(no subject)

Saw King Arthur again with Kat. Laughed our asses off. I'm gonna have to own this one on DVD, as ashamed as I may be to admit this.

Perhaps more importantly however (other than my ever renewed urge to hit people with sticks) is we saw a preview for Vanity Fair. Oh my fucking god. I'm there the second it opens.

rant.

I miss the way stores were when I was a child. This may be specific to me, and the world I grew up in, as much as it is also about age, but it is one of the many things I am snobbish and irritated about.

We bought our pasta and bread and cheese at a store that made all those things fresh. The only chain bookstore I had ever seen was the giant Doubleday on 57th Street and those nasty little Walden Books at the airport. People could write checks and clerks chatted with you, knew about the product and didn't inherently loathe you for making them do their job. People who worked at bookstores read books, and people who worked at food shops were more adventurous than goddamn Wendy's. We had a butcher market with sawdust on the floor. We got our bread from the bread shop and candy from the candy shop. And even with all that, I still had to write essays in French about how stores in France were better than stores here, because Hewitt (and my French teacher) was crazy.

At any rate, I was just in Best Buy (not that they had the CD I wanted) and they search your bags when you leave. I _hate_ that. And I hate it because it doesn't really work -- because they make you open your bag, and then open it again if the detector goes off, but they also say how they aren't allowed to go through your bag, so if the detector goes off everyone just bloody stands there with their thumbs up their asses, and I'm being treated like a criminal because the future isn't now. I loathe it and everything about it.

They tried to take my fucking CD from me. Like hi... It's Wicked in a broken PJ Harvey case... I didn't steal it from you. It made me furious. And all the dumb people who work there being all "is there a problem?" Yes, there's a fucking problem and I'm not it.

It was inevitable that I was going to short circuit about something today, and better today than during the work of the next three days (I don't think I have an assistant this year, that'll be hard). Grrrrr.

Anyway... then I stepped outside, and one of those very small things that could only possibly be funny to me happened, and I couldn't stop laughing. And that was nice.

geek question

I've an old clamshell iBook running OS9.x -- is it possible to upgrade that to OSX or am I shit out of luck?

Union Square

I left work early, because I was in no mood. Discovered a huge sale at Zara, but they had nearly nothing in my size, but I did buy a fabulous green, gold and cream shirt, so that's cool. Also picked up some crap at Old Navy to destroy in the course of the stage management thing.

Wound up at the farmers market at Union Square, and I feel I should talk about that if only to counter my "I miss the way stores used to be" tirade from earlier. Four days a week we have a huge famers market in the recently refurbished Union Square. You can get all sorts of fruit and vegetables, baked goods, cheeses, organic wine, honey, candles, jams, yarn, meats and eggs, dairy, candy, flowers, etc., all from local farms. The prices are good, the people are nice, and it's gone from being something quaint to a very significant part of the way we do things here.

Union Square was fucked up for ages. When I was in high school it was a place that was sort of between a bunch of neighborhoods and had no real point. Since that time, it's been under nearly continuous construction to the point of absurdity, and they just finished the work in the last couple of years, and it's stunning now -- lots of space, and good paving, and all these plaques and stuff in the ground about New York in the 1800s and specifically in the years surrounding the Civil War. There's a statue of Gandhi, a great little park, steps to sit on ... in short it is what passes for, and succeed at being, a community gathering place for a city as urban and densely populated as New York (for people not from here, much of the footage of 9/11 vigils came from the ones at Union Square).

So I wandered through, picked up goat cheese and some cookies and random little things, and then started walking over to the bus, a path which takes a person through the non-farmers market section of the square. I've been singing the dorky little "we will go home" thing from King Arthur all day (my voice _really_ likes stuff that sounds like that), and I come out of the crowdedness of all the stalls into the big plaza, and there's a guy with a fundraising table for ACT-UP set up, and then up on the top of the plaza are the folks that silently hold the banners about the post-9/11 erosion of our civil liberties and then on the traffic island across the ways are the people protesting Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and it's a beautiful day and everyone is happy and engaged and people are sitting on the steps talking and people are selling art and riding bikes and playing with their pets and having picnics.

I have seen this place be this stupid doug up blight of a pit for a decade with orange fencing around it, and I've seen the farmers and holiday markets grow bigger and bigger, and the plaza reopen, and the 9/11 grieving, and I'm singing that stupid song, and it just absolutely blew me away for a minute.

I talk about home a lot. I talk about my relationship with New York, I talk about my parents' house, I talk about home being places I've been briefly or not even yet, and I just had a total Ricky Fitts moment. It was fucking awesome. I love this town. And for all that, I've still no idea where home is. I'm not sure I ever really will.