Spiritual Direction nyc

November 1, 2018

Take Your Meds For Jesus: How to Turn Any Daily Routine into a Prescription for Contentment (Spiritual Practice of the Month)

Surrender (Instagram.Blog)

This post is part of my ongoing series on monthly spiritual practices. I’ve adapted this practice from friend, fellow spiritual director, and glowing newlywed Kimberly Malone. Her original suggestion was to turn taking your daily medication into an opportunity to relinquish control to God.

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I’ve always aspired to be a shower and go kind of gal: Throw on some leggings and a comfy shirt, run a comb through my hair, slap on some sunscreen, and run out the door looking as glowy and pure as a Dove commercial. (Except clothed. Clothing is good.)

Screenshot 2018-09-25 at 12.28.12 PM — The ideal. (*Not what I look like in the a.m. Or really ever.)

Unfortunately, God had other plans for me: a DEFCON-threat level assortment of allergies and skin issues including year-round eczema that ranges from mildly irritating to infuriatingly itchy. As a result, I have a twice-daily routine that includes oral medications, nasal spray, and smearing various over-the-counter and prescription creams on myself. By the end of all this, I’m about as greasy as an arctic seal dipped in Crisco, but my skin will still be dried out within a few hours.

Then, I have to add in the time it takes me to deal with contact lenses, the allergy eye drops, and the retainers I’ve worn since high school. At bedtime, I kick my routine up a notch by adding in the nightly warm compress that keeps my tear ducts from backing up and swelling my left eyelid up to the size of Jupiter. I didn’t know you could have both oily tears and dry eyes, but, hey, I’m a complicated woman.

Screenshot 2018-09-25 at 12.32.16 PM — The Reality: Hot Mess Barbie (Except Asian. And itchy. And not a 5’11” Double D.)

Basically, by the time I get myself to bed in the evening, my husband is already having a cigar with his BFF the Sandman over scotch, a cheese platter, and a roaring fire.

(Does scotch go with cheese? I actually have no idea, since I think scotch is a gustatory experience somewhere between cough syrup and drinking gasoline.)

But back to the spiritual part of this whole mess. Although that’s a misleading statement, because the truth is there is no division between the spiritual part of our lives and all the rest of it. God is in all of it, from the mundane to the awe-inspiring.

That’s why I love my friend Kimberly’s suggestion to turn your medication routine into a time of giving up control to God. And it’s why I am adapting it into this month’s spiritual practice. Medication is not usually something I approach with surrender. It’s something I do grudgingly – because I have to. I dislike the time, the expense, and most of all, the daily reminder that my body is flawed and that I am literally physically uncomfortable in my own skin.

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But what if I approached taking and applying my meds not with tolerance at best, resentment at worst? What if I spent that time giving thanks for the ways that God is present to me each and every day, and especially in my body? What if as I took a pill or slathered on a cream, I offered up control of my body and my life to the Holy Spirit? If I was less focused on the way my body falls short and instead marveled at how I am fearfully and wonderfully made? How God used my hands and my feet over the course of the day? How he might choose to use them tomorrow? What if I used this Thanksgiving season to be thankful for all the ways God is present in my life, even those things I’d rather avoid? How might God turn my grumbling into gratitude? My discontent into contentment?

While I’m going to apply this practice of surrender and gratitude to taking my meds, it can work in any daily routine you have, anything you might normally do by rote: Drinking your morning coffee, getting dressed, brushing teeth, tying shoes, folding laundry. Once you’ve identified the routine you want to invite God into, here is a simple, basic three-step prayer to follow on a daily basis.

As you practice this discipline of relinquishing control and giving thanks, may God bring you new awareness of his gifts and grace in your life. And may your Thanksgiving season be blessed!

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Come find me on Instagram @ravishedbylight.

October 24, 2018

Fighting for a Win-Win in Dating and Marriage: Tips for Handling Conflicts from the Gottman Institute (Book Review)

V1NYC_Dating & Church of God_InstaPost

This coming week, my church’s Biblical Dating in the Digital Age series will focus on “Dating and the Church of God” – or how a love relationship between a man and a woman that starts with dating will eventually become, in marriage, a visible sign of the invisible grace of God: the relationship between Christ and his bride, the Church.

At the same time as the series has been running, my husband and I have been co-leading a premarital counseling course for several couples that are approaching marriage. The bulk of our course is based on research from the Gottman Institute. Researchers there have been taking a scientific approach to the study of marriage (and divorce) for the past twenty years. Gottman’s book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, is based on those insights, which include an over 90% ability to predict a couple’s eventual divorce simply by the way they react to each other over the course of a normal conversation or day spent together. Many of these insights, though discovered in the context of marriage, are also applicable to dating.

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One of the most helpful insights Gottman uncovered is this: Couples are going to argue. Expect it. In fact, 69% of conflicts between even happy couples are what he terms “Unsolvable.” In other words, they are issues that may appear surface and temporary, but at root are core differences in temperament, values, and beliefs that are not going to go away. Ever. What’s key is not whether you fight, it’s how.

So what’s a dating or married couple to do when faced with the billionth fight over the same topic, whether it’s the frequency of date night, someone’s inability to buy good gifts, or who gets to wield the remote?

Screenshot 2018-10-24 at 12.33.14 PM.png — *etsy.com/shop/bitterwhimsy*

Simple. (Sort of.) You realize that you, buddy, are not going to win this one. Neither is your partner. Not completely. You recognize that you are two people who think differently about what’s important and you agree to disagree.

Let’s say, either while you are already married with kids, or while you are projecting your dating life into its possible future, you begin discussing holidays with the parents. You think it’s important to spend every Christmas with your parents, and your partner wants to take vacays to Disney with the kids. You are adamant that your family is the most important thing in your life and you want your kids to spend time with their grandparents. Your partner (who is as not as close to his or her parents) is equally adamant that getaways for your nuclear family will help cement your bond and create lasting memories. At the core, the two of you are fighting not about a holiday, but about definitions of family and priorities that you’ve been forming since childhood. Neither of your experiences or values is going to change.

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You could fight about – or sweep under the rug – both the surface and the deeper issue every Christmas for the rest of your lives, and let the bitterness of the perpetual conflict – or perpetual repression – seep into the rest of your relationship. Or, you negotiate. You compromise. You find a middle ground in which neither of you is right, neither of you is wrong, and neither of you gets completely what you want. But both of you win.

You win because you’ve stopped an unsolvable disagreement from spilling into those areas of your life where are in accord. You’ve drained the toxin from a conflict that has the potential to poison your marriage. Now, you agree to spend most Christmases with the grandparents, but every third year you see them on Thanksgiving instead and head to the Magic Kingdom for Yuletide. Is either of you getting exactly what you want, every time? Nope. But both of you are getting some of what you want. Both of your needs and concerns are being valued. And you get to keep a healthy relationship. That’s the definition of a win-win.

(Just know that for me this is an imagined scenario only. In reality, I think I’d commit seppuku with a rusty nail clipper rather than be anywhere near Disney on Jesus’ birthday. I’m not anti-Disney, exactly. Just anti-peak holiday crowds, interminable lines, and exorbitant prices for a stupid sipper shaped like Mickey’s head that, btw, is both creepy and bad for the environment. Let me tell you: it’s exhausting to spend a whole day on your feet while feeling morally superior to the people you are elbowing out of your way.)

christmas-trees-sleeping-beauty-castle-disneyland — Remember, it’s a beautiful castle, but the wicked witch and her spinning wheel are hiding upstairs. (image from disneytouristblog.com)

That’s just one example of how couples might begin practicing the art of the “win-win” while they are still dating. Whether it’s who pays for those Broadway tickets or how many evenings you need to spend with just the two of you vs. hanging out with friends . . . find a way to negotiate. Give a little to get a little. It sounds manipulative, but it’s not. It’s practical. And it’s loving. You have a perspective that your partner needs. And your partner has a perspective that will help you grow into a fuller, richer person.

I’m not saying don’t have non-negotiables. I’m saying be realistic about how many you have. And ask yourself: If I bend on this a little, what am I losing? What am I gaining? What might my partner lose or gain?

You might gain years together. You might get a marriage as it was meant to be: two people who are willing to mutually sacrifice for the other’s good.

Or, on the flip side, you might decide your non-negotiables are exactly that and save yourself years of fruitless friction in a relationship that doesn’t allow you to express your authentic self, nor appreciate who your partner truly is.

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Either way, it’s a win for both of you.

Find more resources for couples from the Gottman Institute on gottman.com

To follow Vineyard One’s Dating and God series, watch the sermon series on Facebook Live at 10:30 am EST, or at any time after the live stream concludes, or visit vineyardone.nyc.

October 13, 2018

Everything I Know About Love, I Learned from “Bachelor Nation” (Book Review)

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In tribute to my church’s current series on God and Dating, I’m continuing to review some of the books I’ve read relating to love, romance, dating, and marriage.

Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure isn’t really about dating, in the sense that it’s not a “how-to” primer, the way The Four Man Plan, which I wrote about last week, is. But entertainment journalist and author Amy Kaufman definitely uncovers some of the secrets to making people feel the pulse-pounding onslaught of love (or maybe just lust) – whether or not they’re there for the “right reasons.”

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Let it be said, right off the bat, that the Bachelor producers come off in this book as beyond Machiavellian. They make the author of The Prince, the scourge of the Medicis, look like a rank amateur. They are manipulative, scheming, ratings-grubbing, and drama-mongering. And they are obviously geniuses at what they do, because, well, we’re still watching.

Screenshot 2018-10-11 at 12.09.03 PM — An Actual Bachelor Producer

Well, I’m not. Anymore. Mostly because it’s faster for me to skim the recaps.

What were my “right reasons” for beginning to watch the voyeuristic marvel that is the Bachelor franchise? Way back in 2002, my husband and I had a new baby that Would. Not. Sleep. After four months of stumbling around like zombies on Ambien, we gave up and sleep-trained her – an esoteric process otherwise known as “let the baby cry herself to sleep, already!” The problem was, we were in a very small apartment and had nowhere to go away from the crying. So, we turned on the tv, and lo and behold! Like a light shining out on our desperate existence, there was Chris Harrison! And the Bachelor! And 25 Bachelorettes!

Reader, it was the distraction we needed. We were hooked like big, bug-eyed catfish and stayed hooked through the second season, when the lovely former cheerleader Trista graced our screen and flitted out with a proposal from Fireman Ryan, he of the sweetly terrible – I mean just horrendous – poetry. We watched their wedding, when the couple bizarrely decided they only needed to recite thirteen-and-a-half out of fourteen lines of Elizbeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

People, you just cannot truncate a sonnet of its final couplet. It becomes a painfully unfinished thing. It’s like . . . if Pygmalion hadn’t wanted to bother with styling Galatea’s hair and just left her brainpan open. IT CANNOT BE DONE.

Screenshot 2018-10-11 at 10.37.53 AM — Etienne-Maurice Falconette, The Walters Art Museum

Screenshot 2018-10-11 at 10.39.01 AM — Trista and Ryan, ABC

Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

Anyway, back to the book. Here, in no particular order, are the 10 secrets to falling in love a la Bachelor Nation. (Have no fear, I will also list more broadly applicable secrets for the rest of us who like to visit Reality TV Land but wouldn’t want to live there.)

Alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol. So much alcohol. Because people without inhibitions can be coached to do anything!
Sleep-deprivation. Also not known to promote rational, self-protective behavior.
Isolation. You know all those women can’t leave the house, right? Not even to run to CVS for toothpaste.
Complete lack of privacy. Cameras everywhere! Eventually, contestants can’t keep their guard up all the time any longer and that’s when things really get rockin’.
Ruthless editing. By manipulating camera angles, cuts, and voice-overs, and splicing together exactly the words they want someone to say, the producers can make a perfectly pleasant one-on-one date seem like an encounter between Attila the Hun and the Roman army. Or vice versa.
The same interrogation techniques used by police when they’re trying to get someone to confess to murder. “Oh, come on, Ashley. You know you’re for falling for Justin. We’ve been in this room for 15 hours without daylight or water or even those little 100 calorie cookie packs from the vending machine. Why don’t you just cry a little and say you’re ready to marry him and we can all go back to our tequila?”
Pursuant to numbers 4, 5 and 6: An iron-clad contract. Everything you say and do can and will be used against you in the court of reality television. Even if you didn’t actually say or do it.
Boredom. There is nothing to do in the Bachelor/ette mansion. No books, no tv, not even jenga. Eventually, there is nothing to do to entertain yourself except fall in love, form Survivor-like alliances, and acquiesce to whatever cunning narrative the producers want to tell the viewing audience. They want you to wear a tiara and a ballgown? Sure, what else have you got to do?
Using women’s biology against them. Did you know that when a bunch of women stay in the same place for an extended time, their menstrual cycles start to sync up? The Bachelor producers sure do. Mass outbreaks of crying, moodiness, and exhaustion make for must-see-tv!
The producers conspire against you. They cultivate your friendship and then they lie, lie, lie. Say Rudy tells Tania – to her face! – that he doesn’t know how he feels about her but he does think she’s great in the sack. The producer whom Tania trusts the most will then assure Tania that Rudy is a deep, sensitive guy who is already halfway to the altar.
Did I mention the alcohol? Because I think they might fill the swimming pool with it.

Screenshot 2018-10-11 at 12.33.26 PM.png — The Bachelor Pool: Powered by hormones, mixed drinks, and impaired decision-making.

Now, for those of us who have no designs on the Fantasy Suite, here are Bachelor-inspired dating insights for normal people:

Love is many things, but among the most measurable is a neurochemical state. The culprit is dopamine, “a stimulant that gives us motivation, energy and focus” (Kaufman 135). When you’re in love, dopamine floods your brain and you feel elation, drive, even obsession. The Bachelor puts its contestants in situations that prime them for dopamine surges. Maybe we can’t all have twenty-five people vying for the favor of our attention, but there are some things we can do to stimulate dopamine production on our way to finding that fairy-tale ending:

Go looking for love. Just the expectation that you might meet someone drives up your dopamine levels. Proximity to other people looking for love can also increase dopamine production.
Put yourself in novel situations. Combine your romantic quest with new experiences. Try new things in order to meet new kinds of people. And when you’ve met someone, try new things with them.
It’s even better if the new thing is something you’re slightly afraid of. Conquering fear or facing imagined danger with a potential or actual romantic partner will bond you even more. The Bachelor calls these “adrenaline dates” (Kaufman 133) – rappelling down a cliff, zip-lining over a forest, swimming with sharks, dashing to Macy’s on Black Friday. The surge of endorphins on top of all the other hormones will increase your feelings of connectedness and euphoria.
Keep your clothes on. Also known as the “Don’t Give Away Your Goodies For Free” postulate.* Why? Because when you’re in a state of heightened dopamine – which everyone at the beginning of a relationship is – it’s hard to distinguish between lust and love. The instant sex enters the picture, your dopamine system basically explodes your brain. It conspires against your reason, wisdom, and self-preservation. You can go instantly from a superficial interest in someone to feeling like he is the Romeo to your Juliet, the Lancelot to your Guinevere, the Jason Mesnick to your Melissa Mycroft. And we all know how well those stories turned out.**

*I heard a mom tell her teenage daughter this on the subway. It was probably the funniest #overheardinnyc moment I’ve heard yet, even if the daughter didn’t feel the same way.

**Also, because reportedly the number one reason would-be contestants get turned down for the show? Previously undiagnosed STDs.

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Want to learn more about love? Join Vineyard One NYC for our sermon series on “Biblical Dating in the Digital Age.” Find us at vineyardone.nyc or stream our services Sunday mornings at 10:30am EST on Facebook Live.

June 25, 2018

Better than Redemption (Bourbon)

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This past Christmas, my church co-hosted a Christmas party in Long Island City. Our good friend Cici, owner of the Mighty March Liquor Store in Elmhurst, donated three cases of wine to the party. (My dad, a staunch Nazarene until the day he died, is probably giving me judgmental glances from heaven right about now. Nazarenes, who are both teetotalers and cessationists, don’t even get “drunk” in the spirit, much less on a good Chardonnay.) As a thank you, and to prepare for my in-laws’ upcoming visit to New York, we bought a few bottles of red wine. My husband had also – I can’t remember why – decided he wanted to drink bourbon.

So what else is a good Christian wife to do when she sees a bottle labeled “Redemption” but tell her husband to buy it? I’m pretty sure that’s what John Calvin would do, right? (Martin Luther, of course, was a beer guy.) Not that I had to flex many of my persuasive powers: As I said, he was on a bourbon kick for some mysterious reason. (For the purposes of this post, I’m not going to dwell on Redemption’s problematic claim that it’s a “true reflection of ‘America’s Native Spirit.'”)

Now, my experience with hard liquor is very limited. My husband is a scotch drinker, but scotch to me tastes exactly like a band-aid smells – rubbery, sharp, and with a whiff of bodily damage having taken place somewhere. Bourbon doesn’t rate much better with me, although the smell is more nail polish remover than plastic adhesive. So believe me when I say that the only reason I chose this particular bottle was its name. (There’s probably some sub-SAT level analogy there – choosing a book : its cover :: choosing a liquor : its name. Alas, I think analogies have been scrubbed from the SAT, which means millions of high schoolers are now illiterate in the mysterious symbology of analogies. Which I think was one of the rejected tracks from Schoolhouse Rock?)

Not that it matters, since I have no idea what a “good” bourbon should taste like. My husband seemed to like it okay, although he quickly moved on from straight shots to making Old Fashioneds with Angostura bitters. He hasn’t chosen to re-purchase Redemption, though. (That sounds like the boozy equivalent of re-committing yourself to Jesus, which, to my recollection, every good Nazarene does at least half a dozen times a year.)

Last week, I visited Wilmore, Kentucky, home of Asbury Theological Seminary, for a conference. Since Kentucky is the birthplace of bourbon, it only made sense to pick some up as a souvenir for my husband, whose Redemption had long run dry. (The puns are endless.) While my traveling companion Larry and I were hunting down a liquor store on the way to the Bluegrass Airport, three different people recommended Woodford Reserve as the best local version.

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The people at Woodford Reserve, besides having apparently thoroughly mobilized the airport-adjacent population of Kentucky on their behalf, are conscientious folks. I couldn’t even click on their website without putting in my birthdate to prove I am above legal drinking age. I am more than a little confused by this precaution, given that the limit for legal consumption of html is somewhere around infinity. Their website also helpfully informed me that their bourbon has zero caffeine, zero carbs, zero protein, zero sodium, and zero sugar and is friendly to butterflies, watercress, and native white pond lilies. Except for the part where it can cause inebriation, lead to poor romantic choices, and smells like I should be scrubbing my toenails with it, this makes it no worse for your health and arguably better for the environment than Diet Coke.

My husband likes the way the Woodford tastes, too. He said it tastes like “burning velvet.” (My oldest daughter says this would be a great name for a band. She’s too young to have heard of the Flaming Lips.) Asked for a comparison to Redemption, he thought for a second and said, “The Redemption had the burning, not the velvet. And not even as much burning.”

So there you go, folks. Better than Redemption, and with more burning. Do with that what you will.

(P.S. I made gentle fun of the Nazarenes here, but I grew up with them and consider them my family. I jest with love.)

April 23, 2018

“Faith in their hands shall snap in two”

I’ve been thinking about a line from the poem “Death Shall Have No Dominion,” by Dylan Thomas. First of all, my sense of the absurd is tickled by its presence on a site called “Funeral Helper,” where it is listed as a “popular non-religious funeral poem.” Do people at funerals actually want to hear this poem? It’s not entirely comforting. Its language is properly Biblical (which seems problematic enough for the “non-religious” set) but becomes so bleak and at times grotesque that it seems unlikely to make anyone feel better. Unless “Twisting on racks when sinews give way” is an image that warms your cockles, in which case you probably liked Fifty Shades of whatever way more than I did.

On the plus side, it’s at least honest about torture being a sucky way to die.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what “cockles” means, which I did, Google tells me they are either the ventricles of your heart, from the root word “cochlea,” which said ventricles resemble, or a shellfish that tastes delicious boiled and with a dash of white wine vinegar.

Also, they’re alive, alive o.

A bit of family lore: My husband wanted to name our son Dylan Thomas, but I objected to naming him after a hard-drinking, soul-tortured poet, however beautiful the lines he composed. Wouldn’t that be asking for trouble? So we struck that name off our list. Then, we accidentally gave him the name of a famous comedian. Which is totally fine, because most comedians are well-adjusted teetotalers, right?

But getting back to the poem, the line sticking in my head is this: “Faith in their hands shall snap in two.” It’s stuck because it’s set up echoes in my head with a passage in a book called Interior Freedom, which was written by a member of a Carmelite community with the perfectly perfect French name of Jacques Phillipe.

Jacques writes:

Desire can only be strong is what is desired is perceived as accessible, possible . . . We cannot effectively want something if we have the sense that “we’ll never make it” . . . [But] Through hope, we know we can confidently expect everything from God . . . But for hope to be a real force in our lives, it needs a solid foundation, a bedrock of truth. That solid foundation is given by faith: we can “hope against hope” because “we know whom we have believed.” Faith makes us cling firmly to the truth handed on by Scripture, which tells us of the goodness of God, his mercy, and his absolute faithfulness to his promises” (105).”

I can’t set my heart on something I don’t believe is possible – whether that something is a fulfilling relationship, a satisfying job, a dream home, a reconciliation with someone I care about. If I don’t believe those things will happen ever, not in a million years, then why waste time hoping? But the converse is this: Faith provides us with the assurance that we need in order to hold out hope, even in difficult circumstances. It’s not faith in any thing, but faith in a person – in God who is good and always keeps his promises. In Jesus who is the living embodiment of love, truth, and unfailing mercy towards us. Faith, as it says in Hebrews 11:1 “shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.”

That’s why, when we are standing before the Risen Christ and death has been defeated once and for all, we will have no need for faith. We will have all the evidence we need, right before our eyes, that God has been making all things new, all along. The reality of everything we have hoped for will have come to pass. Faith, which has sustained us through all our years, will be obsolete, as unnecessary as a childhood blankie long loved but outgrown.

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

(Death Be Not Proud, John Donne)

On that day, death will have no dominion. All of our longings will be met in the person of Christ whose body was broken for us, then made whole so that we, too, can be whole. And faith in his hands shall snap in two.

photo credit: foodfaith.com.au

September 7, 2017

The Noguchi Museum, the Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Goat Days of Summer

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Every first Friday is free admission at the Noguchi Museum in Astoria, Queens, so last week I took my three kids with me to wander around. One of my friends joined us with her two-year old.

Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese-American of mixed ancestry. (His father was a Japanese poet; his mother an American writer.) He was a sculptor, designer, and activist on behalf of Japanese Americans interned during World War II. It’s a testament to his influence on modern design that his paper lantern designs look like something you might buy at Ikea.

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The museum looks like nothing much from the outside – gray brick, low-slung, industrial, flanked by power lines, the Southern Astoria waterfront, and Costco (which my family visits almost as religiously as church). Inside, it is minimalist and modern: long, spacious rooms with clean lines, white walls, polished wood floors, and impeccable lighting.

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As you enter, a mini-lobby leads immediately into the first exhibition space, an open-air high-ceilinged brick room that houses several monumental pieces carved from granite and other stones. It opens into the sculpture garden, a serene, Zen-like space. With its high walls, gentle landscaping, stone sculptures, an abundance of trees, and benches it would make a great place to bring a book or a sketchpad any time you needed to get away from it all without leaving the city. (Presuming that the things you could get away from included your young children, which was not the case on our visit.)

Since we had little ones in tow, the museum was not a leisurely experience — we careened through the museum at a break-neck pace suited to the first-grader and toddler — but it wasn’t stressful either. It’s a kid-friendly place, with family guides and pencils provided for children and small enough to be manageable in an hour or less, although it would absolutely reward several hours of your time and attention. Noguchi’s sculptures are varied and visually and texturally engaging, and they’re not roped off, so kids can get nose-to-nose with them. While I can’t say my brood came away with much intellectual knowledge gained, they had fun identifying sculptures (none of them have identifying plaques, so you have to match them with their photos and names in printed guides) as well as making up their own names based on what they thought each sculpture looked like.

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All things considered, I was pleased with their level of imaginative engagement. We also had a brief discussion on the way out about who decides what constitutes “art.” Is it the wealthy who control the art market and dictate taste to the unwashed masses, as my worldly-wise high-schooler asserted, or is there something more transcendent at work? What if you don’t enjoy looking at a painting by Picasso (as my son put it, “that guy who makes the weird faces”) but you have an understanding of what he was trying to do, or vice versa?

(Also: if you are six and you wear a scarf printed with Van Gogh’s “Night Cafe” wrapped around you like a sarong and tucked into your underwear, is that a sign of good taste to come or bad?)

This discussion proved prescient as we trooped over to the Socrates Sculpture Park, a free outdoor space just across the street from the Noguchi. Socrates is a hoot because you can never be sure what you’ll find there. On this day, it was goats. Lots and lots of goats. All life-size, except for one gargantuan head-on-a-stick that looked like the world’s most diabolical cake pop.

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(Fun fact: Goats and other mammals with hooves are called ungulates. You can read all about them and their unguises on my new favorite website, Ultimate Ungulate.)

The smaller goats all had bizarre appendages – sticks growing out of their back or a mangy coat of hair – and at least one was upside down. It was all quirky, eye-catching, and also vaguely disquieting. I immediately thought of pagan rituals like the Israelites worshipping a golden calf before God literally made them eat it. I was unsure what the exhibition was “about,” so I wandered around taking pictures and considering a few important questions, like a) whether the Billy Goats Gruff got royalties from the exhibition; b) if all the garden gnomes had fled in fear for their lives and sanity; c) whether the giant goat bell (not pictured) really did look suspiciously like gonads or if I had spent too much time reading Freud as a graduate student; and d) if all six us could split a Costco pizza for lunch.*

As we left the park, I picked up a guide that someone had helpfully discarded, and learned that

[Nari Ward’s “G.O.A.T., again”] examines how hubris creates misplaced expectations in American culture. Ward recasts tropes of outdoor structures – the monument, the playground, lawn ornaments, architectural barriers, and the advertising sign – into surreal and playful creations. This expands the artist’s ongoing exploration of cultural identity, social progress, material histories, and our sense of belonging . . .

Before that day, I had not been familiar with Ward or his work. My ignorance didn’t prevent me from appreciating the exhibition in a bemused, visceral way, but I was glad for the framing and the opportunity to learn more later. (This piece in the New Yorker is a brief, light-hearted sketch of the exhibition and the installation process.)

While we were at the park, however, most of our focus was simply on enjoying the last Friday of summer. The kids, whose observational skills and brain power had already been depleted by the Noguchi, shared fig bars, cheese, and crackers and lounged on stadium seats plopped in the middle of the park. It was a beautiful, sunny morning punctuated by a sharp breeze coming off the water. The red and gold “Apollo” sign — several miles from the original in Harlem — stood out against the green grass and shrubs, the backdrop of the river and the Manhattan skyline, and the bright, blue sky.

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*For those keeping track, the answers to those questions are: a) no, and it’s a crying shame; b) wouldn’t you?; c) yes, and yes; and d) yes, but we ended up ordering other things too. My son is inexplicably a fan of the baked chicken cheese roll, even though it tastes like someone stuffed microwaved pasta Alfredo into a hot pocket made of cornstarch packing peanuts.

Image Credits:

Noguchi Museum Garden

Noguchi lantern

Noguchi Museum(external shot) tribecacitizen.com

Noguchi interior howcreativeswork.files.wordpress.com

Noguchi Museum Garden 1.bp.blogspot.com

Segmented “Worm” sculpture lostfoundremembered.files.wordpress.com

August 22, 2017

Wonderland in Bloom: Chihuly Sculptures at the New York Botanical Garden

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Two weekends ago, some friends took our family to the New York Botanical Garden to see the Dale Chihuly exhibition.

Chiluly’s name sounds like a portmanteau of a lily and a Chihuahua. The lily part seems appropriate for a man who sculpts flowers. I don’t know how to connect the Chihuahua part though.

Walking among his glass sculptures is like being in an enchanted world, where everything is uncannily close to what you know . . . but not. The giant lemon, chartreuse, and white bloom above, with its crazily twisting spirals and shells, looks simultaneously like an anemone dancing in the ocean currents; an ecosystem of corals, mollusks, and eels; or Medusa’s hair re-interpreted as a topiary or a joyfully vibrant dress-up party hat. In its excess of size and movement, there’s both beauty and a touch of the grotesque. As a flower, it looks just wild and untamed enough to be dangerous – the kind of bloom that might beckon an insect in before devouring it. (And that sentence sounds like Freud trying his hand at a romance novel. I already regret writing it.)

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Among the towering flora, I felt a little like Alice in Wonderland after she had shrunk to the size of a mouse. Even among the more “normal” sized sculptures, I half expected the flowers to insult me, the Mad Hatter to drag me to a tea party, and the Red Queen to stride in bellowing “Off with her head!” Maybe even a baby that turned into a pig. (Fun fact: The word “portmanteau” was coined by Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, writer of the Alice books, and friend to the real Alice Liddell, who as far as I know did not actually babysit pigs.)

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Although we never encountered the White Rabbit and his pocket watch, we did spend many minutes observing the fuzzy honey bees, boisterous and laden with pollen.

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My kids and I were equally fascinated by super-sized koi fish, mouth agape, cruising for crumbs in the lotus pond. It reminded me of a baby plugged up with one of those see-through pacifiers.

Not the actual mouth we saw

My son gave the fish pieces of sandwich bread, which I am sure is not allowed. However, I am also sure someone has been feeding that monster more than just carp food. It looked one growth spurt away from starring in the next Godzilla sequel.

Someone definitely tried to feed it a cell phone. We saw groundskeepers dredging for it among the lotuses.

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Inside the greenhouse, the sculptures and their settings conjured up a paradisical jungle, with luminous white “belugas” (that looked like alien pods straight out of a horror movie), white and indigo flamingos, and perfectly constructed leaves, with the striations and variations in the glass mimicking a real leaf’s vein. Some leaves looked so like their real counterparts that only the informational placards called attention to them.

We left the Garden tired, content, and hungry, and our friends took us to SriPraPhai in Woodside, Queens for authentic Thai food. While everything was delicious, what I remember most is the dessert: salty, sweet, and warm sticky rice, served with a fresh cold mango in a swirl of coconut milk. It was the perfect combination of flavors, temperatures, and textures, and a fitting end to a day in Wonderland.

Image credit:Koi: http://www.japanshakuhachi.com

August 16, 2017

It was My Anniversary . . . and a Bird Pooped on My Head

Screenshot 2017-08-12 at 12.24.04 PM — Not the guilty pigeon

There I was, minding my own business, walking with my husband to a restaurant to celebrate our 19th anniversary, and the next thing I knew, I had pigeon poop in my hair.

We were out the night before our anniversary, because, on our actual anniversary, my husband took our son, his best friend, and two other guys to Six Flags for the day.

As many of our friends and family members already know, this is not the least romantic thing my husband has done on our anniversary. That would be the year he planned to go to Mets game with 10 guys from church, found out the game was on the day of our anniversary, then bought the tickets anyway.

They got rained on though, so I feel like karma was on my side.

This year, the kids jaunted off to Shake Shack with their godparents, and my husband and I drove to Jackson Heights, an area of Queens that makes understatements of the terms “urban density” and “diversity.” We parked and walked several blocks towards a small second-floor restaurant that serves Thai hotpot – all you can eat within ninety minutes (there are overage charges). It was while we were standing at a corner under the elevated 7 line tracks, waiting for a light to change, that a pigeon left me a present.

I can’t remember the last time I was pooped on. By a bird, anyway. I remember loads of times (pun intended) I was pooped on by a kid. Mostly by my own, although just last week the neighbors’ newborn leaked all over me.

I’m not really sure why, of all days, a pigeon singled me out on my 19th anniversary, but I am hopeful that was not a portent of things to come. Although, didn’t getting pooped on by birds get Diane Lane her own villa in Under the Tuscan Sun?

Please, can I have my own villa?

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No villa materialized, but we did have a great evening together, once I scraped and washed everything out of my hair and hands in the restaurant bathroom, then dolloped on some hand sanitizer for good measure.

The restaurant we chose, Jaew Hon NY, was eclectically and colorfully decorated with light fixtures made of umbrellas and colanders and a painting of the recently deceased, beloved Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

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It was a family-friendly spot, with several families with babies and young children crowded into the narrow space. (As the night progressed, the crowd shifted to adults.) Many of the babies and toddlers were vociferously not enjoying themselves, and no one seemed to mind. They were also sitting mystifyingly close to the in-table heating elements.

The heating elements turned out to be (mostly) child-safe inductive heating surfaces that stayed cool while keeping the broth inside the hotpots boiling at a consistent 390 degrees. From what my humanities-tilting brain can tell from a quick perusal of some diagrams on Google, induction heating works through magnets and, um . . . magic?

Regardless, I came away wanting an inductive cooker for our apartment, because turning on a stove during an NYC heat wave is akin to using a blowtorch in hell.

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If you’re not familiar with hotpot, it’s found in many Asian cultures. In Japan, it’s called shabu shabu, a name that Wikipedia informs me may be an onomatopoetic representation of the sounds made by cooking and stirring. It consists a variety of vegetables, meats, fish, dumplings, tofu products, and noodles that you cook in boiling broth right at your table. According to the Thai friend who recommended this restaurant, Thai hotpot is distinguished from Chinese hotpot by its dipping sauces and broths, all made with Thai spices like Thai basil (spicier than the Italian variety), lemongrass, and galangal (related to ginger).

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For our hotpot, we ordered marinated beef, thin-sliced beef, squid, and shrimp, then chose items from the fresh bar: several kinds of mushrooms, bok choy, Thai basil, squash slices, eggs, tofu, tofu skin, pork and shrimp dumplings.

The shrimp came with heads intact. I made my husband deal with them. I don’t like it when my food stares at me with its bulgy, beady, pleading eyes. Or with any eyes, for that matter.

n5tv42ae64nmanya1v5k — The face of nightmares

We finished off the evening in Astoria Park, looking out at the Manhattan skyline through the lattice of the 59th Street Bridge and eating Talenti Almond Coconut Chocolate Gelato with plastic spoons.

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For a night that started with getting pooped on, it wasn’t all that bad. I’d spend another 19 years like this.

Illustrations from Mo Willems’ Pigeon books. My family is also fond of Gerald and Piggie and Knuffle Bunny.

July 20, 2017

Love, According to a First-Grader (and some Minions)

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At our church retreat last week, my six-year old discovered an – shall we say – appreciation for her class teacher. “Mom,” she whispered. “I got my first crush!”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, on my teacher!”

“Your teacher? What’s his name?”

“Ben.”

We have some conversation about the admirable qualities of nice, funny Ben before moving onto other subjects.

The next day:

“Mom, guess what? I told Ben I had a crush on him, and he said he has a crush on me, too!”

“Wow, that’s great! So does this mean he’s your boyfriend now?”

“No, Mom, I can’t have a boyfriend! I have a husband!”

The tone of her voice tells me she is questioning my mental capacity.

“Oh, really, who? You said you wanted to marry G [a boy from her pre-Kindergarten class]. Did that happen without me noticing?”

“NO, Mom! Jack! Jack is my husband.”

“Oh, right. I forgot about Jack.”

Jack is her imaginary husband of about six months. He started out as a fiancé, and almost instantaneously moved up to permanent status. When she told me about their marriage, she also told me emphatically that he’s an adult, not a kid, and I refrained from commenting on yet another barrier to the legality and longevity of their union.

When Jack first became a part of our lives, she had long, rapid-fire conversations with him on an old Blackberry in Public, an imaginary language first invented by her older brother when he was three or four. (I think he must have heard the phrase “speaking in public” and misapplied it in a manner that actually makes total sense.) Public has no discernible rules, grammatical structure, or consistency, but sometimes sounds like Minion language, if the Minions were only slaughtering Spanish and perhaps Portuguese, and not also French, Mandarin, and a grab bag of other languages.

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I’m not sure who the wronged party is in this situation: Jack or Ben. The husband or the crush? But I am relieved my daughter at least understands that adultery is not an option.

So, this morning, as we’re snuggling in bed, we revisit the subject of Ben, for the benefit of her older sister, who wasn’t at the retreat with us. “Why do you like Ben again? Is it because he’s nice and funny?”

“No! It’s because he has big arm muscles!”

She shows me how big with her own arms. Somehow, she has become a shallower person at six years and one week than she was at six.

“But he’s not your boyfriend. Because of Jack.”

“Jack?”

“Your husband?”

“Jack isn’t my husband! He’s my friend.”

“I thought he was your husband. Remember? First he was your fiancé?”

“Oh, right. But now he’s only my friend.”

“Why? Is it so Ben can be your boyfriend?”

“No! Ben can’t be my boyfriend. He’s married.”

Pause.

“Can I be married to both of them?”

“No, you can’t!”

Pause.

“I can’t keep one a secret and not tell anyone?”

So much for the morals of a six-year old.

July 17, 2017

Sunset Over Manhattan

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It was a good friend’s birthday today, so she and her husband, and many of us who love her, celebrated at Anable, an outdoor bar and grill on the Long Island City waterfront. The drinks are simple – bottles of beer and cans of Perrier citrus sodas – and the furniture consists of polished wooden picnic tables and umbrellas, plus assorted metal and plastic chairs that look like they were filched from Generic High School USA. The view is undeniably beautiful, and by city standards, peaceful, with a few helicopters flying by and the occasional speedboat. It’s a good place to sit, watch the sun slip down between the skyscrapers, and, depending on your personality and tax bracket, either reflect on the beauty of the New York City water and skyline, or nurse a serious case of real estate envy.

Anable serves a variety of meats – cevapi, chorizo, kielbasa, bison – with pitas and the appropriate toppings (sauerkraut and mustard for the kielbasa, some kind of red pepper relish for the cevapi). I think they had salad on the menu, but no one in my party bothered with pesky details like balanced meals or fiber consumption. We had cake and cupcakes, after all!

The piped in music is lively and the crowd tended towards the young and pretty, although no one availed themselves of the ample space for dancing except a few of the kids. With the adjoining pier to walk or run on and the casual setting, it’s a very child-friendly place, although you will have to make sure yours don’t hurl themselves from a table bench over the railings into the East River. I was also afraid that mine were going to make themselves sick eating the green peaches from an overhanging tree, but no one has complained or puked (yet). In any case, this may be the closest they’ll come to eating the fruits of an urban garden, since I can’t seem to grow anything but weeds and poison ivy. (I even kill cacti. It’s a gift.)

Besides the need to keep your little ones from taking a swim, there are a few drawbacks to Anable. One is that they don’t give you water pitchers, although my kids had no trouble getting individual plastic cups of water or ice. It was hot outdoors, even after 5 pm, and we were all a little dehydrated by the time we left around 8. The other is that it’s outdoors, so there’s no smoking prohibition in effect. If you’re a smoker or don’t mind others smoking, this won’t be an issue, but if you don’t want your kids hacking up a lung, you may have to change tables at some point. The last sticking point is the bathrooms. There are no paper towels or hand dryers provided, so the floors are wet and slippery, and it’s hard to tell if what’s down there is water . . . or something else. Enter at your own risk, and don’t wear your shoes in your house when you get home.

A final danger to Anable is large, laughing groups of people making idiots of themselves by taking lots of pictures using selfie sticks and singing horribly off-key renditions of “Happy Birthday.” I plead the fifth on that one.

Note: My 30-day writing challenge to myself has officially ended, hopefully with some momentum built and discipline discovered. I will continue posting on a regular basis, but probably not everyday. My goal is two “Summer in the Psalms” reflections a week, plus at least one additional post.

Thanks so much to everyone who has been reading, liking, and following my posts. Now that I’m back from vacation, I will do my best to stop by all of your blogs and say hello, if I haven’t already. You’re all the best!