"like kobe", he lauded himself, "like kobe."

i ventured into the community yesterday to play basketball. i was planning to shoot baskets by myself in the park, but a bunch of guys approached: they were starting a game. there were more than five of us, so we took turns shooting, to see who would play. i was hoping i would miss. i don't play basketball consistently. 'neither do i', one of the other guys said, but there is a difference: i have a slim and bookish body, not really designed to adapt well to sports. it is one thing to drag out my non-basketball playing friends to serve as lame duck opponents in games they don't even want to be playing; it is another to play in a game with guys who play basketball every evening, and with at least one person who can actually dunk.

in the first game, i played pretty well. i focused on not doing anything wrong. i sent crisp passes and got a few rebounds. at this point, i know my strengths. i'm not an athletic-freak, i'm a jump-shooter. i scored one of my team's five points in the first game. i got a pass from the guy who could dunk, and i faked a shot, which a trash-talker on the other team jumped at. then i had a clear jumper. bang! "good move", the guy who could dunk told me; it was like receiving a compliment from michael jordan. he didn't care what my name was, my personal history, my political affiliations, etc. we communicated in the way that teammates on a basketball court communicate. i had been insecure at first, and was happy that my teammates knew; i could play defense, i could set a pick, i could score a point or two. i wasn't the kid in gym class with braces, bespectacled with sports goggles, picking up the ball and running down the court, without dribbling. i was more like woody harrelson in white men can't jump. i had also communicated with the other team; now they had to guard me. my defensive assignment was a kid who was smaller than me. he was quick, but i had confidence that i could keep him in front of me. on one of the last possessions, he told everyone on his team to "clear out." this sets up an isolated situation. i figured he would try to get around me and drive to the basket. i didn't go for the bait, though. i gave him a few inches, whereas if i had gotten too close, he might have blown right by me. he settled for an ill-advised three pointer with my hand in his face, a "hero" shot, which he missed.

our team lost the first game however, 11-5. my ball had disappeared somewhere in the morass of players, and i gradually realized that it was the game ball. the next game started between the team that beat us and the team that had "next." i sort of wanted to leave, but they were using the ball to play. so i stayed. then, two big verizon trucks showed up. the drivers hopped out, leaving them parked right next to the court. large speakers were magically and instantly assembled on the backs of the trucks, and rap music began to boom. the game went on.

during the second game, i was less successful. the guy i was supposed to guard- i stopped him the first time, cut him off on the baseline. a golden rule of defense is to deny the baseline. the second time though, he got around me. i was too slow for this fleet-footed achilles. the leader of our team switched me to a different position. i also took a shot, a three, and it was an air ball.

oh well. the bottom line is that i went down to the park and my identity for a short while was negated. people are fed through machines and all that comes out, all that matters, is how you ball.

junot diaz reading

Junot Diaz will read from his pulitzer-prize winning book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, at 8pm on Monday, September 8th, in the Multipurpose Room of the College Avenue Student Center.

I haven't read the book, myself. It won the Pulitzer, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007. A good deal, apparently, is set at Rutgers University, where Diaz graduated in 1992. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times remarks of the book:

"a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a.k.a. New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora."

potential job description #1

it was six weeks ago that i came to work in the alexander library in new brunswick; alexander is the middle name of my brother, and the name of a greek who conquered most of the known world twenty-three or twenty-four hundred years ago. i was assigned by the work study department to the sub-basement branch special collections. there i met john, a man who works downstairs by himself, and who showed me around. on the first day, he showed me the fragmented skull of a hessian soldier, with its jaw missing. he also showed me various documents dating back to the fifteenth century, and a few ominous looking tomes out of lovecraft, presumably dealing with arcana or hermeticism. one needs a special key to gain access to the sub-basement, and no food or drink is allowed. in addition, due to the sensitive nature of the various documents, a large humidifier drones constantly in the back of the room, behind labyrinthian rows of sliding shelves.

on the first day, i was set to work on sample US voting ballots dating from the nineteenth century. i learned that the communist party has been on the ballot for years, even during the cold war era, and that you could probably vote for their candidate this november, if you were so inclined. it was interesting to see these names from history. richard nixon- the year he won every state except for massachusetts. i sorted college photographs from the 50s and 60s by theme; there were a lot of sporting events, and one day john asked me to do research on the first rutgers crew team, which began competing in 1865.

i guess this is normal; the special collections branch in the rutgers alexander library has an incredible amount of information and history on...rutgers. there is one guy who is writing a book on the history of rutgers football. it's a big deal here; when i was a freshman, i remember the dean saying something about how, centuries ago in the first college football game, rutgers defeated princeton, as if that's something for a rutgers student to hold her head high about. to me, it seemed an utterly flimsy thing to hold onto, the symptom of a spiteful inferiority complex.

but anyway, he is writing a book on the history of rutgers football, and i contemplated asking him about the process, even though it's not a subject i'm terribly interested in. but he passes through the workplace quickly, sometimes shooting me a charismatic smile and saying, "you the man." on the third or fourth day, i helped a friendly man with an unnatural limp ("try not to have a stroke", he advised me) pull apart a few walls. i spent a day moving boxes with a long-haired truck driver who said, "so you work for jerk-face, huh?" (the boss), and went on to give me a run-down of their past confrontations.

but as my time there has progressed, i've gradually realized that i'm not needed, and i've taken to wandering the library throughout the day. this past week, i took the stairwell to what i assumed would be level 2b, above 2a- but as i walked among the shelves, i realized that i was wrong. at certain spots it looks like the aisles could go on forever, like borges' library of babel. i have a friend who rarely talks, and sometimes doesn't respond when i speak to him. i like to think that it's because he is actually in some section of this library, thousands of years in the past.

gradually, i ascertained that i was on the 3rd floor; i didn't know there was one. well, there is. it's where the fiction section is. there is a lot of philip k. dick, including three books of letters that he wrote in the last decade of his life. it seems as though he wrote letters all the time; to his editor, his friends, his children...i thought that it's too bad, for the geniuses and visionaries of our time, that most of them, probably won't have letters to collect, since it seems most people don't write letters these days. or perhaps our time doesn't have any geniuses or visionaries. perhaps they exist but they prefer to keep their wisdom to themselves.

Downtown religiosity diptych

Street art on Central Ave

NB Garden Tour

We're pretty intent on proving that New Brunswick is more than just a collision between the classic college town and a playground for cigar-loving, portly urban planners. It's a place where real people really live. In support of this hypothesis, I went to scope out signs of intelligent life in the city, and what I found was NB's best (and worst!) gardens. Whether for nourishment, decoration, or just plain hobby, the people of Brunfis work hard on keeping a couple plants in the ground, and that in itself is a testament to New Brunswick's unique position in the urban/suburban tug of war, as well as its place in history as one of New Jersey's oldest cities and one of its most thriving still. Our first installment of the tour starts humbly, a few meager plants behind the northeast corner of Somerset and Easton.

Without a patch of dirt, a fire escape becomes the perfect refuge for a couple of tomatoes, basil, peppers, and flowers. These are great choices for the gardener-without-a-garden, because all are pretty difficult to kill. This is where the college town/urban part of New brunswick really shows its face. The shoving of foliage in front of even the smallest slivers of sunshine is telling of urbanite ennui - everyone gets homesick for a little slice of dirt now and again. And it's completely hip to keep a few plants around if you're on a college budget: they're pets you don't have to feed, food you don't have to pay for, decorations that (usually) survive when your drunk friends accidentally knock them over. Oh, and you look so mature and cultured in front of your date when you actually pick basil from your porch to throw in the pasta you made for dinner. What's not college about a few easy-to-grow potted plants?

And of course, these fire escape gardeners have one more thing going for them: Since their plants are mobile, they won't have to part with them when this "blighted" corner is torn down early next year to make way for the new Gateway Center Transit Village.

Rating:for making the most of every little bit of your urban space

New Brunswick Eyesore 1: Verizon Building

Urban design is a funny thing. New Brunswick is a humble stop along the Northeast Corridor and it has some imposing .

The Verizon Building on Bayard street takes our first eyesore. I love me some infrastructure, even a cool antenna array on a roof can make an interesting view, but even the one up top can’t save it. It’s nearly windowless and uneven.

When Seattle’s Seafirst Building, a huge black modernist slab, went in 1968 it was locally reviled as “ the box the Space Needle came in.” People like it now.
The Verizon Building went up the same year, yet I can still be comfortable calling this the coffin architecture was buried in. And no one I've spoken to has grown to like it.

(Now, as I post this, I’m of course expecting my cell phone service to cut out...)

"isn't this really you?"

Seen on George Street at Douglass