Mine!

2nd night of Bread Pudding at Raglan Road Irish Pub in Orlando. A-MA-ZING!

Whistle While You Work

Just to show that we were actually working for the past three days, and that it was not all princes and fairy tales at Disney-- Here's Jennifer in the booth with our guest from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute speaking to a conferfence attendee about the Clinical Trial.

Best Desert Ever

Oh-My-GOD!
Outrageous bread pudding!

Raglan Road Irish Pub at Downtown Disney in Orlando serves this-- literally the most yummy desert I've ever tasted.

A Heart at American Heart

I found this one at the American Heart Association (AHA) Conference exhibit Hall in Orlando. Hearts everywhere, true, but not on the floor in my path... :)

Menacing Sign at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando

Is there any other way out?????

Adventures at EPCOT

Jennifer was the Dopey one, gettin her finger in the picture. Funny tid-bit: Dopey made me put my beer down before he woudl get in a photo with me. I guess he is trying to shed that hard-core partier image he has been sporting...

On the way out of the park after the spectacular fireworks and light show.

Test Track-- A fun thriller. That's Jennifer in the back. Tourist tip: ALWAYS GET IN THE "SINGLE RIDER" LINE. IT'S ABOUT HALF AS LONG AS STAND-BY!

Pirates all!

Maria, me, MaryAnn volunteering at The Floating Hospital Children's Halloween Party.

Everything is Rosie, Since I met my Rosie!

She was so amazing. I was a little emotional because after mom died, Rosie's show was a daily escape that I could could count on. She saw me me approaching with tears in my eyes and she came from behind the table to hug me. We talked a little about Mom-- the rest is a blur.

I just GET her. I understand where she's coming from, and I appreciate her willingness to be out there with her family life and her politics. The media loves the soundbites, and always shows them out of context to make her seem so radical. Of course they won't show how she interacts with her fans, including 85 year old Mary who could barely walk but still came from Riverhead, and the boy in the wheelchair, and the hundreds of others who waited hours to shake her hand.

(That's her brother Eddie in the background.)

The people in line all shared a common love of Rosie, and I had a great time hanging out with them while we waited. The line-up. I was number 3. I had showed up a week early by mistake, but I couldn't convince the others there that that should count and entitle me to #1.

After my encounter. My hand was still shaking a little, so it's kinda blurry.

Several years ago, Rosie autographed this heart for the NMF's HeARTworks Gala auction. She remembered it, and we talked briefly about me working for the Foundation.

Right?!

This would be funny if it wasn't so true!

A Little Late...

"National Coming Out Day" was a few weeks ago, wasn't it???

I love the ruckus this is stirring. I moved a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" into the Gay and Lesbian Fiction at Barnes and Noble last night as a show of solidarity!

We are EVERYWHERE-- even in Hogwarts!

Lazy-Boy Candidate Selector

I friend emailed this link to me to help compare your position on a variety of issues to those of the 2008 Presidential Candidates. I found it to be pretty interesting. I was a little surprised. Your comments?

Tequila Free Zone

I still couldn't bring myself to come back to Tequila. Even a single marguerita didn't go down easily.. I switched to a pina colada and then decided to go to diet coke. I was severely damaged in Indianapolis. So sad...

After a night at the local haunt in Huntington, we decided to stock up on junk food and all of us pile into bed to watch Dane Cook. I got ice cream. Here's the conversation:

Rachel: What flavor did you get?

Jonathan: Haagen Daz Peaches and Cream.

Rachel: You always get somehing different. I usually get the same thing.

Jonathan: Well, Lori from Weight Watchers says you lose weight faster if you "mix it up" and don't always eat the same thing.... So I alternate between Chunky Monkey, Half- Baked, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Strawberry Cheesecake, and Peaches and Cream.

Rachel: I don't think that's what Lori meant....

[as we roll in a fit of early morning giggles...]

Wade Robson on "Dancing with the Stars"

AMAZING! I love this type of treatrical and stylized choreography!

Sweet Heart

A heart and an urban cat on a NYC street.

This sweet baby was sitting on top of a stack of freight that had been unloaded from a delivery truck in the flower district in NYC. I stopped to give him a little pet and noticed his heart tag. :)

To Be in the Audience, or to be IN (the show)

I have a great friend with whom I share a great love for theatre. She refers to be as "Brother" in her blog, so I'll refer to her as "Sister" on mine. She posted something on her blog that really stirred a response in me! Click here to read her posting about how we all have to find different ways to satisfy our "bug for the boards." I SO GET what she is saying!

Wow! The grass is always greener.

I want what she has!

I want to be IN theater, not get to go see it!

I want to create it, not watch others create it.

I want to feel the audience’s energy, not BE the audience.

Getting to bankrupt myself to see all the great shows is a sorry substitute for the profound joy of an opening night call for “Places!” by the stage manager.

She is SO LUCKY! Her husband also shares with her the love of the stage, and they get to build a life together around this!

But then, I can't imagine not having the Great White Way at my disposal either. If I were wealthy, it would make it a little more practical, but I can accept spending an occasional week living on Top Ramen to feed my theatre habit. :)

Really?!

Are you kidding me?! It's not even halloween yet!

"Tea-cup Fingers"

A highlight of my summer was getting to hang out in Palo Alto with Broadway legend Ann Reinking! Here I am with Ann and NMF Board Member Steve in the bar after a long day. We are doing our best Fosse-Style choreography. If you are truly living under a rock, or don't follow Broadway, you will also recognize Annie from her many movie roles. Here is a list.

(I just came across the photo on my computer... I think I forgot to post it in July.)

Book Report- "Sick Girl" by Amy Silverstein

Working part time at a book store, I frequently come across books that I never would have found otherwise. I have shelves and shelves of them at home, waiting to be read. I recently stumbled across "Sick Girl" by Amy Silverstein and, after hesitating for fear it might hit too close to home, decided to give it a go. I was right. It was WAY too close to home.

The book is a memoir about a typical type-A law student who, at age 24, found her carefully planned out life in shambles due to an unexpected health crisis. After a period of misdiagnoses (far too common in women, even today) she discovers she has congestive heart failure, and must have a heart transplant.

When her transplant finally arrives and she struggles with a world that expects her to be unconditionally grateful at her good fortune and to pull herself up by the bootstraps despite the fact that she has simply traded one set of problems for another. She is misunderstood and isolated in her feelings, and struggles to portray to role of a "recovered" sick girl for the benefit of those around her. All the while, on the inside she faces the daunting and endless threat of rejection and a series of opportunistic infections and other physical side effects from the immunosuppressant drugs.

I really wish I had had the opportunity to read this book while Mom was still alive. I found myself realizing as I read it that I was just like the friends and family in the book-- well-intentioned people who inadvertently put insane amounts of pressure on the transplant recipient to "be normal" again. To be grateful for being alive and not muddy the waters with tales of shingles and annual heart biopsies and further illness.

Mom had her transplant at age 47, and as far as I was concerned was supposed to get another 20 years. I remember ONE number when we found out that she was going to have to have a heart transplant back in the winter of 1993-- that statistics showed that over 85% of heart transplants were still alive after 5 years. That's all we had at that point, since "routine" transplants had only been being done for about a decade at that point. I focused on the 85% alive, and the fact that what would happen beyond the 5 years was conveniently and definitively swept under the rug.

Mom always said that, despite the pain from the actual surgery, she woke up from the transplant feeling better than she had on months, maybe years. Did I stop paying attention then because I needed to take it that all was good? Did she feel "sick" every day--even after she was "healed"? I know there were complications that came along, but I always thought of those as occasional bumps along the way. Did I not ask because I didn't want to know the answer? My not asking, and not understanding, must have felt awful for her. Is that sort of sense of isolation what led to her depression?

In the book, Silverstein talks about facing the constant fear of "transplant artery disease" and rejection. Mom's official cause of death was listed as "chronic rejection of transplanted heart." When she started going downhill, the doctors told us that another transplant was inevitable. As the family member, my attitude was "fine, let's do it" even though I knew that the likelihood of it coming as fast as the first one (an unheard of 4 days on the list) was pretty slim. Also, I knew that mom had real misgivings of going through it all again. I wanted to beg her to fight, but I knew that she didn't have much fight left in her.

I did not like Amy Silverstein for a good part of the book. I guess I joined the ranks of her family and friends that just wanted her to be thankful and shut up about the rest. But I learned from her, and for that I appreciate her willingness to share all the ugliness that she experienced, in addition to what we are conditioned to call "the miracle of a heart-transplant." Reading this memoir provided an insight into what Mom must have been feeling during those 7 years, 10 months, and 3 days between her transplant and when she died.

I am grateful for that.

Here are a few passages that I found particularly powerful:

"The people closest to me, whose understanding would have been invaluable, could only run my ordeals through their own filters and then invent wildly far-fetched, impossibly upbeat conclusions that had no basis in my reality as a heart-transplant patient. Their creativity had more sting to it than they would ever realize, but I knew they called it up for a good cause: optimistic nonsense about my health situation made everyone feel so much better. Except for me."

" I love my family, but I can't live for them. Maybe that makes me a bad person, I don't know. But Scott [her husband] gets up every morning and goes to work, and my son goes to school. And I'm at home feeling sick. Or at the hospital. I can't just be this fixture that hangs around so the people I love can check in on me every now and then while they go along with their busy lives. Call me selfish, but I need to have some meaning besides living for other people."

Everyone who knows someone who has expereicned a transplant should read this book to understand their loved one's perspective a little better. It will be scary. It will make them worry about the future. But it is honest, and it will paint a realistic picture for them of what they may need to do to be more supportive and compassionate.

Here's a link to the Reader's Group Guide for the book.

Mom

(here's another post about some of this "stuff" from last year)

Book Report: "Celebrity Detox" by Rosie O'Donnell

I really admire Rosie for her candor and willingness to hold strong to her views in the face of a firestorm. It must be insanely difficult to try to stay so real through it all...

People who judge her based on the mainstream media's "soundbite" approach to reporting are being unfair. Read her book, Celebrity Detox. I enjoyed it, and think it will help people understand her better.

I'm hoping to see her next week at the Book Revue in Huntington... :) She's doing a signing.

Photos from the 9th Annual Martin Bonfire in Indianapolis

More pictures on Flickr.

What a wonderful world- Hand puppetry

My cousin Sherry sent me this. Amazing!

Bonding with my Cousi-Step-Brother Through Tequila

It went downhill from here...

Babysitting Dylan Ethan

How CUTE is this baby?!?!

Dillon is Cousi-mom's great-nephew, which makes him my 5th-cousin/step-2nd cousin. (Again, for those who need a refresher: my 3rd cousin is also my step-mother. The family tree looks more like a banyon tree than a traditional tidy geneological graphic.

Hearts on Vacation

Heart at home

Indianapolis for R & R

'The Circle' in Indy

Taking a week of R & R in Indianapolis. Visiting Family, laying on the couch, drinking wine in teh hot tub. Doing a LOT of nothing!

Dancing with the Stars 2nd Week - Helio Castroneves

My new official pick to go all the way and win it!

And a Silver Heart

Two particularly beautiful ones the same day.

A Ruby Heart

Here Comes Rosie!

All the media garbage about Rosie's new book is making me crazy. They are taking soundbites and passages out of context and portraying this book as a mudslinging free-for-all. The point of the book is to share how fame becomes like a drug withdrawing from the spotlight can be like trying to overcome any addiction. Rosie shares her experience of leaving her show and then coming back after several years "off."

There are several cartons of the book in the back room at Barnes and Noble (with the incorrect release date-- there was a problem with the text on the dust cover that had to be re-done, so the new release date is 10/9 insead of 10/2).

Does a Heart Lay in the Woods?

In the woods near my house, found while out for a walk after work.

Exotic Feline Rescue Center

Please visit the website for The Exotic Feline Rescue Center to find out about this amazing sanctuary for abused, abandoned or otherwise displaced "big cats." My Dad went to college with Joe Taft, the man who founded the Center in the early nineties. It's located about an hour outside Indianapolis, and provides up close and personal views of some of the most amazing animals on the planet.

"Marie Osmond is about to Foxtrot"

I was watching the season premier of "Dancing with the Stars" last night (one of my many guilty pleasures) and got downright giddy when Sabrina Bryan-- I'd never heard of her either-- did her hip-hip influenced cha-cha-cha. As soon as she hit the final pose, I literally jumped from my couch applauding. It was SO MUCH FUN TO WATCH! I grabbed my cell phone, desperate to speak to someone that I could share the moment with.

I dialed my great friend Darla. The conversation went something like this:

[ring-ring-ring]

Darla: Hello?
Jonathan: Please, please tell me you have given up your "I don't watch those shows" attitude and are watching Dancing with the Stars right now!
Darla: Sweetie, I'm not watching. I don't watch those shows.
Jonathan: Please watch it. I need to talk to someone abotu it, and I KNOW you'd like it.
Darla: I'm sorry... I---
Jonathan: But Marie Osmond is about to do the Foxtrot! How can you to miss that?!
Darla: And you wonder WHY I don't watch those shows...
Jonathan: [sigh] fine, goodbye.
Darla: Goodbye.

I'm not sure, but I think I have humiliated myself. LOL

I LOVE this show. I admit it. I was a snob the first few years and scoffed at it, but I discovered it the night of the great Emmet Smith v. Mario Lopez finale, and never missed it last season.

I cast my votes for Jenny, Marie, and Sabrina.

My prediction for the season (having only seen the women-- the men are on tonight, including Wayne Newton) is Sabrina to WIN!

Come on people -- Wayne NEWTON! This is good television!

Yikes. One of MY friends did THIS?!

I noticed Stephan's shoe-sock combo while chatting over a coffee. He said,"Yeah, it's PIMP FLY, dontcha think?"

I MUST be getting old...

Keith Olbermann NAILS IT!

Olbermann to Bush: ‘Your hypocrisy is so vast’
A reaction to Thursday’s press conference: the president was the one who interjected Gen. Petraeus into the political dialogue in the first place
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Updated: 9:59 p.m. ET Sept 20, 2007

So the President, behaving a little bit more than usual, like we would all
interrupt him while he was watching his favorite cartoons on the DVR, stepped
before the press conference microphone and after side-stepping most of the
substantive issues like the Israeli raid on Syria, in condescending and
infuriating fashion, produced a big political finish that indicates, certainly,
that if it wasn’t already – the annual Republican witch-hunting season is
underway.

“I thought the ad was disgusting. I felt like the ad was an
attack not only on General Petraeus, but on the U.S. Military.”

“And I
was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat party spoke out strongly
against that kind of ad.

“And that leads me to come to this conclusion:
that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like Moveon.org
or more afraid of irritating them, than they are of irritating the United States
military.”

“That was a sorry deal.”

First off, it’s
“Democrat-ic” party.

You keep pretending you’re not a politician, so
stop using words your party made up. Show a little respect.

Secondly,
you could say this seriously after the advertising/mugging of Senator Max
Cleland? After the swift-boating of John Kerry?

But most importantly,
making that the last question?

So that there was no chance at a
follow-up?

So nobody could point out, as Chris Matthews so incisively
did, a week ago tonight, that you were the one who inappropriately interjected
General Petraeus into the political dialogue of this nation in the first place!

Deliberately, premeditatedly, and virtually without precedent, you
shanghaied a military man as your personal spokesman and now you’re complaining
about the outcome, and then running away from the microphone?

Eleven
months ago the President’s own party, the Republican National Committee,
introduced this very different kind of advertisement, just nineteen days before
the mid-term elections.

Bin Laden.

Al-Zawahiri’s rumored quote
of six years ago about having bought “suitcase bombs.”



All set
against a ticking clock, and finally a blinding explosion and the dire
announcement:

“These are the stakes - vote, November 7th.”

That
one was ok, Mr. Bush?

Terrorizing your own people in hopes of getting
them to vote for your own party has never brought as much as a public comment
from you?

The Republican Hamstringing of Captain Max Cleland and lying
about Lieutenant John Kerry met with your approval?

But a shot at
General Petraeus, about whom you conveniently ignore it, was you who reduced him
from four-star hero to a political hack, merits this pissy juvenile blast at the
Democrats on national television?

Your hypocrisy is so vast that if we
could somehow use it to fill the ranks in Iraq you could realize your dream and
keep us fighting there until the year 3000.

The line between the
military and the civilian government is not to be crossed.


When
Douglas MacArthur attempted to make policy for the United States in Korea half a
century ago, President Truman moved quickly to fire him, even though Truman knew
it meant his own political suicide, and the deification of a General who history
suggests had begun to lose his mind.

When George McClellan tried to make
policy for the Union in the Civil War, President Lincoln finally fired his chief
General, even though he knew McClellan could galvanize political opposition
which he did when McClellan ran as Lincoln’s presidential opponent in 1864,
nearly defeating our greatest president.

Even when the conduit flowed
the other way and Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to smear the Army because it
wouldn’t defer the service of one of McCarthy’s staff aides, the entire civilian
and Defense Department structures, after four years of fearful servitude, rose
up against McCarthy and said “enough” and buried him.

The list is not
endless but it is instructive.

Air Force General LeMay—who broke with
Kennedy over the Cuban Missile Crisis and was retired.

Army General
Edwin Anderson Walker—who started passing out John Birch Society leaflets to his
soldiers.

Marine General Smedley Butler—who revealed to Congress the
makings of a plot to remove FDR as President and for merely being approached by
the plotters, was phased out of the military hierarchy.

These careers
were ended because the line between the military and the civilian is not to be
crossed!

Mr. Bush, you had no right to order General Petraeus to become
your front man.

And he obviously should have refused that order and
resigned rather than ruin his military career.

The upshot is and
contrary it is, to the MoveOn advertisement he betrayed himself more than he did
us.


But there has been in his actions a sort of reflexive courage,
some twisted vision of duty at a time of crisis. That the man doesn’t understand
that serving officers cannot double as serving political ops, is not so much his
fault as it is your good, exploitable, fortune.

But Mr. Bush, you have
hidden behind the General’s skirts, and today you have hidden behind the skirts
of ‘the planted last question’ at a news conference, to indicate once again that
your presidency has been about the tilted playing field, about no rules for your
party in terms of character assassination and changing the fabric of our nation,
and no right for your opponents or critics to as much as respond.

That
is not only un-American but it is dictatorial.

And in pimping General
David Petraeus and in the violation of everything this country has been
assiduously and vigilantly against for 220 years, you have tried to blur the
gleaming radioactive demarcation between the military and the political, and to
portray your party as the one associated with the military, and your opponents
as the ones somehow antithetical to it.

You did it again today and you
need to know how history will judge the line you just crossed.

It is a
line thankfully only the first of a series that makes the military political,
and the political, military.

It is a line which history shows is always
the first one crossed when a democratic government in some other country has
started down the long, slippery, suicidal slope towards a Military Junta.

Get back behind that line, Mr. Bush, before some of your supporters
mistake your dangerous transgression, for a call to further politicize our
military.

© 2007 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20896378/

It's the little things...

I went from this...
To this...

All by myself... I even used tools.

(Note the rotted out pieces of the pipe in the top photo that were leading to a profuse leak in ym bathroom sink. After attempting to plug the leak with chewing gum (kidding) and silicone sealant (NOT kidding) I gave in and journeyed to Home Depot. It took two trips and a spat with the Depot Dude that wouldn't help when I told him my pipe was too big and needed help making it smaller, but in the end I was sucessful in the do-it-yourself home repair arena. :)

Little things can make your weekend.

Peeking Hearts

Random discovery at my BN counter. It is an item we sell, but clearly out of place at my work-station. It still made me smile, so I'm "counting" it. :)

Hearts are Falling From the Sky

This one was kind of interesting... I passing by a pile of empty boxes and this one fell from the top and landed i front of me...

9/11 Anniversary

Cartoon by Jeff Parker, Florida Today

On September 11, 2001, I left my apartment in Brooklyn at the usual time of about 8:00am to start my daily commute to work in Port Washington (Long Island). My route put me on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway directly across from the southern tip of Manhattan, with the World Trade Center prominent in my sightline, and then north, driving parallel to the NYC skyline to the Long island Expressway. Even after having done the commute to Long Island for well over a year, the City-view with the early morning sunlight ALWAYS made me take note. That particular morning was perfectly clear-- no clouds at all.

For some reason I was listening to a CD that morning instead of my usual ritual of NPR. About 45 minutes later, I arrived to a state of confusion at the office as people were trying to make sense of the jumbled news reports that there was an explosion at the World Trade Center. I had just passed by there on my way in, but clearly had just missed it. We had no television, and the portable radio was inadequate, so I called Dad to see if he was watching the Today Show and could tell me what was going on. I relayed the information from him to my co-workers that there were rumors that a small plane had crashed downtown. Then the confusion was compounded when dad said "A plane just hit the the World Trade Center." I said that we had already heard that, and he said, "No-- another plane just hit the second tower!"

Now, it is certainly a testament to just how naive I was that my first reaction was that something was somehow malfunctioning with the airplanes and air traffic navigation systems at the NYC airports causing planes to crash. I truly believed that for a brief moment, until Dad said, "No-- this is terrorism." In unison with the rest of the civilized world, as has been proclaimed ad nauseum in the media since tht day, I/we lost our collective innocence on that day. We were suddenly living in the "after" version of our world, and we hadn't even begun to realize how deeply it had just been rocked.

The confusion became utter disorientation when I looked out the window of my office looking over Manhasset Bay and the Long Island Sound and could see two distinct billowing streams of dark smoke rising up from behind the hills off in the distance. I knew intellectually that I was seeing the smoke from the WTC. However, until that moment, I had always thought that the window of my office faced north. I tried to rationalize that the smoke must be from something else since (in my skewed geographical view of the world) my window faced north. When I managed to "get rational" again about the directions, I was shocked by the distance. All those hours and hours of sitting in my car driving back and forth to Long Island, and I was just over the hill from the City, and I was actually watching the smoke from the WTC rise into the sky in front of me-- not on television, but right before my eyes. When I thought back on that later, it was mind boggling how fixated I had become on the direction and distance to Manhattan.

Everyone has their own story of where they were and what they were doing that day, and it really seems to me that, at least among New Yorkers, we all share a deep understanding of the craziness we all experienced that day as we waited to hear news of unaccounted for friends and colleagues. The hastily crafted "Missing" flyers that appeared on lamp posts and blanketed the sides of buildings by the thousands became their own lasting reminder of the frantic desperation that so many felt. I can remember passing one of the walls and realizing that people were actually stopping and reading them in detail. I saw one face that seemed strangely familiar, although I couldn't place where I knew her. I finally realized that I had seen her sister holding up a copy of the flyer for a news camera and pleading for anyone with any information to call her.

For hours, even days, we watched the television, waiting for the talking heads to add something new from their last live report, but instead seeing more and more people with their printed flyers as hope gradually began to fade. The image of these "Missing" flyers has cemented itself in the American psyche.

This cartoon is brilliant. The message is conveys is disturbing.

On the Streets of NYC