Words’ End

Penultimate drum-and-dance of the year in South Amherst yesterday. I brought my drum, even though I don’t have a bag for it yet and it was raining a little – but Molly and I threw garbage bags over the drums, and I’m very happy we did. By the end of the evening my hands were somehow hurting and a little numb at the same time, and I could still feel the just-played drumbeat in my ribcage.

I did better than had seemed possible, given how out of practice I’ve been with things that require sustaining a regular rhythm with my hands (drumming, juggling, playing the guitar which I haven’t done in any sort of sustained way since my first year in grad school). Concentrating on picking out, playing and sustaining relatively simple rhythms for several minutes at a time was great practice.

Molly and Natalie and I stayed over at our friends’ place in Hadley (Inspirit Common), and had breakfast at Cafe Esselon there. Natalie kept feeding us pretend food. The more ridiculously we reacted, the more giggles scattered, sparkling, across the table.

It almost looks like coffee, but it’s tea – Twinings Lady Grey with citrus added, which is inexplicably unavailable in the States but was so kindly supplied by a wee goddess. Over-brewed because I forgot, with whole milk added, it turned out to be the perfect strength – the kind that needs dairy to cut it.

Today I am catching up on overdue work. Everything, sight and sound, is muted by a thick invisible blanket of gray. It looks miserable outside. But inside, the cats are sleeping on the bed, there’s a book on performance in medieval France at my side, and I’m thinking of digital text scholarship in both its senses. This is good.

Thirty was certainly all-encompassing, the best and the worst. My birthday, however, was almost unreservedly fabulous. In fact, the entire weekend was so. It was filled with giggling toddlers, loving friends, conversation that kept dissolving into laughter, high hopes for employment, dance-y drumbeat, blue-green hair, family blood and chosen, and the best that the moon has to offer.

And the food. Oh gods, the food. Homemade pizza with so many different toppings for a second birthday party. Strawberries with whipped cream made with vanilla extract and nutmeg. Duck breasts made in some delicious way at which I could only marvel. Mahon cheese ice cream. Not to mention coppa (like prosciutto, but different), skyr (Icelandic yogurt-like thing) and freshly roasted coffee.

Best present is a tie between massage that made me at once floopy and energized, and my nephew Tesher getting his orange belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Twelve more minutes of birthday left, or none if you count from where I was born. Make that eleven. Here’s to tectonic shifts.

(Really, this is just a post to test Flickr’s blogging feature. Not much of interest here.)

Came home from a four-hour job interview yesterday and didn’t know what to do with myself. No problem! My body did. I ate dinner – first real meal of the day – and promptly fell asleep, from sometime before 8pm (!) until after midnight.

Then I stayed up until 5am. Around 2:30 I glanced around the kitchen cupboard, saw the mac-and-cheese box and realized I was ravenously hungry. So I made some, tip-toeing through the quiet house full of sleeping foik behind closed doors. Pietro the canary seemed amused and perplexed at my timing, insofar as a canary can seem to have any moods at all.

Interview itself went… well enough, I think. I’m too close to it to tell. Now I wait, and maybe finally de-lame and paint some walls in my landlady’s other house like I’ve been promising for something like a month and a half. And have comfort food at 3am.

Yesterday I spent about four hours making chicken soup, complete with roasting the chicken parts I got for it. Hey, there was nothing else to do – no job on the horizon, which is wearying – and chatting with friends dealing with random illnesses inspired me to go buy soup makings, including enough meat for two batches. Of course, instead of the intended one-batch-and-leftover-chicken there ended up being more soup. My entire household, and then some, seemed to approve; and I felt close to my grandmother, who’d spend entire days in the kitchen cooking stuff up for the sheer joy of the process, and of feeding people with the results. I joked with a friend that one day I’ll get a dozen friends to make a kept woman of me, and will feed them in return.

(But no, srsly, a job – preferably an interesting, challenging job that pays me enough for me to feed friends anyway – would be way better. You hear me, multiverse?)

Then we drove to the wilds of R’dale with soup, getting astonishingly lost for, like, half an hour within a mile of the place we were going to. Classic Boston adventure. I’d intended to drop off soup and friend, but ended up staying and chatting and laughing with folk in a room painted a pleasing shade of orange.

Last night I dreamt of having a good, loving and kind and familiar conversation with someone I don’t talk to much these days. Waking up to reality is a bitch sometimes.

But it could be worse than a sunny day, ice cream for breakfast (because what’s better when you burned your tongue on hot chicken soup yesterday?), and a small black cat curled up beside me.

I dislike Valentine’s Day with something between deep indifference and red fiery passion. That said, as a member of my household I just got the best V-Day present ever, and am now almost – uh – sanguine about the holiday. From an email by housemate/landlady’s awesome partner: “For Valentine’s Day, I brought you a dozen duck eggs, just laid today.” !! Thanks, Paul!

It’s snowing white all over and so, so quiet outside.

This past Saturday was Frostbyte’s memorial auction. I arranged food for what probably ended up being a couple hundred people over the course of about 24 hours. Didn’t really cook, except in a minimalist sense. Still, it was lovely – several times that day people asked me the requisite how-are-you and I would answer, “in my element.” Providing good food for people, even if I just shop and chop veggies and open cheese and get others to help me, fills my soul like nothing else does. Especially when people I don’t know take note of the food and are pleased with it. Especially-especially when I get to participate in a group effort such as this was, two years in the making (by others: I only came to it within the last month). Labor of true love, it was, despite the complexity and frustrations of the organizing process. The next day, as we were finishing cleaning up, one of my co-organizers smiled at me and said, “You’re a new old friend.” Burners’ spirit of instant community is priceless.

(I don’t actually know whether the person who made the above remark has gone to Burning Man. But he’s old-school TEP, and I gather that’s pretty close in all the relevant ways.)

Saturday evening I sat on a couch in front of Tensor, weaving slow conversation with the human beside me into its constantly changing color-light play. A swing hung between us and Tensor. Its shadow in the bright lights, sometimes swinging empty, most of the time complete with people’s silhouettes, was the narrative of remembrance unfolding. If the mark I leave on my community when I’m gone even approaches Kevin McCormick’s – he died at just 29 – I’ll have done well.

Yesterday I spent a few hours with a sweet, social two-year-old and remembered how exhausting and satisfying it is to live only for the present moment, all the time. I remembered the realization I’ve been coming back to over the last couple of months: the kind of family I want, the village that it takes to raise children and be the change I/we wish to see in the world, is already there. Here. All I need to do is participate in it.

Last night another new old friend, the luminous human with the Tensor-side conversation, brought me a present, a square of squares of color-cycling light. It is making slow progress in its simple programming as white snow layers itself onto the skylight, sounding like grains of sand falling. White cat at my feet, I watch the color cube and feel his still calm.

“Scarborough Fair” is an old one! The Fair itself, a huge month-and-a-half-long trade show, originates in the 13th century, and the ballad appears to have its origins in another one from the late 17th. I, of course, am partial to Simon and Garfunkel’s version (link to YouTube video), because it takes me all the way back to 1993, when I moved from New York to sunny southern California (and hated it). S&G’s “The Concert in Central Park” was one of the first CDs I mail-ordered from BMG, an unspeakable luxury back then. That CD came with the bonus of “A Heart in New York,” which I sang to myself whenever I missed Queens. Which was often.

Come to think of it, I also hummed it to myself whenever I flew into New York to visit my brother (or whatnot). Have you flown into New York City in the dark? It’s unbelievably cool.

But this is a recipe post, of course:

-Take a chicken breast. Preferably a locally-grown, awesomely outrageous chicken breast, like the stuff I get from these folks. Defrost if necessary. (Never ever defrost meat in the microwave: potential health problems aside, it just gets an icky texture.) Preheat oven to 400F (200C).

-Put some salt, pepper, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme in a leettle bowl. How much? I dunno. It’s hard to over-herb a chicken breast. Mix.

-Put in a couple spoons of mayonnaise. Again, I don’t know how much: enough to coat the chicken. Mix well with the herbs.

-Slather the mixture all over the chicken. Use your hands. Get some under the skin too, if you like.

-Put chicken in a foil-lined or greased baking dish. Bake for 45-50 minutes, or until the juices run clear when you poke it with a fork. Eat, and tell me you don’t love me. I dare you.

By the way: I’m generally not a white-meat person. The meat CSA share has changed that! The Chestnut Farms chicken – as all their other meats – is amazing, and given that I’m not going to give up meat for environmental reasons anytime soon, it’s just about the most eco-conscious stuff to get. We get to eat meat of animals raised humanely, meat that hasn’t been plied with mysterious ingredients and transported the usual long distances. Support local agriculture, and all that.

If you have a chance to support your local agriculture, meat-raising or not, I encourage you to do so. Chestnut Farms’ minimum monthly share (ten pounds) is way too much for us, so we share it among three households. That way, even though the per-pound cost is high ($7 or a bit less, depending on whether they have thrown in freebies), it doesn’t break the bank to get a 3-4 lbs a month. Paradoxically, this arrangement has encouraged me to eat less meat than I normally would: store-bought stuff just doesn’t compare unless it’s really great and thus even more expensive.

Being able to participate in this meat-share thing has made me very, very happy to be back in Massachusetts: there was nothing like it around Providence, although the fruit-and-veggie farmers’ markets there are pretty good. It’s just one more thing that makes Boston feel like home all over again.

What’s your favorite recipe for bread, made using hands and an oven but no bread machine, and easy for a bread beginner, and not so time-consuming that it’ll discourage me from baking bread in the future? Not sourdough: I don’t have starter, and don’t like sourdough enough to seek it out.

LiveJournal readers, please to comment using the URL up top and not directly on LJ; I won’t see the latter.

Today was cheesemas. Cheeses were bought and brought – drunken goat, mozzarella, robiola, explorateur (?! – hokey name, but most excellent cheese), some other alcohol- (port-)laced semisoft cheese, Valdeon (a Spanish blue), raclette and half a dozen others. Someone even brought raclette ice cream which, really, was much milder than it had any right to be. Add to that fruit, bread, fig-and-vidalia jam, wine, beer, sprakly non-alc cider, fifteen folk or more and two mostly happy and social toddlers, and it’s cheesemas in the neighborhood. My undying gratitude and love to my cheesemas-elf conspirator.

Unrelatedly, I thought some this evening, and wrote down the following:

north is triangular, steady, monument-al

east is rounded, exotic, otherworldly

south is light, scintillating, hot

west is radio, diagonal, big

the center is small, sensitive, reactive