I’m not insane.  I’m a normal person, just like you. Ok, so maybe I’m not normal.  Me and my hyperbole.  But still. I’m sane. I’m sane, and  I have a ghost living in my house.

I’m not one to easily believe in such things, but sometimes some powerful truth reaches out and grabs you no matter how practical a person you are.  During my divorce, I moved into this house in 2006 with my son who was then under three years old.  Shortly after I got a dog.  After a while, we added some fish.  Now?  We’ve added Nancy the ghost.

Not long after I moved in, I heard some odd noises in the house, and they scared the bejeebers out of me. I cannot recall the full context, but I believe I heard someone other than my son calling “Mommy”.   It was so odd, and so scary, that I blocked out the specifics. Being a person of relatively sound mind,  I chalked it up to being in a new house under very new circumstances. I talked myself into believing I was just on edge, which was understandable under the circumstances. It was an unfamiliar old house, I was on my own with a young child for the first time, and I was going through a divorce.  Clearly, a life in transition.

There had been rumors about ghosts living in this house from before I moved in, but I wasn’t sure I could sign onto that.  I began to question my reticence  when a neighbor came in to let my dog out while I was at work, and her daughter saw an old woman at the top of the stairs.  The woman was gone by the time the child’s mother got to the landing to look.

Then one night about a year after I moved in, my boyfriend at the time, Andrew, and I were in bed.  I heard an erie, high pitched, girlish voice say “MOMMY” from the room adjoining my bedroom.  Then I heard it again.   It was long and drawn out, like:  ”MOOOOMMMMY”. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at full attention.

The room where it came from is not near my son’s room, and the voice was not my son’s.  I turned quickly to look at Andrew, and he nodded and said, “I heard it too”.  My first thought was that it had to be my son, “how could it not be my son?” I thought as my mind raced for an explanation.  I got up out of bed to investigate.

Barefoot, I walked across the wide wood planks of my second floor landing to my son’s room, where the door was ajar as always. He was fast asleep.  It wasn’t him.  If he had spoken from his bed, the voice would have come from the other wall of my bedroom. The high pitched, almost creepy voice came from inside the adjoining room of the master bedroom.

Confused, I turned from my son’s room to walk back and was then facing the staircase down to the first level.  I then saw that the baby gate was not up.  Since I’d moved in I’d been putting a baby gate at the top at night, just in case my son got up in the middle of the night. I didn’t want him to accidentally fall down the stairs in a sleepy moment.  I fixed the gate, and wondered if that had been the reason for the disturbance.

I broke up with Andrew quite a while ago, and I’ve been with Dan now for over a year.   I’d warned Dan about this odd stuff in my house.  He was very kind to not call me the cookoo bird that I know he thought I was when I told him.  The ghost then saw to it that he knew I was not nuts, at least not about this.

A few weeks ago we were both in bed sleeping when Dan heard “MOOOOOOMMMMY”.  He says it woke him.  He was groggy, so he thought maybe it was my son, or maybe he had dreamed it.  Just when he was about to go back to sleep, he heard it again, loud and clear.  This time, he was certain it was not my son.  I never heard it, because I was fast asleep.

I mentioned this to my neighbor, who is apparently a medium and spiritual guide.  She offered to come over and see what she could pick up.  From her visit, we learned that this ghost dislikes my dining room.  There was a disturbance whenever she walked into the dining room.  I spend a lot of time in the dining room on the computer writing and facebooking, and sometimes working.  Tina looked at me and said “What do you do in here? She hates it here”.  Then Tina moved to the kitchen.  She said the kitchen was a place the ghost liked.  She liked the fish.  She wanted me to know the white fish was not named Cindy (my son named our boy beta fish Cindy.  The ghost, rightfully so, thought this was absurd).  She also wanted me to know that she liked our playroom, but that she wished she could have a toy of her own.  ”All the toys are boy toys”, she said.

Tina says that this ghost is a young girl of about 10.  She likes to be called Nancy, although we suspect this is not her real name.  She did not come with the house.  She was drawn to the house because of us.  We were already here when she arrived.  Tina communicated with the ghost a bit, who asked if she could please show me when she was around more often.  She also told us that my son, who is now 6, has no idea she’s here, and that she’d never scare him.  She wouldn’t promise, however, that he’d never see her, which was a bit disturbing.

Nancy did not want to tell us who she belonged to.  Initially she admitted that she came from someone Tina and I “both knew”.  Questions to figure out the identity were met with some anxiety.  The chain tina carries to sense these spirits began to twirl quickly.  Time to switch subjects.

Tina explained that Nancy was saying she liked our house because there was so much here that she never got to have.  She felt like she never got to have a mom, and she never got to have all those toys.  She liked being here, because she felt on some level, that I was like her mom.

Tina said that Nancy wanted me to know that she thought if I’d paid better attention, I’d have noticed her more often.  She told Tina that if I would just listen, then I’d know she was there.  Then, she told Tina to tell me that she only wakes us for a purpose.  She then explained, through Tina, that Adam had been having a nightmare the night she woke Dan, and she had wanted me to go to him.

Nancy also clarified that it had not been her at the top of the stairs when my neighbor’s child saw an old woman.  Nancy explained that while she is the only consistent entity here, sometimes “others come and go”.

Fantastic.

After talking extensively with Tina about the things she sensed from Nancy, it was finally time for the night to draw to a close.  Tina walked up the block to her house, and I was jittery all night.  Since then I haven’t really seen or heard anything else, although there have been episodes where I’ve smelled a super sweet smell of candy and vanilla in the dining room when I’m writing.

I’ve put a little pink VW bug in the play room, which has since gone missing. I don’t know if the children moved it, or if Nancy did.  The dog is sometimes hesitant to enter the playroom, and sometimes needs coaxing to go out through there to get to the yard.

I’m not sure what I believe about all this.  I can tell you that I do believe something is happening here in this house.  I have a pretty strong sense that whatever it is, it’s not malevolent.  What it is, exactly, I cannot say.

During the last snow storm I sent an email to Tina, asking if she thought perhaps Nancy might like to help shovel.  Apparently, the answer was no.  Oh well.  Can’t blame a girl for trying.

Not just Obama – this woman was also selling John McCain and Sarah Palin condoms in Union Square today.  Yes it was her: the Obamacondoms.com lady.  All images licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution.

Last night was a star-studded salute to one of the main reasons people pick up the Village Voice:  Michael Musto, who has written for the newspaper for 25 years.  Pick up his new book, Fork on the Left, Knife in the Back, and you’ll be as enchanted by his acerbic wit as is the rest of New York City.

Below are photos from the celebration, all taken by David Shankbone and licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution.

Joan Rivers hosted the party.

Countess LuAnn de Lesseps of the Real Housewives of New York

Irina Movmyga and artist Andres Serrano

Miss Dirty Martini, Michael Urie and Michael Musto

Ronnie Spector serenading Michael Musto

Ronnie Spector of The Ronettes

Joan Rivers enjoying Murray Hill’s performance.

Michelangelo Signorile and Linda Simpson.

Michael Urie of Ugly Betty.

Robert Verdi (center) and artist Robert Richards (right)

Burlesque sensation (and Karl Lagerfeld muse) Miss Dirty Martini.

Lisa Levy and David Shankbone (both of whom fought this People’s Court case for a dog rescue)

Epiphany, Brooke Crescenti and friend.

Party-goers

Robin Byrd

Musto and Judy Garland (Tommy Femia)

More party-goers

The folks at PETA are pure geniuses at marketing their cause: as of this writing, there were 314 stories on Google News about the Tiger Woods ad that they’ve barely used:

Alex Turco’s Madonna/Louis Vuitton with a piece of “Green Marilyn” (cool exhibition):

Jonathan Safran Foer was on Stephen Colbert last night.  He is a master of good sound bites, including that the turkeys raised on farms and sold in the grocery store can’t have sex.  I looked this up and found Wendy Gordon, a self-described “Green consumer movement leader” at Simplesteps.org:

As their name implies, Broadbreasted White turkeys are valued for their large, meaty breasts, which breeding has enhanced though the process has rendered them virtually infertile. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, without artificial insemination performed by humans, this variety of bird would become extinct in just one generation.

Of course, Wendy also has a Huffington Post blog (whatever that means).

I found a story on NPR’s All Things Considered, “Preserving Historic Breeds in Kansas“.  Most of it is old news–the historic breeds have rebounded dramatically–but it also backs up that the turkeys we buy from the store can’t have sex.  The  hens are genetically bred to be so fat that they have to be artificially inseminated; the males can’t get to the holes.

On Wikipedia  the Broad Breasted White article was unhelpful, but the “Heritage turkey” article had this:

To meet perceived consumer demand and increase producers’ profit margins, the goal in turkey farming became the production of the maximum amount of breast meat at the lowest possible cost. As a result of selection for this single trait, 70% of the weight of mass market turkeys is in their breast. Consequently, the birds are so heavy that they are completely incapable of reproducing without artificial insemination, and they reach such extreme weights so quickly their overall development fails to keep pace with their rapidly accruing muscle mass, resulting in severe immune system, cardiac, respiratory and leg problems.

For over 35 years, the overwhelming majority of the 280 million turkeys produced in North America each year have been the product of a few genetic strains of Broad Breasted White. The breeding stock for these birds are owned by just three multinational corporations: Hybrid Turkeys of Ontario, Canada, British United Turkeys of America in Lewisburg, West Virginia, and Nicholas Turkey Breeding Farms in Sonoma, California.

The sources for the above paragraph are Storey’s Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds and this New York Times article.

Image:  My photograph for Wikipedia of Jonathan Safran Foer at the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival; also see this post for 2009  Creative Commons images of him promoting Eating Animals.

Right now everywhere in political circles the recently-deceased John Murtha is being toasted by friend and former foe alike.  He was a man’s man and a politician’s politician.  It was hard not to like the character he cut.

That said, I don’t miss the King of Pork Congressman Murtha, who felt no shame in the game that earned him his moniker; the white elephant of waste that is the $200 million John Murtha airport his true legacy.

Liberals sort of fell for Murtha when he became anti-war because he was continually trumpeted in the media as a real “hawk”.  He’s still loved for that.

However, Murtha’s ‘grasp at the swill for my constituents because it’s my Constitutional duty’ style of politics were foolish before and ruinous now that the country’s economic outlook is so dire.  If we don’t start capping people like Richard Shelby at the knees, as we should have done to Murtha, our entire standard of living is threatened.  We simply can’t afford to spend this way anymore, nor allow our government to be run so ineffectually.  The war, tax-cut and high spending policies of the last ten years have hurt this country’s finances greatly, and we haven’t woken up to the economic reality yet.  Our leaders won’t tell us how bad it is because they are all too much like Congressman Murtha, or Senator Shelby, and because the cold hard truth of it all does not get them re-elected.

But a toast to John Murtha the man, may he rest in peace.

New York Times obituary.

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

I took this early in my photography, on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2007, two months before I bought my Olympus.  It’s the stage that is shared by both the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera.  I had a cheap Panasonic, but a guy who I had fallen in love with once offered to show me around because he had access to what was then the New York State Theater.  I didn’t want to waste the opportunity, so I used what I had, but it still came out decent enough.  I believe this is my one and only panoramic shot.

Man, I had to go to the ballet a lot when we dated, because he had been a ballet dancer and I thought I should give it a try but after two I was burned out.  Nobody can tell me I don’t have a right not to like Balanchine, as it was his anniversary season so every show was Balanchine.  I’m sure he’s great, but I learned ballet is not my thing.  Particularly as I associated it with this guy.

Two years before on Valentine’s Day, 2005, was one of the most miserable moments of my life, and he had a good bit to do with it; that and MacroCat prematurely dying on that day as law school exams loomed.

I hadn’t spoken to him for over a year after he left to work in Europe, and in that time I had finally forgiven him for the lies and betrayals, forgiven him enough that I pined for that in-love feeling I had felt.  We tried to make a go of it again for about a month, but whatever we had was lost.  Worse, discovering new indiscretions and trying to remember what I had even seen in him cheapened what had been a proud bittersweet memory.

The photo I took that day of a ballerina working with her coach in the empty theater is used on 143 pages on 31 Wikimedia projects around the world.

Over on my Facebook account I put up a photo essay of the 100 favorite shots I took for the Creative Commons, such as the above 2008 shot of Ian MacKaye of Fugazi with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth in Brooklyn.

My photography days for the CC are over, but I’m proud of the work I put into the project.

In last week’s New York magazine there was a very large feature about literary and political giant Larry Kramer (above, left).  In the article, they reference my interview with Edmund White (above, right), another literary giant and a former friend of Kramer’s (in the early 1980’s they were amongst the co-founders of GMHC).  The New York story itself made news, and quite a few Wikimedia Creative Commons shots of Kramer were used in the ripple effect (Dallas Observer and the Advocate, for two).

I know Wikinews has been used as a source in reliable sources before, but I’m not sure if there is a running list out there of when it happens.

New York references my Edmund White interview because of some unpleasant things that White and his partner Michael said about Kramer.  There is a feud between the two icons, on a William F. Buckley v. Gore Vidal level.   White, a professor at Princeton, was candid and unabashed throughout.  He was a subject with seemingly no limits in where he allowed me to take him.   There was a sense that if I had the guts to ask, he had the guts to answer although White notoriously does not suffer fools.  I would occasionally ask a question thinking to myself, Now surely he’s not going to answer this one! and Professor White would.  Below are a few of my favorite exchanges from the November 2007 interview, Edmund White on writing, incest, life and Larry Kramer.

DS: What is a gay novel?

EW: One that is marketed as gay. Usually a picture of a cute boy on the cover.

DS: Would Hollinghurst’s Swimming Pool Library be one?

EW: Well, he’s a cross-over writer. He’s a little different because he did win the Booker Prize with The Line of Beauty, and he was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, which is the most prestigious reviewing organism in the English-speaking world. He has a dark brown voice and he went to Oxford and he knows everybody. He’s admired by everybody. London is such a different place because in America writers teach in different universities and they are scattered all across this huge country and they sometimes know each other, but not usually. Whereas in England they are all journalists , they live in London, and they all know each other. It’s a very small world, which is good and bad. One of the good things is that if somebody is really talented like Hollinghurst and has accumulated a bastion of power like the TLS, he’ll have enormous impact, and everybody knows it. Whereas here somebody like David Leavitt is teaching in Gainesville, Florida. That’s pretty far off the beaten path even though he’s a wonderful writer. His last book, The Indian Clerk, was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times book review very glowingly. Nevertheless, it doesn’t sell and nobody cares. It’s very hard.

————–

DS: You had mentioned particular issues about a father may arise in a slave-master relationship. You were sexually attracted to your father, so do you think you worked through your own issues with him?

EW: Yes.

DS: Where do you think that attraction came from?

EW: I don’t know; I think it’s very hard to explain attraction. If I’m attracted to you right now, why? I don’t know why.

DS: But that’s something people could perhaps explain more readily than attraction to one’s father.

EW: I don’t know; I wasn’t really raised by my father. I lived apart from him and I would spend every summer with him, but not see him much during the year. My parents were divorced from my age of seven on. I think the incest taboo sets in and turns somebody off sexually with somebody they know very well and lives with. I think with my father he was somebody who every eye in the family was focused on and he was a sort of a tyrant and nice-looking, the source of all power, money, happiness, and he was implacable and difficult. He was always spoken of in sexual terms, in the sense he left our mother for a much younger woman who was very sexy but had nothing else going for her. He was a famous womanizer. And he slept with my sister!

DS: What you describe is power; are you still attracted to power?

EW: No. I mean, my idea of power, but not everybody’s idea of power. In other words, I wouldn’t want to go to bed with Bush…

DS: What did your father’s incestuous relationship with your sister do to you?

EW: I was envious of my sister. I wished I had that kind of access to him.

DS: Did you try?

EW: Yeah.

DS: And he spurned you?

EW: No, it was so subtle he probably didn’t even know I was longing for him because, I mean, we’re talking about the 1950’s in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Texas. He didn’t know I was gay until later and he would tell me he had just fired a man because he thought he might be gay, or at least he wasn’t married and he wore a ring.

DS: How would you respond?

EW: You couldn’t say anything.

DS: Did he ever know?

EW: About me? Yes. Fairly early on, when I was about 15.

DS: What was his reaction?

EW: He was horrified, because he thought it was my mother’s bad influence because I had led an overly sophisticated life with her. He thought I should lead a simpler life and put in hours and hours of yard work and that would make me straight.

DS: Your mother was attracted to you, right?

EW: Or anybody that was around, I think?

————–

DS: You have to choose whether to blow up China or India, and if you do not choose then they both go. They are roughly equal in population according to their last censuses; which do you choose?

EW: I think I would blow up China. I majored in Chinese in college and I was a great admirer of traditional China, but I don’t really like modern China very much and I’ve never had a desire to go there. I feel like whatever wisdom or culture or civilization they had they pretty much destroyed through the Cultural Revolution, paradoxically, in the Seventies. I think that will end up being the worst thing that happened in the Twentieth Century, worse than the Holocaust. It killed more people and it destroyed the fabric of their society more than anything. India never really had anything comparable. They had the British, they had the Raj, and that was pretty damn bad, I guess, but it was an ambiguous thing. It preserved a lot of things and it destroyed others, but it consolidated power in India. It had been so many different little kingdoms.

DS: So is China.

EW: Yeah, that’s right, although the Chinese empire is very old. There is nothing comparable in India.

DS: It’s more cohesive now, but China, once the Communist Party loses its grip on power, it’s going to fall apart.

EW: I don’t think so. Maybe Tibet.

DS: You have Muslim provinces, you have Tibet. You have problems in the south with the north. Hong Kong. You don’t think that there will be a domino effect that when one goes, the others will go?

EW: I don’t think so. You know why? China has been one country. Obviously Tibet is a different problem. Manchuria is a different problem. Mongolia is a different problem. But if you forget all those problems, and you just talk about the central provinces—which are immense—that’s always been one country for almost 4,000 years with an emperor ruling it. Starting with the Han Dynasty, which is about the time of Christ, with an elaborate civil service system. That’s what Confucius was about.

DS: So the age of the end of the empire won’t touch China? It won’t be a Soviet Union?

EW: If you look at Russia and all those places, like Georgia and Uzbekistan, those are all different little countries and it was the Soviet Union that dragged them all together and when the Soviet Union croaked they all fell apart. I think China traditionally was unified.