Dinner Bell! (Chickpeas and rice; banana on bread)

So this was last night's dinner: Chickpeas cooked in the leftover broth from the beet stew (there are a few beet and parsnip bits in there, but not many) and the last of the kateh.

And tonight's dinner: bananas and peanut butter on homemade oatmeal-flaxseed-whole wheat bread, and a sliced Granny Smith apple. It amazes me how much more filling an apple seems when it is diced and eaten a piece at a time. (When I was a kid, btw, I thought that Jesus was able to feed the multitudes with the five loaves and two fishes because he cut the loaves and fishes up into really small pieces. There may be something to this theory.)

Off to NYC and TMBG tomorrow!

More Food Pics: Beet Stew

So the above is the first round of what I am calling "beet stew" even though it contains beets, parsnips, potatoes, and chickpeas. Spices are cumin, mustardseed, ginger, turmeric, pepper, and chilis; it has a firey taste--not peppery hot, but it literally tastes warm and kind of the way that fire smells. Smokey, maybe; that's the parsnips doing their work.


Here's the kateh I made tonight. I was craving rice for some unseasonable reason and whipped up some lovely golden-crusted kateh. The top is a little more "burned" than "golden," but I'm not complaining.

Kateh plus stew. ^__^ (Don't you wish you had dinner at my house tonight?)

The Money's Under My Hat

Anyone who knows me knows that I am inveterately frugal; so much so that, when I actually do go and buy something I've needed for a while (after using it up, wearing it out, making it do and doing without--in that order), I often get a feeling that can only be summed up as follows:

Having one of these is SO AWESOME.

In short, I have a hat. Which I bought particularly because I was going to be going to NYC this weekend for TMBG; the seats are general admission and I plan to be queuing for a while, and it's going to be cold.

Now, my frugal mindset says "so do what you do on other days when it is cold; pull your pashmina over your head." But then the "I want TMBG to think I'm cute" mindset popped up and said "when you do that, people tease you about looking like an old lady."

So I did a little online research and found out that in late February, stores are practically giving hats away, and I got this little $50 number marked down to $16.

And now I have a hat.

Having a hat is so awesome. It keeps my ears so much warmer than my pashmina did. Plus it is undeniably cute. ^__^

I guess, in the end, one of the benefits of being otherwise frugal is that it makes small things, like buying a hat or buying a mixing bowl, much more enjoyable than they have any right to be. 'Cause I am loving this hat, just like I love my bowl, my toaster, my annotated Pride and Prejudice, my Ira Glass-signed Kings of Nonfiction, and--of course--my laptop camera.

And I'm going to see TMBG this weekend wearing an awesome hat!!!!!

More A Soup

Blast! Still doesn't look as good as it tastes! Not even with its garnish of chili pepper!

This Week's Submission

TMBG And I Are Getting Old And We Still Haven't Walked In The Glow Of Each Other's Majestic Presence

1996

“You have to listen to this song,” my friend said. There were six or seven of us crowded into her parents’ living room, in my small midwestern town, before the day I accidentally spilled Mountain Dew onto their brand-new carpet, before the only boy in the group asked me to prom, before the rest of the group convinced him to try an experiment in which he would see how long he could go without speaking to me before I got angry with him; before I accidentally spilled sparkling white grape juice on my friend’s faux-fur coat and effectively ended my tenure in that particular living room. (The grape juice moment is caught, somewhere, on videotape.)

“You have to listen to this song. There are secret lyrics.”

There were.

Experimental dog
Salivating dog
Good dog.

We were fourteen years old and proud of ourselves for understanding the reference. I think we had just learned about Pavlov in psychology.

2002

I’m being driven across the country from the small midwestern town to the university I attend, three states away, after Thanksgiving break. The driver is a friend of mine whose family lives in a city en route; I am delivered to his home and he delivers me the rest of the way as if I were a parcel on the Pony Express. It’s very late. He puts in a cd: Mink Car. For the first time I hear the song “Older,” which is probably the only way to really hear this song: after midnight, in a car where you haven’t spoken to the other passenger for hours, in hour ten of a fourteen-hour haul. Pitch black outside. Nothing but the two voices:

You’re older than you’ve ever been
And now you’re even older
And now you’re even older
And now you’re even older.

When the CD finishes my friend is too tired to replace it, so we listen to Mink Car twice that night. It also contains the song “(She Thinks She’s) Edith Head,” which I listen to very intently because the lyrics hit a little too close to home (“the accent in her speech/she didn’t have growing up,” etc.).

I’m nineteen years old and, surprisingly, know who Edith Head is, though it’s a bit complicated to explain how I know (it has to do with a Pride and Prejudice-related image search which led to this site which led here). I’d be proud of myself for understanding the reference if the song itself didn’t make me a little uncomfortable.

2005

I see the Homestar Runner “Experimental Film” video for the first time, in a dingy apartment in Minneapolis. For the first time I make the connection between They Might Be Giants, the band; and this song, which is awesome. Every day before I go to my telemarketing job I play this song and rock out.

Oh—and of course I get the reference to Un Chien Andalou. Even though I’ve never actually seen the film. But there’s no one in Minneapolis to tell about it, so it doesn’t matter.

2005 Part Two

On the basis of “Experimental Film,” I decide that TMBG is my favorite band. Even though the only real understanding I have of their oeuvre is this song, plus a few memories of a salivating dog, Edith Head, and getting older. I decide to buy my sister a TMBG album for Christmas because I think that giving other people things that I think are cool is a good idea. On Amazon, the TMBG albums are too expensive (even used) so I compromise by getting John Linnell’s solo project State Songs. My sister loves it.

2005 Part Three

I happen to see a sign for a TMBG free outdoor concert in dingy Minneapolis. The concert, however, happened two days ago. I promise myself that I will go to a TMBG concert someday.

2008

Talking music with a friend; I mention, of course, “Experimental Film.”

“Is “Experimental Film” your favorite TMBG song?” my friend asks.

“Yes,” I say. “What’s yours?”

“Birdhouse.”

“Yeah, that’s a great song,” I agree.

I'm bluffing: I’ve never heard “Birdhouse In Your Soul.” Never knew it existed until that moment. Later that day I google it tentatively, wondering what could be so good that it surpassed “Experimental Film.” I listened to it and understood.

I’m twenty-six at this point and perturbed at the incorrect reference: Jason and the Argonauts were not killed by a faulty lighthouse. Medea guided Jason home safely and no one crashed on the rocks and then Jason married Medea and they had two sons and then Jason started macking on Glauce and so Medea made a magical dress and gave it to Glauce and she put it on and burst into flames ‘cause it was magic and then Medea killed her two children so Jason’s bloodline would end and I’m a dork.

2008 Part Two

Thanks to a combination of YouTube and Seeqpod, I begin to familiarize myself with the entirety of TMBG’s twenty-year career. (Actually, that’s a lie. What I really is listen to “Birdhouse In Your Soul,” “Don’t Let’s Start,” and “I Palindrome I” over and over and over. )

2008 Part Three

Wait: they wrote the theme to The Daily Show???

2008 Part Four

When my sister graduated from college, she got a book titled Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff: After Graduation, which contained such gems of advice as “Give Up Your Political Ideology” and “Get A Haircut.” (The book advised graduates to, quite literally, give up their hobbies, beliefs, and friends in order to start a new life as a working adult; it says that after six months into the job you are allowed to go back to one hobby and call up your college friends to ask how they are doing. It’s an extremely depressing book to give to a new graduate.) The one piece of advice I liked was the one that said “Every time you get a new job or a promotion, buy yourself a present.”

I decided that when I got my new job I would buy myself a copy of TMBG’s Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants. I got my new job. I decided it would be better to build an emergency fund. I never bought the CD.

2009

I made a New Year’s Goal to attend a TMBG concert. They were still, after all, my favorite band—even though I only knew a few of their songs and had never bought any of their CDs.

2009 Part Two

I buy my first TMBG CD. It’s the “greatest hits” album A User’s Guide To They Might Be Giants and it is used, on super-sale in the back bin of Melody Records. I listen to the CD like, a jillion times.

2009 Last Week

I do a quick search to see what TMBG concerts are coming up in the next few months and end up buying tickets for the Flood Concert coming up this Saturday. ^__^

2009 This Morning

Using Seeqpod, I listen to (and record) the Flood album for the first time. I'm twenty-seven and the album is twenty years old exactly.

Curing Colds With Ginger And Cinnamon

Look, I know that colds are colds and they last for about seven days and then they stop of their own accord, right?

But if I made myself a fantastic potato-cabbage soup with three tablespoons of ginger the night before I finally started feeling better, then I can claim it was because of the soup, right?


And if I woke up the next morning and had a lovely breakfast of Kashi, yogurt, apple, honey, and cinnamon, and by the end of the day my cold was gone, I can be assured that the cinnamon helped, yes?

(Yeah, that second picture looks so much better than the first one. But the first picture allows you a glimpse of my apartment!)

I Have TMBG Tickets!!!!!

It’s strange, the way the universe aligns sometimes.

I wrote about Ira Glass, and Ira Glass appeared, live, in my world.

I wrote at the beginning of the year that I wanted to go to a They Might Be Giants concert. On Monday I randomly clicked over to the TMBG website to see when they were playing, so I could think about planning a trip.

They’re doing the Flood Concert in NYC on Saturday the 28th.

And I have tickets.

I can’t believe I am this lucky. They’re not playing in a month or in six months; they’re playing next week. And they’re playing Flood. And I have tickets.

I’ve never been to a concert before. Not a concert like this. I’ve been to symphony concerts and every kind of quartet-quintet-octet-ensemble and innumerable choral/orchestral concerts and those “educational” concerts they bring to colleges and universities, like the seventh generation of the Martha Graham dance ensemble.

I’ve never been to a concert with, you know, a band in it. Like, a rock band. Even if TMBG sings about history and geography and chemistry, it’s a real band that is very popular.

I am twenty-seven years old, I rub wrinkle cream into my forehead every morning, and this is my first rock concert. It’s also the first thing I’ve ever done without planning it out beforehand; as soon as I saw that there were tickets still available I thought buy them NOW; don’t run your cash-flow budget, don’t worry about whether or not you’re going to take the train or the bus, there are thousands of reasons to talk yourself out of going to New York for the weekend but YOU CAN’T MISS THE FLOOD CONCERT!!!!!

Now, of course, I’m all “what do I wear??” My first thought is that it doesn’t matter; my second thought is that of course it matters; don’t I want TMBG to look at me and think I’m cute? ^__^

But I’m the sort of person who wears cardigans. My t-shirts have smocking in them. I don’t even have bangs. (How can I be a TMBG fan and not have bangs???)

This is where I wish I could pull off hipster-cool, but I’ve never been able to pull off hipster-cool. So I’m probably going to wear a dress over blue jeans.

I’m so excited. This is going to be SO AWESOME. I can’t believe I’m going to a rock concert. ^__^

Open City: Who Wants Meatcakes?

I cannot believe it, but I have finally found a restaurant worse than Tryst.

Of course, I should be able to believe it; they’re owned by the same people, after all, and Open City is kinda like Tryst's cousin, the one who is trying to be classy (real tables instead of couches) but is actually kinda skeevy when you get to know him. The service is faster, but that’s mostly because there are fewer people there.

So I have to write about this meal, because I think it was the worst meal I’ve ever been served at a restaurant and possibly anywhere. It wasn’t the server’s fault, and I don’t think it was the cooks’ faults, necessarily; it was just a dismal, dismally awful dinner.

Open City’s thing is that it serves breakfast all day long. I went in with the intention of ordering pancakes but, looking at the menu, thought it might be smarter to order something healthier. So I asked for two eggs, scrambled, and wheat toast. I got two eggs over easy and wheat toast.

This in itself is no big deal; I have nothing against a fried egg and was quite willing to eat the two eggs however they appeared. But these two particular eggs were so easy that as soon as I cut into them they drooled both egg yolk and egg white all over my toast. Disastrous. Even worse was that when I tried to eat the egg mess, it was cold.

I was very upset; less in the “oh noes my eggs are disgusting” way and much more in the “oh noes, how am I going to get out of this one without looking like a spoiled princess.” No sooner had I pushed my egg mess away from me than it was whisked off the table by an overly solicitous busboy, which meant that I was in the position of having to explain to my server that I wanted an entirely new dinner in place of the disaster dinner that, since it was no longer on the table, the server could not actually see for herself.

But Open City has, for what it’s worth, great service; I as the customer was of course right and the egg dinner was taken off the bill and a fresh dinner—pancakes this time, since I wasn’t ready for another go-round with cold eggs—provided in its place. (I gave the server a 50% tip for her gracious way of handling the situation.)

But then the pancakes came. They were warm, for a start, and visually appealing. But—and there’s no nice way to say this—they tasted like meat. Open City serves all-day breakfast, but it serves all-day burgers and fries too; and now I’m picturing, in the kitchen, one giant communal grill.

I kept re-tasting these things to make sure; after all, it’s been nearly three years since I last tasted a hamburger. But… yeah, these things were definitely burger-flavored. And while someone out there probably thinks hamburger-flavored pancakes are a great idea, I am not that person.

Oh, and despite the “free wifi” sign, the router has been down since December. Which means that I’m writing this blog post (and the two to follow) on Microsoft Word.

Still: a 50% tip for the service. But consider it a warning.

Alan Ka Saag: The Secret Family Recipe

So by now you get the general theme; a bowl of stuff, a plate of fruit.

Tonight I unfroze a brick of alan ka saag, a Jaffrey "secret family recipe" which, since it has a yogurt/besan base, doesn't unfreeze with the same smooth texture that it had prior to its life as freezer brick; but as George Frankly once said, "changing the surface area doesn't affect the taste!"

(Which isn't, necessarily, true; but it works in this case.)

I'm kinda wondering, as I put these up, whether my dinners look appetizing to anyone else. I mean, in the past few days we've had "bowl of brown goo," "bowl of red goo," and tonight's "bowl of green goo." Sure, these are all extremely healthy soup/stews with plenty of fresh vegetables and spices, but they don't seem to be particularly photogenic.

Maybe I need to stick a sprig of parsley on the side. Or put everything on a large plate instead of two small ones, so the colors of the fruit show up next to the colors of the stew. Tomorrow will be another bowl of alan ka saag, so I will get another chance on making it look as good as it tastes!

Here Comes Dinner!

I have a cold. To help ease the congestion, I "invented" a soup which contains:

Farmers' market cabbage (1/4 head)
Farmers' market beets (1, larger than my fist)
Farmers' market carrots (4)
Supermarket potatoes (3, russet)
Mung dal (about 1/2 cup)

Started out by making a stock (of sorts) using 2 tablespoons chickpea flour, 1 tablespoon garlic paste, and generous pinches of ginger, asafoedita, turmeric, black pepper, and cayenne, stirred into about 1 1/2 cups of water.

Tempered cumin and mustardseed in the soup pot, added the stock, added more water, added veg and dal. Cooked for an hour, which was probably too long, but I wanted it to come out at the same time as the bread.

I know the soup turned out all one color (that'd be the beets), but it tasted really good and cleared my congestion for about 20 minutes which is about all that can be expected. ^__^

Anecdote, Reflection, Anecdote, Reflection.

I spent most of yesterday in Tryst (which, as I noted on Twitter, is like the boyfriend you settle for) reading everything there was to read on Transom, which may be my new favorite website.

I know it's "just a phase," but the rabbit trail thus far is so interesting: I posted on Facebook that I had a secret crush on Ira Glass, and the universe responded by providing him in book-signing form; then I met him and he was my friend for five minutes, then I thought (like everyone else who listens to public radio) "I wonder if I have a story that's interesting enough for This American Life?" which led me to the "How to get onto This American Life" page which led me to Transom, the website all about radio production and aural storytelling.

Which is fascinating.

I'll just cut to the chase and give you the most fascinating part, which Ira himself wrote and which I will quote verbatim:

The length of a news spot — if you listen to like the newscast at the beginning of All Things Considered or Marketplace — is 45 or 50 seconds. Usually, there's a couple of sentences from the reporter, then they do a quote from somebody, and kind of two or three more sentences from the reporter, and you're at 50, 45 seconds.

It turns out that we public radio listeners are trained to expect something to change every 45 to 50 seconds. And as a producer you have to keep that pace in mind. For example, in a reporter's story, every 45 or 50 seconds, you'll go to a piece of tape.

So if you have a four-minute story, you figure you're going to have four quotes or maybe five. And even in a format like ours, where it just sounds like people talking and music washing all over the place, we have to adhere to that pace.

I bring this up because I produced this writer named David Sedaris, and from the very first time I saw him read, I knew his work would work for the radio — not only because it was completely original, and not only because it was really, really funny, and not only because he had a great reading style that was totally his — but he told anecdotes that ended every 45 or 50 seconds.

It gets better, further down the page:

The fiction that we have on the show, we edit it exactly the same way that we edit the nonfiction, which is that it proceeds in a rhythm of: anecdote, reflection, anecdote, reflection.

That's such a useful piece of information that I can't believe they're providing it on the internet for free.

It made me wonder if this "anecdote/reflection" pattern only applied to aural storytelling or if it appeared in written storytelling, too; and if it was something people did naturally or if it had to be learned.

The only way to find out is to test it. (This is where we all start to realize that this is going to be a long blog post.) Below I'm going to reprint the text of the "Ira Glass Is My Friend" post, highlighting the anecdotes in red and the reflections in blue.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Ira."

I didn't respond automatically as I should have, temporarily bowled over by two contradictory thoughts: first, the sheer duh-ness of his statement (of course you're Ira Glass, that's why we're here); secondly, the absolute genuineness with which he spoke. He was introducing himself. He wanted me to know who he was. In those three words he connected with me on a personal, almost intimate level, and I could understand how he got people to tell him their stories and secrets.

"Hi," I said, a few seconds late to the exchange. "I'm Blue."

I had waited over ninety minutes to get to the front of the line. At first, in the back, when we were too far away to see, people were joking "it's taking so long because everyone's pitching him ideas for This American Life;" as we got closer, we realized it was because Ira was talking to everyone in the line; asking them questions about who they were, what they did, where they lived, what brought them out that evening, etc.

I'd bought his book even though I don't really think it is useful or necessary for me to get famous people's signatures on things; the real reason I bought his book was because I hadn't known until the moment I walked into the Borders that Ira Glass had written a book (they had advertised it as an opportunity to get This American Life DVDs autographed, and the books were a surprise), and by chance or fate the woman behind the counter told me this particular book was the very last copy in the store. That, apparently, is what it takes to get me to impulse-buy something. (I have a vision of the woman pulling out another copy after I leave the counter, and telling the next person who walks in that this, too, is the very last copy.)

So after Ira talking about This American Life and the Q&A I got in line, with this book, and waited ninety minutes (and read the first 130 pages) and as soon as I got close enough started watching Mr. Glass interact with everyone in line. It was fascinating.

After Ira Glass introduced himself to me, he asked me a few questions about my job and then said, over his shoulder to the Borders assistant, "All these people in Washington have such interesting jobs!" He was keeping track, too, because then he talked to me about some of the other jobs he had heard about in the past ninety minutes, and then he signed my book "Your Friend, Ira Glass." Then I said "Thank you very much," and he said "No, thank you very much," as if it had been the most generous thing I could have done, to come out this evening and buy his book and then wait patiently for him to autograph it.

It was an interaction both intimate and bizarre, in the way that I felt that Ira Glass was one hundred percent serious about what he was doing, both in terms of his radio show and in terms of every interaction with every person in this line. I left wishing I could be more like that, though I can't imagine how much energy it would take, to invest oneself fully in every conversation and to remember and track them like threads in a story.

But Ira Glass is, after all, a storyteller. And, for five minutes yesterday evening, my friend.

Okay. So it works, at least for that blog post.

My next thought was that I would test it against someone else's blog post, perhaps a more famous (and thus "better") blogger than I am. Typing "blog" into Google brings up Seth Godin as the first hit, which must make him the most famous blogger of all, and here's his most recent post, color-coded for your benefit:

Authenticity

If it acts like a duck (all the time), it's a duck. Doesn't matter if the duck thinks it's a dog, it's still a duck as far as the rest of us are concerned.

Authenticity, for me, is doing what you promise, not "being who you are".

That's because 'being' is too amorphous and we are notoriously bad at judging that. Internal vision is always blurry. Doing, on the other hand, is an act that can be seen by all.

As the Internet and a connected culture places a higher premium on authenticity (because if you're inconsistent, you're going to get caught) it's easy to confuse authentic behavior with an existential crisis. Are you really good enough, kind enough, generous enough and brave enough to be authentically a hero or leader?

Mother Theresa was filled with self doubt. But she was an authentic saint, because she always acted like one.

You could spend your time wondering if what you say you are is really you. Or you could just act like that all the time. That's good enough, thanks. Save the angst for later.

It's all reflection, as far as I can tell. But the second thought that comes to mind is that this isn't a story, so it doesn't count. (The third thought that comes to mind is this doesn't make a lick of sense, but who am I to criticize the most famous blogger of them all?)

Anyway.

So now I have to think of a clever way to wrap this up (the story should end on a reflection, after all).

Um... TRANSOM IS AWESOME.

2nd Gen Yogurt

Madhur Jaffrey says not to worry if one's yogurt doesn't turn out the same way from day-to-day. She writes that when she was growing up, starting yogurt was the last chore done before bed, and the next day they ate whatever it was that turned out, whether it was thin or thick, sour or sweet.

I've made a pot of yogurt every week for the past three months or so, and two of them have turned out perfect. The rest have turned out in all kinds of variations; mostly thin, which is fine, and occasionally curdy, which I usually have to throw out.

Anyway. So last week I made a perfect pot of yogurt. For whatever reason. It was thick, creamy, exactly as yogurt should be.

I had been waiting for this perfect pot for about a month, because I really wanted to try using my own yogurt as a starter instead of using Dannon 100% Natural yogurt from the supermarket. After all, what was the point of making yogurt by hand if I had to go buy store yogurt to start it?

So last night I started a pot of 2nd gen yogurt, and woke up in the morning to this:



I thought I would have to throw it away. I don't know why sometimes it turns into delicious yogurt and sometimes it turns into disgusting curds.

But, as I started to pour it down the drain, I realized that underneath the layer of curd and water there was yogurt.

This looks much better, doesn't it?



And here it is with a bit of cereal and honey:



But seriously. Why sometimes yogurt and sometimes curd?

Lunch!

Did I mention I have a camera now?

Today's lunch was the last piece of this loaf of bread (whole wheat, oatmeal, and flaxseed), a Granny Smith apple from the farmers' market (did you know that Granny Smith apples came about by accidental seed pollination in Australia in the 1860s?), and Madhur Jaffrey's "Urad dal cooked in the Punjabi style" from Climbing the Mango Trees.

A note about the dal: I'd made this recipe before, sort of, except I had split urad dal instead of whole, and I didn't have a blender so I couldn't puree the tomatoes, cream, garlic, and ginger... I hated it. In fact, I hated that entire bag of split urad dal and the way it turned everything gray and unappetizing.

This time, I had all of the ingredients as well as the whole beans. And my Magic Bullet, which I like much better now that I understand its limitations. (Mashing garlic into a paste? Yes. Dicing vegetables? NO. Grinding spices? Yes. Making satisfactory hummus? NO. Of course, that last could just be user error.)

Anyway, what is interesting now that I have a blending apparatus and the right kind of dal and measuring spoons so I can put in exact amounts of ginger and chili pepper is the way the dish comes alive. You know, when you cook it the right way. The taste unfolds in layers: bean, tomato, garlic/ginger. I hate to use the phrase "balanced flavor palate," but... you understand. It doesn't taste like gray beans with a can of store-brand tomatoes thrown in.

Probably will post pics of dinner as well. That's... kinda why I bought the camera. Also so I could take videos with it (it's a combination camera/webcam). Videos of me cooking, of course. ^__^

Part Of A Nutritious Breakfast!

Also, I have a camera now. ^__^

Blue Gets Advice

So there are at least two reasons why people read advice columns.

One is for the schadenfreudedy aspect of the whole thing: look at those crazy people with their crazy problems!

The other is on the hope that, by some chance, someone will write in with a problem that's similar to what is going on in our lives, and by reading the advice the columnist gives the letter writer we, too, will know what to do with ourselves.

Last year, on Valentine's Day, I ran an advice column; this year, I saw myself in one.

Never mind the question, although you can read what the woman wrote here: this is the paragraph that jumped out at me, in the answer:

I just have this big feeling that you are enormously sweet and quite dangerously cutting and somebody should come into your life and just be a nice guy and gently coax you into being kinder . My only fear is that if a nice guy comes into your life, if you have not dealt with this cutting, biting, uncompromising, demanding and perhaps perfectionist side, you will cut him to ribbons without really meaning to, and he will run out into the street and collapse from contagiously low self-esteem.

Yep. I'm a perfectionist to the point where the first thing that jumped out at me in the paragraph (after the meaning of the text, of course) was the missing Oxford comma. And I'm kind of that way about people, too. I'm enormously sweet and generous and giving and cutting and uncompromising.

What to do? Dunno.

No. Seriously. Dunno.

Hope you all have Happy Valentine's Days! I've got to remember to go out and buy myself my favorite Valentine's-only chocolates: Queen Anne Cordial Cherries.


Cheap and yum!

Ira Glass Is My Friend

"Hi," he said. "I'm Ira."

I didn't respond automatically as I should have, temporarily bowled over by two contradictory thoughts: first, the sheer duh-ness of his statement (of course you're Ira Glass, that's why we're here); secondly, the absolute genuineness with which he spoke. He was introducing himself. He wanted me to know who he was. In those three words he connected with me on a personal, almost intimate level, and I could understand how he got people to tell him their stories and secrets.

"Hi," I said, a few seconds late to the exchange. "I'm Blue."

I had waited over ninety minutes to get to the front of the line. At first, in the back, when we were too far away to see, people were joking "it's taking so long because everyone's pitching him ideas for This American Life;" as we got closer, we realized it was because Ira was talking to everyone in the line; asking them questions about who they were, what they did, where they lived, what brought them out that evening, etc.

I'd bought his book even though I don't really think it is useful or necessary for me to get famous people's signatures on things; the real reason I bought his book was because I hadn't known until the moment I walked into the Borders that Ira Glass had written a book (they had advertised it as an opportunity to get This American Life DVDs autographed, and the books were a surprise), and by chance or fate the woman behind the counter told me this particular book was the very last copy in the store. That, apparently, is what it takes to get me to impulse-buy something. (I have a vision of the woman pulling out another copy after I leave the counter, and telling the next person who walks in that this, too, is the very last copy.)

So after Ira talking about This American Life and the Q&A I got in line, with this book, and waited ninety minutes (and read the first 130 pages) and as soon as I got close enough started watching Mr. Glass interact with everyone in line. It was fascinating.

After Ira Glass introduced himself to me, he asked me a few questions about my job and then said, over his shoulder to the Borders assistant, "All these people in Washington have such interesting jobs!" He was keeping track, too, because then he talked to me about some of the other jobs he had heard about in the past ninety minutes, and then he signed my book "Your Friend, Ira Glass." Then I said "Thank you very much," and he said "No, thank you very much," as if it had been the most generous thing I could have done, to come out this evening and buy his book and then wait patiently for him to autograph it.

It was an interaction both intimate and bizarre, in the way that I felt that Ira Glass was one hundred percent serious about what he was doing, both in terms of his radio show and in terms of every interaction with every person in this line. I left wishing I could be more like that, though I can't imagine how much energy it would take, to invest oneself fully in every conversation and to remember and track them like threads in a story.

But Ira Glass is, after all, a storyteller. And, for five minutes yesterday evening, my friend.

ZOMG IT'S IRA GLASS

So I happened to mention the other day, both on the blogosphere and on the Facebookectangle, that I had a little infatuation with Ira Glass, or at least with his magical radio voice, and that I listen to a lot of This American Life. (They have every single epsiode online, for free. Thirteen years' worth.)

There's a lot one can do during an episode of This American Life, like cleaning the entire apartment or cooking enough meals for the week, and the two addictions (that of the radio program and of the to-do list) probably feed on one another a bit. Let it suffice that I for serious have this show going in my apartment all the freaking time.

But the most important thing of all is that IRA GLASS HIMSELF is going to be AT BORDERS talking about HIS SHOW on WEDNESDAY!!!!!

I am delighted for two reasons. First because ZOMG IT'S IRA GLASS, and secondly because this is happening right at the height of my infatuation with his program. ^__^ If he had come to DC next year, I might have moved on to something else and maybe I would, you know, go just because I used to listen to his thing all the time, but I might be a little over it.

But since it's happening on Wednesday, I get to be a complete fangirl and swoon over the possibility of being in the presence of an aging nerdy Public Radio documentarian.

It's like The Secret in action.

This Week's Submission

Look, if she hadn't wanted this to happen, she shouldn't have told us she was a banana. Or given us detailed instructions on the best ways to eat her.

It's too long to win, but we all remember the song, yes?

To Quote Both Bronte And Skunks

Once there were two skunks named Out and In.
Whenever Out was Out, In was In
And whenever Out was In, In was Out...

Now that I am not at Tryst, I wish I were at Tryst. Actually, I don't, because Tryst is the sort of place where you have to wait 1/2 hour to get a glass of water, and by then you've already gotten up and gone to the counter yourself and just taken one.

But I wish I were somewhere.

Do you remember that sentence, from Jane Eyre? The one where she tires of her routine of eight years in a single afternoon? I feel a little like that. It's not that I'm tired of my job, because I love my job. It's not that I'm tired of doing Ashtanga every morning, because I love that too. But I'm starting to feel like I come home every evening and watch Hulu and eat dinner and check my Google Reader and go to bed. That's what I'm tired of.

(That whole thing about my "not having an evening routine" isn't true, btw. I come home. I shower, cook dinner, eat while watching Hulu, check the internets, maybe play some Super Famicom, and go to bed. That is teh lame.)

So I need somewhere to go.

Actually, finding somewhere to go is the easy part. Tomorrow Dalton Conley is giving a talk at Politics and Prose about his book Elsewhere, USA and I will go there. Today I went to Tryst and to the Farmers' Market and to the zoo. I also did two loads of laundry, one load of dishes, cooked meals for the entire week, packaged them in bento, and baked a loaf of bread. And wrote a short story and three blog posts. And hung out in Idle Time Books for a while.

Okay, let me rephrase this:

I need somewhere to go where I have to talk to other people. ^__^

Every time I go to Tryst or wherever I do kinda hope I will maybe talk to someone. If I didn't, I wouldn't bother putting on lip gloss or brushing my hair. But I don't know how to gracefully jump the chasm from "sitting next to six other people on a ratty coffeehouse sofa" to "starting a conversation that is enticing enough to draw their gaze away from their laptops, and to ensure that gaze is interested rather than murderous."

So--before you all jump with the suggestion--I spent some time this afternoon flipping through Meetup.com. Whenever I found a meetup group that looked interesting (like the cooking ones) I checked the stats on the previous meetups. There weren't a lot of repeat visitors. People would come to one meetup only and then quit the group. That didn't bode well for the success of the enterprise.

Still, I signed up to receive messages from a cooking group and a Scrabble group (Scrabble is fun, and more importantly, free), and tried to find a writing group but most of those seemed to be out of commission. (That was the other weird phenomena of Meetup.com. Groups would form, have three meetings, and die.) And then I thought about groups I would like to start, including:

• A cooking group which didn't require a $75 per-meeting fee; maybe one more like a potluck group where people brought dishes and talked about how they were made and then we talked about how they tasted and offered suggestions, or maybe a group where everyone learned how to cook by all trying to make the same recipe and comparing results

• A group for people who still play Super Famicom ^__^

• A group for people who want to listen to This American Life together on Saturday mornings and talk about it and maybe there would be food too

As you can see this is an impressive list.

Sigh. I still haven't put that "yoga happy hour" sign up on the wall of my Ashtanga studio. That might be an easy next step.

And I am going to hear Dalton Conley tomorrow. If all else, his book is about how we don't talk to one another anymore. ^__^

Yo! Check Out This Awesome Loaf Of Bread!

Now that I have a fast-moving laptop I hope to post more pictures and (maybe even) media. The next item on my to-buy list is a webcam, and I have visions of posting a nightly pic of "what I ate for dinner..." (tonight, cabbage with potatoes and curd rice).

But check out that bread!

If you remember, this is what the first loaf of bread I ever baked looked like:

Yep. A squished football on a paper towel.

But my mom recently sent me a Pampered Chef baking stone bread pan, and--after three tries--I finally got it seasoned enough that the bread just slides out in perfect loaf shape. (The first two times it came out in a torn-in-half, stuck-to-the-pan ruined loaf shape.)

So yay for loaves that look like loaves!

Tryst

Now that I have my new laptop, I need a good coffee shop into which to take it.

The obvious option is Tryst, the local independent hipster hangout that is barely a block from where I live, but... I've never really managed the disaffected hipster gaze thing and Tryst manages to irritate me every time I go in there. (This from a person who is generally pretty amiable.)

Yes, the coffee is good, but the service is deliberately terrible. This is probably to be expected when the website advertises its open positions by saying the the job is more about hanging out with friends than it is about actually working.

As a former waitress I should be sympathetic towards my fellow workers because I know what they're going through, but it turns out that as a former waitress I'm actually very put off by poor service because I know exactly what giving good service requires. (When it is good, I tip very, very good; but when it is bad I tip horrid.)

Hello Cupcake would be ideal, but I don't think it has wireless. It's also problematic because we aren't supposed to bring our own laptops into my workplace, so I would have to walk two miles back to the apartment, get the laptop, and then head two miles south to Hello Cupcake.

There's a Starbucks next to my apartment, of course (isn't there a Starbucks next to everyone's apartment?), but it's Starbucks.

Which means I should probably suck it up and get used to Tryst, even though today (for example) I got up to use the restroom (taking the Acer with me, of course) and came back to find that my seat had been given to another patron and, after I sat down at a different, empty seat, got lectured by the waitstaff for "making it look like I had left without paying." Um... if I haven't paid yet, why did you turn the table? Next time I'll leave a note: "I am in the bathroom. Please do not remove my plate of food. Also, I do intend to pay and maybe even tip if this seat is still waiting for me when I get back."

Or I could just practice my disaffected hipster gaze.

My Acer Extensa

Summer 2005: I buy a Compaq Presario laptop in preparation for grad school. It costs about $400. I pay for it with money saved from a summer of waitressing.

Spring 2006: The battery dies on my Compaq Presario. Won't recharge. I call in a handful of favors from all the computer geeks I know and they tinker around with things. No luck. My laptop is now effectively a desktop.

Fall 2007: The hard drive dies on my cord-tethered Compaq. Just up and dies. Woke up one morning and pressed the "on" button and nothing happened. I take it into a shop and, for $300, get a new hard drive with 99% of my files restored. (Yes, I save copies of the most important files; but I didn't save copies of photos, music, etc.) It will take nearly two years before I pay the $300 off of my credit card.

Spring 2007: I finally pull together enough spare cash to buy a new battery for the Compy. Pop it in. My friend and I celebrate by taking the laptop out and watching a movie together, on the porch, free from cords or outlets. Halfway through the movie the screen goes black. Battery is dead. It never, ever recharges.

Summer 2007: Compy goes to India! It's during this period that the cord stops functioning properly; unless it is attached to the Compy at exactly the right angle, it won't provide electricity. I memorize the angle. Sometimes a small thing, like someone walking next to the table, will shake the cord out of position. Power out, laptop off. (I learn to hit ctrl-S after every paragraph.)

Fall 2007: I open up what I am now affectionately calling the "craptop" and discover that the screen has gone all pink and green. Everything that would be white in color has turned pink; everything that would be black is bright green, and the rest of the colors fall somewhere inbetween. After some wiggling I discover that the monitor will restore original colors if it is held at exactly the right angle. I memorize the angle.

Spring 2008: My lappy takes approximately 10 minutes to restart from sleep state and 20 minutes to restart from shutdown.

FEBRUARY 2009: I buy a new laptop. An Acer Extensa 4420. (Edit: the box and the receipt say Extensa 4420, but the computer inside is labeled Extensa 4630Z. Am hoping I got an unexpected upgrade.)

Having this Acer in my lap feels so weird, for three reasons:

1. I'm running Vista.
2. It isn't exactly the laptop I had planned to buy. I had planned to get the HP Netbook 1010 which was retailing for $299, but then I learned that the 1010 didn't have an ethernet port, and to use it I would need to buy a router ($50) and to use the router I would have to install the drivers which would require me to use the router's CD, but netbooks don't come with CD drives, so I would have to buy a CD/DVD attachment ($100)... and suddenly this tricked-out Acer is the more frugal choice. But... sigh... it isn't the cute choice. (I tell myself that buying an actual laptop instead of a netbook is better; that having a computer with a CD/DVD drive and actual memory and two cores is a good thing; but that friggin' netbook was ADORABLE in a Hello Kitty way and the Acer is just ordinary-looking.)
3. Any time I spend more than, say, $100, all of my former starving-graduate-student alarm bells go off: Did you really need that? What if something happens and you don't have enough savings to cover the expense??? Never mind that I have plenty of money saved and this was a purchase that should have been made FOUR YEARS AGO.

And then there's the fourth reason. The uncomfortable feeling that, thanks to planned obsolescence, this will all happen again; I'll spend an evening or two going through the Compy, gmailing myself the best photos and documents and opening them up again on the Acer; I'll re-install Audacity and Paint.Net and ZSNES and Adobe and MS Office; I'll get used to Vista; and then, maybe in a year, the slow process of laptop death will start all over.

Sure, I say, this time around I'll treat the Acer right. I'll never touch the mousepad without first washing my hands. But I know it wasn't really because of finger residue that the battery, the cord, the hard drive, and the monitor all failed. It's because they were built to fail.

And so I can hardly be as thrilled about my new laptop as I was the first time I opened up my Compy.

But it's nice to have a machine that doesn't turn everything pink and green. ^__^

My Facebook 25 (Yes, I finally wrote one.)

1. I love living in DC, more than any other place I've lived so far. Every morning I walk to work and look at the architecture and the sky and think about how lucky I am to be living here.

2. Yes, I walk to work every morning. 1.7 miles. 3900 steps. Rain or shine.

3. And back again, too.

4. I'm also that annoying person who packs her lunch every day.

5. I'm very happy being a vegetarian but I don't believe that my choice is any more "moral" than being a non-vegetarian. There are too many factors involved and there are as many abused, suffering migrant workers as there are factory farm animals.

6. The Sunday farmers' market is my church. The first time I went there, I was overwhelmed with the sense of being in a holy place. I know that sounds ridiculous, but there's something very awesome (in the original sense of the word) by being surrounded by locally-grown vegetables.

7. The last time I was at the farmers' market I was looking at a basket of parsnips and I had the sudden thought that life was too short for me to learn to cook every single vegetable in the world. That was sad.

8. New topic: I have a secret crush on Ira Glass. I listen to an episode of This American Life nearly every day. I was devastated when I found out he was married.

9. I just don't think the British version of The Office is funny. I've tried to watch it several times.

10. I still play Super Famicom games.

11. I really like comics, probably more than I should. At one time I was part of a For Better Or For Worse online forum. We spent most of our time talking about how awful Anthony was. Right now the two comic strips I follow most closely are Questionable Content and 9 Chickweed Lane.

13. I want to eat at The Grill from Ipanema mostly because it has great lighting.

14. Celebrities who have recently appeared in my dreams: Salman Rushdie, Hugh Laurie, Amitabh Bachchan, Steve Lawrence. (Unfortunately NOT Ira Glass.)

15. The two most important things in my life are my job and my Ashtanga practice.

16. The above is probably the most honest statement on this list. I mean, everything on the list is true, but... 15's the bare-naked one.

17. Sometimes I worry with Ashtanga that my diligence outweighs my natural ability. Then I consider that nobody got anywhere without practicing.

18. I am SO GRATEFUL that my parents taught me how to practice. It is a skill that has paid off a billion-fold.

19. I'm so jealous that there was no YouTube around when I was a kid, because I taught myself how to play all kinds of video game theme music on the piano. At one point I could play the entire 15-minute "Final Fantasy VI End Sequence."

20. I carry a copy of The English Patient around with me when I travel. I've read and reread that book nearly 20 times and I always find something new in it.

21. In fact, I have a good copy, which I keep at home, and a travel copy, which travels.

22. I make to-do lists for everything. I have a to-do list for today. This is on the list.

23. When I was a starving graduate student, a few people gave me unexpected gifts which really helped me out. I sent thanks at the time, but now want to repay them and don't know how to do it without seeming tit-for-tat. Probably that means I need to pay it forward.

24. I spent way too much time writing this list. It actually went through three separate drafts. And, as a result, I'm late to the game. Meh.

25. I've really loved reading everything everyone else has written, and actually have been going on to Facebook in the hopes of reading more of these. (This from a person who, otherwise, barely looks at Facebook anymore.) So if you haven't done one, SUFFER THROUGH IT!

Stupid Facebook

Have spent the past 45 minutes trying to write out that "25 Things" meme on Facebook.

The group is too mixed. I've got friends, relatives, classmates, and colleagues all tumbling over each other, and here I am tagged on all sides by people who want me to reveal twenty-five of my secrets!

I tried twice to come up with something satisfactory, but both times it came out fake--and worse, self-conscious. Which is not an image I can very well present to friends, relatives, classmates, and colleagues.

Facebook drives me bat-crazy. Even if it weren't full of zombies and invites to events happening four states away, it's an exercise in image management to an audience so disparate that I am uncomfortable putting up much more than my picture and some very basic info. I'm hesitant even to put my workplace up on the Fbook, for fear of stalkers, revenge-seekers, and the like. (And I love my workplace!)

This is a long-short apology for this not-a-real-post, because I spent my evening trying to write up 25 "secrets." Bleh. More to come later, I promise!