food – Page 2 – Words' End

June 21, 2008

long days of summer

At the moment of the summer solstice – at least, it was solstice as far as the internet was concerned – I was washing dishes in a quieted house, after an exquisitely summery grilled meal. A year ago I was in a very different place. The last year has brought with it changes I’d never imagined, not then, not in the near future. I went to the darkest place I’d ever been, and have come back out into the light.

Life is softly humming along. I’ve been getting re-acquainted with how it feels to rely almost exclusively on public transport and my feet for getting from point N to point ΔN. It feels long-ago-homey – more like Kishinev than even my recent experiences in New York and Boston. Maybe it also feels a little like London, where I also took both subway trains and buses regularly. It’s an entirely different pace of life, and (aside from the fact that some things are just not possible without a car) I think I like it better. But I need more audio books.

There are still many, many days left in the season before I begin feeling like they’re getting short again. The sun tends to lighten people, and I’ve been feeling my friends’ burdens fade into the background even as they don’t fall away. My own, too.

Been daydreaming about the Burning Man road trip. Right now I’m thinking something like this on the way out, and maybe a southerly route on the way back. It’s a lot of driving – the way out west as I’ve mapped it out is 11 driving hours more than the shortest route, and the way back – 13, which amounts to two extra days of driving. I don’t know how I’ll afford it, but this is the year of a cathartic road trip, so hopefully I’ll find a way to make this happen. Or, you know, shorten the route. The shortening will likely be on the southerly side, though, because the northern plains and the Bad Lands (thanks for the link, Rosa) are calling me.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some mushroom caps to stuff. Happy solar holiday, all.

June 11, 2008

satisfaction

Satisfying:

-writing my very first AppleScript, and having it be reasonably clever (for a first script, yo) and work.

-lunch of spicy Thai beef salad and a gingery tofu-veggie dish with Molly. There’s just nothing bad about that.

-decent talk with my therapist earlier this evening.

-lovely time with Colleen, whom I’ve known for ten years this year, and gods, knowing her is one of the best things that ever happened to me. And with her kid Sylvana, a giggly, smart, developmentally fascinating toddler.

-fiddleheads, slices of cheese, and riesling for dinner. As a “picnic” on the kitchen floor. Complete with real wine glasses.

-a garden full of roses that have a scent, around the corner and down the block from my house.

-my house, with its murals and animals and human animals and quiet when I want it.

-summer, even despite the heat wave.

-lying around naked on a weekend morning, underneath a ceiling fan, grinning ear to ear because you just can’t help it.

-being dependent almost entirely on public transport, and finding that to be very pleasant.

-Mac OS Leopard and the upcoming release of the 3G iPhone.

-reading more, as I ride the T to work.

-making a mental inventory of the last week or so, and of the rest of the summer, and realizing just how lucky I am.

June 4, 2008

excuses and high lights

OK, an hour ago I still had the excuse of long-overdue catching up with a friend. Now it’s just the sneezing and the achy throat keeping me up.

Significant bright sides, both from tonight and from the past weekend: conversation over ginger lemon tea and a hummus plate at Diesel right up until they closed. Coming back home and preserving lemons brought to me by erstwhile Croatian visitors. Tasting the resulting lemon-juice-and-much-salt concoction, which won’t actually be ready for 5-6 weeks, but hey, I was curious; and experiencing a unique taste sensation that is oddly compelling. Listening to Ottmar Liebert, one of my favorite guitarists, whose album “In the Arms of Love” I’ve come to associate with the calm of late evenings.

Last Friday, seeing Mischief in the Machine, incredibly satisfying not least because the musicians have been practicing in my living room for the past several months, and some of the other performers are friends and acquaintances, and oh, also because it was an excellent show.

Food shopping with two friends and a kid, and helping the two-year-old through a comparative critique of two fairly complex cheeses.

Dinner (involving sushi), dessert (involving cherries and really actually unfortunate bacon chocolate) and conversation (involving three of my favorite peeps) underneath the Templet.

Helping a friend move – not under the best of circumstances for him, but satisfying both in a physical sense and in that I was able to participate. I’ve been on a bit of a streak reacting to what I see as empty pronouncements of love and sunshiny feelings towards the world – the only meaningful way I’ve found to counteract that is to invest of myself in my world, in practical ways that benefit it (them) and therefore myself. Hey, it’s not the best of motivations, but whatever gets me up and running, no?

Speaking of up and running, weightlifting is still having a profound effect on my life. Have I mentioned that? Yeah, like, every other post. Well, it’s true. Soon, if Molly and I succeed at mutually motivating, I’ll go check out BU’s gym facilities.

Going from strenuous move to the best picnic “brunch” yet this season. Quotation marks because it lasted most of the day. Molly and Rosa really know how to make a girl happy with food.

And then quiet and important conversation with Mark, one of the aforementioned favorite people; feeding my haptic interface; and an opportunity to start organizing my life – and snail-mail – and other paperwork – that seems to have been just the push I needed to start digging myself out of the piles-of-paper-everywhere hole I seem to get into at least a couple of times a year.

On balance, things aren’t bad. Except, of course, for the things that are. But, as I’ve written for the past several months, that’s largely out of my control.

Aki is sitting guard by my side. Time to go cuddle the cat – if he deigns to assent. Here’s hoping that the echinacea and goldenseal capsules counterbalance the lack of sleep, where my immune system is concerned.

April 5, 2008

the morning after

GNAAAAAAHM by moominmolly

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.

March 28, 2008

baby it’s cold outside

baby it’s cold outside by wordsend

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.

March 16, 2008

31

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.

March 4, 2008

3am comfort food

3am comfort food by wordsend

(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.

February 16, 2008

mundane details are people, too.

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.

February 13, 2008

V-Day goodness!

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!

February 13, 2008

everything is white and colors.

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.