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.

A Brave Blog

WICHITA, Kan. – In my last post, I rather ridiculously admonished a 91-year-old woman for straying from her mother's story in her self-published biography. That might have been slightly tasteless. Today, perhaps as a form of redemption, I wanted to highlight a piece of a writing that's completely serious and incredibly brave.

Tamara is a local woman, probably in her 30s. She's been through some hard times. A decade ago, she was addicted to cocaine for a period. But she cleaned herself up, and married a by-all-accounts decent man. They live in Wichita.

A few months ago, Tamara started throwing up frequently. She couldn't keep anything down, including her anxiety and depression medications. She become jittery, nauseous. Her husband took her to a doctor, who referred her to a specialist. She saw doctor after doctor. Tamara wasn't getting any better. By July, she was having trouble breathing. She was admitted to the hospital.

Doctors continued to examine her. For a while, they thought it was a case of pneumonia. But she kept getting worse. She needed a breathing tube, and later a feeding tube. She wasn't responding well, so she had to be restrained and sedated. Then, the doctors came back with the final diagnosis: advanced cancer. Her doctors believe she has months to live.

I've never met Tamara. I know what I do about her because of her husband, Josh. He's transformed his blog, "I Got The Poison", (a line from a Jason Mraz song) into a log of Tamara's illness. He's been incredibly faithful in updating it. His entries have only gotten more frequent in the last couple weeks, as Tamara has been in and out of the hospital.

I don't want to say much more about it. The journal is online, and deserves to be read. My interpretations of it, what it means, why it might exist and how it helps are all beyond the point. What matters is that this journal exists and makes for sobering reading on the often-frivolous Information Superhighway.

Go here to read it.

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.