Oh Little Town of Hoboken

12230 Steps

Pat, Charlie, Sean and Peter get through customs.

The festive season continues with my first trip to New Jersey. Went with friends to Frank and Teddy's Christmas party in Hoboken. What a really nice town. Parts reminded me of Noe Valley in San Francisco, parts Ugly Betty, parts Europe. All blended with that red & white checkered table cloth Frank Sinatra/Billy Joel vibe. Does that give you a clear image or just make you tilt your head like a dog and go "Huh?"

It was so nice to get out of work and go somewhere right after. (Like that is new for me?!). AGAIN I met a lot of nice people and had a great time. The food was great and Frank outdid himself in decorating the place. I had my camera in my pocket and never took pictures inside for some reason. Shame.

Back to Manhattan. It was raining. Charlie and I took the subway uptown. Turns out he works in the animation business and knows people I know from my past. When will this small world end? Never, I hope.

I woke up at 8am and really wanted to sleep in. But I was thinking of coffee and TO DO lists and the world outside so I got my carcass upright. When I was downstairs I looked at the clocks and it was 7:20am. But my alarm clock says 8am? NOW I realize why I was getting into the office so early and quickly this week - my clock was set ahead 40 minutes and I never noticed. I just thought the train was really fast!!!!

Today I am going to have my first New York haircut. Last time was at the Mexican barber in LA with the straight razor. Loved that place. And I am going to get toothpaste and shoelaces. This is the kind of day that I love. Just going to enjoy it.

Mac Me Happy, Won't You?

7233 Steps

I am convinced I need a Mac in order to be happy. Where is that coming from? Excellent marketing? Low self-esteem? Low RAM? Hey, now that I am a semi-professional blogger, I need to be ON THE GO! I need to be able to blog in the flash of a pan of a moment's notice. If someone drops a gum wrapper on the head of a pigeon who is dead in Union Square Park and then buys an apple and walks away, my readers need to know about it. Now. This, of course, has nothing to do with owning a new laptop. I just want something new and streamlined and pretty. And since that is not my body at the moment, I need a new computer.

"Do I look fat holding this MacBook Pro?"

I remember when I was convinced that a Walkman would make me run more. My parents finally got on board with this logic and got me one. I ran on the track at UCLA with it a few times and that was that. Perhaps Mom and Dad should have included a tape that repeated "Go to grad school, don't move home, follow your dreams now and don't smoke." But that would have been hard to put to music back then.

There was a point when all I wanted in life was a bean bag chair, a hanging fern in a macrame holder, a walking stick that turned into a seat and Earth shoes. IF I had ALL of those attainable items, I would really be happy. Still.

So where does this all lead, grasshoppers? That's right --

GET IT ALL NOW!

Scratch that itch until it is satisfied and/or bleeds. Rationalize, rationalize, rationalize.

Here is a good starter example: "If I get this [Armani suit, Mac, BMW, Piaget watch, etc.] then I am telling myself I care about myself and it is stating to the world "Hey, this guy is serious about caring about himself so he will be better able to care for others and the world he lives in." And that will get you more money, broads/dudes, recognition in the market place, recognition in the market, and just much, much more.

"You can give a man a fish and you have given him a meal OR you can teach him how to edit his fishing trip in Borneo on his MacBook Pro and burn DVDs of it to give to friends and he will have a lifetime of achievement and pleasure and memories."

Until a newer version comes out. And Borneo is no longer cool.

But that will be a while...

Boxing Day

10364 Steps

The Day after Christmas should be a Holiday in the US. I don't want to sound greedy, but no good can come of going back to work the day after Christmas.

This is what it could help to avoid: exhaustion, confusion, bitterness, raccoon eyes, raccoon breath, raccoon coat, shoddy workmanship, disorientation, price tags hanging from one's personage, irritable vowel syndrome.

I am too tired to operate blogging machinery today. Too tired. So I am just going to write crap. Please feel free to take the day off from reading.

Here are some goals for next year:

1. More sleep

2. More water

3. More exercise

4. Less coffee

5. More reading (esp. classics like "Greek Mythology for Dummies")

6. Less computer

7. More veg. eating.

8. Less prepared foods

9. More saying "Good Day to you, kind sir/madam" on the street.

10. More tipping of hat when doing 9

11. More hat purchases for tipping of.

12. More bagpiping

13. More listening to music

14. More feeling okay about not watching TV

15. More meditation.

16. More breathing.

17. More yoga

18. Less ice cream.

************************

Sensible Things I Would Do with Too Much Money:

1. Have weather boxes installed outside my windows so I could click a button and have whatever weather I wanted appear: Heaving, driving rain for reading, snow for Sunday mornings, hail for soup days.

2. Have a car horn that blared "FRANCE!!!! in an American accent every time I honked it. "France, France, France!"

3. Have a guy who would follow me around and photograph me and my friends. Saves having to ask other tourists and show them the right button and then pose and have to walk towards them again to set it all over.

4. Have Dettol flown in from the UK so I could clean my place with it.

5. Have someone cut my hair in my sleep. I hate getting my hair cut.

6. Have someone shave me. Unless s/he was cross with me in any way.

(I hate shaving. And I like not shaving. I think they are two different things. ) I would have my weather boxes set for "foggy then to sun" for this ritual.

7. Have a live-in computer geek/driver/coffee maker/personal-trainer/massage person who darns.

8. Have a Modigliani painting hanging in my kitchen next to the message board.

9. Have all my shoes hand made by Estruscans.

10. Go to all the "Hotdog on A Stick" locations in the US by motorhome and photograph them and journal about the experience for use later in a self-published coffee table book-slash-expose called "Hotdog on a Stick: Cultural Icon or Creepy Lolita-esque Sausage Purveyor?"(working title.)

*****************

Things I Want to Have Less Fear of in 2008:

1. Spice racks

2. Yeast

3. Technology

4. Stunning looking people who say "Dude."

***************

Travels for 2008

1. Quincy, MA

2. Japan

3. The Bronx

************

Work more with in 2008:

1. Fennel

2. Sorrel

3. push pins

4. fresh fish

5. post cards

6. floss

*********

Christmas with the Cohens

10728 Steps

This morning I got up and went downstairs to make coffee and open my presents under the pumpkin. I put on my fave collection of Christmas music and had the moment. I have to say I LOVED all my presents and really more appreciated the art of gift giving, though I really did not participate in it this year. So thank you to those who DID! So I guess, really, I appreciated the art of gift receiving.

I got a groovy scarf, an outdoorsy shirt, homemade epicurean provisions and an amazing knife. This all together suggests I could exist in the wilds of New York alone for quite some time.

I put my new scarf on with my shirt and new jeans and headed out to meet Cheline and Hilary for Chinese food in Chelsea. Only bagel shops, Chinese restaurants and Starbucks are open in New York on Christmas day. Sort of a Will Smith "I Am Legend" vibe, but with Jewish and Chinese people. And me. The Chinese food was delish and we had such a good laugh it was almost painful.

Hilary, Pat and Cheline in Chelsea on Christmas Day, 2007

Later Hilary and I went on to Brooklyn to Steve and Nhadine Cohen's house for our Christmas feast. Hilary and Steve went to grad school together. It was a GREAT evening with about 20 people and an all-vegetarian menu of amazing food. Amazing food. I so enjoyed meeting all the people who were wonderful and interesting and really, really friendly. You could tell that Steve and Nhadine are that amazing couple who brings all their friends together. I think theirs is the home you go to when your relationship is falling apart or you just need a cup of tea and a home-cooked tofurkey.

Later Cheline met us with her boyfriend Murph who just flew in from Austin. He made an apple tart that he imported from Texas and it was amazing. Someone else brought a lovely Red Velvet Cake from Georgia. It was just like Christmas on Walton Mountain if Pappa Walton went to Tennessee for a bundt cake and couldn't get back in time for the serving of the traditional red bean paste casserole, but showed up just in time before Mary Ellen was going to make the mistake of her young life.

I have no idea where I was going with all that.

The evening finished off with about the best White Elephant gift giving I have ever been part of. That is that game where you take numbers and the first person picks a gift on the table and the next person can either steal that gift or take a new wrapped gift off the table. I was #5 in line and picked what was to be the MOST STOLEN gift of the evening: "Heroes of the Torah" glasses.

There were two in the set that I had and I loved them. But it was not meant to be as they were promptly stolen away.

Hilary #2 gets posession... briefly

This game went on forever when I finally had my window to reclaim what was rightfully mine, but then I was to lose it all again when Steve suggested a King Solomon-type deal where we would each take a Rabbi and walk away. I could either have one or lose it all for a fleece hat, gloves and scarf set. In white. I went for it and went home with Rabbi Goldberg.


Steve and I learn the true meaning of Christmas by splitting Rabbis.


All in all a wonderful Christmas.

Not a Preacher Was Slurring...

A Squirrel Eating Red Berries outside the Met. (bad touch-up job by me.)

19325 Steps

Christmas Eve 2007.

Though I am far from home, away from family, and orphaned by my parents, I managed to keep alive all of our favorite Christmas Eve traditions: I got up, did an Excel spread sheet of all the possible contacts I have for work, walked with a friend to Grant's Tomb (He is still right there next to the missus), stopped in to hear the choir sing divinely at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (Do you know they are doing refurbishments on that church and the actual initial building has never been finished? That means parts have gone into disrepair before the whole was every completed. Much like life, I suppose.), got a Christmas Eve massage and went home to watch Julie Christie slowly sink into Alzheimer's in "Away from Her."

Blissful.

As a matter of fact it was all kind of okay. I have so loved this season and being here and I did all the Christmasy things I could want to do. I even went to Bach Vespers last night at Holy Trinity Church on Central Park West. Amazingly beautiful. So today was kind of great in its not so Christmas Evieness.

And now to sleep to awaken on Christmas morn and see what Santa has put under the pumpkin.

And to all a rude bite?, a lewd kite?, a "should write"?

Whatta Year 2007/Blog Pauses for Christmas Letter

If I were to graph my 2007 it would start so high and then plummet so low and then plateau and climb and then dip and then soar and then get all squiggly and end climbing, but cautiously, but climbing.

But whatta ride, man.

I started out 2007 coming off a wonderful Christmas with my family in San Francisco by meeting up with Jan, Ashley, Annie and Jenean in Palm Springs for New Years. It was perfectly perfect. Then met a guy at a birthday party at Trader Vics in Beverly Hills. Over by the puu-puu platter. He was a really nice, funny, talented, smart guy and he asked me out. I was starting my year meeting a great guy. (In fact may 2008 start the same!) But we had to wait to go out because I was going to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah to work in the programming office!!! Whatta way to make someone wait! You can't write this stuff (oh, I just did.) It was the most amazing experience and I realized for 12 straight days I was really, really happy. It was a combination of being in air so thin and doing something I really, really loved. I got to introduce filmmakers and their films and go to screenings and parties and meet a bazillion people. I have to stop because I could keep writing about this part.

Leaving for Park City with my Programming colleagues and pals.I am really here!!!With the filmmakers of "Adrift in Manhattan" (hmmm? Foreshadowing?)

Me with Kim and Basil, fellow programming friends.

Got back to California and started dating which for me is like being up on water skis and wondering what you are doing up there since you don't know how to water ski. It was great, but scary and came crashing down into the murky water and was dragged around by the speed boat way too quickly. I thought. But what do I know about water skiing?

Then I got hired to be the Panels Programmer for Outfest Film Festival in LA. This was the best timing as it got me out of my black hole and back to being productive. I worked with great people and got to run my own show at the same time. It was a huge success and I loved every minute of being at that Fest.

The cast of Ugly Betty, one of the panels I produced at Outfest. With my excellent bosses too!Matthew Rhys from "Brothers & Sisters" - another great panel at Outfest 2007!

Then momentum slowed, and I got a call that my pipe band folded. No job, no date, no band. I may as well have bought a dog so you could kick it. But I took trips up to San Francisco to see family and friends, played pipes with pals at the Bohemian Grove, and made a mad trip to Fort Lauderdale, Florida with my pal Brian. (He was in Seattle, I was in Los Angeles, we met up in Florida.) I read my hard-hitting, seminal piece "I HATE LA" at Chi Chi's Word Parlour thanks to being chosen and for the greatness that is my pal and writing teacher, Marilyn, at Writing Pad. (see link on my blog links.) I attended the Caledonian Club of San Francisco Highland Gathering to receive my 25 Year membership pin at the grandstand show with my wonderful brother Sean and lifelong pal, Will. We were presented these pins by our good friend and bandmate, the Chief, John Biggar. Wow. Cool.

Brian and Pat in Florida

At the Bohemian Grove with good friends. I just missed my brother.

Here he is! With Leiyan, Oonagh and wee John. I loved that day with them.

The three Graces on Angel Island. (Amy, Lauren, Jen) Notice the Golden Gate Bridge in the bg if you see past all the beauty!

My niece Claire and my nephew Mitch.

An amazing dinner at Eileen and Rick's in San Francisco.

Cheline and Marjorie mixing it up.

No San Francisco party is complete without whipped cream. Trust me. Me reading on stage at Chi Chi's Word Parlour in Los Angeles

Will, Sean and I after getting our 25 year pins. A lot of history.

Back to LA. Eric and Lana forwarded me an on-line advert for a consultant position at Sundance Channel in New York. What the heck. I applied, wrote to the Sundance Channel folks I met at the beginning of the year at the Festival and got an interview. Then two more interviews and then the job.

I got the offer on 14 September and on 28 September I landed in JFK. Thanks to SO much help by friends in LA and SF I was able to pull this off.

Steve, John and I wrapping and rapping in advance of my move.My Dolce Teresa! Love that woman. I cannot even write words about how much I adore Marian and Eric. With David Dean! He gave me my first "kitchen intervention" and threw away all my crap right in front of my eyes!

Brad and I became friends right before I jumped ship for NYC. So glad we did that.

I really am a Lesbian at heart. Truly.

My Northern Cal crew after a hard day!Two of the many princesses in my life: Claire and Lisa.

Now I live in New York City and love it more than I can describe. As I have said before, every day here feels like a backlot musical to me.

So let's recap: I started in the desert (literally), met a guy, got high, lost a guy, got low, paneled, performed, travelled, got medaled, moved. Wow.

I am blessed with loads of good fortune, wonderful friends and family and a new town. Thank you 2007. And thank you all for being in my life.

I hope you all have a wonderful, healthy and happy 2008.

xo Pat(rick)

I just moved to NEW YORK CITY!!!!
My hoos!My neighborhood.

I miss you Mum and Dad. Thank you. xo Pat