on halloween October 31, 2009

Holidays, like sports and most of pop culture, are to me readymade traditions that the unthinking masses engage in because they haven’t thought of anything better to do. Thus, an unending delightful consequence of being an adult is the ability to decide for myself what holidays I celebrate.

In true anarchist/atheist/selfish fashion, I celebrate no holidays except birthdays. The joys of doing my taxes on Thanksgiving or spending all of Christmas reading a novel are ceaseless wonders to me. Without mandated family gatherings or oppressive religious traditions (a luxuriously empty womb also means I don’t have to go through the motions of enjoying holidays in order not to deprive a kid), the lack of holidays has come to signify something truly worth celebrating: escaping from a chaotic, sad childhood into a hand-crafted, well-examined adult life.

I usually feel gleeful when my sweetheart and I are escaping the banality of what the rest of the country pretends are celebratory occasions, but for some reason Halloween always trips me up.

It seems innocuous enough: I like candy, I like outfits. It’s not a religious holiday, in fact it’s an explicitly irreligious one. But every year Halloween just about breaks my heart, so maybe it’s time to get to the bottom of why.

Maybe it’s because I can’t stand horror movies or anything gory. I can’t tolerate being scared by imaginary demons when the world terrifies the fuck out of me on a daily basis. If I let myself, I could have nightmares about the soap aisle in the supermarket. Staring too hard at a strip mall brings tears to my eyes if I don’t catch myself. I am just not cut out for this harsh American world. The idea of a holiday designed to scare people when everyday life is rife with serious terror is inexplicable to me. I know I have a horrid gift for finding the downside to everything Americans seem to enjoy—maybe people not possessed of this knack actually need to go searching for things to be scared of?

Maybe it’s all the feminist ridiculousness surrounding the holiday we’re all aware of—how it’s all about being a “sexy” whatever. Any excuse to parade our indoctrination into the patriarchy, right?

There is also the small matter of “costumes.” As someone who has the terrible habit of dying her hair unusual colors—these days demure, almost imperceptible blue streaks—a holiday where people give themselves “permission” to wear “crazy” hair styles and clothes is just patently ludicrous. I “dress up” every day (well, OK, I dress up 3-4 days of the week, depending on if I’m working a regular 8-hour day and might see another human, or a 15-hour day when wearing a true outfit and a bra is just stupid). People who wear Uggs and leggings every day of their unimaginably horrific lives then go crazy on Halloween seem breathtakingly sad. (On the other hand, people who wear amazing outfits every day and use Halloween as an excuse to wear extra amazing outfits are breathtakingly rad. I’m not one of those people, but I at least understand and like them.)

And then maybe it all comes down to that thing I have with festivals and fairs, again. And that fall is just a depressing season for a sun worshipper like me.

Or maybe it’s just that my sweetheart has been out of town forever and all I ever do is work and work and think about work and come home and read The New Yorker and drink wine with my cats and decline offers to hang out with good friends because being around anyone just reminds me how he’s not around and maybe if my bestest partner in crime was here we could go out on Halloween and enjoy the ridiculousness and I wouldn’t be here stewing in my own pickled juices and overthinking everything and could just let people go and have their fun without hating on everything, all the time, always, forever.

Ugh. I want this day to be over.

why are artisans so often assholes? October 14, 2009

Have you noticed this? That people who are really deeply good at what they do and are doing it to the Nth degree are so often serious assholes?

If you’ve been to, oh, I don’t know, let’s just say….Brooklyn, then you know of what I here speak. Awesomeness overshadowed by self-awareness of awesomeness, which then tips said awesomeness into the realm of insufferability. We’ve come to accept it with writers, painters, movie directors, but in my life I see it a lot with small business owners. The ones who are doing the most awesome shit are so often also the most stuck-up and annoying.

My work is to be at once awesome and not assholey, and it’s harder than you can possibly imagine.

Seriously. The struggle not to be an asshole takes up roughly half of my mindspace on any given day. I come from a family comprised almost solely of giant assholes, and I live in today’s giantly assholely world. I am both made of and swim around in assholely molecules every minute of every day.*

Despite that, I think it’s fair to say that I am not, on balance, an asshole. I think about this all the time, and here’s what I’ve figured out: I think (I hope) I have struck this weirdly awesome balance in my life: I am at once the most intense and angry person I know as well as one of the most sweet. Can this be? Can I continue like this? I really want to, I really like this balance. Not letting the anger overtake the sweetness, not letting the sweetness trickle into treacle.

I am deeply hard, I have harsh political views, I am sometimes overly brash in my resistance to compromise, and being forced to bear witness to most people’s lives, beliefs, and activities engenders in me feelings ranging from disinterest to literal revulsion to screaming rage.

On the other hand: I work hard at cultivating loving relationships with those I love; at deeply enjoying the pleasure of being alive; and at opening my heart to the many breathtaking wonderfulnesses my life provides.

I like talking about it, and trusting good friends who will tell me when the balance is a little off. I like that I can sometimes sort of put my sanity into other people’s hands, letting them feel the heavy weight of it and asking them plainly: “OK? Sane?” And they can nod and smile and reassure me that my anger is healthy,** or take my hand and ignore me when I blow up and take a walk and tell me I’m being, quite literally, insane.

A lot of this is related to work. Let me tell you a story.

There is a bakery in the town in which my commercial kitchen is located. I have heard many, many stories about the baker who owns this bakery. For example, a few months ago I linked to a police report about him wandering around a street festival without trousers, with his junk all on display. (That really doesn’t bother me, I’m just painting a picture for you. I like people’s junk being on display, actually. It sort of adds value to my day to know that weirdo bakers are getting drunk at small-town street festivals and possibly scarring children for life with their wrinkly junk.***)

In every story I’ve ever heard about this baker, the phrase “what an asshole!” is invariably used. The story about the time my sweetheart tried to get a vegan hot chocolate. The many many stories from my sous chef, who continues going there seemingly only to collect bizarre stories (I should state that she is too sweet to actually call him an asshole, but that’s her sentiment, I can tell). The friends of mine who ordered a wedding cake from him and somehow things got so angry that they asked another friend to pick up the cake because they knew they would get into a fist fight if they saw him. Etc. Ad infinitum.

I had never been to this bakery. I bake my own bread and work around the corner, where there is always good, free food waiting for me. But on a recent weekend I was poking around town with a friend and he wanted to get a coffee**** and a sandwich on good bread, so we ventured in.

Within two minutes I was so incredibly angry that my friend and I spent the next few hours analyzing the interaction second-by-second, with me tracing each strain of anger back to a specific ill-placed word, dark look, snobbish turn of phrase, infuriating sentence.

My friend wasn’t particularly bothered. He was happy that some sort of eggy sandwich he got was appropriately-sized (“Only one egg!” and I should state that he charged him .25 more for an egg that wasn’t born in hell, which is, I suppose, good on balance.)  and he also ate the second half of my sandwich, which was incredibly tasty (I’m a half-sandwich eater, OK?*****).

That’s the thing: everything was good. The food was just lovely. Made with care, if not exactly love. When ordering my sandwich, I misunderstood the vegan options on the menu and apparently ordered wrong. I was sternly told that my off-the-menu sandwich creation was “not recommended” and looked upon like a speck of dust who couldn’t put together a good sandwich if my life depended on it. The baker went on and on about why that sandwich wouldn’t be good and why I should order the sandwich on the menu—which is what I was trying to do.

In the end I got all icy and sternly said: “Just give me the best. vegan. sandwich. you. can. make.” and he respected that, both the iciness and the request for quality, as I had a feeling he would.

I won’t go into the many more details of insultingness and irksomeness. It was a feeling that permeated the place.

“He’s a good baker, he’s just not good with customers,” said my friend. He didn’t get why I was annoyed.

“Well he shouldn’t FUCKING DEAL WITH CUSTOMERS if he’s going to insult them all day long.” I replied.

This is, of course, why I do not have a shop that is open to the public: I am not good at dealing with customers. I would critique people’s orders, talk down to them, get visibly annoyed by their food stupidity. I know this about myself, and I sequester myself appropriately. I am largely cloistered. I rarely answer the telephone. This is good for me. I have found a way to navigate through my annoying snobbishness and holier-than-thouity to a decent career doing what I love. (The internet is my medium, I bow to its barriers.)

The thing is: the baker was toeing a line I very much like: he runs his business with principles other than money making at its heart. Clearly he cares more for quality than kindness, and I completely respect that. The place reminds me a lot of my beloved Bloodroot: resolutely individual. Going to Bloodroot for the first time can be frustrating because there are no waitresses and the ordering system is quirky, but the owners are aware of this and walk everyone through the process. Unlike almost every restaurant in the world, they treat you like a person, not a “customer.” I love this. It is the world I want to live in.

You’re not treated like a customer at the bakery, either. You’re treated like a potential enemy who must be conquered. This I do not love.

The baker is an artisan: I’m sure he works with razor-thin margins, I know he bakes everything from scratch, I’m sure he puts in the effort to make everything he does worth doing. People do not like this. They like and want cheap shit, and when you give them something other than cheap shit they are confused and quickly become annoyed, as do you after you explain for the six hundredth time why you cook the way you do, why things take a little longer because you make them from scratch, why your bread won’t last for weeks and weeks.

This work of quality artisanship is very, very annoying. You’re taking one little string and trying to pull the entire world over to you with it. Sometimes it breaks, and that makes you angry.

We make our choices. I understand mine, I understood Bloodroot’s, and I understand the baker’s. I don’t understand McDonalds, I don’t understand Starbucks. I like mine, I like Bloodroot’s, and the baker’s make me angry.

Balance is the thing, I suppose. Balancing our love of artisanship and all that it entails with a love of life that prevents us from succumbing to assholery. I guess I’ll keep on keepin’ on, trying to balance my beloved anger with sweetness, keeping my head down, working hard, trying to have compassion for those also on my path.

Meh.******

*I just had a long conversation with myself (in my head, thankfully) about whether or not calling people assholes is sort of anti-gay, just as I try not to call people pussies unless they are, you know, doing something awesome (I went through a phase of calling people “fucking cunts” when they did awesome things, but somehow it didn’t take, I have no idea why.). For some reason I have absolutely no compunction about calling people dicks since I very much enjoy insulting men, but calling people assholes seems a teeny bit insulting specifically to my beloved fags. After I went around and around this in my head, I finally came to the conclusion that it’s OK to call people assholes because let’s face it: shit comes out of an asshole, that fact cannot change.

(And here my partner is reading my blog in his bunk on his bus on his phone right before bed, and is dying a little bit inside because of my bathroom humor. I can hear his sigh these many states away. Alas! We can’t all be Mr. Integrity!)

**Which brings me to my Best Facebook Status Update of the Week. Are you ready to be blown away? Here goes: “My anger is a guava kombucha: sometimes healthy, sometimes explosive, always pink, always on the verge.” yesssssssssss.

***I think we can all agree that calling people’s bits “junk” is sort of rad for reasons no one can really explain, no?

****I’ve started saying “a coffee” instead of “a cup of coffee” or “some coffee.” I like it and feel it somehow sounds more European. Don’t you think? (I don’t actually drink coffee myself, but jump in on people’s conversations about which of the 40 coffeehouses in my town has the best coffee all the time. You didn’t need to know any of this.)

*****This is the post full of things no one cares about or needs to know!

******If you are wont to compare my writing style to that of the dearly departed David Foster Wallace because of all my parenthetical asides and footnotes, PLEASE DO.

in which a rabid anarchist appears in….an ad. September 30, 2009

Because she so loves small businesses! And her dentist! (Even though he fills her mouth with dead people’s bones!)
And because…how fucking cute is this, if I say so myself???

cuteness is communicable September 11, 2009

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god OH MY GOD. Those paws, that tiny little head—those curls, that vegan-doughnut stomach: the adorableness overwhelms!

Oh my god people. There is some CUTENESS happening that I can’t keep to myself.

First, someone was giving away kittens at the farmer’s market. Yeah, spay & neuter, etc etc, but come on, who can resist a good old-fashioned kitten make-out session once in a while? My sweetheart sure couldn’t– he was doing business on the phone a couple yards away when I walked over with a kitten attached to my shirt and he got off the phone the second he saw a tiny mewling head and demanded I hand her over. We very narrowly avoided adding a fourth cat to our managerie–look at this bond!

And then there’s my mom.

My mother has a full-time job, but outside of that I think it’s safe to say that 97% of her life is devoted to animals in some capacity. She lives with animals, does animal rights work, volunteers in a no-kill shelter as an adoption counselor, and has an intense relationship with the neighborhood creatures who live around her Chicago apartment.

She has a long, complicated, and, hilarious relationship with, for example, the neighborhood squirrels, to whom she spends inordinate amounts of time tossing nuts.

Because she tosses the nuts into a knothole in a tree across the sidewalk from her balcony, she has become an amazing dunker as well–though these days the squirrels know the deal and have become amazing catchers.

What a scamp!

We can’t be the only ones who find squirrels ridiculously cute, right?

that thing they say about time: it’s true, you know September 10, 2009

Here we go again, a little less achy this time—please.

hot pink nesting doll lovers against useless death and suffering August 19, 2009

This is going to be a bitchy, annoying post, so I’m going to make it go down a little easier with photos of the most odd, charming place I think I’ve ever been to: a hot pink world 1/2 hour from my house aptly and simply named “Nesting Dolls.” (Or, more accurately, “NESTING…………dolls.”)

Guess what it is?

A store that sells nothing but nesting dolls.

It’s awesomeness is going to blow your mind (though my ultimate hero James Howard Kunstler, [he of the must read The Long Emergency] hates it, but I pretty much completely disagree, these days anyway, with his views on architecture, so whatevs.)

OK, so: I’ve got a little irksome nag that I have to vent about:

It’s the oldest irksome nag in the world to a vegan, and it’s been so discussed and played out that I feel silly bringing it up, but oh well.

So, most of my true friends are vegetarians and vegans. I mean, how could they not be, right?

That is the question.

Lately for whatever reason I’ve been rubbing up against nonvegans of all kinds (that sounded sort of dirty, didn’t it? I’m going to keep it.), and it means that for the millionth time I have to work out my feelings about how best to handle that most annoying and indelicate of situations: eating in restaurants with flesh-eaters.

I’m not worried about how to externally handle it—I think I’m pretty graceful, in truth. Only with my true BFFs do I dare to hate on them for ordering nonvegan food. With everyone else I am the fucking picture of the nonviolent, politically correct, serene-in-my-choices, live-and-let-live vegan that I believe vegans should be when forced to eat meals with flesh eaters. Killing them with kindness is my general policy. (Are you getting the meat-eating ironies I am injecting into these sentences, people??)

My goal: politely ignoring the fact that my dining companions are engaging in an act which I find so intensely morally inconceivable as to be literally stomach-turning.

Lately it’s been difficult, again, not actually physically at the restaurant, but in my heart. Not because I know assholey non-vegans—that would be easier. Assholey non-vegans can so easily and cuttingly be dealt with: assholes always want to fight, and I’m amazing at fighting and always win, so that’s all well and good.

No, it’s because I know some sweet, kind, intelligent and generally awesome non-vegans. They know not what they do, I tell ya. At least…that’s what I have to believe.

Here’s my take on the whole thing:

Unless explicitly asked, I never talk about veganism, and I’m even moving away from introducing myself as a vegan chef (I just tell people I make vulvas.). My strategy is to change minds through impeccable example. It works all the time. It takes years, but it works, and none of my unintentional converts have ever converted back. (On the other hand, all the high school and early college friends I pretty much forced to be vegan by screaming at them are a) not friends with me anymore and b) meat-eaters.)

Most of my friends who aren’t vegan are those (take a deep breath, O vegans, because there is a trigger warning coming right at you:) “vegetarian-but-I-eat-fish” people.

I won’t even pretend to understand it. I know like five good friends who rarely eat eggs and cow dairy or dead cows or pigs or even chickens, but who will slurp up plates of oysters and salmon mousses and whatever the fuck else people make out of fish (I’m going to link to my essay on fish every single time I have to use the word, OK?) with no compunctions. They have iPhone apps that tell them what fish are, like, not going to instantly cause total extinction of that particular fish species, and they belong to a CSA and love going out to good restaurants, and it all just blows my mind.

Of course, being in the Slow Foodie sort of circle I run in I also know oodles of those nose-to-tail eaters who so delight in talking about the pig’s feet they had for lunch, and this depresses me in that special way I call, with a special sigh, “Fucking Nourishing Fucking Traditions,”* because of the book that talked a whole socioeconomic demographic (white, Brooklyny, annoying) out of being vegan.

Related to this are the farmers. When I’m being the farmer-groupie that I am in my professional life, I constantly run into Slow Food-esque nouveau farmers whose delight in using all parts of their pigs, and their CSA customers’ delight in sharing those pig parts, routinely hurts my heart so horribly that it’s hard to buy my hundreds of pounds of produce from them (which is why I buy veganic produce whenever I can).

I know that by not participating in the factory farm system that they are doing good, but after we get past those issues, we bump into another one: these people, these farmers whose livelihoods I so cherish and respect and support, have no problem uselessly killing beings that do not deserve, in any way, to die.

It’s rough.

But back to dinner with pals.

Here’s what I wish I could say to those friends of mine:

“Dearest friends of mine! You are so dear! I’m so happy we are pals! And I would never say that you couldn’t order whatever you want when we go out to dinner, that would be just rude. But I have such deep-down bedrock ethical issues with your meal right now that it’s sort of harshing my mellow in a really major way. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know** is that sometimes it’s sort of hard for me to keep driving when I see roadkill on the road. I’ve got a tender heart, OK? And I like animals so much more than people, which makes everything difficult in this world of ours. So, dearest friends, how do I be OK with your animal-eating ways? I mean, I don’t want to be OK with it. But I want to have a good time tonight. What to do?

“What? What’s that? Fish?

“Oh.

“Well, since we’re talking about it, you want to hear my thing on fish?

“Sigh. I hate this.

“I’m becoming sort of didactic and overly moral for a fun dinner out, but oh well. Now that it’s started I won’t be able to stop, so I apologize in advance.

“Fish. Personally (and by “personally” I mean: everyone in the whole world should feel exactly the same way I do), I think eating fish is worse than eating “meat.” Because you get what, like 100 hamburgers out of one cow, plus leather shoes and whatnot? See, that whole fish you’re eating right now is a whole entire being, a being that lived in agony***  and suffocated to death for no reason other than so you can eat it, even though you didn’t need to eat it. My cycling book right now is this history of vegetarianism, and it’s sort of boring actually (T. Colin Campbell liked it a lot though [scroll down to read his review], so I’m sticking with it), but it’s interesting as a reminder that there have been vegetarians and, lo!, vegans, since, like, um, the dawn of time. That whole “we need meat to survive” argument just doesn’t hold water. But of course you knew that. You’re my smart awesome friend!

So I don’t get why you eat fish. Maybe you believe that it’s better on the environment [this is an argument so ridic I will not stoop to refute it, though my fish essay does!]. Maybe you believe that cows are somehow higher beings than fish. This just irks me.”

(deep breaths at this point will not stop what is coming)

“And now we’re going to start talking about killing flies or something and someone at the table is going to say something like, “well, you just do what you can do, la di da la la la” and my face is going to get red and I’m going to say that YOU CAN NOT EAT FISH, THAT’S SOMETHING YOU CAN DO” and I might use a swear word.

And.

This is why I’m writing this blog post, so that doesn’t happen.

Because I want to be sweet to my sweet friends, but darlings,

you’re fucking killing me.

OK?

Phew, I’m so glad we had that little talk.

.

.

*While I agree with some of its points, blah blah, oh look, I already wrote about it in this post that makes everyone so very angry!

**When I get nervous I start quoting Salinger, what can I say?

***Do some research on fish farms before you start talking crap about how sweet fishies are just swimming around all happy until they get a hook to the mouth, OK?

“…that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude” August 16, 2009

It’s 11 PM on Saturday night, and this is what I’ve got:

• All the lights off in the entire house except the rice paper lamp over my head in my pink office
• Cows making their nighttime rumbling moos far away across the street
• A million trillion buzzing creatures outside, frogs in the stream across the way and all manner of cicadas and summery winged beings doing their summery thing
• A very hot, very shedding black cat dancing around wanting to sit on the computer keyboard
• Ten drippingly ripe peaches in the fridge ready for me anytime, anywhere, as long as there are many napkins also present
• Watermelons ripening at the farm across the street, having been promised to me by my farmer today with a knowing twinkle in his eye.
• Wild blueberries traded for chocolates in the freezer, waiting to be used as ice cubes
• A teeny vodka gimlet made with basil simple syrup and plum-infused vodka
• Two hours before I have to sleep in order to be fresh to conquer my two hardest cooking days of the week
• And after that, the sweet reward of my sweetheart home from endless, endless touring.

All of this is good.

Starting on Monday I will have everything I love most in the whole entire world: fruit, summertime, and Jacob being home.

Jacob being home, however, means that these pleasantly weird, ultrahot, exquisitely internally-focused days I’ve been having will come to an end.

“Pleasantly weird” is the best way I can describe my feeling about summertime. I love summer with a clutchy, obsessive love, but its heat reminds me of my childhood, which means my joy at being able to wear dresses and eat fruit is tempered by “that inward eye,” and my emotions are a weird mix of intense gratitude (because my childhood is over), pride (at having survived it), and, to put my full extreme summertime dorkiness on full display, burning and sometimes overwhelming happiness at being alive. (See, commenter #10, I told you everything would balance out!)

Hey, I haven’t put any annoyingly navel-gazing outfit pictures on the blog in a while! I bought this dress in North Carolina, shortened it (hello, headband!) and took it in in, um, a key area, all by myself! (Why are there dresses behind me? Because my closet broke, OK?)

Is it possible for someone to be manic depressive, but only in a seasonal way? Summertime pretty much kills me with its amazingness every year—but, having grown up in a place without winter, I’m smart enough to know that true summertime joy is a pleasure best experienced when one knows its opposite.

At any rate, some of this summery intensity is closely related to solitude, and a part of it will come to an end when Jacob gets home. This is not a bad thing, not at all, but it feels right to try to capture my cloistered summery feelings while he is still off on the tourbus.

My hair needed something that day…

Being with him in the summertime means dinner out on the patio with sake, house projects, NYC trips, berry picking, hiking, bike riding—none of which I tend to do on my own (even, tragically, eating dinner), as well as several temperature-related negotiations. Most notably: moderating the punishing heat I seem to enjoy trapping inside the house. Jacob being home also means that I will notice that I like weird things about summertime, things that, when one is alone, one never really thinks about because they are just second nature but that cause many sideways glances to be directed at one when one lives with someone who maybe doesn’t share ones preferences…um…I’m trapped here in an overly clause-y sentence involving passive voice and way too many words, eek!

Phew. Let’s blame that train wreck on the gimlet, OK?

Things I Like About Summertime That I Don’t Think Anyone is Supposed to Like

• Still air. Everyone else in my life loves moving air. My friend Than is so obsessed with fresh air that we call him a FAN: Fresh Air Nut. I love the absolute quiet that comes from open windows and no distracting fans with their annoying oscillations. Related:
• Hot bedrooms. I will concede that yes, I am maybe the only person in the universe who still sleeps with a down comforter (vegan police!! It’s a pre-vegan comforter from Jacob’s childhood!) in August, and when Jacob surreptitiously (which, for reals, I just spelled “syrupticiously”) switches to just a top sheet and light blanket I will act OK with it. Inevitably, one night I will creep into the linen closet and get the heavy comforter out, and when I wake up sweaty and light-headed, my body basically a microwaved burrito, Jacob staring at me as if I am insane, I won’t know what to say. I like sleeping in a very hot room, OK? I suspect it’s because of the fever dreams it gives me, and I also suspect that this is so strange that I shouldn’t be confessing it to the internet. Hot weather dreams are most awesome, though, can we agree on that?
• Fecundity. Rotting fruit, the compost with its layer of fruit flies, the sticky smell of overripe everything. It speaks to me of abundance, security, and possibility.
• I even love my stinky armpits after sweating all day, I even love the bathroom after a shower when it’s so humid that you instantly feel like you need another shower (because I of course don’t turn on the helpful overhead fan), I even love it when I cut my feet from walking around barefoot so much, I even love it when the power goes out because of lightening storms, I even love it when you get in the car and it’s so closed in and hot you feel faint.

All better!

Of course, I love the uncompromised wonderfulnesses of summer too: swimming in lakes (well, lakes are always too cold, but I do love reading books in a bathing suit next to a lake) and wearing almost nothing and the windows down in a car and your special summer song playing just a little too loudly (right now it’s “Satellite Skin” by Modest Mouse. I’m humiliatingly obsessed with this song, and am not above air drumming to it at traffic lights.). Sandals and tan lines and ice cubes and bare legs and sunglasses and sitting on stoops drinking beers.

Well, I don’t think I have ever sat on a stoop and drank beer, but when I drive home from work on Fridays and Saturdays I see kids doing just that. The collegey girls in their Friday and Saturday summertime getups fascinate me and everyone just looks so happy and alive, and, like the rest of summer living, it’s trite but but it’s so free and easy and fun that it doesn’t even matter.

I just love it, all of it, unedited and all of a piece. Perfection.

affirmation/emancipation proclamation of self-determination in order to facilitate resiliency when faced with idiocy July 17, 2009

via

Dear no one you know:

I know that my mere presence makes you feel guilty about the choices you’ve made in your life. This doesn’t mean that you can be passive aggressive and snide to me just because I remind you that a person can be happy and fulfilled while also being highly ethical and taking the hard path you are too weak to follow.

Dear Lagusta:

Whilst hanging out with above person, remember that “when you’re in the right you can afford to keep your temper, and when you’re in the wrong you can’t afford to lose it.”

Repeat under breath as needed.

Go forth!

[Related: this can also work as an affirmation to all those fucks who are all "I don't eat much meat..." when all you want to do is eat a damn vegan meal in peace. How annoying are those people???]

song for sunshine July 10, 2009

I haven’t really been paying much attention to my life lately. Midsummer, all that. I’ve been mastering the art of not giving weight to problems and annoyances and watching them fade away.* It’s been difficult to align all my synapses to do real work, so I haven’t been. Somehow chocolates still are getting made, food is still getting cooked and delivered. It’ll work out OK.

Usually I take pride in pushing my life—not just crossing off items on a to do list, but working to move the big things along too. Not being passive. Gathering up my strength and energy. Doing it. Balls out. Go!

But I’m sleepy and quiet and lazy these days. It’s the middle of July and I’m in full heat-seeking mode—eating lunch on the back patio with the sun streaming all around, just the way I like it. If my sweetheart were home we would do that thing we’ve been doing for twelve years: finding the spot where the sun and shade split, so he can sit in the cool shade and I can feel the sun pouring down on me. We do it without thinking most of the time: when feeling our way to the best picnic or rest stop, we automatically look for that curtain that will give each of us what we want out of summertime.

What I’ve been thinking about a lot, while hiding from the to-do list—the kimchi that needs to needs to be made for the winter with all this nice local cabbage, the pickling and freezing and planning I should be doing, the weeding and trimming and accounting and advertising (not to mention figuring out why like half my blog pictures don’t seem to show up for some people…)—is how much I want to be at Polihale with the one I love.

Isn’t it weird when a place enters your consciousness and won’t leave? I won’t get a chance to visit Polihale for about six months, but I’ve been craving the feeling of home that beach gives me. I got all sappy about it here, at the very bottom, so I won’t get all emo on you again today.

All I want—what I keep thinking about, with a very pleasant achey longing—is to walk on this beach, holding the hand of the one I love and talking about everything in the world.

Soon. Soon.

Soon.

In the meantime, I’m ignoring mostly everything. I’m putting on pretty dresses every day and wandering around town, humming under my breath, working on my posture, enjoying being alone and walking aimlessly, noticing flowers and new shops. Overhearing conversations, watching all the beautiful girls in their beautiful summertime clothes, sipping lemonade and wondering if I should stop for a taco.

I wouldn’t want to be this loose and free all the time. I like my focused, ultra-productive self—well, I like where it takes me. But if I can’t be at Polihale with my sweetheart, I’m thankful I can be in New Paltz in July, even solitary.

.

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*The Green Party minutes report: “Lagusta apologizes for enjoying her life and being a slacker of a Green. General consensus is that this is alright in light of the beautiful weather outside.”

summer in the city July 4, 2009

Did you ever take a self-taken photo that makes you think you might actually be a serial killer and not even know it? My Dexter is showing a little in this photo, no?

I’m following my sweetheart around on tour for the next few days, and today the laminated piece of paper attached to my belt loop says we are in New Haven.

I have a tour routine: while he’s working, I scope out the city, then we have lunch, he works more and I settle into computer work and more wandering around.

After walking around the Yale Campus for an hour or so today, checking out the current college fashions and thinking about how everyone passing me had done better on the SATs than me, I hopped up on an old stone wall and sunbathed while reading this week’s New Paltz Times.*

And the troubles began.

Is this outfit just too skimpy to wear out and about? Ladies, please let me know. I’ve got the little slip that prevents the dress from being too short and everything!

So today, I was sitting on the wall, legs crossed all tidy, not laying out in the sun lolling about or anything, and a dude whistles at me.

Of course, New Haven is 20 or whatever times bigger than the town where I usually hang out, and this sort of thing happens in cities, I know that. A whistle, who cares. I’m reading the paper completely happy. But combined with three other incidents, it all added up to some annoyance on my part that I think I need to blog out of my system.

So I’m sitting on the wall, and after 10 minutes or so I suddenly become aware of a figure creeping toward me around the corner. I jump about fifty feet in the air and literally gasp, and a very white, very withery 70ish man straightens up and says “I was just going to tickle your foot–it was just dangling right there.”

UM.

I jump up and gather all my crap and start hustling down the street, literally too stunned to say one word. Should I have laughed it off? It freaked me out to a ridiculous degree, to be honest. Before I could tell that the dude was super old and possibly insane, his creeping form seemed like an attacker who was going to snatch me away to a certain death—seriously.

As I was booking it, he was on the other side of the street, and he said that he was “just kidding! I didn’t mean anything by it!” and I yelled back over my shoulder, “No worries, it’s fine!” when in reality in no way was it fine.

Why do we do this?

Most women do it: the desire to be nice above all. My concern is always that if I am my interior brutal self, I will have misjudged the situation and everyone will know what a serious asshole I am and how badly I overreact. I felt bad for being so jumpy, to be honest, and just exactly how fucked up is that?

So then I go back to the venue and tell Jacob the story and head out for a walk. While window shopping, a (pretty cute, actually) dude walked up to me and asked if he could ask me a question. Warily, I said OK. “Are you part Japanese?” “What? Um. No.” “Oh, because you look sort of Japanese from a certain angle.” “Ah.” And I wished him a good day and walked on.

I know pretty much all women get flirted with in this way pretty much all the time. I just don’t leave my little bubble that often, so it doesn’t happen to me that often. But I am also afraid that my love of the world—my wild, intense joy at having a day to spend walking around in a brand new city in the summer sun—was palpable. My heart felt very open today, and how depressing that if you’re putting out open-heart energies you attract crazy dudes.

People who live in cities have a public face that they put on—a blank, impassive, dead stare that repels panhandlers and overly friendly tourists. If I’m in a city for a few days I can get into that routine, but yesterday I didn’t have a city face at all. I was open, very alive and wildly happy. The world will not tolerate this in women who are wearing short dresses.

Why did it have to be dudes, though? (Don’t answer that one.) Why couldn’t cute girls ask me where I got my dress? I could have told them the best story: I got it in Tasmania, at a music festival in the rain and the mist at the very bottom of the world (yes, even at the bottom of the world there are vendors selling cheap China-made dresses).

So, back in New Haven, after the sunbathing and the window shopping I go to a charming little indie coffeeshop for lemonade and computer work at a table outside, and a Yalie prof. comes up to me after a few minutes, saying he is sitting inside and is wondering if it’s too humid to sit outside. And even though he is in this 40s and is interminably blah (fuckin’ chinos and a blue cuffed shirt), he begins blatantly flirting, saying I have an interestingly-shaped face (was that even a compliment?) and asking what I’m studying (“Um, I’m 31. I’m not in school.”) and the whole fucking thing. He was a brain scientist dude…what’s the word? Where you do MRIs on people’s brains and shit? He did that sort of stuff. Eventually I scratched my head and my luscious armpit hair entered the picture and he seemed sufficiently bored with my non-answers (“Where are your ancestors from?” “It doesn’t matter.” “It doesn’t matter in a larger sense, or you’re just saying it shouldn’t matter to me?” “The latter.”) that he drifted away, but not without me telling him my real name for some stupid reason and him saying a whole long thing about gusto and tongues and ick ick ick.

And we’re beyond the need for feminism, right?

Even though we can’t walk down the street with open hearts and short skirts without dudes jumping into our lives?

Please.

*Speaking of: I generally cannot find fault with newish Town Board member Jeff Logan—he was super sweet when he was my nurse when I went to Dr. to get a part to a tick extracted from my back during the Lyme Disease scare a few months ago—but I was more than a little weirded out by the fact that all of the sudden he is apparently obsessed with some New Paltz medical imaging company getting rid of a trailer they apparently shouldn’t be allowed to have that they use for MRI scans (I don’t have the paper in front of me right now for the details). It seems more than a little sketchy that he works at a clinic where MRIs are available [update: maybe not---their website doesn't mention it], which he comes pretty close to pointing out in the article, even—I’ll toss the quote up here when I get back to my car with the paper in it.

What gives, Jeff?