steph's new clean teeth

  

steph and jean-charles talking about steph's camera

  

i can't help it if i snarl when the people take the pictures

  

walton ford at the brooklyn museum

so, last wednesday, before i left for paris, i went to the walton ford show at the brooklyn museum. he is my favorite artist, probably because not only does he paint these amazingly detailed and kind of sinister paintings, but they encorporate audoban and storytelling. each one has a background.


i'd seen some of his stuff at the whitney about 2 years ago. but it turns out this is his first museum show.

while i was there, he was giving a talk to the museum doners so i got to hear him personally talk about what had inspired him to paint each thing.



this here crazy animal is taken from hemmingway's stories about hunting in africa.

Rio did not like the Musee Picaso

but he does like the space invaders.

oh well.

oh. and the space invaders

we were talking about them, and jean-charles didn't know where any were. but then, i saw three of them. ha ha! he was laughing at how easily i'm entertained.


we were talking about them, and jean-charles didn't know where any were. but then, i saw three of them. ha ha! he was laughing at how easily i'm entertained.

again. not my photos. i think i need to buy a camera, eh?

The Cat in Monmartre

my friend took me today to see the cat. he kept talking about it and i had no idea what he was talking about, he just was trying to show off street art to me, so we paid for the "galaxy," the telescope.

a lot of people offered to make caricatures of us, too, and insulted him by speaking to him in English.

these are not my pictures. all my pictures are on my phone and it is not turned on, so i will put them up later.

Backpack?

  

Rio! Look! Over there! A Bog Person!

  

looking for Jim in all the wrong places....

  

is that a bog person?

  

Sick are you, Rio?

  

this is a VERY GOOD GUY.

  

Clean those teeth, Anne. Golly.

  

Steph LOVES his camera!

  

Nico and Delphine have come over to play!

  

Ayla knows who is the cutest!

  

rio in the rain

  

en francais

ande has just taken the babies to the doctor, so i'm here at their apartment in the Oberkampft (sp?) listening to 90210 en francaism it is almost better, and updating my blog. ande was mad that she didn't know it or update it, so now i will.



on saturday we took Rio to the Pere Lachaise cemetary, that's the one that the american's go to to see the grave of Jim Morrison (apparently he is not
still there.), because Rio is obsessed with Bog people. Ande told him all the cracked gravestones were where the Bog People had escaped. I told him where ever there were swords or flowers there were good bog people and that the good bog people would protect him from the bad.


since then he and i have been playing a game that involves a giant toy Hummer that turns into a race car town, two trains, a stuffed wolf named dog and a stuffed leopard named ? and a lion named simba. then the VERY BAD GUY who is a bear with pleather motercycle pants and tatoos shows up and attacks the town. The VERY GOOD GUYS protect the town and put the VERY BAD GUYS in jail (Ayla's crib).

*U*C*L*A*fight*fight*fight* (where each star represents a clap)

12/2/2006 ~ Football
UCLA knocked No. 2 USC out of the Bowl Championship Series title game with a stunning 13-9 victory over its crosstown rival Saturday. The loss was USC's fourth in the last 59 games. (More) (from usc's website)


well, we won a football game.
we, as if i am somehow in anyway to do with it, or even really care.
it is neat to see, that on saturday evening,after the ucla usc game, the daily bruin has not updated with the good news but usc is updated with the bad. will the tyranny of money never end? is it that all the bruin reporters are getting drunk? and the usc posting because they are sad...

sad bikes

i left my rock hopper locked to the for sale house next door. locked up with my gym lock. it is so no there. i bet it will be fixed up and for sale at the bike store next door.

all right then

i was trying to capture how damn happy i was to be in san francisco yesterday. and i didn't even eat a burrito.


now that i'm having the slightly disturbing feeling that someone other than me (and occasionally the two people who know i write it as a writing exercise) might be able to find this, somewhere underneath the twenty pages of Anne O'Neil the basketball player on Google, perhaps I should write about something other than YA Lit.

but really, what else do i have to talk about? the spookyness of interior decoration? the absurdity of san jose drivers? my obsession with veronica mars? why i love gmail talk? these are banal normal things, not nearly meriting a blog of the genius nature of my critical essays on the princess diaries.

oh wow. my airport book last week? that i picked up because i, of course, after making it to both jeff and scott's birthday parties, missed my 6 am flight and was stuck at GH expensive bookstore or whatever that place in the airport is for four hours, and bought a meg cabot book. didn't keep me awake on the plane or anything, but apparently i am not the only one inspired by the britney (innocent virgin) + justin timberlake = breakup followed by justin timberlake touring with white trash christina aguilera. though my story was about a pop star meeting a new york comic on jay leno, and the tabloids and the jay leno breaking them up, it was the same bit, also peppered with bad song lyrics. do you think someone (scott, fess up. you've been selling my genius stories to the mass market) gave meg cabot Night Time with Bob?

teenagers

so i've been reading endless teenager live journal entries. what the hell does "woot"? mean? is it just a long drawn out "what?" no idea.

teenagers really do think about tests a lot more than they think about boys. i guess if i think about it, that's true. i can't even remember what boys i thought about when i was a teenager. i remember i had a crush on a swimmer named brad, whose last name i can't remember, only that tracy (shit, i forgot her last name, too. and we were buddies, on academic decathalon together. she was going to market my clothing. she was a mimi type.) had a crush on him, too. and i thought about james all the time, but in weird fantasy mode.

i do remember having totally lame note passing conversations about deciding who i liked. but crushes were much easier then, and i was much more impressed by cute than i am now. but maybe i was just as unimpressed. i was in san jose, for god's sake. anyway, i can't remember what i thought about all the time.

anyway, listeing to wowie zowie the rerelease. it's calming, but i still haven't rewritten all i lost last night, not to mention, conquering finishing the book.

Funeral to Funeral

We were a twenty five car procession circling around Kenmore New York with a police escort, and suddenly we faced a different twenty five car funeral procession on the other side of the street.

at the luncheon afterwards, my cousin mark told me he knew the woman who had died. her name was mary. she was his age, not his mother's.

sisters

soccer taco saves the day

i've spent a lot of time lately hating on Red Hook, but i'm just being stupid. it's not red hook's fault that i refuse to get a job, that i haven't finished my book (okay, it could have something to do with it, considering all the social distractions innate in the neighborhood), or that i get involved in relationships designed ot not work out. nor is it red hook's fault that when i had to move i took the path of least resistance, instead of making an intelligent decision.

i looked at what i hope will be my new apartment today and the landlady seemed like a normal person. that made me feel better. that and soccer taco.


there are great people everywhere here. who cares if it's a small town and i'm a local. i wanted to be a local, now i am.

last night i worked at the hope and anchor diner, where i used to work and the kerioke was nutty and awful, but i walked up to the pioneer and my old friend Megan who moved off to go to grad school and sometimes that's enough, right?

every thing doesn't have to be monumental. it can just be.

it's windy in new york

i hate waiting for the b61 almost as much as i hate riding it.

pleasant surprises

it's good when you go see your friends band (art, reading, comedy, etc) and you're expecting it to suck because their myspace page sucks. hurray for myspace actually sucking and being a horrible way to communicate with people and real live shows being good.

what's up with people not knowing anything about themselves these days and just saying, it's on my myspace page?

what i'm not reading

With respect to the fact that most of the books about teenagers i was reading were written by people my age (all references in the jessica darling books were to john hughes movies and other niagra falls areas)i tried to read shut the door but it's terrible. which makes me feel better and worse. you want the sixteen year old to have written a good book, but she didn't even if she did get it published. it reads like bad melodrama and none of the characters are well realized. in the end, it's just boring and obvious, but that's maybe because it's something like i might have written at that age, although i wouldn't have known the stuff. it wasn't in the books i read and i wasn't picking up boys at the mall.


The talked about it book of the fall, as told to me by Moriah Cleveland and the New York Times, is Special Topics in Calamity Physics and i'm not sure that i'm buying it, either. i'm on page 75 and still annoyed at her tick of annotating everything. it's a joke, clearly, relating the the narrator's academic father, but we don't need annotations everytime someone references a book or a movie. we know them, and getting the reference is half of the joy of reading that stuff. (i once tried to read the recognitions using the annotations and realized i was ruining it for myself. sure, i needed a bible and a dictionary, but check check checking everything out was ruining the actual story of the story. See Infinite Jest.) i think somewhere in there is one of those really lovely and fun books, like the Secret History, but she's making me work so hard to read it, i read Paul LaFarge's diatribe on Dungeons and Dragons in The Believer instead. Lately, due mostly to a conversation with Andres Debuffet in between back to back director's cuts of the Lord of the Rings movies, when he explained being a comic who performed all the time but didn't get paid was like starting off as a wizard in D&D instead of a warrior (or whatever the jocks in D&D are): through experience points the wizard ends up a whole hell of a lot more powerful in the end. I'm not sure that it's working of him or any of the other comics (or unemployed fiction writers, for that matter) that i know. But it did reevaluation my appreciation for D&D. Like my father's appreciation for spectator sports, "You don't know how it's going to end, it hasn't been decided for you." That’s what got me into watching sports: not the athlecticism or the physical challenge, but the story: this guy wants to beat that guy because that guy used to beat him. Or whatever. D&D is all about story. It’s just an adventure tale for boys (usually the kind that I like, who like novels and art and movies about dragons) the way playing house or dolls or dress-up is for girls. Sure, as a kid, maturing away from that stuff too slowly, we tried to distance ourselves from it, but now I realize my need to anthropomorphize everything, the way I feel I’m hurting my broken down Specialized Rock Hopper by trading it in for a road bike, has only to do with seeing stories in everything, even inanimate objects.

rocktober

all of that summer bliss, reading teen novels and writing pithy little bits about them ended with a sad reality check:

i had to move in with roommates.
not just a roommate, but two. (plus the, as there always is in the roommate situation, everpresent totally annoying boyfriend who is in the house so much that i never come home therefore giving him by possesion is 9/10 of the law more right to the place than me the rent payer) this has all but stopped both of my reading and my writing and turned me into a base alcoholic. not just due to my misery and my o'neilish tendencies, but because bars are the only place one can go to hide until 3 am when the roommates have gone to sleep.

this should change this week, when i move into the world's most depressing one window studio. but a one window studio of my very own is still safer than any attic in a dorm room.

Writing and Love and love of writing

I had to go out and buy the third book in the series, because I had to get my fix of Marcus Flutie. I went to write yesterday, and although I got my "goal" amount of work done, I couldn't concentrate, so distracted was I by love of an imaginary person. (I've read a lot of these books in the last week, and am starting to sound like Marcus in his letters). What's totally hysterical, (in the psychotic crazy meaning of the word, not actually funny) is that there are hundreds of teeny-boppy websites devoted to my imaginary friend.

this is why teen lit/chick lit/romance is crap.

I thought maybe the third book would have to be bad (it kind of is) and lame and make me fall out of love with Marcus Flutie and get me over it. The book isn't nearly as good. It would be impossible to make it good: the nature of writing a book about a girl going off to college insists that she learn something there, but she refuses to learn dick. She stays the same small minded judgmental / observant self-righteous person she was in the beginning. The problem again, is that she is a much less likeable person than Marcus. She's kind of a brat. Not that that doesn't redeem the book; it does allow us to like the book, because I know I am a person like her: high minded, self righteous and a little bit rash in my behavior, so that Marcus continues to woo her and love her makes me (the reader) think this all is possible (along with the possibility of a Marcus Flutie existing) feel happy that he still loves her. But she does get irritating in her unbelievable inability to forgive her parents for being people and begin to love them. Most people get over that during college. Marcus, when he comes to stay with her and her sister, sees value in her whole family. Again, he's the wise one.
The problem (or maybe not problem) now is I feel the Zen need to separate myself from things and desire. To cleanse myself of desire for things or sex or attention or even completion of my writing in order to be more whole and honest with myself.
I have never tricked myself into thinking that the things I want be they possessions or destinations weren't both constructs and comforts. I am affected and a little bit pretentious. I like cool things but I hate cool things when they become just things everyone has, yet I love to wear my ugg boots and wish they didn't say something about me so I could wear them out of the house. The observations Marcus makes don't ever quite work logically: he can go off on a hippie retreat to learn, but most of those people always end up being pretentious and suck anyway, he can be Buddhist and separate himself from desire, but he still comes back to Jessica constantly so he still has desire. And Jessica might judge the death of irony with the ironic t-shirt, something I have obsessed about for years: it can't be ironic if it's fashion, then its fashion and intrinsically not ironic.
(Aside: this goes to comedy, too. the level of comedy, like watching Anchorman last night, where the jokes are supposed to be post-politically correctness or even a commentary on seventies style office harassment, they're not. they're just potty humor in the office. No one is laughing at the inappropriateness. It's not Americana.)

Yet Marcus is still this dream man, writing these cryptic postcards, six one word post-cards over two years? And I think it's shitty when a dude plays games with me for a month? Wow. Oh yeah, they're TWENTY! They have time (and three books) to waste.

I think about the way I've felt for the last few days since I started reading these books and I'm trying to remember the last time I felt that way about anyone real. I know I dated someone in the last year who I had hope for, but it was all projected. It didn't culminate in a poem, or some cryptic postcards, it ended with a couple awkward phone calls and running into him when he made out with his new (taller than me but with more wrinkles, if that's supposed to somehow make me feel better) girlfriend, to which I responded, very unMarcuslike, but getting drunk and making out with my best guy friend. Luckily my friend doesn't suck and he was cool with it right away.

The weird thing is the crush I have on this guy makes me think I could fall in love again. Makes me remember what it was to be in love. Makes me remember how great it is to feel scared and nervous but really excited and happy--but then again makes me kind of depressed. I turn 35 in two weeks. Less now. THIRTY FIVE! In the last seven years I have said I love you to two people, one of whom (who does love me) said, "I don't like the way we're treating each other and I don't know why you're using the L word." The other tried to convince me it was just sex. It was I think the best sex I've had, but I suspect he has that kind of sex with a lot of people. He is more Marcus than many people I have met because he radiates something that isn't in his physical appearance. But in my life I have only felt that "forever" feeling with one person, who I broke up with seven years ago because we were to young and too insecure to trust and love each other and trust that we loved each other. It sucks. It, more than any career thing, is the one thing I regret in my life. But it doesn't end in sad post cards, just one cold email a year. He's not the same person I was in love with and I'm sure I'm not the same person he was in love with.
But that's why these books suck. They teach you to hope for love possibilities that are not real. Or maybe they could be real if I had been this in love when I was this young. Or if my first sexual experiences hadn't been bad ones.
This is crazy.

Charmed Thirds is a terrible name, too.