Supplies

ALBANY, N.Y. - My family held a small party to celebrate the beginning of my latest Chinese adventure. Many people came, and much to my surprise, several brought gifts. The gesture was unnecessary, but appreciated.

A theme emerged from the open packages: food. One person brought Japanese Melon candy. Another, two pounds of Twizzlers. Someone else gave a package of fruit gummies.

I've got enough candy to maintain a sugar high from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific. I'm going to pack some of these treats (others will probably serve as a refreshment during the lengthy packing process), and share them with people I meet along the way.

May we all be hyper together.

Flashers

ALBANY, N.Y. - One night, about a year ago, a friend and I were walking across Albany's Empire State Plaza on the way to a concert in the Egg.

It was a warm night, so we walked slowly. The Plaza is a long promenade that connects the State Capital to the State Museum. Created in the 1960s by bulldozing the city's old Italian section, the Plaza is the symbol of Albany, the thing that appears on the few postcards sent each year from the city.

The sides of the plaza are flanked by office buildings, four smaller ones on the west side, and the Corning Tower, Upstate New York's tallest building, on the east side. On this particular night, ambling toward our destination, I looked up at the night sky.

Somewhere between the ground and the few stars that penetrate the urban light pollution, something was wrong. The Corning Tower looked alive. Lights were flashing, randomly, at all of the tower's windows. All 42 floors were illuminated and then dark, dozens of times each minute.

"What's that?" I said. My friend stared at it for a while and shrugged.

I stood in front of the Tower and frantically narrated a digital camera video on what might be causing the light show. Aliens? Terrorists? A government conspiracy?

After shooting, we hurried quickly into the concert. Two hours of Aimee Mann's country rock later, the lights were off.

Two weeks ago, that same friend and I were talking about that night. He said off-handedly that he later found what had caused the display.

"That's what happens when the fire alarm goes off," he said. "Those lights were the emergency flashers."

The lesson of the evening: In Albany, things are often duller than they seem.

Cold Air

ALBANY, N.Y. - It's freezing here in Albany. The weather's turned from a permanent Indian summer to where an window scrape is necessary after two hours out of the car.

Global warming may be changing the region's climate, but there's still enough cold air around for a few weeks of Old Man Winter.

Walking home from Bombers one recent evening well after midnight, I shivered in my pea coat. After three beers, my constricted blood vessels sent a message to my feet: get us somewhere warm - quick.

Throughout December I, along with most of the Capital Region, complained about the lack of winter. Where's the snow, we said, bemoaning the loss of ice rinks, snowball fights and a satisfying cup of cocoa.

Unlike memories, actual winter is complicated, requiring hats, jackets, scarves and earmuffs just to do tasks done in warmer weather with ease. Two hours is enough to wonder how long it will be before a month where I wish for it to be warm without fear that the short-term savings on heat foreshadow a environmental catastrophe.

The temperature only promises to get colder, and I'm bound to complain more. Perhaps I should move to Dubai, where winter is available via an indoor entertainment park. That means I can keep my time in cold weather to hours, not months.

Two Rags

ALBANY, N.Y. - Albany is a two newspaper town.

The Times Union is the larger and more respected publication, owned by a big newspaper chain and rich enough to sponsor the city's sports arena for the next five years. It's a paper that people in smaller markets like Worcester and Scranton aspire toward, a place where a good story will be picked up by dozens of smaller papers.

The Daily Gazette is a small family-run organization, the paper that still runs three wires a day on its front page. They don't have an editorial cartoonist, and never send a reporter to New York City for a story. The paper actually is based out of Schenectady, the twin city of Albany, but it competes for an audience.

My family gets the Gazette. Growing up I felt intensely loyal to this locally-owned underdog. Now, after time at a couple papers, I recognize that both papers have strengths and weaknesses. A good way to see the differences is to compare the lead story in this Sunday's paper, the "Sunday Centerpiece" in newspaper lingo.

Today the Times Union leads with "Meet the Clarkes" a Sunday profile on a family with seven wrestling children.

It starts great:

"BALLSTON -- Lines of cars thick with frost shroud the home behind a used-car lot. The porch light flickers on, cutting through the icy darkness. It's 3:45 a.m."

But it quickly degenerates into lazy writing. Here's the very next paragraph:

"It's just another Sunday, just another weekend wrestling tournament for the Clarke household, who are to their rugged sport what the von Trapps are to song."

The Clarkes are interesting subjects, and reporter Bryan Chu introduces dozens of excellent details that add color to the piece:

"Few would be able to stomach Michele's typical day: preparing meals for 11, doing eight to nine loads of laundry.

Everything is clockwork. It has to be."

The story loses focus long before coming to a conclusion. Chu continues generally chronologically to the end of the Clarkes day, but in so doing repeats ideas over and over: sacrifices are necessary for 11 people to live on $50,000, driving to a wrestling tournament in Long Island is a long drive.

Eighteen hundred words later, the Clarkes haven't had to answer the one question I had coming into the article: Why on Earth they think it was a good idea to have nine kids in the first place? And is wrestling really the ticket to an affordable education at a private college, as the parents claim on the article's first page? What if the children aren't good? Furthermore, do all the children really like wrestling? Wouldn't someone rather sit at home and read a book?


Meanwhile the Daily Gazette leads with "Soares getting mixed reviews as DA," a story about the lead prosecutor who's been a media favorite since helping to force out state comptroller Alan Hevesi late last year.

Bryce talks with the right people: the Albany Police Union, colleagues and predecessors, but isn't able to make the procedural story come alive in a way a Sunday centerpiece should.

"Public integrity cases are receiving much more attention than in the past, but McDermott said Soares is not overemphasizing this area."

and

"Soares said the DA's office practices a single standard of justice."

Finishing the story, the reader comes away with a nuanced understanding of a man who's generated plenty of press this week. Unfortunately, it's a story that's not easy to make it all the way through. Kind of like the Daily Gazette.

Spitz

ALBANY, N.Y. - Early Monday morning, several dozen joggers ran around a downtown park with newly-inaugurated governor Eliot Spitzer. I was nearby, sleeping off the night before.

That Spitzer would begin his first day in office with a dawn run through a rather-dangerous park in the sleet and rain is entirely appropriate. Spitzer as attorney-general was a quixotic figure, taking on Wall Street and the music industry with zeal. He charged into situations, frequently taking the right position, but often lacking in tact.

Take his appearance on "The Colbert Report" two weeks ago. Appearing on the popular show was a shrewd move, but on television Spitzer came off as being incredibly awkward, a walking Jewish-American stereotype.

But after his run, he showed he can act. Spitzer swooped into the capital, declared the state awoken from a Irving-esque decade of dormancy and signed four executive orders on ethics.

Albany responded. The Natalie Merchant and James Taylor concert in his honor at the newly named Times Union Center sold out. It took me an extra ten minutes to get to work because of the road blocks set up for Eliot's big day.

It seems like we've been counting down to Governor Spitzer's inauguration for ten years. With the event finally here, I find it hard not to be excited that he may actually bring change. The best summary of the mood in this city came from a co-worker, while we standing outside the soon to be open store at the same Spitzer was being sworn in downtown.

"I'm really happy about Spitzer. I voted for him. I really hope he does a good job as governor. I think he can."

The Slow Become Slower

ALBANY, N.Y. - I may be on America's East Coast, but the Taiwanese earthquake slowed down my Web surfing. My attempts to check the progress of my language school applications - never an easy process - the last two days have loaded at one-quarter or less of their regular sluggish pace.

I think I'll take a couple days off from Baidu MP3 search as well. That means no more cheesy Chinese disco-pop songs until the New Year.



(The above video is for a New Years song by the China Dolls, whom I know nothing about.)

New Hoodie Source

ALBANY, N.Y. - His hooded sweatshirt had my area code on it, so I asked him to tell me about it.

Turns out Jesse designed and silk-screened the hoodie at his own design shop, 518Prints. I checked out their Web site after work and it's a pretty professional operation. The difference between this site and others I've encountered is this business is a full-time job.

According to Jesse, who I met near a stack of Nalgene bottles, 518Prints bread and butter is selling merchandise to bands. They make up shirts and hats and mail boxes to different tour stops. This way the band always has a fresh supplies of buttons to sell to new converts, and doesn't have to haul 5,000 shirts from Portland to Seattle.

With the Eggcellent business on hiatus - or at least hibernation - as its founder attends college, this could be my new source for Albany-related T-shirts.

I owe Jesse one. He spent $425 on mountaineering equipment and a really fancy jacket.

Now I just need to coin the next Albany shirt sensation. Perhaps "Spitzer: Bringing Baldness Back" or "I'd Rather Be At X-Gates" shirt.

Precious Gifts

ALBANY, N.Y. - Every so often, there's something that jolts you out of the endless stream of holiday shoppers purchasing last minute coats, skis and Nalgene bottles.

Today's interruption was a 34-year-old woman with shoulder length curly hair and a pilly black peacoat. She placed a year-old pair of long underwear on the table and said she wanted to exchange the size.

"I got married this year," she said. "When you get married everything just goes on hold."

While she picked out a new size, I searched the computer for the garment's coat. Without a receipt, the woman would receive the current price of the bottoms. She was very lucky; normally last year's models are put on clearance and eventually marked down to 99 cents. Instead this model was still in stock and at a higher price. The woman got a $9 credit in addition to the trade. I rang up the transaction and placed the cash on the table.

The woman looked confused by her windfall. She stumbled for a minute, and then said she had another transaction: She wanted a $15 gift card. Fifteen dollars is an unusual amount for the store; it's the smallest one I've made this year. Even more strangely, the woman requested that I take the $9 and place it toward the certificate. She paid the rest of the total - six dollars - by check.

"I don't have much money," she said, and I took it the reason why she divided up such a small amount.

On the gif certificate, she filled out the subject line "Paul's Gift" and circled a Bible verse on her check, something from the Gospel of John. I placed the check in the register and gave the woman her receipt.

"Thank you very much," she said, and then took a small, salmon colored business card that she'd been holding in her hands and pressed it into mine. After she left, I turned it over. It was another Bible quote, Isiah 43:4. "You are precious in God's eyes..."

This gesture moved me. I may not share this woman's passion for religion, but her actions were pure. That she'd give me this small card, with no sermon or attempt at conversation, is wonderful. I felt the same way earlier this year when a woman handed me a red "Support Our Troops" wristband at a gathering for a group of soldiers en route to Iraq. I treasure these objects, because of the people who gave them to me.

Small But Sexy

ALBANY, N.Y. - Called "Smalbany" in the current Lonely Planet (a term I've never heard used by a local) Albany gets a bad rep. The truth about New York's capital is best summarized by a transplant I spoke with at a holiday party.

"People think Albany doesn't have anything. That's wrong. Albany has one of everything," she said.

I'm reminded of a statement Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit said a couple years ago, that his city was "arm, aber sexy," - poor but sexy. Here in Albany, we're small but sexy.

And my party friend's right about the number of things in Smalbany. There's one good tea store, one buffalo farm, one nice Hindu temple, one controversial Guayanese club and one place to buy stinky tofu.

It's not perfect; every year the local alt-weekly Metroland complains about the city's lack of an Ethiopian restaurant. But with that Horn of Africa power busy "liberating" Somalia, that might be a good thing. There is Yonder Farms, a market less than a mile from my house with a working water-wheel and greenhouse in front, that I go years without visiting. Eating food by using bread as a utensil might be a little much for a year that has already seen the opening of several upscale clubs, lounges and even a "contemporary pub" (aka a bar with fancy appetizers).

Albany's nicest venues, the Emperor's Place serving Cantonese seafood dishes, the politico hang-out Jack's Oyster Bar and the free display of modernist and cubist sculpture at the Concourse are fantastic, they rival their counterparts in New York. The only difference is that here in Albany we only have one of them.

SmAlbany, the blog, examined the differences between New York and Albany in a post called "The "intellectual" roots of Oh, SmAlbany!"

Sample:

New York - "high paying job in the 'financial district.'"
Albany - "cushy and comfortable job with the state."

New York - thinks the "in-town" newspapers are so lame. Reads LA TIMES.
Albany - thinks the "in-town" newspapers are so lame. Reads NY POST.

I've been back in Albany two months now, and think I'm beginning to get settled in here. The other day I even thought about buying a copy of the Post.

Three-Way First Date

ALBANY, N.Y. - I'm holed up on this chilly December evening at Professor Java's Coffeeshop, a high school hangout for the goth/poetry reading set. I'm supposed to be writing a letter to Beijing University about spring semester admission, but instead I've been listening in on a first date a couple tables over.

I particularly enjoy this story, told by the male - a self-proclaimed "easy going person" - about a previous unsuccessful dating experience.

"She was dressed basically like her mother. But she's like three years younger than us. She was just really out there. And I'm like she's totally, totally not my type. But I'm having a great time with this."

"So finally her friends get there and we have a couple drinks. We were pretty buzzed. It was like 12:30 and we left, and I knew a place on my route that was open.

"I had a good conversation, I had a good time. I mean anything above that, no way, but I had a good time."

"A couple days later, I call her up, and ask to speak with her, tell her 'hey that was fun. maybe we should have drinks again some time. But her mother picks up the phone and says she's not home."

At this, the date groans. Her new man got stood up.

"And now I feel stupid, because I totally didn't want this to be anything, and now it looks like I'm the one who's calling."

"And you're trying to be a nice guy."

"Yea."

I can only hope the same thing doesn't happen after this date.

XXII

ALBANY, N.Y. - Today's my birthday. I thought I'd mark the occasion here by looking back at what happened 22 years ago today, as I was emerging into this great Earth.

According to Wikipedia, the day is notable because:

"The Tamil Tigers begin the purge of the Sinhalese from North and East Sri Lanka; 127 are killed."

The Nevada Board of Regents "Approved authorization to seek the changes in NRS 396.325 as reflected in Ref. K, filed with the permanent minutes, and approved the interim policy, also defined in the reference material."

The New Kingdom Metaphors were officially deactivated from the Cosmic Baseball Association.

The Dukes of Hazzard episode "Danger on the Hazzard Express" primeres. One reviewers on Amazon describes the episode as, "Boss Hogg's crooks steal the General Lee and rig it with explosives to crash the car into a train filled with gold."

And I was just 22 years away from my 22nd birthday.

A Russian Master

ALBANY, N.Y. - I'll cop to putting some unusual things on the blog this week. Poems, old articles and weird pictures. That's just the way it's going to be sometimes on here.

This morning I had tea with a Russian woman, Irina. Irina is in her middle 40s and came to our meeting in a full-length formal coat and black slacks. Her wavy hair was recently highlighted.

I wore a mint colored button down shirt with a yellow and blue band near the shoulders that said "RedEx: Redhot Express" across the front. It cost $5 at an export shop in Hong Kong.

We met at Border's Books and Music in the Albany suburb of Colonie. My father was there, and so was Irina's daughter, Tonya. Tonya, 15, is a ranked chess player, future AP student and anime fan. By coming to Albany today, she missed anime festival in New Hampshire. She made an elaborate costume for Halloween this year, a hooded warrior that took more than 20 hours of sewing between Irina and Tonya, and plans to wear it at future anime gatherings. I told her about my recent trip to an anime festival, where I saw a number of people walking the hotel event room floor with eight-foot keys from the game Kingdom Hearts.

"That's a very popular game," Tonya said. Apparently anime tastes in the Northeast aren't terribly different than in the Heartland.

Tonya and Irina live in Montpelier, the tiny capital of Vermont. (Tonya said it only has 8,000 people, Wikipedia says 8,035, which is pretty damn close.) They're originally from Moscow. I'm not sure why they came over here: I was too busy talking about anime to ask.

Irina and I met because I've recently begun planning a trip to Russia. I tentatively thinking about flying to Moscow from New York in early February, and making my way to language school in Beijing by rail. Paul Theroux, the chronicler of train journeys, has convinced me to take this long trip. Irina's never been on the long train, but she had some advice on the Moscow leg of the trip.



"The plane food was O.K.," she said. The best part about Aeroflot - the Russian airline - was the free rubber duck provided in coach.

Moscow has terrible traffic. It always moves, just at a slow pace. Obviously Irina does not travel with the blue light buying sect in the city.

I shouldn't travel places at night, it's not good. What will happene, I'm not sure, but Irina didn't get into I didn't want to ask.

There's a cool chocolate factory near the riverside monument to Peter the Great. Sounds yummy.



And best of all, Irina agreed to hook me up with an American friend living in Moscow to be a companion, guide, friend and possible host while in the city. For the price of a cup of Pomegranate Green Icea Tea, I learned quite a bit.

Hometown Prose

ALBANY, N.Y. - One fallacy that continues to persist is that when I'm home, I'll catch up on my e-mail. Before arriving here in Albany, I imagined myself typing away at the computer, returning unanswered dispatches from March and reconnecting with lost friends. In reality, you're much more likely to receive a note from me originating in Indiana or France than Albany or Boston.

But tonight, with an extra hour due to daylight savings time, I started an e-mail to a friend in Australia, last seen in Zhengzhou. I decided to write to him because in addition to having an unanswered e-mail, I'm also reading a book that takes place in his current town of Alice Springs.

The book is "The Songlines" by Bruce Chatwin, and tells the author's quest to find the meaning of indigenous songs, and more deeply, trying to find a connection between nomadic peoples around the world. It's an ambitious, mostly non-fiction account of a lengthy visit to the area in the late 1980s. The text is fascinating, as it runs from encounters with Russian castaways and priests on the lam. The book makes me pine for a visit to Alice Springs, a desert settlement of 28,000 over a thousand miles from a major city.

I hesitated to mention this in the e-mail, as it seems too obvious. Surely my friend has heard of the travel book largely set in his hometown? A book that is taught in universities, has been awarded several prizes and is considered a masterpiece by important literary critics?

Albany has one famous work of fiction: "Ironweed." The William J. Kennedy book chronicles a down-on-his-luck man's return to his hometown during the final years of the Great Depression. I should say it apparently does, because I've never read the book. I heard of it growing up, but its setting in Albany never made me want to pick it up. I remember it now because in my travels, when people (usually educated people) find out I'm from Albany, they'll ask me if I've read "Ironweed."

So maybe The Songlines isn't being read in Alice Springs after all.

A Long Midwestern Goodbye

WICHITA, Kan. – Mostly Red is beginning the transition to another geographic location. In just two weeks, I'm going to leaving wonderfully flat Kansas for the sights and sounds of my hometown of Albany, New York.

I've been regularly blogging for about five months now, and I've yet to file a dispatch from my hometown. Soon that should all change. I'm looking forward to offering my perspective on the city I know the best, sharing memories and also new experiences in the Empire State.

So don't be surprised if the next two weeks bring more reflective entries and less reactions to the day to day of my life. There are certain topics which have been on the back burner, in a pile of things that I want to cover while in Kansas. With time running out, hopefully I'll actually write about these before it's too late. And perhaps talk a little more about QuikTrip.

A Kansas Life

WICHITA, Kan. – How long have you been here in Kansas? How long have you worked at the paper?

I get asked these questions all the time. When you inquire for a living, people will turn the tables quite frequently. At the beginning, I was cagey about the answer. After all, I didn't want everyone knowing that it was only my third or 14th day on the job. By now, I've gotten to the point where the answer isn't completely embarrassing. Two months or ten weeks doesn't sound half bad. People assume I at least know where the copy machine is by now (although I can't get it to work more than half the time).

I've come to a point now where the idea that I can only live in Blue States or large coastal communities doesn't make much sense. There are places here I'm quite familiar with. The taco stand where I grab a torta pastol. The bar where I get a Wheat Boulevard. All of the QuikTrips where I purchase a variety of strange soda mixes, paid with a credit card. I've been to these places enough times to feel comfortable; like they are touchstones of my daily life.

The same is true with my apartment. It may be dirty, permanently smoky and have walls that let know exactly what my neighbor is viewing on T.V., but the other day I caught myself referring to it in conversation as "home." It was a pretty scary thought, but two months does seem enough time to put down roots. There's a reporter who joined the paper two weeks ago. She seems pretty settled now, already telling funny vignettes about run-ins with strange sources. Maybe I've been here that long, too.

The train of thought is dangerous, because it leads to more questions: Why do I live in such a dump? Why is there frequently violent crime in my neighborhood? I went to college so I could live here - I know people in Albany who didn't graduate high school living in better places.

Finding answers to these questions requires breaking the little illusion I've sometimes fostered in the last few weeks: Wichita isn't really home. In fact, it won't be terribly long before I break out of here. Perhaps the reason that I haven't put down roots in the ways the new reporter at the paper has is that I know that my ticket out of here is visibly on the horizon. I'm not in countdown mode yet, but there's no point in calling myself a Kansan when it's almost time to pack my bags.

The Course of Things

BOSTON - Here's the plan: keep a regularly-updated blog that will document and try to find a common thread through my planned adventures in Hong Kong, Wichita, Kansas, New York and finally Beijing. I'm not sure if there's necessarily something to tease out here, but I figure the best way to find out is to force myself to regularly write about the events in the places around me, and how the larger events in the world are impacting the way we are now.

I'm going to try, but at this point I really can't make any promises, to focus on the locality that I am in at any given moment. That's why I'm throwing up the dateline on each entry, as part of a larger experiment to see how where I am effects the way I write. We'll see how that goes.

The real meat of the blog should begin from the date of my graduation in late May, but I admit that I will probably be posting things from time to time before then. Since I've never had a blog before, consider it a "soft opening" before things really get going.

One more structural point: I've decided not to share this blog with anyone for now. I think in the future, after it's been kept for a few weeks or month, I might mention it to friends and family, but for now, nothing. There seems to be so much baggage that comes with "writing a blog" these days, that I want to keep things on the down-low for the meantime, and give myself the opportunity to back out at anytime. But of course, this being the Internet and a public and searchable blog anything might happen.

And that is what I'm hoping will.