this week is my birthday...i can't believe i'm 39....

the days are ticking past quickly as i end my 39th year....thursday marks my 39th birthday and the onslaught of the 4th decade for me....i am not exactly sure what that means....never one to really dwell on my birthday, i mean, really, it just happened for me, i really didn't have a lot to do with it....but for someone reason, i have found myself wanting to celebrate it this year....i'm not sure how i'd like to mark it or what i expect to transpire, but somehow, it feels like i should be doing something that makes me feel my age while allowing me to retain my youth....

i guess i'll see what the week holds in store for me....after all i won't light the candles before thursday - nyc fire code may just cause the candles to lay dormant for yet another year.....

i was questioned about my blog name.....

and i thought it was funny, but a little obvious....those of you who know me, know me....what you may see is guarded and often-times called stand-offish...i've even been told i'm aloof....but those that have truly taken the time to know me know that underneath it all, i'm painfully shy, i am generally feeling awkward and have a very difficult time socializing with people i don't know....thus, when you take the time to read this, you get the real me....because underneath it all, i'm painfully aware of being emotionally vulnerable....thus, i'm pretty much naked. see, it's really got nothing to do with what you're wearing or how i'm dressed, it's a deeper and more abstract way of being seen....for who i truly am....

run...run....run....! 50, 000 people chased each other....

from bridge to bridge, and avenue to avenue, up side streets and across town and then by my bedroom windows, around the north loop of harlem, back into the northern end of central park and, phew....finally, to the finish line of the nyc marathon...here's the noise makers and their supporters that kept me awake after a particularly harsh and upsetting episode of insomnia....lucky bastards, as grouchy as i was, at the 21.5 mile mark (note the blue line up the middle of first avenue), they were still able to outrun me.....

the george washington bridge (gwb) is always a sight to behold....

when the sun goes down and the lights come up

the gwb is a beautiful thing to see, especially when you are so close that you can reach out and touch it!....

sitting and waiting, poised for snow and hot cocoa....

mom is safely back for thanksgiving from helping aunt pat and uncle jack down in virginia.

the holidays are fully upon us and once again, the weather is nose diving towards those lower regions of the thermometer and i've hit one of those crucial martha stewart milestones that so many of us measure our lives in....for some folks it's the laying on of hands to create festive and fragrant holiday wreathes from pine boughs and cones, for others it's opening up a hermetically sealed shrink wrap of pre-fab cookie dough to make the entire house seem homey and more enticing than it would otherwise feel in such dreary days....for me, it's back to my basics....let's start with the endeavors that become fiasco and work our way forward, shall we?....

let's see, friday i decided i finally needed, not wanted, but actually needed, to make homemade peanut brittle....that in and of itself should alert the papers and put me right in line with fiasco-ville, right? right! since i bought the christmas treasury cookbooks at night heron out in laramie with mona and mom this summer, i've been waiting, and waiting...and even waiting some more for inspiration to spark me into a kitchen frenzy for something divine and off my beaten path...peanut brittle struck me as that thing....easy enough recipe...except for the part that insisted a labor of love such as making home made brittle would also encompass the hand shelling of the required peanuts....pre-processed in a can wouldn't do....so i sought out and found my own 5 pound bag. peanuts be damned...and damn the peanut shells, i was going to do this and do it right.....

so i did....boil, boil, roiling boil and more boiling, add the peanuts, add the butter and the vanilla....boil some more...must be close to 300 degrees for hardcrack candy right? it drops in to water and makes a little ball with the string on the way down...very elementary in my cooking rudiments...only perhaps my timing and my thermometer were both off....i removed from heat, added the baking soda and stirred thoroughly....then turned to butter my jelly roll trays to pour it into for hardening....when i glanced back over my shoulder the damn science project (as it is henceforth to be known....) was growing all over the friggin' stove....yep....baking soda....inert and active ingrediant all at once...if you don't have the trays pre-greased, you can kiss the stove top goodbye...and about anything else within range of said experiment....drop the trays, butter flying, grab the silicone spatula and beat the beast (with much love of course) back into saucepan submission....that's why they say use a large pan....5 quart saucepan, far too small for the creature to live in when it's really raging to get out....

i debated with pouring it directly on my silpat...but afraid the counter would be un-level and spill boiling and chemical goo into my drawers i went for the pans...great choice....it was hot and stringy and sticky and nutty for hours....

knowing full well i was going to want to try it before hefting it off on others in the coming days, i pried a small corner out for myself....yep....sticky....stringy....gooey and i might add a little delicious too, but over all too stringy and sticky for my liking (and i'm not allowed to have the nuts and who needs the sugar...i'm sweet enough - couldn't you just go diabetic knowing me?) so i decided to place them in the fridge and then flip them out on the silpat and container them for giving...what a brilliant plan...except for the fact i should have sprayed them down with pam instead of the somewhat invisible butter, so when i flipped and smacked my trays, i cracked the brittle...in fact, the warmth re-gooed the non-brittle - brittle and allowed for very slickly brittled nuts to fling about the kitchen with abandon....sticking in every crevice, on every surface and sliding oh so slowly as a science project is bound to do, down the cabinet doors hoping to reach my previously immaculate floors....

you know that brought bob to the window (you all remember bob, my squirrel(s?) from early on in the blog....yep...bob's back...and jonesing to get in for the gooey goodness of my non-brittle-brittle....who knew....?

i took a tupperware to ken's apartment last night after prying it out of the copperclad grasp of my revereware one fingernail at a time....it passed the peanutty-goodness test, but alas, ,even refridgerated it was barely brittle...that said, i think it was ok in the end, since most of it is out of my house, off the walls, deglazed from the floors and scraped from the stove....and what was at ken's was a well dented attempt of sharing....

this moves us to the successful portion of the weekend candy making experience....teaching ken and his friend michael how to create home made molded chocolates so ken can make up fancy little boxes for his client roster as an extra something for the holidays. i think i lost my love of chocolate making somewhere between the last wedding cake with disasterous flower ramifications and the umteenth hundred-thousandth hand rolled, dipped and marked chocolate truffle for someone else's wedding....i used to make candy in my sleep, in fact i used to love the intamcy and intricacy of hand painting each petal of a floral mold or each figure on a chess set, creating the fondants and cream fillings used to be an adventure, each taste something to wonder over and compare with the prior batches....but now, that's a million years in the past or so it would seem and i've had to step back and watch with new eyes from a different perspective.

ken can come across as a bit shy when he's not yet mastered something...or so it would seem....he's very much like me in many ways....meticulous but he has such a firm grasp on reality that he is the first to remind everyone to "remember the fun"....which is a good lesson to take away...because when all is said and done, the chocolates were beautifully done for a first go. ken and michael managed to even get down the fine art of inserting flat fillings of almond paste and liquid carmel into the centers without mucking up the fronts or the back of the pieces....ken played the concept of using edible gold leaf on the rosettes he'd poured and quite tastefully accomplished! i ate my fair share of the dark chocolates (life is far too short to be wasted on the other varieties in my opinion)....as ken stated a couple of times "they're so good, they're better than godiva...."

and as i am left to point back out to you ken - you are correct, they are better than godiva...that's because you embraced the moment and kept it fun.....

as i trudge towards birthdays, holidays and post holidays recoil, i am going to start working on stitching a little something to remind myself of that very self-same thought "remember the fun...." truer words to live with may have never been so randomly uttered with greater take away value....for now i'll log off so i can start the next project on which i must stitch....and then when i log in next i'll be ready to bitch about it i'm sure.....

i have experienced the most perfect moment....

the first night of freezing temperatures in nyc and ken invited me over to his really comfy and cozy apartment in hell's kitchen for dinner and to spend the evening....never one to arrive empty handed if i can help it, i grabbed the first bouquet that i came across trying to get from east harlem to that little slice of heaven he calls home....unfortunately for ken, my bouquet was a choice of two, either green beans with almonds or broccali with chedder cheese sauce since birdseye was on sale and i'd just been to the giant pathmark near my apartment....

when i walked into his home, i was greeted not only with his oh so adorable face, but he had set out a platter of cheeses and bread and crackers, as well as a really delicious bottle of cabernet sauvignon....we snacked and chatted and suddenly it dawned on me that i heard crackling and popping from the far end of the apartment -- he had laid the first fire of the winter season in his fireplace so i asked if we could sit with our wine in front of the fire...nothing makes me more centered and aware of everything around me than a nice home made fire....

as we lay on the couch, slouching ever so slightly further and further into it's generous and very cushy depths, ken asked if it was ok that he lay with his head almost on my lap....who could turn down a cautious questionning of said nature....so as he lay with his hair wrapped in my fingers and his breathing growing so steady and even, deep and sonorous, like the weltering flames of his fire in front of me, i could hardly help but be overtaken by a sense of such complete and utter contentment that it may have even bordered on rapture....the thing was, with ken's head on my lap and my hand playing along his arm and in his thick beautiful hair, i was so lost in my own thoughts that i didn't realize until many minutes later that as he was drifting in and out of a comfortable and unfettered slumber, i was actually crying....

that's when it struck me....just how idyllic and perfect that very self-same moment in time was for me....somehow it held everything i've ever wanted and all the things i've never had or couldn't find in a lifetime that must have been spent searching....as my tears slowly dried into blotches on either side of my face, i was forced to move and shift causing ken to slowly focus on being awake with me and i just had to tell him how i was moved by that immense burden of life being relieved in his home, nay, in his presence...astoundingly, as i tried to minimize my words and just get the exact sentiment of all i was feeling without all the adjectives, i not only realized that maybe i was crying not because i'd never had that moment before or even that i'd searched for it in vain, but instead, i think i have finally realized that my life should have been filled with many moments such as that one and somehow, sharing that one perfect moment, in solitude and faltering shadows of light, with ken, even as he slept, i knew i had missed out on so much of life's beauty and that i really want to be a part of something that allows me to see moments such as this, and feel emotions such as these....but to me the most beautiful thing was when i finally finished explaining in as few words as i was able, ken said simply, "i know, i was in that same place with you."

now that is a moment i will always remember, and whether another perfect moment ever comes along in this lifetime, it will not matter, for i've had one, and if you've had just one perfect moment with such clandestine beauty and such unadultered pretense in a lifetime, you know that the self same single moment is enough to sustain a soul until the end of all time....

the heart is a lonely hunter....

is that the title of a book from oprah's book club?

if so, sue me....it sure as heck is way i've been feeling oh so often as of late....

have you ever noticed that your heart can hold so much love, and because of all the love it knows itself to hold, it never worries one single iota about having the love it gives returned in kind?

the head on the other hand, much less forgiving and far more demanding....the heart may be a lonely hunter, but the head is meant to hunt solo, with a quiver full of poison darts and words that it can sling like arrows to any unsuspecting target....the head will stealthily turn inward and hide any brain that might have been visible, cloaking the soul with reason, and coating the outside edge of reality with expectecations....

my head knows not to follow my heart, and my heart seldom follows my head...as if the intelligence one has gathered could foil the the fool-hearty encounters anticipated by the other.....

it leaves me confused....my own confusion....and it leaves me pondering why, what, when and wherefore all things in my life are from yet alone their final trajectory....i have not had need of love, nor have i had want to expect anything from a single soul, for as far back as i'm able to recall...and suddenly, i'm finding myself right there in the thick of wishing, always hoping and subtly wanting what i know i shouldn't, nay, what i mustn't wait for....what animal ever trapped by another laying in wait has grown to love it's captor? but then, what animal, forever unloved and never without hope of said affection would ever show mercy upon it's captive if it were not for the unfettered and undeclared need for love in return?...

i have been shown love lately. i am sure i've put out some love myself...heck, i've been putting love out there for years, as weak and as mired as that love has always been in my own self-effacing need for approval....now it is different to me, for me, with me....i need love, yes, i do....and i deserve love as well, every human being, good, bad or indifferent does, but lately, i'm feeling the kind of love that puts my world at great peace and allows for wonderful things to root and begin to flourish....i am never certain when i love something or someone, that the love will ever be noticed, yet alone acknowledged or returned....it happened once, so long ago, that i have always felt that perhaps it's a one time event in any person's life (or atleast in this person's life...)but with that said, my expectations continue to remain low, perhaps in self preservation, but my emotion continues to grow unabated...and somehow, for me, this is a wonderful and necessary thing to know....

having known great love, and having lived through great loss, i live daily with great pain and often with great disappointment, yet now, i'm living....i don't care to measure the loss, i am not dwelling on the disappointment, the pain is part of the process and i can say with steadfast resolve that love, the age old folly of mankind, the thing that brings us to tears, both of joy and of sorrow....oh love, love which costs not a cent, but can cost a body it's heart and soul, love has not changed....i am no more, nor any less of the man i was when i thought love was something that everything could have...and here i am, thankful to the core that i am the lucky man with another chance to feel my soul open like a flower, showered with kind words and fond deeds, affection, for all the world to see so easily....my soul, my heart, my head....all going in different directions....all seeking something so vastly and eternally different, yet all bringing me to the same place deep within myself...a place few have seen, or been invited to witness, yet, a place that must be evident in my speech, in my step, in my laugh and more than anywhere, in my self....

my heart continues to pound relentlessly within my chest for each passing touch of a hand, hoping it is one of many the future will provide....and my head keeps telling me to let it go and enjoy the moment, for, you truly never know if or when love may pass your way again....the moment is there to cherish....the future is only there to instill worry...so i live in my moment....and my future...my future does not need a plan....

if i found a wistful unicorn....

if my turtle caught the croup, and really wanted chicken soup, would you bring it?

if my freckle decided yesterday to become a dimple anyway, would you notice it?

if said that i would dance, then fell off the stage and tore my pants, would you mend them?

if i ran backwards up a tree, tumbled down and skinned my knee, would you bandage it?

if i sang a song for you, as hard as that would be to do, would listen?

if my cricket wouldn't chirp, but stayed real still and out of work, would you watch with me?

if i found a wistful unicorn, would you pet it?

if any of these things you'd do, i know i'd never have to say to you.....