and to celebrate, i got job-eliminated. that’s the polite term for laid off. it was a huge layoff at my company, so i had plenty of, well, company. so i’ll be putting president-elect obama’s economy rebuilding skills to a personal test.

it should be more traumatic than it is, but in truth, i’m looking forward to new challenges. nine years is a long time to work anywhere — seven years was my previous record. kirk’s been working in reading (his hometown) anyway, doing theater and corporate training gigs with his friend larry, so it’s a natural time to move on.

which is what i’m doing. moving to reading, pa, and selling the apartment:

$199K for a nicely updated prewar 1 bedroom, ½ block from the 1 train (via secret tunnel!) on a secluded bluff overlooking Van Cortlandt Park, 40 minutes to midtown.

i’m exploring going back to school. if i do, it’ll be in the health-care field. if not, back to the world of work, hopefully with new and fresh responsibilities and challenges.

how’s that for change you can believe in?

chills, i tell ya. i get chills.

what an incredibly awesome place. we’ve been before, but this time we especially enjoyed every minute of the peace and quiet, especially on monday night, when we were the only campers in the park. and the cell phones don’t work there. love that.

we took advantage of the empty time to take a look at the campground, figure out the camping spots we liked, and picked a top 5. our positive criteria were seclusion, beauty, and space. negatives we looked for included being too near or (especially) at the end of a road (headlights in the tent — not good), being too close to the road in general, and close proximity to the bathrooms (too much noisy foot traffic). we labeled the ones we liked with “y” (for “yes”) and appended a “-” for a decent site with some problems, a “+” for great sites, and an “!” for the outstanding sites. our top five sites are all “y!” sites.

your criteria may differ from ours. if so, check out the details of the individual sites and plan accordingly. kirk took pictures of the sites we liked — they’re coming soon.

here’s a page where you can download a map of the campground, so you can play along at home.

there are two camping areas in ricketts glen: the big loop (sites 1-73) and the small loop (sites 74-120). the small loop sites are all knocked out of serious contention immediately. none of them border the water, some of them (sites 80-93) allow pets (no pets allowed in the big loop), and they are very crowded with no buffer zones to speak of. we gave three small loop sites a “y-” ranking: sites 101, 108, and 115. but they are strictly a fall-back position, in case the big loop is completely full. if the big loop is full, and these sites are gone, certainly there’s enough positive features at the park to still come. but it’s going to be packed with people, and you’re likely to have a less than optimal experience.

for the big loop, i’ll list only the sites that got “y-” or better. the sites not listed got knocked out for the aforementioned reasons.

big loop “y-” sites:

3, 5, 17, 23 (17 + 23 close to bathroom but big), 27, 33, 46 (27, 33, 46 at end of road, but on water), 49, 52, 54.

big loop “y” sites:

7, 9, 24, 26 (campground host site, near entrance), 34, 35, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 57, 71, 72, 73. all but 42, 44, and 71 are on or near water. 57 is at the end of a road but is so spectacular that it loses the minus.

big loop “y+” sites:

5, 20, 22, 29, 31, 56, 66. all but 5 on the water.

big loop “y!” sites:

21, 36, 37, 59, 61, 64, 65. there’s nothing wrong with any of these, in our estimation. site perfection.

and for the top five — again, culled from the “y!” sites:

#5 — site 64. at the end of a road, on the water, huge with no near neighbors.

#4 — site 59. secluded, on the water, huge surrounding area.

#3 — site 36. at the end of a road, on the water, huge, only site we saw with a constructed tent platform.

#2 — site 21. huge, on the water, secluded. the best part about this site is that the area behind the site drops down to the water, and then there’s a shelf right by the water. so you can sit by the water, and no one can see you. spectacular.

and the #1 site — #37. the huge site drops down from the road, so you are hidden from everyone else. and you have an enormous peninsula you share only with site 36, with water views on three sides.

there you go — our subjective opinions, explained. what do you think? leave a comment if you disagree, or have experiences to share.

» next tuesday is the stevenote at macworld, which means lots of new apple stuff to potentially spend money on. in case you just stumbled here, i’m a big apple fan. what could get me to blow the dust off of my wallet? perhaps an updated 3g iphone — kirk could get the new one and i’d take his old one. perhaps something more useful than apple tv to hook up to the hdtv, since we don’t have cable tv. maybe it’s the whatever-they’ve-come-up-with-that-noone-has-thought-of. maybe the wallet stays intact.

» i’m starting to get more political again — i find myself going to more and more political news sites and blogs. i get geared up every election cycle, and this one promises to be no different. i’m sure to bore you with my mumblings and rantings, but i gotta be me. still liking that obama guy. but i may change my mind. maybe i’ll even vote republican this year. it could happen. you never know.

» via kottke, a great article by kevin smith about his new movie, “zach and miri make a porno”. anything by kevin smith is a must-see for me (chasing amy is on my top-ten favorite films of all time), but with a title like that i can hardly wait.

» have a great weekend! i mean it. no excuses.

and kirk and i told the story of how we met. short version: me in south florida, kirk in nyc, i see hedwig in nyc, i leave message on hedwig.com message board, kirk the webmaster responds, the rest is history.

except that apparently wasn’t it. kirk has put his old design for the hedwig.com site up on his site, thestagingarea.com, and after the events of last night, i was poking around that site this morning and found this:

Name: Jamie
E-Mail: picaman_AT_csi_DoT_com
City/State: Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Home Page: http://www.queerspace.com
Date: Mon Mar 22 14:50:12 1999
How you found us: Too much Grain and Brita; I don’t remember
Wrote…
HATAI was the last of 7 shows i saw on my just-ended NYC trip and DAMN i’m pissed cuz if i’d seen it first i would have just seen it again and again. it’s the most amazingly well-done show i have EVER seen….i’m a complete hedwig convert

so apparently i didn’t initially find the message board — i just left a brief message in the guestbook. and truly, if kirk hadn’t been so diligent in emailing everyone who posted on the site, and hadn’t taken the time to make it more than a cursory email, we might never have met.

i wish i had that email, but i don’t. it must have been a great email, though, for me to bother to reply with something thoughtful that kirk then in turn responded to.

and so on.

thanks, kirk, for taking that moment. it changed my life, and all for the better.

it’s different from mine, in a good way. there are actual graphics on the page, for one thing. i was jealous of that, for a few minutes, but then kirk pointed out that the text-based spareness of this site matches my personality, and the graphics matches his. in addition, my site has been text-based since 1998, originally because i hated slow-loading graphics-heavy pages that took forever to load over dialup. but now, it’s just part of the history of the site. my trademark, if you will.

so text-based it is.

anyway, back to kirk. it’s a great beginning, and i think he’ll post and keep up with it, so it’s worth bookmarking or adding his rss feed. and he has a crapload of content in the vaults — all of the sites he designed for various broadway and off-broadway shows, including the original hedwig.com site. if he gets all that up and running, it would be very cool.

one note of response to his first real post. he says:

Jamie has also said that I think too much. There will be no argument here; I do think too much. This is why I can’t sleep. This is why when he’s calling me from the other room, I don’t hear him. I admit it, my head is obsessively caught up in thought.

except of course he uses capital letters. show-off.

with me, though, there are vast stretches of time where there’s literally nothing going on in my head. i don’t mean that flippantly or facetiously; i mean that i just don’t think of anything. i don’t hum a song, or do sums, or even think about not thinking, although at some point i become aware that i’m not thinking again, which of course is thinking in itself.

it’s probably better to think too much than to not think enough.

one closing promise, as i reread what i’ve written.

my blog will not become an insufferable dialogue between my blog and kirk’s blog. i’ll keep the cross-commenting to a minimum.

this in itself is not exactly news. people buy shoes all the time.

what’s news is the shoes he got, which are these extra special shoes that make you walk like a masai warrior.

mbt shoes.

m=masai, b=barefoot, t=technology. and apparently the masai walk differently, because they walk on soft surfaces and land on their arches and push off differently, instead of coming down hard on your heels and pushing off with your toes.

the latter style of walking, if the hype is to be believed, gives you back pain and problems that the masai never have.

so the soles of these shoes are bulgy in the middle, and have no heel or toe to speak of. this is supposed to force you to duplicate the walk of the masai warrior, and eliminate your back and hip and knee and leg and thigh and calf problems.

i have to say that they look somewhat odd, but the concept makes some sense to me. i’m letting kirk be the guinea pig for this one. i can’t decide if this is all just marketing crud (walk like a warrior! people have been walking wrong for centuries! learn the secrets of walking that the multinational corporations are trying to hide from you! be the first to join the revolution!) or if there’s something to it. if it works, i might have to get myself some too.

after we pay the visa bill for kirk’s pair, that is. these things ain’t cheap.

i’ll keep an open mind.

really.

i didn’t forget to go to kiki and herb this time, and the show was, as always, phenomenal. don’t miss it. it was the last show before opening night tonight, and they were up for it. i’m going to go back again, assuming i can get a ticket deal of some kind.

the fake steve jobs blog, which i’ve written about several times, is back in operation. check it out–hysterically funny writing.

and, although kansans are once again supporting evolution in schools, it appears that the united states is ranked next to last among countries of the world in acceptance of this scientific theory. the chart depicting the results is truly depressing. only 40% of americans accept evolution as true, with 60% stating either that it is false, or that they are not sure. at least we are smarter than the turks in this regard.

turns out that, ironically enough for someone who bakes constantly, he is allergic, or whatever, to gluten. the stuff that’s in wheat and oats and i don’t know what all else that holds it all together.

he hasn’t had any gluten for two weeks, and feels much better for it.

there’s more irony.

i’m trying to return somewhat to my meat-free past. for health reasons mostly. and lots of the meat-analog stuff i like to eat, for instance seitan, morningstar farms veggie burgers, fake lunch meat, and whatnot, is all made out of. you guessed it.

gluten.

so our fridge and our kitchen is getting a bit schizo. i have my fake bologna for my lunchtime sandwich, next to the salami that i’ve bought for kirk’s lunchtime sandwich. i’m snacking on all the things that kirk has stopped eating, like graham crackers, even though i don’t really like graham crackers. i’m too cheap to throw out a $1 box of graham crackers.

some things are better, though. we bought rice pasta and quinoa pasta, neither of which are wheat-based and therefore have no gluten. and i’ll be damned if the stuff isn’t pretty good. it’s different from regular pasta, but it has a risotto-like creaminess that is damn good.

and kirk is still baking–he’s just learning to bake with gluten-free flour which is, of course, a challenge. but, talented baker that he is, the gluten-free bread he made for the week’s lunch sandwiches is really good. and i’m sure that it will only get better.

in a way, although he’d probably beg to differ, he’s lucky in that although i’m sure he misses bread and whatnot, he’s interested in making alternatives, and has the talent to do it. other people just cheat and eat the gluten-laden stuff occasionally, because they don’t have a ready option. try to find ready-made gluten-free products. it’s hard, and when you find them you could go broke buying them.

all of this is not to say that kirk has had his last piece of bread. i can’t imagine that he’ll spend a week in paris without eating a baguette.

but, for as badly as he has felt for as long as he has felt badly, i’m sure he’s happy to have an answer, and a plan of attack. to paraphrase dorothy zbornak in my favorite golden girls episode of all time, “he has a disease, and his disease has a name.”

he’ll love that allusion.

it’s celiac disease, i think. not celeriac disease. i think he could do without celery root pretty easily. celiac is harder.

wish him luck, and strength. i do.

it’s anything but. actually, dropping off the taxes is one of my favorite things i do in new york all year.

confused? I’ll explain.

my taxes are straightforward and uncomplicated. i do them online at turbotax.com, a self-flagellating experience i’ve documented elsewhere on this site. but it works, i must admit. i got my federal tax refund automatically deposited into my checking account yesterday.

it pays to file early.

kirk’s taxes are another matter entirely. his taxes are a rabbit warren of complication. he has his home business (photostrata.com) with all of its attendant weirdnesses.

so where better to take his taxes than a rabbit warren of an office?

i won’t tell you where it is. if you emailed and begged and sent bribes i might be swayed, but i might not be, too. suffice it to say that, after one year’s return we were so happy with how good this guy is that we sent him flowers. how many times have you sent your tax preparer flowers?

and his name, i’ll tell you cryptically, is the same as an aging rock legend. which seals the deal for us.

this guy knows how to do taxes, and how to find deductions, like no one i’ve ever seen. he’s a rock star himself, in the world he inhabits, as far as i’m concerned. and going to his office is, as i mentioned before, one of my favorite new york experiences.

it begins when you ascend the stairs. the building is one of those decrepit old buildings where the tenants have been there a hundred years, and therefore the landlord doesn’t sink a dime into upkeep because he doesn’t have to, so there’s a tenement feel to it as you creak your way up the wonky staircase to the office of the taxman.

and you wind your way up, and then you push open the door. if you’ve ever wondered what happened to the “clarks” in all those dickens novels, this is where they’ve gone to die. median age is probably eighty, but median iq is probably 160. these guys are geniuses. a room six steps by maybe seven steps, if you were short and walked with a limp. squeaky wooden floors slightly uphill and then down, office furniture from ’40s film noir, bookcases stuffed with yellowed paper lining every available inch of wall space. and the files and paper overflow everywhere. the desks. the floors. stacks and stacks everywhere, tilting at crazy angles.

and the dust. my god, the dust. and the cobwebs, and the dank, stale air.

there may be a window. it’s hard to tell.

and you hand over your folder, and it disappears into the vast chasm that surrounds you. and two weeks later or so, or less if you have brought your forms early which we have, your completed tax forms reappear from the dense mess, and you pick them up, and you marvel at the refund the genius has extracted, and you write a pretty big check for them but are more than happy to do so.

after all, in new york, you have to pay extra for the ambiance.