Today, I stole ten minutes out of my work day to bask in the light and air. Most days I walk across campus from my office to the building where our mail is delivered, gather the mail from the wire basket where it lands after being sorted, and then turn around and head back to my desk. Round trip, it takes about half an hour with no dawdling. But today, I felt compelled to snag a couple minutes for myself. I stretched out on a marble bench, half shaded by an oak tree and relaxed. The mail balanced on my belly, I could feel the cold stone pressing into my back, and few complaining stomach muscles, sore from the previous night’s pilates class. A few leaves on the tree above me were starting to turn from summer green to fall brown, and I know soon, the browns and reds will take charge, leading the tree into it’s winter configuration. But for now there is green. I watched the branches stretch in the breeze, and as two squirrels played tag on the slender upper limbs. I listened at the bell tolled three o’clock and for a second I was 18 and in Walla Walla, so similar is this clock toward to the one at my own college. Eight years passed in ten seconds and it was time to go back to work. I lifted myself off the bench, getting a surprised look from a guy set up with a laptop a couple of benches away, and walked back to my office.

Right now, at this very minute, I’m sitting at my desk, eating a salad I made last night while talking to my cousin Melissa, the cell phone balanced uncomfortably between my right ear and shoulder. It’s a good salad, romaine lettuce with tomatoes, feta cheese, red onions and cucumber. And a lemon-honey salad dressing I made myself (I have a salad dressing gift. It will take me far).

I come from a family of salad eaters. When my mom was growing up, in her suburban Philadelphia, atheist/Jewish family, there was a salad on the table every night. Except Thursdays, that was the maid’s night off (the fact that my mom grew up with a maid blew my mind for most of my childhood. But that’s another story, for another day), and then they would go to Horn and Hardart’s. So what if the salad was mostly iceberg lettuce and pale pink tomatoes, it was salad at a time when most of the country was getting the bulk of their vegetable intake from a can. Part of the motivation behind the salad was my grandmother’s omnipresent diet (she spent 50 years dieting, had a stroke in her late 70’s and spent her last 10 years eating caramel candies and spare ribs), but hey, at least it got some roughage into her family’s diet.

They were eating salads on the other side of the family tree as well. When my dad was born, the youngest of three boys, his family lived on a farm outside of Alexandria, VA (land that has since been swallowed into the suburbs). I’ve been told that there was a pretty intense vegetable garden on their property in those days, the bounty of which regularly made it to the table in one form or another. My grandma Bunny’s salads were a little greener and a little closer to the soil than those my mom was eating.

I grew up eating salads my mom’s salads. They carried traces of her salad heritage, but were more directly influenced by the healthy foods movement of the 1970’s, with sprouts, corn, beans and wheels of unpeeled carrot. In many families, you can trace their unique history, growth and change through the food. In my family I choose to mark it through salads. I time travel via the stained index card that carries Bunny’s recipe for spinach salad with bacon and mushrooms, through sprouts and yes, even through iceburg lettuce and pink tomatoes. Someday, may my future children find connection through romaine lettuce with honey-lemon vinaigrette.

I just got off the phone with my cousin Melissa, after spending an hour and fifteen minutes catching up on the family gossip. The big news is that her brother Mike was featured in the LA Times on August 28th (so I’m a little behind in the family news) as a young Hollywood writer with potential. And Mike and his brother Wil have sold the option on a script they wrote years ago to the Disney channel. Just in time for Wil’s 30th birthday.

To quote Melissa, “The Fox boys have had a good couple of weeks.”

Yesterday, I got home from around 6:15 pm, after spending some time with a friend who is going through a sad break up. I felt a little tired and a little restless. I thought about going for a run, but my foot was still a little tender from last week’s spraining incident, and I didn’t want to push it. But I had an urge to be out, so I walked onto the sidewalk, to take some pictures of buildings for the Philly Metroblog “Where are we?” contest and to wander around my city.

I used to do this all the time, just head out with no destination and see where my whims and the streetlights would take me. I headed down Chestnut Street, noticing the details of the buildings more intensely than usual, trying to find interesting things to take pictures of. Dusk was coming on, so my first few pictures came out bright and lit with those slanty, warm rays of sun that dash through the buildings before slipping away to make room for the evening, but the rest are kind of dark and shockingly morose.

I meandered for an hour, not engaging but observing, enjoying Center City on what is probably one of the last few warm Sunday evenings of the year. I found myself walking down Camac, a little alley that is meticulously neat and still paved with cobblestones. There, on Camac, is the Philadelphia Sketch Club, an institution that my paternal grandmother (Bunny) belonged to in her youth. She was an artist, and would take the train into town from her parents’ home in Germantown to meet her friends to draw, to chat, and then to walk around to the corner to drink tea out of glasses in silver holders at the Russian Inn. My maternal great-grandmother had started the Russian Inn in 1919, as a means of supporting her family after her husband (a violinist in the Philadelphia Orchestra) died from the flu. She died several years later, leaving the Inn and three young children behind. Her sister took over the Inn, while her husband’s sister took over the children. The sister, my great-aunt Sue, ran the Inn with a deeply instilled sense of drama (1233 Locust Street) until 1968. (Over the desk where I sit writing this hangs the original sign that swung from hooks over the front door of the Inn). At the time that Bunny was sitting with her artist friends, drinking in the sweet tea and the bohemia of the Inn, my maternal grandmother was the cashier at the restaurant. These two young women, both single and childless at the time, who spoke to each other in the polite, distant words required of a cash transaction, had no idea that their paths would cross again, intimately and deeply, 35 years later.

I stood for a while on Camac, soaking in memories and experiences that I did not live but have imagined with my heart and mind, and then headed home. I approached Rittenhouse Square, and from a distance, recognized a shape. It was my friend Matt, who I worked with at my last job. I always enjoy running into people, because I take it as a sign that I am on the right track, at the correct place at the perfect moment, to be granted the gift of a little sychronicity. Plus it was just fun to see him and catch up a little.

After that it was home and into bed. Pretty much, a perfect evening.

About half an hour ago, my cell phone started ringing just as my supervisor walked into my office. As I reached into my bag to switch it off, I noticed that the caller was my sister. It pained me not to answer the call, because my sister rarely calls me just for kicks, but I had to give my attention to work at that minute. I got distracted from the call with work (shocking, I know), and only just now remembered to listen to the message. It said,

Hi Meece. I’m downtown (Portland) and being downtown makes me think of Philadelphia, and Philadelphia makes me think of you, so I thought I’d call and say I love you a bunch and that I miss you. Okay, bye.

My sister loves me and felt the urge to call me and tell me. It’s amazing that that’s all it takes to turn an average day into a great one.

(Hey Rainy, I love you too!)

Friday afternoon, I left work with a plan. I was going to go home, change clothes, eat dinner and then ride my bike to the movies. Alone.

This is not new for me. I’ve always been a fan of going off and doing things by myself, whether it be walking around the city, buying groceries at Reading Terminal, hitting a thriftstore, or sitting in a coffeeshop reading. I like being independent, and I don’t like feeling like my range of activities are limited by the fact that I’m the only one doing them. But sometimes, even I have a bit of a hard time going to the movies alone of a Friday night. In our culture, it is a night to be social, to be with friends if you aren’t with a romantic or possibly romantic partner.

I once had a friend tell me that I had no mystery, that I was so totally open that I rendered myself unappealing. I think that being out in the world by myself, without anyone to engage or interact with, lends me a sense of mystery, at least for the time that I’m out there by myself. (Besides, I actually think that whole mystery thing is a load of crap, as my mom said when I told her this comment, “Mystery is just another way of saying neurotic.” I’m not looking for mystery or to present mystery to others, the world is complex enough without veiling yourself. I am open, I look for it in others and I’m not going to change).

The movie was cute (okay, so I broke down and saw “Just Like Heaven.” What can I say, I have a thing for Mark Ruffalo), but the evening as a whole was really nice. I have to say, it was the best date I had in a while.

None of the glasses in my kitchen cabinet match any more than two other glasses in said cabinet. The mugs too. I’ve done this on purpose. There is an order in which they must return to the cabinet, or they won’t all fit. I’m a little compulsive when it comes to loading the dishwasher, in my head there is a specific location for each dirty dish, and they must go where they belong. I believe I got this from my mother, who can fit more into a dishwasher than any other person I know.

I’m a closet FLY Lady fan. If you don’t know who FLY Lady is, you must go check out her late 90’s website. It’s all about loving yourself and your family by taking better care of yourself and your home. The intention is good, and she has helped lots of people, but the tone of her writing and the testimonials that her fans send in are schmaltzy and very middle America. FLY stands for Finally Loving Yourself, a concept I believe in, and yet am still turned off the level of sincerity with which FLY Lady and her people approach housecleaning.

For the ten minutes or so before I fall asleep each night, I snuggle with my beloved baby blanket, which isn’t even my original baby blanket, it’s a replacement that I bought at the thriftstore when I was 12, when the original finally disintegrated. My extended family used to joke when I was about 7 years old that I was going to take my blankie to college with me. I did. The appeal of the blankie, for me, rests in the acrylic satin with which the edges are bound. From the time I was young I would take this binding between two fingers (or my lips if the fingers were busy) and rub it back and forth. I called this practice “ribboning” (very original, I know) and to this day, I find it to be one of the most calming activities on the planet. The reason I kick the blankie out of bed at night is that I find the ribbon so tantalizing, that I my fingers keep reaching for it if it is still in bed with me. During the time my ex-boyfriend and I lived together, he came to accept the blankie.

When the books on the shelf across from my bed are uneven, I will lay there looking at them, willing them to move into a different configuration. My mind will move them over and over again, until I’m forced to get up out of bed and fix them.

I used to be addicted to “It’s a Miracle.” It’s a relatively cheesy show, with a more intense Christian bent than I typically can handle, on PAX, once hosted by Richard Thomas and now hosted by Roma Downy. I watched it a lot with my mom the six months I lived with my parents between college and moving to Philly. We would sing the theme song together every night at 11 pm, along with the show.

In the 4th grade, when I spent the night at my best friend Emily’s house, we would pretend to make our Barbie and Ken dolls have sex with each other. I never really liked Barbie and Ken, except for this purpose.

When I was a junior in high school, I asked a guy I liked to go to the prom with me, only I was so shy and embarrassed (what’s weird is that I’m not actually that shy), that I couldn’t help pin his boutonniere on, I hardly danced with him, and after the dance was over, I abandoned him at an after party (I was the driver that night) to go hang out with my friends. We haven’t spoke since.

I was kissed for the first time on stage, during a rehearsal of Bye Bye Birdie (I was Kim), when I was 12 years old, at fat camp. I was pretty certain, even then, that the guy I was kissing was gay. We were instructed to count “one-one hundred, two-one hundred, three”–all the way up to six, before we could break contact. Oddly enough, Lori Beth Denberg from the Nickelodeon show “All That” was also in this production.

I could go on and on, but just as I felt compelled to write this, I also now feel compelled to end it.

I woke up this morning to a report on Morning Edition about how FEMA officials were duly warned about the potential for disaster that Katrina posed. And how in the face of this news, they neglected to act.

Leo Bosner, an emergency management specialist at FEMA headquarters in Washington, D.C., is in charge of the unit that alerts officials of impending crises and manages the response. As early as Friday, Aug. 26, Bosner knew that Katrina could turn into a major emergency.

In daily e-mails — known as National Situation Updates — sent to Chertoff, Brown and others in the days before Katrina made landfall in the Gulf Coast, Bosner warned of its growing strength — and of the particular danger the hurricane posed to New Orleans, much of which lies below sea level.

But Bosner says FEMA failed to organize the massive mobilization of National Guard troops and evacuation buses needed for a quick and effective relief response when Katrina struck. He says he and his colleagues at FEMA’s D.C. headquarters were shocked by the lack of response.

You can read these National Situation Updates on the page for this article here.

I’ve been thinking a lot about our country’s response to Katrina. As a people, we’ve been outraged and horrified, as we’ve watched our fellow Americans warehoused in a sports area, watched them drown and watched them dehumanized. The whole time, our government has looked at the situation like a dog looks at it’s ass when it farts. You know, with that expression that says, “Where’d that come from? Who me? I didn’t do that!”

Hearing that story on Morning Edition reintensified my feeling of frustration with our government and the way this country functions. Have our leaders become so insulated by their fatty layers of false power that they really thought they could let a city of people drown without consequence?

I’m hoping that out of all this destruction, a little change will be wrought. A girl can only dream.

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Arch 3, originally uploaded by Marusula.

I took this on Sunday. It looks bigger in the picture than it actually is. It’s a relatively small structure over behind the art museum, in the section that hasn’t been cleaned up yet.

As I boarded the trolley this morning, I noticed a cluster of people standing around the back doors. I sat down in my usual seat (a single, across from the doors) and realized what was happening. A woman’s bag was caught, trapped between the door and the metal handrail. She was outside the trolley, and three people were crouched around the bag, tugging and yanking, trying to wrest it free from grasp of the trolley. Then, a man who had been watching, stood up, grabbed the bag and pulled upwards. It passed the top of the handrail and was free. The woman took her bag and everyone involved returned to their seats, their commuting masks back firmly in place, like nothing had happened at all.

It’s gotten me thinking a lot about alternative solutions. About stepping back and examining the situation before acting. About how a little calm perspective can resolve difficult scenarios better than force.

Quite a lesson for a morning trolley ride.