Giving and Volunteering



Far Rockaway, NY: "U Loot. We Shoot"!

This weekend I volunteered for the disaster recovery of Sandy, and I’ll be brutally honest (when am I not): I did it because I felt survivor’s guilt, I wanted to see what devastation looked like other than on TV and yes, I wanted to help as much as I could.  The bottom line is: why you volunteer is irrelevant as long as you do.  

 

Spending a waaaay long time in various buses to and from the Far Rockaway’s I had two very interesting conversations about disasters, giving and cultural differences.

Sandy - The Perfect Storm 2012





Tag! You're it.

A perfect storm, first 1991 and now 21 years later… I understand the semantic description of a perfect storm – which is when different weather systems, geographical and thermal elements coincide to make a big storm bigger; and bigger is apparently perfect – we are in America after all. But I do not entirely understand the technically of it. I do know that we are in a low pressure system. What I don’t understand is why my building’s hot water boiler doesn’t work because it is a low pressure system. We also have our gas stove not working properly – for the same reason: low air pressure…? I need to revisit my middle school text books. There was a time where we learned all of this ‘stuff’.

The perfect storm to me is being nervous about water leakage (anybody say Hurricane Irene 2011?), busted windows (neighboring idiots who leave their patio furniture on the balcony) and fear of losing power (I’m diligently, constantly charging everything and anything). It also means many hard boiled eggs in the fridge, lots of water and even more wine in the house.

Doping and the End of an Era

Remember, cheating as a kid, or that little white lie, or the half-truth or just leaving something out? We all have done it and will do it again unless you’re a saint and if you are and are reading this blog, please do introduce yourself – I’d be honored to know you.  

 

But back to the rest of us; as the saying goes (bible I think): “he who is innocent cast the first stone”. I don’t want to throw the first stone, but as it is I’m a bit late anyway to the stoning of Lance Armstrong, but never the less let me throw my pebble too.

Aunting

I’m aunting, starting Monday – for 11 straight days.  My sister is giving me her most prized possession on temporary loan, arriving as an unaccompanied minor on Swiss flight LX014 on Monday at JFK.  Then, for the first time in my live, I will be in charge of something (somebody, sorry) more complex than my plants – the only living thing I own.  Although I have quite a few of them (plants), but I think somehow it does not compare. 

 

My friend Silvia cautioned me today: “you better not break him”. In my head I added: “or lose him”. The pressure is on: he’s also the only grandchild. Imagine I’d lose him in the subway or in a shuffle in Times Square, or a bike rider ran him over, or a truck struck him crossing the street. I’m stressed. 

When Your Computer Crashes (Yes, a PC)

Yes indeed – it did; and spectacularly so. It took my remote IT person and me over an hour to get him logged on, it was so infected.  But thankfully we have a cloud and everything’s backed up, but for the lovely document I was working on, which, you guessed it, was a blog entry. 

 

Some extensive research will need to be duplicated; some brilliant thoughts will need to be re-thought. But today where the actual machine is quasi irrelevant, crashes are not the drama they used to be.  Anybody who saves documents ONLY on their machine deserves a slap upside the head (you know who you are and you know that I know). Loosing data today should be a thing of the past. 

It must be New York

After spending nearly two months in Switzerland and a big amount of that time outdoors I saw ducks with ducklings, a 20 head herd of red deer, marmots, an ibex and even a mountain goat with a baby, but it took coming home to New York to see – on my first day – during a ride in Central Park a presumptive relative of Pale Male (our famous New York red-tailed hawk) descend from the sky and attack a unsuspecting pigeon (we call those flying rats). 

 

I’ve seen plenty of predatory behavior in New York, but this must have been the most brazen one apart from the shootout between two cars careening through the lower east side I witnessed two decades ago.

 

The crazy thing is: it felt like a home-coming.  I love my native country, I love the wonderful vacations it affords me and I love coming back to New York, to its amazing energy.  It’s not a feeling I can describe and I certainly am a peace-loving person and I HATE noise, but there’s something about New York that still holds my attention two decades after arriving and the hawk’s attempt for a mid-morning snack fits that profile.  It’s good to be home.

New York's Pale Male

Context - Part 2

(In case you were wondering: no, you did not miss out on part 1 – I just thought I’d jump to part 2, because part 1 takes a lot of deep thoughts and I’m not done sorting them out yet as I’m busy with my life and having a good time)…

 

My mother and I visited the Jeff Koons exhibit at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland this week. Two years ago we had the privilege of visiting Koons’ studio on the west side of Manhattan, thanks to an artist friend of mine who works there.  Our trip to Basel was a great full circle experience to our studio visit.