G'Evening Sports Fans

I had a lovely time at Drinking Monday last night, especially nice to have a tiny hamburger from Mark Burger on St. Mark's Street.  Fries were tasty too!  This place was definite win.  I also got review the work of the irrespresible miss Yao Xiao.  I see big things in her future indeed.

I had a great time chilling with my buddy Josh as well.  I like him an awful lot.  He is very silly and smart and cute!

Today was good although I had a late start due to the hangover from last night's drinking.  oh well, all's well.  Sent out my submission for this week's Pink Ponies Writing Group and got over to work on time.  Had a nice quiet afternoon of Barbie and snack-time and Culture Club with Ava and then caught a ride home with Brian.  Just finished a tasty dunkachinno and made dinner, which I will consume upon my return from the gym.  Now I must fly :)

Im baaaack

American short-haired Oni

Iron & Wine - Freedom Hangs Like Heaven

For Samson. Might be my new favorite song.

Headed upstate On four hours sleep. Had grits and a greek omlette @ the stage coach diner on boston post road.

HAPPY TANKSGIVING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Hi guys!  Things are going pretty well out in Oni-Land, in spite of being way-laid by my monthly nemesis for a bit.  Been doing lots of love things with the wee ones, like visiting Mrs. Roth's first grade for the Thankful Feast (they don't call it thanksgiving because I think maybe it is considered too volatile a holiday with the Native Americans having been violently divested of their lands, lifestyle and lives.)  The school is very diverse and we had empanadas, kotafi, arroz y frijoles, lo-mein, gyoza, sweet potatoes, roasted carrots and parsnips with thyme, salad, borekas, burek, cranberry sauce and turkey. It was super fun, and the children read aloud from their "thankful" books, and at the very last page of Ava's she had drawn me and said she was thankful for the best babysitter ever!  I love that girl :)

Yesterday we had another one and one day and I was pretty miserable with cramps, but she still made me smile.  When we got to her apartment I asked shall we do some drawing and what would she like to draw and she said "BOY GEORGE!" which made me bust out laughing and asking her questions and then I was like nah let's just do this.

She is awesome and weird.



now i have to get ready for work.  going upstate for thanksgiving tomorrow, will visit ya'll for a extra thankful Things ILove Thursdays

{BUSHWICK BLOCK PARTY}

pink gorilla by Sam the Butcher

yesterday I went to a graffiti event in Brooklyn, by the Morgan stop off the L train.  It was awesome and super fun and pretty cold and very neat.  i also ran into some kids i know from upstate, and Max Dunn drew me a pictures!!  here are some pictures:

I thought this 3d one was amazing.

so cute!

gorgeous

steam horses and a night train

this is the picture that max drew for me!  i love it :)

Found a banana.

RobotsWillKill [The Street Spot: Home]

RobotsWillKill [The Street Spot: Home]

 

O-kay kay kay!

I just ate 40lbs of fish

/

Dessert at minado sushi buffet on long island.

it's been a while

         I thought i ought to check in with everyone here on the blog-o-sphere-o-world-ee-verse.
i'm reading this book today. gogol is so weird. one of his stories, Ivan Fyodorovich begins with the narrator being a very old man who forgets things and he tells us how he likes to write them in his notebook but his wife is also very old and one day she is baking pasties (you won't find better pasties anywhere, I warrant you) and he picks up the pasties she has been baking on some paper and there is writing on the paper and it was just as he suspected she was using the paper from his notebook! and he can't have a fight with her, can he, because his wife is also very old. and then he tells us about a year ago he was driving through Gadyach
and he has tied some knots in his hankerchief to remind himself to ask Stephan Ivanovich about the end of a story, and reminds himself that if he sneezes when he is town he must remember to ask Stephan but he sneezes plenty and forgets so he suggests that the reader go to Gadyach himself and ask Stephan Ivanovich the end of the story and gives us great details hw to find the gentleman himself.  Then the story begins and we met Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and his Aunt.  We watch young Ivan grow up, join the military, have great success in his career. 
Next he gets a letter from his Aunt who is in charge of his farm, asking him to come to the country and take over the farm and he does and he likes it.  But his aunt tellshim there is this paddock of land that will soon be very valuable  and that the land actually belongs to him as this other man had ceded it to him in his will.  He goes to see the man's nephew who ought to have the deed to give him but the man, Grigory Grigoryvech Storenko, tells him there is no such deed and to bad and feeds him a magnificent feast and makes him drink vodka.  Then Ivan goes home to his aunt who tells him that Storenko is a fat swindling bastard of many chins and they resolve to go together next time.  While they are there and Storenko is out the aunt devises to leave Ivan alone with a maiden who is Storenko's daughter as she has designs that the two should be wedded.  Ivan is terrified and they sit together for half an hour and do not speak except once, to comment on the fact that there are many flies in the summer. 
Then Ivan and his aunt go home and Ivan is very nervous and has mad dream about wives with the heads of geese and tiny wives in his hat and in his pocket and then dreams that a "Wife" is a new type of material that the dry goods man is trying to sell him, saying that it is very fashionable and everyone is having frock-coats made of this material so he buys some and takes it to his Jewish tailor who tells him that it is very poor material indeed and that no one with any sense of fashion is having frock-coats made of wife anymore.  and then he wakes up and is troubled and meanwhile his aunt is coming up with a scheme in her head, which we are told we will learn of in the next chapter, and then the story ends.  Have you ever read such an absurd story as this?  I have not.  And Gogol is considered great Ukrainian literature, is he not?
So the moral of that story is that I ought to write whatever weird and wonderful fancies come to my head and in whatever bizarre way I desire because perhaps I will end up writing great Ukrainian literature.  Tee hee.
Have you every read any of Bruno Schultz's work?  He was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher, who is widely regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. Schulz was born in Drohobycz, in the province of Galicia, to Jewish parents, and spent most of his life there. He was killed by a German Nazi officer.
His work is as ethereal and bizarre and magnificently weird as Gogol's, perhaps more so.  I want very much to own several collections of his work but they are very expensive.  I would like to recommend a film Santorum Pod Klepsydra
or the  Hour-Glass Sanitorium.  It is as surreal and brilliant as the book and is the most beautiful Polish movie I have ever seen.

It is available on Youtube, but lamentably only in Polish.  I used to have a copy of it with English subtitles, and I am sad to say I no longer do, nor do I know where could get it.  If you can solve that problem for me, I would be very grateful to you.

Thanks for reading!

love,
oni

here's a clip with subtitles that you might get a feel for the film:

Lauren's Story: Dora Gets Fat

Four Year Old Writes Her Own 'Dora The Explorer' Episode [VIDEO]

Four Year Old Writes Her Own 'Dora The Explorer' Episode [VIDEO]

Hey stranger

I also put fruit upc stickers up in the train.  cept mine are not organic.  but i wish they were

oni and lank make with the good weekend

my brother lank was in town this weekend.  we always have a nice time but this weekend was exceptionally loverly.  yesterday was hiking on hook mountain, a late mexican dinner and sleep.  today found us making an awesome breakfast and then seeing the artists at union square, then heading over to greenpoint/williamsburg to visit Brooklyn Brewery, and closing that outing with dinner at Peter's Since 1969.

We left on the five train from Pelham Parkway around 12:00pm and I managed to get in 900 words during the trip into the city.  We went to the bank then took a lookie loo at the art in Union Square.  the best thing i saw at the artist's at union square was some photographs in gold leaf and one photograph that was pigmented, a picture of some graff at 5 Points (see above for a different picture of the same graffiti.)  i might buy that picture for a friend next Sunday.  also i enjoyed a beautiful picture of a cat in whose eye i saw the reflection of a harbor, by an artist named Stavros something something, whose last name I forget, but who was very gracious and friendly.  That picture inspire me to take the mask picture featured later in this post.  That mask was awesome, I want one.

Then Lank and I took the L train (where a curly haired girl played mandolin and sang softly to an older black man who was carrying a guitar, and everyone smiled to each other and clapped at the end) to the Bedford stop, played a quick game of "look at the hipsters" then went over to the brewery.  they had a nice little bar there and a wonderful cat, Monster,  a ten-year old male neuter who is in charge of all mousing operations over there at the brewery.

Lank and I split twenty dollars worth of tokens, giving us three each.  We then exchanged the a token each for a cup of Brooklyn Brewery's Brown Ale and Weisse Ale respectively.  The Weisse was amazing.  We enjoyed those and I snapped some photos with his camera because it is awesome and mine is
a. not
b. currently misplaced and
c. has a scratched lens.

Then we had the tour which was amazingly brief and very entertaining due to the tour guide and his love anecdotes about Williamsburg in the 1990's.  I highly recommend the tour but have a beer or two first as otherwise you will disappointed by its brevity.

Then we took to the long beer-hall style tables in the bar and settled in to make some new friends.  We met a Derrick and a Carston who work for ZocDoc, a online company which allows you to book appointments with doctors who take your insurance, and which my dear friend Dann reviewed quiet favorably last week.  They were lovely ready-made drinking bodies and we discussed topics as diverse as the distribution of the world's Jewry, life in Brooklyn, small vs. large dogs, fiction writing, life being good, and a voice acting. here's to them.

 Then we decided we needed to eat.  we walked back to bedford and found a comfort-food joint called Peter's Since 1969.  I had chicken and mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes because i was tipsy and that means carbs don't count.  lank had more chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy and some string beans.  Everything was fantastic and not too expensive (round $10-$12 per meal).  I highly recommend them.

Then with very full tummies we bored the train and rode our way home to the Bronx.  I'm reading The Ask by Sam Lipsyte and Lank was dipping into the Idiot by Dostoevsky.  I'm enjoying The Ask, but found it to be more intelligible and enjoyable when I was tipsy, so take that for whatever it is worth.  I read the Idiot a few years ago and found it brilliant, albeit massively depressing.  Sometimes I need massively depressing literature to check my perspective :)  life is good.

I would go on to tell you all about the hike we did in Nyack yesterday but I am a bit weary and still have plans for this evening  Suffice to say mother nature shone exceptionally bright in yesterday's beautiful weather.  The trial was just difficult enough to be a bit challenge but not kill me, and we did about 8 miles over the day.  The view from the top was astonishing in its beauty and the birdwatchers we met at the summit were very interesting and quite willing to share their knowledge with us.  The best part of the trip, for me, was showing the 8 year old triplets that accompanied us some things in nature which I knew some things about.  I love an open mind and young people can be absolute sponges for knowledge, once you get your foot in the door past their too-cool exteriors.

 

photo by: Joe Svantner

Greenpoint

Tree eats bike thing

@ brooklyn brewery

Life is very g00d!

Back down again!

Im on hook mountain!

Fun @ the playground

N0ther hard day @ the office #lovemyjob
.

TILTING like the tower of pisa :P

Things I love this thursday!

1. Sweet Potatoes.  holy mackerel that's a yummy vegetable!  sweet potatoes were grown in Peru as early as 750 B.C.E.  Native Americans were growing them here when the first Europeans showed up.  They are packed with calcium, potassium, and vitamins A and C.

2. Treatments for S.A.D.  For those who don't know, I've struggled with chronic depression since the late 1990's.  It has become debilitating and even life-threatening at points.  And it is always worse in the winter.  My dad read an article in Psychology Today and asked me to look through my journals and see if I was getting sick more often in the winter and I complied and there was a huge correlation.  My psychiatrist and my psychology were able to diagnose me with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I started with light therapy maybe three years ago and this year I added in Vitamin D3 supplementation.  I still struggle but utilizing these combined therapies in the winter months has made a world of difference.  Winter months I used to sleep 12 to 14 hours a day, unable to attend school or work when I was in the depths of a relapse.  My eating disorder behaviors would become unmanageable and my personal relationships suffered to no end.  Because of the research leading to these treatments, and my father's vigilaince in monitoring the research and also in helping me secure the means of treatment, I now have two powerful tools to battle this ailment that used to make so dysfunctional.  I couldn't overcome it with my will or with talk therapy or with the regular anti-depressant I still take, but these treatments have changed my life.






3. The rest: clean kitchen, healthy turtle and cat, good friends, fiber-one cereal, presents, and arts and crafts. 

Today's post was meant to be longer but I have to go to my writing group now :) 

holy clean cocina bat-hombre

brian and i got an idea and we moved lahsanna (my turtle) into the first room and out of the kitchen and made the kitchen all super kitcheny.  Oh yeah.

also, sophie mage me a dope thanksgiving decoration for my fridge:

it says have a turkeylishoush thanksgiving!

Ive been sitting on this box to wait for the 1 train @ 207th and 10th ave for 3 years. Today an mta guy told me it is full of sand. Im sitting on the beach :-)

Ballet ? Time

GUEST POSTERS~ today featuring chloe and ava and sophie

chloe: i love pineapple sorbet!  (from naomi -->) today chloe had a headache from banging her head against the wall.  she was crying and sad and her mom called and said she could have sorbet because ice cream cures everything for chloe.

Sophie: ugh math tests next week NERVOUS!!! im not the best at math so im gonna treat myself to a Dum Dum lolly after its over.Wish me luck![and hope!!]

ava: i agree.  ice cream does cheer people up when they are sick.