A Thousand Times No

After an extended hiatus, I’ve finally returned to putting some mileage on my bikes this spring. Today I took a spin up Forbidden Drive, a 9-mile car-free gravel path that runs alongside scenic, tranquil Wissahickon Creek. The rains and flash-flooding of the past week were still manifest in the condition of the trail, which was muddy and soupy in low-lying areas throughout. I even rolled home this evening with some respectable trophy stains!

It’s also been fun to put some of my more recently acquired gear into action. (C’mon, have you ever met a devoted cyclist who wasn’t a gearhead?) I’m as acquisitional as the next pedal-pusher, but allergic to paying retail, so my cycling accoutrements are a mish-mash culled from bike swaps, Craigslist, and clearance sales. As my mother used to remind me and my sister when we fussed about the appearance of our food as kids, “It’s all the same in your stomach.” With biking gear, it’s all the same once it’s met the mud, honey.

Today I was decked out head-to-toe in bargain-basement gear. A Giro Pneumo helmet, a Sugoi Invertor jacket, and pair of Diadora Caymano touring shoes, all from the “T-town Swap” at the Lehigh Valley Velodrome in Trexlertown, PA. Toss in some full-fingered Louis Garneau LGX-Vent gloves, brought home so cheaply from Bicycle Therapy that they were practically five-finger discount items. Total markdown: $210.

Because the simoleons for that other gearhead fix of mine have gotta come from somewhere…

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I’m behind on everything: phone calls, email, snail mail, housecleaning, sleeping, blogging, podcasting, and life in general. Today I was fortunate enough to catch up in one single department, namely, getting my hair done.

Or should I say “redone”? Let’s rewind for a moment. I spent the past several years just letting my hair grow out. When it nearly reached my waist, I would get it cut and donate it to charity. After a few rounds of this grow-cut-donate cycle, I was ready for lesser tresses.

However, my pocketbook wasn’t — I had just passed the last four years with a total haircut budget of $10 in tips and free charity haircuts. The prospect of laying out $400 annually in tonsorial fees ($50 in cut + tip every six to eight weeks) was something I was still trying to fathom. At the beginning of this month, I took a baby step towards more dedicated hair care, stopping by a budget chop shop to have several inches of bedraggled loose ends pruned away.

Big mistake. Everything looked fine when I left the shop, but even before my head hit the pillow that same night, the stray ends began to poke out from the edge of the cut. Lost, misguided strands of hair hung an inch or two below than their neighbors, a picturebook illustration of “not with the program.”

Looking more closely in my bathroom mirror, I discovered the entire cut was asymmetrical in the back, wandering down one shoulderblade like an unfinished afterthought. Have scissors, will travel: I began trimming back the egregious outliers. With each comb-through, I was confronted with more renegade hairs. Over an hour later, I had finally brought my hair back in line, rendering it more or less symmetrical.

It was also choppy and painfully blunt, exactly what you’d expect from myopic, late-night self-surgery.

Fortunately for me, just this week a local beauty school opened new branch near my workplace. Not just any school — a Jean Madeline Aveda Institute. When I lived in Minneapolis, I used to get amazing $5 haircuts at the aromatherapeutic mothership, the original Aveda Institute. I would patiently wait my turn inside the sprawling, reconverted mansion just off Franklin Avenue, emerging with something fun, sharply geometric, often deliberately akilter. (Ah, the 80’s…) Like Target, Aveda will always have a special place in my little Minnesotan heart; Cherry/Almond Bark conditioner is my madeleine.

So today, I stepped into Jean Madeline and Jacqueline, one of their very capable students, gave me the full treatment: scalp massage, shampoo, hand massage, herbal tea, haircut, blow dry, lip gloss, free Aveda samples. It was so relaxing, I fell asleep in the salon chair. The cut looks great — my hair has motion again! And my pocketbook was happy: $16, plus tip.

Oh, a girl could definitely get used to this.

Philly was pounded this weekend by a nor’easter, a late spring storm that pushed rivers and streams up over their banks and dropped a few inches of sleety snow onto the peripheral reaches of Chestnut Hill. Planes ran late; some trains stopped running entirely. One of the great, tall sycamore trees that stood at the northeast corner of Rittenhouse Square toppled over, battered by the heavy winds and unable to keep its purchase in the drenched and sodden soil.

This morning, while clumps of snowflakes drifting past my window, I began working on my income taxes. I had taken the day off work in order to have enough time to get through all the paperwork. It was a late start, even for an inveterate five-minutes-to-midnight filer like me, but the prospect of beginning to fill all the various forms on the morning of April 16th – and still have a 40-hour window! – felt like the absolute apex of temporal decadence.

After battening down the hatches, I finished in the early afternoon. That was when I returned to my connected, plugged-in existence, only to learn of the horror that had unfolded this morning at Virginia Tech.

Today’s news reports repeatedly mentioned the 1966 shootings at the University of Texas. When I visited Austin for the first time last August, I was flabbergasted by the height of the campus clock tower. Charles Whitman, the Texas gunman, had been more than 100 yards up in the air when he shot his victims one by one, a singular massacre in American higher education.

And I mean American. Accounts of previous school gun tragedies in the domestic press uniformly overlooked the 1989 École Polytechnique shootings in Montreal, which bore several more striking similarities to today’s events than Whitman’s sniper-like attack. It seems most Americans, including members of the press corps, have little or no awareness of that terrible day in Québec.

A cynic would say that the things I experienced today really shouldn’t surprise me any more — yet they still do, one and all.

Yo, dawg, check it out: I’ve been faithfully watching American Idol 6. In January, after music critic Jody Rosen wrote, “In terms of tone, timbre, and control, [Melinda Doolittle] has the best instrument of any Idol contestant I’ve heard, in any season,” I had to go have a listen. Of course, I was hooked.

Even without a television, or halfway around the world, it’s easy to follow along with sites like YouTube, IdolStarTV, BuddyTV and Slimtainment. The song titles for anything released eons ago (like, y’know, the late twentieth century) are so routinely mangled in the online captioning and reporting that I find myself reaching for Geritol on a regular basis, but that’s half the fun.

Last night was “Latin Night,” with guest star Jennifer Lopez coaching the remaining eight hopefuls. At the end of the evening, the much-maligned Sanjaya Malakar opened his mouth, and this is what came out:

Bésame, bésame mucho,
Como si fuera esta noche la última vez.
Bésame mucho,
Que tengo miedo a perderte,
Perderte después.

[Kiss me, ply me with kisses,
As if this night were our last.
Ply me with kisses,
For I fear losing you,
Losing you later.]

Now, you can mock the boy all you want for demonstrating on national television how he learned to hula while living in Hawaii, but when he’s the only person who even dares attempt singing in Spanish on a queso-laden theme night, it has to be said: Sanjaya is packing more cojones than you.

The peregrine falcon that I first spotted three months ago returned to pay a visit outside my office window this afternoon!  So handsome, be it he or she.

It perched on the exact same spot, facing the same direction, so it seems likely that it’s the same bird, or part of the same pair.  If not, it’s a very odd, but happy coincidence.

Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a fascinating piece about a little social experiment that they carried out within the heart of the DC Metro system. They invited world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell to take his $3.5 million Stradivarius into the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station and play for 43 minutes. His total take from over a thousand passers-by? $32.17.

“Yes, some people gave pennies,” reporter Gene Weingarten wryly wrote, closing the piece by noting that tomorrow Bell “will be accepting the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L’Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America.” Bell routinely sells through concert halls all over the world, and has played before an audience of over 50,000 in Central Park. But tuck him under a baseball cap in our nation’s fair capital and you set off a deflationary spiral that mimics an utterly collapsed currency.

Before you write off the morning rush hour commuters in Washington as complete cultural cretins, ask yourself this: When was the last time you attended a live classical music performance in America that failed to result in a standing ovation? Yeah, I can’t remember, either. When it comes to classical music, once we’ve bothered to drag our patooties into the fancy-pants venues, or even out onto the grass in the middle of Manhattan, then it’s officially “culture,” and we oblige with overcompensatory enthusiasm.

The one notable exception would be during Ivo Pogorelich’s 1999 performance of Rachmaninoff’s 2nd with the Philadelphia Orchestra, after which he was booed outright — an event so remarkable that it was duly reported via the AP wire service across the nation. (Yo, somebody please wake those stringers — this is Philly. We boo Santa here.)

Whether we ignore or fawn over classical musicians, we’re having difficulty hearing, and really paying attention to, the very sound that is right before us.

I just returned from taking part in the Podcamp NYC “unconference” last weekend. At the moment, the podcasting arena is like a very, very long subway concourse jam-packed with street performers, all of us busking our little hearts out. Has any content producer in the pod-o-sphere really been able to quit their day job? Yeah, but only when they’ve figured out just how it is that you to get to Carnegie Hall. (Hints: Clean up well. Be on time. Stay patient. And of course, practice, practice, practice.)

Meanwhile, even if you’re sawing a Strad, you’re not going to have two Hamiltons to rub together, so you’d better be doing it for love. That, and the odd penny.

On Friday morning I caught a SEPTA commuter train from Philadelphia to Trenton, planning to transfer to a NJ Transit train and arrive in New York before 1:30 in the afternoon. The train out of Philly was late, and people familiar with the Philly-NYC rail run already know how this story ends. That’s right: as the train from Philly pulled into the Trenton station, the NJ Transit train waiting within sight on the same track slowly pulled away and left cars full of Pennsylvania riders milling about in Trenton for another 40 minutes.

For those of you who haven’t been in the Trenton train station, let me explain just how long 2,400 seconds can be. Cross a very nasty restaurant bathroom with a construction site (reportedly $56.6 million in renovations, the ultimate in lipstick-on-the-pig). Pack it with disgruntled people who are squeezed cheek-by-jowl into a tiny indoor space that contains virtually no seating. For a finishing touch, set this whole happy scene in the middle of New Jersey. 2399…2398…2397…

During recent trips to and from New York, I’ve alternated between taking the train and using the “Chinese bus” system. “Be careful, those buses are really unsafe,” one of my friends warned me (complete with press links) when I was planning a trip last fall to Washington, DC. Let’s see, engine fires and colliding with concrete barriers vs. being stuck in Trenton? No contest.

Next time, it’s definitely the bus for me.