well what do you think it is?

hola from costa rica.
went to the big cloud forest reserve today and straddled the continetal divide. it was gorgeous. this whole trip has been pleasent b´c where we are is so pleasant. they don´t call it a cloud forest for nothing and it is wondeful to sit on the back deck and watch the clouds roll in past you. on my monkey hunts i haven´t seen any but i saw saw white faced capuchins in the wild yesterday. it was sweet. saw some awesome bromelids blooming today and some crazy orange bugs. i am exhausted, stayed up too late playing shitty games of spades. (spades is awesome, we were not playing well at all)
ok i really want to find a taxi and go back and hioke through the woods and pass out in my bed with new sheets. do you know how much more often my sheets are cleaned here than in my apt.
looks like i still dont have a roommate im a little worried.
later

itunes store your will make me broke-lastest purchase bon jovi

have a mentioned that i am not taking any skirts, cute clothes or jewelry to costa rica. it just doesn't make sense for the itinerary or climate of the trip. but have we mentioned how i feel (and therefore look) cutest and best in skirts?
late for my breakfast date with guate girl and then coffee with a mate of springy's to tell her where to check out in brooklyn- i did always want to be a tour guide.

good day

today was a good day (except i'm still not packed, the coop shift has no way in hell of being done and the paper is not finished. a and c will be taken care of though. and i need to go to the post office tomorrow, maybe guate girl will go for me as a birthday present) the two job interviews went really well. the one at CPC is pretty much my ideal job, except for the saturday thing, but it combines a lot of what i want to combine and populations i want to work with. i feel pretty confident that i will be offered one of 4 positions they have there, but i'm not sure i would take the assistant job, esp if it pays less per hour as its early on a sat morning that they want me there. the cathedral interview also went pretty well. i don't want to jinx it all but i'm pretty sure they will offer me a job, and it seems like i could work just a couple hours a week and they'd be cool with it. another space on the resume and more bank than i made at the zoo for less of a commute. i will await phone calls on my return.

snagged a table outside at the gate at the end of happy hour time. score. love drinking outside. then met up with the rabbi and his wife who have just moved back to town, which is very exciting for me. they are nice to have around, esp in the shabbes land. and tea lounge ended its stupid early closing hours experiment and went back to closing at a reasonable time. left and ran into someone i offered the apt to and his boyfriend who gave me pastries. he took another place which was sad for me, but maybe not for my waistline.

i need to find pens to take with me, i doubt i will be able to hold on to just one for 16 days. i also need this apt sit to be figured out i don't want my roommate to have to deal with it while i'm gone, in part b'c i don't want someone i've never met to move in...

probably won't post again tomorrow. too much to do. everyone who needs some lovin and support i'll be thinking of you and hope times aren't too rough and stressful. to the rest of you, have a fun couple of weeks. i'll be back on the 5th assuming i haven't killed anyone and be thrown into a mountain costa rican jail.

what the hell do you wear to a job interview when its 100 degrees out?

2 job interviews tomorrow. one for an easy job with ok pay and not great hours, and one for a great opportunity with good pay and reasonable but mostly on saturday in spanish harlem at 9am hours. not sure how i feel about that, but we'll see what the deal is after the interview. about to send in a cover letter for a job i am qualified for, but they don't think i am, but the morgan library pays well.

went to the met with shiloh's mom today. she is suck a bride, which i never thought she would be, later on in the afternoon i helped her cut out floral arrangements from bride magazines. i think shiloh's other mom is a bit overwhelmed by this whole wedding thing, she can't believe she is taking part. but i'm sure it will be gorgeous and can't wait to go. berkshires at the end of october i love it.
but at the met we saw the two exhibits i've been wanting to see the kara walker one which was disappointing and the tribute to susan sontag which was awesome but too small, i wanted more. great black and white images she had written about and wall text of what she had said about them, but about the power of photography in general. i was really upset when i heard she died, she was a public intellectual i could really get behind and look up to. (i'm sure she probably did lots of bad shit too, but i don't know about it). my only question was why only old photographs, as the intro wall text said that they weren't just using photos that she had specifically referenced, but maybe they were. i wish i had noted down who the photographer of the peppers was. i have never seen a vegetable look so sensuous before.
i really like kara walker's work and think that it can be really powerful, but maybe she doesn't make the best curator. her paper-cuts and silhouettes seemed lost in the space of the room, which wasn't up to her, but also so crowded in with the other work. it was also hard to find a coherence to it and how all the pieces related. she was charged with curating this exhibit before hurricane katrina, but got down to work around the time of the aftermath and that clearly influenced where she was going with the show and why and linking her traditional themes of racism, and the negative black experience but then tying it together with water. it felt like she just took every image out of the met's collection that had to do with slavery, water or garbage or preferably all of them together. i still support her work, but you aren't missing anything if you miss the show.

mmm. i have no idea what to pack. weather reports seem conflicting from info i've heard, and are only for san jose which is not up in the cloud forest. i've done no research on where i am going. i'm just showing up at jfk at the appointed time and trusting that the powers that be have taken care of the rest. i assume that someone in the group will have a guide book and that can be used for arranging canopy zip-line tours. i wonder how much of an issue my lack of spanish will be. the only thing i did attempt to research was the exchange rate for currency. which i found. $1~500 colones. of course i couldn't find what the relative buying power is, like how many colones do i need to buy a bottle of water or a stamp? i think i decided that i would take out $100 when i got to an atm, which seems weird to punch in 5000.

i no longer get email in my junk folder at hotmail. what up with that? did their filters really get so great or so lousy? i feel like there is mail i am missing. nothing personal but some stuff that might help me be in the know.

fucked up tan lines

went to coney island today but had to leave to show the apt just as the sun was getting to be that awesome soft light that makes the sand and water look incredible and isn't harsh on you but warm and inviting. i hope that one guy who came by is interested in the apt or a i will be 1) frustrated with this process and potentially screwed and 2) pissed as hell that i had to leave the beach. got my nathan's fries and lemonade at least.
i apparently cannot put sunscreen on evenly though as i discovered some pretty uneven tan lines as i was attempting to shower all the sand off. i also got a little burned which i did not mean or want to do. i am flailing on this tan thing. healthy is sexy but so is tan-it looks healthier than pasty white. my problem is that i'm trying to go from pasty white to tan in 60 seconds.

this city stinks, literarly

coming back from wine tasting in the gunks the stench could not have gotten worse, basically as soon as we crossed into the bronx, but i think yonkers was bad as well.
dude i love the hudson valley, as we all know, and the gunks are really just a gorgeous ridge. the wine was ok. we kinda stupidly didn't have a dd but DOH served us quite well. Apparently trying to get to newburgh is just like driving in ireland, you have to make several uturns of places you've already been to get there. we did find a place where we could dine al fresco with the dog, and the eggplant parm hoagie was decent, but i've had better and more quainter meals ( in more quaint towns) in the hudson valley. on the drive up we saw at least one of the spots where the tornado hit last week. just a swath/patch where the tops of trees were torn off, bottoms ok and the trees all around were ok. kinda crazy. as a kid i don't think i had any bigger fear than tornadoes. they still freak the shit out of me, just my odds of being near one are pretty slim.
had to deal with some prescription stuff today. the healthcare system in this country drives me insane. luckily mollie rose and some know and some over the counter stuff to help me out. but dude preventative medicine should be the way to go. i look forward to having health insurance again.

humanistic anarchist showed up again last night. we'll see if he sticks around long enough to be schooled in the ways of the princess bride.

fyi

new gomez-LOVING IT!!

i just don't get why some people think that they are better than an entire class of people

why do people being different scare us so much?
as we walked into moma yesterday someone stopped us and asked if we had a minute for gay equality. daewoo's response was, mmm i don't know i'm into equality for everyone. her response both annoyed me and rang very true. but that would take some drastic paradigm shifts that would make the world a better place for everyone, but apparently we aren't into that. it frustrates me that i cannot speak coherently about why this bothers me so much.
but all these court decisions are just so horrible. i really don't get what the big deal about state sponsored marriage is, esp in a country where there is theoretically a separation between church and state. marriage has nothing to do with procreation-that can happen so regardless of marriage. its about showing a basic level of respect to people. why can't we do this?

had a date with an irish catholic kid last night. apparently i can't get enough. he's written a 700 page book, its a how to user's manual for some software. i kinda wonder how much he wrote of it, and how much is kinda form fill in the blank. if i decided to pick up video editing maybe i'll pick it up. but hey he's employed.

big nose full body

[as an aside, there is a documentary -wordplay about will shortz the times crossword puzzle editor. i'm not crossword fanatic so i will probably pass, but the man does have a cult following]

bought by first box of wine, definitely since college but possibly ever. while i drank many a glass of franzia my friends and i had stricter tastes for what we would buy. so i walked into big nose full body as i passed by and a wine tasting was about to start. as a general rule if i am not on a time schedule i stop into all wine tastings i pass. i used to not be a fan of big nose full body, not a lot of kosher wine, nor i thought cheap wine for that matter. but the place is definitely growing on me. they chatted with me for a while about the wine they were tasting and the box wine (which is better environmentally) and they guys know a lot and they have great t-shirts. i was tempted to buy the maybe one year old sized shirt and save it for some future time when i have a kid b/c it was just so cute and maybe they won't be around then. i passed. there is no need to buy clothing for children that doesn't exist and i sent josh's kid a present already.

add to the recap

-meeting the irish representative to the venice biennial and being really into his work
-'hiking' in the woods in killarney national park with our umbrellas up
-damn cows are in my path to the ring fort

clap your hands say yeah, i'm an idiot

so on the line to go through immigration on the way back to the us (even though we were in dublin and i then had no immigration at jfk) i run into this guy who used to live in my building i never really was sure of his name. we say hi. i ask why he was in ireland. said he was playing some festivals. i wonder to myself if he had been at oxygen the festival i so wish i had been at on sunday but don't ask. end of story. ran into him on the street yesterday and ask how his flight was, then what festivals he was playing. turned out he was at oxygen, so i ask what band he was in-turns out he's in clap your hands say yeah. all i could respond was oh yeah cool i've heard of you guys. not that i'm with it enough to have heard their music or anything but they are pretty much the hottest band to come out of new york in the past year and have had an instant rise to fame. i should have asked him his name. i've always thought he was cute. made me feel like i do live in that brooklyn where famous people live but i never see them

the selected recap

the trip was great fun, the wedding was awesome and i was so glad i got to hang out with the wasp and the on the grid off the gridders, even though it had been years since i'd seen them it totally didn't feel like that all. many thanks to mr building his own house for chauffeuring us around!

the full recap would bore you so here are some selective highlights/possibly blog entry titles/random thoughts. if you want full details on any story just get in touch (jorrav lets have a drink, there is at least one you'd love the full details of) so here they are in no particular order in regards to importance or trip chronology:

-being american does not have the same cache it did 7 years ago
-palm trees? what the fuck?!
-can't go anywhere without making 2 uturns.
-the road to amarillo/dance remixes and mash ups
-bulmers should be drunk from the bottle on ice-bad on draught
-contrary to the map these roads are a figment of your imagination
-i chose this way b/c this way i get to follow water
-its not the bog its the ring that sucks you in
-conemmara, bogs are damn cool-don't fuck with the bog, lakes, sheep on the road, national park, damn fucking bridge in roundstone
-oxygen festival? no i don't wish i was there at all. nope not at all. it would suck to see those bands.
-encounters with an uncircumcised penis in the ironing closet
-puking at the beach
-medieval castles-not a romantic, fun or hygienic place to live
-number one irish national resource-limestone
-do not trust noula the RTE 2 psychic
-hurling makes every other sport look wimpy
-gaelic football is like ultimate frisbee, and the speed of play makes soccer look slow
-history is written by the winners to promote their propaganda (hill of tara, famine museum)
-you call this a two lane road!
-irish women wear fucking high heels
-spicy wedges oh how i wish i ate you every day
-oops i forgot my american flag but it didn't matter since we didn't make it to the world cup finals
-into the change for change program on the planes where you donate currency you can't convert to unicef
-i fucking love moving water but the kids at bishops quarter beach were crazy!

i'm back

send me your lovin.
free until the 19th? i've got nothing planned and you know how 'well' i do with extended free time, err or not.
looks like no one was able to download the chili peppers concert for me. i'm sure its somewhere on the web, and i'm sure i don't know how to do it. any suggestions?
will post something about the trip. it was grand. sad to be back to the place where stress is, but beer is cheaper (i never thought i'd say that about new york, but there is a horrible exchange rate at the moment)
fyi still looking for a roommate if you know of anyone and of course as always still looking for my everlasting partner in crime.

bad, but not that bad, shit happens when you let me drive on the left side of the road

all is well. including our micra, but let's hope that $1500 wasn't a deducatble on the wasp#s insurance. also realized that i want to date/be with the male version of the wasp.
bogs=cool.

contrary to evidence i have matured since college

having a great time thus far. lots to post.
irish weddings mad fun and mad drunken. and the sun should not come up before you leave the bar.
think its ridiculous i've seen 2 signs in dublin today wishing me a happy 4th of july. i love ireland, but not so much love for dublin.
if you think i should have your address and want a post card send it to me as i don't