Bracing for 'Frankenstorm'!

As most of you know, the north east coast of the US is about to ‘welcome’ hurricane Sandy, which has been devastating the Caribbean islands for the past few days!

Sandy has been charmingly nicknamed Frankenstorm as it’s due to arrive just in time for Halloween…I guess, sadly, the parade will have to be postponed this year! Luckily, though, most people got to enjoy their Halloween parties last night before the mayhem starts!

With the arrival of Sandy we've been told to expect 70m winds, heavy flooding and some power failure for the next three days and all the news site are sending out lists to help people prepare for it and businesses have already told their employees not to come in tomorrow. The subways are now closed and their air vents are being shut in to prevent flood damage.

After last year’s overblown Irene, it makes you wonder whether we are not all just overreacting but I guess it’s always better to be safe than sorry!

So, in order to prepare for Sandy/Frankenstorm, my friend and I (yes, I’m husband-less during this chaos as J is experiencing his own little disaster as he is ‘buried’ under 1.5m of snow in a house in the French Alps due to an unannounced snow storm! And some people still don’t believe in climate change, honestly!) set out to the store to pick up on some necessary items, like water, candles and canned food. The store, close to my house, is usually quite empty, you bump into your neighbors on occasion but it’s pretty nice and calm. Today though, a totally different picture as the queue to the registers went all the way to the vegetable section - you have to pass the bread, meat, deli, dairy, fish, and beer sections before getting there, just to give you an idea of how long that queue was! Everybody was rushing to get all the essentials before they were sold out but everybody seemed calm and collected.

Surviving in Timor-Leste with no electricity was tough but it wasn't a problem because our cooking stove ran on gas and we had plenty of flashlights and canned goods, not to mention a generator when the darkness just got too much…here though, everything in your house revolves around electricity, even the water supply so it’s actually harder to prepare for a power outage in the city!

As we were coming back to the apartment, laden with all our shopping bags full of water, crackers, popcorn (why not!?), cheese, cans and what not, a cop was just behind us eager to enter our building…I asked him what was wrong and he calmly told us we would have to evacuate!!!! So that’s about the time I started freaking out!

Apparently our building, since it faces the East River is in Zone A for evacuation…Now, spending the next three days cooped up at a friends’ house is not my idea of weathering the storm in style, as much as I do love my friends! So, I started checking with my neighbors to see if they were evacuating. My next door neighbors are Dutch and they have a 15 month old and another one on the way. They assured me that they would not be evacuating and that if I needed anything they were happy to help…

Well, if they are staying with a toddler in the house, I don’t see why I should have to leave the comfort of my house, especially after all the food I had just bought. Turns out about half the building is sticking around and the building next to ours and closer to the waterfront still has a lot of lights on as well. So we started weighing the odds (we are on the 5th floor after all) and doing our utmost to prepare, including mask taping our windows in case they break, and now we’re patiently waiting for the proverbial shit to hit the fan.

Cop cars keeping coming around announcing on megaphone that we have to leave by 7pm and that if we refuse to evacuate we could be charged with a class B misdemeanor…It’s 7:28 as we speak and I've just made cheese scones and T is preparing dinner - I guess we’re staying!

So Frankenstorm, do your worst, I’m ready! Well, not literally please, let it be just like Irene and give us only very strong rain…at least my pantry will be full ;)

Right, I’m off to fill my bathtub with water…

It's debate season!!!

This past Wednesday we had the first presidential debate between Obama and Romney. J and I have a TV but no cable and this was actually the only occasion I regretted not having cable but it all turned out well thanks to Youtube live stream. 

We gathered a few friends, lots of cheese, crackers, beer and wine and sat down to watch what ended up being a pretty unexciting debate. It was however, the greatest event in twitter since it’s debut back in 2006! At times I even found it more interesting to watch the twitter comments rather than listen to Romney prattle on, especially when Romney said he would cut PBS and Big Bird with it, the response on that was phenomenal!

It was a bit disappointing though in the end. Obama is usually a great orator but he seems to have trouble when it comes to retort, losing his fluidity in speech and hesitating far too often before replying, something that I had already observed back in ‘08. Unfortunately, most of the audience is looking for the bloodbath in how many zings each opponent throws rather than the content of the actual debate so in that front it was an unfortunate win for Romney. 

Other than the RNC, this was the only time I’ve hear Romney speak and I’ll admit he does have charm (and good hair!) but hopefully people won’t be fooled by it when it comes to voting time. I’ve never seen an opponent go back and forth on his promises as often as this guy does! That’s what I love about fact-checking though; it weeds out the lies from this campaign!

And can we please stop with the blame game! Obama did not cause this recession, he did not cause the crisis, he did not cause unemployment growth!

Can we just take a minute to reflect on something…imagine that Obama had been president right after Clinton…I seriously doubt America, and the world for that matter, would be in the state that it is now! Clinton left the economy high and unemployment low and if Obama had followed suit he would have built on what Clinton had done, instead of destroying it like the Bush administration did! So please let’s not talk about whether or not the US is better off than 4 years ago (itis better off by the way!). Bush destroyed the economy in 8 years, it will probably take just as long to get it back on track. Especially when Congress is so hell bent on voting down any democratic proposition. Government should not be about taking the biggest slice of the pie home, it should be about sharing the pie equally among everyone and you need compromise across the line to achieve that.

But who am I to say anything, I don’t get to vote! There was a joking petition at one point during the 2004 elections going around in Europe saying that actually the whole world should be able to vote for the American president seeing how his decisions affect the whole world, so yes, I do wish I could vote but since I can’t then I hope that people will vote according to their beliefs, I just hope their beliefs take their pencil to tick for Obama come November!

I can’t wait for the next debate this coming week, let it be on foreign policy, that one should be rather interesting!

I wonder whose flag pin will be bigger next time and please no more threats of making Big Bird homeless!

An evening with Paul Auster

One of the amazing things of living in this city is the cultural opportunities that abound everywhere…something that unfortunately was lacking in both of the ‘jungles’ I have come to know in the past couple of years.

However, being unemployed has actually been a bit of an impairment to my knowledge of all the wonderful events that are happening in the city…leaving the house requires spending money and when all your friends work during the day, leaving the house also becomes a lonely journey into the unknown, or errand running (which is more usually the norm for my leaving the house these days!) Thankfully, New York also provides us with visitors, lots of them these days actually! And through these visitors we learn about things that are happening right under our noses that we wouldn't normally know about. This past weekend, for example, looking for things to do with our visitors, we found out that it was the last weekend of the Dekalb Market before it closed shop for winter; we also found out it was Dumbo Arts Festival weekend, events that we normally wouldn't be on the look out for on a lazy Saturday and which ended up providing us with a greater awareness of our borough of Brooklyn and its myriad of neighborhoods.

Today was the same…thanks to our visitors I learnt that Paul Auster was speaking at the New York Public Library on 42nd St this evening. 

I was very recently introduced to Paul Auster just this year by one of my flatmates in East Timor. We had a lot of time on our hands and reading was one of our ways to ‘kill’ it. She had one of his books, Sunset Park, and she lent it to me. I devoured it in a matter of days (I think it was literally 2) and quickly moved on to the next one, Invisible, which I borrowed from her cousin and read just as quickly. I became enamored with Auster’s writing. And, unbeknownst to me at the time, I was already familiar with Auster’s wife, having 2 of her books in my collection, which I very much enjoyed. Auster writes in a completely different style than his wife and knowing now a bit more about his life from today’s talk, I wonder if (well, like most writers, surely) whether his novels aren't appropriated from parts of his own life.

Today’s talk was about his latest book, Winter Journal, which consists of biographical fragments of the author’s life in a bodily context, meaning based on physical rather than spiritual events. He was asked to read excerpts from his book and talk to some depth about the events that inspired the book. The speaker also talked about the Paul Auster archives that are now in the library open to the public, containing notebooks and essays dating from his earlier work up to the present.

Auster’s voice is soothing, he didn't dramatize his reading and made the audience comfortable with his self-abasement. He introduces himself as a wanderer, a husband, a father, a writer, among 3 other things, which I seem to have forgotten at the moment (should really start taking pen and paper to these things!). I love his way with words, he is elegant without wanting to be since his belief is that you write to live, to describe life, not to make words beautiful or elegant. But his words are elegant and beautifully written and they make me want to keep reading his books, his words. I need to thank my flatmate again for the introduction and our visitors for letting me know about these gems of the city!

A very enjoyable evening indeed!