birds

A tryptophan-laced Quote-n-Meme-fest

aprilswopegreene 4 Comments

According to some possibly-reliable source I just encountered on the internet, “tryptophan [the notorious turkey-derived soporific] is an essential amino acid needed for growth and development, producing niacin and creating serotonin in the body… Lots of other foods contain as much or more tryptophan as turkey, and do not cause drowsiness.”

This is especially good news given that I’m a longtime vegetarian and haven’t cracked into a T-Day turkey since high school. Conveniently, tryptophan-heavy pumpkin seeds, soybeans, and lentils are all staples of my everyday diet already. Niacin, here we come!

All this talk of chemically-induced healthy sleep and stable moods is leading up to something other than a series of funny turkey memes, though…

Hillary Clinton turkey gif

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Albeit there will be those, too.

Mostly, I wanted to leave you for the upcoming holiday weekend with three quotations I’ve read or heard in the past couple of weeks that have helped me envision the path forward after this upending presidential election.

First, from ioby, a revolutionary platform for starting and supporting neighborhood-based projects (and one of my favorite clients):

We believe that getting to know our neighbors, and working together to solve problems, is a transformative act of healing.

We need to remind ourselves that democracy is not just about voting and protesting; democracy is also giving, leading, doing, and inviting others to participate in building the social and physical fabric of our society. The neighbor-led change we support every day is civic engagement. If we work together, we can — and will — heal and shape the future of our communities.

Older man with turkey hat gif

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Next is the venerable Malcolm Gladwell, with his podcast Revisionist History. I listened to episode 10—”The Satire Paradox“—at the gym today and enjoyed its parting shot:

Nothing of consequence gets accomplished without courage.

[Speaking to the stories in the first 10 episodes of the series:] You can’t educate the poor without making difficult choices, without giving up some portion of your own privilege. You can’t be a great basketball player without being willing to look stupid. You can’t heal your church without sacrificing your own career. You can’t even drive a car properly unless you’re willing to acknowledge that you sometimes make mistakes: stupid, involuntary, dumb mistakes.

The path to a better world is hard. Is that depressing? I don’t think so. I think what’s depressing is when we ignore everything history is trying to tell us.

Psychedelic turkey gif

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And last, a quote -slash elegy for the late, great Leonard Cohen, who I learned over the years to revere, if not always like. This one came to me from my internet buddy Pooja at Life’s Fine Whine:

Leonard Cohen quote

Hope you enjoy the holiday, everyone. See you on the other side.

A reluctant blogger finally gets into blogger-hood

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If you know much at all about me, you know that I’ve never had a Facebook account or an Instagram account. I signed up for Twitter in 2009 so I could join Medium, but I’ve so far tweeted exactly once (to my local NPR morning show host so I could recommend he do a story about the awesome combination washing machine repair and rock collecting shop in my old neighborhood). I have been on Flickr for the past decade, and have somehow posted over 18,000 photos there in that time, but I have also accrued only 18 followers, which says something about how much I care to advertise it. The list goes on thusly.

Galah bird in Onkaparinga, Australia

One from the Flickr archives: 27-year-old me about to receive a finger bite from a gas station owner’s pet Galah bird in Onkaparinga, Australia. That’ll learn me to poke!

All of it to say that as long as blogs have been around (probably 20 years), people close and not so close to me alike have suggested that I start one. Of course I understood the idea (I’m a writer! we have the Internet! therefore, I should write on the internet!), but my reluctances ran several:

1) I’m not particularly techie, and wasn’t particularly interested in learning how to blog from the software standpoint.

2) While I have come to love writing in many genres and spend a lot of my days doing it, my most favorite writing pastimes involve composing personal work for specific audiences (journal entries that only I see, letters and emails for friends…). I didn’t want to feel like this supposedly-fun pursuit was actually work.

3) Conventional wisdom holds that the best blogs are somehow focused—on food, travel, relationships, the world’s largest collection of taxidermied frogs depicted in various everyday life situations*, etc. Since I like to write about all of those things, and many more!, how would I ever imbue my blog with a sense of focus, purpose, and cohesion?

Most of those reasons finally stopped stopping me in January of last year. At that time, I was a half-year in to my new full-time freelance writing life, for which I’d already gone through the learning pains of setting up an entire website (with a lot of help from friends like Claire here!), so the tech thing was no longer so intimidating. I found I was actually enjoying challenging myself to write in different genres, and slowly became more and more curious about how blog writing would compare to the other types I’d recently gotten practice with (including ghostwriting, post-translation polishing, and drafting static pages for websites). Plus I now had a natural focus for my blog: my life as a freelance writer! And since that in itself encompasses a lot of topics, I felt I could justify squishing them all into one blog with “freelancing” as the overarching umbrella.

Blog tags

A screenshot of my blog post tags. Too eclectic? Nah.

Since the start of 2015, I have come to enjoy these weekly diversions from writing blog posts for inspiring nonprofits and newsletters for unique conferences to reflect on the work I’ve recently done and life I’ve recently led.

As a (somehow unexpected) side benefit, I’ve also found myself crossing paths with some awesome fellow bloggers. Here are two I believe are worthy of sharing with you now: they also got roped into the Liebster Award madness recently, and both (to my amazement) took the time to post responses to the 11 funky questions I posed when I nominated them!

Have a look?

  • Nicholas Peart, aka The Slider, a British-born painter, musician, songwriter, poet, filmmaker, photographer, and traveler who wrote some stuff about his time in South Africa that I very much enjoyed.
  • Neil Scheinin, who goes by the handle Yeah, Another Blogger, a fellow self-described dabbler who writes thoughtfully about a range of fun topics, including pizza, beer, and rock music (mmm!).

In response to their responses, I will just say:

  1. Nicholas, one of my favorite popcorn toppings is a solution of garlic, olive oil, and crushed red pepper. Heat that up in a pan while the kernels are popping, then drizzle it over the bowl, sprinkle a bit of salt, and you’re golden!
  2. Neil, regarding the number of seconds by which you’ve been known to extend the three-second rule (“thousands and thousands”), I can only say: NICE WORK.

Thank you both for your camaraderie, and your good writing, in this big old Internet world. Knowing I’m in the company of such excellent dudes makes me a less reluctant blogger every day.

*Okay, Froggyland is a website, not a blog. But I’ve been dying to mention it, so I just shoehorned it in here. Apologies to the purists. (But aren’t you also speechless??)

The Montauk Century: 108 miles, two wheels, no chamois cream

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We did it!

Montauk Century 2016

Sunrise in Babylon

We got up at 2:30 am, smeared peanut butter on bagels outside the Barclay’s Center, boarded a minivan to Babylon, Long Island, and proceeded to ride our bikes 108 miles to the end of the line. It was Saturday, May 21: the Montauk Century 2016.

Known to some nipple balm endorsers who shall remain nameless as “an old man’s ride,” this hundred-ish mile pedal-fest to the tip of Long Island has been happening in some form since 1964 (and I’ll have everyone know we only overheard one conversation that referenced “taking fiber”). Seeing as how I got just about all the physical exertion I can imagine wanting in one day from this experience, I say you can take your longer, hillier, spicier, juvenile delinquent-age rides and go ride them yourself, hot shot.

Signage to make your heart sing, courtesy of legendary organizer Glen Goldstein
Andy and Arthur lookin’ fly at the start

As for Jonathan, Andy, Arthur, and I, we soaked in the sights as we made our way eastward, sights that included:

  • Mansions
  • Potato fields
  • Mother goose and fuzzy baby geese!
  • Signs offering free mulch and mulch at a price
  • Guys in full spandex with beer guts passing us
  • Mansion-dwellers getting their new Lamborghini (or something) delivered off a semi truck whose hubcaps were decked out with six-inch chrome spikes
  • One or more of us belting out Twisted Sister lyrics to keep the energy up

To be honest, much of it is already a blur. The hypnotic effect of spinning mile after mile, enveloped by the twelve-foot-high, super-coiffed hedges of Amagansett, Water Mill, and Southampton turned much of the day into one great green undulation. Even at the 50-mile rest stop, we were getting pretty dopey!

Montauk Century 50 mile rest stop

We’re not even halfway there yet?! Should I laugh or cry…

But when we pedaled through to the finish line—which on this posh ride meant beer, massages, ice cream, and a mobile shower unit—the stiff knees and sore bum readily gave way to excellent new feelings of accomplishment, relief, and the various chemical buzzings that result when you put things like beer and ice cream into your body. Ahh!

Would I do another one? Sure. Would I use the free sample of chamois cream next time? Maybe.

Fly By Night: Duke Riley turns everybody on at the Brooklyn Navy Yard

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“Duke Riley’s Fly By Night brings the rock dove back to the forefront of the New York story once again,” reads the program for the performance we saw last night, “assembling an unprecedented fleet of specially-trained birds that pay homage to the inhabitants of Cob Dock [the largest U.S. Navy pigeon coop, previously located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and now defunct] over 100 years later.”


As they got started, a hush fell on the crowd

Extremely cool artist and “long-time pigeon fancier” Duke Riley is partnering with one of my favorite organizations ever, Creative Time, to enact a fairly thrilling bird-based performance on a semi-secret corner of NYC’s waterfront this spring. Creative Time says:

“Friday through Sunday evenings at dusk, a massive flock of pigeons will elegantly twirl, swoop, and glide above the East River, as Riley orchestrates a series of performances… At the call of a whistle, thousands of birds will emerge from their home in a grand, converted historic boat docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The pigeons will circle above the river as the sun sets over Manhattan, and small leg bands, historically used to carry messages, will be replaced with tiny LED lights, illuminating the sky in a transcendent union of public art and nature.”


The birds’ changing shapes, swoops, and dives were mesmerizing!

One might wonder “why pigeons?”, but then one only need read further into the event program, which was so good that I’ll just quote it verbatim again:

“As the oldest domesticated bird, the rock dove has been part of the human story for thousands of years. …These delicate and talented creatures are deeply loved by the humans who raise them and widely misunderstood by their urban neighbors. … Letter carrier, spy, camera operator, educator, and soldier are just a few of the professions cited on the long resume of this often underestimated bird.”


In the dark, it resembled a giant game of Pong on steroids

The romance of the many points of light, the pigeons’ swirling flight patterns, and the long, almost melancholy whistles of the jumpsuited “conductors” were not lost on the crowd. Most of us kept our seats on the temporary bleachers and craned our necks back to watch the half-hour show, while others reclined on the pavement for a panoramic view. Judging by the general silence and periodic gasps of delight, I think we were pretty much all peacefully entranced.

From any vantage point, it was nice to see NYC’s proverbial “rats with wings” literally cast in an artful and appreciative light. (I’ve never had an intrinsic problem with rats either, come to think of it. Maybe a performance starring them will be next? Paul Jarvis would be proud!)