Co-incidences in the mid-to-late teens

We have not posted since 2013, but today Lucia in Durham sent me and my other friend Julia G. an email with this link that she discovered on my Goodreads profile.

I looked at the old entries, including the early ones when I lived on the coast of Southern Maine (and Julia lived with her mom and still worked in an office and had just met her wife.)

Additionally, on my way home tonight, I started brainstorming group call-and-response songs that I could lead the 3rd graders in tomorrow morning when it is my turn to lead the 3rd Grade Morning Meeting at my school. I thought of one, Hey Hey Bo Diddly Bop, which I learned from my friend Andrew and led routinely during one year that is well documented on this blog (2011.) 

When I arrived home, I checked the mailbox. A postcard from my friend Andrew! In the postcard he said that he had moved back to Portland, ME! See you soon, he wrote.

(And I just thought of this one. I was already thinking of Andrew this morning, even before Lucia's email. Andrew always likes to spell my name with a lot of silent "g's." Today, I visited a 5th grade classroom and one student spells her name "Leigha." It's the first time I saw that spelling for real! It does exist!)

things that are the exact same color as other things

Submitted by Amy F.

Dinner and sweater

Things that look like other things

the tree

On March 23 at approximately 6:15pm I saw on google reader that Julia had posted something new on this site (LJN).  After reading it, I briefly browsed other items and eventually checked facebook. On my newsfeed, Sarah Lawrence College, (which I "like") had posted this picture:

This photo struck me as very familiar! It is an almost identical to the photos that I took of this tree everyday in April of 2006. The photo was so familiar that I double checked to make sure that I was not looking at my own tree pictures which are also posted on facebook.

Julia and I have not been in as frequent touch as we sometimes are. Even so, at 6:36pm I received the following text message from her:

                                            "De: Julia

                                              How would you

                                              feel about

                                              posting the slc 

                                              tree photos to

                                              ljn every day of

                                              april?
                                              Mar 23, 6:36 pm"

Coincidence???!!! Maybe. The photos were posted on the same days that I took them in 2006, starting on April 2nd when I took my first photo.

Things that are the exact same color as other things part 3

Soup & Sweater

The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Truth

Recently, news broke that Mike Daisey's report for TAL was partly falsified. So much response to that on all fronts. Well actually I don't think I had a real life conversation about it, but I saw multiple blog posts and articles (is the difference between an article and a blog post only who publishes it?) and tweets. All the sentiments can be mostly summed up in these two tweets of @KateHarding:
___________________________________________________________________________________

19 Mar Kate Harding ‏ @KateHarding

A fiction writer's challenge is to tell a story that rings true. A nonfiction writer's is to make the best story out of what happened. (1/2)

19 Mar Kate Harding ‏ @KateHarding

Making shit up and calling it nonfiction rejects both challenges. It's about manipulating the audience, not creating art.

___________________________________________________________________________________

(sorry, I don't feel like going through that whole Print Screen business right now)

So Daisey mostly told the truth about the conditions at Foxconn but was not true to facts* when discussing his meetings with Foxconn employees / injured people, notable the guy who swipes the iPad open and calls it "magic" or the people with the health damages from the dries-faster-than-alcohol cleaner. This is a problem because it's very easy to make up something that is compelling and it's much harder to find the compelling nugget in a fact-based story.
*by "facts" I mean THINGS THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

For example, to hear that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion is much more arresting than 3%. This figure makes you move, makes you shout WHAT and clammor for more information. Three percent is like, whatever, fine, that's what I expect I guess or something, who actually cares, PP does all kinds of health services. So when you learn it IS 3%, and that you'd been fed 90% for inflammatory purposes (Jon Kyl said he wasn't trying to be "factually accurate"), you never forget that it's 3%.

I guess what can be good about distortion--or any kind of aggrandized statement--is that distortion garners attention and press. Maybe Daisey would have better luck passing off his carelessness as determined misinformation to galvanize activists, or Apple, to take action.

A couple weeks ago the NYTimes Book Review published a front-page article on John D'Agata's twists of FACTS towards a shady aim: "beauty," that elusive beast. He claims that as an essayist, not a reporter, he doesn't have an obligation to tell "the truth." Hey, you know me; you know I'm a big believer in subjectivity, multiple truths, and conflicting realities. One would be naive to think we don't live in a world of multiple realities: look at the US Congress, can't barely do a thing, everyone thinking their reason is the best reason! My problem with D'Agata is that he's trying to change all these small bits of information to make a better story, and that's not good writing. That's not effort. That doesn't produce art. And the base things he's trying to change to make his story more compelling aren't even a big deal to begin with.

Daisey changed compelling facts in the name of truth. D'Agata changed uninteresting facts in the name of art. And there's nothing more to this post than that these manipulations are a recent coincidence I've been thinking about.

Big Day March 9

March 9th, Friday, was a big day. Lots of coincidences. I could not believe it.

Start it off: "When I'm Gone"

Recently I began reading Just Kids by Patti Smith. The book is a chronicle of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and their concurrent rise in the art world. When I first picked it up I read 65 pages without stopping. I completed the whole book in about a week, often reading at work while I scanned archival WWII documents or current valid photo IDs. I finished on March 9th, 24 years to day Robert died.

On the train on the way home I decided to listen to Horses. I must have taken it off my iPod because all that exists under P is Phil Ochs. On the Manhattan bridge my phone rang. I answered it--my sister--a family friend passed away--as soon as we hung up, Mom called from California. The train was moving slowly so I was able to take both calls. It is still March 9th. Two deaths on March 9th.

I put my headphones back in and it was Phil singing When I'm Gone, about who will do the political art/works when he's gone. It could have been any song as iPod was on Phil's "There But for Fortune" album shuffle. I kind of turned it off and sat stunned thinking about impermanence and the universe.

Later that night I went to see Laurie Anderson perform Delusions* (that's your cue--switch it up) at Pace University, downtown on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. How can you describe music? Laurie's not just music, but video, video on screens and a couch, and tiny with spiky hair and a suitish outfit and sparkle shoes. And Fenway Bergamot also--every scary robot voice from any scary AI movie. *This is not the best recording but I found it the most resonant now, writing, and it has many segments of the performance.

Laurie mentioned the priest who helped her when her mother died. She went back to Chicago. The priest told her how to say goodbye to her mother--Laurie said she couldn't say she loved her; the priest told her to say she cared. Laurie said the priest was also Robert's priest. Robert's! The same Robert's! It was still March 9.

Things that are the exact same color as other things Part 2

part one of same color things

"Abide with me"

This past week I finished this book:

Then on Sunday, I went to Unitarian church and this was the last hymn (a hymn I have never heard in before in a UU service):

York, Maine Synchronicity.

Internet wandering, the kind where you click on one link, which leads you to another site where you click on another link, and so on, brought me to looking at the photography of this guy today.

This one particular photo looked so familiar.

I almost didn't make the connection that I have seen Flo's manytimes, until I saw that the words on the truck say "York, Maine."

I drove past Flo's Steamed Hot Dogs many times a week earlier this fall when I worked in Ogunquit, just a little ways up 1. I always noticed Flo's because no matter what time of day I drove by in the afternoons, there were tons of cars parked perpendicular almost to the point that they were spilling out into the road. Since then, I have started working somewhere else that has me driving in the opposite direction.

Photo by Jonathan Levitt

uh-oh!

One of my potential child's names--Cadence--was chosen by one of the moms on "sixteen and Pregnant" as a middle name for her kid. Silver lining: gender entirely neutral. Name: Bentley Cadence. Source: 16 First and Middle Names of Babies on 16 and Pregnant, in Order of How Much I Spit Out My Drink When They Were Revealed

Things that are the exact same color as other things

7 January

I am at work updating our database to reflect which of our clients have died. The first step in this process is matching the client's birth date on the Social Security death record with their birth date in our database, to make sure it is the same person. Just at the moment when I was thinking fondly of a friend from high school I confirmed the birth date of a deceased client and saw it is THE SAME birth date as my remembered friend.

Unintended Reunions

Last week I ran into people from high school and college a lot.


DATE                                LOCATION                                     ACQUAINTANCE SEEN
Monday 14.3                    W. 4th area               three separate people walked by the Greek restaurant
Tuesday                                    I don't remember right now but I know I saw people
Wednesday                        at the gym                        classic SLC pretend not to know the other one
Thursday            Lincoln Center to Columbus Circle             "                     "                      "
Friday    Prospect Lefferts Gardens Indian restaurant      a kid I don't remember from h.s. said hi

st. patrick's day affirmation

There's a line in a book of short stories by Simon Van Booy recalling wisdom from somebody's grandfather: "Coincidences mean that you are on the right track."  Tempting words to keep in mind.

This St. Patrick's day, like most, we did a little research to recall what the day is celebrating.  I read this much on a wikipedia, or maybe heard it on a report from NPR Morning Edition, that St. Patrick is remembered for driving the snakes out of Ireland.  This idea was debated briefly by graduates of conservation biology school: what factors cause extinction of an animal group from a certain region?

Ok.  A day later, a housemate, reading The Mists of Avalon, came upon the St. Patrick story.  "Snakes" stands for Druids being driven out by Catholics. A day later, I started reading the book Forever, by Pete Hamil and the subject came up again, talking about "the lonely God of St. Patrick," and the persecution of the Celts.

(Continued) Review of Autumn/Winter Synchronicity (part 2)

A housemate has been reading The Mists of Avalon, a book she received from another housemate, who got it from his mom.

Yesterday, she was sitting at the dining room table, with the book and her laptop on the table in front of her.  Since we live in a partially furnished beach vacation house, objects that came with the house fill the shelves and cabinets.  I sat next to her at the table, and looking behind her on the bookshelf, I pulled out a copy of Die Nebel von Avalon.  It has been sitting on the lower shelf unnoticed, until last night.

Bonus: We moved into the beach house in December.  I had just finished The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene, a book I bought at a used bookstore some time ago, and finally decided to read.  Of the small collection of books that came with the house, stored on the bookshelves mentioned above: The End of the Afair by Graham Greene.

3-3 / 3:03pm

I work for about 30 hours each week in an office in Midtown Manhattan, scanning documents, old (pertaining to peoples' persecution under the Nazis in WWII) and new (applications for monetary compensation because of the persecution). The papers in my post from the 3rd of March come from one woman's application file. She was not approved for compensation because in her application she told two different stories, utterly in conflict, about her persecution. One version said that she fled east through the USSR, and the other one said that she spent several years in a hospital in the south of Germany, in Bavaria.

The documents in my post contain a photograph of the applicant as a young girl. I have scanned many photocopies of old photographs, but always photocopies--never the original. This is an original photograph. The international organization that was helping the applicant verify her story sent her a letter saying that they had found records of her hospital stay, and some photographs of her as a child when she was admitted to the hospital, and she could have those photographs to keep, if she wanted, as they might provide sentimental value. But then she sent us one of the photographs, the actual photograph, not a copy. Why? Did it not affect her? Did she think it would help in the approval of her claim (it didn't)? Did the organization maybe send a duplicate, and this was the extra? Or did the photograph bring back too many memories? I wonder how I would have behaved in her situation. I wonder that a lot at my job, how I would have acted in the applicants' situations.

Also noteworthy: The hospital this applicant stayed in during and after the war is in a small tiny town in Germany where my friend was working a couple years ago. I have visited that small tiny Bavarian town, on the lake, in the gently rolling hills. 

3-10 / 3:10pm

A Review of Autumn/Winter Synchronicity

In the fall of 2010, many curious coincidences occurred which seemed significant at the time.  Below follows a semi-complete summary.

1. Shortly after moving into the house in Ocean Park, Maine we found a copy of a novel entitled The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter.  "A complex, smart mystery filled with intrigue, drama, and more than a little danger awaits" the reader of this book, though we found out that it actually has nothing to do with the tiny incorporated area of Ocean Park in which we lived.

After living with the novel for a few months, we traveled to northwest Connecticut for work.  One sunny afternoon in late November, a co-worker and I searched the nearby town of Winsted for a book store.  The man at the newspaper store told us with passionate aggravation that no bookstore existed in the town.  We decided to travel to the next town over, Torrington to look for something.

We found a Super Goodwill with some books including a prominently displayed copy of The Emperor of Ocean Park.  Additionally, we found a working Globe Lamp, an item I had been daydreaming about quite seriously.

Since this encounter, I have noticed a copy of this book in every used bookstore I have visited.

We visited another co-worker from Ocean Park on Cape Cod where she is living for the winter.  She presented me with a present that she had found on her own...a copy of The Emperor of Ocean Park.

Has anyone else ever encountered this novel?  There are several other qualities about it which I find intriguing and hilarious (such as figuring out what is going on with the background of the author photo.)

here is a link to a map charting every place TEOP has been found...keep in mind it was found multiple places in Portland, ME


This Review To Be Continued....

Seen on the train

This morning I took the Franklin Ave. shuttle from Prospect Park to Franklin Ave., where I switched to the Manhattan-bound C train. I saw a couple interesting things during this trip.

On the Shuttle there was this spilled plant in the doorway. There was dirt and soil, and two plant stalks on the ground. It was really beautiful and out of place! The plant had a large bulb attached to the bottom, like a tulip, and the stalks were long and spring green, like scallions or leeks. Interesting contrast between the spotted linoleum (vinyl?) floor and the scattered soil.

On the C, someone had stuck some slips of paper into the advertising above the seats. It was two slips of paper with distinct block letter handwriting, giving the address of the New York State Attorney General's office in downtown Manhattan, and the address of the New York Post. I wonder why!