There’s a famous American movie called St Elmo’s Fire, from the 1980s.  The plot revolves around a group of kids who had recently graduated from Georgetown University.  The plot itself is paper thin, something about them sorta simultaneously being in love with one another and going from self induced crisis to self induced crisis.  There’s some other bits, but I guess that’s the relevant part.  

Chris Traeger, I mean Rob Lowe, plays a guy who seems to have a problem with hair gel, in that his head seems to feature a lot of it.  Demi Moore, pre superstardom, plays a sort of an airhead.  Mare Winningham plays Wendy, a sort of shy girl, improbably in love with Chris Traeger.  OK, sorry.  Rob Lowe.  In my opinion, she’s the only halfway likable one.  Andrew McCarthy plays a guy brooding over his best friend’s girl, Ally Sheddy.  The best friend is played by Judd Nelson, doing his best Patrick Bateman, sans you know, the meat cleaver.  I’m not sure what Emilio Esteves is doing in the movie.  I guess Gordon Bombay has to graduate from somewhere before he gets sentenced to coach rag-tag group of scrappy pre-teen hockey players.  He swoons over his manic pixie dream girl, Andie MacDowell.  

It’s one of those movies you don’t watch for the plot.  You watch it for the clothes, the handsome young actors and the throbbing, mid 1980s soundtrack.  I was 8 years old when this movie came out.  I have some small memory of it from it coming out.  I was a little more concerned with getting my Hello Kitty pencil cases at that age.

When I moved to DC, I realized that the movie took place in Washington, more precisely Georgetown, a place I had started spending a lot of time in.  St. Elmo’s Fire features a lot of wide shots of the area.  All brick, green and blue.  They ride down M street in a Jeep.  It looks beautiful from the outside.  They hang out at a bar called St. Elmo’s.  Their lives have the hallmarks of post college life.  Some of them live in weird pits, others in big apartments, somehow, because movies.  Movies.  Where babies are born looking like nine month olds and people live in huge apartments, working unpaid internships.

It’s sort of hit me recently that I was these people.  I didn’t graduate from Georgetown, but these people had the kind of life that looked glamorous from the outside.  I guess my life looked pretty glamorous from the outside too.

Georgetown was a place I spent a lot of time in during those years.  I was with this temporary group of friends I had at the time.  The son of a cabinet official who seemed deeply unsatisfied with so many aspects of his life.  The daughter of a very old American family who life looked so beautiful from the outside.  She lived in her family’s house in a posh part of DC, quite posh.  The part that I left out was that her family had fallen apart in a really sad and heartbreaking way.  Her house was full of pictures of the family together at holidays, impeccably dressed.  The sad part was that except for her, everyone was in different corners of the planet, the family broken by an acrimonious divorce.  

Growing up the way I did, never sure if we were going to stay in America or go back to Poland, those people looked like they had the perfect life.  In my utter naiveté, I thought people like that didn’t have any problems.  Seeing the inside of this house, like hundreds of others I had seen from the outside before looked so beautiful from the outside, but the inside was just like mine, filled with the normal ups and downs of life.  

Sundry hangers on joined this group of people, my own St. Elmo’s crowd.  There was a lot of partying, drinking, so on.  I remember so many nights going to Nathan’s bar on Wisconsin and M, I guess our version of St. Elmo’s.

You never believe how glamorous people’s lives look like from the outside and ours certainly did.  Our lives looked a lot like the St. Elmo’s crowd.  Young, privileged and full of promise.  The thing was that even the ones on the inside thought of themselves as being on the outside.  I looked like I was on the inside of the crowd but I was on the outside too.  To me, even my crowd, I was on the outside.  I was sitting on the outside of them where the whole world saw me as a part of this world.

At 46 I realize how much you are still a kid at 26.  At 26, I was already so behind everyone else.  Everyone was thriving in their careers, their personal life was going from strength to strength and everything was just going along swimmingly for them.  Everything had to happen at 26.  Once I hit 30, I mean nothing would happen anymore.  When I was 26, to me I was alone with my Milano cookies, my cameras and my foreign film DVDs.  There were nights out in Georgetown, but there were also lonely nights on Maryland avenue.  Little did I know that as quickly as things can come together and work out, it could fall apart and that certainly would happen for this crowd.  And sometimes falling apart meant falling into something better.  

Sometimes I think about how grownup we all thought we were.  We really did think we were adults, with our conversations, but really we were just kids.  And if I’m really honest, elites.  Part of the one percent.  I chafed at this description for a long time but now I can see how I am a part of this class of people.  Monetarily, no, I wouldn’t have put us into that 1% tier, but I could take advantage of any educational opportunity I wanted to go after, including the unpaid internship I did when I first got to Washington.  Then I did another extremely low paid internship after the first one.  None of this was a real problem money wise.  

Success came early and from my perspective, too easily, when I first got to Washington.  I did my best to fit into this crowd, but the feeling of being an imposter never really wore off.  We were all at Nathan’s, our St Elmo’s, pretending to be adults.  Us with our big, important jobs thinking we were the kings of the world.  

The more I describe this, the more arrogant and self important I sound, but we were part of an extreme elite.  A couple of years ago, I taught in a community college in a small community near Boston.  I’m not going to go into any noblesse oblige here about the experience.  I loved those people.  I remember teaching them and thinking how different our experiences coming to America had been.  Most of them had left their home countries and come to the United States and worked in factories or as Uber drivers.  My dad came as a post doc at a very elite American university.  The media tends to paint immigrants as a kind of a monolith.  My experience coming here had been so vastly different from theirs.  I was at once with these people but also separate from them.

Because of my dad’s brain and a lot of good fortune, I ended up in that crowd in Georgetown, that St Elmo’s life.  I never shook the feeling that I really did not belong there. It’s hard to describe how the situation felt like from the inside, from what it looked like on the outside.  From the outside, we were these super elites with these fancy jobs and resumes already full of a lot of upper middle class enrichment activities. Study abroad, unpaid internships at great places, studying under incredible experts.  

But what it looked like from the inside was vastly different.  It felt like this endless pissing contest about who had done what better thing.  Who was doing what better thing.  And everyone played this contest of “who knows who,” which I absolutely hated.  

The pissing contest about what you had already done always went something like this. Me: I studied in Copenhagen and Krakow.  I went to Russia, Estonia and Poland while was there.  Them: oh, so you didn’t travel while you were there?  When I did study abroad in London, I traveled around Europe every weekend.  I went to….. this long list of places.  Me sort of slinking away, thinking I was a loser because my parents couldn’t give me the money to travel as much as this person had.  And also conversation over, quickly.  Rinse and repeat.  I remember other conversations that involved asking which building that person had worked in during their internship on the hill.  To me, it stunk of “I’m letting you know I know the names of buildings on the hill and you cannot stump me.”  

The “name the place and I’ll tell you who I know from there” game infuriated me further.  I worked at this specialty press in Fall Church with Herman and this eclectic cast of character.  Eclectic.  I guess that’s the ten dollar word I would use to describe my coworkers at the tax shack.  Herman was a high school salutatorian from New Jersey who had studied biochemistry, had known Edward Albee, was an extra in a Keanu Reeves movie, owned a bookstore in Baltimore and was the editor of the product I worked on.  I don’t know who he knew, but I knew he was fun to hang out with and my best friend.  A lot of those conversations about “who you know, do you know….” revolved around asking a person where they work and then asking if they know this person over there.  Somehow Tax Analysts never entered the chat.  Not major league enough, not fancy enough I guess.  I found this extremely tiresome.  One time with Little Edie, we were with one of her colleagues from her much more prestigious work place and he was Australian.  Little Edie asked him if he knew some other Australians in DC.  I turned to the guy and asked him if he know Elle McPherson and Mel Gibson.  The guy chuckled and said — no I don’t.  They didn’t go to my high school.

I think in a way, we were fooling ourselves.  At 26, your job defines you.  It is your entire world.  At 46, I realize that what you do for work doesn’t define you.  What defines you is the kind of person you are in the world.  Are you a generous person?  Are you kind?  More importantly, are you kind to the people you know cannot do anything for you?  Who were we really at that age?  Who are we really at 26?  Just kids.  

Recently, I went to a conference at work about the intersection of sociolinguistics and disability studies.  We heard an incredible talk by an anthropologist/linguist about a newly formed language he had studied.  At the beginning of the talk, he called us all “weird.”  Interesting opener, I guess.  But he meant this acronym that is used in psychology research that stands for White Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic.  The striking part about that acronym is that it represents just 12% of people on planet earth, but is used as the metric for most psychological research.  The St Elmos/Nathan’s crowd, us, we were “w.e.i.r.d”. A small slice of “weird.”  The luckiest group of people in the world and yet somehow deeply insecure about our place in the world.  But most of all, just kids.  We were just kids.   

Well congratulations. You made it down this far. Let me reward you with pictures of Georgetown, past and present:

I don’t mean to use this blog as a space for a memoir, but I guess it kind of has become that. I’ll be 47 this year, omg that looks so old. How did I get this old? I look in the mirror and don’t see an old face. The grays, they are there. But then I go to work and see a student on my roster who was born in 2005 and is sitting there fully formed in front of me. 

In my mind as well, influenced by my peripatetic wandering last summer, my Eat Pray Herman time, I have had time to explore the other times when I did that, namely during my Wilderness Years, where I had no fixed address anymore. I wasn’t living with my parents anymore but I wasn’t settled anywhere yet and I was just kind of wandering around, trying to figure out exactly where I even belong in this world.  

I had another sort of time when I took a sort of “sabbatical.”  In March 2009, I left my last job media job in New York, feeling dejected and hollowed out.  I didn’t make a decision to go on this sabbatical but it was just a time of contemplation.  Whenever I have a problem in my life, I do a couple of things.  I write, I take pictures and I do something physical.  During my 2009 sabbatical, I walked around New York with my camera.  And I wrote this blog, when it was in a completely different form.

Photography is something that has just always been in the background for me.  Its not linear for me and I am always working on mastering a new aspect of it.  I see people’s photography and it seems so “neat.”  I meet people who do photography and they take these cut glass flat landscapes and that’s great, but not my approach to photography.  To me, it’s always been trying to certain type of photography.  Maybe I should put “master” in quotation marks, because I don’t really think we ever really become masters of things.  Maybe becoming proficient in something might be a better way of putting it.  I find a type of photography and I try to become proficient in it and I might labor at it for a while, be happy with my results and then abandon it and start on something else.

Recently I joined a group on Facebook called “The New Topography.”  The photography there is of man made structures in landscapes.  Or as I like to call them — there’s absolutely nothing going on in that photo, but it’s beautiful.  I would take it out a little further and say that I have always been fascinated by these decontextualized photos.  Again with the cut glass flat landscapes, it screams where the person is but when it comes to the types of photography that  I like to do takes away a lot of the context of where you are.  My favorite kind of thing is really to photograph things that could be anywhere because it is beautiful.  You take what surrounds you and you make it beautiful.  

I did my early photography in Washington DC, my real exploration into photography started there.  Washington DC is such an iconic place, with some of the most famous landmarks in the entire world.  The city has an old fashioned feel to it.  At first when I went there, I was photographing the landmarks.  Then one day I realized that I had gone from taking pictures of landmarks to photographing raindrops on my windows at night, the bottom of flag poles, escalators and just these really mundane things.  

One of my favorite thing was photographing my path to work in Falls Church.  I can’t even describe what that area was like.  The general feeling I always got in all of my years in Northern Virginia, especially on my myriad of weird adventures with Herman, was that most of the buildings looked like they had been built with the thinking that it would be there temporarily and then they just kept it.  I use the term “architectural style” loosely here, as I’m not sure there exists a word to describe office and apartment buildings that looked like someone sat down at a drafting table, drew a vertical rectangular box, drew some windows on it and called it a day.  At that time, Five Guys was a business with three storefronts in Northern Virginia, in a scenic area called Bailey’s Crossroads.  “Scenic.”  It was such a weird place.  I remembered thinking that this area was almost like it had been planned inside out. How the area was planned was that it should really have inside a mall or some place like that, but for some strange reason, it was outside. It was an inside place built outside. There were sidewalks that no one ever walked on and buses that you never saw. Was this built for pedestrians? No. Anyway, Herman and I spent a lot of time at Five Guys so I had a lot of time to contemplate this.  For a while, it was the one form of solid food I ate, but that story is for another day.

One day, while enjoying a burger and listening to Herman tell some other manic story about his days of bookstore ownership in Baltimore, I realized that we could be anywhere.  There was no feeling that we were even in Virginia.  The only thing that told you that we were in Virginia were road signs and license plates.  What was even stranger was that I saw beauty in these places.  I cannot stress how un-beautiful these places actually were.  Do you find parking lots beautiful?  How about random concrete high-rises?  Somehow I found this all quite beautiful.  

It came into my mind after a while that maybe that could be reflected in my photography work, this feeling of — well, we could really be anywhere.  You don’t get that rush of “oh THAT’S where that is.”  Rather its — that’s a parking lot that nothing much is happening in and you know what, it’s beautiful.  

I’m not the first person to ever come to this realization, that those kinds of photos can exist.  For me though, that has so much more of an impact than a picture taken of the Grand Canyon with some crazy powerful camera with a huge sensor and the sharpest lens in the world.  Maybe if there’s some ugly strip mall with the Grand Canyon in the background, that might have a greater emotional impact.  I mean put it this way.  When it comes to photography jealously, which is how I measure if a photograph is having an impact, I feel no photography jealously for a flat image of some famous landmark.  But an image of a broken down car with a vast prairie behind it or someone who photographs the inside of a giant box store in a compelling way, I will spend the next couple of years trying to figure out how to photograph that.  

As this entry started to take shape, I started thinking — I have a lot of photos like that, where the context has been removed but they make an impact in other ways.  There’s a kind of feeling in the photograph that says — that could be anywhere, but I feel an impact.  There are still so many photographs like that I want to master.  I see these pictures of these random hotel rooms and they fascinate me but my own attempts at that kind of photography have thus far not produced the kinds of results I wanted.  My attempts are always just — that’s a hotel room, not that’s a hotel room with a MOOD.

Anyway, I applied a my fierce curatorial eye to my online portfolio of 30,000 photos and pulled out what I thought were the best examples of decontextualized but yet impactful photos.  Since I take so many pictures, most of these have never really been seen by anyone before.  I take the best photos and put them up here, wrapping a narrative around them.  These photos really don’t have a narrative.  I mean I giving them a narrative now, where they it didn’t used to exist.

Yeah, it’s a lot of words, but can you really write about your best friend of 23 years without using a lot of words?

I wrote this blog entry originally in the weeks after Herman passed away and it’s been sitting on my computer for a while. I would open it, close it, go back to it, amend it, edit it.

Recently though, as I’ve returned from my summer travel, well, you know, three months ago, I wanted to write about Washington DC portion of the trip. But then I thought that I could write the origin story about how I met Herman, what led our paths to cross in the first place. And yeah, if people get through the novel that is this blog entry, there are some pictures at the bottom. Patience pays off, lemme tell you.

Well. buckle up. Get your snacks and beverages ready. Choose a comfortable place to sit. Here is the origin story of how I met Herman and my years of working for him.

I guess the story really starts in 1997.  As I’ve talked about before, I studied abroad in Denmark in 1997 and that basically turned my life upside down.  

I returned to college and I knew one thing.  I did not want to go to school anymore.  I was really uninterested in studying anymore.  But well, I wasn’t exactly calling the shots and the person who paid for my college education was kinda insisting I finish.  I still remember going to see my advisor and saying — I don’t want to study anymore.  He goes — well, you could go to Washington.  We have this internship program.  Well, that’s not what he actually said.  He said — have you ever taken a trip across the country?  Go do that, keep a journal and I’ll give you the 8 credits you need.  I would have preferred that option, but well, more level headed people prevailed.  Thank God.  

I applied and got in and ended up doing a really outstanding internship at the Voice of America.  On the first day of the internship, one of my new coworkers came up to me and said — I heard you were from Chicago.  I said — no.  I’m from New York.  We lived in Chicago when I was a little kid.  The guy looks at me and goes — you??? LITTLE KID??? I have ties that are older than you.  And that dear friends is how that internship started.  

Despite this seemingly inauspicious beginning, the internship was great.  I learned so much at that internship at the Voice of America.  My boss was this diminutive Texan who reminded me of Ross Perot in manner.  The guy had a bust of Aristotle and a plaque with an armadillo on it.  He swore Aristotle used to wink at him occasionally.  And the plaque of the armadillo was from a beauty contest the critters had participated in.  The Texan had a really deep Texas accent.  One time someone called and asked for the website for the service. This is before the web had seeped deeply into our collective consciousness.  I remember the Texas boss saying “our website is dubya dubya dubya dot VOA dot gov.  It took about half an hour for him to say this.  

Needless to say, everyone was decades older than me.  The Texas boss enlisted me to work on these crime alerts, kind of an America’s most wanted for international criminals.  The Texan was vehement about this stuff, kind of like an old fashioned sheriff.  I actually really liked it.  The crime alerts were for international broadcast and that to me was pretty cool.  I got to know all about what kind of alerts Interpol puts out about criminals.  A random piece of information if I ever heard of it.  They also did editorials, which were a little bit more difficult.  At first it was supposed to be one editorial during the whole internship but I think it turned into five or so of the editorials.  I also got to work on a television show, sitting in the control room running a teleprompter.  The guests were some pretty heavy hitters policy wise.  I remember going to the front of the building to pick up the Dalai Lama’s personal representative to the United States, a jovial man who shook my hand with a lot of enthusiasm.  

They were giving me pretty simple tasks but they couldn’t be sure about what my skills were and I understood that.  I was treated like their daughter.  I went back to them for years afterwards for references for jobs and educational opportunities.  

I learned so much from all of them, not just professionally.  There were four of them in the office.  Two of them were completely on the right, one of them a totally lefty and another one who was a veteran journalist.  They weren’t just civil to each other, they were friends.  There were never any big disagreements between them.  They got along really well.  What I learned was beyond politics.  I learned a level of civility towards other people that needed to be there in situations, something that served me well in the future.

After the internship ended, I went back to college to graduate, as I was still in my last semester of college.  

It would make a great story if everything just worked out after that, but I’m leaving out the part about being dumped.  Yup.  The ritual post college dumping.  It’s not you, it’s me honey.  Yeah, ewwwww…. I mean I was a lot better off in the long run but it sure did not feel that way at the time.  It took me forever to figure out why I got dumped and I eventually realized that it didn’t actually have anything to do with me.  And I was absolutely better off without this guy.  

I graduated from college and took off for another summer in Europe, another odd chapter of the wilderness years.  A summer that saw me ending up in some truly odd situations.  This was at the height of the wildness years, where I had no fixed place where I was all the time but I hadn’t found my home yet.

It was still the phase of things were I was running away from life, not towards it.  

The people who gave me the first internship recommended me for a second internship.  The second one was, um, interesting.  I guess that’s a good way to explain it.  The internship was based in the Northeast quadrant of Washington DC, on Capitol Hill.  The office for the internship was in one of the old row houses.  

I walked into the office at the internship and it was like a time capsule.  I don’t even think the guy who managed the whole thing even had a computer.  But what was the funniest thing was that the guy was there smoking.  In an office.  In 1999.  I mean I knew people had smoked in offices.  But that was in the times when men called women “broads,” men wore hats, red meat was good for you and women had few if any rights.  Something told me they would have loved to harken back to those wonderful days.  

Then there was the internship.  Behind the smoke filled room was another room filled with these ancient computers.  We’re not talking DOS here but they were in desperate need of an upgrade.  None of them could even display most websites properly.  I remember trying to check my email and it wouldn’t even display.  

The building had its own let’s call them quirks.  Quirks.  The floor in the upstairs was slightly warped.  The staircase kinda leaned.  The quirky characters matched their setting.

The women in the internship program lived together in housing provided by the organization next door to its headquarters.  There were eight or nine of us living in this three story intern house.  There were bunk beds.  Incredibly we had no cable, no internet hook up and we shared a phone.  All eight or nine of us.  One phone.  What was funny was that the house was directly next to the headquarters of the internship, separated by a fence.  My big decision was to just cross over the fence or walk around it.  The decisions you make as a 22 year old.  

Our neighbor was an old man named Finnegan.  Finnegan.  Another old crank.  Finnegan was a photographer.  Who photographed the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  We’ll get to the origin story of that joke in a little while.  I’m kidding, but only slightly.  The guy had photographed Roosevelt, Franklin Delano.  Teddy may have been a little before his time.  But only slightly.  He had photographed Eisenhower and probably every president after that.  

And boy Finnegan was cranky.  Vintage cranky.  He has ties older than me cranky.  When I found out that Finnegan was a photographer, I thought I could pick his brain about that.  Finnegan though was having absolutely none of that.  Absolutely none of it.  He told me curtly that back in his day, of daguerreotypes and magnesium flare flashes, you got two tries to get a picture right.  I’m kidding about Finnegan making daguerrotypes but he wasn’t that far removed from that.  Finnegan had a lot of grievances about modern photography.  I mean what what this bullshit about having 36 exposure film????  In Finnegan’s day, with his Graflex Speed Graphic, he got his ten shots and he didn’t complain.  A journalist had come to interview Finnegan about being a historical figure on Capitol Hill.  That person had taken ten rolls of 36 film.  Finnegan was completely horrified by this.  

Then there was our stipend.  The condition was that we had to keep the place clean and we all got the princely sum of $263 a week.  We would receive a check that could only be cashed at an ancient bank on Capitol Hill.  The bank was near Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, so on payday, you’d have a bunch of 22 year olds with nearly $270 dollars in cash on them.  I mean direct deposit already existed.  People weren’t getting physical checks anymore.  But as I said, the place wanted to hang on to ancient ways of doing things and no, they were not looking to change anything.  

We were all assigned these news stories to research, things that the two who ran the internship wanted us to report about, I guess.  The topics were, um, weird.  Let’s say they were to the right of what I believed, what I currently believe.  My topic was about press leaks and Ken Starr.  Ken Starr and his office leaking things to the press.  Ken Starr leaking.  I don’t even remember.  And Ken Starr.  Who ever remembers that name?  It was that long ago.  The topics definitely had a certain stance to them, let’s put it that way.  A certain right leaning stance.  Yes.  Let’s definitely put it that way.

There was this unpleasant little man who worked there as well.  One day I did say that I had no interest in the topic I had been assigned.  This little unpleasant man said that journalism was about writing about things you have no interest in.  I said eventually I wanted to write about my opinions.  This person said that opinions were like buttholes.  Everyone has them.  Except he used a different, more colorful term.  This was the first time anyone ever said this to me and unfortunately not the last.

The internship had these weekly meetings, these forums.  I can only remember two of these forums.  One was a guy who came to talk to us worked for C-Span.  I had read a magazine article about how C-Span had the worst green room of all of the television stations in Washington.  My fellow internship mates dared me to ask this semi obnoxious question.  I’m 22, have zero brains, few inhibitions and aim to be outrageous.  The guy who was there though was very gracious and answered my question very well, talking about how C-Span did so much with such a tiny budget.  In a weird way, it was my first lesson in maturity and being gracious.  I remembered this lesson for a long time after that.

Another session was memorable for all the wrong reasons.  We were supposed to write up the sessions in a journalism way.  Well I found this out later.  So the unpleasant man I had mentioned before looked at something I had written and had all sorts of negative comments.  Eye rolls.  He sits there and goes — you put all the important stuff at the bottom.  Proceeds to give me a dressing down.  Lengthy dressing down.  I call this my introduction to journalism.  “Here.  You did this all wrong.”  Spectacular.  How auspicious.

I’m making the internship out to be a miserable experience but really absolutely it was not.  I mean parts of it weren’t great but a lot of it was a lot of fun.  We went out constantly because there was absolutely nothing to do in that house.  Remember, this was the era before smartphones.  Smartphones were called “going out.”  Wow.  I sound really bitter and old.  

Anyway, we did in fact have a lot of fun.  One of my fellow interns, still an extremely dear friend of mine, was working for Robert Novak, a Washington DC pundit and columnist.  Novak’s nickname was “the Prince of Darkness.”  Novak was a total Washington character.  One time, the interns got invited to a taping of Novak’s show, the Capital Gang.  Novak was part of this weekly political round table with other aged pundits.  There were liberals Al Hunt and Mark Shields.  Novak was on the opposite side with old Pat Buchanan, veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White House’s and a guy who got into a fist fight with a Washington DC police officer.  

For the show taping, the interns had to sit on the side of the studio.  I remember basically sitting on the floor.  Novak kept calling my friend, who was his intern, by the wrong name.  Amani???? Amoni???? Novak might have had a really fierce nickname but he wasn’t so fierce in person.  We all thought what Novak was doing was pretty fun.  

The banter on the Capital Gang was really premium.  To sound like an old codger here for a second, people like Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson are such imposters compared to people like Novak, Hunt and Shields.  I can’t imagine Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingram going toe to toe with a rank and file Democratic pundit now.  It wouldn’t be a discussion of any real issues.    

The proceedings at the show taping were really fun.  Hunt, Shields and Novak kinda sat there and play-fought during the show taping.  There was nothing hateful or malicious about any of them.  At one point, Hunt turns to Novak and says — Bob, you remember the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  I mean you were there, right??? I have continually repeated this line since then.  Thank you Al Hunt for making this joke.  Those guys were FUNNY.  Meanwhile, the interns were given strict instructions not to laugh because it would interfere with the taping of the show.  Did we laugh??? Of course we did.  

The other thing that I remember was that Novak, Hunt and Shields were actually nice to us.  Novak, for all of his bluster and his unfriendly nickname was actually a pretty nice guy.  We all took a picture together as well, which is unfortunately lost to the sands of time.  

I had joined up with this internship program that promised that I could an internship in a place like CNN.  I got there and they said (and I will never forget this) that we can get you into the Alexandria Gazette Packet.  I am in no way dragging that newspaper but it was really disappointing as they had advertised themselves as a place that could place you in all of these really impressive news organizations.  I ended up at the Herndon Connection.

Once I got the assignment though, it did turn out to be fortuitous.  It 1999, I guess the waning years of big journalism, before social media took everything over and media started to crater.  The news room at Connection Newspaper was buzzing.  I still remember.  It was in this anonymous building in Northern Virginia, among a lot of those buildings that look like overturned shoe boxes.  There were scores of people working there, old style newspaper editors.  I got paired up with this classic journalism crank named Sanford Horn.  Oh was Sanford ever cranky.  If you could harness the crankiness of this man, you could power a city.  He would pick up the phone and say “SANFORD HORN” right into the phone, almost as if speaking in capital letters.  For some reason, they put me with Sanford.  On one of my first day shadowing Sanford, Sanford handed me a folder of stories and said — these are my dogs.  What Sanford meant was that these were the stories Sanford had no interest in writing.  

Still, I was undeterred.  I had always loved to write and thought of myself as quite good at it.  It was a skill I had gotten quite good at very quickly and could do it with relative ease.  Could I drive a car or keep a house organized?  Can I not answer in the interest of not incriminating myself?  But I could always write.  That was a solid skill for me.

The whole point of the Connection experience was to get “clips.”  Clips, for the younger audience, are samples with your name on them with your writing.  Samples containing your byline.  Backtracking here for a minute, the colorful characters at my post college internship told me that the writing I had done at my wonderful college internship didn’t officially count as clips.  Because my name wasn’t on them.  

Connection turned out to be a really good career move, as much as I thought I was “too good” to work in a local newspaper.  HA!!!  Honestly I paid no attention to Sanford’s editorializing about the stories.  I interviewed a bunch of retired women about the bike ride they took around Scandinavia.  I interviewed another guy about his butterfly collection.  I went to a high school band concert.  It was real community journalism.  In my mind, there’s something so innocent and idyllic about the whole time in my mind.

There was a big group of us over there.  We would all go out to lunch with another intern over there named Jesse.  He had a Volkswagen Beetle that had holes in the floor.  He loved telling us that the car was an antique and didn’t need to follow any modern car standards, including the holes in the backseat floor where you could see the road.  At lunch time, we would fight to see who got to sit in the back so we could observe the holes.  

So I left with six or seven clips.  I’m not talking that those were my six or seven best.  I had six or seven clips total.  

Again I cannot overstate how confusing the post college time is.  It felt like to me that there was absolutely nothing.  I cannot put into words how confused I was about what I was supposed to do or where I was even supposed to work.  I returned to New York to live with my parents and work at truly one of the most horrible jobs I have ever worked at.  

At that time the prevailing narrative was that needing your parents or even being close to them was for the stupids.  I was 22, going on 23.  The whole thing, at least among the group I belonged to, was that listening to your parents or going to them for advice made you childish.  

No one, no ever tells you how hard the post college time is.  You are done with the first part of your schooling and you are not really sure what is coming next.  It’s that uncertainty that causes the maximum amount of anxiety.

After the internship was over, I moved back to New York for a little while.  I met this person named Little Edie at the internship, who convinced me to move back to DC.  I mean I don’t know if I needed much convincing.  I had wanted to stay in DC but I had also wanted to be close to my parents.  Or maybe I didn’t want to be close.  I had no idea.  

I moved back to DC.  The place I lived in was miserable.  It really was.  It turns out Little Edie had sorta conned me into moving there.  As soon as I moved down there, she vanished.  She was gone to her boyfriend’s and I was alone.  At that age though, it felt like I was alone, always alone.  

The awfulness of the place cannot be overstated.  I remember sitting in the living room.  There was this absolutely pathetic red futon.  There was a tv on the floor, an old white television.  It was an old, beat up television.  There was no furniture other than that.  I had a bed with no bed frame and no box spring.  My bed was held up by a stack of bricks.  The carpet in my room was filthy.  The shower was broken and consistently leaked into the living room, to the point where I put a large bucket underneath the area it leaked into so the floor wouldn’t warp more than it already had.  The toilet hadn’t been installed properly, so the floor underneath it sagged a bit.  From downstairs, you could see the ceiling sagging where the toilet was.  Oh and I almost forgot the hole in the ceiling.  Giant hole.  And little Edie’s role in all of this???  Zero.  She was gone.

I remember thinking — I’m going to have to earn furniture.  I’m going to have to earn a couch, a coffee table, a shelf.  Needless to say, Little Edie played no part in any of this.

Oh and I didn’t have a job when I moved there.  I had some savings and the rent was insanely cheap, $400 a month.  

So I was sending out job applications.  I sound like an ancient person but applying for a job wasn’t like it is now, where you use some stupid system with some name like Bullfrog or Simple but the name has a Q in the middle.  Companies were just getting email.  I remember applying to a job via fax.  One big Washington publication called Congressional Quarterly actually required that you mail them the application.  Mail.  With a stamp.  Those were the days.  

There was a job board in the Hill newspaper and Journalism Jobs.  I dutifully sat in a Kinkos on Capitol Hill, using their computer to send out applications.  I sent out so many applications and had quite a few interviews, most of which I don’t remember.

But there was one that I do remember.  It was some kind of a non profit near Pennsylvania Avenue.  I got out of the interview and I had a voicemail from the office manager from some place called Tax Analysts or Tax Notes.  I don’t remember which she even said.  Yeah I had a cell phone.  It made phone calls.  That was its bell and whistle.  Notice I used the singular.

And yet again in a moment that could only happen in Washington DC, the day I got the call to go to Tax Analysts, when I was on Pennsylvania Avenue, everyone, I mean EVERYONE on the street was staring at something.  Suddenly a car slows down and the window rolls down and we see President Bill Clinton.  Clinton was over there laughing.  Somehow after all of this turmoil, this felt good.    

Back to this tax place.  I remember applying for the job.  I remember it was based in Northern Virginia.  Everything else was based in DC.  This was the only thing outside of the city.  I remember thinking — watch.  This is the job I’ll actually get.  

I had no clue about the area.  I was disappointed because it wasn’t DC.  Northern Virginia.  What was that exactly? 

I got up early for the interview and actually got there early.  The orange line to West Falls Church.  I think that was the terminus for the orange line then.  The place was at East Falls Church.  The building was on Lee Highway.  I actually got there way before the interview.  These were the days when there wasn’t a Starbucks on every corner.  Lee Highway didn’t have anything for that matter.  So I walked into a bar at 10am and asked for a cup of coffee.  

I got to the interview.  I looked around at this place.  There was this wood paneling around the whole place.  It wasn’t sleek.  It resembled a den.  I had an interview with Chris Bergin, who was the editor of the magazine at the time.  The whole editorial staff was there at the time.  A very pleasant looking blond woman.  A bespectacled guy with brown hair.  And a guy who looked slightly upset to be there, wearing athletic shorts and a t-shirt with a drawing of a basketball on it.  This was a formal job interview??  Basketball shorts????

The interview was kinda fun.  I went with my six clips from connection newspapers, the six I had.  They told me I would be working as a formatter, whatever that was.  In my overeagerness to find a job that I had applied for a reporting position, which I was absolutely not ready for.  According to them, it would be formatting with reporting opportunities.  They reassured me that when the reporting opportunities came, I could ask any question I needed about tax law and they would answer them.  Whatever this formatting job was, I was ready for it.  23 and eager to please.  

It seemed like they were going to hire me so we took a short walk around the office.  I would be a formatter for a magazine called Highlights and Documents, H&D.  I’m being shown around and the office kinda looks like a teenager’s bedroom.  An edgy teenager.  There was some kind of stuffed animal attached to the wall.  There was a 1960s movie poster for a movie where the tag line was “Come to Susanne, both sacred and profane.”  There was a bottle of a substance called “Go Away Evil.”  That substance was rapidly dissolving so I guess the level of evil was rising.  There was a couch that had seen much better days.  There was one of those televisions in that room that was the size of a small suitcase.  I’m not sure of the last time that television had even been turned on.  It was one of those televisions that people turn into fish tanks now.

By far the most unique, funny, interesting and profoundly sacrilegious object in that office was a sign left by the previous occupant of my desk.  Tacked onto the wall was a sign that said — Warren A* Rojas.  Underneath that, next to an asterisk, it said “The A stands for Anti-christ.”  If that wasn’t funny enough, underneath that it said “Crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women.”  

But the thing that really sold me on the job was a picture of two dachshunds on the wall.  It was a very formal portrait, like something you’d see of a person’s kids but it was of dogs.  Those dogs belonged to Herman Ayayo, the guy in the athletic shorts.  I thought — this is where I want to work.  

The job I got was pretty interesting.  The start time was 1pm and we’d be working until 9pm.  I later learned that these were just guidelines.  The real working hours were let’s say more flexible.  My official job title was “formatter.”  I was to work on a daily magazine called “Highlights and Documents” or H&D.  The place had a weekly magazine called Tax Notes and H&D was their daily product.  

Herman wasn’t my actual boss.  He was the upper boss.  It was the bespectacled man with the brown hair, Scott.  As much as I learned from Herman, I learned almost an equal amount from Scott.  Now did I appreciate this at the time??? Absolutely not.  

The first thing I learned was how to put together this magazine.  Now no knock against Tax Analysts, but I thought we were going to use a graphics software to do the magazine.  There were already some really good software programs to do graphics then.  Digital photography was happening.  Digital was coming.  Quickly.  

Tax Analysts though was sticking to this unholy marriage between graphics and Microsoft Word.  Let’s just say that those graphics and the text parts of this marriage did not get along.  And we dealt with this daily.  And it filled our lives with joy.  

Putting together the magazine involved running macros on all of it that I slowly learned.  We also had to copy and paste tons of things into the magazine.  What I learned really quickly was how to deal with content, how to label content, how to navigate content.  This was so valuable for me in every way because I could solve any problem involving dealing with content.  Even now I make it a point to teach my writing students how to deal with small and large amounts of content.  I teach them how to properly label files, how to format documents, how to deal with people’s names on the first instance and the second instance and how to refer to things that are acronyms.  All from this education I received in this small room in this forgettable brick building in Falls Church, Virginia.

What is also funny or interesting or strange is that I still use the same file labeling system that Herman taught me long ago in that H&D room on my own personal files.  When I would write a paper in graduate school, I had a notes file that had the file name reversed and a final file name that had the class number first, then the topic, then the due date.  The same goes for the files I make now for my students.  They are always class section topic date.  Oh and not to mention my photos, which are always place, subject, date and number.  And what’s more, I cannot stand when people don’t label their files correctly or put extra punctuation in their file names.  Again, all because of what I learned in that tiny room.  

I don’t really remember every single minute detail of the first few months working there, job wise but I do remember Herman and his funny antics.  The first email he ever sent me was Clippy the Microsoft assistant, offering to help me with my suicide.  This sounds weird and morbid, but one of the choices was “pastry” so that was pretty interesting.  Unexpected.  

The other thing was that Herman was the first person who agreed with me that bagels in Washington DC were absolutely inedible.  Does Washington have some great food??? Yes.  Were bagels on that list at the time??? Well, no.  I remember going to some free event in Washington, of which there were many, and grabbing and bagel.  I took one bite and thought I had bitten into sawdust.  I didn’t realize that you could mess up bagels but you could.  Absolutely you could.  And here was clear evidence of that.  

Herman had grown up in New Jersey and he knew this better than anyone else.  On a trip back to New Jersey, Herman brought back a giant bag of bagels.  I remember thinking — this man knows the truth about the bagels in DC.

Then there were the dogs.  He had two long haired dachshunds named  Ebony and Greco.  He used to bring them to work with him and walk around with the dogs on his shoulders and say — hey dog.  You got a Herman on your ass!!!!!!  More on the origin story of the dogs as we go along in this blog post.

What really cemented our friendship was when Scott went to England for a week.  I was about two months into the job then.  Scott really wanted to make sure I was ready for him to leave so I could do the magazine on my own.  Now to be clear, I was not ready to do the magazine on my own, far from ready. 

My one big fear was that I would be left alone with do this and I was not ready for that.  I’m 45 now and have been teaching for 14 years.  As a former coworker said to me once — you have seen it all.  And yes.  I have seen it all.  But 23 and on my own and responsible for formatting and making this magazine.  I could not do this, so Herman came in to help me and we were ok.  

My fear was not unfounded.  Before getting hired at Tax Analysts, I worked at the single worst job I have ever worked in my entire life and believe me, BELIEVE ME, I have seen some things in my life.  I worked for this utterly insane man in this five person news organization in some random office on some random block in some random part of New York.  One day he screamed at me from across the office, cursing, spitting, about some story I had written.  This man provided no support for writing things and expected a 23 year old who had just graduated from college to know specifics about some kind of loan collecting.  I quit this job via fax and never went back.  And that’s all I’m going to say about that.  Again, no names.  So my fears were not unfounded.  Somehow though with Herman helping me, we were ok.  The magazine got done and everything was fine.  Little did I know that I would continue to lean on Herman for years after that.  

Herman also did the thing that it turned out he always did for people.  He drove me home after work.  Now why this a big deal?  The job was out in Northern Virginia and I lived on Capitol Hill.  I could take a train home, then another train, then a bus home.  With Scott being gone, Herman was my ride to the train station.  The train station was about two minutes from the job but here we are getting on Route 66 towards DC.  Herman goes — I’ll just take you into DC.

The first night Herman drove me home, I unloaded.  That was my habit back then and well, continues to now, but I hope to a lesser degree.  The topic of my unloading was the aforementioned Little Edie of Maryland Avenue.  

And who was the aforementioned Little Edie of Maryland Avenue?   She was my roommate at the time.  How to describe this person?  Well, the nickname really tells the story.  Of course it is a reference to Grey Gardens, this 1970s documentary about Edith Ewing Beale (Big Edie) and Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie).  If you haven’t seen the documentary, it’s about these two women, a mother and a daughter, who were part of the America’s Catholic aristocracy.  Bouvier, as in Jacqueline Bouvier, who became Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.  Jacqueline’s father, Black Jack Bouvier, was Big Edie’s brother, so these two women were direct relatives of probably the most famous family in America.  And the Bouvier’s themselves were no slouches in terms of money.  That was country club money.  Debutante money.  And then it fell apart.  Spectacularly.   

The women’s financial circumstances really changed after Mr. Beale divorced Big Edie.  Grey Gardens, the aforementioned estate fell into serious disrepair.  Horrible disrepair.  We’re talking raccoons in the house, dead cats.  They had had an army of servants to take care of the 28 room mansion and all of the sudden, there was no one to take care of it.  These were women who were raised to expect a certain level of comfort in their lives, in a way hot house flowers who could only exist under certain circumstances.  Through no fault of their own, they were not raised to have any degree of self sufficiency, so the house fell into a degree of disrepair that they could not come back from.  

What makes the documentary so interesting is that neither of them ever acknowledged their change in circumstances.  Little Edie still speaks in the East Coast lockjaw, which is to be expected.  What made this film so curious was that the two women completely acted like they were still a part of this refined aristocracy, when in reality, they lived in this complete ruin.  Neither of them ever breaks character.  Edie speaks about what was in the maid’s dining room in the present tense, as if they still had a maid.  At one point, Edie says to the filmmakers “it’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.”  Edie talks endlessly about her education at Miss Porter’s School or Farmington, as the people in the know call it.  Both Big Edie and Little Edie endlessly reminisce about their glamorous lives.  Little Edie at one point says that you can’t have your cake and eat it too in your life and Big Edie vociferously disagrees with her.  She had her cake, loved it, masticated it and generally had an ideal life.  Never had a cross word with Mr Beale, fabulous marriage, beautiful children.  Now this would be fine except this conversation happens in the bedroom Big Edie and Little Edie share in their dilapidated house.  I mean ok people say these things but Big Edie is saying this while they are both in a room that is half full of trash and Edie seems to be feeding several feral cats while her mother is speaking.  The bedroom is lined with pictures from their formerly fabulous lives.  The family posing outside of the house when it was in its glory days.  The bedroom is, to put it lightly, in a state of disrepair.  There’s a stove in there for some reason.  Little Edie is cooking corn on the cob on a hot plate.  A far cry from the Maidstone Club, I’d say. 

The contrast between the present state of the house and what Big Edie and Little Edie are talking about is really jarring.  Little Edie’s pronouncement that it is really hard to separate the past from the present absolutely plays out on the screen.

Yeah, ok, we went off into this crazy film studies tangent.  Yes.  Yes we did.  But I needed to introduce the original Little Edie to relate her to the Little Edie I shared the space with.  Unlike Big Edie and Little Edie, Little Edie of Maryland Avenue was not an American aristocrat.  Let’s say she belonged to a more recently arrived group of people to the United States.  Little Edie of Maryland Avenue had similarly strange ideas about the world and most of all, of the place we lived in.  To put it bluntly, she was ABOVE that place.  It was almost like she didn’t live there, instead kind of flitting in and out to comment on my decorating choices I had made.  “Decorating choices” as if she were decorating an estate in East Hampton like the Beales.  This was a dilapidated row house in pre-gentrification Capitol Hill, hardly a candidate for a feature in Architectural Digest.  And yet Little Edie of Maryland Avenue lived this way.  She absolutely did.  The house needed a better couch than the one we had been given by the landlord.  The curtains I bought looked like paper towels.  The shelf my dad gave me was ugly.  The dining room table was substandard.  The house of whatever random rich person she visited had much nicer furniture.  Why couldn’t we have the expensive furniture that the people on the television had??  She was like a little child begging her parents for much nicer things than what they had.  It all grated on me to an extreme.

Now I named her little Edie on purpose, because like the women in the documentary, her family had experienced a reversal of fortune, with her father losing his livelihood and he was basically completely blocked from ever getting it back.  The family had had some kind of money but that vanished when that happened, just like for the Beales.  They would not be able to help Little Edie of Maryland Avenue at the start of her career.  

See, but the thing was that she wasn’t open about the family losing its privilege.  She just completely ignored that part and kept right on acting like a wealthy person.  Or how a non-wealthy person thinks a wealthy person acts.  Little Edie of Maryland Avenue, just like the original never broke character, even for a second.  She was rich and that was that.  We didn’t live in a place teeming with cats and raccoons but the place was very bare bones.  Most of the young kids on Capitol Hill lived that way.  Rent was ridiculously cheap and the pay in a first job is notoriously low.  The arrangement was convenient.  

Again though, Little Edie stuck to her rich person personality, despite lacking any sort of funds to back this up with.  One day she said to me that her dream in life was to live in a house with servants.  Another time she told me that I didn’t understand people wearing fur coats because it was a rich people thing and I didn’t understand rich people because I wasn’t rich.  There were so many other lines like this.  I mean what do you even say to this?  It was ironic she was saying this to me because my parents had started to make good money then, but that really had nothing to do with me.  I was out there to make my own money and make my way in the world. 

Outside of the commentary about how I didn’t understand rich people, she was generally an extremely unpleasant person to be around.  I would say things about how much I hated my high school.  Well, her high school was one of the top schools in the United States.  In fact, she had been with the popular crowd.  So popular, she was. Nobody ever made fun of her.  I had gone to a state university that I didn’t particularly like.  Well, she had gone to a private college because HER parents were willing to make sacrifices for her.  One night we were there watching Jeopardy and I thought the questions were kinda hard and I only knew a few of them.  She goes — HOW DO YOU KNOW ALL OF THIS?  YOU WENT TO STATE SCHOOL!!!!!!!.  Like Trump, she extolled herself constantly.  This was never ending.  

One day I asked her if she had the day off the next day which was some kind of a holiday, she said that at a real news organization, like the one she worked at, you never got days off because news could happen at any time.  She was implying somehow that going to the Hill every day and going to these really complex hearings about tax law and tax legislation wasn’t journalism.  She worked at CNN, where REAL news happened.  I mean I wasn’t about to get into some big pissing contest with her about this.  We both worked in media, at times crazy hours.  But I can say this much, she wasn’t on the Hill every day getting news, sitting through some really complex Congressional hearings, trying to figure out what if anything they said would constitute a news story.  They never sent her out to do that.  

Needless to say, her behavior grated on me, to the extreme.  I couldn’t really leave because there weren’t places that were any cheaper to live in around and my salary was so small.  So the first night Herman offered to drive me home, I unloaded on him about this situation and how much this person was annoying me.  I remember Herman just listened, which was what I needed.  His advice at the time was quite wise.  Get away from this she-beast.  But I felt like I couldn’t because of the money issue.  I felt utterly trapped.

That was a continuing theme in those first few years of work.  I felt completely powerless.  Completely.  I didn’t make a good enough salary to move out so I had to live with this she-beast.  Even then I didn’t expect people to be nice to me but I didn’t think they would make it worse, like Little Edie and her comments.  OK I get it.  You are so much better than me.  Thanks for reiterating that, constantly.  I had forgotten.

A lot of those car rides with Herman, I’m a little embarrassed to say, I spent most of the time complaining about Little Edie and her myriad antics.  I’m older now and I don’t really think I can change people anymore.  I’m also not really around people like that anymore.  My life is a lot more sane now.  I tend to push away or just not even pay attention to negative things.  I don’t let them bother me.  But at 23, 24 years old, I really let other people bother me.  I unloaded on Herman a lot about this situation and to his credit, he listened patiently.  I really don’t know how he did this.  A lot of nights though revolved around going to late night diners and places where he’d have the opportunity to change the subject.  That was good too, to get me off the topic of, as Herman called her, the she-beast.

I think Herman could sense how powerless I felt at that age.  There’s this strange idea that your 20s are supposed to be the greatest time of your life.  I’m sure as soon as I say that, someone will come up here and say that THEIR twenties were completely awesome, best time of their life, how could anyone ever think any different.  

Me in my 20s, that was hard.  There was no other way to put it.  I soon realized that I was surrounded by immensely rich people for the most part, and as little Edie loved saying, I didn’t understand rich people.  What a shortcoming that was.  I was there trying to survive on the $12 an hour I made at that job.  I didn’t have much of a choice in terms of where I could live because I couldn’t really afford anything else.  I had to put up with little Edie because I was trapped, at least in my mind I was.

Herman was such a good resource in all of this because he was older than me.  As soon as I started unloading on Herman about my Little Edie problems, he spoke to me from the place of a person who had seen the things I was going through.  And I’m making the talks out to be so serious all the time, but honestly, they were really funny a lot of the time.

That was the thing too.  I was happy when I was at work.  I had landed in Washington knowing very few people, almost no one.  People always marveled at how I did this, how I could just go places where I didn’t know anyone.  But to me it never seemed like a big deal.  So what I didn’t know anyone?  As if I had a huge group of people around me, ever.  

Navigating the social life in Washington was really hard for me.  First, I felt like a complete imposter there, constantly feeling like I was going to be found out at any moment.  Was I really good enough to be there, this immigrant with a degree from a state university?  I mean and the other thing was the people I was around.  Everyone looked the same.  And a lot of people could have used a lesson in humility.  So many of them acted like they ran things on Capitol Hill and those politicos up there are just dumb.  I mean I was past the hero worship and the idealism but this just seemed stupid to me.  On the other side of things, it was always that “their” senator was so brilliant.  “Their” senator.  They have a senator who belongs to them?  Why are you out on a Saturday night talking about “your senator’s” stance on environmental policy?  Why??  Why do this???

I mean now I’m a bit older and wiser and to me this is the idle chatter of children but back then, this really had an impact on me.  There’s this idea that if you don’t do everything in your 20s, find the ultimate great group of friends, the relationship of your dreams, the job of your dreams that pays you in piles of money, you’ll never do it.  It is unachievable after the age of 29.  I’m 46 now and I absolutely do not believe this, but this 23, 24 year old, with Little Edie chirping around the corner all the time, I believed this.

There was also always the thing that I was weird.  From the time I was probably 12 or 13 years old, I was incessantly told I was “weird.”  I remember a girl I knew at college who said — you dress weird, you talk weird, the music you listen to is weird, everything about you is weird.  I never understood why people said this to me.  I mean I never understood why being curious about the world, paying attention to what goes on around you and being knowledgeable about a variety of topics, why was that weird?  Just struck me as so odd.  To me, that was weird.  No one sees themselves from the outside so I didn’t know how I modulate my weirdness. In my mind, the way to deal with it was to just let go of parts of myself.  Slowly over those years, I gave up a lot of interests.  I even stopped taking pictures for about five years.  But the chirping about being weird continued.  

Then though I would go to work.  I never felt weird at work.  I remember thinking — these people are fine with me.  They like me.  Again, a big part of that was Herman.  

Slowly I realized that the 1pm to 9pm aspect of the job wasn’t really true.  It was “whenever we tell you to show up” to “whenever we tell you to leave.”  That never really bothered me.  I kinda loved it, actually.  We would be up against some pretty strict deadlines at the job, but most of the time, it was fun.  The person who made it fun was Herman.  The main reason the job ran so late was because of this thing called Tax Notes Today, or TNT.  The compiling and processing of the TNT file would take a while, sometimes a long while.  I never actually knew why it took so long and I think a big part of that was because Herman was there.

The office was like this tiny little rabbit warren.  Now a lot of offices are sleek.  Tax Analysts offices did not fall into that category.  They looked like people lived in them and in some cases, people did live in them.  

The H&D office was the smaller room.  To the right, there was the proofreading “den.”  “Den” was the correct way of describing it because again, that room looked like people lived there.  There was a couch in the H&D room.  And the main office, where the editor in chief’s office was, was full of these budget looking cubicle dividers.  That was where the copy desk was as well.  

There were a lot of great moments with Herman in the H&D room.  Probably my favorite moment was when I came in and Herman was white as a sheet.  I mean the man was WHITE.  I didn’t know what had happened.  Herman was staring off into space and goes — they double teamed.  A SQUIRREL.  THEY DOUBLE TEAMED A SQUIRREL.  Who??  What???  What happened???  Apparently his dogs, Ebony and Greco, had encountered a squirrel and had proceeded to dismember the squirrel.  Unfortunately a squirrel head had ended up in the stomach of one of the dogs.  Herman had to take the dogs to get the squirrel’s head removed from the dog’s stomach.  I mean this is a horrible, gross story but seeing Herman that day was so funny.  

In that room, there was another semi ancient television.  Herman and I would wait for the file to close.  Usually we’d go on a food run while this was going on.  Herman loved Klondike bars and we’d get a bunch of those and watch all sorts of things on that television.  We definitely watched Beavis and Butthead and Golden Girls.  Sometimes the laughter would get so loud that the Editor in Chief would come and tell us to be quiet.  I mean I’d be at work until after midnight a lot of the time.  Still though, it never felt like a pain or anything.  There was food and company and I was fine.

The car rides and these late nights at the office were really the times that I got to know Herman.  Immediately there were so many stories.  Among the first stories I heard was about the legendary bookstore in Fells Point in Baltimore, about how it had gone out of business.  It went out of business because a Barnes and Noble had opened up in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, or as it was known from that point forward — The Inner Horrible.  I also heard for the first time and certainly not the last time that he had walked out of his medical school admissions exam and then had his plays produced by Edward Albee.  He also told a story about being a background extra in a movie called “The Replacements” with Keanu Reeves.  I heard about his teenage study abroad in Belgium, where he was almost signed to a youth soccer league and made a really embarrassing radio appearance during that trip.  I heard about his cat, Leon, named after boxer Leon Spinks, who used to pee in his bed.  Some of his comedic material about Leon and cats in general.  Unfortunately, most of it is really unprintable for a family blog, like this one.  One random night, when the file was taking a really long time to close, we went for a ride to a local Ikea to buy a cushion for one of the chairs at his house.  He said he needed to get one that wasn’t light blue because that had set off the dogs.  The particular shade of light blue had set off the dogs and they had destroyed his cushion.  So, anything but light blue.  The dogs irrationally hated that shade of blue.  I have retold this story a million times.  So Herman.

I also realized that everyone got a nickname in Herman world.  Everyone.  Even if they didn’t want one.  Some of them were easy.  My coworker Warren was obviously the Anti-Christ.  I mean he was the self proclaimed Anti-Christ.  Then one day, Warren came back from some reporting assignment and brought a sign that said “Pepper Santa Lucia.”  Warren told us that he wanted to be known as Pepper Santa Lucia from now on, so sometimes we called him Pepper.  Other times by his full title, Pepper Santa Lucia.  An incoming news story from him though was always known as an AntiChrist special.  Sometimes we even called him “the artist formerly known as the antichrist.”  Another coworker whose last name was Gnaedinger, with a silent G because the Gnaed, where the G was not silent.  We had a coworker who just showed up with curly hair one day.  A man.  So Herman nicknamed him “man-perm.”  One day our coworker had straight hair again, so Herman said that there had been a coup d’etat in the land of man-permia.  

Initially when I had interviewed for the position, they said there would be “reporting opportunities.”  I thought this meant four or five times a year, they would send me out to cover something.  No.  “Reporting opportunities” meant that I was basically the B team for the two official Capitol Hill reporters.  There were constant hearings, forums and conferences going on in Washington and someone had to go and cover that stuff.  At first I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to do the reporting because of the experience I had had with the job in New York.  

“Reporting opportunities” wasn’t really the right way to describe the job duties over there.  Slowly the job became 24/7 insanity.  I mean the 7 part isn’t really true, but the 24 part was definitely true.  In 2001, George W. Bush decided to cut taxes.  Remember him?  George W.????  More innocent times, I guess you could say.  As 2001 rolled on, the reporting assignments increased and increased.  And I’m not going to lie.  I was afraid.  I was really concerned I wasn’t going to understand what they were saying at these hearings and policy forums.  I made Herman promise that when I was sent out to cover these things, that I could come and ask him things about what I had heard and that he would help me.  And he kept his promise.  He always helped me.

There are people who say these ridiculous things about how the “best way” to learn things is by just dropping people into things.  That is so stupid.  “Throw them into the deep water.”  Sure.  To watch people sink.  “Nobody held my hand.”  Great.  You were gaslit into believing that this kind of treatment is right by people who didn’t care about you.  But Herman cared.  He cared enough to make sure I was ok with my reporting.  Pretty soon after I started, I didn’t need Herman’s help anymore.  Just giving someone a small helping hand can make all the difference in their development as a professional.  

Of course Herman’s office was another manifestation of a very interesting person.  His office was a tribute to every campy thing on the planet.  I love campy things, trashy things.  He had a bumper sticker from a place called South of the Border, which I found out much later on was a kind of a camp ground/roadside attraction/ice cream store/amusement park off Interstate 95.  He also had an Edgar Allan Poe action figure.  The greatest object though was his signed photo of Tammy Faye Baker, wife of the disgraced televangelist Jim Baker.  I think the story was that he had met her at some event and had convinced her to give him her autograph.  Either way, the office was a museum of camp.  

It was such a tremendous mix of emotions for me being sent to those things on Capitol Hill and being there every day was really complicated.  It was this weird mix of a couple of emotions.  First, I always felt like I was worthy of good things, that I should have good things, but my high school experience had really beaten this out of me.  Was I really worthy to be there???  Again was I going to be found out at any moment?   Am I going to be escorted out of here when they find out what a loser I was in high school, which I had only finished five years earlier.  Intellect wise, I felt on par with everyone.  I didn’t feel outmatched intellectually but just worthiness of being there, that I had a problem with.

I mean I’m five years out of high school.  HIGH SCHOOL.  I had this notion that I wanted to do journalism in my dorm at college two years earlier and here I was doing it on this big stage.  But somehow at the time, I still felt like a failure.  I was writing for a specialty press, not the New York Times.  At the time, there was a journalist who was the exact same age as me named Sewell Chan who had been the editor in chief of the Harvard Crimson and he was working as a reporter at the New York Times.  I thought — I’m not a reporter for the New York Times.  I’m coming up short.  I mean according to Little Edie, I didn’t even work at a real news organization.  

Still the imposter syndrome would set in quite often.  Were they going to find out that I really didn’t belong there?  This little loser from some nothing high school in New York who had been brutally made fun of for years.  But Herman would just always say the same thing — do your job.  Go do your job.

I have to admit that the reporting part of the job was a lot of fun.  Too much fun probably at times.  I’ve detailed some of what went on when I was a reporter.  Just a sampling.  There was a lot more.  

One time a certain Congressman from New York who Donny Q Trump nicknamed “Fat Jerry” pointed at me and said — no one from the press is here.  I’m here Jerry.  Me.  I’m here.  Another time I was at a forum, extremely early in the morning, dead tired, barely keeping my eyes open.  A man rolls up next to me, sees my name tag and proceeds to tell me about the work he was doing to repeal the estate and gift tax or as it was nicknamed at the time, the death tax.  I’m gulping down coffee while this guy is telling me about this.  I must have faked interest well enough because before I knew it, he was gone for some reason.  He returned with Xerox copies of an article that someone had written about him with the title “They call me Mr Death.”  He hands me this article about himself.  So considerate.  At another policy forum, the former governor of Indiana got snippy with me when I asked him a question.  I told some of the other stories already, about Kevin Hassett pointing at me and telling me Paul Krugman always gets his tax wrong and that I could quote him on that in Tax Notes.  Now mind you, I didn’t think that guy even knew who I was.  Another time, a politician named Dick Armey, came into the House press gallery and did a stand up comedy routine.  That man, whose politics I heartily disagreed with, was so unbelievably funny that I forgot that I was supposed to dislike him because of his politics.  Herman had another rather unprintable nickname for the guy that was not derisive but that made reference to first name and his last name sounding like a branch of the armed forces.  Use your imagination.

The job was for lack of a better word HILARIOUS a lot of the time.  To call out my beloved Pepper Santa Lucia/artist formerly known as the Anti-christ, one day I’m aimlessly flipping the channels and I see my coworker Warren sitting behind Paul O’Neill, who was the Secretary of the Treasury then.  I look closer and Warren appears to be picking his nose.  Another time I’m watching the evening news and I see myself standing behind Tom Daschle, a now former senator from South Dakota who had been the majority leader and the minority leader in the Senate at different points.  Almost everything I attended was broadcast later in the day on C-Span so sometimes I’d call my parents and tell them to put the channel on and we’d laugh at whatever I said or was wearing that day.  One time I saw myself playing with my hair at some policy forum while I sat in my living room, yes, playing with my hair.  Perhaps the funniest appearance of the back of my head was at one of my White House visits, where I actually raised my hand to ask a question at the press briefing.  I sat and thought — am I going to turn my head so you can actually see me?  I mean who was going to believe me that I had actually been there, in the era before camera phones??  I mean nowhere to flex about this???  Why even go???  

As I alluded to before, Herman did send me to the White House a couple of times.  I don’t care who you are, going to the White House is a big deal.  But I felt like I couldn’t get excited about this because everyone around me was so jaded to the whole thing.  I was there for work but other people had been there for the Christmas party or to meet celebrities.  I knew someone who had already been there many times before I went and had pictures of himself on his walls at home with various celebrities at the White House.  I remember someone saying to me something along the lines of — so you are excited about going to the White House?  Interesting.  It all dripped with jaded contempt.  Oh so that’s a big deal to you???  In any case, I was there to cover a summit meeting between George W. Bush, the president of the European Union at the time Romano Prodi and the prime minister of Spain at the time, Jose Maria Aznar.  43 tried some Spanish on Aznar and Aznar was having absolutely none of it.  I also went there for a tax bill signing and to another summit meeting when the Greek prime minister was meeting with Bush.  I’m not trying to flex here or make myself out to be fancy or better than anyone else.  I cannot express just how out of place and insecure I felt in that environment.  Why was I not there for the annual Christmas party or to meet celebrities?  I just there for work.  No big deal.  Everyone goes to the White House right?  Who would even get excited about this anyway?

Again too, I felt so profoundly that I did not belong there and that at any second, someone was going to come from behind a curtain and say — she’s a loser with a bachelors degree in political science from a mid range state university in New York.  

That was the thing about Herman too.  Herman wasn’t too taken by all of that and it truly was just work to him.  Underneath it though, was the message that I did belong there and that I had no reason to think I didn’t.  Again, just do your job.  Don’t get too taken by any of this.  

Herman protected me too.  I remember years later when the Me Too movement started and I told Herman that I don’t remember getting sexually harassed at any of these things I was sent out to do.  Not that men weren’t inappropriate with me in other contexts but that never happened when I was reporting.  Herman said to me that if it had happened, whoever did it would have to answer to him or Chris Bergin, who was the editor in chief of Tax Notes at the time.  Neither of these people were anyone to be trifled with.  Herman’s whimsical office always featured a lacrosse stick.

After about two years on the federal side of the tax reporting, I moved over to the international side of the company.  There I would do reporting about the European Union, which I had mentioned before.  There was also another whirlwind of activity, press briefings, embassy visits, and the like.  We’d write about the EU trade commissioner at the time, Pascal Lamy and Frits Bolkestein, who was the EU trade commissioner for taxation and the internal market.  As I have mentioned many times before, I dragged my camera absolutely everywhere, my tiny little Soviet made spy camera.  Herman told me to take my camera and snap some pictures of Bolkenstein, which ended up on a website about internal EU matters.  Bolkestein was a good sport about the pictures and the questions I would ask him during or after the briefings.

Lamy was the one with a bit of a sense of humor.  He’d be in town.  Herman gave him a nickname too, and you must realize now that this is a trend.  We would call him the Lamy-in-a-tor.  I hope Pascal Lamy does stumble upon this humble blog one day and sees this.  I’d go to the EU delegation once a week for a little press briefing, called Entre Nous, between us.  I got to know the people over there pretty well and they were fun.  Lamy would be there via video conference from Brussels periodically.  One day some of us were a bit early and it was us and Lamy.  We just sat there and waved at each other for a bit and just goofed around.  Us in Washington DC and our friend Pascal, advisor to world leaders and soon to be director general of the World Trade Organization.  Normal.  Completely normal.

The people at the delegation were fun too.  One time there was a teleconference with the Lamy-in-a-tor and they were testing out the audio-visual equipment.  The guy who ran the AV equipment asked one of the people over there who ran the briefings to test one of the microphones.  The guy picks up the microphone and says — I have long had a candle of love burning in my heart for you.  SO funny.  You better believe I stole this for later use.  The AV guy, his last name was Brown.  One day he went around and said — what can Brown do for you?  That was the slogan of UPS at the time.  

Every year the EU celebrates something called Europe Day, the anniversary of founding of the European Union.  It’s usually in May, when the climate in DC is a little bit less like the inside of your average sauna, which is descends into in the summer.  Usually I’d get sent to cover something and then I’d go back to the office to work on the news file with Herman.  On Europe day though, in 2003, when I was covering the EU, Herman let me go to Europe Day, which was great fun.  They gave out all kinds of EU swag and I go to visit the residence of the European Union’s ambassador to the United States.  It was this absolutely stunning villa, that looked more like something that belong on the shores of Lake Como than Embassy Row.  It was pink with a courtyard in the middle of it.  I seem to recall a fountain in the courtyard.  In a terrible lapse of judgement, I neglected to take a picture of this place.  Our hero stood around with her buddies from the EU delegation enjoying some hors d’oeuvres.  Divine.  Again, all thanks to Herman having faith in this inexperienced child.

Again, you would think that I would have been happy doing all of this.  It sounds so incredibly glamorous, and I think if I had been doing this now, I would have been happy and more importantly, grateful.  I really should have been much more grateful.  This isn’t the normal environment for a 25, 26 year old to be in.  But in my mind, the doubts lingered.  Why wasn’t I working in a bigger, more famous publication?  Why wasn’t I working at the European Union?  Unbelievably I thought I had accomplished nothing in my life.  The tricks the mind plays on you.  The things you think at that age. 

While working in the international division of the company, I got a bit more of the Herman origin story.  Well, the origin story of the dogs, Ebony and Greco.  One of the first days when I got to international, I saw this little plaque with a news article printed on it.  The news article included a picture of Herman bending down with a dog.  The caption said — Herman Ayayo with special correspondent L. McTavish Way.  I thought — oh cute.  A bit later I found out that L. McTavish Way had belonged to an editor and journalist at Tax Analysts who had unfortunately passed away.  Herman was in charge of taking care of the guy’s dog during this sad time.  Herman ended up taking care of Louie, L. McTavish Way’s nickname.  Now comes the punchline of this story.  As I mentioned, L. McTavish Way was referred to as a special correspondent and it turned out he had been.  Louie’s owner, the man who unfortunately passed away, used L. McTavish Way as a pseudonym when he didn’t want to publish under his own name.  His name was already on the masthead.  Herman told me that at one point, L. McTavish Way had the fourth highest number of bylines in the history of Tax Analysts.  People used to call in to ask to speak to L. McTavish Way.  If he had had thumbs, I’m sure he would have gladly taken the call. 

Again as I mentioned before, your 20s are a very difficult time in your life, at least they were for me.   I mean if you want to leave a comment up here about how your twenties were so awesome and great, go ahead and by the way, bless your heart.  And I mean that in the passage aggressive southern way.  Anyway, I was trying to figure out what my next move was going to be, life wise.  I had a long standing interest in international politics, especially Cold War politics.  I’m a child of the Cold War, literally born behind the Iron Curtain.  I was also interested in the modern European Union.  I had no idea where this was going to go but I would go to graduate school and figure it out.  I hoped.  I applied and was accepted to New York University, Boston University, George Washington University and I was wait listed at Georgetown University.  Your loss Georgetown.  I decided on George Washington, the Elliott School of International Affairs.  They sent me a letter about how incredibly impressive the admitted class was and how I was a part of this.  That imposter syndrome crept in again.

I made the decision to leave Tax Analysts, thinking it would be best for me to focus on school full time.  The university had said there would be all kinds of work and internship opportunities.  In retrospect, I should have stayed but live and learn.

I also needed to new place to live.  I went around to look at different places to live.  I was visiting a new place to live in Georgetown when Little Edie called me to inform me that our house, well, let’s be honest here, my house, had been robbed.  I got home and the place had been broken into.  The bars on the back windows had been undone.  They took the DVD player and a bunch of my DVDs.  My PBS documentaries.  An odd choice to say the least.

Herman drove me into DC to check out the damage.  Little Edie swanned in to check on the house, this house she sorta floated above.  She got on the phone with some friend and said — it’s ok.  We live in a bad neighborhood.  We were entitled to get robbed.  That was the moment I lost it.  I ran down the stairs and started screaming at her that we were not entitled to get robbed.  Screaming.  She sorta laughed and said — you are going to clean this up, right?  It was at that moment that I decided I was going to stop speaking to her.

Herman said he was going to stay over, sleeping on the floor in the living room, lacrosse stick at the ready.  

I moved out not too soon later, to the place I had been looking at when the house got robbed.  I lived in the house for a month without speaking to Little Edie. 

I want to put in here that yes I spent a lot of time talking about Little Edie, that I have begun the path to forgiving her.  She wasn’t open about the financial reversal the family had suffered and I’m sure that had a big impact on her behavior.  And my behavior wasn’t perfect then either.  I mention her here because Herman and I talked about her a lot and she did play into my whole inferiority complex.  All I can say is that I’m on a path to forgiving her and that holding on to old hurts, slights, and insults does no one any good.  

On my last day at Tax Analysts, Herman took me out to lunch at a local restaurant in Northern Virginia.  It was again, a happy occasion.  At the end of the lunch, Herman goes — goodbye and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.   

This closed the chapter of having Herman as my boss and began us being friends with each other.

Oh and this is a picture blog, so here’s are some pictures from Eat Pray Herman Washington portion. Enjoy.

And as an extra, added bonus, that time when I visited the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and sorta pretended I was William Eggleston. Dime store William Eggleston.

Yeah Ok, it’s December and I got back from the trip in September. OK. But I mean I am the editorial director of Wrong Side of the Camera, I can decide when I write and publish.

Well I do have a full time job, senior lecturing at this little university in Boston. These days though I think more than I write and I develop a narrative in my head, abandon it, come back to it, abandon it again and then somehow 27 minutes before midnight in December, four months after my trip ended, yeah, then suddenly, inspiration strikes. I don’t know how much writing there will be here. Might be a little, might be a lot. Kinda don’t know yet. We’ll see how it goes.

So I spent the first few days of Eat Pray Herman last summer in New York. I was tired last summer, teaching a very academically rigorous class, and quite frankly having a very rough time, it being the first summer without Herman.

I think a lot about the range of time I knew Herman. When he passed I was 46, 14 years into an unexpected career as a teacher, six years after I started teaching on the four year collegiate level, now having spent much more time teaching at different private universities than I ever spent attending any kind of private school over the years. When I met Herman, I was five years out of high school. The last summer before I knew Herman, I guess was 1999. Summer of 1999. I had just finished undergraduate, embarked on a truly weird chapter of the wilderness years that included getting unceremoniously dumped in the central square of Copenhagen and living and working in a place that had a curved, warped floor, living next door to Finnegan, the cantankerous photographer and working for a man named Sanford Horn who spoke in CAPITAL LETTERS. The bit with the hole in the ceiling was a little ways away. Not too far away.

When I found out that Herman had passed, I was at work at the university, just finishing giving a first day diagnostic test for the TOEFL exam. I had left journalism behind long ago and had been working at the university for going on four years. The floor at work doesn’t bend and I live in an apartment without a hole in the ceiling. No one has dumped me in the central square of any Northern European capitals of late. Hoping not to repeat that one. To say things had shifted would be an understatement.

Uh, I am not making a point. Meandering again. Ok meandering back to what you might call our thesis statement, yeah, I was pretty upset last summer. I kept hoping I would have that great summer moment, when the sun would set and someone magical would smile at me. Instead it LITERALLY rained every weekend last summer. Now I’m speaking in capital letters. On one of these rainy Saturdays, I flipped on YouTube while I was probably trying to make soup in my instant pot or just generally trying to figure out what I was going to eat for the rest of the week and this program loaded on YouTube about different unusual places in New York. House museums, places that had remained from the city’s colonial past. Glimpses into the past of a city that had done pretty much everything to stamp all that out. I ended up making myself a pretty good meal and I started a list on my phone of all of these places I wanted to go.

I copied the list into my phone. A lot of the places were in parts of Manhattan I had never really visited, despite having grown up there. Some of them were in places I had not visited in a very long time.

All the destinations on Eat Pray Herman were in a way connected to him and New York was probably the most connected to him. He grew up in Emerson, New Jersey. We could joke about Patterson and Paramus and all of those places that New Yorkers look their noses down at. Herman understood about bagels and about how Washington lacked in them. We could talk New York comfortably, understanding the place in a way other people didn’t. The New York of Action Park, Crazy Eddie, Bernie Goetz, the Strand bookstore and a carnival barker orange haired “real estate developer” nobody really cared about then. This was “our” New York, the real New York, not the one in the movies with the giant apartments people can afford on the salary of a barista.

Both of us had a difficult, complicated relationship with the city, at once in awe of it, but despising it at times but also acknowledging the role it had in shaping us. There’s something about the growing up in the Northeast that shaped us. We’re more sarcastic, more acerbic, that much more pessimistic that your average person. Herman and I shared that. I think that’s why we understood each other so well.

Herman also got being around the city in the 1980s. It was a DIFFERENT place back then. It had a dangerous feeling to it, something decayed and wasted and at the same time beautiful. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m an only child and we didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so I just went along with the adults and saw the city. I remember when Greenwich Village, Tribeca, the Bowery, those were not places you wanted to hang out. The people who lived on the Lower East Side were working class or recent immigrants. The Polish delicatessen was down there, where the owner gave me a treat whenever we visited. I could talk to Herman about this stuff. It wasn’t far away, theoretical or completely unknown to him.

I thought about Herman a lot when I spent my days in the city. I indulged in my love of history and you know, pastrami and visited places I hadn’t been to in ages. The Lower East side is still memorably quirky, the pastrami at Katz’s still heavenly, the area a glorious mess.

Of late I have been teaching a class about the history of Boston, being a history nerd, this is something I enjoy immensely. I sit in the classroom and think about how funny it is that a Polish immigrant who didn’t grow up in Boston is teaching the youth of the world about the Yankee Brahmins and a place where people are allergic to the letter R, have a great time making fun of themselves but if you mess with them, they will shut the place down and find out. What makes Boston such a curious place is that it is a microcosm of the United States, the buildings showing the city’s rise and fall and continual cycles of renewal.

New York, being larger and older, is the Boston microcosm on a larger scale, bigger, shinier, sharper. The goal of my visit to the city was really to trace the history of the place. The thing that I will never get over is that you cross New York and really cross centuries. Upper Manhattan, above 125th street, you see New York’s colonial heritage. Lower Manhattan, below 14th street, you see Dutch New York and the Jazz Age. The grave of Alexander Hamilton next to a building put up during the Wall Street boom, next to yet another sterile condo tower occupied by a raft of foreign billionaires who never visit. It’s all there, a microcosm of the whole world. To paraphrase from my favorite documentary of all time, New York by Ken Burns, a New York at one outward looking and yet shockingly insular full of shadows and light.

I spent a couple of days wandering the island with a dear friend of mine, who is a fellow history nerd. I made a mad list of places to visit and somehow, we made it to all of them.

I should put these in chronological order, but eh, I just don’t feel like it, so we’ll just go with the flow.

The first picture is of a mosaic that I absolutely love. It’s on the old International Telephone and Telegraph building in New York, 1928 futurism, when international communication and the future could only be a good thing. No dark clouds ahead.

These next couple, I put them into the category of “on today’s edition of no this actually Manhattan, not New York,” may I present the campus of the City College of New York. Yes. This is NOT Europe:

These next ones are from Hamilton Grange, from that guy who is the star of some little known musical. Fun fact: he only lived in this house for a short time before being taken out in the infamous duel.

Hamilton Grange:

Next up we have the Morris Jumel house and it’s accompanying terrace. This was the most fascinating place because if you faced one direction, you were in Colonial New York. If you faced the other direction, you were in modern New York. Yes, this is still Manhattan:

And finally, Federal Hall, which I did not even realize you could go inside. And yes, still not Europe:

As is the way now, I came home a couple of days ago and Netflix had already picked my programming for the evening and at this point, who am I to disagree with the robots? The robots are controlling our shopping now and writing all of our papers. I mean a robot or ChatGPT could be writing this right now. You don’t know. It might be true. You might be impressed by shockingly good prose that it turns out is written by an AI thing. Thing. I don’t have a better term for it.

Well I hate to disappoint you, but it’s still me, writing from my undisclosed location. A couch. I’m writing this from a couch with a period drama muted in the background. Anyway, let’s get ourselves back on track. Netflix picked my evening programming, a nice little documentary called “Squaring the Circle” about a graphic design collective called Hipgnosis, a graphic design collective active in England from the 1960s to the 1980s. They designed the cover art for some really famous albums at the time, including the Pink Floyd cover featuring two guys in suits. OK that’s pretty normal. Did I mention one of them is on fire? I did. I did not. They did a lot of other famous covers, but that one is the most memorable.

The thing about the album covers at the time was that they were actually done by hand. Digital photography was a long away dream, Photoshop perhaps a far away idea. If they wanted one guy to be on fire to photograph, well, one of them had to be on fire. If they wanted a double exposure, well, bust out the Rolleiflex and take some double exposures. The covers are graphic dreams that somehow embody the bands they are made for. It’s remarkable the degree to which they embody the music they are matched with.

I’ve been fascinated by images since I was a kid. As a teenager with nothing much to do, nothing to look forward to and no where to go, I decorated my bedroom floor to ceiling in images. I tore them out of magazines and taped them to the walls. So many of those images still stick in my mind. Back in those days, back in those days when we threw nickels in the Nickelodeon to make it play, people made mix tapes. Sometimes you recorded songs from the radio for said mix tapes. The youth, they will never know the pain of recording a song and having the tape just run out on you. The olden days. Simpler times.

After a while of making these mixtapes, I started putting little covers on them. Of course my life was already occupied by cutting out pictures from magazines, so I continued that. I kind of applied a design aesthetic I liked to the covers. I remember one I made had sofa cushions on it and I put a title on it using the typewriter we had. Typewriter. That’s how long ago that was. Making these covers was part of my quasi artistic pursuits at the time. I was in high school in this desolate barren landscape and the powers that be decided I wasn’t an artist, so I did what I could to express that particular side of me. I was already interested in photography but I thought SLRs were too complicated to use. I did have two point and shoots. I had shot maybe five, at most ten photos that turned out how I liked.

As I got further into photography, more and more I associated images with music. Even now if I can associate a picture or a film with a piece of music, I enjoy the music a lot more. I loved the show Gossip Girl, at least the first season, before it got completely ridiculous because the visuals in the show were unbelievable. I was 30 when the show premiered, far out of the demographic the show was intended for. I was living in Sweden when the show premiered and I missed New York. A LOT. The show kinda brought me back there in a great way. I had no idea what music was still even popular at the time, so the show filled me in on what the youth were into at the time.

In one episode, Serena become a debutante, complete with snotty, stuck up blond grandmother there, disapproving of her bringing Dan Humphrey of the Williamsburg Humphreys. Sure the show was corny and a tad over the top at times, but the visuals were flawless. At Serena’s debutante ball they played a song called “Secret” by a duo called the Pierces. It is a stunningly beautiful scene, with the dancing and the intrigue on the floor. The Pierces made a video with the song and I saw it and thought it was completely wrong for the song, because I associated it with the beautiful scene and the actual video didn’t match the picture I had in my head.

So as usual, as I’m watching this documentary about the album covers, I started thinking about the pictures I took during Eat Pray Herman. I hauled around four cameras on the trip. Nothing makes me happier than hauling around an insane number of cameras. I got some incredible shots on the trip, but at one point I did think — why do I take pictures? I mean souvenirs, artistic expression, all of that. The cameras got a real workout during the trip. The Rollei saw some action in Florida, Iceland and Washington/Virginia. I bought a roll of black and white infrared film in New York. I had to buy a lead lined bag for it and couldn’t load it until I got to Florida. I had to take a dark bag with me to load the film in. Oh and to get the really good effects on the film, you have to use a red filter. I have a 40 year old Canon AE-1 and I had to find a red filter for it. Way too late I realized that I had bought the wrong size filter, so I had to jury rig the filter to the lens with gaffer tape. Good times.

I took so many pictures during Eat Pray Herman and I did wonder why I took all of them. Once I saw them though, I knew why. I knew exactly why I had taken them. Something about these made me think of a mix of island music and rock. This is what came to mind when I saw these pictures:

This picture that I took in Reykjavik really made me think of some kind of warm folk music:

These look like they belong on the cover of an acid rock album. Yes they are both mistakes I made with film. No these are not altered in any way digitally, I guess an homage to Hypgnosis:

Iceland to me just looked like the cover of a Who album or maybe Led Zeppelin. Good album covers for complex, layered music:

This is the shot though that I like to call “The Icon.” Maybe this could be for a Greatest Hits album. It is that beautiful:

These two, both taken in Iceland, would fit well on the cover of an album by a sensitive alternative band:

This one, this definitely belongs on the cover a Jimmy Buffet type album, tropical ease:

These ones, they would go with albums that have music on them that is a bit strange for people’s tastes, a bit out there:

This one belongs on the cover of an album that is a bit happy and a bit sad at the same time:

This could be heavy metal:

And last, but certainly not least, this one could definitely go on a comedy album or a band that has a comedic, offbeat feel. Where that communism at, Comrade Lenin says:

Eat Pray Herman

Writing has always helped me to process things.  I’m not exactly sure why.  

What’s even funnier is that formatting documents relaxes me.  I sit in my office at the university creating lessons almost every single day, and when I get stuck on an idea or I can’t think of something, I make a big document and just start formatting it.  

The first time I ran into an issue at work with my lesson and I opened a document and just started formatting, I thought — this is exactly how it was in 2000 when I worked for Herman, with us sitting in that little office on Lee Highway in Northern Virginia.  I’m there, working on deadline, ordering food with my coworkers from the Lost Dog cafe.  

It’s 23 years later and I’m teaching at the university and I’m still there in my mind, in that little room with Herman and my coworkers.  By no means was that an easy time in my life.  I was 23, just freshly having been dumped by the guy I thought I would be building a relationship with, feeling like life was over, when I worked there.  I was happy at work but unhappy otherwise, not fitting in anywhere, least of all with all those Oxford shirts at the Hawk and Dove.  The Hawk and Dove.  Feels about a million miles away, distant and remote as the moon.  

A couple of days after Herman passed away, I was sitting in my office trying to solve one of my myriad problems for the day and I opened up a document and just started formatting it, like I usually do.  I always figure that whatever problem I have, I’ll just open a document to solve part of it and suddenly I come up with a solution.  The thing that time though was I finally figured out why I did that.  It was what I did when I worked for Herman.  In my mind I’m still back in that office and somehow this was a safe place for me.

Grief though.  Grief is weird.  I don’t know if there’s a better way of describing it.  Grief is just weird.  You are ok for a while and then it just grabs you again, when you least except it to. In these months after Herman’s passing, I have had to deal with it in a way that I hadn’t had to previously.

I don’t even want to remember the day I found out when Herman passed away.  It is just randomly somewhere in March, but otherwise I don’t want to remember anything about it.  When I found out, I went to my parents house for a week.  I remember the first night I was just sobbing.  Sobbing.  I told my parents that I would go downstairs (where my sleep area is) and I might not come back for a couple of hours and they just need to let me do that.  My parents gave me the space I needed and I am so grateful to them for that.  

But then something funny happened the second night at was at my parents.  A friend of Herman’s who I also knew quite well messaged me on Facebook to ask if I had heard and yeah, of course I had heard.  She called me and expected to have a ten minute conversation with her.  We ended up on the phone for two or three hours.  I didn’t keep track.  

Over the course of this conversation, we told every Herman story imaginable.  His plays being produced by Edward Albee.  The fact that he may or may not have a child in Norway.  He was a background extra in a Keanu Reeves movie. Tales of his ex-girlfriends who have nicknames that cannot be mentioned on this blog.  “Did he take you to Gatorland?”  Of course I went to Gatorland with Herman.  I mean who doesn’t want to spent the day in a place that is the temperature of your average sauna or Bikram yoga studio that is built for lazy, scaly small brained potential killing machines?  This friend mentioned that the Gatorland trips were his test.  A test?  Alligators are awesome.  Who wouldn’t want to hang out with them for a day and watch them eat entire supermarket chickens in one go??  

During the course of the conversation, we realized what a profound character we had been friends with.  He was alive again between us for that moment.  We had gone from being in utter, unending, inescapable grief to laughing about the guy.  

The next day I got a message from another woman.  The message was telling.  We’ve never met but I feel like I know you.  He had mentioned this woman many times and I felt the exact same way.  I had never met her but I felt like I knew her.  The next night I had the same conversation.  She had known him since college, so even longer than we had known each other.  She told me the full versions of some famous Herman stories that I had just gotten the summary, years later version.  And we laughed our asses off, of course.  I started feeling better.  The grief was still something unbelievable and just inescapable but now it was becoming somewhat easier to deal with.

A couple of weeks later, they held a memorial service in Virginia Beach for Herman.  I made my mom go with me.  My mother knew Herman and loved him a lot as well.  It was really important to me that she be there.

I did not want to get on that plane.  I did not want to be there.  We stayed in a hotel that smelled weird.  I was upset.  A portrait of a giant televangelist greeted us in the airport.  Bode well this did not.

But something happened at the memorial service that I had not anticipated.  It was almost remarkable.  I met the other women he shared his life with.  I knew some of them but I met others who I had only heard about before.  

Oddly, the memorial wasn’t sad.  Everyone was hugging and exclaiming — OMG!!!  I heard about you!!!!  Even before the memorial started, the other women in Herman’s life were heard to exclaim — OMG!!!!  That’s her???  I’ve been hearing about that forever.  My mother didn’t really know what hit her watching all of this.

What struck me as well was that I had this whole life with Herman.  We had been to Virginia Beach together and I had met his family there many times.  We had friends in common, this whole life that we shared.

The memorial started out a bit sad but as it went on, it was just hours of sustained laughter.  I mean it NEVER stopped.  Herman always told the story about his ex-girlfriend who he suddenly drove back to her house after her father had had a heart attack.  Herman always said — she went to College of Notre Dame of Maryland.  He always said that she had gone to “CONDOM college.”  So when I saw her and said — OMG, you are the one who went to “condom college.”  We were ALL laughing.  

Soon enough the speeches started.  Soon enough we realized that we all had the same stories.  We were yelling out parts of the stories and laughing at the wrong places when everyone started talking.  We also realized that it was all women reminiscing about him.  By the end of the night, we had a group photo.  And we were so happy.  

When the memorial happened, a group of us formed a messaging chain to just get information out about what was going on logistics wise when we were in Virginia Beach.  After it was all over, I suggested we keep the messaging thread going.  

Along the way, one of my friends came up with a really great nickname for us.  She started calling us “the sister wives.”  It stuck.  We were Herman’s sister wives.  Solidified in this way.

Our messaging channel is still going strong, six months after Herman passed. Recently I found out that Herman had shared the secret of the best halo halo (Filipino dessert) with another one of the sister wives. She had halo halo with him at an authentic Filipino place and that halo halo had 17 layers by her telling. I had been begging Herman for the secret codes to the halo halo for years and all I got was some supermarket halo halo that gave me an idea of what halo halo could be, kind of a Cliff’s notes of halo halo. Turns out he had shared the codes with another sister wife.

I told my church community that I would leaning on them more than ever after this happened.  The pastor said two things to me that really comforted me.  First, he said that grief fills us but we eventually grow bigger than the grief.  The second thing they said to me was that I might have lost Herman but I had gained four other friends.  I knew it would take time before these statements had any meaning to me.  I learned this from a lot of the things I hear in church have meaning over a longer stretch of time, not immediately in the moment.  And this stuff was comforting. I feel like that I am growing bigger than the grief and I am starting to see the things that are growing out of losing Herman.

The months since Herman passed haven’t been easy.  So many times, even now, I wish I could just talk to him again.  He was always able to give me advice in a way that no one else was ever able to, especially when it came to work stuff.  I ride a bus down Commonwealth Avenue every day when I leave work and I sat on that bus so many times and I thought — I am ok.  Herman is gone but I am ok.

Somewhere in there I thought — what about doing a trip this year?  In 2021, Herman and I took this hilarious roadtrip through the south.  Last year I went to Washington and Florida in late August.  The idea of this trip continued to percolate in my head.  Where could I go?  What could I see?

In August too, work got rough.  It was a rough summer.  Summer in Boston has always been just a magical time here, with sunsets, new experiences and things that seemed unbelievable as they happened.  This summer though was just work.  It was the first non-magical summer here.  I’m a positive person, sort of feeling full and happy most of the time but it was a rough summer.  

At the end of the summer, work got kinda rough.  Not super rough but things got rough.  The thing was that usually I would have called Herman to talk about it and get his advice but I couldn’t do that.  And it was really really hard realizing this.  

Throughout the summer, when things got hard, I would work on my summer trip schedule.  I revised the trip schedule many times.  Initially I was thinking of visiting my sister wives but logistically it wasn’t going to work out just then.  Did I mention the salting away of the savings?  Yeah.  Very little summer fun but that doesn’t really matter.  I hang out in my neighborhood most of the time and cook at home.  My life is super boring now and I could not be happier.

Throughout the time when I was scheduling the trip, I kept thinking — this is my Eat Pray Love, a book I hadn’t read that was transformed into a movie that I didn’t much like.  But I saw the parodies of it on my beloved Rich White Lady instagram page.  I love you Nicolas Flannery!!  He’s continually parodying the suddenly single woman who goes out and looks for meaning by traveling, eating and maybe praying.  Except I’m not suddenly single.  I lost my best friend.  So I decided to name the trip “Eat Pray Herman.”

Eat Pray Herman went through multiple revisions before I decided on the final itinerary.  Every stop had meaning for Herman in one way or another.  I chose New York to start because Herman grew up nearby and I had gone down a major YouTube rabbit hole of all of these places in New York that I wanted to visit.  Really un-New York places, places that look more like Europe than New York.  Relics of New York’s Colonial past.  Some deep history stuff.  Herman would have loved that.  Oh and for the eating part, pastrami at Katz’s Deli, which Herman also would have loved.

The next destination was really not on the original plan and there’s a short story about it.  In 2007, right when the “Iceland is cool” thing started, I spent an hour at Keflavik International Airport in transit to somewhere else and decided I loved Iceland.  One hour in the airport.  That’s all it took.  I forever regretted not exploring Iceland.  Around that time, I met this older doctor from Iceland and he said — in Iceland, we charge the least amount of money possible to get to our country and then we take all of your money.  More prophetic words have never been spoken.

Fast forward to last year and I was having a conversation with the pastor at my church and out of nowhere he says — we have a relationship with a church in Iceland.  I nearly fell out of my chair.  Iceland was the one country I had always wanted to visit, always wanted to explore again.  The pastor next said that in a year or so they were planning on sending some church members over there.  I thought — when this happens, you are absolutely going. Suddenly, and I have to believe that this might have involved the hand of God, a trip to Iceland had just popped up.

Even more interesting is the fact that Herman actually visited Iceland in 2002 and loved the place. I took a picture along of Herman to photograph in different places in Iceland, to have him there with me.

The next destination was Washington DC, about which I have done a wholesale reconsideration after thinking I kinda hated it there when I lived there.  I’ve realized recently that I have a lot of happy memories from the place. Obviously also this is where I met Herman as well.

My final destination was to be Orlando, Florida, home of my weird best friend and his gigantic Venezuelan family.  I first visited Orlando in 2008 with Herman on our first road trip, where I was introduced to Gatorland, the Waffle House and souvenir stores that look like space ships and wizards.  Oh and South of the Border in Collins, South Carolina.  Did I mention the Peachoid???? How could I have forgotten that. Herman’s father and a lot of his family members live in Florida, so it was a natural destination for that reason too.

Like I said, it was a rough summer and by the middle of August when work winds down, I felt empty.  All I kept thinking was that the trip was going to maybe make me feel whole again.  I mean you aren’t supposed to use travel to solve your problems.  I mean that’s what I had always thought.  

I guess I wasn’t really going to use the trip to solve my problems.  What I wanted to do was get some space, some time to think and to reconsider a lot of things.  I also wanted to trod the soil of new places I have never been before, see sights I had not seen before and move and feel things I had never felt before.  Eat Pray Herman did accomplish that for me.

There will be four separate entries about this trip because what I experienced and saw on the trip.  For now, here are what I think are the four best photos from what I saw on the trip.  MUCH more to come.

The introduction to Eat Pray Herman:

I’m going to start the entry off by saying that I love my job. I mean really I do love it, but the best feeling in the world when I close the door and I am in my own little world. It will sound corny but I make dinner every night, actual real life dinner, not TV dinner or takeout. Actual dinner. Pots and pans and salt and pepper.

I’ve taken to calling my time when I get home as “creativity time.” I’m not so prolific anymore with the blog posting, not because I’m getting lazy. Rather I want to weave some kind of creative narrative around the pictures before I post them and sometimes that takes a while to come up with. And I’ve revived shooting with film, so it just takes longer to get my film back.

Like millions, if not billions of other people, I come home, flip on Netflix and well, the service shoots some kind of programming at me. Recently it recommended a movie called “Shirkers” and I cannot get it out of my mind for so many different reasons, most of course photography related.

I was out a couple of days ago shooting with my little weird half frame up by the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and I returned in my mind to “Shirkers” and honestly this is one of the most remarkable movies I have ever seen and so different from anything else I have seen for a long time. So much to feast on visually, intellectually and mood wise.

The simplest way to explain the movie is its a documentary about three young women who were 18 in 1992 and made a film called “Shirkers.” I was 15 in 1992, so these people could have been classmates of mine. They are now around my age, the same or different as they were a lifetime ago. The plot of the movie was a road movie around Singapore, where the three young women lived at the time, where the main character is a killer. But the plot isn’t even really the center of things. For me as usual it’s the visual and color story. And there’s a detective story aspect to the thing, but we’ll get to that.

The documentary weaves the film footage with present day life. It’s the film footage that really caught my eye. It has this absolutely dreamy fuzzed out film look about it. And the color palette is absolutely amazing. The film has this warm glow about it. And the bright colors are incredibly bright. I can’t really describe the color story. I guess it’s full of just primary colors. It’s Singapore, so full of these lush scenes of vegetation. Seeing Singapore as well brought to mind Europe and Asia at the same time, modern and old. In the eyes of these filmmakers, I bet it’s just “boring old Singapore” where they grew up, but to me it’s this technicolor wonderland.

What I particularly loved about this movie is that it plays into what I really love about photography, filmmaking, chronicling. I see other photographers work now and some of strikes me as much too precious. A lot of people call themselves photographers now but the images they produce are so shined up and polished and perfect. A lot of these pictures I see now call to mind more computer screen savers than actual examples of how these people see and interpret the world. Watching this Shirkers movie, I really saw myself in these filmmakers, photographing and filming inside tunnels, at car washes, on empty highways, their favorite bakeries and mannequin shops. They shoot scenes in a supermarket, with its green fluorescent light.

When I was at the Chestnut Hill Reservoir a couple of days ago, I looked around at the people walking around the reservoir. With my little half frame, I started photographing them. I started photographing the people lying in the grass near the Reservoir. I shot a swimming pool near the Reservoir. I stood there for a while and thought maybe this world is really like Shirkers, just little corners of experiences. I also thought about photography, where it’s much more interesting to shoot things like that than it is to shoot these perfectly flawless scenes. To me, corners, sunsets, abandoned things and mundane things have always been much more interesting that massive vistas, landmarks and shallow depth of field flower or animal pictures. I always joke that I’m not the precious photographer. Half the time my camera is covered in ice cream or whatever I’m eating at the time. This really happened. I am not making it up. Many times this happened. A couple of days ago, I put my coffee commuter cup into my handbag with the aforementioned half frame, just to discover a bit later than the entire cup had spilled into the inside of the handbag and the half frame smells like espresso now. I just cleaned it off with an alcohol wipe and it was back in business.

Back to the aforementioned “Shirkers.” Me being the photography weirdo that I am is there busy watching for all the visual stuff, shamelessly stealing ideas for future photos. The story too in the film, which slowly unfolds, is engrossing on its own. The three young women, teenagers basically, make this film, really a labor of love and really all they have because it is 1992, film making equipment and reels upon reels of film are difficult, if not impossible to get for non professionals with no means. They make the film under the tutelage of a mysterious man named Georges Cardona.

Cardona cuts a really interesting figure in the movie. His origins were obscured. He seemed to tell a lot of tall tales. He seemed to have an interesting personal life. And in the end, he becomes the villain of the piece. Once the film is finished, the three women take off to different corners of the planet, leaving Georges with their film. He’s supposed to edit their film and show it to them as a finished product. Instead he disappears without a trace. Honestly I don’t know how these women dealt with that, because I would be pretty angry if a person did something like that to me.

Years later, they find out that Georges has died and his wife or companion has the film of their movie. There is no sound to this movie they soon realize. Georges has taken the voice track for “Shirkers.” The film delves interestingly into Cardona’s life, which seems to be filled with half truths, tall tales and things left unsaid.

I guess with this new inspiration floating around in my head, I looked at some of the film I got back recently from the Cayman Islands. We went on our annual sojourn down there. I was supposed to bring a favorite medium format TLR. Instead I brought my Canon AE-1. I brought a backup panoramic medium format camera. Yes I travel with that man cameras. No my neck does not get tired from all of those cameras. So I decided to shoot the roll loaded into the camera, just for some film fun and I dragged the camera all those miles, hey why not shoot something.

As I looked at these though, Shirkers did come to mind. They have this dreamy haze to them. They capture maybe some less beautiful parts of the island. But the pictures are a chronicle, not an art piece. Corners, memories, rather than ultra sharpened laminated looking images. Honest and imperfect in their very form.

The Cayman Films, I guess that’s the title if you like: