Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from September, 2014

Take Your Daughter to Work

My dad is a photographer. Nowadays he shoots mostly digital, but when I was a kid he used black and white film and printed the photos in our kitchen. Looking back on that time, I remember feeling excited on the nights he would set up this makeshift darkroom, like there was a wild adventure about to happen inside my little Manhattan apartment. He would hang thick, black curtains over the kitchen door and windows and a long clotheslines across the center of the room to hang his photos on while they were drying. The chemicals were poured into red and orange trays. Usually, I was asleep for all of this; but every so often, for reasons I do not remember, I was allowed to stay up and join him in that Halloween-like room that smelled strongly of photo chemicals and looked nothing at all like my kitchen. I would watch, wide-eyed, as blank pieces of photo paper turned into pictures. Sometimes he would even let me swish them around in the tray prior to hanging them.  Before printing, my dad wo

New Belts for All!

When you run a dojo, there are a lot of things you have to think about. What classes you are going to offer. How much you are going to charge for tuition. What to do about that slowly leaking pipe that is directly above the mens changing room. (Seriously, can someone come and fix that!) What color gis should everyone wear.  And if your students wear gis, they probably wear belts. And if they wear belts, you are probably going to have to figure out how and when to give them said belts. Which means some kind of promotion.  I have promotion on my mind right now. We just planned a big kids one at our dojo for early October. In mid October, our style promotes black belts, for which we currently have 4 candidates. My BJJ school is promoting students tomorrow. All of that adds up to a lot of pieces of colored cloth. There are many different ways to do belt promotions, and since I have been involved in multiple arts with gis over the years, I have witnessed a bunch of them. The promotion

Lincoln Tunnel

A little over a week ago we went to the NY Renaissance Faire. (Yes I insist on spelling it that way. Their website spells it that way. It is correct. Lofty, obnoxiously correct.) We had a great time watching knife throwing and jousting, eating overpriced fried foods, and enjoying the scripted antics of people dressed up like Shakespeare. On the way home, I did what I always do on car trips, obsessively checked Google maps for the most efficient, traffic-free route home.  There are many ways to commute from Tuxedo Park, NY to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. All of them involve a bridge or tunnel of some sort, most of them through the fine state of New Jersey. Since I am a tad claustrophobic, if given a choice, I would always prefer a bridge. If it is New Jersey, I would prefer anything but the Lincoln Tunnel. Why such prejudice you ask? What difference does it make?  It doesn't really. Only to me. I have some weird travel quirks. In case you have never had the pleasure of this particu