a heartbreaking work of staggering brevity

Since I still have several hours of homework to go, but still want to keep my promise to be a better blogger, here is a true story:

Today when I rode the T on my way to class, the guy who sat down next to me smelled SO strongly of weed that I had to get off a stop early, go to CVS and purchase some deodorant body spray so that I wouldn't roll up to Ethics and Law smelling like a human joint.

FIN.

post-lapse post

I know. It's been a while. In my defense, I moved to a new city and started school again. Ph.D. school. So time hasn't exactly been available in huge dollops like it was a couple of months ago. My weeks are now packed full of classes, and I've read more for one week's worth of assignments than I think I've read in the past five months. My brain has never been happier--I think it was starting to atrophy. For posterity, this is my schedule:

Mondays: Class straight through from 10am to 7pm. Archaeological Ethics and Law, Intellectual History of Archaeology, and French For Grad Students Who Want to Avoid their Departmental Exams.

Tuesdays: No class. Hopefully I will soon have a job with real hours, so the day will be more occupied--right now it always feels like a weekend day or something and it totally throws off my week.

Wednesdays: Class from 1-4pm. Pre-Urban Development. So, basically human prehistory, mostly from a geological perspective because it's being taught by a geologist. It's really interesting stuff, but thank goodness it switches from lecture to seminar next week--no matter how interesting a topic is, if you put me in a warm dark room and show me slides...I'm going to nap.

Thursdays: Class at MIT's Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE). 1-4pm in Cambridge, so really, 12-5 because of the travel time. Sounds fancy, and I'm sure it'll look nifty on a transcript. It's a ceramics analysis course, and I'm definitely experiencing the one-sidedness of my undergrad education. I totally have the historical context down for all the examples we're shown, but when the instructor starts talking chemistry, I have to scramble to understand.

Fridays: CMRAE lab from 12-4 (plus travel time). How much do I love potsherds? A lot.

Weekends are in flux right now--I'm still job-hunting, although I've found a weekend gig that I hope comes through and becomes more permanent. The other students in my program are super friendly and a lot of fun so far, so I'm hoping to remain a social creature and not become a recluse in my cozy little apartment. Although, as I sit here with my coffee and my homemade apple cinnamon bread pudding (made with homemade bread! Redundant? maybe. Delicious? yes.), being a recluse is looking fairly attractive.

I will try to post more regularly now that I have some semblance of a weekly routine. I can promise a lot of food posts and maybe some ranting about ethics...IRRESISTABLE. I KNOW.

Yours in hermitude,

Anna

fair play

I'm going to a fair this weekend--I hope it's like the one I went to as a kid. That one was an agricultural fair (because I grew up in a seriously rural part of Connecticut), so along with the corn dogs and the Tilt-a-Whirl, there were long low buildings full of prize cows, sheep, pigs and chickens, a tractor pull, a horse pull (the horses were pulling, not being pulled) and a petting zoo where you could milk a goat. I also vaguely remember a big building full of crafts and baked goods that had been entered for competition--but I wasn't too interested in that as a kid, because as far as I was concerned, if I didn't get to eat any of the pies, I didn't care what color ribbon they got.

I always went to the fair with our close friends and neighbors the Starrs--their kids, Emmy and Sarah, were two and four years older than me, respectively, and we'd been playing together since before I could even sit up on my own. We spent a lot of time together when I was little, and they were two of my closest friends. They're both married now, and Sarah has a little girl. That is completely surreal. Anyway, when we were kids, one set of parents or the other (god bless 'em) would chaperone us around the fairgrounds in the brutal August heat and wait patiently while we whizzed around on the more child-friendly rides (MOON BOUNCE!) and got covered in calf slobber at the petting zoo (my personal favorite part--seeing how much dirt I could reasonably acquire in the course of the afternoon). Then we'd all troop over to the food part of the fair for an ice cream sundae apiece. It was the best.

I'm sure I'll have a lot of fun at the fair tomorrow, but I know it won't be the same as when I was a kid. I'm a lot more finicky now, and I'll be noticing the crowds and the heat and the smells instead of making a beeline for the merry-go-round. And while I hope there are calves I can scratch behind the ears and fried dough and cotton candy and ice cream, and maybe a ride or two if they look like they won't make me barf...it's just going to be different. If I had a dollar for every time this month I've wished that I was eight years old again, I could buy my own fair.

my new conversation technique

I often find myself in the uncomfortable social position of being involved in a conversation that I would desperately like to end, but have no convenient or tactful way to do so. Either I'm talking to someone who won't let me get a word in edgewise, or it's someone who I didn't want to even interact with in the first place but who saw me across the street and I didn't avert my eyes quickly enough and they saw me and were all like "heeeeeyyyyy" and glommed on for a chat, and now I'm fishing desperately for things to say to make them go away, but instead just sort of awkwardly point in some random direction and mutter something about that thing that I had to go do while I edge away.

SO. I've decided that from now on, whenever I get stuck in those kinds of conversations, I am just going to take my social cues from this goat:









"Yeah so then I was like 'hey so I was on my Twitter account and I --"
"BRAAAUUUUUUUUUUGGGGH"
"Um. Ok. So I--"
"MMMMUUUUUURRRRGGGGHH  "
"Yeah, you know what? I actually have to run, I gotta get to this thing."

scatterbrains

Apologies for the lapse in posting--it's been a rough couple of weeks. That said, there's really nothing that's happened that makes for good reading, so I'll just do what I usually do when I don't have a story: post a collection of unrelated thoughts and hope that they're interesting.

I'm seeing more and more runners in my neighborhood wearing these strange little footie-glove-shoes. They're legit running shoes--they're actually supposed to be better for your feet than sneakers. The design is, I believe, based on the running technique of people who normally run barefoot. I know there's a particular native group in Mexico where runners can go barefoot a hundred miles at a time or something staggering like that, and there are plenty of other places in the world, like Africa, where it's normal to be barefoot all the time. The thing is, when you run barefooted (or rather, when you learn to run barefooted, and never run in shoes), you hit the ground with the balls of your feet, which results in almost no impact to your joints. When you run in sneakers, you hit the ground with your heels, and actually incur two to three times more damage. I'm wondering if I can un-learn the way I run now and try to put more of the impact of my stride on the balls of my feet. I'm guessing that I will trip a lot, but it might be worth a few scraped knees now to avoid joint or cartilage problems in twenty years.

I'm searching for jobs, and so find myself on Craigslist a lot of the time in the hopes that something will have popped up in the "part time" or "creative gig" category. In the course of my Craigslist trolling, and thanks to a category of transaction that Amanda called to my attention, I have come to the following conclusion: if I never find a job, it might actually be just as lucrative for me to sell my underwear to strangers on Craigslist. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

My project for the week is to clean out the pantry and all of my kitchen stuff in preparation for packing it all up, and I'm a little scared of what I might find at the back of the shelves and under the sink. On the plus side, discovering new life forms might benefit my academic career. Or endanger my health. Which reminds me, I'm out of Lysol.

sea food

It is, unsurprisingly, very difficult to eat well on a cruise ship. I don't mean "well" in the sense of heartily or satisfactorily. I mean "well" in the sense of enabling good decisions. You're not SUPPOSED to make good decisions. You're supposed to be on a seafaring vacation, enjoying the luxuries and excesses provided to you, and that includes what you put in your mouth. And I am here to tell you that you could easily spend an entire Carnival cruise doing nothing but putting food in your mouth for twenty-four hours a day. For one thing, the pizza and ice cream stations are open twenty-four hours a day, so that's not even an exaggeration on my part. I think the easiest way to explain the food layout is to go through a day based on meals.

BREAKFAST
For breakfast, you can do any (and if you are extremely ambitious/a family of seven, all) of the following:

Room Service--The housekeeping staff leaves you a menu of room service selections in your room every night. You check off what you want, and hang the little menu outside your door. In the morning, a nice man in a snappy vest knocks on your door and hands you a tray piled high with everything you requested, which is approximately enough to stock a hotel's continental breakfast bar. You immediately regret your enthusiasm the night before. We never ordered room service for any meal but breakfast, so I'm going to just leave it out from now on. I assume it'd be like any hotel room service. Meh.

The Mermaid Grill(e)-- (I hate hate hate when extra vowels get slapped on to names. That should be a taxable commodity--extraneous e's, and multiple c's-turned-into-k's for places like Kristine's Kotton Kandy Korral. GOD. Ok, what? Breakfast. Yes.) Deck nine of the ship was mostly taken up by an upscale cafeteria with multiple hotlines where lines of people could form every morning and pile their plates with pancakes and waffles and hash browns and scrambled eggs and sausages and bacon and toast, all drizzled liberally with syrup and ketchup.

The Dining Room--This is where you could go if you wanted a sit-down breakfast. Generally, I was much less impressed with the dining room, mostly because since they had to churn out individual breakfasts for about 2,000 people each morning, the food often arrived cold, and portions were on the weeny side. Also, while I usually enjoy interacting with strangers, I like to view my breakfast as part of my sacred quiet morning time, and you just can't do that in the dining room.

LUNCH

Grille--The same place that had hot breakfast provided tons of food at various different stations from noon through the rest of the day. There was a pizza station, a deli station, a burger station, a salad station, an "ethnic" station...and several more. The food was tasty, there was plenty of it, and you could play a game with the labels called "count the typos."

The Dining Room--Honestly, I don't recall ever eating in the dining room for lunch. So I'm going to take a pass on this one. I'm sure it was great.

DINNER

Grille--The same food as lunch. If you liked it the first time, sweet! Have some more. If you didn't, then eat it anyway. It's free! You're on vacation! This is all make-believe fat!

The Dining Room--We had a sit-down dinner every night. Our waiter was a youngish guy from Serbia named Dejan (rhymes with "lay on"). He was tall and kind of goofy-looking, but not in an unattractive way, if you can visualize that. Amanda and her mom loved Dejan. LOVED HIM. LOOOOOOVED HIM. That's all I'll say, but I'm pretty sure that some Dejan Fan Club shirts are in order. TEAM DEJAN!!!!!1!!11!!
Anyway, the menu changed every night, but it was all sort of heavy food in weird combinations. Grilled shrimp  paired with mustard potatoes and a bowl of corn niblets topped with an olive--that kind of thing. It was all very tasty, but very heavy, so after a week of that I feel the need to eat leafy greens for a while and get some cleansing goin' on.

So that was pretty much the food situation aboard the Carnival Pride. I really wanted to get up one night at 1am and go to get pizza and ice cream just because I could, but I always slept right through the night. Oh well. It is now time for me to go and find some roughage. Pictures from the Bahamas tomorrow!

good girl.

Going to miss you, puppy.

i can hardly stand the fun

Carnival Cruise Line's slogan is "FUN FOR ALL. ALL FOR FUN." And man, they are not kidding. Fun is something of a relentless priority on board the cruise ships. If you aren't having fun at one of the twelve different and exciting activities happening every half an hour, you can be having fun splashing in the on-deck pools and hot tubs, or you can have fun out in the sun in any one of six thousand deck chairs (except that every single guest on that ship seemed to think it was okay to reserve ten chairs with towels or hats or diapers or whatever on the off chance that their friends or relatives might show up and want to absorb some UV rays). You can also have fun while you eat, and fun in your stateroom with your towels that are cunningly folded into animal shapes, and hey, are you taking a dump in your tiny but compact and well-appointed bathroom? Isn't that fun???


It sounds like I'm complaining about all this fun, but I don't mean to. Really, I enjoyed having lots of events to choose from throughout the day. And it's not like any of this fun was mandatory. Basically, every night when you came back from dinner, the housekeeping crew had already gone through and tidied your room and made the beds (which was kind of weird, but nice), and had left the schedule for the following day. The schedule would look something like this:

9:30am:
Abs Class: Tighten That Tummy, and Then Let's Go Get Some Curly Fries
Power Yoga With Someone Annoyingly Chipper
SPA SPECIAL: BUY STUFF FROM THE SPA. IT ALL SMELLS LIKE CANDY.


10 am:
Early Drinkin' at the Atrium Bar
Let's Talk Relationships With Someone Annoyingly Chipper
FUN SHOPS SPECIAL: BUY A LOT OF ALCOHOL AND/OR JEWELRY


...and so on throughout the morning. Then in the afternoon, things would start to liven up a little more.

1:30pm
Men's Hairy Chest Competition
Sports Trivia
Name That Tune From the Seventies that You've Never Heard Until Just Now
Unnecessarily Complicated Swimming Challenge


2pm
BINGO: BUY BINGO CARDS AND, FOR A MOMENT, FEEL AS IF YOU MIGHT WIN
Afternoon Drinkin' at the Lido Bar
TV Trivia
Boggle Your Mind Trivia
Trivia Trivia


2:30 pm
Aren't You Tired Yet?




So basically, throughout the afternoon, the staff (and by the way, every member of the staff was friendly and clearly worked very hard. I'll say that now) worked tirelessly to completely overstimulate everyone and keep them supplied with exorbitantly priced cocktails so that by dinnertime everyone was drifting in a pleasant haze of booze and contentment. I'll talk more about the food on board in another post--believe me, I'm going to milk this vacation for every posting opportunity possible.

After dinner, there were more activities of a similar nature--more trivia, "game shows," karaoke, but as the evening progressed, the events became more adult-friendly, so that by the end of the night, it was mostly bingo and raunchy stand-up comedy. There was also a big theatrical show every night--again, a post for another day. I'm going to have to spread this out, otherwise I'll be sick of talking about it, and you'll be sick of hearing it.

Anyway, usually by about ten o'clock, we were all so tired and sunburned that we conked out right away. One of my very favorite things was feeling the engines rumbling through the floor and the ocean rocking the ship as I fell asleep. I slept well every single night. I think this is a clear sign that I require a vibrating bed. Do they make those any more? Or was that something exclusive to sketchy roadside motels in the mid-70s?

Something to ponder, anyway.

captain's log

It's Monday, and I am crashing back into reality after a week at sea aboard the floating head trip that was the Carnival Pride. Goodness gracious. Too many things happened for me to cover it all in one post, so this week I'll be posting a series of descriptions and stories, hopefully with lots of pictures once I get it together and remember to bring my camera to work.

First of all, I am going to try to describe the interior of the ship. There was a LOT going on up in there. I think the overall theme was meant to be sort of an ultra-lavish tribute to Renaissance art--there were blown-up copies of Titians and Botticellis splashed all over the walls, gilt chandeliers, sculpted moldings...it was basically as if every European Renaissance-era tourist attraction had vomited splashily and extravagantly onto the interior surfaces of most of the rooms. The real theme was excess. No inch of wall, ceiling or floor was left unadorned. And into this mix, the decor designers had detoured briefly to Vegas, so there were weird areas of flashy neon and lots of velour.

The various rooms and galleries had names that sort of coincided with the Old Masters-y theme...the Raphael Lounge, the Lido Deck, the David Steakhouse (as in Michaelangelo's David) and things like that. There was also, however, the Taj Mahal theater, the Normandie Restaurant, the Ivory Bar, Starry Nights Lounge, Butterflies Lounge...so I'm really not sure what was holding all of that together other than a collective ecstasy binge on the part of the designers.

I'll have to put up pictures soon (mostly stolen from Amanda), so that I can really give you an idea of what was going on--tomorrow I'll write more about what we did/what there was to do on board. For now, let it simply be said that I had a fantastic time, had a lot of great experiences, most of them hilarious and involving personal injury on my part, and I am equal parts dejected and relieved to be back in the swing of the work week.

Speaking of work. I'm supposed to be in a meeting. Here I go.

givin' you highlights like Sun-In

It's summer, and things have been ghost-town quiet at work for the past few weeks, but do I take the time and use it wisely to do creative and mind-expanding things like writing blog posts? Nopity nope nope nope. I park my butt in front of internet TV and allow my brain to quietly bubble out of  my ears. June's almost over and I have almost nothing to show for it, post-wise, so here, in a blatant overcompensation, are the highlights from the past month.

--Things are going forward on the moving-to-Boston front. I've started getting lots of emails telling me that registration's coming up, and I need to schedule meetings with professors and advisers, and I've been trying to write everything down in my new you're-a-grownup-stop-writing-your-life-on-Post-Its daily planner. A carload of stuff has been packed up and trucked off home, thanks to Mom, so that's a bit less that'll have to fit in the moving van in August. We have an apartment, and therefore I'll have some place to move to, so that's good.

--My poor kitty has been coughing up a storm lately so we took her to the vet (a REALLY AWESOME new vet--of course we find one right before we move away) and it turns out that the poor sweet thing has asthma, and possibly pneumonia or some other unpleasant chest problem. So we're getting her medicine, and hopefully she will start feeling better soon.  

--Mom's visit to Philly was too short, but still fun. I took her to the big Central Library on the Parkway (which she'd never been to. For shame, mother! You grew up in Philly!), we bopped around Center City, we ate Vietnamese food, and generally had a neat-o time. And then she helped me lug boxes down the stairs and load them into her car. Thanks, Ma!

--A tornado hit West Philly the other day and tore Clark Park to pieces. No joke. It wasn't a twister, but tornado-force winds and golf-ball-sized hail hit my neighborhood for about twenty minutes and did a ton of damage. Enormous trees got completely uprooted, and some just snapped in half. There's still a big ol'tree lying across the path at the head of the park. Ridiculous. I'm just really glad that no trees fell on the apartment or anything!

--I got paid forty bucks (thanks, Craigslist!) to paint the inside of a little wooden box and inscribe it with some pithy sentiment for a guy who was then going to give it to a friend. I got the impression that it was a lady friend, and the gift was an attempt to get lucky; I did a good job (even if the color scheme was purple and yellow--his choice, not mine), so I hope he got laid. Or not, if it was a platonic deal. Whatever. It's always neat to earn money for doing something fun.

--That forty bucks went part of the way towards purchasing tickets to the Celtic Fling in Lancaster PA. It was at the same place that hosts the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire every year, and the same groups of people were in attendance:
GROUP 1: Nerds. Pseudo-goth and Dungeons-and-Dragons type people who get REALLY into throwing on about eight hundred pounds of costume (read: any combination of lace, corsets, leather, buckles, and those shirts with the laces and floppy sleeves) and role-playing in weird accents for a day. These are the people for whom there are stalls selling Hobbit ears, and furry tails, and who knows what-all else. I know I shouldn't scoff, but I do. I lost count of the amount of unfortunate cleavage I saw, and I am frankly surprised that we only saw one accidental nipple exposure.
GROUP 2: Large rednecky Republican types. Maybe not so much up on their history, but definitely up for the type of event that involves beer, swords, and smoked turkey legs. Again with the scoffing. I can't help it.
GROUP 3: Tourists like A and me, there for the spectacle but not really sure what was happening most of the time.

It was stiflingly, blisteringly hot on the day that we went, so that was miserable, but we got to pet the "royal hounds" (the sweetest, loveliest greyhounds. I want one. Or twelve) and a "baby dragon" (a tiny, sleepy lizard. I want one of those too), and we got to see the band Solas perform for a bit, which was wonderful--I really like them. So we had some fun, but by three-thirtyish we had each sweated away about a quarter of our body weight, so we decided it was time to go.

--I only have a two-day work week this week, and then on Thursday I am leaving for a week-long Vacation-With-A-Capital-Vee and I am SO excited.

That about does it for June--hopefully I will have exciting vacation stories and many more things to talk about in July!

you're my little potato

Several weeks ago, I bought a large sweet potato at the grocery store with the vague idea of turning it into a tasty potato curry at some point during the week. As is the case far too often, however, instead of sticking to my menu plan for the week, I stuck the potato on top of the fridge for safekeeping and promptly forgot about it for a couple of weeks. The only reason I remembered that I had it is because in the relative warmth and light of the kitchen, the darn thing put up shoots. I saw the green stalks poking up like little SOS flags, and I didn't have the heart to throw the thing away. So I put it on the radiator by the window, where it has stayed. And now it looks like this:

When my mom comes to visit I'm going to give it to her so she can bring it back to Boston and put it under the dirt where it belongs. Hopefully it will make more potatoes!

the eight-dollar joke

This is a true story.

This past Sunday, Amanda and I were sitting on a bench in our neighborhood park. I was reading the New York Times, and Amanda was slogging through cover letter rewrites. I was shuffling through the Arts section, and I made some comment about how I liked Caravaggio (there was an article about one of his paintings or something). A guy walking by the bench, stopped, and looked at us, and said "Y'all must be REALLY EDUCATED." We both sort of smiled awkwardly and made "aw shucks" noises, but the guy wasn't done yet. "You guys, seriously. Seriously. Somebody told me to give you THIS"-- and he handed Amanda a little yellow crockery teapot that he was carrying in one hand. We made dubious noises of thanks. "Now hang on, hang on, I'm not finished yet. SOMEbody told me to give you THIS"--and he handed me what he was carrying in the other hand. It was a tarnished and fingerprinty metal cup, engraved with "KY DERBY, 2001." This, he said, was the real deal, and was worth an awful lot of money. Again, we murmured our thanks.

 "Now I want to tell you something, you guys, now listen. Last night I saw two stars in the sky, and tonight imma look up in the sky and I won't see those two stars, because they sittin' right here in front of me."

More "aw shucks" noises.

"Now you guys, listen. Do you think you can help me out? (here we go) I'm for real, I don't do no crack, I got HIV, and I'm just tryn'a get a hoagie and a Gatorade, so do you think you can help me out? Now listen (as we reached for our wallets) I'm for real, I'm for real. You ready? Imma tell you two jokes." He did a little backwards jig-step and prepared himself for his performance. His joke was as follows:

Ok so last night I was up on twenty-third and locust, because I paint, you know, too, I'm a painter, and you know, I seen this guy drive up into the gas station in a cham-PAGNE-colored BENTLEY, you know? And I went up to him and I said, excuse me sir, can I please wash your rims? And he said...but it's raining! And I said, well, can I wash your rims? And he said man, I got a ring on my little finger that's worth more than some people's houses, you know? And I said...but can I wash your rims for you? And he said where's your bucket at? And so I said sir, when you come back out the gas station, your rims will be clean, I promise you, I'm for real.


So he went up into the gas station...and I pissed on all his rims.


That got an involuntary laugh from both of us, and he did another little hop-step, and repeated his piece about wanting to buy a hoagie and a Gatorade, except now it was a hoagie for him and one for his wife, and a Gatorade. So we gave him the cash we happened to have on us--a five and three ones. When he had these in his hands, he looked down at them and started to whine. He literally made a whining moaning noise that usually comes from the mouths of tired four-year olds.

"awwwwnuuuuuhhhhh. muuuuuuhhh....that's it?" He screwed up his face and performed some laborious mental calcuations. "But it's $12.50" We told him that he'd taken all the cash we had (I almost offered to take it back from him, if he didn't like what he'd been given, and he could try to find his $12.50 somewhere else), so he grabbed the Kentucky Derby cup with a muttered "imma sell this off then, this the real thing, worth a lotta money..." and loped off through the park. We kept the yellow teapot.

 But we paid eight dollars for TWO JOKES, dammit, and we only got one. I'm still bitter.

the new me

Things have been hectic around here, what with the finding of apartments and the search for new jobs and the preparations for moving, so it's been hard to think of things to write about. But I learned something yesterday that I thought I would share. In Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, he writes about the human body's ability to constantly renew bits and pieces of itself. Skin dies, gets sloughed off, and is regrown. Hair falls out, and is--with the unlucky exception of those afflicted with male pattern baldness (hi, Dad), replaced. Organs repair damages, some more slowly than others, and what it all adds up to is that if you look at all of your bits and pieces and cells and tissues individually, they have all been renewing themselves at different rates to the extent that technically speaking, you are not made of altogether the same material that you were nine years ago. So during the past nine years, my body has quietly worked away at itself, and now there is nothing left of what there was of me when I was fifteen. Come to think of it, that's probably all right--fifteen was sort of a wretched age anyway--but when I was fifteen, there was nothing left of what there had been when I was six! And nine years before that, my cells didn't even exist yet! The several billion gazillion atoms that now just happen to exist in a me-shaped package had yet to coalesce. That's a really fun thing to think about. Mortality is scary, the prospect of a decline into old age is scary, and none of that is something that I want to think about, because it makes my stomach go into panic knots. But it is nice to know that you can sort of shed your material self like that, over a long period of time, and nine years later still have the same little ball of consciousness wrapped up in a (relatively) new package.

Anyway, that's enough heavy thinking. I'll end on another philosophical note from A Short History of Nearly Everything:


"Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."

make it up to me

I really really hate that song by Alanis Morissette that's about things being ironic. It gets stuck in my head, I don't like the tune or the way her voice goes all yodely throughout, and I know this has been said a kabillion times before but nothing in the lyrics is ironic. All of those things are just interestingly juxtaposed and mostly unfortunate circumstances. BUT THEN I was thinking what if it was all on purpose and the irony lies in the fact that a song about irony only talks about events that are not at all ironic?? If only I smoked weed. I feel like that thought would occupy me for hoouuurrrs. 


Alanis Morissette did redeem herself slightly (ever so slightly) in my eyes, though, by doing a cover of "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas. If you have not looked it up on YouTube, you need to.


I like to read the Philly Citypaper that we get delivered to my building every Thursday, but I never learn to not read it at the desk. And I should learn that, because every single time I read it at the desk, I always forget that there are explicit escort ads in the back. Every. Single. Time. So I'll be flipping through, mindlessly skimming editorial rants and movie reviews, and then BAM. Naked ladies and Skanky McHoebags aplenty. Practially leaping off the page, legs spread and nipples juuuust barely covered with clipart stars. And, inevitably, every single time I get to this page, it's right when someone comes up to the desk to be scanned into the building. So it makes me feel super sketched out, and then I hastily flip the paper over, so then it looks even MORE like I was ogling the fine offerings available at Adam's Apple (BEAUTIFUL YOUNG ASIAN STAFF! BEST SAUNA IN THE CITY!) Sigh.


Citypaper made nice this week by issuing their quarterly "Dish" feature, which is all about food in Philly. Now I have some new places to try out, so I'm excited.

...i win?

I would just like to point out that the Evangelical Fight Club that I wrote a post about way back in February was the subject of a brief feature today on the Daily Show. I feel pretty good about that. I mean, sure they did a better job with the mockery, what with the interviews and letting the stupidity speak for itself...but they're professionals.

I'm just saying...Daily Show...I CALL TWINSIES!!!

baby baby baby noooooo

I have been meaning to relay this story for the past few weeks, but for some reason it kept slipping my mind when I went to blog--which makes no sense at all because it's one of the funnier things that has happened to me in recent memory. Anyway, this time I remembered.

One of the things I do as part of my job is to sort the mail that arrives at my building. We get a lot of junk mail and a lot of wrongly-addressed mail, but one day a few weeks ago, we started to get these letters addressed to Justin Bieber. As in, prepubescent Canadian teenybopper Justin Bieber. This guy:




Philadelphia is not Hollywood. Nor is it Canada. I don't know if Justin Bieber has ever been to Philadelphia, but he sure as shootin' has never been to 3320 Powelton Avenue, much less lived there. So you can imagine my surprise and amusement when these letters kept coming in. They were all written in grade-school handwriting ("to Justin Bieber form [sic] your fan"...aw). While I was never so underhanded as to open any of them, I did hold them up to the light to try to read what was inside. The best snippet: "I love that song Baby that you do with Ludacris, say hi to him if you can."

Yo hey, Ludacris, what's happening, man?


Aw hey, Justin, what's shakin'? Your balls dropped yet?


No, still waitin', but Janine from W.D. Sugg Elementary School says hi.


Oh, word.


And I'm not kidding about the name of the school, either. All of the letters came in pre-printed envelopes with the return address of the school. W.D. Sugg Elementary School, in Town-I've-Never-Heard-Of, Florida. Once we got more than three of these letters, I realized that this must have been some kind of class project--you know, hey kids! Let's all write to our favorite celebrities and develop our communication skills at the same time! So I felt really bad that these letters were ALL going to the wrong place--whoever had been in charge of finding out Justin Bieber's address must have somehow gotten misinformed by the internet (I know, right?? That never happens!) I did a quick search on Google for "Justin Bieber 3320 Powelton," and sure enough, a query came up under the "Cha-Cha" search engine for "what is Justin Bieber's real address?"

Can you imagine? In the whole vast internet, this one tiny section of Justin Bieber's fan base tried to find his address by typing in that specific phrase, and we got the letters instead. It turns out that there was once a Justin Bieber who lived in my building (I bet he loves having that name now); he was on the Drexel soccer team, and graduated in 2000 or 2001--in fact, on the address search, his age comes up as "30-32 years of age," but I guess the folks over at W.D. Sugg ignored that part. 


Anyway, I did call the school and spoke to a very nice lady in the front office, and hopefully she was able to find out which class had written the letters and set them straight. We haven't gotten any Bieber fan mail since, so I'd like to think that my detective work paid off. Justin Bieber, you're welcome.

way hey and away we go

Monday night was the Great Big Sea concert that I've been looking forward to for weeks and weeks. I love them. A lot. The concert itself was in Sellersville, PA, which...I had never heard of. But Google maps is a handy dandy thing, and Amanda has GPS, so we did ok. Turns out that Sellersville is a fairly rural town about an hour outside of Philadelphia. It reminded me of the town I grew up in....sort of. Not really.

My town was way more farm-y, and didn't have quite so many Mennonites. Sellersville is, apparently, chock full of Mennonites. Anyway, so we drove through looming metropolitan Sellersville and found the theater where the concert was to be held. Since we're Grown Up People, we partook of some adult refreshments (a merlot for the lady friend and a delightful Yuengling draft for me, both in classy plastic cups) and then found our seats. Here's the great thing about our seats: The theater itself was only big enough to seat a couple hundred people, so we had a pretty good view of the stage, even though we were back in row S. Here's the not-good thing about our seats: We were seated directly in front of a whole group of Talkers. I totally understand that people want to cut loose and have fun at concerts. I completely get it that you might want to exchange a few words with the friends around you from time to time. But this was a group of several fiftysomethings with loud, grating voices, who cracked stupid jokes and made inane comments during the entire opening act (which was a group called Corb Lund and the Hurtin' Albertans. Ohhhh Canadians.)

The Talkers were perfectly friendly and not belligerent or anything, just completely obnoxious. We sat through their yakking until we couldn't stand it anymore. Amanda spoke to an usher, and the usher and the manager of the theater spoke to the Talkers at least three times. No results. But the awesome upshot of that was that for our patience, the manager upgraded us to the front of the theater halfway through Great Big Sea's set! We spent the rest of the show just a few rows back from the stage! It was fantastic. I loved it. So thanks, Talkers! You were great!

...is it so much to ask?

This is a diagram of my dream apartment. I have forgotten to label the bathroom, but it's there in the middle-right. I would like to find this apartment before September 1st. I would like for it to be priced at a reasonable rent that won't shut down my savings account. Furthermore, I would like for this apartment to be situated in a nice neighborhood, preferably with a few trees about. This apartment has plenty of sunshiney windows and enough room to have friends over for dinner. It has enough square footage in the bedroom for two people and all of their stuff to comfortably coexist without cramping each other's style. If there happened to be another small, quiet room off the front hallway that I could use as a study, that would be even better. I also need this dream apartment to be within easy commuting distance of Boston proper and close to a supermarket and some sort of town center.

Ok? Ok. GO.

Thanks.

oh help. skinny jeans.

I had to go shopping for some grown-up clothes yesterday because I am meeting with some professors at B.U. on Monday and apparently when you meet the eminent and highly published people you're going to be working with for the next five years, you can't just breeze in wearing jeans, a hoodie, and your ratty old Chuck Taylors.

Usually I like shopping. Whenever the seasons change, I enjoy going to pick out a couple of new items of seasonally-appropriate clothing. I enjoy going out for fun sometimes and poking around, ogling things I can't afford and telling myself that I don't need any more boxer shorts or kitchenware. What I really HATE is going shopping for an outfit when I have to. This occasionally happens--a formal event comes up, or I need to look less rumpled for some other damn reason, and I have to go find something presentable to wear. (I realize that on the list of tribulations, not enjoying finding a new outfit is under the "shallow and pathetic" section, but it feels good to rant) It's my own fault, too, because I always put it off until the last minute, and then I'm twice as stressed about it because I have one day to find something.

It's also difficult for me to find grown-up clothing because I am the opposite of girly. I wear a lot of men's clothing because feminine clothes make me incredibly uncomfortable, and a lot of men's clothing is becoming more and more androgynous, which works out well for me. If you want to see me miserable, put me in a skirt. It's not that I don't like my body--I actually think it's quite nice--but it's what stupid magazines like Cosmo call "athletic,"--i.e. boyish, fairly muscular, and not so many curves. Yes, it also probably has to do with "the gay," but really my body just happens to look better in extra-small men's clothing a lot of the time. Which is great, but not when you need to make a good first impression.

So yesterday was shopping-freakout day. I went to five or six different stores in Center City and didn't find anything, and then ended up pacing around the GAP for an hour, intermittently calling my mom and being all "but I can't find anything to weeeeaaaaaaarrrrrrr." It was not good. Fortunately, I did end up finding some clothes. I got a pair of skinny jeans, because if I'm at least wearing jeans, I'm still in my comfort zone (plus they make my butt look great). I also got a very nice black button-down shirt (if you say "blouse" I will poke you in the eye), and I already have a spiffy gray blazer to wear.  SUCCESS! Except for shoes. I still don't have shoes, and there is no way I can get away with just wearing my Chucks. But I'm sure I'll figure it out.

MOOOOMMMMMM!!!!

blessed are the cheesemakers

I did it! It worked! I made cheese! That's the good news. The bad news is that I was so happy to be making cheese that I completely forgot to take pictures throughout the process. Plus, making fresh cheese is a bit hands-on, and I didn't want to get cheesy glop all over my camera if I could help it. So I took one (not very good) picture of the finished product:

See? Slightly less than beautiful. Oh well. I guess I'll have to do it again soon. In lieu of a brilliantly composed photo essay (which maybe I'll get Amanda to help me with the next time), I'll talk you through the simple and extremely gratifying process of making fresh cheese.

You may or may not know this, but milk is not, in fact, a homogenous liquid (even if it is homogenized milk. That means something different, and is unnecessarily confusing. Carry on). It consists of tiny solid particles suspended in liquid. Cheese, in its most basic form, is composed of those milk solids, all compacted together. To make cheese, you need to separate the solids (curd) from the liquid (whey). Remember Little Miss Muffet, eating her curds and whey? She was basically eating coagulated milk. Which is much harder to rhyme, so I can see why "curds and whey" was the more viable phrase.

Anyway, to get from milk to cheese, all you need is heat and a coagulating agent--which in the simplest case is an acidic ingredient like vinegar or lemon juice. You'll need about a cup of acid per gallon of milk (and you can easily cut that proportion in half if you'd like). So here are the ingredients, the equipment and the steps for the cheese that I made last night:

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 gallon of milk--whole, 2% or 1%. I used whole, but that was because that's all the supermarket had.
1/2 cup of lemon juice (I like the slight fruity taste from the lemon as opposed to just the tang of vinegar)
1 tablespoon olive oil
sea salt and pepper to taste

EQUIPMENT:

A large, heavy-bottomed pot
A colander lined with a (clean) cotton cloth, like a handkerchief or cut-up t-shirt
rubber band or string

Step 1: Heat the milk over medium-low heat until it's steaming and juuuuust about to bubble up at the sides (this is called "scalding," in case anyone's interested). This should take about 10 minutes. Stir occasionally to keep milk from scorching at the bottom.

Step 2: Toss in your lemon juice or vinegar, reduce heat to the lowest possible setting.Stir slowly. In a minute or so, you'll see the curd start to break up and thicken into lumps. This looks really gross, like sodden cottage cheese floating in a yellowy liquid, but it's exactly what you want.

Step 3: When you see that the curd is totally separated from the whey (when the surrounding liquid is fairly clear and there are plenty of lumps), turn off the heat. CAREFULLY pour the entire potful of glop into the strainer and allow the liquid to drain off.

Ok. At this point, if you just want fresh cottage cheese, congratulations! You're done! If you want a more solid cheese, though, you have a couple more steps to go:

Step 4: Carefully gather up the corners of the cloth and tie off the top like a hobo sack. Make sure there aren't any holes. Run the bundle under cold water for a bit until you can comfortably handle it. Then begin to twist the top of the bundle. This will squish all those lumpy solids together and force the excess liquid out. Continue to squeeze out the moisture until you reach the consistency you want.

Step 5: Empty the drained mixture into a small plastic container and add salt, pepper, and a bit of olive oil and a little bit more lemon juice, if you want (or you can add whatever seasonings you'd like. This cheese is very very mild, so it can take a lot of flavoring).

Cool the cheese in the fridge overnight--in the morning, you can unmold it from the container and wrap it in some wax paper. And then you have cheese!

So that was fun. Also, here are some photos of what I had for dinner, because I promised I'd take some:

big ol' lump of bread dough rising.

Swiss chard. A neutral vegetable, if you will.

A Meyer lemon and some kalamata olives to go with the chard

The finished chard. The more I type "chard," the more ridiculous it looks. Chard chard chard.

Soup! Of the butternut squash variety. Made it myself. And by "made," I mean "opened a carton."

YUM.