She Miró; She Lloró

Last Sunday I biked over to the National Gallery of Art to see the Miró exhibit. How refreshing it was for me to have time to go soak in art at my own pace. Since the children were off camping, the beautiful art kept me company.

Or was it beautiful art? I'm not a fan of surrealist art. Like so much of poetry, I usually want to strangle the proverbial neck of the artwork and scream, "Why don't you just say what you mean??"

While Miró didn't tell me what he meant, whoever did the write ups for the exhibit shed some light on his meaning. Each room grouped his works into a theme: a place where he lived, a war going on, a scene he repeatedly painted, etc. And in several rooms a recurring theme became evident. A few times he included a ladder to represent his escape.

Like Jacob's ladder, Miró's ladders are grounded on earth but reach to the heavens. For the artist, this escape was artistic expression free of all the political restrictions and turbulence oppressing him. To me, that ladder felt like hope and I cried as I sat there in the East Gallery looking at his art.

Unable to disguise my crying, I tried not care that people were looking at me. I read about his life, the 3 wars he lived through, the exile he was forced to endure, and thought about the peasants who didn't have the money to move away from the misery.

Something struck a chord within me, and to the surface came all the fucked up shit in my life that I try to drown out with distractions. I felt all the pain I try to ignore and longed for his ladder to escape my woes so that I can frolic in my own artistic expression.

Crazy isn't it? I looked at funky art like this and cried.

What is Truth?

I was raised in a fundamentalist home that both mocked the Enlightenment for replacing transcendent truth with reason and yet embraced logical explanations for religious beliefs. From an early age I was taught to question everything from abortion to evolution to why we are forced to wear seat belts by asking a series of questions that requires an opponent to define their terms, name their sources, and get to the root of their moral framework.

Assuming everyone else is consciously operating from a thought-out worldview, this works great. But in this post modern times, nobody gives a fuck why they do anything. I envy those who just don't give a damn since I'm left questioning Christianity without having anything to replace it with.

Believing that truth exists whether or not you choose to believe brings so much comfort to me because then truth isn't dependent on me. In that scenario, truth exists. It just is. Instead, I feel so uncomfortable under the weight of the decision: what do I believe? What if I choose the wrong truth like some fucked up Mormon or Al Qaeda freak?

Often I feel like Pontius Pilate standing before an innocent man who's about to be sentenced to death asking, "What is truth?"

French Kissing on the Bus

Waiting in line to board the bus back to DC from New York City, this kid with a heavy French accent wanted to know why I travelled with my bike. Hearing that accent made me want to keep talking to him, and he wanted to keep talking to me just because I knew some French geography. That's not surprising. Europeans are typically won over if you demonstrate a knowledge of world geography.

We sat next to each other on the bus and proceeded to talk the entire drive back to DC. Throughout the conversation, he kept dropping hints that he was interested in me. For example, he kept offering to teach my kids math or be their French tutor. And then he said how tired he was of college girls since they are so loud and don't know much about anything.

I had to stop him there. Anyone who knows me knows that I can be extremely loud. In Europe, I stick out in a crowd with my loud guffaws and I don't really care. You know why? Because we Americans are happy and we show it.

Secondly, he's studying at a university. Don't girls need to prove they are smart in order to be admitted there?

I kept pressing these points until the truth came out. He doesn't like to date younger women; he prefers older women. What the hell? Didn't I just go through this already? As if the universe wanted to magnify how similar this boy is to the Georgetown student, this VA Tech student also plays rugby for the university. All of these comments sparked my curiosity.

"What do you wish the college girls knew more about?" I wondered.


"They know nothing outside of America!"

"What was the oldest age of a woman you dated?"


"45."


"Have you dated women your age?"


"Yes, but those relationships don't go anywhere."


"So you seek out older women?"


"Yes. In fact, I think you are very attractive. Would you mind if I kissed you?"


Even though we were seated in the middle of the bus were everyone could see us, I thought that I'd probably never kiss a random stranger on a bus again. So I kissed him.

He's an excellent kisser, living up to his French stereotype. With one hand he grabbed the back of my head and with the other one he inched up my thigh. At first I could only think about people watching, but then I just let go of that thought. When I forgot about the people around, my tension eased, and I reciprocated.

We kissed so much after the bus arrived that he ended up missing his bus to Blacksburg, so I drove him to the station the next morning to catch the next bus.

My First Encounter with a Hassidic Neighborhood

While in Brooklyn, I stayed up late and woke up early. Unfortunately, I could not sleep in due to the bright sunshine pouring into my room and my usual early mornings back at home. So when I came back from my run on Sunday morning, my friend asked me to go walk the neighborhood so that she could sleep in. This was my chance to bike over to the Brooklyn bridge.

From her place in Greenpoint, Google directed me through a section of the Bedford neighborhood where the Hassidic Jews live. At that time on Sunday morning, school boys were being collected by yellow school buses with Hebrew script on the sides. The sidewalks were full of mothers dressed all in black and wearing 1930's style head wraps. They pushed strollers and were surrounded by their numerous children dressed all alike. Females only wear long dresses, thick tights, and long sleeves. I'm sure that black outfit must feel great come August.

But really, these people all looked alike. Images of clones from the opening theme song for Weeds went through my head. "Tiny boxes on the hillside, tiny boxes full of ticky tacky..."

The boys look like clones of each other. There is no red headed or blond Hassidic Jew who will mix it up a little. No, instead, they all don the top hats, the long dark curls, the long black coats and black pants. Looking so similar was kind of creepy for me. Horrific thoughts began to go through my head.

What if that goofy outfit was just meant to disarm someone like me? 
What if they are all armed assassins? 
What if they see how different I am and converge on me like ants on a dead bug?


Fearing that these people really didn't want an outsider like me to be biking through their neighborhood, I peddled faster.

Are all of these really the same man?

The Quintessential New York City Experience

Every sitcom or movie set in New York City always seems to include a scene in a tiny theater off Broadway with a performance by amateur actors. I know you know what I am talking about.

So when my friend who divides her time between DC and Brooklyn told me she would be performing the same weekend I would be up north, I determined to go. I took a bus early enough to make the Friday night performance and stowed my bike in the undercarriage. From the bus stop at Penn Station to Times Square, the bike ride should have only taken about 15 minutes.

Now even if I were in DC, I would need my handy GPS to get around. But I was biking in Manhattan. Manhattan! Those streets are even more crowded than DC. Every once in a while I had to stop riding, pull out my phone, and try to translate the phone's map to the street layout of one way streets.

After zigzagging through Times Square more times than I needed to, I finally found the theater. It wasn't even a half block from Times Square where the flashing lights spilled onto this street. Dodging the theater-goers who were leaving shows like The Lion King, I biked up and down the street trying to follow the building numbers but I just couldn't find this building. With the help of a woman rolling a cello down the sidewalk, my eyes finally saw the skinny building that looked like a plain office building but housed the theater. Yes, I did say that the woman was rolling a cello down the street.

Up on the 8th floor of this narrow building, I found a stage with maybe 60 theater seats. It was tiny. Gratefully, I drank the beer that came with the cost of admission. Not only was I thirsty from the ride, but I figured that being buzzed would help me enjoy the performance. Alcohol also tends to make me chatty, so when I saw this guy,  I laughed and struck up a conversation.

How could I not laugh? He glittered and shined like no one I had ever seen before. In one fluid swoop, his mustache started below his nose, swooped along his jaw line, ran over his ear and around the back of his head then ended at the starting point. One unbroken circle of hair. His mohawk was really made by two stripes shaved clean and decorated with beadazzle beads. Blue glittery lips playfully peeked beneath his hair and matched his blue glittery spandex pants.

Being super friendly, he talked to me all through intermission and indulged all of my questions. Foremost, I wanted to know if he dressed like this all day every day. I mean, does he dress like this for his day job? Yes, yes he does. With some sort of academic job in the sciences, he claims that he's only had to forgo his wild dress a few times.

Some of the storytellers that performed were much better than I expected. And the burlesque show based on Donkey Kong made us all laugh when the strip tease ended with nipples covered in gorilla fur. But none of these performers had the same panache as this guy who doesn't change his clothes when he leaves the theater to go out on the street. I wonder if he knows that I consider him part of my NYC experience?

Everybody Say, "Oohh's and Aahh's"

It's more crowded after the Food Network feature.

Last Friday, my friend and I biked for several hours through the city. It was a blast, but it left us hungry. By the time we arrived at our destination, it was well after 10pm and we hadn't eaten dinner yet.

Starving, we walked into the soul food restaurant Oohh's and Aahh's located near the corner of U St. and 10th. I had learned about this place a few weeks before when I was waiting on the corner for my friend. On that Sunday morning, a guy sweeping the sidewalk started talking to me and invited me to eat at the restaurant where he worked.

My friend and I tried to eat there that morning, but our timing was off. We were ready for brunch at 10:30 am and the joint didn't open until noon. So we returned after our brunch to say hi to the sidewalk sweeper. While saying hi, we met the chef's mother who gave us samples of the most delicious food with a heaping side of entertaining stories.

She told us that her uncle modeled in Milan, Italy. There he learned that Italian men love black women, therefore she wants to go there before she dies.  The other place to see before she dies? Rio de Janeiro. She'd like to enjoy the nude beaches there before "gravity sets in." This woman had us captivated with her charm. We couldn't decide which was better: the food or the chef's mom? We vowed to return.

This dive is easy to miss.

Finally, we did return. At a quarter to 11 pm on a Friday night, the place was crowded. The restaurant serves food until 4am on Friday and Saturday nights.  So I'd recommend this as an alternative to a jumbo slice after a night of dancing. Try another DC experience. Eat soul food at the counter and talk to the staff! They are so friendly!

We ordered our food, sat at the bar by the stove, and talked to everyone working in the kitchen. They laughed at my method for attacking my beef ribs, yet they also assured me that my fingers were the only appropriate utensils. But did everyone wear their BBQ sauce on their face like I did?

I ate and ate and ate. My stomach never told me, "I'm full." So I ate my whole plate of beef ribs, yams, and collard greens. I ate everything. BBQ sauce threatened to encroach my hairline and covered my hands, so I was a mess. And I was in pain! I was so full because I also drank my industrial sized ice tea. Don't order the large drink. It's too big.

It's a steep price they charge for the plate of food ($20), but you receive a lot of food. Ladies, plan on splitting your meal with someone. Also, be prepared because they only accept cash.

Biking the District

Are you afraid of biking in the city? I was.

With all of the cars zooming by, I figured that I surely would get hit. Ouchie! Or maybe someone would open a car door just in time for me to slam into it, summersault over the it, and land on my back. Seriously, I've imagined and assumed all of these worst case scenarios and more. But my friend convinced me that riding in the city is not scary and is really fun.

Enjoying the full moon this past weekend, my friend and I rode our bikes through the city. Where we began our bike ride is enough to make most people slap their forehead with their palm.

After the sun set, we decided riding along the Rock Creek Parkway was the best route. Did I mention that it was already after dark?

"Rock Creek Parkway?" I asked.


"Yeah. What's wrong with that?"


"Well, I grew up around here. That's where girls go to get raped. I didn't think women ever jogged in the Rock Creek Park anymore," I explained.


"Well, you'll be riding a bike. Secondly, you won't be where any women get raped."


So, against my better judgement, I thoroughly enjoyed myself!

We biked from Columbia Heights, through the Rock Creek Parkway, cut over in front of the Kennedy Center beside the Potomac, then I gave my friend a short history lesson and guided tour of the monuments. Lit up at night, they are so beautiful!

After attempting a few pictures on my phone, we were off to dinner. We rode down Constitution and then shot up 13th Street to U St. There we devoured some delicious soul food.

If you are afraid of biking the city, don't be. Trust me! It's even faster than a car in some cases! It's a fun date idea too!