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"inside, we're all seventeen with red lips." - roger angell

why is mcdonalds in charge of telling me which country has won the most olympic medals?  

"walking uptown on seventh avenue south"

it's after work, and that little clock inside my heart that rings only when it has been too long since i've talked to my grandma goes off.  i'm walking a few blocks uptown to go to a specialty food store to buy white chocolate chips, which is the ideal time to touch base with my nintey-two-year-old grandmother.

if you ask my grandma who her favorite of her ten grandchildren is, she will vehemntly protest the question and say that she has no favorite.  if you ask her who of her ten grandchilren call her the most, she will reply without hesitation, "my two boys, julian and ben."

i don't know what happens when ben calls my grandmother, but today when i called she seemed happy to hear from me.  someone had told her that i had recently come down with a cold, and she had a lot of questions about it.  she always answers the questions she asks me about my health herself--always with "i hope you're eating nutritionally."  my grandma was very worried about all the snow that's been falling in new york city.  i grew up down the street from her.

the thing i remember most about my grandmother was when i was bringing a boyfriend home for the first time.  i told her about it over the phone before hand, and she said to me "julian, if this is someone that you love, and they make you happy, that is all that matters.  i'll love him."  she likes to remind us about how much she doesn't like republicans.

my grandma likes to talk about getting old.  she talks about it with an acute morbidness she contorls by virtue of the fact that none of us can really relate.  she talks about how her friends have died.  she refers to her walker as "her pal." every so often, she opens the windows of her town house to air it out so that "it doesn't start to smell like old lady."

midway through our phone conversation, my reception starts to get fuzzy.  i'm thinking, fuck, i'm going to lose her, she's going to get really confused, and when i call her back i'm going to have to spend two minutes explaining to her what happened. my grandmother was born in ninteen twenty-two.  she had to make space in her mind for commercial airlines, world war two, moonwalks, vietnam, aids, computers, microwave macaroni, the internet, and beyonce--all in a single life.  it's okay with me that it will take her a second to understand what happened with the poor cell phone reception, but i'd rather spend those two minutes talking to her about something else.

my phone cuts out.  i immediately call her back and get a busy signal.  i hang up and try again.  busy signal.  busy signal.  busy signal.  she is on the other end, doing the exact samet thing to me.  finally i catch her while her phone is hung up.

"julian? what happened?"  she sounds startled, as if i entered  a room with a mild, impermanent facial deformity.  i tell her that i had poor cell phone reception.  i stop talking and wait to see what questions she is going to have about that.  she replies. "awe, poor julian. he has bad cell phone reception."

it's funny because it feels like she's mocking me.

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this is an actual good idea:  at the beginning of each winter olympics, release six siberian tigers on the top of the olympic mountain.  that way, during the next two weeks, participants run the constant risk of being eaten by a rogue tiger.  i think it would really help raise the stakes of some of the less dangerous events like luge, skeleton, and ski jumping.