taking it personally – Page 30

September 22, 2004

Equinox.

Molly pronouncing us wed

Ethan and I married each other yesterday evening. This first of two weddings took place on the eve of the autumnal equinox. Our friend Molly, a minister of the Universal Life Church, officiated; her husband David smiled and looked generally radiant in his too-cool-for-words top hat; and Zhenya and Jo Ann, my brother and sister in law, witnessed. In attendance was also my four-year-old nephew Tesher, injecting his usual whirlwind excitement at the world.

I met Ethan at Burning Man 2003. Took off driving across the country after that event, not knowing whether I’d see him again, but knowing that something was right with the world. That was August last year.

September we spent largely on the telephone, surprised again and again at the similarities in the worldviews we had developed so carefully before we knew each other. In October, he visited me for three weeks that seemed a long, crisp, sunny day full of tea and quiet work side by side. In February, he moved out to Providence from Seattle; in June, we found ourselves a different apartment to live in. Just over a year after seeing each other – really seeing each other – across a dusty nighttime dome for the first time, we wed.

Ethan is calm and centered, our friend Alex remarked last week, when we visited him in Chicago. Yes, and he’s almost supernaturally intelligent, kind and hilarious. His capacity for caring about other human beings, whether he knows them or not, has inspired me to live more fully, and more simply. His approach to the breakneck pace of daily life that has characterized our first year together continues to remind me what is important, and what isn’t. His encouragement of my professional choices, and the days he has spent working with me on humanities computing tools (another coinciding interest!) is heartwarming. He’s an experimental soul, in just the ways I like. I feel more fully realized as a person.

We got dressed up and went for sushi, because can you really picture any large event in my life not being centered around food? It was noisy and hectic in that little room, but both the company and the food were impeccable. Zhenya, Jo and Tesher had driven up all the way from New York, and later took off again with cheerful fortitude. Molly and David stayed with us, long enough for us to get a coffee together. Smiles all around.

Now, we’ve formalized it. Now, as we settle in for the winter, we dream of spring, when we’ll get married all over again, with friends and family around us. Really, this has all been a ploy to have our wedding night last many moons.

We didn’t get much sleep last night. I am bleary, happy. All is right with the world.

Some of yesterday’s photos are here.

August 23, 2004

Comfort food.

I’m afraid my entry into the distributed cookbook will be somewhat disappointing for George, since it’s…

well, it’s miso soup.

And I’ve never made it. But going to some Japanese place and ordering a bowl of that stuff when I’m feeling cold and miserable, mmmm. It cheers me right up.

The next thing I think of, when contemplating comfort food, is actually chicken soup. To wit:

a few large pieces of chicken
(I don’t much like white meat, so tend to get leg quarters)
1 onion
a couple of carrots
a couple of celery sticks
a couple of potatoes
fresh dill and parsley, the more the better
a tablespoon of Vegeta, more to taste
large pot

Throw the chicken in large pot, fill with water. Don’t ask me how much of either, because I don’t know. You know the largest pots in the cheapo sets they sell at Walmart? I’d probly put two leg quarters in that, and fill it almost-full of water, with just enough space to spare to put all the other stuff in.

Put that in, bring to a boil, reduce to simmer, wait until the foam floats up. Skim off the foam.

Put in everything else except for the herbs. I usually put in the onion whole, and at the end throw it out, but that’s because I don’t like boiled onions. If you’re using Vegeta, watch out: it contains salt already, so don’t add any more salt. Add other seasonings if you like, but I usually leave it at that. Cook until the vegetables are done, probably 15-20 minutes.

Throw in the herbs, taste and adjust the seasoning. I generally throw in a liiittle bit more Vegeta, or leave it be.

Let the herbs cook a couple of minutes. Turn off the heat, cover, let stand for as long as you can bear it. Ladle into bowls and grind some black pepper into that. Mmm.

August 13, 2004

RIP Julia Child, at 91.

It’s true.

Perhaps this weekend I’ll cook something out of her recipes.

July 21, 2004

when blood sees blood of its own

it sings to see itself again

it sings to hear the voice it’s known

it sings to recognize the face

Having posted about being harried, I have reduced the number of e-mails in my inbox to fewer than thirty, written a lengthy letter to a long-neglected friend, and successfully tackled some work I’d been procrastinating on. This morning’s first hour was devoted to exercise, and now Suzanne Vega is making me nostalgic. There’s dinner in the oven. Perhaps there’s hope yet?

July 21, 2004

you ever have one of those

There are over five hundred e-mails in my inbox. Probably fifty of them need to be answered.

There aren’t enough hours in the day. Utilizing all of them maximally leads to too much stress; underutilizing them saves sanity, but seems to have a detrimental effect on the to-do list.

April-May-June really sucked, personal-time-wise. July is half-over, and I feel like I’m still racing to catch up.

Here’s the thing: I haven’t been slacking. If anything, I haven’t taken enough time to just chill. And still there’s so. much. to do.

Right at the moment, I’m not stressed, which is why I’m able to post it. I’d like to keep blogging, but it takes time, and it seems to take up energy that I should really be putting into keeping calm and methodical about all aspects of my life.

Even given all of the above, I feel myself slowly getting a grip on all of the too-many things that need to be done in order for life to run reasonably smoothly. I guess that’s good, at any rate.

I’m happy. I just wish there were more hours in the day, not least to communicate with you.

June 24, 2004

re-learning to listen to myself

One thing last weekend revealed to me in technicolor, something that I obviously needed to re-learn, is that pushing my body the way I have of late is not permissible. Or perhaps it is, but I do need breaks, and also to pay attention to things like nutrition. The nutrition bit I added on my own; I haven’t exactly been starving myself, just not paying attention to balance in my diet.

So I’m trying to eat – among other things – more mindfully. One thing that just occurred to me (I’m recording it here mostly for my own benefit) is something I’ve heard before but only tangibly felt now: when impulsively hungry, before getting food check if the hunger is really thirst.

This immediately takes care of two problems: the erratic eating schedule, and also the amount of liquids I’ve been ingesting, which for a while now has felt too low.

J. wrote again. This time I will write back, despite my intense feelings of guilt over not having written for… oh, long. My daily work will be changing rather radically come fall (more on this later). One thing I sure am looking forward to is figuring out ways to save some time, my most precious commodity, for my personal life. Won’t that be grand!

I’m behind on my blogging, again, as ever. Been too busy living.

June 22, 2004

solstice

Solstice is incarnate in my life this year, for it is my love’s birthday.

We shared last weekend with friends old and new at firefly, coming back home rather later than planned. Today, we showered, ate glorious Italian brunch food, read about consciousness, prepared and ate festive lunch and dinner food, and saw Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring. All day, as in the few days previous, I have watched this light-filled, sparkling being by my side, and have laughed to myself, delighted at the adventure of knowing him.

Happy birthday, Ethan, my longest sunny day. Race you to 29.

June 5, 2004

Reagan dead at 93.

Ronald Reagan has passed away.

I know that many people are quite pointedly not aggrieved, given what they thought of him as president. I just can’t help being sad, though, for everything that man and his family went through, over the ten years of Alzheimer’s. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

May 30, 2004

the big move

Not yet to WordPress or similar, but in fact to a new apartment.

I’m exhausted, and no longer in a good way. It’ll take another week to make the place not-filthy, but it will indeed be kickin’.

Can you imagine me living for probably about a week without an operating kitchen? Well, it’s about to happen. The floor in there needs to be stripped, primed and polyurethaned; more importantly, we have no stove.

Well, it could be worse: we could’ve had no stove and no refrigerator. The ones in here, you see, are in hte process being replaced by various methods. We have the fridge now (following a day’s worth of helping to procure it – but now we have exactly what we want!); the stand-alone chest freezer, which we’ve been coveting for months, is coming on Tuesday; and the replacement stove should be here Any Day Now.

The last three weeks have been nigh unto insane. We searched for a place, thinking we might need to be out of town at the end of August (when my original lease ended) and ready to break the lease. We found a place we fell in love with (pictures etc. when it’s cleaned up). We searched for someone to sublet our apartment, or else draw up a new lease, a process that quickly turned into an unreal, nightmarish chain of people expressing enthusiastic desire to take the place off our hands and then disappearing. We finally found someone, and she signed the lease on Friday. Well, that was close. Oh, and we moved.

You know what? I love this place.

May 19, 2004

AIDS kills 600 people a day in a single country.

I don’t think I can do anything about this. But this BBC article kind of puts it into perspective. If a plane crashed and killed 600 people, we’d care, right? It’d be on the evening news. What’s the difference?

I write this a day after finding out that mom’s cousin’s husband died of cancer yesterday. The C word hitting my family again. I feel so weak.