I am now officially on Twitter. It’s experimental. My name is “melissakirsch”. Surprising, I know.

Please “follow” me as my posts promise to get ever more mundane. That’s not true. They’re going to get kind of amazing. It’s all part of narrowing our focus for the future. I would like to voice that the Twitter interface is so crapped up it’s impossible to find anyone if they’re not a Yahoo(!) mail contact, which I find absurd. But you can find me. For the time being. Any Twitter tips or insider trading hints welcome.

Never in modern politics has an expression so strange and strangely disturbing gotten so much play. Sarah Palin’s three possible locations for the spoils million-dollar fashion spree include two semi-sane ones and one baffling heretofore unconsidered Valley of Ashes.

1. Returned to Neiman-Marcus, etc. (Plausible, normal, okay)
2. Accidentally went back to Alaska and got packed up and shipped to the RNC (weird, tedious, as anyone who has ever ordered a queen’s ransom in bathing suits from Lands End only to keep one sole vaguely flattering Swiss-dot bikini bottom will tell you, but okay.)
3. The Belly of the Campaign Plane (gross)

The Belly of the Plane. There’s a lot of insistence going on about stuff that has been left in the Belly of the Plane. Is this the cargo hold? Like where the luggage goes after it’s stickered at the ineptly-named self-check-in? Why belly? Is the plane’s belly, as it sounds like, some strange peristaltic cavity where aviation bile and breaks down the fibers of moldering heaps of Bill Blass silk shantung suits with jaunty self-bows at the waist? Every time Palin mentions the belly of the plane, I get grossed out and confused.

Just how big is this belly? How much loot can fit in a belly? How long can you keep merch in a belly before it passes the no-return date? Is it longer than I can keep four H&M bags sitting in the corner of the living room that I so should have tried on before buying but will probably miss the cruelly short return window for and end up with yet another pleated monstrosity I am never going to wear? Is it longer than the two weeks I have to use my Duane Reade Dollar Rewards $5 coupon before it cruelly–and I seriously mean cruelly here because that is one great reward with a few very unfair strings attached if you don’t run out of Tampax Pearl fast enough–expires?

Why belly? Why not overhead compartment? Is there someone down there in a headlamp, prowling around in the Belly of the Plane, rifling through a lot of garment bags, making lame comparisons to the Belly of the Beast? Is mentioning the Belly of the Plane just a tic now, a hip visual aide to conjure the Land of the Lost or the Valley of the Dolls or other territories into which Palin would certainly never venture?

I stumbled across a cache of reviews of The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything on the Goodreads website. I’m not terribly familiar with Goodreads as Facebook is about all the social networking I can tolerate (and I rarely log on to Facebook because once I get in I never get out and I kind of feel filthy and time-warpish and violated afterwards a lot of the time). Anyway, there’s something enlightening about reading reviews in a context where people post photos of themselves and seem much less rehearsed and more conversational than they do on Amazon. There’s something rather “I’m writing a review for public consumption” about posting on Amazon, whereas on Goodreads or I’m assuming Shelfari (which I have yet to scour) you’re writing for your friends.

Here’s the exchange that I found fascinating on Goodreads:

(For the record, there is no section on snapping gum in the book. I don’t even know how to snap gum. I was recently having a nostalgic conversation about Chewels, however, and its competitor Freshen Up gum. I noticed Trident is getting into the gums-with-fillings situation, and not a moment too soon. My favorite French gum is Hollywood Sweet Gum, with a crispy vanilla candy coating and mint surprise inside. I am sad that I have run out of my meager supply. I like anything with a secret filling. Which is why I am not ashamed to tell you I am always going to select the powdered donut that may be filled with jelly or maybe cream. Donuts. I only like them when they’re in a big box of many flavors and I get to choose. One solitary donut is not that fun.)

Yes, I know. Where have I been?

1. France

2. Greece

3. Thinking

Not doing much of 3 in 1 & 2 but today, jogging because it’s not cold, for four blessed days at least not cold, it is over 70 and the horrid grayness abated, while jogging I did think okay, Melissa, come on, you can post something short on the blog each day. We will get more involved as the weeks go on, because there’s a lot to talk about, but oh right:

4. Writing

That’s important, 4. 3 led to 4, as it does if you’re lucky. If I’m lucky.

Don’t call me “your friend,” I am not your friend. Don’t call me folks. Don’t tell me that calling Sarah Palin stupid is sexist. Speaking of which, who can explain the new Genius function on iTunes to me? It does seem vaguely genius, but I’ve only created one Genius playlist. It’s probably the most depressing playlist on earth as I told it to start with a Colin Hay song and it dug up 25 Songs to Sob To.

5. Sobbing

Which inhibits 4, of course, but 4 is a good stay against 5. Not that much of 5, but, you know, tomorrow’s another day.

I think this is a good start. To being back. And to say to the readership, the wild & raging readership of Girl’s Guide and beyond, that I’m fast at work. Watch this space.

Anthony the Magician made the blog work again just in time for my return from a summer in France. Posting to resume apace.

Everyone sat around the small bar and didn’t look at each other. They sang strange, obscure songs in warbly, coked-up voices and no one performed for anyone else. No one smiled or laughed or hit a wrong note to be funny. It was like prison in that everyone seemed to know each other but not by choice. The No Exit Karaoke Bar. A begrudging acknowledgment that there were other people there but they would get no attention, this was a night to be endured, like every night to be endured. Twenty people in a karaoke bar, the same people every single night they had probably sung every song in that catalog. There was no joy.

When our number, Total Eclipse of the Heart, finally came up, after about one billion years of solitude in a crowded bar, Derick and I got the two mikes and belted. We caterwauled. There were two extra verses that don’t exist in the real song. It was like “Turn around, bright eyes, Every now and then there’s an adorable little boy and now he’s grown up to be a man. Turn around….” What? We sang it anyway. We went for drama. As much as we could in a room full of stoics. I’d forgotten Derick is a real rock and roll singer, rock and roll star, so he could actually harmonize but I was wailing so hoarsely that his sophisticated stylings were mostly lost. The crowd didn’t love us. The crowd was possibly secretly handcuffed to its stools with its jaws wired shut.

Earlier, we ate hamburgers at the Sunburnt Pig that had beets, eggs, pineapple and bacon on them. That’s where we first heard the Bonnie Tyler classic on the sound system and decided it was important that we go sing (sing) karaoke. They also played “Oh Sherrie” by Steve Perry which damn I still love, that’s a love song, it’s so damn earnest I love it . I had a big crush on SP in that video, singing to Sherrie on the steps of like a courthouse (?), so deeply yearning and passionate and then flinging himself around a stairwell, squinting a lot with pain, the exquisite pain of ardor and Sherry and the world too much with him. I also looked a little like Steve Perry when I was a child so I think there was something there–long stringy black hair, middle part…I felt like we were kind of meant for each other. I think I need to find that video.

Not only is Anthony a magician, but this Wordpress “dashboard” is actually friendly and comprehensible. It feels like a new lease on life. I can’t believe I suffered through that weird interface for so long and then spent hours cleaning up the hacked crapfest. You mean to tell me I can audio and video with no problem whatsoever? I can add images and it will align the image? This is a very fancy Wordpress. And it appears to be saving the draft every two seconds.

WYSIWYG editing! It’s like the 20th century all over again.

I’d like to live in a world as clean as this page is right now.

The work is coming very slowly, refracted, refractory. I hear my name like it’s coming through water. I left the blank page and went uptown.

I looked up “refractory” after I typed it because I didn’t want to confuse it with “refectory.” OS X’s Oxford American Dictionary offers the example his refractory pony. I love this.

I hadn’t been to the Cloisters before. Almost one year ago Ben & I rode bikes over the George Washington Bridge and back and then went to Fort Tryon Park. It’s one of those memories that’s still very present, I see the day crisply, it felt like leaving New York. I wanted to get away from this and go to that.

Really I wanted my own cloister. The Cloisters themselves are lovely, but they’re a museum, and filled with people, babies, shovers. The atrophy of experience: digital cameras trained on pietas, dry fountains, unicorn tapestries. There is a terrace that wraps around the building from which you can see the Hudson and I guess New Jersey. I was looking for quiet. I found it in the Heather Garden of the park outside.

In the grass on the hill I read the The Last Life by Claire Messud, and the gears slowed. I didn’t have any expectations for clarity. Vague hopes that The Project (there’s always a project, but this time it’s a large looming one) would crystallize or stand down or make a tenuous promise to stop confounding, but I read and looked at the river and thought some about my block, where I would have been had I not caught the train.

Something broke. I had one of the tiny Field Notes books with me and things started to make sense. I diagrammed ideas, wrote myself notes for later concerning the manageability of the work in case I was seized by anything resembling doubt masquerading as procrastination.

Oh! The last time I scribbled about museum-going, Lynn & I went to the Dia:Beacon in the Hudson Valley. I took these pictures on our trip, which I’m honored to report are featured in the latest issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, accompanying Lawrence Wechsler’s (one of my favorite writers) article on Robert Irwin. You can’t see the photos on the VQR site, but you should consider checking out the hard copy for Wechsler’s always riveting prose. Here are the photos:

Now I’ve got spring fever. I’m a mess of allergies and sunlight and already mourning summer’s passing. This winter was kind of the pits. Better things are drawn to summer, they want to happen then. When I finished a perfect 70-degree run last weekend, Lance Armstrong’s voice came eerily on via my Nike+ iPod thingy and congratulated me on my longest run to date. Which is not true, since I’ve only had this gadget for about a year or so and I just recently allowed it to talk to me. Am I inclined to run farther to win Lance’s love again? Yes. Yes I am. Why am I so easily seduced?

I think it’s spring. The construction has abated, the days are long and therefore manageable. There is enough space in them for coffee on the corner and walking to the cleaners in Gramercy and getting A Moveable Feast from the library and seeing a movie about people who won’t feel whole until they’re paralyzed. Yeah, I saw that movie, Quid Pro Quo, tonight. Nick Stahl is aging strangely but attractively. Vera Farmiga is several varieties of troubling. The movie’s got some moments. But then it’s got some moments and you’re just like who greenlit that.

Days wide and warm, in which I wander listening to back episodes of the Fresh Air podcast. Springtime, you count. I will wear a daisy in my hair.

Okay, far be it from me to obsessively follow the fascinating twists and turns of a dead actor’s constantly changing obituary, but come on, New York Times. Now it’s just embarrassing.

From today’s corrections:

An obituary on April 7 and in some copies on April 6 about the actor Charlton Heston misstated the year he enlisted in the Army Air Forces, as well as other aspects of his life.

1. He enlisted in 1942, not 1944.
2. He served in the Aleutian Islands about two years, not three.
3. And he and his wife, the former Lydia Clarke, an actress, spent less than one year, not several seasons, at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Theater in Asheville, N.C., which they founded after the war.

These three additional corrections (you’ll recall there were about five published in the days following his death) wouldn’t be as bewildering if not for the original crapped up report. But now, two weeks later, they’re issuing more corrections? These tiny details, we can all agree, are not as crucial as when the Times got Heston’s name and age wrong, but nonetheless, they leave the paper with even more egg on its face (and its readership even more stymied).

I now imagine the New York Times obituaries are written kind of like Mad-Libs - you know, you fill in blanks like “Proper Name,” “Name of Movie Character,” “Number of Years Served in Aleutian Islands,” and end up with a mildly entertaining but usually totally unintelligible story.

Previously: New York Times Violates (At Least) Ten Commandments of Journalism in Reporting Charlton Heston’s Death

What on earth is going on with Second Avenue? I usually reserve my neighborhood codger persona for whinging about how crazy loud and invasive the Cooper Square Hotel Hostel is. But the situation with Thai restaurants on Second has just gotten bananas and I can’t sit in silence any longer.

Okay, forgive this totally-specific-to-my-neighborhood post in advance but I need to discuss something.

For a million years, Thailand Cafe has flourished — or rather existed — on Second between 5th and 6th Streets. It got a weird clubland makeover last year and a sans-serif logo that was a lot better than its green dragon-lady signs of yore, but still Thai.

East Village Thai, which you’d think from it’s creepy awning would suck but is actually terrific (I usually default to the Gang Massaman) is at Second Avenue and 7th Street.

Sea Thai is decent but kind of insane if you eat in there on the weekend, on Second between 4th and 5th Streets.

Holy Basil, while not next door, bears mentioning as it is yet another Thai restaurant, and has been rattling around forever at spitting distance: Second between 9th & 10th Streets.

So that’s a lot of Thai in a few block radius.

But now another Thai place, the very lamentably named Kurve, replete with weird Spirograph rainbow sign, is opening at Second Avenue and 5th Street. I will never get over that name. I will never get over the Cooper Square Diner that was there when I moved in and was lit solely by pink neon lights.

Then today I noticed ANOTHER THAI PLACE is opening in the old Bamboo House Chinese restaurant (where I saw a rat once) at Second Ave. and 6th Street. This time it’s Spice, which is kind of good, and the nearest branch is MILLIONS OF MILES AWAY on University Place and 10th Street. But wait. Aren’t Spice and Sea owned by the same people? Yes they are!

What is going on? I’m sure I even missed some Thai restaurants in this teensy radius. If I knew how to make a customized Google map, I’d do that. I like Thai food. I like to have Thai food options. But I have a bad feeling that someone’s not going to survive this situation. I fear it may be poor, Queer-Eyed Thailand Cafe. It’s right in the eye of the storm and it’s been having a weird identity crisis for a while.

This whole post is ridiculous and very “Area Woman Wonders Why There Are So Many Thai Restaurants In Neighborhood” but what are blogs for if not observational blather? I know. Selling awesome things.