Let's Do Church

I had the opportunity to meet Greg for lunch today.  In the morning I jumped out of the shower, grabbed coffee, made tuna and packet our lunches.  We were both heading to offices for the day.  I thought I wouldn't see him again until we both came home to rescue the dog....but a little gift came from the universe in the form of:


"Hey.  Why don't you just take the rest of the day off?"  


I dashed to the office kitchen, found a tub under the dining table, ran to the large sink in the wheelchair-accessible bathroom, filled the tub with warm water, oils from India, rose pedals from Spain...got on a plane...plucked cotton from an old tulip farm in Holland...traveled through a dark and dangerous forest full of elves...found Rumplestiltskin's fair maiden...had her spin the wirey tufts into soft, fluffy gold...got back on another plane...went back to the bathroom...grabbed the tub of hot water and jogged with its sloshing suds spilling about...leapt down the hall to my superior's cubicle...bowed in reverence, ripped her shoes off, kissed each of her toes and proceeded to bath her feet while singing Ave Maria...


After I turned in my key-card, I texted Greg: Lunch? 


He said, "yes in a few" and I walked through Wall Street like I'd never used my eyes before.  I literally wandered by an old fenced in graveyard next to a miniature Notre Dame.  The doors were open.  Tourists in small spatterings.  I made my way to the chapel of the infamous Trinity church and sat.  


A sign said,"Please keep quiet.  This area is reserved for prayer and meditation."


OH EM GEE.


I am not a religious person.  But I sat in this incredibly religious space and imagined allllllllllll of the women that may have sat before me...meditating...praying...and was overwhelmed with a calm buzz that will never be fulfilled no matter how much champagne I gorge.  I studied the walls, the glass, the carvings, the gold, the embroidery...incents...cool, dry air...I think I traveled back in time and talked to a nun.  And then one walked by!


I looked down in my purse.  The iAnacronism told me the time.  I got up...found dark, winding halls which lead me to the little cemetery outside.  I walked by the very people I was jealous of when I spotted them from the other side of the fence and wondered how they got in!  The interred have been there since the 1700's.  I know how they got in.  I felt my Payless shoes wince.


I met Greg...he was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen.  I wanted to grab his head and kiss every part of his face.  He is my husband, my partner, my hero.  I convinced him to wander around the free Native American exhibit for fifteen minutes after we stuffed our face with too-salty tuna I packed in too-tight tupperware.  Then I went home with The Beatles in my ears and took a nap.  In the afternoon.  In bed.  With the dog.  I'm not 8.  


It. Was. Awesome.


Thanks, Lee Ann for the gift. When after you asked me what I was going to do with my afternoon and I said, "go home and write"...I didn't know I meant later that evening. 

All Due Respect

One of my jobs entails staring at photos of supermodels - REAL supermodels - all day.  There is still no other Elle Macpherson, Cindy Crawford, Rachel Williams, Ashley Richardson, Naomi Campbell, Yasmeen Ghauri...


These photographs are taken by Gilles Bensimon.  Google him.  


Gilles Bensimon: Perfecting Eve...by me.  


I feel I could do a thesis on the man after being paid to stare at his work all day.  His work is not about stealing magic or genius skill at transforming light, or emulsion, or manipulating the minds of these superfreaks-of-delicious-nature.  It is more organic than that.  He is a man. He chose the most perfect moments to aim a lens at the most incredible looking and moving women wearing the most flattering works of art. He did this with little more than his aesthetic, his eye, his...gut.  He trained an entire planet to admire, emulate and thirst for his personal desires.  He's the Kevin Bacon, six degrees... of fashion. 


Staring at work that propelled the art of modeling, advertising and frankly, desire several times a week is inspiring.


Devil Wears Bensimon.


I need to hit the gym.  Hard. 

Cool Hand Jesus - Friday Haiku

I am practicing
to smile like Sir Paul Newman
in a cubicle.

Oh, the joy of life!
Feeling Secretary Spread
numbness in my cheeks.

Temporarily,
I shine at Power Point.
Facsimile me.

If I were to sneeze,
my voice would be heard throughout.
One might shout, "Bless you!"

I walk down the hall.
I glance inside each small space.

People staring straight.

They'd give their own blood

to go on a vacation.

Their families know.

Love is the reason.
The picture frame by the screen.
Carry on Warriors!

Deep End

Every time I speak to my step-mom or my father I ask what they are up to and they tell me they are "working on being more shallow".  We laugh then catch up on family news or gossip about work.  Sometimes we discuss politics, my new married life or a good movie.  And sometimes I give my theories on whatever I've hitched my wagon to that week.

As I get older, I am coming to terms with ideas like:

A: 'it really doesn't matter what people think' 

and

B: 'don't do it just to please others'

and especially

C: 'do what you want, not what you think people want you to do'.

I think these are the standards behind "working on being more shallow".  I can get behind that. 

A: I'm worried people think I'm too weird at this office.  I cracked a joke during rush-hour in a packed elevator yesterday and as the silence choked everyone between floors 4 and 5, I thought to myself, 'THIS is the worst NYC-trapped-in-the-elevator story ever...forget the man who spent a Labor Day weekend in one...'

B: I keep trying to look cute.  Nobody knows my name, nor do they need to since I'm temporary.  That is the beauty and the curse of temporary.  I'm just waiting for the CEO to say, 'Nice Shoes Skura!'

C: I am going to admit it right here and now that I'm just buying time....time before I get to try to have babies and make my husband's breakfast every morning [and paint commissioned portraits of angels while living atop our luscious mountaintop vineyard in a castle...].  But since I am not living in 1887 or a Jane Austen movie, and I do consider myself an artist [lacking focus and audience...], I heard myself say I was a 'freelancer' yesterday.  I may as well have said, "I'm a person.  Yep.  Thaaaat'sssswhaaat Aye dooo."

There is another quote that my dad and step-mom say to me a lot, usually at the end of our talks. 

"Don't let the bastards grind you down."

...And You Shake It All About...

CHARACTERS:

           80+ year old, home-maker grandmother:     Marilyn

Her 40+ year old, career-minded daughter-in-law:     Josie

SETTING:

Kitchen.

TIME:

Present.

[Lights up. Marilyn watches Josie wrestle with a roll of thick, black, un-perforated, city-supplied-mandatory-usage, garbage bags.  Josie has been helping* Marilyn clean the house for several days in a row.]:  Now see dear, being a house wife...that's what it's all about!!!

[Doing her best Ayn Rand, blank stare.]:  I thought it was the Hokey Pokey.

[Beat.]

[Black out.]

*Performing all house-hold duties while making Marilyn think she's executing them perfectly and all by herself.

Breakfast At Tiffany's

This morning I am standing on the downtown platform as a Real New York Commuter waiting for the C train to take me to my Temporary Employee Assignment when two sweet looking, 20-ish, French Boys with luggage ask me how to get some place they are pointing to on a map.   They had just gotten off the “boos”. 

Thing is, I ask for directions a lot, only I usually ask someone who I have to jump in front of, rip my shirt off and scream, “SURPRISE!” to get them to glance ahead.  Real New York Commuters know exactly how many minutes it takes to get across a street and they spare no other minutes for silly things like eye-level vision.  Real New York Commuters know the pulse of foot traffic in this city and while we speak in robot as I jog along side them, I usually get the correct directions. 

“I don’t know.  I just moved here.”

That is my regular phrase.  But only after a good 30 seconds of real attempts.  Not attempts at direction.  I know this city too, but it is the exchange I feel compelled to be responsible for.  It usually starts with, “OK…let’s see…you want to go to…now how much time do you have?...have you been here before?...MoMa?....hmm…you may want to go by the park or maybe you should take a cab…it looks like rain…do you know where you can get the best umbrellas?!....”  I don’t mean to wander around in my brain like this in front of people.  I think I just enjoy that someone wants information I have.  I think I feel important for a second.  Like an ambassador for the City, State, Country….Planet.  This tends to weird some people out and I sense it so I gracefully let them move on to the topless tactic with a Real New York Commuter.

Zee Boyeez were visiting for three days and told me all of the places they wanted to visit and the order they were going to do so.  Times Square, Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Staten Island Ferry, Central Park and MTV.  And they were staying somewhere on the upper West Side.  Ahhhhhhh….my people….  The lost Parisians smiled such grateful smiles and listened to my quick stories of my three-day visit to Paris on my recent honeymoon.  We chatted until their stop and I told them to ask someone to point out where they could get the, “UPTOWN ONE/NINE…no, 1…or 2….the RED line…ROUGE….”   We all laughed. 

Hold The Elevator

> -------Original Message-------
> From: greg@gregskura.com
> To: greg@gregskura.com
> Subject: Re: Ricardo Khan quote
> Sent: Aug 20 '10 12:02pm
> “IN EVERY WALK OF LIFE, THE EXPRESSION OF ONESELF IS THE MOST POWERFUL TOOL OF COMMUNICATION YOU HAVE.” –Ricardo Khan
>
>
> Greg Skura
> http://www.gregskura.com/


How do you learn this?  Do you learn this?  Do we all agree on this?  Don't we all try NOT to do this so we don't embarrass ourselves but then every commercial and subway ad encourages us to go for this by using their products?  Is this a secret desire that should stop being so secret?  How about those of us that have only one language?  Is it OK if we use our hands?  Eyes?  Blogs?  Art?  What if we don't feel like we are very good at this?  Is that why we hire PR people?  Do we all need PR people?  What would happen if we all just accepted each other's expressions instead of trying to all have the same expression?  Is that why we ask, "How are you?" and don't pause for the answer? 

Feet, Pray, Love

At 4p today, TGIF, I was sent on an errand to pick up an envelope from a government building.  My purse had to wear a name tag.  No joke.  On the way there I passed the downtown hospital and The Lehman Brothers Emergency Room. I couldn't help but picture rows of men in suits laying down with IV's coming out of their wallets. 

I also passed by a sharp-dressed-man pulling a gurney out of a hearse and awkwardly dragging it up the loading dock.  I couldn't help but think things like, "How's he gonna get that thing down from the dock once he has a dead banker on it?" and "How do they put toe-tags around wing tips?"

The sun felt so nice on my face.  I stood there for a hovering 30 seconds just in case the cartoon in my mind came true.  Then I walked away and passed a woman leaning, no laying vertically on the side of the hospital.  Her eyes were darting everywhere and her hands nervously pulled at each of her fingers.  She looked lost and not homeless and I suddenly felt grateful for being in a moment in my own life where I can look at a hospital and make jokes. 

I hope her subject of worry is OK.  I hope she has humor in her life again very soon.  I hope her husband did not work for Bear Stearns.  I think they have a graveyard in Queens.

Park and Bark

I'm doing temporary office work right now.  I haven't visited Cubicle City in a while but I have to say the 'perks' that keep us all sedated towards efficiency are kind of nice.  Especially to the short-timer.  Sort of like staying in a hotel.  I don't really want to live there, now that I'm over ten.  

Ice machines are the bomb.


Busy day.  I got two emails from the guy in the cubicle I share a wall with after I received the task of punching holes in about 20 pages of paper from the guy in the cubicle diagonal to us both. Exhausting after two instant hot chocolates and four trips to the bathroom.   I kept wishing my POV was from the ceiling.  


I picture the giggling woman down the hall stepping one leg out of her office to sing an aria over the maze.  I see quiet guy, angry guy and curious guy joining in one by one.  Heads popping up and down above and below their own half-office-walls.  I want the young, sharp, female director I am assisting to march briskly past my entryway, stop, reverse, and face me...boldly stare over my head and open her mouth as wide as she can...let out an awesome, floaty note that goes on for 90 seconds......add violins....cellos....a ballet dancer leaping over my wall...tall, intellectual, executive VP of course...spotlight...kodo drums...a DRAGON...


...but then the phone rang.

Timecapsule

One night, when I was in the third grade, my mother walked into my bedroom and asked what I was doing awake at 3:30a in the morning.  I was sitting at my desk trying to write, re-write, fold, re-fold and fold again the PEHERRFEHECT note to a boy I...liked? Respected? High-fived?   Mike Norwood.  As I recall, he had dark reddish hair and freckles and a kind, calm, old-school-pre-crazy Mel Gibson cocky sense of humor that made something inside me want to chase him and then throw things at him. I remember walking home with my best friend Stephanie Lyons and after I threw a pathetic snow(eye)ball at him across someone's yard she said, "Why did you DO that?"  To which the obvious fell out of my mouth. 

"BECAAusse  I like him!"

I still have a tiny little torn piece of paper he stuffed inside an empty gumball-machine-trinket-capsule.   He managed to get it in my hands after passing it through several other little hands under several other little desks without the teacher seeing.  


"Will you go with me?  Check Yes or No."


And of course there were two square boxes drawn under this penciled sentence you can barely read now since the small thing was opened and squashed back into it's home so many times. I still have it.  The 'survey' tactic must have been over my head.


We stayed in the same class for three years until Junior High hit and I literally never saw him again.  But during those three years, even though we never really 'went' anywhere together, I remember many many many knowing glances, chases and laughs on the playground.


Sometimes you just know you know someone and know they know you.  And sometimes that is incredibly beautiful, or scary, or threatening, or just damn relaxing.  Allies and annoyances.  I think we instinctively know our kind before we even know our kind and talk our heads into trying to be like other kinds.  


Of course we need to explore the other clans. [We never would have figured out smokes on our own.] Each of us can be so fundamentally exactly the same.  We each have to fill our bellies, our lungs, our minds and our hearts in order to survive. And why? Still waiting to find that clan...


But.  As beautiful and interesting as that is...isn't it amazing when someone just knows your soul?  And you know they always will and always have?  And isn't it amazing how little "how's your day's?" and "Happy Birthday's!" and "I hate Sarah Palin's" really matter?  Like they are little red, cellophane pieces wrapped around little red cinnamon candies.  [Don't ask.] 


I'm a lucky gal.  I've had this feeling many times in my life.  Thank you Cinnamon Candy Pals.  [I just said that.]

Timewaster

I've heard many folks describe Facebook as a major 'waste of time'.  Texting is 'destroying our social graces'.  Blogging and YouTube is 'narcissistic' giving us a 'false sense of self' and a mask of 'unique identification'.  [I'm quoting the voices in my head...]

I understand those feelings.  I see the heads bowed down to the palms in prayer of calendar checking and email deleting while crossing Manhattan streets ignoring honking buses that almost skin them alive.  I try not to shake my head at the teenagers on their phones in a crowd of their screaming friends or scold myself when I'm asking if my mom she can still hear me while I'm cooking dinner and setting the smoke alarm off.

We can instead chose to think of these things as tools to better communication, education, information, our life station, reputation... [Go with it people...]  Or we can just stop judging it all and chalk it up to interesting.  We may not be learning the things our folks did but we are learning something. 


The avalanche cannot be stopped.  But perspective can.


I overheard two young teenagers behind me the other day.  They were arguing in that passive agressive way that only two tween girls can - or little old ladies...with similies and explitives poured on top:


1: So, like, if you were on why didn't you f*%king message me back?  Or write on my wall?  I thought you would at least, like, f*%king do that."


2: I texted you and then left you a voice mail. I, like, totally f*%king get it why you'd wonder but like, f*%k, I don't f*%king know why you didn't get them.  I Facebook but not, like, all the f*%king time."


Their conversation went back and forth like this for many blocks.  The same agendas, different words.  I turned into a deli, piled my pay-as-it-weighs food into my plastic, disposable container and went upstairs to sit in the public space.  I pulled out my iPhone like everyone else sitting in the dining area - with or without human companions - and called my husband to keep me company while I ate.


I can only speak for myself but I know I don't use certain parts of my brain anymore because frankly, I don't have to.  I can't spell, or multiply.  I have no idea what day it is or what time it is...how to get to where I'm going or when I'm supposed to be there without what I call my iBrain.  I like to think this frees me up to use my head for other things but I think it might just free me up to fill it with more questions. 

If I were to give advice to the world. [Excuse me?]  I would say to be present about these technoligical external neurocenters and don't waste precious time when with other humans. 

3: Do you realize you two have spent over five minutes arguing  about your virtual relationship?  You could be giving each other an actual 'XO'. 

But then it occurs to me.  This is just another aspect to relationships.  We continually challenge the simple.  Have we mastered the simple?  What is mastering?

MANY voices in THAT head, the world wide global universal brain.

PS: Right now, as I am typing this...there is an advertisement that declares "CLICK HERE TO STOP NARCISSISM. narcissismcured.com".