had a few nights of us just dining by ourselves, because we wanted some private time.

In the course of the two weeks we were in the Midwest, we spent a few days in Saginaw, a couple days in Chicago, I worked three days remotely, and we were committed to two weddings. (sadly, one's been rescheduled, but that's a story for another day)
Once you do that math, you find that we had just a few open evenings in A2, and in choosing to spend them in a much mellower way, we missed seeing lots of people we think of often.

It's all part of the tradeoff and of learning how to be a tourist in a place we used to call home.

Maybe we'll be back in September for a quickie visit? Details TBD.