I bought four magazines today in preparation for plane travel to and from California: Yoga, Utne Reader, Mother Earth News and Tricycle. I feel both guilty and excited about my purchases. I am a former (recovering?) magazine addict.

I used to be ridiculously obsessed with magazines and my subscriptions included, but were not always limited to: Utne Reader, US News & World Reports, Time, Newsweek, Knitting, Mother Jones, National Geographic, The Smithsonian, Dance, Contact Quarterly and Jane (before it became stupid)—plus a slew of literary, art and design magazines and random zines I would buy intermittently.

Managing to avoid a career in journalism, I have regulated my appetite for mags. I now allow myself the pleasure only at airports and beaches; compartmentalizing my desire. Since I live in a land-locked state and no longer go on tour frequently, my magazine consumption has truly been restricted.

My thoughts are salivatory and my fingertips anticipate flipping those glossy rags, but a rule is a rule and I’m making myself wait until I get to the gate.

Cleveland comedian, and good friend, Micheal Ivy had a week-long gig MC-ing at Pickwick and Frolic in August. I met Ivy when he was a chef, and I was a server, at Parker's New American Bistro. In between making sorbet, chocolate souffles and apple tarts, he would scribble in this tattered notebook he kept at his station. In between spacing out and getting yelled at by the executive chef, he would make fantastic deserts.

At the time, I was a full-time modern dancer and he had dreams of becoming a comedian. So, we'd talk about the difficulties and rewards of a "career" in the performing arts.

He left Parker's to pursue his goals. He started with some contests at the Bassa Vita Lounge, helped to create aone productions, performed at comdedy nights at Rockstar and submitted videos on TBS's comedy website. He has been paying his dues and networking for at least three years. Needless to say I am thrilled for him and impressed by the way he has helped to grow the local comedy scene.

Thanks for the laughs!

I saw this sign on a telephone pole near my house. I suppose it is effective because I went home and Googled Ron Paul.

Garden Update:

Sugar Snap Peas

Bib Lettuce

Broccoli

Carrots

More signs of optimism:


"We spend millions of dollars on health studies, and a huge amount of our time, money, and mental effort on eating right and getting exercise. Yet what really kills us is cars: motor-vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people aged six to thirty-three. . . . We crash our metal boxes into each other and into walls. . . we ignore the death strips that are our roads and highways. If we rejected cars, we would have to walk, and our exercise problem would be over."

-Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth

Signs of life in Tremont:

Human invention is a “sign” of hope and optimism, or at least that people do not totally regret life.

-Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth

On Saturday afternoon I had the pleasure of kayaking (with boyfriend and his canoeing co-workers) the Upper Cuyahoga River. The seven miles downstream on the river to the Camp Hi Livery was placid, and I was reminded how good green smells and how sonorous springtime should be; we were accompanied by bird song, dragonfly buzz and bull-frog blats as we paddled/floated along.

Today, I was in Cleveland walking between Ohio City and Tremont, lamenting the cement-shored-up Cuyahoga of my neighborhood; disbelieving it is even connected to the river I kayaked just a couple of days ago. Walking over the Abbey Avenue Bridge, I stopped to smell the tree blossoms along the hillside leading to the tracks along Train Avenue. I jumped when I saw a pair of eyes looking back at me. At first, I assumed it was just someone hanging out in the trees (for a variety of reasons, none of which I cared to analyze), but I soon realized that they were not human eyes. It was a large doe.

My first reaction was sadness. I was sad for the deer, and her kin, who are eking out an existence along the narrow strip of post-industrial green between the river and the train tracks. My second, and longer-lasting reaction, was hopefulness. The reason I stopped to smell, was the same reason the deer was there. Nature abhors a vacuum. Could the space left by departed industry be slowly filling with good growing things?

I looked into this peaceful animal’s eyes. Despite the drone of traffic, I was transported to the past and potential of our Cuyahoga—the verdant growth, the bird song, the hillside sloping down to the river. She stared at me for about 30 seconds before she turned and went in the other direction.

I went to the Twilight Hike in the Natural Flats and the Shrinking Cities exhibit at SPACES Gallery, but today was the first time I viscerally understood the potential for a “shrinking city” to embrace compactness and to truly become something different. A deer on Abbey Avenue, I had no idea.

I took this picture at the University Circle Rapid Station. The fine print at the bottom reads: "GRAFFITI IS A PUNISHABLE OFFENSE A PUBLIC NUISANCE AND MUST BE ABATED PER PUBLIC CODE 3101"

The weird thing about the sign is that I couldn't read the print until I took a picture of it with my camera and then zoomed in on it. I wasn't sure if the sign (tacked to a bulletin board) was a joke put up by graffiti artists or part of a guerilla campaign cooked up by the city to deter graffiti artists.

The graffiti is one of the few aesthetically pleasing sights on the red line from Tower City to University Circle. Personally, I'd like the city to focus on cleaning up the piles of tires, refrigerators, and blue toxic waste barrels and leave the aerosol artists alone for now.