the important things

This is going to have to be a quick one. It's late, I only got back from work about an hour ago, and we have a big presentation tomorrow morning. My eyes were really blurry today, and I'm sure staring at a computer screen for 12+ hours doesn't help. I'm worried that my eyes may not get much better than this, and I think I am only at about 20/40, if even.

But the high point of my day came at the very end, when my friend surprised me with a really thoughtful little pick-me-up and card:



It's a cooling eye mask, to soothe my dry, red eyes after a long day. Oooh, fun and relaxing! More than that though, the gift and card was a reminder to me that sometimes, some of the most important things in life -- friendship and kindness -- cannot be seen, only felt. Thank you.

it's my life...and it's now or never

Tonight was Bon Jovi's opening night at the all-new Prudential Center in Newark, NJ!! For now, some pix - more details later - now it's time for bed!



Verizon let you text messages that would be displayed on a scrolling ticker... check out this cute message from my favorite little brother:





And here's a special close up of JBJ for my BFF, H-M, who sadly could not make it tonight:



This was my first concert with the new eyes, and I have to say, I wasn't seeing all that much - there were lots of blurry halos and glares. And no, it wasn't the watered-down Budlights and Stellas....!

sesame street in the bronx

Saturday, October 20 was the big mural painting day! As part of the annual NYCares Volunteer Day, hundreds of volunteers take to the schools and parks in the 5 boroughs to clean, paint, garden and just improve the spaces overall. I decided to volunteer my artistic skills to mural painting, and I recruited Anna to help out too. So, Saturday morning - bright and early - Anna and I hopped on a 6 train toward Pelham Bay Park, and settled in for the long ride deep into the Bronx to PS 47x, an elementary school where we would be sketching out the mural for volunteers to paint.




I had already met with Tom & Steve a week earlier, the Principal and Asst Principal, and visited the school to get a sense of what they wanted done. I knew they had already started a Sesame Street mural on the back wall of the school, and wanted to add 2 new characters this year, as well as pull the mural together with a sky, clouds, etc. Tom, the Principal, was this energetic, young-ish guy who actually used to be an Art Director at Print magazine for 6 years until he burned out and left the industry to be an art teacher -- and eventually become the principal of PS 47x. The entire school was filled with fun, cheery characters and wall paintings, and it made me want to contribute even more to the overall creative feel of the school.




So this is how the day unfolded. First, Anna and I scoped out graffiti-tagged spaces on the wall where we would add the new characters, Kermit the Frog and Zoe (note: Zoe is apparently a relative newcomer to the Sesame Street 'hood.)




Then we drew the lifesize characters onto the wall using black charcoal. We also added big, playful clouds and blades of grass to the entire stretch of wall.

Here is Anna's Kermit:


and my Zoe:


By 9:30 AM, the playground was mobbed with ready volunteers, anxious to get painting. They staked out territories where they would paint, and it was actually pretty cool that we were "The Artists" that everyone came to with questions. Anna and I both suffered a little bit of "art director's angst" - where you worry that what you draw will not be accurately re-created by others, but hey, it's a mural, and a community effort, and you have to let go. We jumped in where there were gaps in painters, we re-drew some guidelines where necessary, and directed people overall. We also overheard some people complaining about our designs -- and how the grass was too long, or the clouds were too low... tough critics! But it just goes to show that you can't please everyone.







Ta da! The finished results, by 3 PM Saturday afternoon:








All in all, it was an incredibly rewarding day, and an amazing experience for me. I actually helped create an entire mural in a school in the Bronx! And I'd like to think that that made a little bit of a difference out there.

seeing the light...of ingo maurer

Hi again. It's been a little over a week, and thanks to the encouragement of some friends + family, I am back to blogging again! I did promise my friend BEAU that he would get special props for rejuvenating me back to blogging, as he had specially BOOKMARKED my blog. Wow - being bookmarked in someone else's list of "hot sites" is kind of cool. It's like I can't let people down now. So anyway, a LOT has gone on in over a week's time -- here's a recap of one of the highlights.

Friday night, Anna and I went to the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. In honor of National Design Week, admission to the museum was free for the week, and they are currently running a cool exhibit on Ingo Maurer, this cool guy who designs very funky lighting structures.

Here is a wall designed with "wallpaper" that has a repeating rose motif, where each rose is lit from behind. The clear plexiglass table is embedded with small squares of yellow and green lighting.

There were tons of other amazing light fixtures - the MaMo Nouchies - are a whole collection of paper lanterns and lights, where Maurer collaborated with fellow friend and designer, Isamu Noguchi, and thus the fun-to-say name "MaMo Nouchies." If you're in a bad mood and you say "MaMo Nouchies," I guarantee you will be in a better mood by the time you've finished saying that. Anyway, I would have snapped some pictures of the MMNs, but the cranky security guard lady told me "No photos" right after I snapped the one of the wallpaper roses. Maurer also had some really cool neon-type structures that were really bright and almost painful to look at with my recently-lasered eyeballs. Another cool lighting display was a flat aquarium type structure with floating mirrors, lit from below, where goldfish swimming in the water cast shadows onto the wall, and the mirrors were also reflected onto the wall. Very cool.

This was another one of his weirder lighting "blobs," hanging in the stairwell leading up to the exhibit on the second floor.

Note the freaky portrait hanging on the wall behind the light. The man in the painting has eyes that animate and move every few minutes or so -- odd and slightly disconcerting. It happens just slowly enough that you aren't quite sure the eyes moved, but you catch just enough of a glimpse to think you may be going crazy. I saw these same "paintings" at the swanky bar in the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, and it was a big conversation piece then too.

After our very quick museum visit, Anna and I were walking down 5th Avenue, debating on taking the subway or cab, when the M3 bus rolled by and stopped at a light. Our fellow NY gals-about-town, Jenne and Dayna, are constantly taking the bus EVERYWHERE -- to the very ends of the earth, it seems -- so Anna and I decided to hop on and see where it took us. Luckily, this was the M3 that went straight down to West Village. We got to see 5th Avenue by bus - which is yet another NY first for me. Being on a bus in NYC feels a little bit like being a tourist. Indeed, the lovely German couple next to us asked Anna where to get off for Rockefeller Center, and in her very friendly Midwestern manner, Anna told them to get off 3 blocks before the actual "Rockefeller Center" stop. Whoops. In any case, I finally rode an "M-something" bus in NY, which makes me feel like even more of a New Yorker these days.

Now it's time to turn in. My eyes are really dry these days. The doctors warned that my tear ducts would be producing fewer tears because of nerve damage from PRK. The vision is still not 20/20 yet, which slightly annoys me, but I am being good and using all those eye drops daily. Stay tuned for the next post - mural painting in the Bronx!

how do you turn off seeing?

A weird thought popped into my head tonight on the 6 train as I was going home, after yet another long day at work. Whenever I used to get home exhausted, I would take my contacts out and -- being as blind as I used to be -- I would be able to relax and "turn off seeing" and just be able to look at the world as if it were an Impressionist painting. Kind of like one of my all-time favorites:



Well, I can't really do that anymore these days, and that still kind of feels strange to me.

a cool left brain v. right brain test

My friend, Pete, from work sent me this test today that determines whether you are more right brained or left. Click the image below to try this out.



Which way do YOU think she is turning? I could only see her moving clockwise for a long, long time. If you focus long enough, you can actually see her flip and start going the other direction. Very cool. How do YOU see this?

the city of brotherly love -- and morimoto

Today I brought my slightly blurry eyes to Philly, where my colleague and I are going to be giving a presentation on Web 2.0. We took the Amtrak from Penn Station down here to 30th Street Station a day early so we could hole up and review the presentation and materials.

We did have to take a break for dinner, however, and for that we journeyed to Morimoto, the original restaurant of Masaharu Morimoto, of Iron Chef fame. It was an amazing meal - one of the best I've had in a long time. We ordered a tofu appetizer, where a waiter came to our table and literally MADE fresh tofu from soymilk before our very eyes. It all happened under the cover of a stone pot, actually, over the course of 10 minutes. But still, it was pretty cool. More to come on that later.

For now, it's time to rest my eyes. It's been a few days now since the eye doctor took out my "contact lens clear bandages" on my eyes, and my eyes have been feeling more tired and irritated. Today was also the first day I wore eye liner again - after almost 2 weeks. I think my Lancome Le Stylo Noir pencil had missed my lids!

a new pair of blinkers

I got new eyes last week. By that, I mean that I finally had laser eye surgery. After years of considering it, researching, talking to people and agonizing, I decided that now was the time. I had to have PRK (photo refractive keratotomy), which is a bit more painful than the basic LASIK that everyone has heard of, because I have thin corneas and a high prescription. The consultants at Diamond Vision warned me that I would need a bit longer recovery time, and that the pain would be more intense than LASIK, but I figured a little pain would be worth the chance to see 20/20 again without having to pop in those contacts I've been wearing for 15 years.

10 minutes on a reclined chair under a laser, 2 days of vicodin-induced sleeping in pitch black darkness, and 36 hours of non-stop tearing, burning and stabbing pain in my eyes, and I emerged with the ability to see things across a room that I haven't been able to see since I was a 7-year-old girl. Now THAT is an AMAZING feeling.

And that is why today, while standing in the shower looking at grout between tiles that I used to never be able to see, I decided to start blogging again.

This is my tribute to all things seen by the naked eye.

looking anew: my intro disclaimer

I have a bit of blogger's block- if such a thing exists. I would like to start one again, but have commitment-phobia. I also have blogging performance anxiety. But a new inspiration came to me today and I've decided to start blogging again, after a bit of an embarassing attempt 2 years ago while I was in London. So here goes... my new blog! Welcome, and thanks for reading.