I will never be famous

One of the best compliments I ever got was when I was about 18, in high school. A guy whom I sort of knew from classes was, for reasons I can no longer remember, motivated to say to me, "Someday, you're going to be famous and I'm going to be able to say I knew you." The compliment itself is pretty great, but what made it even more meaningful to me was the fact that it came from a guy who was pretty popular at the time. Because I definitely wasn't. I'm not going to get into specifics here, but I was not interested in earning the adulation of my classmates and made no effort to better my image in their eyes. I have no patience for drug-addled, empty-headed twits so it was unfortunate that they comprised most of my senior class. This guy Jay may or may not have been into weekend chemistry, but he certainly wasn't empty-headed.

So it is with great sadness that I must now make the following announcement. Jay, I'm sorry, but I will never be famous. Ever.

This is not a fear or a prediction. It is a vow.

The back story (yes there's a story, of course there's a story) goes like this. Last week, an outdoor ice skating rink opened right across the street from my office. It's great. It's about 60 degrees outside, which makes it perfect skating weather. I've been spending every possible lunch hour skating since it opened.

Either no one has figured out that it's open, or San Franciscans just don't skate because my blade-footed compatriots have topped out at a grand total of 5. There's nothing quite like having a rink pretty much all to myself to mess around in. It spoils me to no end, and I can't get enough of it.

The pesky downside of all this is that this rink is situated in a small park, next to a bunch of lunch spots and outdoor tables. And wouldn't you know it, my lunch hour coincides with everyone else's lunch hour. My skating time is a floor show for a bunch of tie-strangled yuppies shoveling bad pizza and worse teriyaki into their mouths in a manner reminiscent of a shop-vac attacking a pile of compost.

And they are not alone. Not even close. They are joined by the Dreaded Photo Students.

Let's back up a bit and lay down some small but crucial background information. I don't like being stared at. It makes me really uncomfortable, because for one thing, I never know why it happens. If I notice that I'm attracting undue attention, I'll do the usual inventory of teeth-checking and hair smoothing and clothes-examination and then I'll still have no answers. Of course the only reasonable response on my part is to delve deep into the bowels of the human psyche in a vaguely directed attempt to figure out what mental process would trigger this sort of unabashed ocular vulgarity, and that never leads anywhere good. My understanding of the human condition as it applies to the rest of the population is, at best, one step removed from popular consensus. (in a rare and ultimately doomed attempt to explain my outlook on life to one of my friends, I once said, "It's a real trip, being me." Basically, I meant that fairly often, and we're talking several times a day here, I'll reflect on something I've just said or done and go What the f...? Who DOES this? Like the time I hiked to the top of the really big and really sandy hill on Ocean Beach in my new black velvet trench coat. Or for that matter, the fact that I own a black velvet trench coat with a leopard print lining. What the f...?) Anyway. The point is that I start trying to deconstruct the mental states of random crazy people and that never goes anywhere good. I don't come up with healthy, normal lines of reasoning like, for example, the fact that I might be attractive to at least some of them. Or now, with the short and blue zebra striped hair, a bit distinctive. Oh no. No, I conjure up such searingly sensible hypotheses as...actually, no I don't. I never actually come up with a reason. I just wonder. And it creeps me out.

And now, back to the Dreaded Photo Students, whom, you'll recall, prompted this whole train of thought in the first place. As bad as the staring is, it is sickeningly amplified in conjunction with a telephoto camera lens. Because people with cameras pan. Panning, for those less literate in the intricacies of photography, is a technique employed in the photographing of a moving subject. If part of the frame are moving sufficiently fast, they will blur when captured on film. If you hold the camera still, your subject will blur. And this is no good. You will end up with a beautifully exposed background and a big smudge in the middle. So the alternative is to follow the subject with your camera, and you will get the opposite effect: your background will blur but your subject will be in focus.

Returning from the world of photo theory to real life, this means when I am skating, there are a bunch of very obvious camera lenses following my every move. And, let us not forget that I am a Student Of Art. (Real life was fun, wasn't it? Leave it behind, as you are about to violently catapulted into the World Of Art.) In case you have been negligent in your art theory studies in recent years, the current trend is to attribute a phallic subtext to everything. And not just everything in art. Nonono, absolutely everything. Neckties, the Washington Monument, umbrellas, wine bottles... clearly, clearly, these are artifacts of a misogynistic male-dominated society in which the number one aesthetic priority is to constantly assert the superiority and ubiquitousness of the male apparatus. Now, armed with your new knowledge of the number one guiding principle of product design for the last 300 years, reconsider my experience of being obviously panned by something like twenty very long and sizable camera lenses. Got it? Yeah. It's a real trip being me.

And this is just my experience. Now imagine what it must be like to be, say, Nancy Kerrigan. The camera lenses must number in the thousands. Celebrity is for other people. People who are more equipped to handle thousands of phallic camera lenses.

Shameless Gloating About My Friday Night

Friday night, a coworker and I went out to see a movie after work. (Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Excellent stuff. I highly recommend it.) And after the movie, despite resolutions made earlier in the day of getting sleep that night, we went to a bar.

This particular coworker grew up in California, went to college at Berkeley, and as far as I know, except for a brief stint in New York, has stayed there since. He knows the area quite well, he's got a list of his favorite haunts a mile long, (and these are good haunts, by the way. Not the local-bowling-alley-that-everyone-knows-about type haunts, but the "go in and blow straight past the hostess and head down a small nondescript hallway to the left to the secret elevator which you take to the r0of to get to the rooftop restaurant with an unparalleled view of the city and by the way it's 68 degrees and there's just enough fog to make everything spectacularly beautiful and to top it all off you got there early enough to get a table and can mercilessly mock everyone who has to stand" type haunts.) and we share some interests. This puts him at the top of my List Of People To Get To Know For The Purposes Of Learning New Things.

I'm not completely without a conscience. First of all, like I said, The Coworker and I are into a lot of the same things. We do legitimately have fun when we hang out. So I'm pretty sure I'm not imposing an undue burden on him. And I've got something he wants. Bargaining chips, as it were. In this case, my desirable assets are my books, movies, music, and the people skills necessary to figure him out enough that I can introduce him to my multimedia paradise in a way that makes sense and will be enjoyable (if you have ever tried to get someone else hooked on Tool, you know how hard this can be).

The end result is that I spend a fair amount of time scheming ways to get him to show me more of the city. Though after Friday, I might just let events run their natural course.

Friday we went to a bar of The Coworker's choosing. And The Coworker has a flair for the dramatic, because all of the places we go involve navigating through secret entrances or back alleys and generally escaping the beaten path. This particular bar involved the requisite back alley in the middle of the financial district with the added bonus of carefully threading our way through a collection of large dumpsters and vehicles scattered all over the road and the sidewalk. So I honestly had no idea where we were headed, which meant that I was totally unprepared for what I saw when we actually arrived.

We turned a corner and I was in Greece. The bar was all lit up with outdoor tables and lights everywhere and full of people. It might even have been on a cobblestone side street, although I think I'm making that up. I've seen many such places in Greece and Italy and France, and never in the States. I couldn't believe it.

The bar is actually an Irish bar with...get ready for it... a confessional. They ripped it out of a church and put it in the bar with a few benches and a small table. It's the best place to sit because it's quite comfortable for 2 people and it isolates you from the rest of the bar, so you can actually hold a conversation and not worry about some idiot wildly gesturing into your drink.

But wait, it gets better.

At this point, it's probably about midnight. We're in the confessional, talking about random stuff, and we start talking about food and cooking and...something. I don't remember what something was. It might have been my cooking or a restaurant I'd been to or something else, but whatever it was, it wasn't as good as Alice Waters, and I said so.

"[something] isn't as good as Alice Waters, but it's passable."

"Alice...who?" And he asked this not as if he hadn't heard, but as if he hadn't quite believed what he'd heard.

"Alice Waters."

"You know who Alice Waters is?"

Yes, I do know who Alice Waters is. She's a very famous chef and restaurant owner who has been getting a lot of press lately. She's all about quality food, fresh and local, and I have read nothing but good things about her. She recently figured prominently in an interesting article in the New York Times, and so she's been on my mind a bit, which is probably why I picked her as my basis of comparison to whatever it was I was talking about about. Good thing I did.

I was running all this through my head, trying to figure out why it might be so important, why The Coworker would also know about Alice Waters, etc. And then it hit me. Her restaurant. Chez Panisse. It's in Berkeley. Where The Coworker currently resides.

Long story short, he's also into food in a big way. We're so going to Chez Panisse.

Will the Man With the Green Aliens Please Stand Up?

As some of you are aware, I have a prints account on deviantArt. It's a blissful thing. A few years ago I paid a one time fee to start an account. In return, they handle every aspect of selling prints, from printing to shipping to collecting payment. I just sit back and wait for the money to come rolling in.

I've been waiting since 2004 with nothing much to show. I've sold a print here and there, but the profit margins are pretty low, so I haven't earned much. And I haven't actually been paid anything because dA will not mail you a check until you've earned at least $20. Like I said, the profit margins are slim.

Well that all changed today. I got an email saying that my check has been mailed. It turns out someone, or a few someones, bought prints recently, pushing my profits up to a check-mailing level.

This wouldn't be a blog post if that were the end of the story. The point here is that I am a moron. I forgot to update my mailing address when I moved. It didn't even cross my mind. So some CMU kid is going to get my check in his SMC. I have emailed dA so hopefully now that they have the correct address they will resend the check.

P.S. If you happened to be one of the buyers that triggered today's events, first of all, thanks! And secondly, please please please tell me how the print looks when it arrives. The prints that sold most recently are ones that I haven't seen before, so I want to know if they look good. If not, let me know and I'll make it right.

Glee!

If the library post wasn't enough of a tip off, I have a problem with books. I like them too much. Bookstores make me weak in the knees. All sense is abandoned the moment I enter one. I buy books the way fashion victims buy ugly clothes. I like to think that my books are more meaningful than a polyester bubble skirt, but this is small consolation.

Compounding the problem is the bookshelf dilemma of which I've already spoken. I simply do not have the space to store books.

One might hope that, under the circumstances, I'd take appropriate precautions to avoid exacerbating either situation. And normally it's not hard. I don't live near any book stores. There are a few near work but they're not close enough to pose any real threat. I always forget they exist. Since I've moved here, my main monetary temptation has been not books at all, but the consignment shop that set itself down between my apartment and my bus stop.

However, today it all went wrong. I went to a book sale. And not just any book sale. It was The Big Book Sale, held annually in a gigantic warehouse by Fisherman's Wharf. The posters advertised upwards of 300,000 books to be sold. It was a three day sale and today was the last day, so all the books were less than $1.

The proprietors are smart. They don't mess around with baskets or bags for their patrons. You walk in and deck yourself out with a shopping cart. I suppose there's some sense in that. The warehouse was twice the size of my local grocery store. And the products were cheaper.

Having optimistically foregone even a backpack for transporting these suckers home, I tried to limit myself. I attempted a bit of triage. But the problem is simply that if you shove a book in my hands, almost any book, and ask me if I'd buy it for a dollar, the answer is probably yes. My friend J found this out today as she started shoving books into my arms which I absolutely had to read. She was forgiven for this; they look like good books, and she brought a car and was willing to drive me home.

I learned today that I do some strange things when books are available on the cheap. I've discovered that I am capable of homesick book acquisition syndrome: I buy books because they were in my parents' house. I offer up the following for your consideration:

The New York Times Cook Book - Having been an avid Times reader for quite some time, I am quite confident that the recipes contained herein are wonderful. I'm sure they're full of merit and no doubt will bring me much pleasure should I ever try to execute one. However, I have absolutely no idea what's in this book. I didn't even crack it open before I bought it. It landed in the cart because for as long as I can remember, it has occupied a coveted spot next to The Joy of Cooking in my parents' house. That spot is desirable not for its company but for the fact that it is in the kitchen, ready to be whipped out at a moment's notice if needed. My parents have plenty of cookbooks, and most of them sit pristine in the living room waiting to intimidate less culinarily inclined guests, 2 rooms away. I would suspect a certain quiet smugness on the part of my parents for this except that our neighbors all cook excellently as well (they have a club expressly for this purpose) and while three books of Indian cooking technique might bring terror to the hearts of mere mortals, the members of the Stonehenge Gourmet are not so easily unnerved*.

The New New Thing - This has been consistently lying around our house for the last few years. Or months. Whatever. It was published recently, and I know my dad has been talking about it to other people. I don't remember what my dad says about the book, or to whom he says it, but if it starts that many conversations, it's worth a read. My dad likes to read current writing on various industries of interest to him, such as the news industry or the tech sector. More often than not, our living room coffee tables** are covered with volumes delving into anything from the history of cryptography and code breaking to the study of internet search.

Martha Stewart's Christmas - Let it be noted that this book was published in 1989, well before Ms. Stewart became the embodiment of vilified perfection she is today (though I believe, even then, she was publicly hated and privately envied for her disgustingly perfect homemaking). For quite some time, this book also basked in limelight above the microwave. I think it has been relegated to the dark cabinets in the study with the cookie cutters, but it is reliably reintroduced to the glory of the kitchen every Christmas for The Great Gingerbread Event (which deserves its own post, so look for that closer to the holidays). I was quite excited to find it and I was gaily reliving many past Christmases as I showed J the Gingerbread House To End All Gingerbread Houses with the gold leafed roof. A woman next to me overheard this conversation and promptly started in with the typical Martha comments: "She probably mined the gold herself." etc. Ms. Stewart would be quite disappointed I'm sure, to hear that this woman was unaware that there is, in fact, more than one cook book by Martha Stewart. For though there were no others at the book sale, I know that in our house, the gingerbread undertaking requires not just Martha Stewart's Christmas, but Martha Stewart's Pies & Tarts as well. For whatever reason, the gingerbread formulas in each are different, and over the years my mom has added various footnotes and post-its with to both with invaluable information. So the yearly gingerbread ritual begins with the Retrieval Of The Recipes, followed immediately by the Deciphering Of The Margin Notes, occasionally accompanied by the Scraping Off Of The Old Gingerbread Dough, and finally the Argument About Which Recipe To Use. I think my mom actually has a set favorite, but I can never remember which one it is.

The photos above represent my haul. They also represent $31. So from a monetary perspective, I did more than alright. I just don't know where I'm going to put them.

*I had great hopes and dreams for the end of that sentence, but their realization relied on the presence of another book: The Smart People's Thesaurus. I discovered it hidden away on my bookshelves as I was packing to move. It was a gift to me years ago, and I had foolishly forgotten about it, instead spending many frustrated hours in the following years paging through other less exalted sources of synonyms. Its rediscovery a few months ago led to great rejoicing on my part and a fearsome vow to never let this unparalleled volume go neglected again. Well, now I can't find it. It's here somewhere because I remember packing it, but it must be in hiding to spite me.

**Yes, coffee tableS, plural. And they're all covered in books. Not coffee table books, but meaty, intelligent pieces of writing that will make you smarter for having read them. And that doesn't begin to address the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that cover one wall. I think the ceiling is twenty feet. The shelves aren't quite that high, but they're close. And there are plenty of overstuffed pieces of furniture and a working fireplace. I miss the living room.

Best. Bookcover. Ever

I have made it a point to do at least one fun and adventurous thing every weekend. These aren't hugely exciting moments, but I'm new here and low level characters can't go around tackling turasks. We have to be content with field mice and rabid bats until we level up a few times.

Saturday's goal was the library. And, as an aside, in my world it is pronounced 'liiiiiiiiiiii-berry!' with all the kid-in-a-candy-store inflection implied in an impending visit to a 6 story monument to Free Books For All! I love libraries.

I had never been to the San Francisco Library, but I was running out of DVDs to watch and until I wise up enough to put the "Books" line item in my monthly budget, the library is much safer than Barnes and Noble. Also, as you may remember, I am already in bookshelf debt, and I'm fast running out of interim storage space on my floor. So I set off in search of free books and obscure art documentaries.

I grew up in a suburb. Our library was three rooms of books over the local police station. I remember going in there every few days and talking to the same librarian every time. Most of my elementary school existence was in the library. It was probably about a mile and a half from our house, and I'd walk down there armed with a backpack to carry the eight or twelve books I'd eventually check out. I went back last winter in anticipation of a 4 day beach New Year's, and my librarian is still there. And she looks exactly the same as she did fifteen years ago. Big glasses, gray hair, and pink sparkle lipstick.

I was completely unprepared for the monolith I arrived at when I got off the subway. The lobby reminded me of the Louvre. After a lengthy library card acquisition process, I headed up to the fourth(!) floor to browse the DVD selection. I've been avoiding Blockbuster and Netflix thus far, and after watching an amazing cuban guitar concert (Nights of Fire, by Benise. Check it out) I decided I was in the mood for some art documentaries. The library coughed up a fascinating Andy Goldsworthy video and a Cirque du Soleil performance.

As I was leaving, I noticed a small alcove just inside the door, filled with books. For Sale. The library was selling books, and like a fool, I bought one. I take comfort in the fact that it was only one. I left the physics book on the shelf, along with a lot of cookbooks and an astonishing assortment of trashy beach novels.

The book that came home with me is a collection of travel essays, a genre of writing that has lately become fascinating to me. And this particular volume has, in addition to great essays, the single best cover photograph I have ever seen. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do it justice, but nevertheless, I give you I Should Have Stayed Home.

My new arch nemesis: book shelves

First of all, this is really embarrassing. My arch nemesis is a class of inanimate objects. I've gone from being justifiably feared to being bested by ply wood. It's ignominious.

The book shelf conflict extends back as far as I remember, but it is only recently that the enemy has started actively fighting back.

Book shelves started out as nothing more than a hard problem. In middle school, I started reading a lot. I bought books. Other people bought books for me. And since I enjoy rereading novels, I didn't get rid of any. They started to accumulate. It was a gradual thing, and equally gradually, I started appropriating other sets of shelves in the house, as the ones in my room were inadequate.

Cut to college. I had a new problem, although I didn't realize it for years. My book collection had, up until college, been mostly limited to paperback novels. College text books are generally not paperback sized. Mostly, they're large, hardback beasts weighing multiple pounds. They're massive enough that carrying more than one at a time in a backpack is decidedly unpleasant. And by the end of my fourth year in college, I'd collected a lot of them. In addition, I'd also been slowly building up a respectable showing of art books. Art books showcase the work of particular artists or styles or movements, so they have to be large and full color.

I was justifiably proud of my book case by senior year (pt 1). It was small, but it boasted the texts of not one but two majors. The giantish presences of Dali and Raphael stood in company with the foundations of computer science. It was, in point of fact, a source of great pride.

The enemy must have sensed this, for it struck with calculated vengeance. It could not have picked a more inopportune time: this was the last night of my stay in Pittsburgh. Chris' parents and another housemate and his family had come up for graduation. Having abandoned all hope of eating at a restaurant, the college students were trying to coordinate the culinary efforts of two families in order to get dinner on the table. We did it, and I was relaxing after a good meal when I was prompted to grab something out of my room.

My room was a disaster zone. And for those of you who have seen my bedroom on a regular basis, I must stress that it was a lot worse than you're imagining. My book shelves had, in point of fact, collapsed. The shelving itself had been violently ripped off the legs and the whole unit had fallen forward, vomiting the masters of the Italian Renaissance across the room like so much bad Sri Lankan chicken. Some of the less hardy volumes were being irreparably mangled under the weight of their colossal counterparts.

You'll recall that this was the night before I had to leave, and we had company. The best I could do was to neatly pile the books and forget about it for the summer. When I returned in the fall, I went to Ikea and brought back a new set of shelves which have served me well ever since.

...until Yesterday. I noticed that Something Was Wrong. The books were not vertical, the shelves were far from horizontal, and the sides had come unpegged from everything. At this point, it was fixable. Ikea's famous peg system is fairly forgiving. I started removing the books with the intention of fitting the shelves back together. However, plywood was never meant to be a structural building material. The screws got torqued and ripped it to shreds, rendering the shelves useless.

So now, I must once again admit defeat. And furthermore, I am in the market for new shelves. And this time, they'll be made of real wood.

Oh, the shame

For the last year or so, I've had an on-and-off online pen-pal. He's exotic and German. I can tell you're all jealous. Well you should be, because of that exotic German business.

I like this international pen-pal thing. I get to learn. I get to learn about Germany, about Europe, about the rest of the world across the pond. I'm learning about the German education system, and how everyone must go through job training before starting work, whether they're a computer scientist or a baker. I'm learning that German college is a real bargain at 500 Euros a semester, but you have to go to a specific type of high school to get in, and if you don't finish your last year, you have to repeat the final three to be eligible for college.

One of the most valuable part of this is getting a sense of what some of the rest of the world thinks of Americans and this country. Granted, my source is a bit too rational, and concedes that while many Germans protest the U.S. and everything it stands for, a lot of these same people leave protests and go home and listen to Eminem and other fine, upstanding pillars of our society. Regardless...

It turns out that we can't keep too many secrets from our German friends. I found out one other disturbing disturbing fact today: Germany knows about Fox News. Our national dirty underwear is a bastion of neo conservative alarmists with only a passing acquaintance with fact and the world knows about it. I'm getting hit with hard questions like, "It's so obviously false. None of this is true. I can't believe anyone would ever believe any of this. They don't, do they?"

It's time to step it up. The world is watching, people.

Find the Humans!

No great thoughts today... just an AMAZING website that gives you the phone codes you need to get to an actual human being without navigating the automated menus. Here it is!

LiveJournal, You Suck

A few days ago, completely by accident, I found out that this blog is being syndicated on LiveJournal, and people over there are leaving comments on the syndication. This is great. Pretty much anything can be syndicated through LJ and I know it makes many people's lives easier if they only have to worry about one RSS collection rather than paging through 12 different sites. Fine.

However. There is a problem with LJ's syndication. Only LJ members can leave comments on the syndicated posts. No one can log in anonymously, or with OpenID (which blogger doesn't support anyway). Fine, whatever, I'll create an account and log in so I can post comments. But wait, what's this? UserID meleemistress has been taken?! By whom?

Can you guess?

My userID here, 'meleemistress', was used as the owner of the LJ syndication. So now, I can't create that user because technically I already have it, but I can't log in using that name because it's a syndication account and therefore has no password. I honestly don't care how cool LJ is, or how many features it has. If they can't figure out that, regardless of where it's being printed, I might want control over my own damn content, they need to start over. This is just basic respect for the author of the blog. I know it would be hard to prove that I'm me, and I don't really care. That's their problem.

I sucked it up and made a different LJ account, so here's the pertinent info:

syndicated LJ feed: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/meleemistress/
my new userID: AttackTheGazebo *

I will not be actually posting entries with this account, just comments. So if you see anything under that name, it's me.

*And for those who don't get the reference, or who just want to reread for amusement value, I give you, straight from the annals of gamer legend, Eric and the Gazebo.

The Sofa Saga

I've lived quite a few places since I started college. I had 3 different incarnations of college housing, as well as 2 places in Sri Lanka, and now I'm here in San Francisco. Every time I move, I have to spend time figuring out all the little intricacies of the new place, or I risk stumbling upon them by accident. The second place in Sri Lanka, for example, possessed the quaint little feature of a water tank on top of the building which had to be filled by pump every night. It also had a toilet that would, if not supervised, run indefinitely. The combination of these two factors caused me to run out of water in the middle of a shower, producing an explosion of profanity and incoherent yelling rivaled only when I stepped on a colony of fire ants a few days later.

Or take my most recent house in Pittsburgh which had cheap caulk around the shower. Fortunately we knew immediately when it had rotted through, because we'd discover a stream of water coming through the kitchen light fixture.

The lease started Sunday, and so far there really haven't been any issues. The space is huge, it was just remodeled, everything is new and in pristine condition. So there really haven't been any issues...except for one: the front door.

If you'll allow me to digress a bit, I'd like to talk about a job I had a few years ago as the chair of a campus production organization. We supplied lighting and sound for on campus concerts, fashion shows, culture nights, and anything else that other student organizations could dream up. As long as we had the time and the man power and no one felt the need to pulverize the potential client with the clue bat, we took the gigs. They were all over campus, and some locations off campus, and they ranged in size from a 1 hour long karaoke night with 1 speaker to a multi day multistage carnival involving all our gear, a good amount of rental gear, and all of the help we could scrape out of the alumni. If we were lucky, the alumni doubled the size of our crew and if we weren't so lucky, things didn't go so well.

As chair, my main job was to talk to potential clients and figure out if and how we could make their events happen. Because we work in so many places, we need to think of a lot of different things to make this all work. We need to make sure that the space has enough power, that we have enough set up and tear down time, that we have crew, that we can get the gear there and back, that we have food for the crew if the event is really long.... etc etc etc. Basically, we need to think of everything, because our clients rarely do. It is our job to know what we need, to figure out what the client needs, and how best to combine the two. Let me say that again. It is our job to figure out what we need to know and we must take direct responsibility for any oversights.

Now, I only held that position for a year, which wasn't really enough time to get good at it. Just when I felt like I was really starting to get the hang of things, it was time to elect the next people. But for all that, the chairs generally do a pretty good job of getting things done. So who the hell let an architect design a house that was so close to the adjacent structure that I now can't get any furniture into my apartment?!

This, folks, has been my discovery, and it is a sobering one. My main door (35 inches wide) opens into a narrow little alleyway (30 inches wide). Any furniture I bring in needs to fit both the alley and the door without turning, because there's no room to rotate anything.

I discovered all of this when the sofa delivery men showed up on Sunday to deliver a sofa, and they couldn't get it into the apartment. So, for now, I have 2 dining room chairs, a dining room table, a coffee table, and a bed. Fortunately, the chairs are fairly comfortable, because otherwise I'd have nowhere to type this.

Architects, this is your job. It is your stated duty to ensure, when designing a structure, that it will be usable by its inhabitants. And it is imperative that you get it right, because once the structure is built, it is not likely to be changed. This is a failure on your part, which is a shame because the rest of the unit is so nice. But for now, it will be nice and empty, until I find something that fits through the door.

(not) Driving in San Francisco

My first draft of the Inquirer article included a segment regarding the standard Sri Lankan driving practices, which seemed to me to be mostly a motley collection of lawless vagaries committed in the spirit of artificially advancing entropy. The editor rejected that version on the basis of the fact that driving styles are inherently regional, and complaints on the matter make for uninteresting copy. It is therefore with some trepidation that I attempt to tackle the same subject matter a second time, albeit for different reasons.

I have been in San Francisco since Tuesday night. It is now Monday afternoon, and I have resolved never to own a car here. There are the expected differences in automotive piloting tradition, such as a disturbing tendency of the locals to double park anyone, anywhere, anytime, but those can be learned. The reasoning behind this decision comes from a condition that I have never before seen in any city, which is that private transportation is the lowest priority of the the local government.

Inklings of such a state appeared the moment my mom and I started driving. The parking fees, in particular, we felt to be particularly egregious. 25 cents buys 10 minutes on a good day. Various sidewalk colors indicated loading zones, drop off/pick up areas, and others, all of which equal no parking. Of course, this is all still just a system and therefore can be learned with a large investment of small change. My rebellion against the San Francisco driving institution was not cemented until two days ago, when I read an article in the local paper.

Driving discontent is not at all limited to out-of-towners. Not in the least. San Francisco locals are completely fed up with the lack of parking, the meter rates, and the high fines for breaking the rules. And it gets better. Discussions are in the works for meter rates and fees to be raised *again* for the purposes of....wait for it....subsidizing the public transit system here. Now, for all I know, it's the practice of every city to use parking money to support public transportation infrastructure. But here, I definitely get the feeling that drivers are being punished for driving.

The sentiment expressed in this newspaper article regarding subsidized public transit was mostly negative. Those interviewed felt that public transit should be self-sustaining, and if money is a problem, raise the ticket rates. Now that I've found out that a monthly MUNI pass is $45, I can understand the sentiment. That being said, I'm glad MUNI rates are cheap, and I'm glad I'm not driving.

A Divergence

I swear, I promise, I make an oath that I will write about Europe soon. I am, however, in the middle of moving to San Francisco (I fly out tomorrow) and the blog posts are not high priorities at the moment.

The more immediate news is that finally, after years of trying, I feel like I can really talk shop with my guy friends. Before Wednesday, I hadn't felt that I was particularly weak in the skill of being "one of the guys" but I see now that I was completely misinformed and that certain areas of manhood were closed to me.

Wednesday, it all changed. The catalyst was a rather drastic hair cut resulting in a 14 inch donation to Locks of Love, a funky new hair style, and a morning routine that now requires a hair dryer and 2 styling products.

...It turns out that a lot of my male friends spend some of their morning preening in front of the mirror with wax or gel or some other sinister sculpting product. And now I do too, so we can talk about the benefits of a certain type of wax, or what alcohol-free products will still stand up to the "driving with the window open" test. This is all sorts of fun, and I can't talk to my girlfriends about it, because none of them use the sheer volume of junk required to make my hair look the way I want.

I have returned!

I flew into Dulles on Saturday night and my dad picked me up from Chris' house Sunday morning. Over the next few posts, I'll recount various elements of the trip, because it was fun and it might even make interesting reading.

In Europe!

Expect updates here after June 18th.

I'm Back!

It's been a while, but this blog is back in business. For those just tuning in, I graduated on Sunday (whee!) and I got a job as a software developer in San Francisco. I start July 9th. Before that gets rolling, Chris and I are headed to Europe for about 3 weeks to kick around the U.K., France, and Italy.

We leave Monday, and right now I'm still in Pittsburgh, moving out. So I'm packing. I hate packing. Still. I think the most depressing thing about packing is seeing the bags of garbage and Good Will material and thinking, "Why on earth was I living with all of this stuff?" Most of it could have been trashed six months ago.

Actually, that's a lie. The most depressing part is knowing that I sent a full SUV of stuff home with my parents yesterday and not seeing any real difference in the way the house looks. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that it's a house, four people live here, and two of them aren't moving for another few weeks. Also, I'm not anywhere close to done packing.

And tonight is trash night so I'm trying to get the bulk of the trash dealt with, which means doing with the rest of the packing. It's going to be a long night.

Shopping! Continued

You may or may not remember that I went on a shopping expedition last fall. There's more to the story.

It turns out that the phrase "40 dollar suit" strikes terror in the hearts of people who are older and wiser than me. I know this, because they read this blog. And because they are my parents, and they have a fairly direct manner when they think I'm making mistake.

If it was just them, I might argue back a bit. I find that the "machine washable" trait of the clothes I bought is priceless and therefore should boost the overall value of my clothes. Armed with this rebuttal, I came home for Thanksgiving, fully intending to be quite satisfied with my decisions.

My mom saw it coming a mile away.

And then she enlisted the neighbors. She fights dirty.

I don't actually know how this all went down. The version I got was that one of our neighbors offered to come on a shopping trip with me to help me pick out additional wardrobe elements. So this is how I found myself, the day before Thanksgiving, in Syms with my mom, my neighbor, and my neighbor's daughter.

In my last post on the subject, I impressed the importance of having a forthright, decisive, honest, and frank shopping companion. It turns out I didn't know the meaning of any of those words. We spent 3 hours in the store. My mother and my neighbor were handing me jackets at an alarming rate. I tried them on right on the sales floor, and I'd be able to wear one for all of 3 seconds before a verdict was reached. Most of the time it was "no."

We found a few suits that met with approval, and then we headed over to the separates section. Of particular note was a bright red wool blazer. I wasn't too certain about it. It had a weird 3 pocket thing going on. I was assured, however, that it fit perfectly and looked fabulous and that I should get it. So I did.

And I didn't get a chance to wear it until today, when I had a job fair. I was going to go with a suit, but I decided the blazer looked better, and it was warmer. After I got assurances from Chris that a blazer was plenty formal for the job fair, I headed out the door.

I won't go into details here, but it was the right decision. I've never had a job fair go as well as today's did. And I credit it at least partially to the red blazer, because everyone else was wearing black suits and I stood out really well.

New Blog

I have some pretty serious kitchen plans coming up. Serious enough to warrant a new blog. And conveniently enough, there is, in fact, a new blog to handle it. From now on, all food related posts will be at Kitchen War. I'll still keep this one around for the more mundane stuff.

And the winners are...

For those playing the home game, I ended up making the Pumpkin Mousse for the party. The recipe from Frog is really easy, and it turned out spectacularly. I substituted Buttershots for half of the rum.

I was getting sick of making chocolate, hence the mousse. Chris, however, has not gotten anywhere close to being sick of eating chocolate, so he felt compelled to make the flourless mocha fudge cake. He did it. Yes really. All on his own. We had an icing piping lesson, and then he decorated the cake, pastry bag and all. I think he has more fun in the kitchen than he lets on.

Now he wants a chef's hat. I think he's serious. He said he was willing to sacrifice his hair to wear one.

Baking Fairies

When I was a freshman in high school, I had a group of friends who mostly liked to do stage crew and take apart computers. But sometimes, when we didn't have a show and computers got boring, they'd bake. And they called themselves the Baking Fairies.

Just so we are all agreed on the image, "fairy" is not the first thing one would think of upon meeting any of this group. Not the second, or the fifth, or the last. So I really don't know where the name came from. But they earned it, in my eyes, with their Bomb Cake.

My freshman year, we had a few bomb threats at our school. Not many, and nowhere near the numbers to which we would climb by my senior year, but a few. This was also pre-9/11 so the bomb threat procedure involved sending out a note to the parents explaining that a threat had been made, but police were fairly certain that there was nothing to worry about. Parents had the choice of keeping their kids home.

This was back in the days when we had snow, as well. And there was one February morning when we all trudged to school looking like lawn gnomes with our snow gear. It was snowing hard by the time I got to school. And I had gotten up at something like 6 am to wait for a bus in the snow and the cold, and it was never on time, and I was probably a little bit grumpy. I think this was before I drank coffee.

When I got to school, I had some time before homeroom, and I found some of the Baking Fairy contingent huddled around some sort of package in the lobby (not all of the Fairy folk were still in school). They were looking triumphant, and when I elbowed my way into the crowd, I was confronted with a chocolate sheet cake. It had bright green icing, and, carefully spelled out in multicolored sprinkles, the word "BOMB" on the top.

Right about then, the assistant principal noticed our small gathering and decided to investigate, so we invited him to cut the cake. Pieces were passed around, we had cake before homeroom, and then there was enough snow that we all got to go home early.

Superbowl Dessert Survey!

I'm headed to a Superbowl party and I told people I'd bring a dessert. I don't know what to bring. Please send suggestions.

Possibilities include:

• Killer Brownies
• Carrot cake brownies with buttercream icing
• Flourless Mocha Fudge Cake
• Pumpkin Mousse (or vanilla sweet potato mousse)
• Russian Cream and various toppings
• Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies

Other suggestions will also be considered. Leave comments!

Living Dangerously: Butternut Squash Soup with Roasted Garlic, Cinnamon, and Coriander

It's snowing here, finally. In fact, it has been snowing for the past few days. This is great news for me. My bedroom is in the very poorly insulated attic, and the snow helps keep the heat in. Cold weather is usually closely followed by soup, bread, or cookies. Tonight I made soup.

I've included the recipe, because I think it's pretty great stuff. But I feel that recipes are often lacking. They don't include any information about the thought process of the person who developed the recipe. There's no reasoning behind the ingredients or cooking times or anything else. I feel I would be remiss if I didn't include a full account of the development of this recipe. What follows is an exhaustive set of directions, should you feel that the recipe by itself is insufficient.

1. Go to a used book store. Browse the cooking section, and allow a garlic cookbook to catch your eye. Scan the book and immediately become suspicious when none of the recipes are more than 10 lines long.
2. Go back to the Garlic Roasted Butternut Squash and Pasta recipe. Decide that the recipe is boring, but the general garlic-and-squash concept has merit. Buy the book.
3. Arm yourself with the necessary ingredients.
   
4. Scoop out the icky bits of the squash. Chase the seeds around the kitchen floor. Briefly consider various uses for squash guts and despair when there's no one around to be victimized.
5. Cut up the rest of the squash and roast until fork tender. Throw in some unpeeled garlic cloves for good measure.
6. Unearth the blender.
   
7. As you wash years of greasy scuzz off the blender and your hands, mutter obscenities at whoever designed a kitchen without a ventilation system.
   
8. Peel the roasted squash. Start asking yourself if you really believe your mother when she told you that it's easier to peel a cooked squash than a raw one. Put the peeled squash in the blender.
   
9. Contemplate the fleeting nature of life and the inexorable march of entropy. Use your garlic cinders as a starting point. Extra credit: Recall bits and pieces of sophomore science class, specifically those bits concerning relative densities and heat transfer. Consider that maybe the fragile little garlics don't need to be roasted for quite as long as the squash slabs next time.
10. Set about salvaging the garlic. It turns out that there are squishy bits in the centers of the cloves. Painstakingly scrape out the soft stuff, and throw it in the blender with the squash.
    
11. Painstaking was never your style. Throw the last clove in whole, burnt bits and all. You've never minded burnt garlic before.
12. Add some olive oil, half and half, and chicken broth.
13. Blend.
14. Add more chicken broth.
15. Taste the soup.
16. Discover that burnt garlic is not nearly as palatable as you remember. Despair, and continue messing with the chicken broth to get the consistency right. Become somewhat optimistic. Everyone makes mistakes, and you were just about due for one. Decide that you'll do what you can for the soup, but if it doesn't work out, life will go on. Who's really going to care about one bad soup experience 5 years from now, anyway?
    
17. Recall the way that, 35 years after the fact, your parents still occasionally bring up "The Ketchup Incident." Plunge into a state of abject terror.
18. Rifle through your spice collection. Come up with cinnamon and coriander.
    
19. Pray.
20. Wait in quiet panic for your boyfriend to try the soup.
21. Celebrate a disaster narrowly averted.

The Recipe

• 2 butternut squashes, cleaned and cut into inch thick rings
• 5 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
• approximately 1/3 cup half and half
• approx 1/4 cup olive oil
• 14 oz low sodium chicken broth
• 1/2 stick Sri Lankan or Ceylon cinnamon (Do not use the standard American stuff. It's too strong. If you can't find Ceylon cinnamon, ask me or my mom. If you must use American, use extremely sparingly.)
• 1 tsp coriander

Roast the butternut squash until fork tender. Find someone else's directions on how to do this, because I'm bad at it. Same goes for the garlic. Roast it until... roasted. Peel the squash and garlic and put in a blender with about half of the half and half, the olive oil, and half of the chicken broth. Blend. Grind together the coriander and cinnamon, and add to the soup. Adjust half and half and chicken broth until desired consistency is achieved. Season with salt and pepper. Garnish with croutons.

Party +1

This weekend marks the end of the first week of the school semester, and our house has a tradition of holding parties to celebrate. I'm just now waking up from last night's fete, and I feel that new ground has been forged.

This year, we decided for many reasons to stray from the typical food and (mostly) drink gathering. We added games. Lots of them. Board games, card games, video games, party games. We gamed for 8 hours. I went to bed at 5 am. And when I woke up this afternoon, I discovered something that my parents, former bridge club members, have probably figured out a long time ago. People playing games don't eat or drink all that much, and they don't make messes. We spent a grand total of 30 minutes cleaning up today, and that's without a dishwasher. And most importantly, I think people had more fun than normal. There will be more of these in the future.

More school

My posting got a bit sparse over the last month because of winter break. I'm back though, and I found a bunch of things that I meant to post about but never did.

No one really talks about the cultural value of Pittsburgh. Mostly, there just isn't much to talk about, especially if you don't care much for Andy Warhol. People generally don't travel from distant parts to visit the museums here. And I'm not suggesting you should. However, if you're already stuck here for some reason, you should really be getting your money's worth from the local cultural stuff. This goes double for all the CMU students, because most of the good stuff is within walking distance of campus and it's largely free (with your ID).

I'm only bringing this up at all because I found some old photos that I took at the local garden conservatory, back when they had their mythological creatures exhibit. The one you're looking at now is a hydra. They also had a two headed dragon, Argus (with all the eyes), Cerberus, and a few others. The exhibit has changed now, but it was great fun while it lasted. They don't have anything up now, but in May, they're doing a Dale Chihuly exhibit.