January 23, 2005
Blogger Debut
What the hell is a blog? Judging from blogs I've read, the content of a blog can range from intensely personal disclosure (to an uncomfortable degree) and entirely impersonal, well-crafted journalism that reveals almost nothing about the author's personal experience. Common blog traits include humor (usually in the form of sarcasm), a theme (knitting, politics, dogs), and links to other sites. To contribute to this relatively nascent form of expression, I should probably adopt these loose rules. Maybe I can write sarcastically about themed-blogs and link to them and get away without introducing any new information or insight at all ... but that would be lame and has probably been done already.
Basically, I enjoy writing and don't do enough of it, and I've become addicted recently to reading blogs, so it was only a matter of time before I crowded the blogging universe with my own interpretation of the medium. So here it is.
If I borrow from daily experience, this blog will be about what I'm reading, New York (Brooklyn in particular), various gourmet-food addictions enabled by New York (Brooklyn in particular), passable knitting, sailing (possibly), and my consistently thwarted attempts to travel.
Enough about what the blog will be. Here's what happened today on 11th street.
It snowed all day yesterday and D and I watched inches of white stuff pile up on the fire escape while staying as close to the fire as possible. Today, we headed straight to Prospect Park (as soon as we could drag ourselves out of bed) and found hundreds of Slope kids sledding. Everywhere. There were toddlers on sleds being pulled by their parents every five feet. Sleds were even piled up in the entryway of Applewood when we went there for brunch later. The dogs all seemed a little manic -- endlessly digging in the snow, excavating frisbees from snow drifts, chasing their tails, and trying to gallop through two-foot deep snow drifts only to be submerged up to their necks after one leap. The mood was generally festive -- we rarely get this much snow. We headed to one known sledding hill and watched all sorts of kids sledding on all sorts of sleds and with varying levels of skill. Despite the chronic lack of storage space in NYC, there were wooden toboggans and classic wooden sleds (not sure what they're called). Various cross-country skiers appeared and we saw one couple with snowshoes. Where these people find room for this type of stuff -- which comes in handy two, maybe three days a year -- in their apartments is beyond me. I nearly threw out the single piece of flat plastic that functions as our sled while cleaning this summer.
Since my digital camera is kaput, I have resurrected the good film camera I have. I finished off a color roll in the apartment, taking pics of books and the kitchen counter for fun. The point was to get a new roll in there for photos of the snow -- snow on brownstone buildings in Brooklyn can produce a very Victorian-looking and photogenic landscape. I realized when we got outside that the sun wasn't quite where it needed to be though, and the wind had blown all the white peaks off the wrought-iron gates. In the park, I took pictures of the snow anyway (and as many of people and dogs as I could without getting dirty looks), but since I've forgotten all those annoying details about light and exposure and film types I will probably end up with a bunch of washed out, uninteresting shots.
This week, if work doesn't take up every minute of every day, I'll try to see As You Like It at BAM, visit Jacques Torres, and start in on a pair of mittens to match the hat I finished yesterday. Given, I should really redo the hat because it's way too big, but the stitches are tiny and so perfect that I can't bring myself to tear them out yet. Since I've finished Augusten Burrough's Running With Scissors, I'll move on to this week's New Yorker and Vegetarian Times. Because we watched Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly on Friday and it struck a major chord with me, another Bergman film may been squeezed into one of our evenings. An ambitious plan, and who knows whether I'll be motivated to comment on these endeavors in this blog, or whether I'll remember I have a blog in the first place, but we'll see soon enough.
Posted by csageday at January 23, 2005 07:45 PM