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Mental Gymnastics, and Almond-Plum Cobbler for Your 6-inch Skillet

2011-09-26T10:39:00.000-04:00

When you live alone, there are few kitchen tools as satisfying as a 6-inch cast-iron skillet. It gives power of purpose, and even a bit of flair, to your meals. You can use it to make a fritatta (relishing its oven-safe qualities), fry a sensible serving of hash browns, sauté a couple slabs of tofu or whatever vegetables you please, make non-acidic sauces, and a zillion other meals and dishes. Whatever you cook, carry it proudly to the table, using one gloved hand for the skillet, and the other for your silverware and a glass of wine.

Lately I’ve had more occasions for the 6-inch skillet, since one event in this summer of relative turmoil was a disappointing breakup. That bookended the last part of the summer, while the beginning was kicked off by my dad’s remarriage, and a new family layout that includes a stepmom and stepsiblings. This latter event should have been simple and made perfect sense—a quick checkmark on the to-do list of the summer—except that it was unexpectedly difficult for reasons I can’t totally understand yet.

Then somewhere in there began my first real friendship-threatening conflict with an old friend. It resulted, recently, to my great relief, in dealing and confronting and communicating in a responsible way—such as, talking about things and saying what we mean. Unbelievable how well that works! Even though I've been in therapy for __ years and I know this is the responsible way to handle human affairs, it's historically not my style. If things aren't working, I'll just let it fizzle out and save the worry for later.

In one of my emails to this friend I used the phrase "mental gymnastics": the acquired ability to recognize, say, discomfort or resentment, and be able to both acknowledge its presence and also find a way around it so that it doesn't have a stronghold on unrelated aspects of one's life. The technical word for mental gymnastics is probably "compartmentalization," and whatever the popular opinion about compartmentalizing, working through vs around, and my ability to "save the worry for later," I still think mental gymnastics have a time and place.

So in light of mental gymnastics, I’m not feeling too badly about things at the moment. Consider yourself lucky that none of my previous attempts at writing this post ever went up. And among the relatively crappy stuff that’s transpired, there's some good stuff, too. My second book goes on sale sometime this week, and I’m pretty proud of it. And, I'm paying the rent and putting food on the table! So yep, I'm done complaining.

Leading into the fall it’s been wonderful to exercise and cook freely, to enjoy stints of sobriety, to reconnect with people I’d lost touch with and/or been on bad terms with, to bleach my hair white on impulse, to grab hold of this opportunity to take myself extremely seriously. (Folks, I bought a journal that I can sometimes be seen writing in, in public.) I’ve never been more willing to go see your band perform, or join you at a poorly attended reading, or head to an out-of-the-way housewarming party, or show up at your birthday party even if I don't know you that well. Invite me and I'll probably come. And I haven’t been Debbie Downer about it—I’m not so unfun to be around after all!

But most of all this has been a perfect opportunity to enjoy the privilege and pleasures of living alone.

Cooking for one is kind of an art, one that I’ve not perfected quite yet. (I'm working on it.) I usually take the route of making a standard yield and then packing up the leftovers. And for sure that’s a good way to cook economically, but sometimes I find that either I can eat three portions of food because it’s there and it tastes good, or the leftovers go to waste because the responsibility of eating them is too much to bear. So there’s real skill in making a one-serving meal that’s not scrambled eggs or a sandwich. Right now the approach seems to be to seek out cute little one-serving casseroles and the aforementioned 6-inch cast-iron skillet and then jerry-rig your recipes to accommodate these smaller dishes.

But for dessert, this is one answer and a terrific excuse to luxuriate in cooking for one: a generously portioned fruit cobbler that has a terrific tender/chewy texture and a lot of fragrance, the kind of goopy fall dessert I crave in the summer when it’s too hot to bake. It’s relatively easy, but not so easy that you can just wing it halfheartedly. This dessert requires some work and commitment—a few extra dirty dishes, a coffee grinder to clean, some steps that don't feel entirely streamlined—but it's an effort that always pays off, for me at least. What is good food, if not a buffer you can consistently rely on?

Almond-Plum Cobbler for Your Six-Inch Skillet
Adapted from Martha Stewart

Serves 1 very generously, or 2 sensibly

15 roasted or toasted almonds
2 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup flour
1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons milk
1 tablespoon beaten egg (apologies, there's no way around this obnoxious detail)
1 teaspoon brandy
4 plums, pitted and sliced into 3/4-inch-thick wedges (about 8 ounces)
Squeeze of lemon juice

1. Preheat the oven to 375° F. Melt the butter in a 6-inch cast-iron skillet over low heat and let cool slightly.

2. Finely grind the almonds in a spice/coffee grinder. Combine with the flour, 1/4 cup sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon in a mixing bowl, whisking to combine.

3. Whisk together the milk, egg, and brandy in a separate bowl, then pour in all but a small puddle of the melted butter—leave just enough butter in the skillet to generously coat it—whisking again to combine. Stir in the dry mixture until just combined. Pour into the skillet.

4. Stir together the plums, remaining 3 tablespoons sugar, lemon juice, and a pinch of salt (you can use the bowl the dry ingredients had been in). Scoop the fruit into the skillet, spreading the plum slices evenly into the batter using your fingers.

5. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean and the center is set. If the surface starts to get too brown, cover with foil. Let cool for at least 30 or 40 minutes before serving.

Shortbread Cookies for the Next Flood

2011-08-28T12:29:00.002-04:00

If you were on the East coast bracing for Irene, especially in New York, you may have been bored and antsy because you didn’t know what you were supposed to be doing. I was. After I assembled my "Go Pack" and identified and protected my valuables, I was stuck refreshing my Twitter feed and the NYT homepage, where honestly, the news never fully developed in a way that merited my mania. I tried to busy myself with little tasks, but I lacked focus.

But at some point I watched a video for how to make Stupidly Simple Shortbread, and that provided power of purpose for about 30 minutes. I'm not much of a shortbread person—dry, dense textures aren't my thing, and butter isn't really my flavor. But these shortbread cookies came out perfect. They're crisp and light but not super delicate.

I took some liberties with the recipe, drawing mostly from a tip I read in the cute little cookbook Simply Perfect Every Time—that of adding rice flour for a bit of texture—and then wanted to go for a sweet-salty thing by sprinkling the sliced cookies with both sugar and Kosher salt. I made them with the idea that they'd keep well through the flood, but we ate them all before the heavy rain even arrived.

Shortbread Cookies

1 cup flour
1/4 cup rice flour
1/4 teaspoon Kosher salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Stir together the flours and salt in a small bowl. Cream the butter and sugar in a standing mixer, until fluffy, about a minute or two at medium speed. Add the extract, and then the flour all at once. Stir, on the mixer’s lowest speed, until JUST combined. Transfer the dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap and roll it in a log. Place it in the freezer for 10 to 15 minutes, or the refrigerator for 45 to 60. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Slice the log into uniformly thick cookies and arrange them on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Using the tines of a fork or a paring knife, make creatitive little stripes on the top. Then sprinkle each one with sugar and a pinch of Kosher salt. Bake for 15 minutes, until just golden on the edges and golden brown on the bottoms. Cool completely on the baking sheets.

Circle in the sand

2011-07-07T12:01:00.010-04:00

This is something that happened last night. I went to see Rickie Lee Jones—who, as anyone who knows me knows is an artist I’m mildly obsessed with—at City Winery. I made the decision at the last minute. Tickets were expensive and City Winery hasn’t ever struck me as a very interesting venue. But biting the bullet and handing over a credit card number for a ticket at City Winery is just what you do when you're a fan.

Jones came out after we’d been waiting for a while, and without much fanfare. I just looked up and there she was, in a bowler hat and fingerless, striped gloves that went halfway up her forearms. She fumbled with her guitar for a second, and then set it down and started “Easy Money” acapella. Her band trickled out, joining in with her in a seemingly spontaneous way. It was fun. She sounded fantastic, as she always does. Then the song ended and there was a lot more fumbling—with the guitar, with the tuner; the technician was summoned, something was wrong. Jones was talking with the technician while at the same time introducing the show, all in her characteristic stream-of-consciousness mumble. This is what she does when she performs, or at least in the several times I’ve seen her shows: free verse ramblings interspersed with songs.

We had been waiting for the show to start for a while, and she didn’t seem to be making a public effort to kick it into motion. While we were all a little annoyed, the consensus seemed to be that we were eager to forgive our idol and wanted the show to start. But then the most annoyed and least idolizing audience member, in a moment of Jones’ fumbling silence, said out loud, “This is what we get after waiting for an hour?” Jones snapped: “Yes, this is what you get. Fuck you. You think because I’m standing up here on a stage you can be rude to me? I’ll pay for your fucking dinner and you can leave. Fuck you.” (This is an approximation, but you get the jist.) Then there was more finagling with cords and guitars, and Jones announced she’d be leaving the stage in order to get everything fixed, and in the meantime she wanted the woman who’d spoken up to be escorted out.

And that’s what happened. (It was the most unexpected husband and wife—an older couple in comfortable shoes! I’d noticed them when they entered and thought how when I get old that’s what I’ll look like.) They were escorted out, but not before Jones returned to the stage. The husband threw out a few fuck you’s at Jones before finally leaving, and then the show went on.

(The show was great, even if it had an understandably strange vibe. She performed her first two albums in their entirety, but in the order that she wrote the songs.)

I’ve never witnessed anything like this before. I'd heard and read that Jones—and this is something about her that I’ve always found appealing—is unrepentant when it comes to this kind of incident. She later said, “It’s going to take some time for me to heal from that old bitch,” and people cheered and shouted out lots of compliments. We all agreed: the woman who'd left was undoubtedly rude, she probably shouldn’t have been there, we were glad when she was gone. But there remained a tinge of uneasiness. Surely this was not the most gracious way to handle the situation.

But my ticket said that show time was 8:00. I overheard a server saying later that Jones would go on at 8:30. Then the show didn’t start until 9:15. My ticket—the cheapest option, with an obstructed view—was $60, not including X glasses of fine (as in, OK) wine. Shows always start late, fans are quick to forgive, even at pricy shows, nothing new here. But now I'm wondering, are we getting our information from two different databases? Is this plain revisionist history? It’s hard for even a rabid fan like me to not get irritated at a tweet like this.

This reminded me of the last Cassandra Wilson show I saw (you know, too, that Cassandra Wilson is my other favorite). This was at a similarly problematic venue, Blue Note Jazz Club. At some point during the first or second song, Wilson extended her arm, pointed out her index finger, and, circling around, scanned the full audience before zeroing in on some poor viewer who was trying to film her with a digital video recorder. She stood there pointing, saying something like “Gotcha! Right there—that one!” as she ordered a Blue Note staff member to confiscate the camera. It was a scene, it was the behavior of a diva, and it annoyed me a lot. Sure, it’s not permitted to record these shows (though, what’s going to happen? Another shaky YouTube video that only a rabid fan like me is ever going to watch?), but, once again, is this the most gracious way to handle the situation? It seems to me that recording a live show is a act of affection, and publicly humiliating a fan isn't productive for anyone involved.

So two things: a fan buys a ticket to a show and it is a gesture of respect, and whoever’s name is on the ticket stub is the recipient of that respect. Maybe I am getting old and turning into a Republican (just kidding!), but it seems that that respect should to be nurtured and returned to those who facilitate it. That’s part of what an audience expects, even if there are some exceedingly annoying, poorly behaved ticket holders ones out there. Saying fuck you to even a demeaning, rude, and probably misplaced audience member violates the balance of respect. There must be other ways to make the point without going there.

The other is something my Grandpa told me a while ago, right after I’d moved here and was going on about how in New York I’ve come into contact with all the writers and artists I love—people such as Cassandra Wilson, who I saw in concert not one month after the move. He said, “Yeah, but soon enough you realize they’re all just people, too.” I really didn’t want to believe him then and I scoffed when he said it. But I suppose it's time to come around.

Weighing in

2011-06-25T11:15:00.003-04:00

I woke up this morning, showered, and stepped outside feeling anew: I am a gay man who can get married [here]! As I started thinking through my morning errands, I braced myself to register the change. But things looked and felt pretty much the same. I was getting sweaty, I regretted not wearing shorts. A cyclist almost ran me over. Someone I kind of know was standing in front of his apartment, so I feigned blindness in order to not have to talk to him. Alright, cool, I concluded. I don't have plans to get married anytime soon, so I bought an iced coffee and proceeded with the rest of the day.

Obviously, marriage is never going to be the vehicle for serious radical change. But marriage equality definitely is something, a note of clarity among all the noise of the straight-gay chasm—even if the effort to dismantle constrictive social norms inherent in institutions such as marriage never soon sees the light of day.

But what is the big deal? Why is it taking so long and generating so much angst? For the one millionth time, I expressed this frustration to Matt while we were eating dinner. At this point the vote was still about to happen and I was constantly refreshing my Twitter feed, amazed at how invested in the whole thing I'd become. I'd vowed earlier in the evening that if I couldn't pop the champagne later that night, I'd be cracking the bottle over the curb and taking to the streets.

Matt was in Massachusetts when they legalized gay marriage under Mitt Romney, and he told me that once it passed, the change was hardly perceptible. All that build-up, and then it was just over with. The culture warriors went home or elsewhere, and gay people who wanted marriage certificates got them. Which is funny, as Matt pointed out, because Romney has now done a 180 on the issue.

The funny morphed into shameful. If there's one person who has the national platform to say, "People, trust me: this is so not a big deal," it would be Mitt Romney. His political career didn't really lose steam, and the state of Massachusetts hasn't been sucked into a black hole. I wonder if we'll ever get over the short-term gain.

But Christ, I thought during the few hours I watched the live stream of the Senate floor before I left for dinner, how does change ever happen when the system is built to be so resistant to it? Will there ever be anything but short-term gain?

So here: I'm happy to take the victory for what it is, and happy also to start working towards the next one.

Veggie Burger Haiku

2010-07-07T10:24:00.001-04:00

My cookbook, Veggie Burgers Every Which Way went on sale this week! Pick it up from your favorite bookstore (these are my favorites if you live in New York; maybe they will have to order the book for you, and if that happens, be sure to express astonishment at the buyer's oversight: how could they not carrying such a hotly anticipated, well received book?) or order it online. But if you're a creative type, you may want to enter my Veggie Burger Haiku Contest, happening over at the veggie burger blog, and maybe you'll win a free copy. Check out some of these amazing submissions:

From Matt R:

Boca burger one
Wasn’t all that delicious
But I kept eating

Another, this from Scott Piro:

I microwaved you
You were gristly and yum
A world opened up

And then this gem from Rachel:

a fried hockey puck,
mostly consisted of rice
but got me thinking

You don't have to write a veggie burger poem; you only need to answer a simple question (though the poems are clearly a lot more fun). The contest closes Thursday night! Show me your esoteric veggie burger love.

Grilled Brunch Pizza

2010-05-25T13:34:00.007-04:00

My friend Matthew snarls when he says the word “brunch.” He dislikes—and I know he’s not alone here—what brunch has come to represent, which is many things, including: overpriced, dressed up hangover food for a certain breed of New Yorker who probably shares my demographic. Another thing that I think Matthew takes issue with is how brunch sucks the wind right out of one of your two precious weekend days. (I should add that I’ve never known someone to time-manage as he does; I confuse his afternoon checklist for my monthly one; hell, I don’t even do checklists.) On this point, I’ve been agreeing a lot lately. I am reluctant to watch my day pass by through mimosa goggles, and in my mind, at least, the minutia of my chores consume me more than they ever used to. Furthermore, I can’t even drink before sundown without having to nap for the rest of the day.

Probably anyone who’s ever been a waiter knows the specific breed of asshole that appears during the brunch shift. I shouldn’t call them assholes, because I have certainly been one of them before. They roll their eyeballs back in their head and flop their forearms on the table in exhaustion when you take their drink order—Omigod, coffee. And/or they act all scandalous—they lower their lids and confer with their dining companions in stage-whispered sex voices—when deciding to go through with bloody marys. And then, because this is brunch, the check comes to $12 per person and they’ve occupied their tables for 1.5 hours and still want more coffee. But what it comes down to is that I’m complaining. Brunch is simply more work than any other shift for a server, with all the damn beverages and bread baskets and requisite fits of entitlement whenever either run empty, and comes with significantly less pay. So. I hate brunch, too.

But stripped of its associations, it’s worth reminding oneself that brunch is nothing more than the midpoint between breakfast and lunch, and when one isn't all a-clutter with weekend chores and happy to spend a few hours in the kitchen, it can be a nice way to make for a two-meal day. This was the thinking behind the “Brunch Pizza” I made this weekend at my Dad’s house. I used this crust, substituting a cup of whole-wheat flour for some of the all-purpose stuff, and based the toppings on this recipe, nixing the bacon in favor of olives. On a second pizza I cracked the eggs over a bed of crispy hash browns, which was placed on top of a thin layer of mozzarella; this latter one was the winner. Then I cooked them on a hot grill because it was nice outside and I had access to a grill.

(This is a good time to announce that I’ve just signed up book number two: Vegetarian Entrees Every Which Way: Building Blocks and Over 80 Recipes for Everyday Main Dishes All Through the Year. Yup. It’ll be a very different kind of challenge from Veggie Burgers—a welcome one, in fact, and in many ways more interesting for me to develop since it will represent the food I eat most nights; also, while I do love veggie burgers, it’ll be some time before I care to eat them for 8 meals a week again—due out at some point next Spring or early Summer. I’m going to need help. Please email me if you want to try out recipes.)

But there were some problems with the Grilled Brunch Pizza. First of all, grilling—and I mean grilling, not barbecuing, as many a Southerner has corrected me (barbecue is the thing you eat and not a verb, as in, “Let’s y’all eat some barbecue, y’all”)—is something I am hugely not adept at. I’ve never had one, and growing up I didn’t pay the grill any attention because it belonged in the domain of garages and tool sheds and football—“man stuff.” So I botched this pizza up a little. I should have known that the grill would get too hot and burn the crust before the eggs would cook completely, even though I put high heat on one side, and low heat on the other, and cooked the pizza over the low-heat side where it wouldn’t be directly over the flame. (A helpful tip: go easy on the toppings if you’re cooking your pizza on a grill. You only want it in there as long as it takes for cheese to melt.) Also—and this is something I know to do, but the Food52 recipe seemed to garner such acclaim I was strong-armed into following the instructions exactly—when I was making the crust, I dumped all the flour in at once, rather than starting with half to two-thirds of what’s called for and then working more in as needed. The resulting crust simply had too much flour in it and none of those desirable pizza traits, like being both crisp and pliant. It was one-dimensional and boring, and broke off like a Linzer cookie (part of the problem was that it was on the brill for too long). Thankfully, there is potential here, but next time I’ll have to do it in my oven, and maybe as a vegetarian dinner entree.

The Last Mother's Day

2010-05-09T17:03:00.003-04:00

I went shopping for the last Mother’s Day gift I ever bought about a week before the actual holiday, which at the time was me exercising a great deal of foresight. I was 23, and one thing that had changed as I evolved from a teenager to a college student to an adult was that I was becoming much worse at giving gifts than my younger self had been. I used to love giving presents; the indulgence was almost the same as if I were treating myself. I would volunteer to go Christmas and birthday shopping for my Dad, my brother, and my grandparents because I enjoyed it so—I was literally put in charge of my grandparent’s Christmas stockings—and I was very good at it. For a short time I contemplated opening up a personal-gift-shopper business. But since I entered my twenties, and since the scope of my priorities narrowed considerably after coming out and moving to New York, to the extent that my own gratification has become almost all-consuming, gifts have become tedious and difficult. Everyone I know seems to have all that they want or need, and when I do try to give thoughtful gifts—books, namely—I can sense that it’s being received as a kind of imposition. Why can’t I just treat them to brunch? This is something I am working on.

But the last Mother’s Day needed to be different, because my mom had just gone into remission after seven month’s of treatment for leukemia. I spent a beautiful Saturday exploring the West Village, eventually walking through the Bleeker street fair where I came upon a necklace I thought to be understated and beautiful: a dozen and lumpy pearls, spaced out by about three-quarters of an inch on a thin gold chain. I know nothing about jewelry—as little about jewelry as I do about clothes, which is something else that changed when I entered my twenties: I began to loathe shopping for anything but food—so when the designer told me that the pearls were “more real” because of the imperfections, and that the necklace was one of her favorites, a “truly original piece,” I completely believed her. I paid $50 for it.

I sent it down to Mom in North Carolina with a card and she seemed happy with the gift. Mom literally had a new lease on life, and was elated by almost everything. She was ready to host a luncheon. Having only moved to North Carolina from Idaho about a year before she was diagnosed, she didn’t have much time to make friends. But the few she had made through a golf club she invited over one weekday afternoon. She discussed her menu with me, and I gave her many colorful suggestions, and in the end she went with a recipe for Quiche Lorraine from the Junior League of Boise cookbook. The only reason I mention this luncheon is because there’s a photo that was taken during it: my mom is at the head of the dining room table, mid-afternoon sunlight is bursting through the blinds, she’s wearing a lime-green top and floral-print capris from Talbots—and strung around her neck, coming down just to her clavicle, is the necklace I gave her. In the photo she still looks forty pounds lighter than normal, and her hair is growing back only in patches, and the chemotherapy has given her a dark, unglossy tan, but she possesses an inner glow that—well, you know what kind of inner glow it is. It is the “alive and living” kind of inner glow.

The next time I saw her wear the necklace the circumstances were very different. Mom had come out of remission after about a month, and my grandfather, my brother, and I were all in North Carolina for an indeterminate period during which we slowly acknowledged the ramifications of her cancer. We all went to the doctor with her for a visit; I can’t remember if the doctor had requested it, or if we had demanded it. All five of us were crammed into a small exam room where he delivered her predicament, which was not a good one. He explained that attention would now shift from “treating” my mother to making her as comfortable as possible (this included a prescription for morphine), and that hospice workers would be in touch, and, in front of us all, he asked if my dad was ready to sign a Do Not Resuscitate form. We all broke down during that appointment, first my mom, then my dad, then the doctor, and, quietly, the rest of us. When we left in separate cars, my Dad returning to work in one, my mom, grandfather, brother, and I in the other, she said “I guess I should be used to the bad news by now,” and announced that we’d be going out to dinner that night.

My mom dressed up for the occasion, in another Talbot’s duo, and wore the necklace. When she came downstairs, I told her what the necklace designer had told me, that the pearls were real and valuable and that it was a “truly original piece.” She regarded me skeptically, amused, and said, “Hm.”

The place we decided to go to was one of those sports bar-slash-steak house restaurants with enormous flat-screen TVs in every field of vision, where the waitresses wear tank tops and miniskirts and are mostly spray-tanned. We were seated outside, adjacent to the parking lot. When the waitress took our drink orders, my mom defiantly ordered a virgin margarita, as if we were there to celebrate (for most of her life she drank Chardonnay, but since she’d been sick, she’d not been able to drink any alcohol at all). When the server returned with our drinks, she warned my mom that the bartender wasn’t sure how to make virgin margarita. “It doesn’t taste like anything,” Mom said after taking a sip, and asked for a virgin strawberry dacquri instead.

I have been a very lucky person for my entire life, in pretty much every way, and I believed then, even after the doctor’s appointment, that I was lucky enough that my mom would miraculously recover. But the stress, if subliminal, had its impacts. It seemed reasonable at the time to be jetting back and forth to New York for a job interview (a job that had a start date I obviously wouldn’t be able to commit to for the foreseeable future), and I didn’t feel guilty—in some ways I felt entirely entitled—that those “job interview” trips home were merely a guise for being able to see my first serious boyfriend. Also, I was 23 and had formed many self-righteous opinions due to my liberal arts education and my first few years of living in New York. For example, my entire family except for me was wearing LiveStrong bracelets. I hated those things and claimed, haughtily, that Lance Armstrong was turning death into “the ultimate failure.” I believed that my brother in particular, who had a tan line from his LiveStrong bracelet and had read the entire Lance Armstrong oeuvre, was treating my mom’s sickness as some kind of sporting event. Confiding in my mom’s hippie friend and in her psychiatrist friend, I spoke of how I wanted my mother to feel at ease with dying, that it was natural if unfortunate, and certainly I didn’t want her to feel that she was failing anyone. While I still believe in this kind of thing, and still have issues with Lance Armstrong, I see that I was idealizing greatly—and also that I was being an asshole.

But at dinner that day, we were not speaking much. My brother, who is two years younger than me, had been obsessing over trucks. He wanted to buy one of those big ones with a backseat and a hitch and a tool box built into the bed; this was something he thought to be aspirational and sensible; I thought the whole thing was idiotic and I was willing to cite all the things New York people cite when it comes to SUVs in contrast to our own brilliant public transportation. While we were eating, an enormous truck pulled up, as inconspicuously as a bomb exploding, and parked directly alongside our table. The diameter of its wheels were my entire height, such that the driver needed the built-in stepladder to get in and out of it, and it was covered in decals suggestive of fire and virility. I scoffed audibly and declared it to be the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. This set my brother off. “Just because you don’t want something doesn’t mean that no one else can have it!” he said, viciously, to which I responded, “Just because something exists doesn’t mean that anybody needs it!” equally viciously. I may have paraphrased here, but the argument ended in stony silence, with me vowing to never speak to my brother again. I turned my gaze to the horrible parking lot where the horrible monster truck was parked, and as hard as I tried to stop it from happening, tears welled up in my eyes. I eventually faced the table to find my mom looking at me narrowly, though not unforgivably. (It wouldn’t be for several months that I’d realize my role in ruining this dinner.) When we got home, I followed her up to her bedroom, where she take off the necklace and prepared for bed before shutting the door. A few minutes later I went to bed myself. It must have been 7:00 PM.

After my mom died, in the months during which my dad made an unprecedented, astounding amount of purchases, my brother and I went to pick up a car part for him. The woman working at the shop was wearing a necklace eerily similar to the one I’d given my mom; the only difference was that this one had a silver chain. She told me she’d bought it a yard sale. I haven’t done the necessary homework, namely because I don’t know the keywords for jewelry (“pearl necklace” hardly narrows the search), but my sense is that the necklace I gave my mom is only special in the very relative sense: as special my mother would allow it to be.

*

Matt took me to breakfast this morning—my personal emotional warfare zone of Mother’s Day Brunch—where there were a few mothers out with their kids. I used to want that so badly, to fly my mom up to Brooklyn for Mother’s Day and to show her my life here: go grocery shopping, go for a walk, buy new sheets, drink bellinis, etc. But it didn’t seem that any of these tables were enjoying themselves in the way I fantasize about my mom and I enjoying ourselves. Then for a moment I longed to be with my immediate family, my Dad and my brother. But I quickly realized I was indulging a similar fantasy; I know from experience that their company does not provide the type of shared grieving I theoretically want. In fact, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do—I was with Matt, I was eating breakfast pizza—and afterward I would be alone for a little while. And, not for the first time, I would find some solace in thinking back on all the details, including my regrets.

Biscuits

2010-05-02T20:25:00.004-04:00

Bad weather food is the best kind because it gives one license to indulge. This is how I’ve permitted myself many a baked good, many a cheese-and-bread meal, and many a dairy-showcasing dinner: cheese soufflé, macaroni & cheese, creamed spinach.

Last week a group of us had a Laurie Colwin tribute dinner. Save a cheese plate, we were all charged with bringing one of her dishes, and I decided on biscuits. On Saturday, the day of the Colwin dinner, when it was gorgeous enough outside that I was more inspired to pot herbs, making biscuits felt strange. In my mind—and probably in the late Anglophile Colwin’s mind as well—biscuits are for sitting in the parlor room and looking out on the rain. So I made them, but the entire process seemed contextually insufficient until later in the evening, when they were featured alongside the other Colwin-inspired dishes of baked chicken, creamed spinach with jalapeno and, for dessert, Elizabeth David's flourless chocolate cake.

The following several days brought a rainy, breezy, cloudy, cool front that, compounded by the heat in my apartment having been shut down until next fall, made the idea of baking something quite appealing. Colwin’s enthusiasm for biscuits—and sometimes she does proselytize—largely comes down to their impromptu quality: the ingredients (flour, butter, milk, baking powder [and salt]) should be on hand, the equipment (a bowl, a spoon, a baking sheet) is all probably drying on the dish rack, and the mixing bowl-to-table time is relatively quick for a baked good. She also believes them to be extremely versatile, suggesting the dough as a base for pizza and mini-biscuits as “cocktail nibblers.” Regardless, a warm biscuit right out of the oven is a very comforting thing. So after several minutes of hovering over my preheating oven (it’s hard to recall this now, on the year's first wave of throat-clenching humidity), I gave them another go.

I made one important modification and one not important one. The former is the addition of salt. It’s not until two-thirds of the way through Home Cooking that we get any insight into this maddening omission (it is for the sake of her blood pressure, we discover; however it was also the ‘80s); I overcompensate by sprinkling additional salt on top as garnish. Secondly, I made them whole-wheat. I didn’t do this only because I am usually prone to this kind of thing (what else do you do with oat and rye and spelt and whole-wheat pastry flour once you have them in your possession?). And I halved the recipe, because it is rare that anyone will need more than 10 biscuits. Lastly, I learned—as I have learned countless times in the past—that the oven temperature is important here. If it’s less than 400°, the biscuits won’t rise much.

Biscuits à la Laurie Colwin

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
1 teaspoon wheat bran
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons cold butter, cubed
3 ounces cold milk (half of 3/4-cup; you can probably eyeball it)
1 tablespoon melted butter
Fleur de sel, or other chunky salt, for garnish (OK: optional)

Preheat the oven to 400°. Whisk or sift together the flours, wheat bran, baking powder, and salt. Cut in the cold butter using either your hands or your fingers. It should be uniformly mealy, so that when you grab a handful of it, it holds its shape. (But as with any pastry where you’re working with cold butter, you don’t want to overwork it; a few larger chunks of butter are better than working the mixture into a paste.) Make a well in the center and pour in the milk, then stir in with a spatula or wooden spoon. It will be kind of sticky. Using your hands or a rolling pin, flatten the mixture out to a thickness of about 3/4 of an inch on a clean surface that’s been lightly dusted with flour. Cut out rounds, then scrape up the remains, flatten them out, and cut out more rounds. Brush the tops with melted butter and then sprinkle with the salt. Bake for 15 minutes, until puffed up and browned on the bottom.

Going Home

2010-04-19T17:30:00.003-04:00

This violent Chinese brush stroke is a very accurate illustration of the elevation—actually it’s the logo—of Boise’s Race to Robie Creek that I ran last weekend. I’ve been hearing about this race my whole life—about how hard it is, and all the hills, and how it’s a local rite of passage—but its scope of difficulty somehow failed to impress me. It can’t be that hard, I figured, if people do actually complete it. Now I can attest that it is that hard. It is 8.5 miles of going up. Eight. Point. Five. Miles. That’s a full loop around Central Park and then two times around the Jackie O reservoir. Imagine it all uphill. It’s a long-ass ways. It was impossible to conceive when, from the beginning of the race where it was 75 degrees and we were comfortably loitering around in our running outfits, the race organizers warned us to watch out for ice and snow when we got to the top. (There actually was ice and snow at the top.) And then once you get there, to the top, the way down is rapid and steep and another five miles.

I don’t know how I did it, but one thing that helped was my iPod. I’ve never enjoyed running with one before: I don’t like the extra weight, and any kind of song lineup makes me more aware of the passing time and makes me loathe certain songs that I’d previously not loathed. Still, I decided to give it a try for Robie Creek—I would need the outside motivation. New Order’s “Ceremony” and MJ’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” kicked things off to excellent effect. Sadé’s “Soldier of Love” was a surprise hit; I'd been hesitant to add it. U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and Taylor Dayne’s “I’ll Wait” were big-time misses. I made Whitney’s “Step by Step” the last song, reasoning that by the end I’d appreciate the literalness (and plus I love that song), but by some feat I finished the race before the end of the playlist. The biggest iPod success was Beyoncé’s “Halo.” I permitted myself this sentimental indulgence because one of the motivations behind the race was that my mom walked it many years ago. (My dominant memory of this is that she and her friend Vanice planted themselves in a hot tub afterwards and periodically called for my brother or me to refill their wineglasses.) Around mile six of the climb, when “Halo” came on, I submitted to it completely; I even listened to the song twice.

At the race I feel like I discovered an entirely new aspect of Boise. As part of the pre-race festivities, a drag queen was hosting an aphrodisiac stand, where, she explained to anyone who would listen, she could help you with your stamina. In lieu of a gunshot, the race was kicked off by a bird-mating ceremony performed by two dancers from the Idaho Dance Theater. They were stationed on top of the scaffolding that was piled up as a start line, decked out in painted-on bird costumes; they danced around for a minute or two, and when they finally “mated,” we took off. At a quarter-mile from the top, a drag queen was handing out Hostess goods and a dominatrix girl offered to give me a gentle lashing (“Can I whip you?” she asked. I accepted). It made me believe that there might be a little sanctuary for us in Boise if anyone’s interested in moving out there with me. Except that later on in the race, I was behind a group of kids who had written in glitter glue on their tank tops, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and, perhaps philosophically, “Does a Tranny Wear Pants?” While I’d like to believe these were just confusing jokes meant to capture the spirit of the rest of the race, I can’t fully rule out that the kids belonged to some homophobic high school club.

At the finish line—oh, the Idaho Statesman managed to take a photo of everyone as they crossed the finish line, and the galleries make for a “How Are You Feeling Today?” poster devoted entirely to the grimace, my own included—I ran into my friend LL, who I’d not seen for at least six years. I have a hard time describing what an important person LL was to me during my first few years of college. I realize that back then, when I was figuring out my romantic inclinations, I leaned heavily on her. I had no way of gauging my needs; I wouldn’t have even known then that needing her as a soundboard constituted a need. I believed that we were reciprocally amusing and astute, and that my angst and confusion and all the minutia of my self-revelations were enough to make up the substance of our friendship. It's not necessarily that I was oblivious of her own needs; it's that I needed her involvement in every aspect of my life. I dedicated short stories to her; I sent her books and poems and Xeroxes from bell hooks and Michel Foucault books; a scholarship-winning essay I wrote was, verbatim, a letter I’d written to her. For a time she accepted the full weight of it, and what I asked of her I asked of no one else. But clearly she wasn’t able to sustain it. After I moved to New York I got fewer and fewer return calls and emails from her. At some point in 2003 she called unexpectedly from a road trip and stayed at my apartment for two days, during which I tried to contain my neediness and demonstrate how in such a short time New York had significantly grown me up. After that visit we exchanged maybe one more email before we lost touch completely. By then—even as we were hanging out over those two days—I knew that I needed to be okay that.

When I saw her from across the park after the race, I literally ran to her, which is saying a lot. God, how was I supposed to begin the conversation? It was so incredibly dissatisfying; it was torture. I had to tell her that my mom died, which was painful not because I have difficulty telling anyone, but because to have to share it with someone I once counted as my closest, most important friend only further illuminated what had happened to us. We had to talk about our finish times. I got the 20-second recap of her past six years. I have no idea what kinds of tragedies she may have experienced. The whole thing lasted a minute and a half. During a lull, and because she was with her mom and (I think) her boyfriend or maybe husband, I decided it would easier to just hug her and promise that I’d catch her later on in the post-race festivities. This, of course, didn’t happen, and I’ve been brooding over the incident ever since.

I woke the next morning a little bit hungover and a lot sore, but at 7:00 AM due to the advantageous time zone. I took Katie, who flew out for the race with me, to my high school pre-test breakfast spot Raedeans, where you get a cinnamon roll (or toast; blah) with your breakfast. I used to have dreams about this cinnamon roll. It’s a miracle of pillow-ey dough, topped with cream-cheese frosting and a small ice-cream scoop of whipped butter that melts like a glacier and ultimately leaves the bun resting in a foamy pool of it if you don’t eat quickly enough. Afterward we went back to my grandfather’s house and sat on the back patio while we waited for the taxi to pick us up and take us to the airport. Even though the view was everything pastoral—a small horse pasture and, in the distance, the snow-capped peaks we’d raced the day before—I felt restless. This was the fist time I’d been back to Boise without any family or holiday obligations, and to my surprise I enjoyed being there as my own entity and I wanted to stay longer. I felt bizarrely that I was about to leave home, rather than return to it. That’s the sign of a good trip, I’ll say, until I start thinking seriously about packing my bags.

Notes on Sondheim (on Sondheim)

2010-04-05T10:03:00.004-04:00

Yesterday afternoon I went to see Sondheim on Sondheim. I don't know why I was excited to see this, because lately I'm not much of a musical theater fan, and I've never known Sondheim's work well enough to say definitively that I like it. I guess it was Barbara Cook: We gays have a genetic inclination. Also, Vanessa Williams (more later). The show doesn't officially open until April 22, so the following may not be applicable a few weeks from now.

This show is for bone fide Sondheim fans. It is almost three hours long, and one of its features is the inclusion of songs that had been cut from the final versions of his shows. This is a bad idea for us layman viewers, because it is abundantly clear to us why those songs were cut in the first place: they are bad. And it makes the show longer than it ought to be. Also, when the layman viewer is faced with three hours of Sondheim songs, they all begin to sound the same.

The random selection of songs are loosely strung together by a projected video interviews with Sondheim. Sometimes this works but I found it to be mostly weird (though I can't imagine any other way for the show to make cohesive sense except to have Sondheim on stage in the flesh). His interspersed insights are sometimes used objectively—as in, this is the song that made audiences finally sympathize with Passion [insert "Loving You"]—and then other times interpretatively—he talks about his horrible relationship with his mother [insert "Children Will Listen"]. This latter trick is really confusing, because Sondheim himself claims that he'd only written one autobiographical song, which is a boring one about the biz. So we don't have a solid point of view.

There is only one direct reference to Sondheim's sexuality. He talks about struggling to understand himself and how he didn't fall in love until his 60s, but we are never told that his lover is a man. I was willing to let this pass, but Ann, my friend who came to the show with me, wasn't: She pointed out the discrepancy of his reading aloud a horrible letter his mother wrote to him in which she bemoans his existence. This seems like an act of exposure that would render the word "gay" pocket change. Did producers edit it? Or is Sondheim still not really out? What year are we living in?

I love Vanessa Williams; I love even her Christmas albums; I am convinced she's a wonderful person and I would like to eat brunch with her. But I see her as something of a tragic figure because for someone who has had a long, post-Miss America career in the arts, that career is a pretty uneven one. It leaves me with the impression that either she isn't picky or she doesn't know what she likes to do, like she's either lazily or manically tossing darts in the general direction of the dartboard. In SoS, she stands out as, say, the local news anchor guest-starring in a high school production (this is not to disparage her really talented colleagues). This is compounded by her not wearing costumes very well: We never for a moment lose sight of the fact that we are watching Vanessa Williams sing. That said, I have to give her some credit. It seems like a mean thing to make her share the stage with Barbara Cook in a Sondheim revue.

But Barbara Cook! A boy hasn't lived until he's heard "Send in the Clowns" sung live by the lady herself. Also, Norm Lewis's "Being Alive" makes me want to see "Company" again, and that's a show I am very tepid about. And Cook and Williams's duet of "Losing My Mind" is definitely one of the many highlights. One can't dispute that Sondheim is a tremendously gifted songwriter, and it's a rare thrill to listen to many of the songs in a single evening (or afternoon). But for SoS, there's a disparity that still needs to be worked out. At times I'd rather have been watching something formal, with a solid narrative structure, and at others I'd have preferred informal—like, at Joe's Pub, with a drink in my hand. It seems best to go one way or the other and then stick to it.

Rose Tree

2010-03-27T13:12:00.011-04:00

Four years ago, in the spring of '06, my Dad and I planted this tree as our commemorative Mom Plant. Planting stuff is a way of commemorating that apparently works for me, but it's also something that seems to run in the family. My grandfather planted commemorative trees for both my mom and my grandmother in his front yard. He even had stone nameplates made for them: "Fay's Tree" and "Pam's Tree."

I can't remember what kind this one is. It looks sort of like a rose tree, but I don't think roses bloom in March and I also don't think there is a plant called a rose tree, and moreover it just looks like a flowering shrub that's been pruned to resemble a tree. Maybe it's a Crape Myrtle. (This is only a lazy internet guess. I really have no clue about identifying plants.)

In any case, while I've always known that the plant would flower seasonally, I've never been around to see it in bloom until this year. It's really something to behold: there are lots and lots of flowers, and the red is vivid and forthright enough that if you're looking at the plant from inside the house, you might believe it is summer.

What To Cook When You’re Not Cooking Veggie Burgers

2010-02-11T17:48:00.011-05:00

Now that I’ve finished the recipe writing/testing/rewriting/retesting aspect of the veggie burger cookbook (BTW: Become a fan on Facebook! Follow me on Twitter! Check out the veggie burger blog!), I might turn to working my way through all of Laure Colwin’s recipes. If you’ve not yet read Home Cooking or More Home Cooking and you like food writing, you will probably enjoy her a lot. For me, she’s the calm, patient, understanding aunt who shares all my interests, and when she puts together a menu, she says something like, “Oh, these are just four easy pieces.”

Last weekend I was faced with baking an impromptu Super Bowl dessert and I wanted to bring cake. I chose Colwin’s “Happy Winter Fudge Cake,” from More Home Cooking, which is deceptively titled because it’s not fudgy and it doesn’t necessarily evoke winter. I’d have called it “Chocolate Willow Cake.” It’s soft, a little bit spongey, and moderately sweet: a Pacific Northwest beach cake, or something the Ramsays might have taken with them to the lighthouse had things turned out differently the first go-round. Which is all to say: you could eat it for breakfast if absolutely necessary. I added a big pinch of salt (because, in the same vein of yogurt-for-oil substitutions in the '80s, “sodium” was quick to go) and halved the recipe because I don’t own a tube pan. If I were serving it again, I’d probably try that thing Smitten Kitchen did, of topping it with whip cream that’s had a plop of sour cream folded into it. Whatever, here’s the way I did it.

“Happy Winter Fudge Cake”: Preheat oven to 375°. Generously butter a tart pan and sprinkle with sugar, tossing it around so that it’s evenly coated, and pour off the excess. Melt 1-1/2 ounces dark chocolate and 2 tablsepoons butter over low heat until smooth. Meahwhile mix together 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 teaspoons cocoa powder, a big pinch of salt, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda. In another bowl whisk together an egg, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, and 3/4 cup plain yogurt, and then beat in the slightly cooled chocolate. Add wet ingredients to dry, not overmixing, and stir in 1/2 cup chocolate chips or nuts or something else you like. Pour into the tart pan, bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until firm to the touch. Let cool until safe to touch before popping it out of the tart pan.

But I stopped there in my quest to cook through all of Colwin's recipes. Later on in the week, between monitoring my bank account and watching Marion Nestle’s Authors@Google talk, I made shakshouka, which I wrote about on this blog once before. I’m just going to re-do the recipe here, because I don’t want to encourage anyone to read any of the dumb stuff I wrote two years ago. Plus, you might say I “revised” my recipe to make use of a spice blend I bought ~~three~~ four years ago in Paris called “Piment Basque.” If anyone knows exactly what “Piment Basque” is—besides “Basque Pepper Powder”—I’d love to know. It’s totally delicious—heady and smoky-sweet—and has been holding strong for ~~three~~ four years now and counting.

Shakshouka Redux: Heat a tablespoon of oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add a small minced onion, 1/2 teaspoon sweet paprika, a pinch red pepper flakes, and 1 teaspoon “Piment Basque.” Cook until the onions are thoroughly softened and taste quite rich, about 12 or 15 minutes. Add a 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes (I know that people can be picky about tomatoes and for most of my life I’ve been indifferent, but I used San Marzano tomatoes here and they were very, very good), 1/2 teaspoon brown sugar, and 3/4 teaspoon salt. Heat to a boil, and then lower the heat to a simmer and cook, stirring every so often, for about 20 minutes, until it reduces slightly. You can do all this in advance if you’d like. When you’re ready to eat, heat up the sauce so that it is simmering, and then crack 4 eggs into it. You want them to cook as individual entities—you do not want them to be a mass that floats on the surface. The best way to do this, for me, is to press a cavity into the sauce with a small ladle, crack the egg into the ladle, and then carefully rotate the ladle out from underneath (the egg stays in the cavity). Either transfer the pan into a preheated, 375° oven, or cover the pot and simmer. Baking will take about 15 minutes, and stovetop will take 7 or 8 minutes. You may want a runnier egg or a firmer one, and in that case you’ll know to cook less or more.

Then we had this snowstorm thing. One minute I was walking around outside with my coat unzipped and thinking about how no one will have any reason not to attend my birthday party, and the next minute the schools were closed, everyone in publishing seemed to have the day off, and it was either a Snowpocalypse or Snowmageddon. I had to work at the restaurant, where I basically earned my subway fare and where I spent the entire shift thinking about cheese soufflé. My experience of cheese soufflé is limited to this restaurant: the call bell starts ringing furiously; one waiter, the one nearest the kitchen, scurries in there to take a soufflé just as it comes out of the oven; the other waiter clears a path through any patrons that might be in the way; and we deliver it ceremoniously to the table of some middle-aged woman who usually gasps at how beautiful it is. Sadly I’d never eaten it myself. So deciding that shitty weather calls for soufflé, Matt agreed to trudge through the snow and meet me at the grocery store after work.

Did you know that soufflé is basically just béchamel sauce glorified with eggs? Or eggs glorified with béchamel? Lord, who cares. These were good—and not that hard. We didn’t have ramekins, so we cooked them in 6-oz coffee mugs. (Note: Lots of soufflé recipes call for adding cream of tarter to the eggwhites, which is supposed to make it easier for peaks to form, I think? Cream of tarter costs like $9, and you don’t need it. If you want a stiff peak [ha], just use a very clean—as in, wipe it out even if it’s already clean—big metal bowl, and store it in the fridge with the eggwhites in it while you get the rest of the soufflé ready. Update from from Arch, who is most often right: Wonder if this tip is useful mostly for hearty soufflés that call for stiff egg whites, or if it applies to egg whites that’ll be used for desserts too, specifically macaroons; some recipes call for ‘aged’ eggs [separated and left at room temperature for a couple of days] in order to get the best results: egg whites that form firm peaks but still have a glossy appearance.)

Spinach Cheese soufflé: Preheat oven to 400° F. Generously butter six ramekins or coffee mugs. Separate 6 eggs, and keep the whites in the refrigerator in a large, clean bowl until ready to use. Steam or boil 10 ounces of spinach. Transfer to an ice bath to cool, squeeze out as much water as possible, and then chop finely. In a medium saucepan, melt 4 tablespoons butter over medium-low heat. Sprinkle 6 tablespoons flour over it, stirring constantly for two or three minutes, until it darkens slightly and smells nutty. Slowly whisk in 1-1/2 cups warm milk in increments so as to avoid any clomps forming. Stir constantly until the mixture thickens considerably, about 5 minutes. Now you’ve got béchamel! Whisk in the egg yolks and off the heat. Stir in 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, a few gratings of fresh nutmeg, the chopped spinach, and 4 or 5 ounces bleu or goat cheese, and let be. In the cold bowl the eggwhites are in, beat them until stiff peaks form. Fold them into the custard mixture. Scoop into the prepared cups using a ladle, filling each an inch from the top. Wipe the rims clean with your finger (this allows the soufflés to rise evenly). Bake for about 20 minutes, until puffed up and golden brown; they’ll be a little bit jiggly in the center. Serve IMMEDIATELY.

And after all that, I can now start to think about getting ready for the toughest half-marathon in the Northwest, which I just agreed to do this coming April.

Cassandra Wilson: An Appreciation

2010-02-04T23:46:00.005-05:00

During the first week that I moved to New York, I saw The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, I interviewed for a job at CremaLita (which I didn't take, because just in the nick of time I got a prep cook position instead), and I saw Cassandra Wilson perform. I'd been obsessed with Cassandra Wilson for a few years prior to this—it was the thing that, until I realized my romantic inclinations, set me apart from my Dave Matthews Band-loving friends at college.

I moved on a Friday, I think, and the show was the following Sunday afternoon. It was a free one put on by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. I arrived early enough that I had no problems securing a seat that was exactly in the center and as close to the ledge of the stage as I could be without being tempted to touch her shoe. As the lawn at Battery Park filled up, a man squeezed in between me and an annoying couple who was drinking wine and had spread out a picnic. This guy turned out to be a friend of Lonnie Plaxico, her bassist at this show and a jazz luminary by his own right. The proximity—the narrowing degrees of separation between C-Dub and myself—was intoxicating. She performed with her "muse" Brandon Ross (who, incidentally, I think lives in my neighborhood!), opening with her cover of "The Weight", and sang covers of "For the Roses," and "Only a Dream in Rio" (she does write original songs, but I usually prefer the covers). My face hurt afterward because it had been frozen in a state of barely containable glee. I squealed and teared up. I'd never thought I'd have the opportunity to see Cassandra Wilson live, and look! I'd only been living in New York for three days and I was sitting ten feet away from her!

Over the next seven or eight years, I saw Cassandra Wilson eight or nine times more. I saw her for my twenty-first birthday when she performed at the Jazz Standard. I went alone and ordered a bottle of wine and shook her hand afterward. I brought my friends Meghan and David to see her with me at the Blue Note (a terrible venue); when she sang "Broken Drum," I told them that I wanted the song to be played at my funeral. One or two summers after that, Lesley came with me to see Wilson's Summerstage show. This one was my favorite of all time. There were several thousand people there sprawled out in front of us (we were in the back on the bleachers), and when she sang "Time After Time," the park went eerie quiet and the expanse between us and the stage lit up like a slo-mo disco ball with everyone's lighters held in the air, waving around in little circles. She covered "Brown Sugar" and "Redemption Song" and it seemed that in terms of what was happening in New York during those ninety minutes, there was nowhere else to be. Then one time my ex came with me, also at the Blue Note, to the worst show I ever saw. This mound of a man from New Jersey shared a table with us, and throughout the show he wanted to assert his superior jazz appreciation skillz via his expansive CD collection; even though he did that thing that jazz aficionados like to do, the very deliberate off-beat head-bop thing, he talked over most of the music. But mostly there was no sense of collective appreciation. It's like the music was secondary to the table service, and when Wilson came back out for an obligatory encore, her path was blocked by the onslaught of patrons exiting. Awful.

In high school I drove an old, cherry-red Volkswagon Cabriolet convertible and on summer nights when I wanted to be alone (or, more likely, on nights when I had no one to hang out with) I would drive up into the foothills to a little overlook point from which Boise looked a lot bigger and more interesting than it actually was. There I would play Wilson's cover of "Harvest Moon" on full blast, lay on the hood of the car, and in nonspecific terms fantasize about my adulthood. I'm not a person who is motivated by his convictions, so while at that point I might have told people that I was going to move to New York, I didn't believe I had the inner resources to make it happen, nor could I even fathom what such a move would entail. Honestly, it seemed like a terrifying prospect: What if moving someplace else changed nothing, and I just found myself lying on the proverbial hood of another proverbial car, aching for something still unidentifiable but "better"? "Harvest Moon" is a poor expression of this kind of teenage angst, though conveniently enough it is about yearning, and perhaps as a final appeal, it fast-forwarded from my point in time so that what was yearned for was compassionately figured in retrospect.

After that first concert, I waited at the "stage-door" (in this case, a street barricade) for maybe an hour with three or four others. I finally asked someone from backstage if Wilson would be coming out. "It's not looking likely," she said. I scribbled something on a scrap piece of paper and asked that she pass it along:

Dear Cassandra Wilson,

In Boise, Idaho, I would listen to your version of "Harvest Moon" at night up in the foothills under a blanket of stars and a real harvest moon every once in a while, and sometimes the clouds opened up for me.

Sincerely,
Lukas

I included my email address, but—duh—she didn't respond. It was probably illegible anyway.

Thanksgiving Recap: Give a Little Respect

2009-12-04T11:30:00.002-05:00

Until recently Thanksgiving has been a pretty predictable affair, though for me it's becoming one of those holidays to appreciate only after learning how to abuse one’s sense of retrospect. The Thanksgivings I had growing up were mostly obligatory. My brother and I dusted off our penny loafers, tucked in our shirts, and arrived at our grandparents’ house ready to eat at 3 PM. Then, a decade later, I flew home from college in Oregon and practiced mute wisdom (except for pointing out all gendered power dynamics happening around the table) and asked if there was chicken broth in the stuffing. The first year after I’d moved to New York, my roommate and I stayed put and invited friends over; I made spinach lasagna (because I was still a vegetarian) and my roommate made oyster dressing that was gyrating both before and after it came out of the oven, and we all got very drunk and a little high and many of us hooked up that night. The next year I went to Boise because my grandmother was dying, and the year after that we delivered a roast turkey, etc, to my mom’s hospital room, and the year after that was a sad affair in Arizona at my grandfather’s house—just my brother, dad, grandfather, and me—and then a few Thanksgivings went by uneventfully. Last year I thought I’d have the chance to fulfill my relatively recent fantasy of hosting a proper Thanksgiving on my home turf, but in a turn of events indicative of where things were going with my ex, we went to one of his friend's apartments instead. During the phone call to Arizona, where the rest of my family was, my grandfather was the first to register my disappointment: “You’re telling me that you’re not doing all the cooking?” “No, Grandpa, not [sigh, sniffle]—not this year.” I decided that it’s much better in the end to have at least one family member around for these types of holidays, and also that a shared enthusiasm for hosting Thanksgiving would be a prerequisite in my next boyfriend.

My Dad has been seeing someone for a few years with whom he has many bizarre things in common, chief among them deceased spouses of the same names and same causes of death. She and her family are very Christian, and I am not, and neither is my father. Over the years I’ve come to respect how her church has given her comfort and support, but it still gives me pause.

This year I spent Thanksgiving with my Dad and his girlfriend’s extended family out at a cold beach, where everyone was really nice and welcomed me in with enthusiasm. We began dinner by gathering in the round and singing hymns. They'd been typed up, printed out, and passed around so that everyone (meaning: Dad and I) could follow, and then someone said grace. We split up between two different tables and ate the whole gluttonous meal: turkey and stuffing and lots of delicious casseroles and gooey cheddar biscuits. Over dinner, I heard about one son/brother/cousin who was abroad teaching English through an international program and doubling as a covert Christian missionary: “Because they are required to teach about Western culture,” his mother told me, “and Christianity is a part of Western culture . . .” I slowly nodded my head and said, “Oh.” Dinner was followed by “Rock Band 2,” which we played while sampling a bunch of pies, and then we all played a round of Taboo, which might be my favorite board game (this doesn’t include Uno because it’s not a board game).

During the afternoon, one young couple got engaged. They went for a walk on the beach, he popped the question to her, got an affirmative, and when they came back to the house the family was gathered around the porch with champagne and “Happy Engagement” cocktail napkins, singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” There was another champagne toast the next day when another recently engaged couple arrived. I wondered how, if any one of these people were invited to a gathering of my gay friends (all five of them) and presented with the opportunity to participate in a similar celebration (do we get engaged before we get fake married?), how she/he would respond. I did feel genuinely happy for the newly engaged couples, simply because they seemed so happy, but in the end would she/he do what I did, which was to smile big and tightly, offer my congratulations, and then refill the glass? I think so. The tendency to bypass direct conflict in favor of harboring passively destructive “beliefs”—such as opposition to gay marriage, or opposition to holding hands and signing hymns, which I use here as a stand-in for Christianity at large—is something as American as . . . Thanksgiving.

The next day we ate leftovers, which was preceded by another prayer in the round. We held hands. To one side stood my Dad and to the other the resident Southern Patriarch who everyone called Grandaddy. He reminded me of a Tennessee Williams character, as most Southern men do, but one who is all goodness and really pleasant to be around. I closed my eyes and bowed my head and listened as one of Grandaddy’s sons delivered grace. It was a fairly routine one, calling for thankfulness for all the food and for the family to be together and the good will of the Lord, etc. Towards the end there was a reference to those “here with us, and those beyond.” While this type of oblique reference (here read by me as a reference to my mother), in any situation, usually fails to move me much, the sense of loss I did perceive right then was compounded by that of everyone else: my Dad, obviously, but his girlfriend (who lost a husband), and Grandaddy (who lost a son), and his entire family that had also lost a father/brother/uncle in the same way that I had. Grandaddy squeezed my hand firmly, and I’d be lying to say that right then I didn’t feel a surge of—of I don’t know what: Vulnerability? The Good Lord? An allergy to pineapple casserole? The point is that I felt something, and felt an immediate kinship with Grandaddy, with my mom, and my dad. It passed a split second later, and I was okay with that.

Later in the weekend, after I got back from the beach, I visited my Dad’s next-door neighbors. They are a 30-something couple and have two young sons, one who for several reasons doesn’t eat wheat or dairy or soy and has many other dietary restrictions. His mother, Stephanie, has made raising him and his brother a full-time job for the next several years, and watching her interact with her kids is a remarkable thing: one sits in awe and tries, with very little success, to help. After the kids were put to bed (they both came downstairs wearing their adorable pajamas and bid me goodnight), the conversation turned to gay things, as it usually does, via my mother, via Stephanie’s children, via Christians in North Carolina. I told her about my gay cousins: years ago, when I came out to one of them he basically shrugged it off because he believed my Mom to be so “lax” about it (I’ll never know if this was true or not, but my feeling is that it’s not). Then I told her about a friend of mine whose mother has not come to terms with her daughter being bisexual, despite her habit of reaching out to any of her daughter’s friends that struggle with sexuality issues. “The only reason I can kind of understand that behavior,” Stephanie told me, “is that you put so much time into your kids, and you try to send them out into the world with a sense of self-knowledge and self-satisfaction, and then they come to you with something you didn’t factor in. Like, ‘How could I not have accommodated for this?’ ”

Now, as evidenced by my Thanksgiving 2009 experience, I live in an alternate universe in New York. But I still can’t imagine, these days, that parents don't wonder about their children’s sexuality, especially parents like Stephanie, who I'm pretty sure doesn't apply here (she has a PhD in child psychology). But it seemed like a nice way to look at conflict: How much of what we agree and disagree with, or believe and don’t believe, stems from having accommodated for it? And: is it the same thing as voluntary ignorance? Maybe. Or maybe it just means that life is easier if you don't have any expectations.

Balm in Gilead

2009-11-22T19:33:00.010-05:00

I’ve been trying to figure out my draw to artists like Rickie Lee Jones, and in general my draw to late-career entries of middle-aged lady singer-songwriters. I think it has something to do with the requisite gay obsession with older women, who seem to be living proof that being weathered by life makes you smarter and beautiful in a better way, or at least resigned to your quirks and insecurities. In these albums I often find myself fast-forwarding through my own life and looking back compassionately on some of the stupid things I obsess over right now, which in turn makes the idea of getting older not so bad. Also, these albums almost always make me feel hungry in the womb. RLJ’s Flying Cowboys, which I read as a gorgeous, mostly upbeat paean to motherhood and which I had on repeat through the entirety of my mom’s illness, usually makes me cry. Though I’m probably more susceptible to this kind of thing than others, I have such a weakness for parent-child songs. I fall prey to this brand of romanticizing far more than I do in songs about, like, real romance.

I’ll try to keep this brief, as I doubt I’ve made any RLJ converts at this blog: Balm in Gilead, Rickie Lee Jones’s newest album, is exquisite. Its release coincides with her 30th year in the business and her daughter’s 21st birthday, and it’s a gorgeous, impressionistic survey of her life’s sweep. Her last album, Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, was slightly more experimental—a loose interpretation of the words of Christ. Balm manages to develop some of the spiritual themes explored there (especially the dirge-like "His Jeweled Floor" and “Eucalyptus Trail,” a reworking of “A Face in the Crowd” from her 2003 album The Evening of My Best Day—yup, I caught that). And then of course in the pairing of “Wild Girl,” an epistolary-type song to her daughter on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, and “The Moon Is Made of Gold,” a lullaby her father wrote, we have her beatnik treatment of parenthood, which is forgiving without being idyllic, reflective without being chummy. “Bonfires” is also a nice number, similar to one my other favorites, “Stewart’s Coat,” in that it’s a sad, sad love song with mostly just voice and guitar.

I love her harmonies on this album. Her harmonies, in general, are like the brass section of a jazz band, where there’s the illusion of layers and layers of voice and an ever-present but hardly discernible dissonant note. If you’ve never listened to “We Belong Together,” then you are in for a treat—it’s a storm that seduces you and then beats you up. But on Balm the harmonies are looser, kind of plucky, like a crochet blanket that has some holes in it and is fraying at the edges, and it works really, really well. Especially in “Old Enough,” her duet with Ben Harper, and on some of the other numbers with Vic Chestnut and Alison Kraus.

I am trying not to make this album sound like it’s her "last" album (even as I'm doing it myself, I still think it's annoying when the songs of artists who are not young are described by reviewers as a resignation to or revolt against death), but something really pretty happens in the last song, that does sound kind of like a resignation:

A child on Bayless Street
Left there by myself,
And she’s waiting there to meet
All the people we’ve become.

You can sing about "life" or you can choose against it. But if you are going to, I like this interpretation.

It turns out her Carnegie Hall show—billed as her 30th anniversary concert—has been postponed until she figures out exactly how to structure it. From her website:

Rickie Lee Jones has announced that she will be performing her 30th Anniversary show in two acts. The first act will focus on selections throughout her 30 year catalog and songs included on her new, critically acclaimed album, Balm in Gilead, while the second act will be a performance of her legendary 1981 album, Pirates, in its entirety. Very special guests who have collaborated with Jones throughout her career will be added to the performance and will be announced soon. In order to make preparations for this unique appearance, the originally scheduled date of December 7th has been postponed until early 2010 with new concert information to be announced soon.

You take your time—I'll be there when you're ready!

The Opposite of Sex

2009-10-21T11:24:00.009-04:00

Izzy and I went out the other night to celebrate three things: her temporary financial windfall, her (and, to a lesser extent, my) Sober October baby steps, and my send-off to North Carolina for two weeks to pump out some VBs. The margaritas were good, so we had three of them alongside some snacks (guacamole, tacos, a quesadilla). Once we got soused, she told me something she’d been hiding from me for a little while, how a coworker sent her an anonymously penned story about a gay guy and his lady friend who started having sex together. She couldn’t bring herself to share it with me until then because it made her feel icky (because, obviously, we share the opposite of sexual interest in one another. In high school, when I went to the prom with Kat it caused a small stir because I, the drum major, was such an improbable date; the following Monday, someone spread a rumor that we had made out and we were both equally disgusted). Then the bill came. $120. One hundred and twenty dollars. For tacos. It takes a lot to shock Izzy, but the bill managed to do it. We responded by buckling over into fits of laughter, paying, naturally, by credit card, suffering even greater hilarious shock after calculating the tip. As we were leaving, I said, “You know, I considered taking us to a hotel bar tonight,” actually meaning it, thinking it would be a good change of scenery from the handful of bars we always go to after work. Izzy said, “I’ll bet you did!” We buckled over into fits of laughter and tears again, which lasted approximately five blocks. Then I got home at 10:05 and promptly fell asleep.

I Can Haz Veggieburger?*

2009-09-29T23:32:00.007-04:00

So I am writing a book! And it’s not a memoir about my relationship with my mom via being gay. It’s a veggie burger cookbook!

I have lots of ideas and not a ton of time and so I am going to need some help. I started another site (Sigh. Makes me feel old that my web and photo skills are still so shoddy. When will I ever get around to learning this stuff? Must I resign to hovering over someone's shoulder, feigning competence? What, again, is CSS?) where I’ll be chronicling the madness and posting a few recipes and stuff. If you are food-inclined—and I know that not everyone is, so no biggie, but if you are—would you mind checking in every once in a while, trying out a veggie burger, and letting me know what you think?

This also means that I probably won't be writing much here for the next little while. But after four months of eating almost nothing but veggie burgers, just imagine the epic Poop Group post that is to come.

* Not the title--no, the title is Veggie Burgers Every Which Way.

Cold Comforts

2009-09-12T15:30:00.007-04:00

Yesterday was a startling reminder of what autumn has in store for us in NY—cool, windy, damp, with unidentifiable allergens flying around. If you’re a freelancer like me, it was a perfect day not to leave the house. I intended to do my first “deep clean” of my new apartment and tackle a pile of freelancery work that has piled up, but some mosquitoes, as shocked by the cold as I was, ate me the night before and I ended up taking a few Benadryl at 4 AM. I pulled myself from the Whitney YouTube vortex* I've been stuck in for about two weeks to make lunch and make my bed; otherwise, it was a slow-moving day.

Living alone, you really stretch the limits of your personal sloth. You tolerate all kinds of things that you’d never tolerate in anyone else, such as: pants everywhere, dirty dishes on the floor next to the bed, dirty dishes basically everywhere, piles of crumpled up receipts and pocket change on most surfaces, a bathrobe lying suggestively by the front door, and willfully living out of a shaving kit in your own private bathroom for approximately 1.5 months. I used to think that if a room didn’t keep itself clean, something must be wrong with the way the furniture is set up and where the clothes hampers and trash cans are placed. I’m coming to realize that I’ve never had a room keep itself clean. What has kept rooms clean for me has been the judgment of the people I lived with and, more often, earning the license to judge by occasionally maintaining a holier-than-thou cleaning regimen.

Every time I move, I have grand interior design aspirations. Something I have long fantasized about is using big furniture to create “walls” or “rooms”—like, putting the sofa in the middle of the room so that behind it is a new, separate "space." In this new place I have both a sofa that facilitates a "hallway" and a bookshelf cordoning off the studio into a "living room" and a "bedroom," which was a thrill for me to pull off. But it’s also really disappointing that when my interior design fantasies are finally realized, it basically looks like just my old stuff in a new room.

We had a girls’ night last night—Izzy and Jenn came over, and we talked about heavy shit. (We missed you a lot, Kathryn.) It was going to be just drinks, but because of the weather and what should have been plenty of extra time on my hands, I made soup:

Cheap, Easy Potato Soup: In a soup pot, cook 1 pound leeks, cleaned and thinly sliced up, in 2 T butter + 2 T olive oil over medium heat until just softened, 4-5 minutes; sprinkle with 1/2 t salt. Add 4 cloves minced garlic and 2 pounds peeled, thinly sliced Yukon Gold potatoes, tossing with the leeks, for about 2 minutes. Cover with chicken or vegetable stock by an inch. Bring to a boil, and then simmer until potatoes are soft. Then mush everything up with a potato masher or an immersion blender. Add more butter, salt, and/or white pepper. It’s best served at about 10 degrees cooler than “hot,” and I even like it at room temp. I think that if you cool it, and stir in cream or sour cream or crème fraishe, you can call it vichyssoise.

While waiting for Izzy and Jenn, I regarded my cluttered up “dining room” that comfortably seats only two people, and wondered where we would eat. Then I remembered the big coffee cups I used to have. They had a 14- or 16-ounce capacity—I hated them because my coffee would always get cold before I could finish it. The only reason I’d kept them around was because when my mom and I were packing me up for college nine years ago, she insisted that I take them. I pointed out that I had already packed coffee cups, the regularly sized ones. “No,” she said, “I think you are going to want these big ones to eat soup out of, you know, on a cold night?” She demonstrated with an imaginary big coffee cup and a spoon. I had never seen my mom eat soup out of a coffee cup before, but I decided against challenging whatever inexplicable nostalgic value it had for her. Over the past nine years, I’ve kept packing them up when I move. I even acquired four new ones in a cheap plateware set, never ever using them for the purpose of soup. They were always a thorn in my side by taking up precious cupboard space. Finally, a few months ago, I gave them away.

Enter last night: cold weather, hot soup, corner sofa spots in my "living room" because the "dining room" is too small. Soup in big coffee cups would have been perfect! Oh well. In the end, as has always been the case, bowls did the job just fine.

My Thoughts on Whitney Houston

2009-09-12T13:36:00.013-04:00

I might be jeopardizing some aspects of my personal life with this ballooning obsession. I identified the origin on my Tumblr—that my earliest memory is of singing “The Greatest Love of All” with the garden hose as mic in the back yard. When I was young, I would get Whitney albums for my birthdays and holidays—my brother gave me “Whitney” for my twelfth birthday; it was wrapped up in the Sunday comics on our "You Are Special Today" birthday plate when I woke up in the morning. And I used to feel a sense of personal accomplishment when her songs would climb up the list on "American Top 40" and when she was included in People’s "50 Most Beautiful People" issue. I was never old enough to see her R-rated movies, but that didn’t stop me from reading all the reviews and blurbs on the ads and tallying up the positive press they received.

I stopped paying attention when I saw her on Oprah with Mariah Carey to promote their duet—this must have been ten or twelve years ago—because she was acting like a crazy person and not at all living up to my adolescent expectations. I hadn’t really kept tabs since then. But then all this hubbub over her “comeback” consumed me.

There’s a lot of great stuff on YouTube, much of which I’d never seen. What I find especially touching about the Whitney I remember from my youth is that she's not really that great of a performer. I mean, she can’t dance, not at all. And she’s not particularly good at radiating that special-something to the audience (Love? Gratitude? Graciousness?) that Diana Ross or Dionne Warwick can. In fact, there’s a weird claustrophobic thing happening when she performs live, the feeling that she might be trapped inside herself, some kind of slave to her “gift,” with the thumbprint of a handler smoothing out the edges (one can only hypothesize about this sort of thing in retrospect, obviously). And, let’s be honest, her songs are really not so great. That voice, though: I think it would keep me from dying if someone were to play it just as I was about to keel over.

But there’s a lot of really terrifying stuff on YouTube, too. I think she recorded a pro-life song (though she sings it beautifully). The way her face changed is really upsetting for me to see. And the saddest part of the Diane Sawyer interview—which I hadn’t seen when it originally aired—was Whitney saying that singing wasn’t fun anymore. Ouch. And then those clips from Being Bobby Brown. I shielded my eyes, squinting though my fingers in horror. Who was this person? It made me feel so sorry for her, and for her husband, and for her daughter. I mean, imagine having to deal with more than a handful of people—people you don’t know, people who aren’t friends and family—who have opinions of you, millions of them. Who love the person you used to be the way that I used to love Whitney before I had the sense to question celebrity. That’s a lot of pressure! Well, this isn’t such an uncommon story.

So I got the new album and it made me sad. I watched the GMA performances and they made me sad. I watched this Amazon interview thing, and, yup, it made me sad. “I Look to You” makes sense only if you are Whitney Houston and only if you’ve made a “comeback album.” It doesn’t have legs of its own. And it requires a terrific leap of faith: You have to really want it for her, yes, but more than that, you have to want her to want it.

It’s hard to tell if she wants it or not. I mean, what I want for Whitney Houston (yes, this is ridiculous) is what I want for everyone: for her to be herself and to be happy. If that means not singing anymore, so be it. I tried to find the answer by looking for the “real Whitney”—the one who lives somewhere between the American princess darling and the crazyface crackhead—until I realized that she’s not there for me to find. This is the paradox of being famous and the paradox of being a “fan”—that it’s all a tease. As penance for my willingness to indulge (via this blog post) and to have expectations of her (via my youth), I think that what’s best for Whitney might also be the best thing for me: to leave her alone.

Sometimes I Hate New York for the Same Reasons that I Love It

2009-09-02T19:57:00.018-04:00

I was waiting for the G train 20 minutes ago after shopping at Trader Joe's, and a stranger sitting next to me remarked that all the people on the bench, three of us including him, were rapturously snacking from our Trader Joe's grocery bags. "We can't even wait until we get home!" he said. We laughed. I let him and the other woman sample my cinnamon-sugar pita chips, which are amazing and lame at the same time, and the woman sighed and said, "Yes, I could get addicted to these." (She was eating an apple.) We got to talking about grocery stores and how there aren't any in Bed Stuy, where they both happened to live; I know nothing about grocery stores in Bed Stuy, but I recommended Choice Market anyway (thank you, Emily's extremely resourceful Tumblr). We also talked about the Park Slope Food Co-Op, which I irrationally don't like, though I didn't say so, and how the price and spread for nuts and cheese there are the best almost anywhere. It was kind of a fun conversation! Three F trains came and went. We were midconversation when the G finally showed up, but as if on cue, abruptly, we stood from the bench and loaded the train using three separate doors of the same car. We sat down in different sections. They each began listening to their iPods and I started scrutinizing the eczema on my arm. It's almost like we were embarrassed by what had just happened, except that we played it so cool. I tried to wave goodbye when I deboarded, but they were looking into their laps, deaf by music, and didn't notice me feebly trying to get their attention.

Cheap Candy Concerns

2009-08-30T12:32:00.008-04:00

My previous landlord still hasn’t returned my security deposit. For reasons I won’t go into here, it’s a large security deposit, and because of a clause in the lease that seems somewhat criminal to me, he’s got thirty days from the end of the lease to return it. He has taken his time: today is the 30th. I explain this, because it’s the primary reason I was in front of my computer last night, counting down the hours until rent is due, and also why I always keep a 28-oz can of tomatoes and a package of pasta in the cupboard.

After my pasta, at about 1 AM, I decided to go to the bodega for a candy bar. This is a favorite late-night indulgence of mine, and in this instance, an exciting one because it was the first time in my new neighborhood. I was on my way out with a dollar in quarters in my pocket, but I stopped at the door, reasoning that since I wasn’t drinking tonight, I deserved a special candy bar. A big one with specified cocoa content, studded with orange peel or little pockets of caramel, or perhaps an ice cream bar. I took $1.50 more from my cocktail-shaker-turned-change-bucket.

At the bodega, they didn’t carry anything Nestle or Hershey. No Heath Bars, no Snickers, no Mentos, no York peppermint patties, and certainly no Take 5s (my favorite); all they had were fancy bars—dozens of different brands and flavors—of the type I was considering splurging on. But these fancy candy bars were starting at four dollars. OK, well I’ll just get a Ritter Sport then—nope, the Ritter Sports were $3.49. Hagan Daas ice cream bars were $3.25. I had ten quarters in my pocket and I couldn’t buy anything. I did a forth, then a fifth loop around the store to make sure I didn’t miss the Goya section for candy.

I walked out with a tube of Hit cookies, which were $1.67 and predictably unsatisfying. I’m all about paying a premium for convenience (1 AM and I was buying a treat), and I get gentrification, but if the powers that be are going to take away cheap candy, I don’t like it.

The Big Wave

2009-08-14T12:07:00.006-04:00

An irritating thing that I encounter when I leave New York is the broad application of the word “different.” My family has been doing this for a while, lots of times when it comes to food that I make. When I dished up my cold kitchen sink orzo salad, my brother scowled when he tried it. “It’s different.” But when I made spiced nuts with sugared bacon at Christmas time, he nodded agreeably—“Huh! Different!” Or, for example, someone gave me Momento on DVD many years ago and my Dad finally got around to watching it recently; when I asked him what he thought, he shook his head, sort of bewildered, and said, “It’s just—different.”

I did some traveling through the Southeast last week, starting things off with a haircut. It came up that I’d just been up on a farm. “Tell me all about that,” Brittany said, snip-snipping, and I did, concluding with something along the lines of “and maybe it’s not everyone’s ideal vacation, but it really ended up being a perfect getaway for me.” “Sure,” she said neutrally. “Different.” Later, working her way from the back to the front and finally cutting off the last hunk of hair that had been hanging down over my eyes, effectively unsheathing my hew head for me finally to see, she exclaimed, “Omigosh! You look so different!”

Later in the week, while finishing up a culinary tour of Charleston over samples of pull pork, a few people got to talking about barbeque. One woman, who was from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was telling us about her favorite BBQ joint, Dinosaur (the one in Syracuse, not the one uptown). She went on and on about how good Dinosaur BBQ is (I guess I will have to go try it). Then, frowning at the little Dixie cup with a scoop of pull pork in it that we were all given to try, she said, “It’s not that this isn’t good, it’s just . . . different.”

Obviously I knew what meanings the speakers here were after. What amazes me is the breadth of applications, and how everyone seemed to exploit the word’s apparent inoffensiveness. Evidently you can call something “different” without expressly bestowing a judgment upon it—except that “different” is one half of a dangerous binary, with all these examples meaning “not normal” or “not the same” or “not what I’m used to.” And it’s not supposed to also mean “mediocre” (in the case of the pull pork) or “uncharacteristically delicious” (in the case of the sugared bacon). I realize I’m basing this solely on an amateur anecdotal survey, but is “different” just a lazy, offensive American euphemism?

*

So Meghan and I first drove from Charlotte to Savannah, where one of the highlights was Savannah Pride. There was an awesome Tina Turner, an awesomer Cher, and then, headlining the show, “I Think We’re Alone Now” singer Tiffany, who I never knew I needed to see live. She’s so cute! We also saw the Mercer House, drank mint juleps and ate dinner at the Pink House, and took a lame “ghost tour”—lame except that the tour guide and one other paranormal enthusiast corroborated the existence of Charlie, a ghost who we were told by the innkeeper resides in the hotel room we were staying in (there were no incidents to report, except for an unidentifiable knocking sound on the bedside table in the morning). I left Savannah wishing I’d read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil beforehand, as Meghan had urged me to do, and hoping to eventually make it back for a longer stay.

The next stop was Charleston, SC. Because we were driving in a convertible, a la “our honeymoon,” and because it is ungodly hot down there, we were tired. It took some coaxing and personal motivating for us to leave our walk-in refrigerator of a hotel room at the Indigo Inn. But we did, and we went to the waterfront where we drank sparkling water and watched people from the shade. I had insisted that we stop at the new Baked in Charleston—because I like the original one in Red Hook a lot, and was curious—and discovered, to no one’s surprise, that it’s pretty much the same as its NY counterpart. We went back to our hotel for cordials hour, a Southern custom we highly approve of, and then to dinner at Slightly North of Broad. (That place is great. I had shrimp and grits.) The next morning we got up for a “culinary walking tour.” The tour guide, Sarah, took us on a three-quarters mile walk where along the way we tried grits, sweet tea, pecan pralines, and other stuff that probably sounds obvious; I loved the tour, though, and noted that if I ever make it to cooking school, Charleston will be a great place to do it.

Then we drove up to the beach on Pawleys Island. I will always love the beaches on Jersey Shore and Long Island because they are the first beaches I ever got to know, but the South Carolina coast is so great because the water is warm. There wasn’t much to do but nap, read, swim, drink beers on the beach, and eventually have dinner at the hotel bar before passing out.

*

The next day marked the fourth memorial of my mom’s death and I woke up early for the sunrise. I sat in an abandoned beach chair watching the waves for a while, thinking about how all the forces that make the little waves so soothing—gravity, the tilt of the earth, the moon, certain laws of physics I’ll never understand—are the same forces that will let loose more hurricanes and ultimately, probably, the Big Wave that will be the end of us all. This was a reminder, too, that the forces that enable us to go through good spells (I am seriously going through a good spell) and bad spells (☹) are largely the same: the proportions change, but the core weight stays the same. And, you know, one thing that is not “different” is death. Besides the necessity of oxygen, there’s no other fact about being alive, and no other fact that is so deeply moored in the makeup of the “life” that we largely take for granted.

I tried to prepare for this day, but it was hard because leading up to it I was having so much fun. Against my will, I recalled some of the incidents I manage to suppress throughout the rest of the year—my grandfather bursting into my room that morning saying, “Luke, you gotta get up. Your mother is leaving us” (these are two sentences that I would question the authenticity of if I read them in a book or heard them in a movie or play; funny how that works); or how the cover article in the New York Times Magazine the week before she died began with a description of the death rattle, and I hovered over Mom every time she napped, certain that I was hearing it; or how the only thing I could think to do once she had been taken away was to make breakfast for everyone. Also, every memorial puts in high relief the inevitable fact that everybody has mostly carried on with their lives.

I remember Mom once telling me about my grandmother, whose father died in a logging accident when Grandma was a baby and her mother died before she turned thirty years old; Mom found it unfathomable that Grandma had lived the bulk of her life without her mother around. I assume that this will probably be the case for me, as long as the Big Wave doesn’t come suck me up first. Must ride the little waves while we can.

At the Farm

2009-07-27T17:11:00.025-04:00

Katie and I went up to our friend Ilsa’s farm in Petersham, MA, last weekend. The house is situated on sixty or so acres of land (the land itself is called “Anahata”), and Ilsa and her fellow farmer Ben are the ones who run it (the farm is called “Seven Crows Garden”). Beginning last fall, Ilsa and Ben did everything needed in order to sell vegetables this summer—they tilled the land, built the vegetable beds, got permits, seeded, transplanted, weeded, etc. As someone who can kill aloe plants, every other form of cacti, and even those rosemary Christmas trees found at bodegas during the holidays, and also as someone who hates yard work but who from the sidelines watched his mother valiantly attempt, and fail, at cultivating a garden almost every summer of his youth, I can recognize that Ilsa and Ben's having a full harvest to sell right now is no small feat.

So we arrived late Thursday night and were put to bed immediately. In the morning—But how amazing was my sleep? With the open window letting in the most delicious cool water breeze?—it wasn’t raining, so Ilsa thought it would be fun for us to go weed. We were asked to weed a few rows where the onions were. This part of the garden was quickly deemed “the rice paddies” because we were in mud up to our ankles, thanks to the torrential downpour the night before. I did find a little zen in the process, even though I have historically hated all forms of yard work. Also, the satisfaction of pulling up some kinds of weeds is much like dislodging a great booger. From the farm, we could see turkey vultures circling in the distance; according to Ilsa, these profoundly ugly birds have featherless heads so that they can slide in through the eye sockets of their prey.

At one point, Ilsa yelled at us from the other side of the garden, where she was tending to squash, and came barreling over. “If you see any of these . . . ?” she said, making her way to the rice paddies. She showed us on her fingertip two little striped beetles that were fucking. “If you see any of these . . . ?” she said again, looking us each in the eye, sternly, eyebrows raised. Then, silently, as the answer to her question, she pulverized the beetles—they were still copulating!—between her bare index finger and thumb and flicked the mush away. Such is the reality of organic farming! Those beetles will ruin the squash, apparently. When we wanted a break from the weeding and the mud trudging, we were to inspect the squash plants for these beetles and “squash” them ourselves. (I did only one pair. With a glove on. I’m squeamish.)

So this is my “farm look.” My hair is tied up in a “Bam-Bam” (a summer 'do that I'm playing with) and those pants belong to Ilsa. Also, inadvertent MJ nod.

After the weeding and beetle squashing, Ilsa took us on a small tour of the area. I actually can’t remember all the names of the towns because there seemed to be a new one every time we came to a crossroads. We went to a dairy farm where the chicken coop was a gutted RV trailer, and two adorable three-month-old calves were buckling around. In addition to the milk and eggs sold there, these farmers sold the cows’ colostrum, their first milk after giving birth, for human consumption. It looked like melted Orange Julius.

Katie and I were the resident chefs, and dinner was that evening’s activity. Because of everyone’s various dietary restrictions, everything had to be vegan and gluten-free. I find it hard to cook like this. I made polenta topped with a blend of sautéed greens from the garden—beet greens, two different types of kale, and bok choy—and tomato sauce and basil. Fine, but could have been improved with butter and cheese. Far more successful were my zucchini-potato latkes: Take three medium potatoes and roast them till they’re almost done, and then, when cool enough that you won’t hurt yourself, grate them. Grate up a zucchini into a colander, sprinkle it with salt, and let it sit for a while. Fold together with the potatoes, 1 beaten egg (Oops! Actually, eggs weren’t off limits. We also had them for breakfast. How does anyone live without eggs?) and about a quarter cup rice flour. Dollop these into a hot frying pan, which has a generous amount of olive oil in it, and press gently so that they form three- or four-inch rounds. Fry until golden-crisp on each side. Serve hot, and not with sour cream.

Saturday morning we were up very early, like, the crack of dawn, to harvest the veggies for the farmer’s market. I was put on carrots and kale and fennel. It was too g’damn early for the Bam Bam, so I reached for a red Uniqlo ball cap instead. Here I am practicing my Miss America pose, showcasing some fennel.

Meanwhile, Katie was getting drunk off the snap peas.

Ilsa is very much used to this. Has farming ever looked so fun?

We made it to the Barre Farmer’s Market by 9 AM and Ilsa had a gorgeous spread: three kinds of kale, two types of radishes, two kinds of cabbage, collard greens, scallions, turnips, red-leaf and green-leaf lettuce, snap peas, snow peas, fennel, other stuff I can’t remember. I’m a little biased, but her veggies were the best looking ones at the market. Seriously, if you ever find yourself in Petersham on a Saturday morning in the summer, go say hi to Ilsa and buy some of her vegetables. You will not regret it.

Towards the end of the shift, a woman and her daughter came up. “Skaaaaaahl-eeuhns,” the woman said to her daughter. She stood there chewing for a second (I don’t know what she was chewing) while we stared at her, puzzled, until she then said, “Or as some people call them, ‘scallions’.” I interrupted: “Or as we say in Idaho: green onions!” She chewed again, for an uncomfortably long time. “Idaho.” Now she sucked on her teeth. “What part of Idaho?” It turns out that, thirty years ago, she started the first organic farm in the part of Idaho that I am from.

Then we packed up and went home. For lunch, I made a delicious coleslaw from what didn’t sell: Julienne a head of Napa cabbage and half a fennel bulb. Sprinkle with a little bit of vinegar (I used red wine vinegar) and let sit for a few minutes. Then toss with some shredded carrots, a handful of fennel fronds, a handful of basil chiffonade, black pepper, and two or three tablespoons of plain yogurt (the lactose intolerant person also couldn’t eat cabbage, so this was fair game). It’s now ready to eat.

Later that day we went blueberry picking, which basically means that we started planning Katie’s birthday dinner. In addition to the most delicious and luxurious blueberry cobbler—I know I’m getting ahead of myself—she made this vegan and gluten free carrot cake that was seriously amazing. When I hear “vegan” and “baked goods” used in the same sentence, I instinctively think, “hurl.” But Katie pretty much blew my mind. I wish I had the recipe, but Katie's the type of cook who can visualize something, open up a cupboard to see what's on hand, and soon enough have it coming out of the oven. But before we ate that, she made pesto, which she put on some quinoa pasta and topped with shitake mushrooms, and I did a salad, and fried up the leftover polenta, and we drank four bottles of wine.

A few hours after passing out, I woke up in a heady haze to find that a bunch of mosquitoes had molested me. Arms, legs, toes, hands, neck, forehead, chest, back. (And knees! Why the knees??) But the blind rage didn’t kick in until a little later, when—well, I’m sure that everyone has experienced this: you’re trying to go to sleep, and then you hear a “buzzzZZZZZzzz” by your ear. I probably slapped myself in the face thirty times over the course of a half hour, and then wrapped my whole self up in a sheet, and then piled pillows on my head. Then I snapped. Who can contain the predator within when fronted with an army of bloodthirsty mosquitoes? On went the lamp, rolled up went my New Yorker. I found them all over the room and must have killed twenty of them. Each one left a swatch of blood on the wall and on poor Kirstin Valdez Quade’s short story that I will now never finish reading. On the plus side, I’d gotten over some of my earlier squeamishness.

I thought it would be hard to readjust to coming home. But between fighting for a seat on the Amtrak and then braving the masses in Penn Station, to the break-dancing kids on the A train (or, as Katie called their moves, “yoga on crack”) and the suffocating feces smell on the G train (since, of course, the F train line was under construction), and then to me practically throwing myself at my laptop to catch up on "all that I missed" right when I entered my apartment—it might be that this blog post and the mosquito bites are all that’s left to remind me of how serene it was.

** Thanks, Katie, for all these great pictures!

PoopGroup: WestSide

2009-07-24T13:14:00.003-04:00

Hi poopers- it's been a long time and being as I am spending so much time on the west coast these days, I thought I would share some insights as to how the coast (or is it time zone??) is affecting my poop.

San Francisco- pooping here is a lot like home, except that my boyfriend likes to just walk into the bathroom as he pleases which adds such anxiety that I feel I can't take the time to sit and relax. I do a lot of public bathroom pooping because the privacy provides peak pooping pleasure. I poop when I can, you know me, it's always a struggle

Seattle- crazy feces fest at the space needle- altitude? privacy? all subway diet? fresh northwest beer? all of these.

Portland- I know I love this city because a) $2.75 pitchers of PBR and b) I pooped like a champ. at least 2 lucky days ... a day! I jest not.

Somewhere between So. Oregon and Seattle - so a trailer with a bunch of logs on it. About 2-3 ft in diameter and thought: what would it feel like to poop that?

Yosemite- so exciting. Would I have to poop in the woods? wipe with a leaf? bury the remains six inches below the surface? do bears like or hate poop smell? Who knows?? there was only one day out of 5 where i didn't come across some sort of composting toilet at a backpackers camp. And at the end of that 32 hour period I had the greatest poop in recent memory. Perfectly long and lucky. so much walking, water, dehydrated soups. You can't live like that, but it was an experience.

Next stop Denver: which I know from experience is not good. Something about the altitude, I assume. It dehydrates.

Book Club: Plays Well with Others

2009-07-06T14:28:00.006-04:00

When I first read Plays Well with Others (Allan Gurganus), my first explicitly gay novel, and as I have continued to think about the book over the past eight or nine years, what stuck with me most poignantly was one of the many off-the-cuff statements about New York and it’s Mecca-draw for young gay men: the City is full of boys who believed themselves to be pretty because their mothers told them so. This hit me hard (That’s me!). It prefaced how I came to regard gay New York’s pecking order when I moved here a year later, and it saved me—in theory at least, or probably to my detriment—many years of cultural misunderstanding and self-delusion.

I’ve read the book again, and now I can’t find that passage. In fact, I think I may have misinterpreted one where Hartley, the narrator, describes what he perceives as the gays’ collective outlook, everyone at the time (the early ‘80s) “still very much guy-guys, the more so for youth’s stubborn cockiness. Butch and jawed and proud and hung, our mother’s favorites” [emphasis added. Sigh. Let’s not pause here to draw conclusions about my powers of deduction.]. He continues: “Here, on glossy streets—one glance at any other slim tailored dude was returned with interest, a brazen unharmed ‘Yes?’ . . . . We had come this far to be ourselves. We would not hold back. There were hundreds of thousands of us.”

Does it come as any surprise that it’s an AIDS novel, with such a binary already asserting itself—that star-spangled “before” bracing itself for the counterweight of “after”? Hartley Mims, Jr., arrives from Falls, North Carolina, in 1980, an aspiring fiction writer with a new historian’s interest in the South. He befriends Robert, a beauty-god and composer who is a pastor’s son from Iowa, and then Angie, a driven painter and failed debutante from Savannah; the three form a triumvirate united by horniness, unfettered affection for one another, a magnet-draw to the City, and thirst of fame. Hartley is something of a Carrie Bradshaw among his friends, in the way that he is not only the narrator, but basically the middle child, the midpoint among extremities, the one we’re asked to relate to the most. He does not claim to share Angie’s talent or Robert’s beauty, and his modesty in this regard is largely what makes their friendship possible. There is a sense of time passing, but it’s hard to tell—in the first half, at least, it’s only marked by career advancements and perceived changes due to getting older—because story-wise, the book is pieced together like a journal or diary, formed of incidents and insights that cohere in a spiraling fashion.

It might be a dated book, and the characters’ affectations—they speak a strange hybrid of Twitter and Henry James (“Love you? Love you! If I ever create a masterpiece, it will be convincing you I do. Earth to Angie: I am already your friggin’ slave. The only thing I haven’t done for you is oral sex because I have no aptitude for working with that little. I do convex only.”) might be occasionally grating, but Plays Well is an overwhelming tale of devotion: to each other, but also to the non-native’s New York, and to gays, and, of course, to the nebulous notion of “family.” (Clearly I am in love with this book.)

I often think about how great it was to be young and to “surrender” to everything: impulses, but also to New York, to Virginia Woolf, to my friends, to my ideas of being in love (not that I had anything but fevered wanting at the time in my life when I might have been living “with complete surrender”). You can only appreciate it in retrospect, and that version of events is usually more a fantasy of surrender, anyway. In Plays Well, at least in the “Before” part, Hartley, Robert, and Angie take surrender to a whole new level.

Sex is easy. Squalor is elegant. Parties are always gotten into. And of course they are all bone fide “artists.” Angie calls Hartley one morning at a payphone outside an antique shop wanting him to buy a “faded Southern Gothic” harp that has “three vestal virgins dancing on the wide part down near the bottom.” Does one cater to this impulse IRL? (He can’t afford it, but maybe regret is also a form of surrender?) At one of their coffeehouse gatherings, Robert assigns each of his friends an artistic rendering of “heaven.” Hartley writes a story entitled “Toward a More Precise Identification of the Newer Angels” and Angie paints a canvas depicting “a manhole cover that soon became the shieldlike pattern from a tortoise’s shell.” When Robert, beauty-god, homemade angel wings affixed to his shoulder blades, plays his two-part composition on the piano, it’s a silently agreed to be a failure. But Angie sweeps in with a correction—turn it into a “triptych,” she says. Suddenly his “Paradise Lost Then Corrected” is personified rapture: “The way you know true things in your very follicles, in the basis of your next breath . . .we all gained what we had earlier suspected: how gifted Robert was, how right our Angie had just been.” The few road bumps on the course of this collective ecstatic surrender—Angie’s drive for fame knows no bounds, Robert has a society life that exists outside the others, Robert and Hartley get mugged, Hartley witnesses a somewhat crippling infidelity (I'm sparing you a spoiler)—do little to detract them.

Even their work is a kind of surrender. “We wanted our lives to be representative; we wanted our experience to go all dramatic and to become unique; we still expected to be known as our age’s record-keepers in paint, word, and permanent eighth notes, full-stops.” He writes, “I could not explain my faith in what I did. It was not yet even faith in my own work . . . It was more a faith in the right to work.” Can one only identify this in retrospect, after mortality is prematurely within view?

[Also: Seriously? Did they really work so hard? And if they did, do people still do that? Maybe this is more a testament to my social circles and my perspective than it is a representation of my greater milieu, but: Did/do we ever work so hard? Did/do we ever want something so bad, especially something that is contingent on the value bestowed on it by a third party viewer? What a handicap it must be, the “ambition” for such success (being famous). In yoga the other day, while the teacher was walking us through a pose that maybe two people in the room could do (the instructor was not one of them), she said, “It’s not just about the physical practice, it’s about the longing.” I’m a sucker for statements like this. Virtuous longing, the longing itself being a form of fulfillment (because it happens on the inside, see): that’s something I can get behind. But maybe when I get older, and I experience more tragedy and am contextually fluent in my life’s trajectory, I will look back on this period of my life very differently. I digress.]

I think I’m probably missing the most important parts about this book. It’s so much bigger. Hartley pays tribute to his somewhat distanced father very movingly. And the book is basically a memorial to the idea of the gay urban family and its circumstantial codependency—the origin myth happens here. And then the collective reckoning that takes place in the second half, despite its metaphors—the USS Titanic, extensive quoting from Robert Defoe’s account of the Black Death (Journal of a Plague Year)—has no precedent. I’m struck by the same harrowing aspects of the AIDS experience again and again: the resilience of the surviving and survivors, the scale of tragedy, and then of course the sanctioned contempt and disregard outside gay culture (lest one forget what an unforgivable asshole William F. Buckley was). I wonder if it’s ever been a question in queer studies circles: What exactly makes an AIDS novel? Well, yes, AIDS, but could Plays Well carry itself without AIDS? And is this a question to concern one’s self with? It’s like the Before cannot fully exist without the After, and if that is true, and if we’re part of the After, and cannot really lay claim to the Before, then an off-balance/ambivalent feeling is to be expected, yes?

You ought to read it.

Eggs

2009-07-01T12:46:00.010-04:00

People seem to do okay by eggs. That, or particularities vary enough that most of us, including me, would rather not hear about it. The only thing I'll say is that for years I did not have a nonstick frying pan (it makes a very big difference) and for years I would read recipes that said, "Melt 2 tablespoons of butter over medium-high heat" and think, "Gross! Who would ever use that much butter?" (I do!). So that's my advice: use a nonstick pan and use lots of butter. (Here I'm talking about scrambled eggs, which aside from poached, are the only way I eat them.) Also, the whole stirring-constantly-over-low-heat method that Julia Child insists on has never worked for me. I believe in relatively high heat and quick, folding motions with the spatula.

What's notable about that kitchen sink dish are some new ingredients. I sprinkled chipotle chili powder on a sliced half an onion while I was cooking it (in butter). I picked it up months ago from a spice shop that has since closed and have struggled to find uses for it (it doesn't work in tomato sauces, and just doesn't mesh well with curry spices). And garlic scapes! Everyone is talking about what to do with garlic scapes; cooking four of them them for about five minutes with the onions (before you add the tomatoes—and then more butter—and then pour in the 2 beaten eggs) is a smart option. And lastly, I picked up a chunk of goat's milk ricotta salata last week because it was cheap and this was the second time I crumbled it up over the hot eggs. It's also very good in salad.

And finally, that photo is pretty much what my freelancer's life looks like from the vantage point of my belly button.

Goodbye to Some of That

2009-06-18T17:36:00.008-04:00

That was some short-lived fun!

It's always been hard to reconcile my pre-NY/post-Idaho self, in terms of who my friends are and the degrees of transparency I offer—ie, who gets to know certain types of information. I seem to have maintained that the two camps have this geographic bent. With Facebook, via individual friend requests and that creepy "Suggestions" function, the boundary slowly started to blur. Then yesterday a friend request came through that pretty much sought to dismantle my whole show. We're talking marching band, AP Calculus, Mormons—it definitely would have been a fast beginning to the end. The hilarious thing is that no one's really getting snubbed because I doubt anyone cares that much. And yeah, for the sake of my head, it would have been easier, and more anticlimactic, to just let it happen. But for some ongoing reason, that seemed difficult. Also, it's one less tab to have open all day long.

To my former friends from high school who were all very loving and generous and compassionate and great, and who I severed ties with anyway: I'm sorry. I quickly gleaned from your Facebook thumbnail photos that you're well (you look it, at least!), that many of you have children and/or spouses, that many of you have remained friends with each other, and that your intentions were pure (I'm always surprised at how genuinely you present yourselves). I do wish you the best, and maybe if I ever run into you we can get coffee or something. But I don't think the internet is the right place for us, at least not right now. It's not about you; it's about me.

(However, I can still be found on this Blogspot, as well my Tumblr, a rarely accessed MySpace account, AIM, GChat, any of three personal email accounts, and my work email account. Twitter probably forthcoming.)

All and Nothing

2009-06-01T01:02:00.007-04:00

I'm in Charlotte again, and this has been another few days of indulgent inner reconciliation: loving/hating suburban comforts/my Dad's car; loving/hating being gay; loving/hating my drinking habits; loving/hating that my vacations over the past two years have consisted of me seeing my family; loving/hating the well of uncertainty that is my future. And look: I miss my mom, I miss playing Uno with my ex-boyfriend, and I miss having all my friends living in the same city. My sister-in-law and I went to Borders and because she could get it for half price, she bought Eat, Pray, Love. "I think I'm going to hate this," she said, because she'd heard that in the beginning the protagonist throws away the perfect life, "and I don't know if I can sympathize with that." We all went swimming. I did flips off the diving board and laid in the sun, allowing myself to not be embarrassed of my pale yoga body, and I marveled cautiously at all the beefy teenagers who (shockingly!) had to get out of the pool for adult swim. Here I was enjoying myself a lot. Driving home and in my post-pool glee, I mentally lauded myself for being so great to be around and making the trip so fun for everybody, thinking of how hard it is for all of us—the family—to be having fun at the same time. Snap, duh, no one else was really digging the pool like me—I was making this fun for you because I was having fun, is that how the reasoning goes? See, sometimes I’m a selfish shit, but sometimes I do it in the name of complicating things by exaggerating my own control. Or maybe this is what I mean: I am an exhibitionist in a wallflower, and vice-versa (in sixth grade, I was cast as the Nurse in our class production of Romeo & Juliet), and I have a blog.

RIP, PamPlant

2009-05-01T13:13:00.013-04:00

Two summers ago—if we can stretch the imagination so that right now counts as summer—I planted a Lantana bush/shrub at the waterfront park in Red Hook (adjacent to the barge-museum and pier) on the second memorial of my mom’s death. By sprinkling it with Chardonnay my partners and I christened it the PamPlant. I try to do something commemorative like this on her memorials. On the first one, I got a tattoo on the way to the airport; then the plant; and last year was a big dinner.

As I planted the PamPlant, I was expecting that it might count as vandalism, prepared for it to be pulled up or mowed over or otherwise violated. But to my good fortune a groundskeeper was there. His command of English was not great, but he nodded yes when I made gestures with the plant and the shovel, and he didn’t stop me when I broke ground. I probably planted it a little late to expect much flowering action that first summer, because I realized the next year that early summer is the Lantana’s prime time. Around mid-June, it got big and a blinding shade of crimson. And then it slowly faded into a sagebrush looking thing as the summer wore on. During that spring and summer I ideally visited twice or three times a week (it was very easy when I lived two blocks away), and it was a lovely thing to behold as I approached it from the park entrance. It kept getting bigger and redder and more amazing—until, of course, it peaked, and at that point it wasn’t as fun to visit but I would anyway. I situated the PamPlant next to a bench that directly faces the Statue of Liberty, and while the Statue is not my ideal focal point, the water (which admittedly rustled up mostly trash) and the bell buoys and the ship sounds and the seagulls and the wind and the Staten Island and Governor’s Island profiles in the foreground (and Jersey in the background) and the Verazzano Bridge off in the distance (often clouded over appealingly, like the Golden Gate Bridge) and what I came to realize was the Buttermilk Channel framing everything—it all made for a mini-haven that, by virtue of my having discovered it, I could lay claim to. (This picture was taken later in the summer, when the red began to fade to orange.)

Well, it’s gone now. I went to water the PamPlant yesterday afternoon to find that it had been dug up and leveled over. And for about two minutes, I thought it was the worst possible thing that could have ever happened, especially with dreaded Mother’s Day approaching (I hate Mother’s Day, even if it is just a Hallmark holiday). “This too!?” I said. How many times—how many—had I approached the park with caution, bracing myself for the possibility of it having been removed? And this time, I was practically galloping my way in, relishing the fact that PamPlant’s prime time was coming. It had only been three days since I last visited!

I guess this means that the PamPlant now has its place on the bookshelf, which is to say, it has a beginning and end. I was already processing it this way once my dumb shock wore in. The two people who helped me plant it are both gone: Kathryn moved to Hong Kong, and though this doesn’t mean she died, the immediacy as it relates to me did; and then my ex-boyfriend, you know, died his own figurative death (everything is subjective, see; everything is dead or dying). The whole thing reeked of a very logical “the end.”

And what is it about planting stuff to commemorate dead things? We think that by giving life to something else, the memory of the dead thing will live on, selectively overlooking the fact that the new life is going to die, too. After the real end of my relationship (the not-real end was prolonged and endlessly un-final), I planted some pansies in a window flower box outside my bedroom, thinking absently that this was a way of finalizing, letting go, commemorating the good, whatever, only to find, now four weeks later, that the pansies keep blooming shriveled up wads of dead flower petals. Maybe the point is that I should just stick with food and tattoos as my commemorative media.

When this kind of stuff happens, I like to imagine what was happening at the exact same time—like, for cosmic balance purposes, it is comforting to imagine that mom’s friend Leslie clicked send on this photo when the PamPlant’s roots were breaking free. (Mom is the one in the great coat.)

And with all that said, I’m going to now propose that this is all an unsolved mystery. What exactly is that little shadow—like, a chalk outline from a crime scene—of a flower pot? Did someone steal the PamPlant?

Text from Dad

2009-04-25T18:06:00.003-04:00

For future blog-->book-->page-a-day calendar.

1:04 PM:

We are on a wine tour. I picked up two dessert wines. One is strawberry and one is chocolate. Will go great with one of your desserts.

And at 1:08, in response to my "sounds interesting!":

I think they may surprise you.

Figuring Out the Opposition

2009-04-19T13:04:00.007-04:00

Sigh. Gay marriage. Where to begin? Despite whatever one might glean from my notes here (ie, that beyond poop, I err on the side of prude), I have not really had strong feelings about gay marriage. Obviously, as a right, yes, gays should be able to marry, I want it to become legal, I won’t do anything to stand in its way, and if you let me know where the rally is happening, I will probably show up. But as one whose religious experiences have all happened during yoga classes, the whole God-aspect of marriage doesn’t matter much to me. It’s seemed that the gay marriage debates and initiatives provided a great opportunity for marriage reform, to take a big-picture look at how people live now, and not just gays and lesbians—that by focusing on getting gays into the club, we’re passing up an opportunity to reassess and redefine our little unions and how they integrate into our little societies. But whatever. I am probably wrong and/or confused and/or missing the point.

But some things still make me irate, and one of the reasons I get red-faced and high-pitched when one brings up gay marriage is because of the homophobia it seems to inspire. I went to North Carolina last week because one of my mom’s best friends, Leslie, and her family were staying with my Dad for a few days. Leslie holds a very special place in the trajectory of my gay life (and for many other non-gay reasons, too). My mom may or may not have come to terms with my being gay, but the friends she chose, almost all of them, certainly did. And Leslie, she lived in New York for eight years, which was enough for me to be obsessed with her, and on top of that, she was/is an avid theatergoer, and used to send me Playbills and long letters written on the back of junk mail and scratch paper describing the shows she had seen.

So I shared a car with Leslie and her three kids (who are all amazing, of course) and we drove to Asheville and we got to talking about gay marriage. As a California resident, she saw the ugly underbelly more up-close than me, even though everything she told me about Prop 8—the Mormons, the misinformation, the touchy “race” issue, the propaganda—I had already read about. We expressed bafflement at how something like gay marriage can be such a hot-button issue, when the only people whose lives will be affected are those who are gay and who wish to be married. This is something I think about a lot; like, with civil rights—and I know that this is sometimes a dangerous comparison to make—at least in spite of the moral wrongness of racism, I can see where the bigots are coming from even though it is not right because some assholes only see things in economic terms. But with gays getting married? How can you oppose it for any reason except for you-are-a-homophobe? Then she told me about a family member, and elderly woman who has two gay grandchildren and whom, “even though [I] know [I] am probably making a mistake,” could not bring herself to vote no for Prop 8. My heart started beating a little faster and I got fidgety, but I thought: This is a generational thing, these people just need to die off, I’ll let it pass. But then she told me about someone else, a guy her age (she’s middle aged, a step down generationally from the woman described above), who lives in a big, progressive, urban center, who has a gay nephew he’s fairly close with, and who also voted in favor of it. He also “just couldn’t do it.”

What in the hell? And: For shame! Doesn’t this contradict everything we’ve ever believed about being gay and being out and how the unification of gays and non-gays comes to establish itself? If having gay people whom you love and respect in your life does not endear you to the idea that they should be given access to the troubling institution of marriage, then what will? What I am hoping is that these are two incidental, isolated cases; but the fact that Prop 8 passed probably means that there is a congealed trend here beneath the surface.

Is it anything more than “love the sinner, hate the sin” mumbo-jumbo? Leslie did tell me that both of these people are Catholics. When I first heard that phrase—from a very practicing Methodist at my Methodist college in Oregon but who so enjoyed having '80s dance parties in her dorm room that she couldn’t not have a few of us around, and found that to her surprise she loved every second of it—it sounded a lot like “separate but equal” and seemed hugely hypocritical and almost voodoo-fetishey. And, I mean—what kind of gay person is going to tolerate that? (This girl cited a person at her church who had done some “gay acts” but who thought it was a problem and who went to church and was very active and vocal about how hard he was working on fixing himself; she thought this guy was “noble.” Needless to say, that was the end of my friendship with her.) I think what’s also happening is the “icky factor”: Dudes doing it? Ick! While sometimes people side with their faith, it doesn’t seem like the issue of right or wrong is always the problem—the two people Leslie mentioned both said they “just couldn’t do it,” indicating that there is an emotional, logic-defying thing happening in their hearts and brains.

See, I am trying to figure out what’s up with the opposition. Because I don’t think that my getting irate or haughty or banishing such naysayers from my life is helping the cause. How do we combat this kind of stuff with compassion? Is there a dialogue that is not happening? Do we need to be more patient? Do we need to re-frame (or re-nudge [4th paragraph down]) the issue?

Song of [not really] Myself Sunday Dinner

2009-03-29T22:48:00.010-04:00

Folks, this has been a tough month. Not tough in the-consequences-are-going-to-kill-me-or-anyone-else way, but tough in the my-poops-aren’t-working and if-I-were-capable-of-menstruation-I-would-wonder-if-that-were-inexplicably-happening way. As the month wore on it kept getting worse. And it wasn’t just me—it was all around me. Friends had a week to move indefinitely to Asia. Friends got pregnant. Friends left the city in order to start farms elsewhere. Friends' roommates got mugged. Friends had the bad sense to reconnect with their “open relationship” ex-boyfriends. Friends had the bad sense to expect anything of me. March = this fucking sucks. But then, just two days ago, my dad swept in with the most generous rescue plan I could ever have fathomed, and though by doing so he did not solve everyone else’s problems, he did solve a great many of mine. (I’ll spare you the details, lest you think me more of a child of privilege than I already appear to be, but Dad, if you happen to read this, thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.)

I thus spent most of the weekend paying homage to my Dad, tackling chores that, if he were a gay living in New York, might figure into his weekend to-do list. I spent Saturday cleaning. There were literally fistfuls of dust in the corners and on the windowsills and on top of the bookshelves and behind the TV and underneath all the furniture; like when I was in London, I blew my nose and my snot was black. I fixed my blinds and hung curtains, two items that had been waiting to be addressed since I moved into this apartment nine months ago. I replaced light bulbs. I threw a bunch of shit away. I organized my closets. I went through my spice cabinet. I fluffed up pillows. I moved my furniture around. Then I went to the hardware store where I invested in a new hardwood-floors-cleaning method and on impulse bought a crate of pansies, which I still haven’t transferred into the planters outside my bedroom window. I had lunch at Five Guys Burger Co., the only comparable outlet for my Dad being Sonic (and which still managed to give me diarrhea). Sure, Dad probably would have bought a power washer to clean his driveway and would have chosen to reorganize his garage or maul over trees and shrubs in the name of landscaping, but the gesture is largely the same. Were contextual deficiency not a hurdle for the two of us, Dad would have been proud of me.

And tonight, I forewent my fear of anyone knowing I’m not a vegetarian by roasting a chicken—I put a bunch of parsley and lemon and garlic in the cavity, and stuffed a mixture of black olive tapenade, butter, and parsley underneath the skin—with gravy, of course, and leaned heavy on the cream and butter with the celeriac-apple-potato puree (recipe below!!). The salad was just a salad, with arugula and radishes and cucumber and pine nuts and sherry-shallot vinaigrette. I had made half an effort to share, but the only friend I knew to be available couldn’t come, and truthfully, I didn’t mind making a go of it alone. Maybe I burnt the crap out of my hand, but I had kicked things off with a martini (am getting very good at making those), and what you’re looking at also includes dessert.

The point is: I’m at home, and I’m not going anywhere for a few months. At the moment, this is kind of hail-Mary revelation for me.

PS – How much does it look like an Andre Dubus short story outside?

Celeriac-Apple-Potato puree

4 T butter, separated
1 head of celeriac (celery root), 1/2-inch dice (peeled!)
1 granny smith apple, 1/2 inch dice (peeled!)
2 medium Yukon gold potatoes, 1/2-inch dice (peeled!)
1 t salt
1/2 t pepper
1/2 cup water
1/4 c heavy cream
1/4 c milk
squeeze of lemon

In medium skillet melt 2 tablespoons of the butter, and then add the celeriac, apples, potatoes, salt and pepper. Cook for 5 minutes or so, until it just begins to soften. Add the water (you could also use wine, or cider), cover, and cook for 25-40 minutes, stirring often, until everything is very soft. Add more liquid if it begins to burn. Transfer the mixture to a food processor or put it through a food mill and puree.* Heat the cream, milk, and rest of the butter in a small saucepan. Return the potato-apple mixture to the original pan. When the cream/milk mixture is hot, stir it into the puree. Add lemon, taste for seasoning, serve hot. Yum.

* Postscript: Ever since I started reading cookbooks before going to bed, I have read about how hand blenders and electric beaters and food processors are anathema to potatoes, because when they are whizzed up with such a device, the glucose or something is released, resulting in a gluey dish. At my first restaurant job, when I first discovered this law of potatoes, I asked the sous chef what a potato ricer was; the next day he brought me one. So I've always make potatoes that way and never done a taste test with any electricity-weilding device.

I have tried this recipe two ways now, one with the food processor and one with the food mill, and finally, I know what they mean! The food processor potatoes were sticky and viscous, and the food mill ones had a lighter mouthfeel and were more delicate and seemed a bit more nuanced. Though I'd probably serve the food mill ones to people I want to impress, I secretly actually liked the gluey stuff, too. They were more like dessert--apple-potato-celeriac dulce de leche or something.

On Being a Better Gay, No. 1: Out

2009-03-21T22:35:00.010-04:00

A few things have happened lately that have had me contemplating my big gay existence. First, I met my partner in prude, who has donated more hours to gaytalk over the past two weeks than anyone else I’ve met in my life. Then, as anyone who’s read this blog before knows, I’m facing the gay world alone for the first time in a few years (i.e., I’m single), and finding myself not really enjoying it. Also, Saturn return + single + abundant time alone = this type of thing. Right now, on a Saturday afternoon while I’m simultaneously pontificating about Whitney Houston, making pesto, and drinking a beer, it seems like a good idea to write up the first installment of “On Being a Better Gay,” and I’m going to start with the tired—but maybe so tired it is fresh—subject of coming out.

I still have not “come out” to many of my friends and extended family. The moment I realized I was gay, I had this conviction that gay progress was so advanced as to render coming out obsolete—as in, the psychological risk (great or small) of coming out is equal for both the gay and the non-gay. This seems reasonable, right? For you to know that I am attracted to and want to have sex and monogamously make a life with someone of the same sex is as awkward for me to bring up as it is for you to. So if you aren’t going to ask, I’m not going tell.

And—okay, I never told my mom. I grappled with it. Wouldn’t she want to know who I really am and wouldn’t she want to know that I had finally met someone who I was in love with (at that time I had recently met my first [only, so far] real boyfriend) and wouldn’t this be the ultimate gesture, to crack through the filter that had propped up between us over the past few years? But in the end, and as the end became more imminent, it just seemed crude: crude to force upon her a constructed aspect of Who I Am, crude to inadvertently bring up sex, crude for me to expect her approval, or even her interest, at such a moment. So she died with the question of my being gay never having been addressed. I don’t know if I regret it, but, for the sake of gay people, I feel guilty. (Also, I don't think I'd be writing this if I had told her.) Ideally she would have said “Duh, who cares”; worst-case scenario, it would have made her uncomfortable and irritated that my timing was so bad and she would have thought me selfish for imposing myself on her. (I didn’t fear outright rejection, because my family just doesn’t roll like that.) One thing I have learned from the very few times that my coming out has been of consequence is that you need time; some people need a few weeks, months, years in order to think and feel about the newly addressed outlines of their relationships, and I had let this luxury pass me by as far as mom was concerned.

So I guess the place for me to begin in terms of being a better gay, and maybe some other guys would begin here, too, is to be more out. My biggest problem has always been that I don’t like drawing attention to myself and I don’t like confrontation. (The type of activism that I’ve historically favored has been the kind that comes with enrolling in a class called “Re-imagining Queer” or mingling at the cocktail party after a Kessler Lecture [do you know that I used to think I would meet my future husband in such a venue?].) Well, I say that, and it’s true, but there’s also some cultivated homophobia that comes with being non-confrontational. Like when my grandmother recalled a wedding to me, when I was ten or twelve, and at her table during the reception were two guys who wore matching wedding bands (and whom she knew to be a committed gay couple), and how she thought it was just perfect because otherwise no one even mentioned it—there was no in-your-face nothing, no selfish broadcasting, no icky details—which come to think of it doesn’t seem so bad, but at the time I interpreted as she doesn’t ever want to know, and which is how I legitimized never telling her and how I continue to not address it directly with my grandfather. One would think I’d have learned by now.

But, oh! The disappointment! I was the good kid, the one with straight A’s who enjoyed practicing the piano, who never got a speeding ticket (I didn’t turn gay until college), who always preferred hanging out with his parents to basically anyone else. How disappointing, that after such potential, he should end up as an aberration. When you grow up in Idaho and most everyone you know is a Republican and you’re a status-quo-inclined person, this is what you impulsively think until you get smart enough to question that impulse. It took some distance and a few gay lit/gender theory classes before I could recognize—first, in myself, and then in others—that being gay was not a throbbing character flaw.

Where am I going with this? Well, okay: I don’t really like separatism. When I came to New York and in my soft-soled-shoes way ingratiated myself to the gay scene, I wasn’t quite ready for how isolated it would be from the world that was familiar to me at the time. Even now, almost eight years later, I am still struck by this discrepancy. Why is it that we do so many of our gay things in the exclusive company of other gays? I assume it’s a comfort level thing and that it has something to do with being part of a minority and because otherwise it is exhausting and endlessly disappointing, and honestly what’s the alternative? And maybe all that I’m talking about is bars and crystal meth and XTube and insane sexual histories, and maybe I’m just a prude. But there is some truth to the fact that lots of us make very bad choices, and that our “culture” is not helping us to make better ones. What I’m trying to not say, because I gather it’s a profoundly incorrect thing to say, is that by living this way—publicly amongst ourselves, i.e., privately, i.e., by making our way alone and largely by our own terms, and with a strong emphasis on instinct gratification—there might be some lingering shame about said lifestyle choices. Am I not alone in feeling that it would be a better thing to be more “out”?

Or maybe the fact that it is now Saturday night, the first in a long time that I’ve had off from work, and after the pesto I made “saag” with chickpeas, and then I made hummus, and now I’m three-quarters the way through a very nice bottle of Grüner Veltliner—maybe this puts the whole issue in high relief: I have very little first-hand knowledge of what I’m trying to write about. I do sometimes wonder how it is that the gay “identity” transitions from one of romantic desire to something bigger than that—for example, I have a hard time making gay friends if I have not previously been in love with them; desire has always been the basis of the identity—and I think constantly about how difficult it is to chart your own path when there’s not much of one before you to use for reference.

Poopgroup: epiphany!

2009-03-12T17:31:00.002-04:00

I shock myself sometimes, too. I am not sure I can accurate calculate the amount of time I have spent actively thinking about poop (why aren't I pooping? why am I pooping? how awesome was that poop last night?). On the conservative side I would say I've spent about an hour a week for the past ten years contemplooping, which means about 520 hours (or 31,200 minutes!) and I have never realized this basic reason why i am so tortured: I am an anxious person.

Yesterday, after a sad and stressful day at work, I went out with my lovely favorite boy for a marg and beer. I then snuggled and napped for a little while before he went to go play basketball and I was left waiting for Lukas to call me to go get more drinks. I can't tell you the pooping and farting, and subsequent realizing, that took place in that time.

It isn't the drinking or the beer that makes you poop better, it's the relaxation that comes with it. It isn't the home toilet that makes pooping pleasurable, it's the relaxation of being home. It's how uptight I am that makes me tight up there (too much? eh). You get the point. I am just amazed at how long it took me to.

Skiing; Mom, 51; Beef Bourguignon

2009-03-09T02:16:00.011-04:00

When the conditions are right, is there anything better than snow skiing? What a luxurious sport—I mean, you’re whisked up—gestured, really—the mountain on the chairlift, and the only effort exerted there is that of poling yourself forward through the line, and then you get to just coast your way downhill in whichever fashion suits you best—fast, slow, loopey-doopey, whatever. I was just in Lake Tahoe for a couple days and I honestly don’t think it could have been better. The first day was cold but with lots of fresh snow, and the second day was cloudless, sunny, and 50 degrees—I have raccoon-eyes to show for it. And the actual skiing… Oh, man, my brother and I got most of an afternoon to hop around and we totally resorted to teenaged versions of ourselves. Not even stopping to prepare, just taking off from the top of the lift and making a beeline down the hill with our poles tucked into our armpits. At one point I wish I could have viewed it aerially. There was a group of five or six beginning skiers led by a beefy Australian guy who yelled “Turn!” every three seconds; they were slowly plowing themselves to the bottom, using the whole width, snaking down the run like something in a Chinese New Year Parade, but very focused-like. With my brother in the lead (he weighs 50 pounds more than me, he always wins the race) it was only a matter of the opportunity presenting itself: the unsuspecting skiers had to be aligned just so, with a gap opening up at the curve in the line, where the midpoint was on the outer edge of the run, and the people in front and behind leaving room for a lightening bolt in a red North Face jacket to come burning through, followed a few seconds later by me.

And Lake Tahoe is such an amazing place. You get to the top of the mountain and can see on one side the lake, where the elevation at the surface is over 6,000 feet, and then to the other side the patchwork farmland of Nevada and Carson City, where the elevation is 4,600. It really throws your balance off, because the lake side looks so much higher than the other. Here’s a shot of the lake from the gondola:

My Mom was a great skier. Not the graceful, deft skier that you might watch rapturously from the lift, though she did do it beautifully. She was more the kind that could get down any kind of run with integrity. I am not like this. I am the start-stop, plow-through-the-rough, slide-perpendicularly-down-the-steep-stuff type of skier (though on the broad, flat-ish blue-square runs I think I’m usually better looking than most; I like the big, easy strokes and this is—in life, even—where I really excel). Mom could get through anything with just enough grace and calm to make you wonder for a second if she had been a pro when she was younger.

Today, March 8, would have been her fifty-first birthday. One of my favorite things to think about when I think about her now, now that I’m finally able to remember her not as she was for the last few months before she died—which was miniature, frail, bald, pale, nauseous, tired all the time, not at all herself—is what I’ll call here her “asshole face.” It sounds terrible in this context, I know, but you have to believe me: it was the funniest thing. She reserved this face mostly for when she was imitating some cocky, stupid asshole. She would stretch out her lips downward to make her chin all pock-marked, scrunch up her eyebrows into an upside-down “V,” bulge out her eyeballs, flare her nostrils so that my thumbs could fit inside them, and then say some drawn-out syllable like “DRRRRRR” or “GUHHHH." Oh god, it seriously was the greatest thing. I'm not doing it justice. She knew that it had currency with my brother and me. Sometimes, when we used to play tennis or ski or even go bowling—she was very competitive, and didn’t grapple in the slightest with beating either of her teenaged sons at whatever sport we were trying to get good at—she would make this face just as she was going in for the kill. Say, she’d go racing past us with her poles tucked up in her armpits, skiing really, really fast and I would turn towards her while she was passing me, and she would turn back in response, and in that split second she would make the asshole face. It was almost crippling because it broke my concentration so badly, I would have tears streaming down my face, sometimes I’d pee my snow-pants, and then she’d go on, gracefully, of course, to win whatever the race happened to be that day.

And fifty-one years old. God. What is there to say? I still miss her so much, which seems like such an obvious form of self-torture when I say it out loud . . . Words fail here. It seems more shocking this year than last, and last year would have been her fiftieth, which was really something to consider. Death has this uncanny way of throwing obvious things in stark relief all the sudden. Like the fact that my mom won’t ever know me as any older than twenty-three, and that I’ll never know her as any older than forty-seven—she’ll be forever immortalized in my memory as a middle-aged woman. Also: nothing is ever the same, and yet nothing changes. People say this kind of thing all the time, but every once in a while the saying creeps up on me and has a sobering effect. Would I be in a different place right now were my mom still around? Who knows. I know my Dad better, and my brother better, and I am more nostalgic about my extended family than I probably would have been otherwise (more nostalgic, and yet this nostalgia provides no impetus for me to get to know them any better), and maybe my having been thrust into adulthood was in the end a good thing. And yet I am still stealth in my ways; that probably wouldn't have changed. Were my mom still around, I would still be the same kind of stranger to her that I always was.

Anyway, to commemorate her birthday, over the past four years I had initiated a tradition of preparing one of her signature dishes, beef bourguignon, for a group of friends. (Spoiler alert: I am not a vegetarian, but this is the topic of another blog post.) I had the mom birthday party for the first two years after she died and I enjoyed it very much. I took the day off from work and spent it shopping and cooking, which are the types of activities that make me very happy and relaxed, keep me occupied, and most importantly on this day, result in a whole night surrounded by my closest friends. Then two years ago my Dad invited me out to Reno/Tahoe, where my brother lives, to go skiing with him and my brother and my sister-in-law. I offered to make the beef bourguignon. Then it happened again this year—we went skiing, and on the night of mom’s birthday, I made the beef bourguignon. Now it looks Dad has hijacked my tradition. I won’t complain.

So yes, I made the beef bourguignon tonight. It’s a tedious, but not difficult dish, and it’s not really my Mom’s recipe—she got it from her friend, the famed Idaho chef Suzie Pearson. But because I feel we’d made enough slight modifications over the years—and also because the occasion calls for it—for the purposes of this blog the beef belongs to her.

A few caveats: this is fatty, though I’ve cut back on much of the butter and oil from the original recipe, and what’s below is the real deal. As an attempt to “authenticate” this recipe, I have made my own beef stock, my own consommé, even tried to weasel my way out of the bouillon cubes. It’s simply not as good. So if you’re going to go to the trouble of making this, I suggest you just follow the recipe.

Pam’s Beef Bourguignon

4-pound chuck roast, trimmed of as much fat as possible and cut into 1-inch cubes
1/4-cup vegetable oil
1/2-cup butter, separated
4 carrots, roughly chopped
4 celery stalks, roughly chopped
1 large or 1-1/2 medium onion, roughly chopped
1/3-cup flour
3 large garlic cloves
2 bouillon cubes*
3 heaping tablespoons dried parsley
2 bay leaves
2 cups burgundy**, separated
1 can beef consommé
1 can beef broth (15-oz)
1 heaping tablespoon ground black pepper
1 pound white button mushrooms, stems trimmed, and left whole
1 bag frozen pearl onions (Birdseye brand), defrosted and drained of excess liquid
1 tablespoon sugar

* I find these things morally reprehensible, too, but in this recipe, there really is no way around them. I have tried.
** The original recipe calls for Gallo hearty red burgundy, which is nothing you would actually want to drink. So, per the cooking advice my own mother has given me—one wants to cook with something that one can drink at the same time—I use a French pinot noir instead, which is a really good, cost-effective step up.

1. Using copious amounts of paper towels, squeeze as much liquid as possible from every single goddamn cube of beef. This is the most tedious thing you will have to do, so you might as well put on some good music and fantasize about your career as a covers singer.
2. Melt the vegetable and 1/4 cup butter in a large Dutch oven (a really big one) until the foaming subsides, and then brown the beef in batches. Place it on paper towel lined plates to drain of excess oil.
3. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
4. While browning the meat, combine the carrots, celery, and onion in food processor and puree. (The celery is my addition, and my mom used to just dice the onion and then run the carrots through the grater of the food processor. Then I showed her how I could brunoise once I started working at the restaurant, which made a lovely looking stew. I think, though, that the flavor is best when it’s blitzed to a grainy paste, and that’s what we’re doing here. It’s also really easy.)
5. Add the carrot mixture to the Dutch oven and cook for five minutes or so, until it begins to reduce. Then add the flour, and cook for five to seven minutes more, until further reduced.
6. While the carrot mixture is cooking, combine the garlic, bouillon, bay leaves, 1 cup of the wine, consommé, beef broth, and black pepper in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, and then simmer.
7. When the carrot mixture is ready, add 1 cup of the burgundy and cook until the wine is reduced by half. Then tip the meat back into the Dutch oven, stirring to combine, and then the wine mixture. Bring to a boil, and then cover and move to the preheated oven. Cook for two hours.
8. When the beef comes out of the oven, heat 1/4 cup butter in a large frying pan and sauté the whole mushrooms until browned all over, about ten to fifteen minutes. Then add them to the beef mixture. In the same pan, caramelize the pearl onions with the sugar, another ten to fifteen minutes, and add them to the beef. Serve this dish hot, with buttery mashed potatoes.

Slouching towards Xanadu

2009-03-01T18:29:00.006-05:00

I came to New York really not knowing anyone. I had put a continent between myself and any blood relatives, and the two acquaintances I had in the city, one of whom was a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend roommate and the other a crush object from Idaho who may have resented me, were the only two people I could have hoped to call friends. Coming to New York like this—anonymous, with a black storage chest from Target that would later become my coffee table (my mom insisted I buy it—“It’s so versatile!”)—seemed to me the way that most people come to New York. Or at least that’s what I imagined from what gay books and movies I knew at the time. It seemed like a right of passage. It was, you know, “New York.”

And except for the one time that my parents came to visit me—they drove, saying that it would take them two days but for whatever reason it ended up only taking them one (at this point they had moved from Idaho to North Carolina); they called from the Holland Tunnel needing directions while I was still at work, and my apartment was no kind of clean, largely because I had not yet Febreezed it of cigarette stench—I’ve never lived in New York in fear of running into or being observed by someone who’s opinion of me or my actions might be of personal consequence. I’ve never been kept in check here.

Not everyone is like this—many have family here or in Long Island or New Jersey or whatever (“I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West. . . . one does not ‘live’ at Xanadu” —Joan Didion)—but for those of us who are gay and who came here for Xanadu, we needed friends and we needed something to fill that family-shaped hole in our new setups. Enter sprawling urban families. What a perfect solution, no? It would all be new and voluntary. Thanksgivings would finally be fun. We’d all get boyfriends and the urban families would grow and overlap. Lots of us would probably sleep with each other. We could be the emergency contacts when we fill out release forms at doctor’s offices. I was never one to grow wistful for college when I was away from it during summer and the holidays, but I can imagine that for some people this new urban family setup might feel like a natural evolution.

And in one way or another, this is pretty much what happened to me. (Though my bread and butter are some key straight ladiez, and the few gay friends I have are ones I had to be passively in love with for a few weeks or months before the friendships emerged.) Throw in a boyfriend who came and went. Basically, we found Xanadu.

But what happens when we all go searching for the next Xanadu? What happens as, one by one, people leave [that “leave” there was supposed to link to this great thing on Matt Gaymon’s tumblr about his roommate moving out to the prairie and which, while listening to “Plasticities,” has had me alternately bent over my computer weeping and jumping around in preparation for my next karaoke night, but I think he took it down]? The thing about blood family is that, for better or worse, uprooting yourself is not going to sever ties. The thing about the sprawling urban family is that there is no such guarantee.

I was in San Francisco a few summers ago and met a friend of a friend who was telling me about how gay people have redefined freedom for straight people. We didn’t get too far into the conversation, but the gist was this: by watching gay guys and lesbians chart out new lives without regard to what straight society dictates as right or wrong, straights have become emboldened to live more self-fulfilling lives themselves. I sort of took issue with it, first because I think we can also just thank the sixties, but also because I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I’m of the freedom-isn’t-free camp, the freedom-requires-discipline camp, the if-it’s-too-good-to-be-true-it-probably-is camp. And I really don’t think that this is bottled up gay self-loathing talking.

And then in a fight a few months ago, someone who was previously very close to me said that I’m too concerned with “what other people think” about how I’m living my life, too concerned with how everything looks on the surface, and that I don’t live my life “for myself.” Sure, okay, but here’s my beef.

I want to be able to trust people. In my dream urban family, when someone makes a promise, you know that they’ll keep it. I don’t know what structure, in the urban family, keeps this in place, but in the blood family you do it because you don’t have any other choice. Because that’s how people have historically lived together in communities. This is not to say that anyone not related to you by blood is innately untrustworthy. What I am asking is that if you are not contractually bound to your sprawling urban family, where does the sense of commitment and trustworthiness come from? What provides the incentive? If we are all wandering around, flaunting our self-fulfilled selves, how do we have time to look out for one another? “What other people think” is, to me, one of the ways that we build trust among ourselves and is one of the pillars of living in a community. Do people really stay alive only for the sake of their ego-tastic selves? No. Lots of them actually do do it for the sake of other people.

Of course marriages end in divorce and terrible human beings end up as fathers and mothers, and misguided witch-hunts happen, and things are far from peachy-perfect in the patriarchy. But there must be some comfort in having customs and structures that provide instruction as to what to do in a given situation and ensure that people take care of their own. Gay guys don’t seem to have figured this part out yet.

Which is all to say that, whether or not it is useful or necessary, I’ve never met a gay guy that I didn’t worry about. Most of us drink too much. Most of us never really quit smoking, let alone other stuff. Some of us are contentious about locker room sex, and we defend our porn addictions. Most of us are discombobulated by the idea of aging. Most of us are rigidly self-sufficient. Most of the role models we might have are dead. Most of our parents and non-gay elders don’t understand and don’t even know how we actually live. I told my brother and dad that my boyfriend and I broke up and I think that they are so baffled and alienated by the notion of a gay relationship (which is as much my fault as anyone else’s) that it didn’t occur to them to just say “I’m really sorry. I hope you’re ok”; they wanted moving-on details—So I’m going to move? How soon? How cool will it be to finally live alone?! “Oh man!” my brother said, as if I’d just told him that I didn’t win twelve million dollars in the lottery.

Point being: Dudes, we need each other. Dear sprawling urban family of mine? Please stop moving away from me, and if you must, know that I’m still going to need you.

PoopGroup: The Yoga Edition

2009-02-22T12:22:00.006-05:00

I usually wake up in the morning feeling bloated or with some twisting-turning action happening in my stomach. Surprisingly, this does not often result in morning poop. (It eventually will, though. My dad has a 5 AM poop literally every morning, and though it sounds like the explosive diarrhea variety, which I also don’t have very often, he’s got twenty-seven years on me; one day my BMs will probably mimic his just as my jaunt and jowls are beginning to now.) So it is with some trepidation that I go to yoga in the mornings, which is when I prefer to go. What if the stomach pains turn to cramps and make the poses painful? What if I have to leave class to go poop (the idea of pooping at a yoga studio, which I have done only twice in my life, both times with extreme haste, gives me nightmares despite my extreme poop-positive outlook; I’m working on it)? What if I’m disruptively gassy?

So far I have found nothing that calms my stomach more swiftly or in a way that feels more natural and correct than by doing yoga. And it makes sense. You are twisting your body, opening things up, shifting things around; your intestines are basically getting a sweet massage. And if you’re doing everything right, the meditation, the poses, and in general your controlled focus should take your mind off stomach pain. (I can’t vouch for the ladies with period cramps; my favorite teacher Sheri warns that if any women are “on” their “moons” that they might take a lotus pose rather than an inversion. I’m really curious: Why? And is yoga good for period pain?) Also, PoopGrouper Meghan tells me that a five-minute headstand makes for miracles in your digestive system. I don’t know that I could do a headstand for five minutes, but I did a three-minute one the other day and must say that my poop was pretty great afterward.

But as for yoga gas—which I’ve wondered aloud about here before—I really think there’s nothing to be done. If you are giving your intestines a massage and there is a bunch of turbulent air trapped up inside them, it is going to find its way out. And if no one else is going to admit it, I will: I love farting in yoga. It feels great. It’s like when you’re in a twist and by exhaling you can take the twist deeper: if you let some air out your butt end, you can also go deeper. It’s not like I make and effort to do it. But when the gas bubbles to the surface, I do not try to suck it back down.

I should also say that I am a connoisseur of what my family calls SBD (“silent but deadly”) gas. You may not hear them, but you are absolutely going to smell them. So I have not yet had the experience of releasing a thunderclap fart and having the entire class turn to me in shock. I fart, then 25 or 30 seconds pass, and then you notice the other yogis losing some of their focus, crunching up their noses, exhaling a little bit aggressively. Sorry! But at least it’s a good exercise in flexing your focus muscles. And even if the thunderclap were to happen, what’s so wrong with laughing, outstretching your hands, looking upward with humility to acknowledge the marvels of the human condition, and saying, “Pardon me!”

So to this person, with whom PoopGroup is in direct ideological opposition (this is a dead-end cause already), I have a few things to say: First of all, lighten up! If you can’t take other people’s natural bodily odors, then maybe you should just get a NordicTrak, a DVD set, a good ventilation system, and stay home. Also, if one fart in a yoga class derails all your relaxation and focus, how on earth does gym stench not bother you? (I hate gym stench, which is one of many reasons why I do not go to gyms.) Also . . . you know . . . the point of yoga? Perhaps you’re missing it?

Sure, it would be unpleasant and distracting were everyone’s pranayana infused with fart throughout an entire class (though you’d get used to it pretty fast! Try bikram, where Izzy tells me yogis are encouraged to fart). What I’m saying here is what I’m always saying in PoopGroup: We all poop, we all fart. Sometimes it’s really amusing, sometimes it’s very provocative (I always find it provocative), sometimes it’s embarrassing, sometime’s it’s shitty (ha!). It seems to me that there’s no point in making it shameful.

On Losing My Second Copy of Housekeeping

2009-02-18T09:42:00.005-05:00

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is the most exquisite book I know of. I went back to it for a second or third read, this time really taking to heart Doris Lessing’s advice, to read it slowly, and then more slowly, because it’s true: every sentence is something to savor. I’m thinking randomly of how Ruth’s grandmother’s aging is described, how her halo of white hair takes on “the altered shape of a remembered thing.” Or the summer where Lucille divorces herself from her sister and aunt, and the disentanglement swiftly realizes itself one night, with Lucille boarding with the Home Economics teacher; the passage ends simply, “And from that night on, I no longer had a sister.” It’s poorly reenacted here, but I cried while reading that on the train. And then the beautiful, recurring passages about memory and longing, how longing is a form of fulfillment. Ruth uses huckleberries to demonstrate, saying that without longing for the fruit the pleasure and fulfillment of eating it does not exist. This concept came to mind yesterday when a friend told me that she accidentally smashed a just-purchased bottle of wine on the corner of a building while walking home and didn’t have enough money to buy another one.

I would double-check these passages, and probably type up several more, like the one where the train slips over the tracks while crossing the bridge and dives into the water “like an eel,” or Robinson’s descriptions of the lake breaking and moaning, and the recurring absolute darkness, or her wonderful use of the word “verge,” but I can’t. I lost my second copy of the book at Therapy—not the place where I see my therapist, but the Hell’s Kitchen gay bar.

You know how sometimes you find something and you are certain from the get-go it is going to be around forever? I feel this way about several zip up sweaters that I own, as well as a scarf and a wooden spoon and a pencil holder and many of my friends. And then there are other things that you buy or receive which you immediately know you will lose, or break, or for whatever reason won’t stick around? I feel this way about virtually everything I’ve ever bought at Urban Outfitters, and my stemless wine glasses, and people I've gone on dates with. I also felt this way about a bracelet that my dad had made for me. It is a silver identity bracelet on which he mounted my mom’s birthstone and a few diamonds from her jewelry and engraved her initials—sounds strange but it is lovely. I was slightly terrified to accept it, because at the moment of receipt I could feel what it would be to have lost it. And then one Thanksgiving I did (well, nine months later I found it; it slipped into the lining of a jacket; but the point is that when I did think it was gone, my reaction was more confirmation of a privately honored fatalism than shock or outrage). Housekeeping is one of these latter items for me. I couldn’t hold on to my first copy of that book—I think I loaned it to someone who left the country—and when my friend from Macmillan gave me a new one, I just knew that my time with it would be brief (though I did hope that I’d at least be able to finish rereading before I lost it). Maybe this is a fitting thing for a book about a transient.

Swiss Chard Miso Soup

2009-02-15T22:45:00.009-05:00

I opened up my fridge the other night to find a salad spinner full of swiss chard that was a day or so away from turning soft and rubbery. I’ll fry this up, I thought, as a supplement to the steak and cheese pie from DUB Pies that I already ate. Well I did that—in a little bit of olive oil, shallots, and garlic—and dumped it into a bowl. The swiss chard looked lonely. I went back to the fridge. I found there a pint of vegetable stock that I had made at around the same time that I bought the greens. I tasted, happy to find that it, too, had not yet soured. Anticipating soup, I popped the stock into the microwave and was going to reflect on my resourcefulness when I remembered the tub of soybean paste, which is what is used to make miso soup, tucked back into the corner of said fridge. I retrieved it, scooped up a dab, and stirred it into the hot vegetable stock. Then, as the waiters do at the restaurants that none of us can afford to go to, except that here I used a Pyrex measuring cup where they might have used a sleek silver teapot or something, I poured the hot stock over the sautéed greens. I tasted for salt and pepper. And then, with a cold glass of cheap white wine, I devoured.

Here’s to a wholly vegan, PoopGroup worthy, refrigerator exploiting, easy and delicious dinner that I will definitely try to replicate. I can’t recommend enough that you make your own stock. I’ve written about it before; it’s a deeply satisfying chore, one that not only produces a nutritious, delicious base to your culinary experiments but also extracts the remaining goodness from your vegetable scraps.

Swiss Chard Miso Soup

For one lonely, temporarily stimulated person

1 T olive oil
1 shallot, minced
1 clove of garlic, slivered
1/2 bunch swiss chard, cut into 2-inch strips
2 cups vegetable stock, hot
1 T red soybean paste
salt and pepper, to taste

Heat the oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Add shallots and stir for a minute. Then add the garlic and stir until fragrant, 30 seconds or so. Add the swiss chard and a tablespoon or two of water or vegetable stock. Cook, turning the leaves frequently, until tender, about 5 minutes. Move greens to serving bowl.

Stir the soybean paste into the hot vegetable stock. Pour over greens. Season with salt and pepper and serve.

Facebook, Saturn Return

2009-02-12T11:13:00.007-05:00

A week ago I got a Facebook account and today I turn twenty-seven-years-old. I’m not sure exactly what inspired the Facebook thing; I had resisted it for so long, partially because the phenomena cusped I was on the cusp of something else (adulthood), and partially because I had already done Friendster and MySpace and felt that starting all over again would be exhausting. Then I learned that an extremely unlikely friend had an account, as well as all my friends’ moms (which I, too, had read about in the Times a while ago, but it didn’t really hit home then), and that people find apartments and jobs through it, and that basically it’s a combination Yellow Pages and rigorously updated alumnae directory. (But you can't stalk people!) I began to fear what would happen if I were to put it off any longer.

(I edited an essay in a book a while ago, which argued that social networking sites are the beginning of the end of life as we know it, that intellect will one day be measured in RAM, that MBrains will rule, that the last “cogent” decision we make will be clicking “I AGREE” before letting the hard drives take over our souls; I don’t know enough about the subject to know whether this is laughably reductive or sci-fi or what, but that essay is the first thing that comes to mind as I reconsider Facebook.)

A friend told me that birthdays are “personal new years.” I guess it’s always a little shocking to reflect on all that happens and doesn’t happen over the course of a year, how some stuff is born and dies, and how some stuff stays constant, and how some stuff continues to reinvent and repurpose itself-just when you think you’ve identified one thing and how it informs another, it surprises you by informing something else. Maybe this is all just life and very obvious, and I don’t know what in particular I’m talking about here, aside from boyfriends. In general it’s probably more interesting to spare the details anyway.

I had my birthday party last night at a bar in Brooklyn. Because my preference is to behave like a middle-aged lesbian with a fabulous kitchen (ideally the type from an Amy Bloom story), I have always thrown parties in the style that my mother and Martha Stewart had taught me. They often happen on Sunday afternoons. There are canapés and lots of other edibles. And wine. And music that neither puts you to sleep nor gets you up on your feet. They are old person parties! And I think they have always had a quaint appeal for my friends, most of whom usually attended age-appropriate parties and have done age-appropriate things like social dancing and drugs. This year I chose a bar in Brooklyn where no one would be compelled to dance and I made cupcakes (red velvet with Swiss meringue buttercream frosting, from the wonderful new Amy’s Bread cookbook, though they came out more the color of a brick or a dead rose because I used the Goya brand of food coloring and only half as much as what was called for). We showed up almost exactly on time (I was the late-ish one). We installed ourselves at a few tables. Everyone had a beer or two and a cupcake. We conversed civilly. And a few hours later we all went home. It is always a rare indulgence to have most of my friends in the same place at the same time, and this was very relaxing and fun, but for some reason, last night the Ironic Old Person Party vibe didn’t come through. . . It could be because it was a Wednesday night and not everyone is a fancy-freelancer like me, and maybe I threw things together too haphazardly, with variables more beyond my control than usual. But it could also be that it’s not ironic anymore. Because all this pretending to be old has resulted in making me old.

So it’s a good thing that I am beginning my Saturn Return, into which Facebook appears to factor. I’ll go to yoga today and hopefully be less skeptical when I dump my mudra (in this case, flower petals) over my head, and will sincerely rustle my hair around in ecstasy. (I got into it yesterday as the class progressed.)

Judgment Call

2009-02-07T12:24:00.009-05:00

I spend a lot of time fantasizing about my career as a covers singer. I do it pretty much all day long and it provides a kind of escapism so thoroughly satisfying that damn near anything becomes bearable. I used to tap this resource when I had to clean 150 pounds of squid at a time, during my kitchen job in 2004. Or I would go on two-hour-long walks when my mom was sick and sing out loud, imagining even wiping the sweat off my forehead because of the heat of the spotlight. Or when I had to wait in the cold for the bus to get home to Red Hook, my imagination here was my salvation. If you ever see me walking down the street and I’m glazed over and murmuring things and snapping every once in a while, I am probably feeling myself onstage with Cassandra Wilson singing an edgy rendition of “Cheek to Cheek.”

It’s different from just having songs you like stuck in your head. And I don't fantasize about being only a covers singer—my foundation would be a critically acclaimed body of original work, maybe just two albums or so, enough to prove my chops. No, I would want to be thought of as having really, really clever taste when it comes to choosing and “reinventing” other people’s songs. I wouldn’t record many of them. They would happen as opening numbers at shows and, most thrillingly, as encores. Oh man, people would be cheering so hard, and then I’d come out and blow their minds with a cover of a song by Bonnie Raitt or Rickie Lee Jones or New Order or Pink Floyd or Taylor Dayne or, like, something from Porgy and Bess. It may be hard for you to picture it with the examples I’ve given, but trust me: the unexpectedness is its selling feature. Sometimes I give myself the chills.

(One of my best ideas is a reinvention of Rickie Lee Jones’s “Ghostyhead,” the whole album, start to finish. Do you even know about Ghostyhead? No, of course not, because Geffen pulled it from the shelves because they thought it was too weird and wanted a cash cow from Guns & Roses or something. But strange as it may be for an artist like RLJ, it is a beautiful album, full of nuance, and RLJ herself claims it to be one of her favorites. In my dreams I could bring it to the next level and get it the credit it deserves, and at some show RLJ would come gushing from backstage to sing “Myriad Harbor” with me as an encore.)

The biggest obstacle is my complete ineptitude when it comes to singing and writing songs. The idea of writing song lyrics is so incomprehensible I find it stifling. As far as singing goes, I’ll just admit that I’m not good; I hold my own in karaoke, but I don’t take my eyes of the screen, and I get really uncomfortable during the instrumental breaks. I also don’t play any instruments except for the piano, which despite all my drink-inspired best efforts I cannot do while singing or even talking at the same time, and the flute, which is a pointless instrument. I also have a very apologetic stage presence.

But when I am in the zone, I am in the zone, and I end up staying there for a while, thinking that maybe one day a neighbor will hear me singing Al Green’s “Call Me” in a fresh way while cleaning my apartment and give me a record deal, or I’ll finally learn a karaoke song really well and blow everybody’s mind, or I’ll get this gig at Joe’s Pub called “Gay Songs” which will be about reinventing all these cool old songs that are awesome when you make them gay (serious, it’s an idea that I get fired up about at least twice a week; opening number would be “Death Letter”). But then I’ll be doing research on Youtube and find something like this, which is when the gauntlet comes crashing down and I start feeling terrible about myself. I mean, the poor guy, he got my idea but he was spared the memo, the memo for me being kind of like when you’re out one night and you meet a bunch of new people who seem to think you are fabulous and you laugh a lot and make jokes and, I don’t know, dance, and you go to bed patting yourself on the back for how fun and social you have been lately, how you’re really adapting to the single thing, only to wake up at 5 AM realizing that you were slurring all your words and repeating your jokes five too many times and that, sigh, you weren’t funny at all, they were sympathy chuckles, and you spend the entire next day hating yourself. Or when you are writing something that you think is hilarious and insightful and in the spirit of another blog you admire, but when you click on the other commenters’ blogs on said admired blog you realize that yours is just a drop in the bucket and mostly mimicry anyway (save PoopGroup, which in my darkest moments I still think is genius), and it results in you getting to that point of the night when you decide to “preemptively” lay off the vodka and instead fill up your Nalgene with some cold water and figure on going to bed. Remember to brush your teeth.

Judging is a fraught enterprise. I feel like over the past several years—and maybe this just coincides with my age—it’s been really fun to judge people and to get good at reducing them to their signifiers. I guess that’s fine, if mean spirited. But we must agree that it is a debilitating thing for everyone, to feel that every word and every action can be sussed out to indicate something greedy and terrible and unoriginal about one’s true nature. On the one hand, we can’t have everyone in the world thinking they are the bee’s knees (I’d argue that no one should think one’s self to be the bee’s knees); on the other, if we all live in fear of judgment, we’ll settle for mediocrity and only let the guards down while drunk or high and that probably will result in rape and stuff. Not sure what the answer is, except that there must be a fine line where people can be self-aware and comfortable in their own skin at the same time. And nice to each other. And only moderately reliant on their (heretofore) secret fantasies.

Notes of a Freelancer

2009-01-30T11:17:00.003-05:00

To anyone who doesn’t know me very well, or maybe even to people who have known me for a while, my recent change in employment arrangement might come as a surprise. For five years I’ve been working in book publishing, never sure exactly of what the long-term goal would be but nonetheless working towards it. Due to the meltdown that the media industry finds itself in right now, the opportunity arose for me to work out a new arrangement—basically that I could cut my responsibilities in half and do most of the work from home. I jumped at the opportunity. Someone else would have seen this as a demotion.

For almost a year now, and even more than that if you count the periodic slumps, I have hated working in an office. Hated having to be at work when there was nothing pressing to do, hated the circumstantial friendships that are extremely intense until the moment someone gets a new job, hated the commute, hated spending so much time in front of a computer screen, hated missing all the yoga classes I wanted to take, hated doing everything I need to do during the evenings and weekends. I’m young; I imagine that one day I’ll probably be back in an office and will find a way to reconcile these little points of contempt, but for the time being, I’m going to pretend that being a freelancer will solve all my problems.

I’ve had many, many elaborate notions of what exactly it would mean for me to be a freelancer. First of all, I would get a fun freelancer haircut. Second, I’d need a new computer, preferably a MacBook Pro that I could drape in stickers. Third, I would do yoga three times a day. Fourth, I would refer to my backpack as my “portable office.” Fifth, I would be able to cancel any plans that I was feeling hesitant about by saying, “I’m really sorry, but this project just came up, and the deadline is tomorrow.” And lastly, I could forever affect bewilderment at how my day-jobbing friends manage to do the 9-to-5 thing while keeping their sanity. I’ve followed through with much of this already, save the stickers and the haircut and the canceling plans (see below).

Since the freelance arrangement alone is not enough money, my next concern was finding a job to supplement that income. I’ve talked about my culinary aspirations here before—I had thought that I would go work in a kitchen; I reconnected the chef I worked for, and it seemed like that was feasible. Well, something else happened (because now that I am a freelancer my life is an open book, and you gotta take the opportunities as they come), which is that I got a job as a host at a charming mid-rate restaurant for old people on the Upper East Side. While I’ve long wanted to try this type of work—partly because restaurant work interests me, and partly because I have a friend who works four nights a week as a waiter and has always made at least $20K (annually) more than me—what this really means is that though I can’t get the fun freelancer haircut I was hoping for, I am being paid to be nice and look good during restaurant hours, and that is a wonderful challenge for me. Plus, the old people love me.

A few notes from my first few weeks as a freelancer: I had a moment of unfiltered joy on Tuesday, coming back from a 7:30 AM yoga class and finally being on one of the trains going in the opposite direction of all the commuters. At the yoga studio they must think I’m unemployed and depressed, because they never see me showered or shaved anymore. I have worn the same sweatshirt and jeans every day for about two weeks. I am not cooking as much as I thought I would because it’s easier to eat chips and hummus and scrambled eggs. I’m also not leaving the house a lot because it is cold outside. I’m spending more time in front of the computer than before (check out all the activity on my Tumblr account), which is embarrassing. No one is ever free to hang out, especially now that I work several evenings a week. In fact, while motivation per se is not a challenge, there is an adjustment to be reckoned with. There is something yogic I could say here, about purpose and fulfillment and “work” in the figurative sense. I will give that some thought this afternoon.

Someone needs to tap this market

2009-01-24T11:46:00.004-05:00

I told you about some interesting trends in my modest Google Analytics results. In case you didn't believe me the first time....

Also: Butt enhancing underwear.

Mad Tasty

2009-01-21T10:19:00.003-05:00

I just started writing for a "collective food think tank" called Mad Tasty. Check it out when you're feeling hungry, and I promise not to talk about poop there.

PoopGroup: Sh*tty

2009-01-19T17:31:00.008-05:00

I just visited my grandfather in Sun City West, a suburb of Phoenix exclusively for old people, for a few days and also to run the Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona half marathon. An hour or so after landing, he and his girlfriend took me to lunch at their country club where I had a local specialty, Cobb salad. The toppings were arranged in pie slices on the lettuce—one wedge for hard cooked eggs, one for bacon crumbles, one for bleu cheese chunks, another for avocado, another for diced tomato—and it came with a small pitcher/large measuring cup of bleu cheese dressing for all the greens and toppings to swim around in. It had been fourteen hours since I’d eaten, and I pretty much inhaled my salad with black coffee as a chaser.

We came home and I fell asleep in the sun for a half hour or so, read some fluff in a magazine, and a few hours later I decided that I’d best be training for the race. I dressed in a tank top, some old swim trunks that I also wear to yoga, and tied my hair back with a bandana.

I took off at about four in the afternoon, expecting to do eight miles or so. It was 80 degrees, there was no wind, the sidewalks were smooth as marble and endless in every direction. . . I might argue that one can find Zen here—how you really lose yourself in the manicured perfection the place; mostly every house looks the same, only the colors of the gravel front lawns change from lot to lot, and every once in a while someone’s got a decorative print on their driveway; how you have to surrender yourself to the kaleidoscopic maze of the layout; and how the happy old people buzzing around in their golf carts are just a hair’s breath from obscene in their contentment (I wave to all of them, and they all wave back).

I ran about two miles before I started to notice some rumbling action in my stomach. It was nothing I’d not experienced before—I can usually tame the roar. I released an artillery of farts and thought that would be the end of it.

As no, that wasn’t the end of it. That was the beginning, which coincided with me being at my furthest point from grandpa’s house, and we are all familiar with what I was experiencing: the agonizing come-and-go nausea and boiling innards begging for release but having no means to do it. I stopped running, opting instead for the butt-cheeks squeezed hips-thrust-forward power-walkers’ walk, and headed home as fast as my legs and stomach would allow.

It must be understood that there is nowhere to stop and use a public bathroom when you’re running around Sun City West. No Starbucks, no gas stations, no Barnes & Noble, no Wall-Mart, not even a skeevy public park that might have a restroom—just pastel homes and condominiums in overlapping concentric circles, for 360 degrees in two miles. I was stranded out there.

I could taste all the retching aspects of my lunch all over again. There were moments when I thought I could make it home, and then other moments where I knew I needed a fast solution. I didn’t even consider pooping out in public—how would I wipe myself? And with the local sheriffs patrolling as if for a citywide drug bust I knew that I’d probably get caught. I also thought, What if I just pooped a little? Would that give me enough strength to get home and change my clothes?

While I was thinking that exact thought my body decided that it had lost the battle. Out came the diarrhea. For the sake of clarity—because I know people who talk about how common it is to poop while running, and what they’re talking about is more like a chunky fart—let me explain what happened. As if my underwear were a balloon, it was suddenly inflated with hot diarrhea. My “junk” was swimming in diarrhea. Diarrhea was dripping down my legs and fast soaking through my underwear and shorts. This, despite my bunching up my shorts and holding them taut at the skin at my thighs. And I was a mile and a half from home with out a cell phone, my ID, or hospital release forms on me.

Because of my devotion to this aspect of my blog, I can laugh about the experience now—or at least regard it as a site of inquiry—but it was truly harrowing at the time. I mean, I was a stranger in old person land, in a city whose layout is so confusing it seems like one could contain prisoners there, and I was dripping shit! I wondered if I would be arrested. I got lost trying to get back home and ended up having to walk down one of the busier main drags because I kept going in circles when I attempted the side streets. Golf carts and Cadillacs passed me, residents were out walking their dogs, efficient little women were winding down their exercise regiment. Strangely enough no one seemed to pay any attention—it may have been a form of politeness—though I would not have noticed if they did. I hung my head low out of shame, avoiding every encounter I could by crossing the street or taking a turn. I walked the whole way with my shorts bound up around my thighs with my fists. I cried a little. No, I cried a lot.

It only seemed fitting, I realized while wandering around bemoaning my existence, that the very week, the very year, that is bringing about large-scale structural changes in my life—work, romance, home—should culminate in such an episode. Perhaps I should be grateful that 2009 had begun by expunging a bunch of shit. That is what would have happened in a movie, at least.

My grandpa and his girlfriend were in the middle of cocktail hour when I finally made it home, and, bless their hearts, they were amused. They opened every door and window in the house and put bathroom fans and oven vents on high, but they were amused. (Grandpa’s girlfriend later recalled how “aromatic” the incident was.) When I got cleaned up and began compiling anecdotes for the telling of this story, they each regaled me with their own tales of incontinence. Grandpa recommended next time that I not take off any of my clothes before jumping in the shower. “Shoes and all. Take them off in the shower,” he said, “with the water going. That’s what the old folks do.”

The next night, as my reintroduction to solid foods, we went to an Italian restaurant called Portofino West. There was a man playing the guitar, which was plugged into a karaoke machine, doing “The Nearness of You” when we entered. Halfway through the song he started coughing something up, and without much interruption at all—he left the karaoke accompaniment going—he went to the bathroom and dislodged it. An hour and a few cocktails later, while we were finishing up our meal (at 8:30 we were one of three tables who were shutting the place down), I took a handful of change to the tip jar. As I made my way back to the table I was nearly overcome with affection for the gracious, also probably incontinent people I was eating with. If there is a place in the world to shit your shorts in public, I thought, Sun City West is that place. He began one of his best numbers, “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You, ” and we all swayed to the music together, most of us singing along at the refrain.

13 Ways to Find Christmas When The Spirit Ain't High

2008-12-12T17:31:00.008-05:00

It's unanimous: This year it just doesn't feel like Christmas. Between mass job losses and the otherwise bleak economic outlook, people don't seem to be thinking about it. I haven't been to a Wallmart lately, but from walking past the storefronts here in New York, it appears that the usual Christmas Machine Autocrats aren't even trying.

My dad thinks that this year people are going to finally recognize what Christmas is really about: family and friends, being thankful for those immaterial things, etc. I think that there's still going to be a lot of people moping around. Thus, I propose a few ways that you might find a little boost this year.

1. Make stingers. You can drink them out of pixie cups.
2. Elf yourself. And then Elf your entire family.
3. Go to your friend's holiday party that you were going to skip because it's cold outside. He will understand if you can't bring something boozy.
4. Have sex.
5. Make bread. Ingredients are cheap, you'll feel great about yourself, and then everyone in the house will perk their noses approvingly.
6. Decorate your dog or nephew, film him/her doing something, post it on YouTube, forward the link to everyone you know, and obsessively monitor the hits.
7. Cave. Get a Twitter account. Or don't. Just give it some thought.
8. Research your ancestry.
9. Obvs, volunteer someplace.
10. Introduce yourself to the couple your age who drive Hummers and just bought a house next door to your parents.
11. Don't turn on the computer for the whole day.
12. Alternately, liveblog your Christmas.
13. Take this to heart.

"Milk," and That Irritating Little Voice in the Back of My Head

2008-12-08T11:34:00.006-05:00

I saw Milk yesterday. It's very, very good, making me by turns tearful, inspired, devastated, resilient, etc etc etc, for hours after I finished watching it. It is so nice to see a movie that is about progress and its adversaries, and for viewers to have compassion for everyone on screen--to take a movie about a gay icon and to turn it into a broadly appealing movie about humanity. Josh Brolin's Dan White--a character that in less talented hands could have easily been one-dimensional, the Badly Coiffed Evil Enemy--is someone that most moviegoers, certainly me, felt some sympathy for. And even Denis O'Hare's John Briggs inspires a little bit of patronizing empathy. The film is endlessly gorgeous and infectiously aspirational, everyone should see it, and though it would have been nice if the film came out after Proposition 8 was shot down, it is nonetheless a very good reminder of how long it takes for the mechanics of change to set into motion. (Guys, we need to hit the streets.)

However.

OK, here's my problem with big, commercially successful movies that are about gay people: They always star straight people. Philadelphia, Brokeback Mountain, Robin Williams in The Birdcage (yes, yes, I know: Nathan Lane), Felicity Huffman in TransAmerica--oh, and hahaha, Will & Grace--and I haven't confirmed this one yet, but maybe Angels In America, too (I know about Patrick Wilson and Al Pacino, but not Justin Kirk, Jeffrey Wright, and the other guy whose name I can't remember). I know that this is one of those tenants of the Hollywood-Industrial Complex, that big star means big proceeds, and maybe I wouldn't even be writing this right now were not James Franco in it--I have nothing against us indulging our celebrity fantasies--but before we get too celebratory, it might be worth examining what all this means.

And what it means is nothing that you've not heard before: Is there a gay equivalent to Sean Penn and James Franco (stop dreaming, you did the same thing with Jake Gyllenhall and look who he's now frenching with) that would have commanded the same box office numbers? Could this movie have been as enthusiastically embraced if the actors were out in real life? It's like audiences want to be impressed by straight actors who can portray a gay person who they actually like. I don't know, something about this reminds me of white actors in blackface. Also the gay guys in Milk are, for the most part, very straight acting. There's not a lot of camp, and that's kind of strange. Even though too much camp would be strange, too.

Here's the question: For a movie about gay people to reach the widest possible audience, do the leads have to be A-listers, or do they have to be straight? So far, in terms of serious dramatic feature films, those categories appear to be mutually exclusive.

Venn Diagram

2008-12-07T10:50:00.005-05:00

When do we stop "liking" and start "loving"? And can you retreat back from love into like? Must one precede the other? I visualize this as one of those Venn diagrams where the circles overlap, and the overlapping gray area is the ideal state of any relationship. Like seems to be a simpler, more blasé, less demanding form of affection, and love is the result of a cultivated, time-honored "like," something proprietary that comes with hooks and nets and appendages. Like makes us smile on the outside, love makes us smile on the inside. But it must be that each is an impulse triggered by a completely separate emotional need, and when we like and love recklessly is when our feelings don't fall into the overlapping area. And then there must be a third circle for rigid contempt. It's entirely possible to love, like, and hate someone all at once--that overlapping gray area actually seems the most true and sophisticated. Hell, maybe there's a fourth one that I haven't figured out yet, and then this would be a very complicated approval matrix of like, love, hate, and something else. The fourth might simply be the absence of the other three: the verb form of numb.

Last night was the first snow of the Brooklyn winter, and I made cookies. This morning it's raining brown toilet water in my kitchen. For the second time since I signed the lease in August.

From My Family to Yours: An Xmas Eve Tradition

2008-12-06T10:45:00.009-05:00

Among the many wholesome family traditions that my ancestors have bequeathed to me, my favorite might be the Christmas Eve stinger. I've never ordered a stinger at a bar, and have really only heard outside reference in the song "The Ladies Who Lunch," where it is a vodka stinger--and that can't bear any semblance to the one I drink annually.

I think this tradition only extends to my grandparents, and unfortunately, I may be the only one (gay and childless) carrying the torch through to future generations. Thus, I share it with you, dear urban and virtual family. We believe it to have certain healing properties, because one year a neighbor came by with a head cold and after shooting one of these declared himself fully remedied; my experience, however, is more like waking up by the mantle on Christmas morning with the drink bubbling down my chin. To each his own. Happy holidays!

Lukas's Family Stinger

2 parts Brandy
1 part Crème de Menthe

Shake ingredients thoroughly in a cocktail shaker. Serve straight up in cute little holiday cordial glasses. Toast everyone exuberantly (ref. photo above), and then sip, ignoring that it tastes really bad. You'll start to like it come year four or so.

Thoughts About My Potential Food Job

2008-12-02T15:10:00.012-05:00

As most people who read this already know, there's a very good chance I'll be going to culinary arts school sometime within the next nine to twelve months. I've been looking at a few facilities--I saw Johnson & Whales in Charlotte, I'm heading up to CIA next week--and yesterday I visited the French Culinary Institute here in New York.

I have been unwavering in my conviction that the kitchen is where I want to be. I had worked in the kitchen of an Upper East Side restaurant while I was in college, and over the past five years in book publishing, my fondness for that restaurant job has developed exponentially. And moreover, I'm ready to try out something a little bit more unconventional (read: not taking the subway when everyone else does) that won't have me installed in front of a computer all day long. When someone a few months ago--tired, surely, of still listening to me complain about work--asked me what I would do if I could be getting paid to do anything, I said I'd probably spend my day exactly as I did every day while in Paris for a month: the morning shopping for food and the evening cooking it. With that I decided to pursue a food career, and I've allowed myself to completely embrace the nostalgia. I want to be on my feet again, peeling potatoes, skimming vats of stock, whizzing up tomato sauces with one of those enormous hand blender things, pressing chicken livers through a chinois, chopping up sidewalk-square sized blocks of chocolate, and the whole while losing all perspective when it comes to butter, salt, and sugar. I'd been carrying on like this for a few months now, and have even had many dreams about food.

I spent summers in high school and college working at a bread bakery, and bread bakeries always smell phenomenally delicious. But it's a funny thing about the smell of an industrial kitchen: they don't ever smell very good. On the line (basically where all the food is plated and cooked before taken out to the table) the only thing you smell is meat and oil--the floors and counters are danger zones because it's so slick. But in the prep station (where the vegetables are chopped and dressings and sauces made and the meats and seafood trimmed and cleaned; the above photo is extremely atypical) which is where I worked, it smells like ass. The trash can overpowers everything, and no amount of bleach can conceal the odor. So you have the wonderful, aromatic combination of ass and bleach and, because of the near Universal Rule of Bad Ventilation that the prep areas of kitchens adhere to and the constant 120-degree heat due to the boiler just ten feet away, a lot of heat (which I associate with the smell; it's weird), and there is on top of it all the sweaty, chemical, fumey vapor that comes from the dishwasher. I won't belabor the point here, but that toxic brew is like nothing I have ever smelled before, and with all my recent Proust-meet-madeleine romancing of the kitchen, I have until now managed to block it from my memory.

Until yesterday. Part of my tour of the FCI campus included a walk through the restuarant kitchen, which is part of the school's restaurant, L'Ecole. I had seen all of the four classroom-kitchens, which are sleek and beautiful and fully equipped and which look like the kind of place where I'd have my dream birthday party. But then my guide and I came through the swinging rubber doors of the L'Ecole kitchen and came face to face with That Smell. It was paralyzing. I was introduced to the chef, but I couldn't manage any coherent responses to his jokes about me being from Idaho because That Smell was gripping at my throat and telling me that I'd best run for my life. That Smell was screaming into my ear: Long hours and weekends! Cleaning 150 pounds of squid at a time (serious: I would have to do this at least once a week)! Organizing the walk-in refrigerator! Belittling waiters! Scary chef tirades! The sickness that is what your shoes become! Merengue!

I managed to calm myself down, and we didn't stay long in that kitchen, but I couldn't leave without a detectable tinge of unease about the whole thing. As in: Do I . . .? Really . . .? Want . . .? To do this?

Right now I'm going to say yes. Because I'm beginning to finally understand that all jobs suck a little bit, and if they don't suck, I will find something sucky about them. AND: I love food. I really do. And I want to be great with food. And I know getting older that being great at something requires more than just fervent admiration. So kids, Lukas is going to get his hands dirty. Boner appetit!

PoopGroup: Identity shift?

2008-11-18T22:09:00.002-05:00

Lukas once said (and it is one reason why i love him) that he wished he could get his period once so that he could understand what women go through. I think he meant in terms of pain, PMS, bloating, mood swings. I wish he could get his period once so that he could experience the pooping.

That end of first, sometimes end of second, day of period poop when its slips out like mud but is solid like a type four (but maybe with the thickness of type three!) its pure heaven! i am sad he doesn't get that experience. it is worth the days of type ones leading up to it.

Also:
1. pepitas are awesome for pooping
2. lukas thinks indian and martinis does the trick. (i say who cares? you can't keep up that habit and still be happy)
aaaannnnndd
3. the one thing i learned during (nearly) sober october is NOTHING gets the poop flowing like a good night of beer drinking.

Ghee: You Know You Want It

2008-11-16T20:51:00.004-05:00

Take a couple sticks of butter, put them in a saucepan. Set the heat low. You're going to melt the butter and watch for the milk solids to separate: they will gravitate towards the sides of the pan and drop to the bottom. If you wish, you can stop here and have clarified butter. But for ghee, leave it on the heat, and watch closely for those milk solids to brown. The browner the nuttier your ghee. You're looking for a dark, reddish brown color. When ready--the time it takes depends on the amount of water in the butter; start watching closely after 12 minutes or so--remove the pan from heat, and then strain the butter through three layers of cheesecloth into a glass or otherwise completely heatproof container (and it would be nice if it had an airtight lid). Let it cool--it will solidify like butter--and then close up, and refrigerate.

Ghee is really good. Obviously it's a staple of Indian cooking, but it's also a nice addition to any kind of saute : hearty greens, potatoes, beans, squash, etc. Mix it with canola or grapeseed oil to manage or to dilute the flavor. Like agave nectar, a little bit packs a punch.

You can make anywhere from one to fifteen sticks of butter, and it keeps for a very long time in the fridge.

Don't Speak, Memory

2008-11-12T22:53:00.006-05:00

There are things we wish to forget, and things we wish to forget but on principle feel the need to remember. One such thing of the latter category is my interpretation of Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Princess." It is a piece that I had managed to master for my high school senior piano recital, and which has remained in my diminishing repertoire ever since. In the two years that I spent at Willamette, prior to moving to New York, this was a piece I played often; it's one that I could play, unlike the ornamented, cold, and anal retentive finger-ey Baroque ones that my instructor at the time was assigning me to play. I regularly craved the familiarity of "Pavane" during my first two years of college. Until I came out, I could be found at the piano studio nearly every Friday and Saturday night, and I wasn't practicing anything that was assigned; I was liberally interpreting--in the style of David Lanz, or sometimes Jim Brickman (bad)--those pieces that I fancied myself good at, and "Pavane" was one such piece, along with "Claire du Lune" and several selections from Camelot.

So I had at one time perfected "Pavane" as much as any amateur pianist could. I always thought it was a dirge for some beloved, much too young, prematurely deceased, romantic fling from higher orders; actually it's nothing like that, instead aiming to "express a nostalgic enthusiasm for Spanish customs and sensibilities," memorializing not "death," per se, but the liberties of some entitled person's birthright. Regardless, it is an unbelievably gorgeous piece, and one that I played frequently, with extremely liberal interpretive ornamentations and gestures--some of which I actually imagined Ravel himself to posthumously approve of; I pictured him smiling on me, perched from a cloud, or peacefully rolling over in his coffin, towards the corner that was suddenly generating warmth--both during those weekend night sessions and, more importantly, in the immediate aftermath of my mother's death. It's a piece, like Death Be Not Proud or The Year of Magical Thinking or Angels in America Beethoven's Fifth (if you've read The Farewell Symphony) or even Dante, or countless other works of art, that provides solace to the bereaved. Playing "Pavane" was one of the few things that seemed to personally make sense at the time, and I played it often.

I hadn't played that piece--or any piece, really--for about three years until tonight. After a few cocktails, I began working my way through my repertoire and at some point I delved into that one. It caused a weird sensation at first, kind of like deja vu, kind of like emotional warfare. I slowly realized that this was the piece with which I had decided to memorialize my mother. I had said to myself, over three years ago, after a play-through I was especially proud of, "Don't forget this."

And yet I had. How could that be? Obviously I hadn't really wanted to remember, except in instances like this with the intended purpose of salting the wound. How many things, without stimulus, are lost in our brains forever? Perhaps this is the function of emotional memory: not to act as rolodex and to be available for recall at a moment's notice, but to reside invisibly until one's madeline gets dipped into one's hot beverage of choice. It's a little scary to have your vulnerabilities kept hostage like this.

Things I Thought about while Meditating This Morning

2008-10-09T09:54:00.004-04:00

Dinner with Kathryn and Izzy: Will leek risotto be good with the braised chicken?
Cigarette: What if I had one on my way to the train?
Dishes: I hate washing them.
Ellen: Need to write her an email.
This blog post.
Dad: Must be golfing with his brother right now.
This wonderful book, and how it chronicles a gay relationship in a way that I've never seen done.
Potato soup: Was good last night.
Wow: I'm not cold today.
Ronckytonk: I hope she didn't take offense with my obnoxious meditation comment.
I hate my Tumblr account.

Obviously I have some work to do.

Cold weather: Stock

2008-10-03T12:01:00.008-04:00

I love making soup, especially in weather like this (it is positively autumn outside). Among many of the things I finally realized while losing my culinary virginity in Paris two years ago was that store bought stock is gross. It's too salty, it doesn't taste fresh at all, and any purity you strive for with the other ingredients is seriously tarnished when it swims around in that stuff. Some books I've read recommend simmering the bullion or canned broth with some fresh herbs and vegetables to improve its flavor. I've tried this, and it's OK when you're in a pinch, but still a far cry from homemade stock.

(As a side note: they don't even sell canned broth in Paris--only the concentrated kind, bullion cubes, that you dissolve in hot water. This, I learned, was a WWI innovation--compact, lightweight, easy to prepare, nourishing food for soldiers.)

Making stock is fun and really easy, and when it's cold like this and the radiator doesn't work yet, it heats up your kitchen. When I make chicken stock, which isn't all that often, it's usually because I roasted a chicken the night before or I carved up a carcass myself. I hotly anticipate making chicken stock--the smell is like Proust's madeline.

There are many stock methods out there, but the gist of it is that you simmer the bones (for meat stocks) and vegetables, while skimming the foam and oil, until it tastes the way you want it to. I'm going to put a chicken and vegetable recipe, as well as my favorite recipe for a quick garlic and herb stock that I usually make at the same time as I prepare soup.

For chicken stock (this is a Saturday project): Put a bit of oil in the stock pot. Add the mirepoix--celery, onion, and carrot, all roughly chopped--which is the standard vegetable base. Throw in a handful of parsley, some thyme, a couple smashed heads of garlic, a bay leaf, 10 or so black peppercorns, and 2 whole cloves. Put the lid on it for ten minutes; this concentrates the flavors. Then pour cold water over everything, enough to cover it all by several inches. When it comes to a boil, add 2 teaspoons salt, then turn it down to simmer. Skim the fat and foam as it rises to the top, and after it's simmered for a two hours or so, start tasting it. When it tastes good to you, after 3 or 4 hours, take it off the heat, strain it, and once cooled, refrigerate or freeze.
Viola.

For vegetable stock--EASY!: Save all your vegetable clippings (carrot tops and peelings, parsley stems, potato skins, celery tops, spinach stems, even leftover lentil beans, etc etc etc--the only thing I wouldn't recommend using is onion skin, and be forewarned that beets clippings will turn your stock an unappetizing pink color) that have accumulated over the week. Heat up some oil in a stock pot. When it's hot, saute 2 tablespoons on tomato paste in it. A minute later, throw in the mirepoix and all your vegetable clippings, and, for good measure, some garlic and bay leaf and black peppercorns and any other fresh herbs you want to use up. Stir to coat, and then cover it for 10 minutes. All the greens should be really bright when you open the lid. Cover with cold water, bring to a boil. When it boils, add 2 teaspoons salt, and then simmer for an hour or so, tasting along the way. When it's done, strain it. Poof. Healthy!

But my favorite, fast, easy, flavorful, fortifying tonic garlic broth is this one. Drink it when you're sick or have a hangover. It comes, basically, from this wonderful cookbook that you all probably have already.

This one--along with the others, of course--can be easily catered to whatever you're going to use it in. Add potato skins if you're making potato soup, or asparagus ends, mushroom stems, or any other complimenting herbs like sage or rosemary. Like the vegetable stock before this, make it as you're preparing the other ingredients for the soup. Also, as a warning, this may not hold up in heavier, cream-based soups--it is flavorful, but not rich--but it is a good go-to when you're making, say, braised chicken or a reduction sauce and need a just cup of stock; you can half and improvise the recipe very easily, the ingredients are very cheap, and it is so much better than canned stuff. Plus, after eating this for a while, the taste of homemade chicken stock will be a luxurious, buttery indulgence when you next make it.

1 T olive oil
2 T tomato paste (sun-dried is best)
2 shallots, halved
20 garlic cloves, skins mostly removed, and smashed with the back of a knife
10 parsley branches
5 of so thyme sprigs
2 bay leaves
10 black peppercorns
2 whole cloves
2 t salt

Heat the oil in a stock pot. When hot, saute the tomato paste for a minute. Add the garlic and all remaining ingredients but the salt. Saute for a few minutes, and then cover with 2 1/2 quarts water. Bring to a boil, add the salt, and then simmer for 45 minutes or so, tasting often. Strain when done. I think you can still use the garlic if you'd like.

Sober October

2008-10-02T14:59:00.006-04:00

Sober October. I had never heard of this incredibly bleak-sounding concept until it came up at PoopGroup founder Meghan's debate-watching party last week. Evidently there are people who ritually give up alcohol for the month of October, by virtue of the month's rhyme-y sounding name with "sober." Good for them.

It would be really, really (really) hard for me to give up alcohol for a month. Not unless I was so sick that it didn't sound good. So instead I'm turning October into a heathen's Lent. For this month, I'm not drinking coffee. Just lots and lots of green-mint tea. So my blood and pee probably smell faintly like toothpaste.

Additionally, I'm meditating every morning. In this book I recently read, the protagonist encounters a monk in Nepal who tells her, in the style of someone chiding you for not exercising, that she should practice meditating at least once a day. "It's very good for you," the monk says. That is actually the source of inspiration. Because I haven't gone to yoga for . . . three months . . . I've been missing the meditating. One thing I've noticed is that meditating is much easier when you do it at the beginning of the day rather than the end. It may not be as effective--and I may be missing the point entirely--but when meditating in the evenings, at the classes I used to go to, it would be impossible for me to control my thoughts. Work crap, bills crap, roommate crap, state of the world crap, it's all mounted up over the course of the day and all of it wants my complete, soul-rotting attention. In the morning, however, I have a relatively clean mind and outlook. Only morning sounds--birds, alarm clocks, upstairs tenants stirring sugar into their coffee (I hear all kinds of stuff through the air shaft)--manage to interrupt my focus, and I find them to be sort of refreshing. And then I float my eyes open unto a new day that is rife with booze after work.

Anyway, we've got a superbowl feast--including chicken wings and bean dip and that onion dip that has sour cream and mayo in it--happening for the debates tonight. AND Palin Bingo!

Don't be a jerk.

2008-09-22T11:18:00.005-04:00

I was waiting for the train this morning, reading a book, caffeine giddy, and when the train pulled in I did my customary sweep of the available seats and plotted towards the car that seemed to offer the most hope of me getting one. I shimmied down the platform alongside the door I wanted to use, and in doing so I nearly crashed head-on into a young woman who didn't do the shimmy thing, who was very passé and disinterested and waiting casually for the train to stop. She didn't have any of that blood thirst/seat lust in her eyes, and in fact, once she registered mine, she nearly laughed in my face. It was one of those "oh yeah, I hate myself now, too—thanks" moments. The train doors opened, and I let her take the good seat.

Ugly Marriages

2008-09-21T11:32:00.005-04:00

I saw this play Fifty Words last night. It's an ugly play about Jan and Adam's ugly marriage and their ugly resentments and ugly infidelities and their poor 8-year old son named Greg who's already fucked up because of it all. It must be an exhausting thing to perform, and the performances--there's only the battling couple on the stage the whole time--are nothing I'll criticize. But . . . isn't this subject kind of tiresome? There must be some fantasy in the playwright's wanting to write it all down. Justifying a 10-year-long infidelity? Entitling one's self to be a big bitch? The guy just trying to keep himself sprightly in an overburdened world, and the gal exhausted from bearing the bulk of that burden? Do people want to see these types of plays? More importantly: do people see themselves in such plays? In the end it's always about forgiveness, which means compromise for one of them, and the devices are the dark truths that come to light (ie, wife never wanted kids--and, BTW, are there instances of female playwrights putting such admittances in actresses mouths?--and husband's shaky job prospects).

In any case, here's another opportunity for me to be happy to be gay. Gays still have the opportunity to keep our relationships from getting scarred by such historical burdens, which is to say that yes, this kind of play is the residue of a long, pretty depressing cultural history that tricks people into thinking they know what they want and which---though I'll say it happened under much sunnier circumstances--ultimately begot me, and that while gay marriage might be legal soon, there is still time to question what it all is for, and redefine those social expectations that threaten us to write ugly plays about ourselves.

College, cigarettes, and surrender

2008-09-16T11:12:00.008-04:00

I just went out for coffee and the crisp fall weather that has settled in made me instantly nostalgic for college. Oh, it was so nice at Hunter, between classes on days like this, to go wait around outside the entrance on 68th and Lexington and smoke a cigarette and check out all the other kids. Some people would look busy on their cell phones; then there were those hot 19-year-old couples nuzzled up groin to butt, pretending to carry on a conversation with whatever group they were appending themselves to; there was always a circle of dudes playing hacky sack; and the students with day jobs darting through with brief cases and skirt suits, and the TAs and professors trying to get through unnoticed; and then of course the hobos making the rounds. And then lots of onlookers just like me. It was even fun when it was freezing outside. When I had 8 AM classes I would get up at 6 AM and go to Neil's Diner beforehand, where the waiter--now I can't remember his name, I think it was Jorge--knew what I would order (and who, when I went back a few years later with my parents, still remembered my "regular"; my parents figured that it was my unkempt 'fro that he recognized, but he told them it was my smile), which was two scrambled eggs, hash browns, and a toasted corn muffin, light on the butter; I would eat this three times a week. And this is exactly what cigarettes are good for, for after you eat a breakfast like that while simultaneously annotating something by Eliot, and you're making your way back to class but you have five minutes to burn, and you stop outside the entrance and see all the people who you will forever recognize but whose names you never get, and you smoke a cigarette and wonder how could ANYTHING get better than this!? Man, they used to taste SO GOOD! Parliament Lights! And cigarettes were the boondoggle of college--I got executive privilege with some of my professors, bonding with them as I did over cigarettes (and how cool is it when you're 21 years old and you can bum a cigarette to your professor?). And then to get orgasmic about Virgina Woolf, and to sincerely use the word "heteronormative" fifty times in an hour, and to have undying curiosity and ambition, nothing would ever get in your way. . . . .

I was talking recently to one friend about a mutual friend, we were discussing how things have changed between me and said mutual friend, and the only way I could think to describe it was by saying that "there's just not the same surrender between us." It's probably a combination of several things--getting old, career slump, shifting obligations and priorities--and it's very likely a temporary thing, and I'm clearly romanticizing it a little bit. But I think this idea of "surrender" is something that goes hand in hand with youth. The surrender probably won’t ever return. It's a hybrid of idealism, complete trust, mutual vested personal interest, not being proprietary with feelings. It's a bit life choice, a bit of unexpected circumstantial paradise. It can't sustain itself for very long, but god it's great while it lasts.

Cooking at Home: Why is it such a pain in the ass?

2008-09-12T15:55:00.001-04:00

I just moved into a new apartment, with the kitchen, though very small, being one of its selling features. I'm also now living with my boyfriend. I thought the intersection of these two things would lead to much cooking at home and much money saved, but instead, the opposite appears to be happening. We've eaten out three of the past four weeknights. Below are some of my corrective measures.

Here's why cooking at home is such a pain in the ass: dishes. No matter where your recipe or inspiration comes from, there are going to be dishes. (Unless you're like my grandfather and primarily use disposable plates and cutlery.) A dishwasher would help, but the thing that will help most here--and sometimes I lack the discipline, too--is to clean as you go. It's true.
But essentially, the key to good and easy home cooking is planning. This means not having to go grocery shopping every night. My mother used to write out all the meals for the whole week and then shop accordingly. I don't do that because I never know what's going to sound good, but I do know which ingredients I need to have on hand so that I can work within my culinary whims. I almost always have an assortment of vegetables, which can take you in millions of different directions, a stash of dry pasta and the makings for some kind of sauce, eggs, bread, and some kind of protein in the freezer, like chicken sausage.
Planning, cont.: When I'm on top of my game, I get all kinds of stuff done on a Sunday afternoon: caramelized onions, pesto, roasted peppers or tomatoes; I'll bake something like like zucchini bread or brownies or quiche; I wash and clean all my greens and fruits and vegetables; I hard-boil eggs; I make a vat of vegetable or chicken stock, and maybe I'll make soup; and then some kind of side dish in abundance like pasta salad or hummus. It's totally possible to get this much done, and then you have a foundation for all your lunches and dinners later in the week.
Cook the food you want to eat. This may sound dumb, unless you've had one too many flavorless pasta dishes that, from the second you started cooking them, didn't interest you.
A poached egg is an instant upgrade. Put it on top of your salad or your pasta or a piece of toasted bread and you have an entree.
Good cheeses--especially good parmesean-regganio--improve the sex appeal of your dishes tenfold.
Also, make use of your freezer. This should be obvious.
And buy your fruits and vegetables at the farmer's market. This should also be obvious. Freedom requires discipline.

Many people don't want this kind of work and wouldn't appreciate the payoff, which is fine. But when good food is a priority, and you have some life-denying day job, and come home from work exhausted, and open to the fridge to find spinach you'll have to clean and a bunch of other stuff that already looks like too much work, like the makings for ratatouille, you're going to order crappy take out or go to a delicious neighborhood restaurant, both of which are making you feel gross and sucking your checking account dry. There is another way.

For the record

2008-09-12T14:30:00.005-04:00

I do not "like" Sarah Palin anymore. I don't know that I ever really "liked" her--I know I said that I did--but I think I was more interested in figuring out the roots of her appeal. Now I'm over it. In a big way. Like, give Obama all your money.

Identity politics are dead.

2008-09-08T16:35:00.006-04:00

There must have been a time and a place for identity politics; in fact, I know that in the sixties and seventies it was a mobilizing force. By uniting people around their shared biological (and usually marginalized) imperatives, it was an easy way to draw a crowd. And it's very simple. I found identity politics to be incredibly seductive when I was early in my college career: I loved the idea that the personal is political, and that I was a political cog in the wheel by virtue of my being gay. Plus it's an easy way to speak on behalf of a group of people, and it's an easy way to believe yourself to be politically active: all you have to do is be Different. It didn't take long to feel a little spiteful and think it to be incredibly reductive.

Several months ago (and my friends must tire of hearing this story, no doubt the four of you who might read this), when Hillary and Barack were going neck to neck, I said that I was certain that McCain would choose Condeleeza Rice as his running mate and it would invert the whole issue of the Democrats and this "historic" election year. That's not exactly what happened, but I think that Sarah Palin comes close enough. If there is one person who personifies the fact that "feminism" as an organizing principle has fully expired, it is the human presence of Sarah Palin and this baffling concept of the "pro-life feminist." I never thought I would be the one to say this: Feminism as a political tool has run its course. It's up to a new generation of people to re-define and rename feminism and advocate on its behalf. When identity politics has been co-opted by its former detractors, that means that we're now using the master's tools and living in the master's house and have suddenly been disenfranchised in our efforts to dismantle it.

I'm not saying that feminist efforts aren't valid. Rather, I'm saying that you can't take for granted anymore that a "feminist effort" will have a preconceived "feminist" agenda. Maybe everyone knows this already. But I think that if I were going to try to affect change, in a way that I or someone I admire would deem progressive for women, I wouldn't use the word feminist. I don't think it helps.

I remember saying, in my ardent Hillary phase, that I want to see a woman president--and I've even admitted to friends that I think women are better than men--and maybe this is universally understood and in my shortcomings as any kind of analyst I'll just have to go with it--but: does anyone actually believe that X identity will bequeath X politics? I think all along it's just been dusted off when it comes in handy, like with Hillary ("How can you not vote for Hillary? What kind of feminist are you?") or with Sarah Palin ("How can you not vote for Sarah Palin? What kind of feminist are you?") or with Coors Light ("We love gay people who drink our beer!"). People vote with their hearts all the time, irrational as those hearts may be, but methinks that the next mass movement should be about voting with your head.

Sarah Palin is Causing Me an Identity Crisis

2008-09-04T09:49:00.008-04:00

I have something terrifying to say: I kind of like Sarah Palin. I watched her speech last night, I scoffed at it, went through the motions of thinking it was really good, and then really bad, and oh wow we're in trouble, and then oh hell no, she's got nothing on Obama, and then I went to bed, and I couldn't stop thinking about her. In fact, I didn't sleep! I couldn't get that hockey mom-pit bull joke out of my head.

From the second I heard her voice on NPR, when it was announced that she would be McCain's running mate, I was immediately familiar with her. Growing up, Sarah Palin was my piano teacher, school principal, gas station attendant, mom's best friend, PTA president, pesticide control representative, and swim coach. I know Sarah Palin. Everyone in my family knows Sarah Palin. Idaho knows Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin, I immediately realized, is going to be someone that a lot of people in America can relate to. And I recognized her most dangerous characteristic--deducted, of course, from this idea that she's familiar to me: her conviction. She is 150% self assured. She doesn't question or doubt herself. Some might argue that this is a defining characteristic of the GOP and of lots of politicians; I think the difference here is that while Rudy Guliani and Mitt Romney--and even Hillary Clinton last week--might have gone back to their hotel rooms and eaten their shit after their speeches, Sarah Palin has no such alter ego. She belives every word she says.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I am a product of the West and using that fact as my reasoning as to why I don't seem to be fully engaged with people in New York anymore (or the fact, perhaps, that they are starting to annoy me a lot. It could also be that the denouement of my publishing career is upon me and I've now looked into the face of New York's cultural elite and shook hands with it and... well, that's the nicest thing I can think to say about it. My regard for "thinkers" has plummeted since college). Many of the people I know here have embraced Obama with a fervor that baffles me. He has appeared to me all along as a politician who is very good at writing and giving speeches. I'm sure he's a good person, and he's accomplished, of course, and a pioneering cultural figure, but more than anything he is a politician, and like all politicians, calculating. I can't help but associate his appeal over here--and the respective disdain for Hillary Clinton as I've experienced it--with the type of endemic idealism that perpetuates the social ills (like racism and class stratification) in New York. Similar to the notion that reading A People's History of the United States absolves one of any classist inclinations.

So Sarah Palin enters my life as something that is in direct opposition to basically everything else that is happening. Even in disagreeing with nearly everything she says, I believe her. She may preach a fucked up breed of morals, but dammit, those morals govern her life, too. She'll look you in the face and tell you that if her daughter were raped, she would still choose life (and, I mean, we forgive Obama his anti-gay marriage stance, so what's one more small concession? It's just politics!), and how can you not believe her? And bitch can kill a moose! Yes, I actually find her kind of refreshing! If it weren't for her pro-life, anti-environment, and delusional-perspective-on-the-war stuff, I might be swayed to vote differently! But there's no reason to worry about that quite yet.

Top search results for this blog. Not as boring as it sounds.

2008-09-02T15:24:00.004-04:00

I got Google Analytics a few months ago and am now learning how to use it. There are many very interesting things going on--in particular, how my little line graph that charts the site visits appears to have had a seizure on the rare occasions when the visits exceeded five per day. Today I learned how to see what searches have led strangers to this blog. In descending order--well, OK, everything but the #1 had only one visit:

Yoga positions to release gas
Yoga position release gas
Yoga fart

Evidently there is considerable interest in the intersection of flatulence and yoga.

Sharing cindy
Shakshouka recipe raw food
Points shakshouka
Pink isn’t just a color its an attitude

Here is my VERY FAVORITE and MOST PLEASANTLY VEXING search:

Mutual pooping

A few shoe-ins:

Chocolate nemesis
"jess roncker"

And then, reason #5432890423098423098 that I need to be in a new line of work/modern life is exhausting, this one has brought a whopping SIXTEEN anonymous visitors to "Thanks for Sharing"(and I will spare you the endless misspellings of both "enhancing" and "underwear" and the one lonely person out there looking for a "butt enhancing blog"):

Butt enhancing underwear

PoopGroup: Is there a cure for the summertime poos?

2008-07-14T10:09:00.003-04:00

Multiple theories run through my mind when I ask myself why I have been so ejecta challenged:

1. I am homeless, again. (side note: I swear this is the last time I put myself through this.)
2. Constant dehydration. No matter how much water I drink, I manage to not have enough
3. Lack of consistent eating patterns due to homelessness, money problems, terrible grad school schedule - which includes one class from 830-12 that allows no coffee, food or water in the classroom.
4. Not enough veggies
5. New exercise regime
6. The large cracks between stall wall and stall door in the always crowded grad school bathroom. which is where i am spending most of my time.

Where is God?

PoopGroup: Infiltrating Your Dreams

2008-07-11T10:53:00.007-04:00

Over dinner, we discussed our recent stomach issues, wondered if we are victim to a mild salmonella outbreak because we both have had long skinny poops and nausea-inducing waves of stomach pain that somehow don't culminate in diarrhea even though they feel like they should, both of which conditions seem not to have been triggered by anything in particular. Then, this morning, the following email:

i had a sort of dream, more idea, that bioterrorism struck new york city in a big way, contamination running rampant, everyone's poop looking strange and long and skinny. so naturally, in response, you took poop group to a new level and turned into some sort of superhero and fought for the right of the people to have a good, clean, natural poop again.

The Gospel According to Rickie Lee Jones: A Heathen Explains

2008-06-30T09:53:00.014-04:00

I saw Dame RLJ last night at Le Poisson Rouge. She's always amazing, but this was particularly good. She sang for two and a half hours straight. She sang selections from almost all her albums. Her band was great. She looked great. She sounded great. Her daughter flocked the stage for some inspired backup vocals in an otherwise solo version "Falling Up," which I actually didn't think was so great until I realized it was her daughter. What can I say? I love everything this woman does. She sounds like a siren, an original poet, she sings about big things—dark, heavy shit—in provocative, fleeting, and thoroughly artistic ways, and there's not a trace of a panderer in her. I'm certain that one day she'll be taught at universities, if not become a posthumous poet laureate of the universe.

Her last album is inspired by the teachings of Christ—based on Lee Cantelon's The Words—but she still maintains her agnosticism, and I've found that her breed of spirituality has informed mine. Her faith is probably much more sophisticated than how I describe it here—I really have no fluency in religion at all—but I think this, from "Where I Like It Best," which aims to reclaim prayer from much of its current political misuse, sums up something substantial:

God . . .
You are the prayer . . .
Those words you want to speak
They are the prayer
That dance you make
When you're by yourself
Just before your mother calls you on the phone
You are the prayer

I like how she reduces the individual to a collective, rather than the other way around: that the prayer offers the thread of united consciousness, and results in an omniscient (though perhaps self-defined) God. Heathen that I am, I can't tell you if this is generally understood to be the purpose of prayer, but it reminds me of yoga and for that reason I like it.

And given my curiosity about death, I'm also going to share her theory. It might be a Buddhist principle—again, the yoga thing—because it's the idea of a fixed quantity, a single vat of recycled energy: dying is no more than being dumped back into that vat and squirted out again for new life with the elements redistributed:

The golden thread of nature of this is:
Simply that we are a part of everything
That will ever exist.
To be loved is why we've come.
Every drop of rain that fell or falls
is always falling
on and on and on and on.
("A Tree on Allenford")

Which is a more cheerful way of saying this:

What you have will never be enough.
You will always want more.
But lift me out, over one more night.
All I want is what I was before.
("It Takes You There")

And then here, we have the "transition" taking place, the reduction/submission of the body into senses (this is an unbelievably gorgeous song, one that you play either while you're under influences, before you go to sleep, or as you go to sleep, wondering meanwhile if you'll ever wake up again). I don't know if this song in particular fits into the RLJ gospel, but in the off chance that someone reads this and is inspired to listen to her music, I can't recommend this one enough:

A distant light
that binds me.
A distant sound
that finds me,
When I'm through.
("Vessel of Light")

I mean, please:

Weekend recap

2008-06-17T12:28:00.009-04:00

I was in Charlotte last weekend, and I have a myriad of events to report:

- My brother and I surprised the bejesus out of my Dad for Father's Day. Guerrilla surprise photos available upon request.

- A pile of mulch was dumped onto the driveway, blocking the garage and thus keeping me under house arrest. (Remember, outside of New York, absolutely no destination is walkable, save the church and the mail box.)

- But which led me to discover The Kitchen Diva, pictured. On her food show, she made patties of soy sausage, and mixed in poultry seasoning. She also made the case for some primary food, I can't remember which one, being of African origin. I kind of loved her a whole very lot.

- I heard "It's Raining Men" on the radio three times in so many days.

- I ate wild boar, prepared two different ways.

- I drank four different types of wine, in a single evening.

- And liveblogged the Tonys while doing so.

A memorable weekend! What I remember of it, at least!

Poopgroup: new home, new dome

2008-05-30T21:51:00.005-04:00

I am sitting in my almost empty bedroom on the eve of moving day, thinking about poop. Tomorrow I will take up residence with my best friends from high school, oddly enough, and I am having weird poop about it. here are some signs (and not so signs):

1. last weekend i went camping and ended up ingesting hot dogs and beer, almost exclusively. I wrote lukas a brief gchat about the regret that overwhelmed me monday night being immediately absolved by the five pounds i lost the next morning in one easy, satisfying lucky-day bowel movement.
2. I have pooped two times a day since tuesday.
3. My usual pre-third period poop at school/work was being replaced by a 9th period yearning for my home toilet. This is most crazy because in my hierarchy of poop places, public restrooms (even if they are at work) will often trump my residence de jour - the anonymity becoming the comfort factor.

I think my "home" theory is proving true. While my #2 was stubborn during my stay here in greenpoint (gag), now that i am leaving it is trying to get in as much action as possible. how is it that my poop is more intuitive and emotionally complex than i am?

and that is reason 763 why i love poop!

Service industries

2008-05-27T16:39:00.004-04:00

A few times over the past week or so I have had this euphoric, gaze into the soft light, Coors commercial-style epiphany that I'm finally getting somewhere with my job, as in, I'm one of them, one of the ones on the fast track, a young media savant. (I think it's because I had a moment of public recognition last week, which coincided with the launch of a project I've been working hard on and which is coming nicely to fruition. And the nicely to fruition part is very true.) It was a fleeting thing, but enough that I described my job in great detail for my grandfather, for the first time ever, and even impressed myself.

Then I spent half the weekend anguishing over one stupid little work thing that I forgot to do and the eminent chaos and my deep personal failure, and it made me mad that I was giving it so much thought, and then I got mad because of being mad, and on and on, essentially lasting all of Memorial Day, making me sort of paralyzed with resentment and never wanting to return to work again. And then I had a meeting this afternoon which was ripe with navel gazing, where I fell for the "since you are our resident expert..." bait and agreed to take on way more work that I can handle, and I have to ask: Is every job in America at root just a means of servicing someone's ego? Until it is eventually one's own?

Perspiration

2008-05-23T10:27:00.001-04:00

Since childhood, I’ve maintained a very romantic notion of my body’s ability to sweat. I’m a dainty thing. I was the last to get hair in my armpits. I don’t use locker room showers. They’re gross, and I don’t need them. Growing up, my parents resisted letting me use deodorant for reasons I still don’t understand. But I do understand that in doing so they planted in me the conviction that I don’t emit body odors. So you can imagine my delusion last night when, after a strenuous yoga class, during which enough sweat pooled on my mat that I nearly slipped and died while trying to do a forearm stand, I left the studio, got onto the train and thought, “this reeks,” and then got onto the bus and thought, “foul,” and then got home, closed my bedroom door and said out loud, “why does everything smell so rank?” Then I finally realized that it was me, all along, smelling like cheese.

I don’t hate Mother’s Day

2008-05-11T18:04:00.011-04:00

I’m going to use Mother’s Day this year, first, to bemoan the lack of women in my life. Yes, most of my friends are women, but there is a threateningly large amount of testosterone in every other aspect of my life—my job, my living arrangement, my family, my “romantic inclinations.” Both my grandmothers died five years ago, and my mom died three years ago, and I’m not very close with any other female relatives, and I only see my therapist (a woman) every three or four weeks. I don’t understand how I got here.

No, I don’t hate Mother’s Day. But judging from the past few Mother’s Days, my body knows that it’s coming before my mind does—I just get sad when May starts. And when I lived in Park Slope, I was jealous of all the kids who had their Midwest moms in town, moms wearing their “city outfits” (Talbots or Ann Taylor, the Coldwater Creek left at home) with their “smart flats” (or tennis shoes!), all of which drew more attention to them than if they were to wear their usual clothes. Yeah, that’s what my Mom would have done. It’s cute. I looked forward to my Mom’s weekend visits from the day I moved here; I thought it would, first of all, be really fun (Fairway! Dinner parties! At my adorable apartment! Pilates! Powerwalking through the park!), but most of all I thought that showing her how much I love New York would be the easiest and clearest way of explaining myself to her (though I may have lifted this fantasy from a Michael Cunningham novel).

She never came alone to visit. The one time I did have time alone with her in the city, which was when my Dad was here for a work engagement—and incidentally this is my most vivid visual of her before she really got sick—was when she came to the Feminist Press to take me and Jess Roncker out to lunch. At the time, she had what the doctors thought was lupus and a resulting blood clot in her leg; that most vivid visual—what I think of when I try to remember what she last looked like before she got sick—is of her walking up the hall, beaming, with a limp. I don't mean at all to underestimate her, but it was the first time she was maneuvering though the city by herself and thus a pretty marvelous thing that she made it to and from the CUNY Graduate Center on her own.

Mother’s Day actually makes me sadder than any other reminders of her life—her birthday, the memorial of her death, other holidays. And it was never a holiday that my family or I celebrated with special finesse. Strangely, I’ve zeroed in on Mother’s Day as a kid’s opportunity to present him- or herself to his or her mom as an adult, and I worry sometimes that I never did that properly. Maybe this is the kind of thing one can only worry about after one loses a parent. And of course there are more important things to worry about.

But in other news, the Pam Plant, which I planted last summer on the memorial of her death over at the Waterfront Museum in Red Hook, is absolutely thriving. There are lots of healthy looking flower buds. I'm going to go back out there tonight and get the rest of the weeds.

My new Tumblr account

2008-05-10T16:17:00.005-04:00

I just got a Tumblr account to add to the Thanks for Sharing empire. It is very fun. Given its ADD bias, I'll do the photos and links and quotes and other short order miscellany over there, but maintain my "long form" journalism here. Ha-ha.

A new blog

2008-05-04T17:49:00.002-04:00

It's just me, Izzy

Pride and Prejudice

(5:31:17 PM) izzyf7: OH!
(5:31:21 PM) izzyf7: mr darcy showed up
(5:31:33 PM) lukas: liveblogging pride and prejudice
(5:31:43 PM) lukas: how about his sister?
(5:31:45 PM) lukas: in the movie
(5:31:49 PM) izzyf7: maybe i’ll get a tumbl right now
(5:31:54 PM) izzyf7: I KNOW what a bitch
(5:32:04 PM) lukas: and then judi dench at the end
(5:32:25 PM) izzyf7: yep
(5:32:28 PM) izzyf7: i’m getting one
(5:32:42 PM) lukas: good

Poopgroup: Hold the almonds!

2008-04-22T16:35:00.003-04:00

I began an almond love affair when I was taking calculus during my senior year of high school, after my mom read in Ladies Home Journal that they make you smarter. When my calculus scores were faltering, I started eating them every day and, lo and behold, the scores improved. And up until a few weeks ago, I've been eating them semi-religiously.

I didn't deliberately remove almonds from my diet (it was basically that I got lazy and cheap), but since I stopped eating them every day, one thing has become resoundingly clear: the quality and quantity of my poop has improved a hundredfold. Suddenly it happens multiple times a day! And they are lucky days* at that! Has anyone else shared this experience?

Almonds have some great benefits otherwise, and it really is a shame to put stools over smarts. But I guess that's how the cookie crumbles.

*A "lucky day" is when you wipe once and realize that you never needed to in the first place.

State Rep. Nicole LeFavour might be my hero

2008-04-15T12:00:00.005-04:00

The Idaho Statesman was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize! For its "tenacious coverage of the twists and turns in the scandal involving the state's senator, Larry Craig"! I have just spent about an hour and a half of my life catching up on that tenacious coverage, and though it really hammers the point home that most mainstream journalism is written at a second grader's reading level, I'm still kind of proud of my hometown paper. Anyway: reporter Dan Popkey brought the story to the national stage (though there had been unfounded rumors in the blog world and elsewhere for at least twenty years) and then garnered a lot of acclaim for his continuing coverage, which includes a well-intentioned if choppy, clammy, and ridiculously subheaded feature article that seeks to contextualize gay life in the 1950s and 60s Idaho as a means of trying to sympathize (?) with Craig's covert gayness. (Here it is. Or for a more . . . gripping account read this book instead.) Which is a profoundly depressing topic, by the way, due not entirely to the difficult plight of gays and lesbians at that time, but also because people in Idaho are clearly still freaked out by gays. Just take a look at the comments on the newspaper's website (here for reactions to Popkey's expose, here for the Pulitzer news, and here for the said feature article).

It was a combination of these reiterations (of both Idaho's homophobia and the continuing struggles of gays and lesbians there) that made me fall temporarily in love with Idaho State Representative Nicole LeFavour, who is the state's first openly gay lawmaker.
When the results of a recent poll state that 44 percent of Idahoans think that "homosexuality should be discouraged," one realizes that LaFavour's accomplishment is nothing minor. I don't mean to get preachy, but it's easy to forget how important people like her are.

Cindy McCain may or may not eat raw fish

2008-04-15T09:34:00.007-04:00

In an attempt to ingratiate themselves to Americana, the John McCain website now has a corner called "Cindy's Recipes." And then this morning the Huffington Post found that they were all mostly lifted from the Food Network!

By the way, it's very hard to plagiarize a recipe. You can basically shuffle the order of the ingredients, or call for something "finely diced" instead of "minced," and no one will be able to take legal action. Not that any legal action is being taken, at least as of right now. What's more worrisome is that Cindy doesn't have her own recipe for passion fruit mousse that she brings to the church picnic.

Problems with Butt-Enhancing Underwear

2008-04-12T12:23:00.008-04:00

I don't think I'm much of a prude when it comes to sex and, say, the economy of sex, and the coexisting complexity and baseness of human desire—I did after all study a lot of Foucault and Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler and for a period of my life read every single 19th- and early 20th century novel as an exercise in coded homoerotic behavior—but I do often suffer from a massive ignorance when it comes to the mechanics of how people get laid. My sexual history is probably very uninteresting, and the fact that I've been in a relationship for a while seems sometimes to be a weird fluke. Being a single person in the world, in the event that you would rather not be, isn't easy, and neither is cracking the code of gay mating calls, and my experience at gay bars and other gay social functions continues to be more confusion than connection: how to talk to strangers, the pointlessness of loud music and dim lights, the forthrightness, the disconnect between what's "normal" inside versus outside these places, ie, the satiating of primal instincts being at odds with how one otherwise leads one's life. . .

Which takes us to the subject at hand:

If you can't make it out, that is a model wearing “butt-enhancing,” D-cup underwear.

If you are wearing butt-enhancing underwear, you are probably wearing them in front of someone who has not seen your unenhanced butt before. And the butt enhancing probably serves as a means to an end, the end being getting laid, probably. Granted, maybe people don't want to get laid; maybe the goal is to maintain a mystifying notion of one's butt. Those people don't apply, and I have doubts about them. Here's the crux: Isn't the prospect of going home with someone and having to peel off the D-cups in front of a stranger who wasn’t expecting it worse than the prospect of having to show off your real, flatter, slightly less supple but probably still very admirable butt? How do you explain yourself? Wouldn't it be embarrassing? Sure, there are lots of variables—one night stand, too drunk to tell, too dark to tell, it's a costume, the possibly brilliant revelation that both or all parties are wearing butt-enhancing underwear, and, of course, since this is my first run-in with the product, maybe no one actually wears it. But butt-enhancing underwear certainly doesn’t improve our lot. In fact, this kind of thing probably makes us hate ourselves more than we might already, in addition to encouraging more flagrant consumerism and perpetuating ridiculous and unachievable beauty standards, etc, etc, etc. Who to blame? The Wonderbra? Ourselves? The corporate-consumer-media-monolith that is to blame for everything?

What year are we living in? How come I haven't heard about this until now?

2008-04-09T16:39:00.004-04:00

I guess being gay is a luxury. It is probably good to remind one's self that it hasn't been all that long that one could freely check the "gay" box on one's myspace account, let alone expect partner benefits at some forward-thinking corporations, have a realistic hope of same-sex marriages happening, and participate in the growing popularity of gay and lesbian parenting in America. And it's probably even better to think twice about broadcasting one's self with too much fervor.

In Egypt right now—as in this very moment, in the month of April, in the year of 2008, in this twenty-first century—the New York Times reports that five men have been found guilty of the "habitual practice of debauchery," which is code word for gay, and were sentenced to three years in jail plus three years of police supervision. In addition to being tortured, all five men were forced to take blood tests and were found to be HIV-positive, and so it appears that these arrests are part of Egypt's greater effort to "crackdown" on people with AIDS, though authorities have not confirmed that this is the initiative. However:

The five convicted Wednesday were among 12 people arrested in a sweep that began in October, when police arrested a man during an altercation with another man on a Cairo street, Human Rights Watch said.

After one of the men said he was HIV-positive, authorities opened investigations into other men whose names or contact information were uncovered in interrogations of the first group of men, Human Rights Watch said.

There are just so many problems with this, but what seems deeply troubling, aside from the fact that someone in Egypt can and are being arrested for being gay, is the idea that persecuting people with AIDS will somehow help contain the disease. How is it that we repeatedly fail to realize that stigmatizing only exacerbates problems like this? It's the same resistance met—both here and abroad—by efforts to distribute condoms and promote safe sex practices. God, it's all so depressing.

Bad Ideas

2008-04-05T12:49:00.004-04:00

So the blog Stuff White People Like: you’ve probably seen it. Like me, if you’re white and live in a gentrified outer borough and work in some kind of media or nonprofit or educational sector, you thought it was funny at first, and then, I don't know, the endlessness of it became sort of grating—which must happen with all blogs so narrow in thematic scope (like this or this)—and then it became the type of thing that through its success became a self-fulfilling prophecy, for one popular expression of white people's narcissism is unhinged self-deprecation. Well, it was in the news this week because it got a ridiculously huge book deal.

Whatever, book publishers are very good at making costly mistakes. And I’ve never claimed any real proficiency in what gets America off. So we’ll see. But in the meantime: do you think this is next, and if so, do you think I should get cracking on my new blog idea, “Postcards from Yo Boyfriend,” beginning with this inaugural post?

I am almost home.

Did you get a flu shot this year?

Also I want to learn French with rosetta stone.

Sent from a mobile device.

“What I Wish I’d Known”*

2008-04-05T11:56:00.003-04:00

Boys only have one haircut option: shorter. Even gay boys.

* Lifted directly from I Feel Bad about My Neck by Nora Ephron

Shakshouka

2008-03-31T15:45:00.007-04:00

I am not Jewish, in case you were wondering. But I have lately developed a palate for Jewish cooking, having read a really awesome profile of Claudia Rosen in the New Yorker and several of Rosen's cookbooks (I know that this is a fairly narrow view). One dish that I've been making a lot is shakshouka (the spelling varies, sometimes it's "shakshuka," sometimes "chakchouka"). It is a vegetarian's delight--eggs poached in a slow-cooked tomato, pepper (which I prefer to nix), and onion base (and to please a vegan I read somewhere that you can use tofu instead). It's also one of those dishes for which most people who do a moderate amount of cooking will have all the ingredients on hand. And it's fortifying and soul enriching and worldly (for an Idaho boy) and the aroma suggests all of the above. I tried it first at 12 Chairs Cafe on MacDougal Street and have made it several times since then. I'm including my recipe below.

Shakshouka
Serves 2

2 T olive oil
1 large white onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, crushed and roughly chopped
6 roma tomatoes, roughly chopped
1 med. can tomatoes
1 T tomato paste (or sun-dried tomato paste)
1 t red pepper flakes
1 t sweet paprika
1/2 t brown sugar
1/2 - 1 t salt
4 eggs

Heat oil over medium heat in a moderately deep, wide skillet or other stove-top safe pan. Add the onions and cook for 15-20 minutes, until they are quite colored but not carmelized. Add the garlic. Pass the fresh and canned tomatoes through a food mill so that they end up fairly pureed and removed of peel, and then add to onions. (Alternatively, and I've done this before and it works, you can peel the fresh tomatoes by dipping them in hot water and then work them through a box grater to stimulate the effect; you'll then just mix this with the canned tomatoes, which you'd have purchased peeled and chopped.) Add the tomato paste, red pepper flakes, paprika, brown sugar, and salt and bring to an active bubble. Lower the heat and cover except for a crack through which the steam can exit. Let cook for a half hour or so--it should reduce a bit and the flavors meld.

When the sauce is ready and "simmering," it's time to poach the eggs. This next procedure is something I discovered on my own and am very proud of: Take a medium-sized ladle, make an indention into the sauce, crack the egg directly into the ladle, and then rotate the ladle by slipping it out beneath the egg so that the egg is left in the indentation where the ladle once was. Hope this makes sense. Follow the same procedure for the other three eggs. With a fork or paring knife, break all the yolks. Cover, and let poach for 8 minutes or so, until desired doneness is reached.

Divide the eggs and sauce evenly into bowls. Sprinkle with cilantro if trying to impress. Serve with bread.

Note: If there's a lot of sauce left over, this is good served cold with hard-boiled eggs.

"I think it's just and I think it's proper to have Pro-Life on the ballot. If I save one baby's life, it's worth it."

2008-03-31T15:22:00.003-04:00

Words fail me here. But it IS kind of funny that I almost titled this post "Idaho the Innovator, Part II."

CBS News
Jezebel

Some Thoughts about the Apocalypse

2008-03-30T14:39:00.006-04:00

It seems like no one wants to work anymore. I should know, because I don’t want to work anymore. (Perhaps this is one of those posts that will say more about me than it will the topic at hand.) In thinking about this, I came to a strange theoretical conclusion that goes something like. . .

1. My parents’ generation—and by extension, my generation—has witnessed a substantial growth of the middle and upper-middle classes; we are, I guess, the tail end of the generation following the baby boomers. It’s probably safe to say that we are now more cushioned by wealth than most of our parents were when they were our age.
2. I, and others of my generation and milieu (?), on the whole, have led a more privileged upbringing than what our parents experienced, taking for granted a whole host of amenities that were not available for previous generations until much later in their lives. (I’m thinking here in particular of, say, our ability to travel frequently, or weekly manicures, or strawberries in the winter, or yoga, or paying someone to clean your apartment, mow your lawn, do your laundry, move your furniture, etc.)
3. The most recent previous generations grew up learning how to make money.
4. We grew up learning how to spend money.
5. Many of us—perhaps more than ever before—have not/will not ever experience true financial desperation, to the extent that we will be without basic needs of shelter and food.
6. The wealth of our previous generations will be passed to us.
7. But given items #3 and #4, we will have accumulated little relative wealth and when our time comes to pass it to the next generation, there won’t be much to share.
8. Conclusion: Snap! The affluent middle class dies with us.

I’m at a jobs crossroads, a quarter-life crisis, and trying to figure out what hell I’m going to do next, and while what I think I’d really like to do is work in the kitchen of a restaurant, I know I won’t do it, because I’ve worked in one before and can say firsthand that (a) the conditions are bad, (b) the hours are bad, and (c) the pay is bad. But oh! To take a break from the paper pushing! No more rush-hour commute! To be available for Time Warner on a weekday! And to, like, be up on your feet, doing stuff that isn’t hypothetical!

But I’m beginning to have doubts about myself, that I secretly actually value having a salary, benefits, holidays off, a structured week, etc., because I’m too lazy to actually make anything else work for me (and because I don’t like to work, and let’s face it, corporate jobs are the lazy person’s solution to making a living). So in trying to reconcile this fact, I’ve been taking a closer look at how these corporate-ish jobs are structured, and you know what? The whole incentive for “working your way up” is so that you can eventually get paid a lot to just, like, have “ideas,” and make a bunch of young things who get paid a lot less than you, you know, “execute” them. And, unlike myself, who probably should have realized this kind of thing long ago, other people have identified this fact as the light at the end of their tunnel and stamped it as their goal. [I’m losing my train of thought. My eczema itches.] Whatever happened to being a baker, or a cobbler, or a tailor, or a gardener? Now everyone’s a “professional” and we’ve invented fields like “HR” and “PR” and “Strategy” and “Analysis,” and titles like “associate administrators” and “assistant managers” and, Jesus Christ, every kind of vice president you can imagine.

I obviously don’t know what point I’m trying to make, but what basically started me thinking about this was my brother, who lives in Reno and just graduated from college and has been working for a contracting firm and doing a lot of renovating and building stuff. I always thought it was awesome that he enjoyed this kind of work (he graduated with a “business degree” and I figured he’d take a job with a financial consultant or at a corporate headquarters for something like Nestle or Citigroup). But then it turns out that he doesn’t really want to be doing the building. He wants to go in and “broker” the deal and then send “other people in to do the work.” Which may be a better model for someone starting up a business, and is just the American dream put into practice, but… maybe that’s the problem. As Joni Mitchell put it in her 1991 song, “Who you gonna get to do the dirty work when all the slaves are free?” See above. We’re going extinct.

The French Plunge

2008-03-29T12:02:00.006-04:00

I love coffee, and have for a really long time now. In Idaho, I dragged my brother out of bed at 4:00 AM sometime in the fall of 1998 so that we would be the very first customers at the very first Starbucks in the state; we got a free gift pack for it. I used to drink whole carafes of coffee while I was doing homework in junior high and high school—really this was probably when the first signs of my addictive personality came to surface. I don’t drink it black anymore, and I’ve managed to curb my intake to just two cups in the morning. But what I’ve lost in quantity I’ve gained in quality: I’m kind of a purist about my coffee now—I steadfastly condone anything that that starts with a "frapp-" or that requires too many additions/modifications/special requests, and once, when a friend asked the person behind a counter at a deli where “French vanilla” coffee beans came from and that person said that they were crossbred with vanilla (they spray the beans with sugarshit, and I really doubt they were very good beans to begin with), I wasn’t easy letting it slide.

But being the coffee snot that I am, I’ve had several people ask me what the best way to prepare French press coffee is. I found the following in a recent Time Out NY issue, and… I don’t know. I like it. Maybe it will come in handy.

FRENCH PRESS COFFEE

Step 1. Boil a pot of water. You can use any water you would normally drink, though [the barista at Ninth Street Espresso in Chelsea Market] prefers filtered or spring to best express the flavors of the coffee. Once it’s boiled, allow the water to cool for a few moments. If you have a thermometer, aim for 200 degrees.

Step 2. Measure a heaping tablespoon of quality, coarsely ground coffee for every four ounces of water in your press. [I use less.] [Said barista] recommends grinding your own for freshness.

Step 3. Pour the hot water evenly over the grounds, just enough to saturate them. This process “blooms” the coffee, releasing flavor. Let is sit for a minute.

Step 4. Introduce the rest of the hot water into the press, swirling the pot gently to ensure that the water extracts all of the flavor of the grounds.

Step 5. Close the lid to retain heat. After three minutes, plunge at a slow and steady pace and pour.

Note: Isn’t the idea of “plunging” at a “slow and steady pace” sort of unsettling?

"Pink isn't just a color, it's an attitude!"

2008-03-20T15:16:00.005-04:00

Yes, I saw it on Gawker first, but.... OK, I feel bad that I despise someone who is so young and so clearly does not have agency in terms of her public image, stage name, branding tactics, bank statements, et cetra, but OH MY GOD THIS IS SO ANNOYING!

And if you haven't had enough, take a look at this. Um, thank you? Lesley?

Idaho the Innovator

2008-03-20T10:43:00.005-04:00

I suddenly recalled a program that my mom had helped organize when my brother was in elementary school, where students asked friends and family to "sponsor" them for a math test by committing to pay them an amount, say ten cents, for every right answer they got. I'm sure there were prizes, too. I don't know what came of it—in retrospect, it seems less audacious than it was originally thought to be, and plus, cash incentives seem to be a terrible idea to me for people under the age of 12—though they did raise a great deal of money... And I guess it beats selling wrapping paper!

On a slightly related note, Idaho is in the news today for a new pilot program for second- and third-graders called First Move, through which the state has agreed to finance (they guarantee $600,000) the teaching of chess chess in classrooms. I actually think this is kind of cool, partially because I don't know how to play chess, and also because I like the idea of learning critical yet practical applications of math.

“One of the things that we hear is that too much of what we do is based on rote memorization,” Mr. Luna said. “The part I really like about this program is that kids are thinking ahead.”

And it's a unifier!

“I actually have one student who is originally from Russia and two Hispanic students who have limited English skills, and chess kind of leveled the playing field, and it kind of helped their self-esteem issues,” she said.

Read the NYT piece here.

PoopGroup: Yoga Gas

2008-03-16T23:43:00.004-04:00

I recently enrolled in an introductory offer at an amazing yoga studio where one can take unlimited classes for a week. I have done a smattering of yoga over the past few years, but mostly just Pilates (and a brief six-month period of ballet, which I somehow feel compelled to mention here). This place is awesome. I had never really been much of a believer of materialized goodness before. It is a space totally free of judgment, run by a host of eloquent and inspiring and intelligent instructors, which has produced the closest thing to a religious experience for me that I’ve ever come to. I’m hooked, obviously.

But more importantly, I’m intrigued by the notion of yoga gas. My inquiry has to do with the acknowledgment. In everyday life, not many of us acknowledge our farts unless we’re in familiar company, and even then it’s a pretty rare occurrence. But in yoga—you’re finding your center, and the bountiful love within, letting go of fear, etc., etc.—and wouldn’t you think that if there ever were a welcome environment for one to comfortably own up to one’s farts, that a yoga studio would be it? And given the ways bodies move in yoga classes [One day, Meghan and I are going to compile a chart of positions for which to best release pent up gas; she gave me pointers once and really knows a lot about this kind of stuff.], you’d think it to be a completely common occurrence. And you would think, too, that a yoga fart would be sort of like a shower fart in terms of decibel level—it would be hard for everyone else in the class to ignore. I haven’t seen it happen in yoga yet, but once in Pilates I let one rip, much against my will, actually, and I didn’t own up to it. Everyone tried to pretend that it didn’t happen, which was weird because it totally reverberated throughout the room. But Pilates doesn’t tap into the spiritual stuff. (Are you supposed to acknowledge a fart if it happens in church?) I’d really like to know: In yoga, is it better to own up to a fart than not to?

Namaste.

PoopGroup: Jezebel weighs in

2008-03-12T16:17:00.002-04:00

Jezebel does a nice little survey of some current poop lit today. Has anyone ever heard of a turd twister?

PoopGroup: Top Three

2008-03-10T22:02:00.005-04:00

Today I propose a challenge: what are your top three?

Top three what? Top three most satisfying poops? Top three inopportune (but worked out anyway?)poops? Top three most embarrassing stories? You choose. I am going with top three biggest.

3. Oatman, Arizona. Late February 2002.

I was traveling through this old western Route 66 town en route from the Grand Canyon to Joshua Tree National Park. I had been driving/camping, eating carrots and apples and peanut butter, for about a week. Needless to say, I wasn't pooping much. While in Oatman, I ducked out of a duel reenactment to hit up the town's only toilet. There was a suggested donation box that I averted on the way in, and luckily I didn't have to wait on line, as all the women in Oatman were watching two "cowboys" turn and draw. I sat and drew something that had to be at least 16 cubic inches. Unfortunately, my excitement turned quickly to despair after three flushes failed to bury the beast. I clogged the only toilet in Oatman. I put $1.00 in the donation box for good measure.

In terms of top three greatest experiences, I wouldn't count this. In terms of size? you betcha.

2. Cambridge, Massachusettes, Easter, 2000.

Plain and simple. I took a gnarly large poop when out to Easter brunch with 20 of my closest family members. It was so big, it literally wouldn't budge. I had to use a discarded cigarette carton to break it in half so it would go down. Gross to talk about and write about, but it felt pretty cool. It was a lot spongier than I would have anticipated.

Again, the stress of the stoppage makes this not such a favorable memory. But lord, the size!

1. Brooklyn, New York, TODAY!

I can't stop thinking about it. Sometime during fourth period I started feeling it coming on, but I knew I had to wait until my lunch period, 6th, to get it out. Trying to teach for two periods while you need to poop is pretty much the worst thing ever, so as a reward, I decided to walk home from work at lunch to have some privacy.

It came out like magic. I literally felt like I lost 10 pounds. I have felt so good all day. It broke apart into three pieces on the way out, but if I had to guess, it would have been about 12 inches long - with a considerable girth.

This furthers my theory about my pooping at "home." I was at my boyfriend's house all weekend and really didn't even have the feeling like I wanted to poop. (except for after a brisk jog over the Williamsburg bridge, but by the time I was back to Ludlow St, I had forgotten all about it...) As soon as I was at work today I knew I would have to #2. As soon as I told myself I would go one step further (or about 1/6 mile further) I knew it was going to be memorable.

What are your top three?

Reprehensible Acts

2008-03-08T17:03:00.005-05:00

I've been spending the past four days in Reno and Tahoe—I met my Dad here and we visited my brother and his fiancée to go skiing and to hang out. And though I abhor Reno and have mixed feelings about Tahoe, it was largely a great trip. But that's not going to stop me from a small sit 'n' bitch purge.

Nothing in Reno tries to be anything but exactly what it is, and that's basically the problem. The casinos are unabashedly casinos, with all the gaudy ornaments and lights and inauthentic courtesies. The suburban sprawl is unabashedly suburban sprawl, with mini-malls of Starbucks and Jo-Anns Fabrics and LA Tanning cradling all the new subdivisions and apartment complexes like mold on cheese. The class stratified housing projects and low-income neighborhoods purport to be exactly that. No effort is being made for veneers, and there appears to have been zero city planning projections. The only place in Reno that you might get trapped inside a delusion is at one of the casinos.

Which leads me to the topic at hand: Gambling is one of the most reprehensible acts ever. I saw an exhibit at the Whitney several weeks ago—I can't remember the artist but it was a concrete or marble bench with lots of "truisms" etched into it. One of the phrases was "To overeat is criminal," which has haunted me ever since. On this trip it occurred to me that the nature of overeating's criminality is exactly the same as what is morbidly wrong about legalized gambling. People shouldn't do it, and there is no way to justify it.

I repeatedly fail to understand how anyone—anyone!—can walk into one of these establishments and think that they're actually going to come out ahead. I mean, seriously: Gambling is the most basic cost-benefit-analysis equations that there ever was. Look around. For every single game that you sit down and play, the odds are against you—it's math! And if the odds aren't against you, that means you're rich. And if you're rich and you have several hundred or several thousand dollars that you don't mind just, I don't know, flushing down the toilet, and that you decide that the medium for your flushing is a goddamn casino, then you are what I call one of the Problems With Humanity. There's no excuse. You are to blame for problems in the world. (Sorry! I know that there are many of you out there that fall into this category and I probably otherwise admire many of you very much, but it's the truth. It doesn't matter if it's just "fun.") And if you are not rich and have turned to gambling with the dregs of your savings or—worse yet, the dregs of some loan that you're in a pinch to repay to WHOMEVER—and hoping for some kind of miracle cure, then you are stupid and you are a Victim of the Man and there are a lot of movies that you should watch. Because can I explain something? About the Man? The thing about the Man is that he doesn't often get beat, and especially when there is a line of complacent motherfuckers sitting next to you at the Texas Hold 'Em table who are willing to finance Him.

I know: Money and America has a fraught relationship. There are any number of topics I could sound off to, and many of which I am probably complacent to. But casinos in America are such lemming-like institutions that benefit no one but the few at the top and create very little good and manipulate people who are in very problematic situations who should know better but who unfortunately are tempted by temptation. It's like the credit card companies and banks who can calculate your inability to meet the requirements of whatever contract you just signed. The only way not to lose is not to play. So don't.

Kiki & Herb: The DVD

2008-03-02T13:31:00.010-05:00

My ability to get obsessed with something—be it food, books, music, theater, whatever—usually happens unexpectedly and in an instant. Kiki & Herb are one such obsession: in the heat of a moment my interest in them shifted radically from passive to fevered. I saw them for the first time at the Cherry Lane Theater (“Kiki & Herb: Coup de Théatre”) five or so years ago and thought it was really funny—especially the bits about Kiki’s father (“A lot of people jumped out of windows when the stock market collapsed in 1929, but not all of them died. My father was such a man”) and the “Whitey’s on the Moon” trilogy (a bulldozing medley beginning with the spoken word piece by Gil Scott-Heron, segueing into Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” and finally Talking Heads’ “Once In a Lifetime”—and you know, I think there’s also some Wu-Tang Klan in there, too)—but left it at that. In fact, I think I saw that show two or three times, and even at that point, it felt like a healthy, casual admiration.

Something has changed dramatically over the past two years, though. First of all, they were supposed to die (the 2004 Carnegie Hall show, which I stupidly did not see, was meant to be their last one), but they didn’t. Their comeback show, “Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway,” which was nominated for a Tony Award, proclaimed that they actually would never be dying (they disclosed that they were in fact inside the manger at Jesus' birth and drank the milk of the cow that ate Jesus’ afterbirth, and are thus immortal). Sometime in between my multiple viewings of that production, I bought the recording of the 2004 Carnegie Hall show, and it was then, upon hearing their cover of “Running Up that Hill,” that, subtly but instantaneously, I was no longer just a loyal patron: I was a Fan.

I can’t talk about Kiki & Herb without emphasizing that what they do is more than entertainment. Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman are so just goddamn smart and they work really hard. Kiki reenacts scenes with Joan of Arc, Lillian Hellman, Adolf Hitler, Billie Holliday, William Burroughs, and others, and a large part of what they offer is a hilarious and pointed historical sweep, enlivened by their involvement in all of it. They were there for Jesus’ crucifixtion, William Burroughs shooting his wife, Princess Grace’s Bastille Day Ball… At one point she proclaims, “First it was the communists. Then it was the war on drugs, now it’s this and that. You know, the main thing is to have an invisible enemy that there’s no chance in hell of you ever catching.” And it appears that Kiki’s politics are far left of left, but by asserting that an adopted white baby is “a status symbol” nowadays, it’s pretty clear that few really escape her scrutiny. Sometimes you even wonder if she’s gone too far, like when she argues that in the fifties, marriage was one of the only ways that women “could get out from under their fathers” (striking a similar chord as their oft quoted assertion that, “If you weren’t molested by your father, you must have been an ugly kid.”)

And I’m convinced that they work incredibly hard on this stuff. (Maybe I'm stating the obvious here.) Coupled with a stroke of genius, one doesn’t pen a medley of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (Joy Division) and “Temptation” (New Order) and make it a grand finale to a retirement concert without giving it a great deal of thought. Their signature number—Meat Loaf’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” but bookended with Pat Benetar’s “Love Is a Battlefield”—is no simple feat either. The banter is imaginative, perfectly plotted, and hilariously, seamlessly interwoven between songs. This is as good as Elaine Stritch or Kitty Carlisle Hart or Barbara Cook—a revue as notable for its breadth of scope as for its depth and, yes, wisdom—except in drag! And with really interesting songs! And for how funny and insightful most of their numbers are, I actually think that many are incredibly beautiful. “Heartbeats,” the song by The Knife, managed to elicit total silence from the audience the two times I heard it done. And their rendition of Pink Floyd’s “The Thin Ice”—which caps Kiki’s reenactment of Miss D.’s death and the ongoing guilt that she continues to grapple with—has actually made me cry.

And so they have recently released a DVD, the recording of a show I saw last year at the Knitting Factory. It was a sublime show, and this DVD is pretty sublime as well. It’s a different experience from watching them live, and not for the better or worse. One of the major advantages to the film is being able to pay more attention to Herb. Live, I’ve always felt that I should be watching him more closly, but Kiki commands the stage; this direction does a good job of keeping Herb in the frame and it significantly enhances the experience. And though I proclaim to be a Fan of them, I know that I missed out on many years' worth of their shows and can't claim authority here, but I do think that the DVD is a very good sampling of old and new material. In any case, it perfectly compliments the CD because the two have few overlapping numbers.

Word on the street has been that if either of their side projects (independent of each other) were to take off, that Kiki and Herb might retire for real—after all, they’ve been doing this act for at least fifteen or twenty years. It might be a good idea, if you haven’t checked them out before, to keep them on your radar.

PoopGroup: Quote of the day

2008-03-02T09:33:00.002-05:00

"Ever take a dump that makes you feel like you slept twelve hours?"
—David Mamet, Glengary Glen Ross

Thanks to What's Good / What Blows in New York Theatre.

Has anyone ever taken such a dump, and if so, would you mind explaining further?