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?

it’s all over now, baby blue July 1, 2009

I’m writing a teeny little thing about my childhood for a reason too dumb to even go into, and to help me out with facts and spellings I’ve been doing lots of Google searches. I just looked back at my last hours’ worth of searches and they make the most perfect poem about my first 18 years:

gila monsters

low-lifes

drug you make by heating a spoon

drug that sometimes causes houses to blow up

sugarcoat or sugar coat

Phoenix razing desert 1 acre per minute

ornamental orange side effects of eating

“bread cereal”

do people really go to prison for tearing labels off mattresses

shooting guns backfiring bashing forehead

You’re all grown now, kiddo. Things were crappy all those years ago, but now you’ve got the pretty kitchen and the cupcake papers and it’s all over. No one’s ever going to make you shoot a gun again. Repeat repeat repeat.

perfect day, pretty much. June 24, 2009

Got up at the ungodly early hour of 10:30 AM.

Took pictures of three cats all snuggly next to me in bed with crappy phone camera. Photos blurry but adorable.

Cleo, mid-midmorning bath; Noodle, lovey as always.

Email phone calls blah blah.

Strawberries.

Finished cycling laundry load #1, hung up on clothesline.

Began cycling laundry load #2.

Mowed lawn with electric mower.

Strawberries.

Weeding. More mowing. Extreme thirst.

Water, email, Facebook. Narrowly averted getting into a giant stupid horrible fight about veganism with a friend of a friend on Facebook.

Cycled laundry #2 whilst talking to sweetheart (en route in Minneapolis) about narrowly-averted fight. Decided and felt thankful for the millionth time that without level-headed sweetheart with which to work through massive amounts of annoyance, I would spontaneously combust.

Vacuumed and mopped entire house.

Minestrone + Martha Stewart Living on the patio.

Shower, hair washing, leg shaving (!!!), weekly general bodily tuneups and maintenance.

Post office drop off (“Anything fragile, perishable, liquid, or hazardous?” “Just chocolate vulvas, as usual.”)

Computer work in café.

Dinner with a pal: black bean soup in a sourdough bread bowl, chocolate stout; talking about where our lives are going, the importance of balance, whether or not we exercise (mostly we don’t) and whether or not we should (yes).

Email, paperwork, facebook, blogging, cat petting.

Strawberries.

The New Yorker.

Sleep.

femininity is a performance June 13, 2009

Womens!

Have you heard of this thing called a “t-shirt bra”? I just bought one, and it’s like I’m fucking fourteen years old—every time I go to the bathroom I have to lift up my shirt to check out how amazing my tits look.

As I have previously gloated about ad infinitum, I do not buy sweatshop clothes. I don’t really buy new clothes at all, except from small companies and cool designers as a special treat a few times a year. But I spend more time thinking about clothes than someone with the hardcore anti-consumerist views I have rightly should. Sometimes I am walking past, say, Rambling Rose on Main Street in my little town, where the pretty dresses are arranged so artfully, and I get a surge of “I want to buy clothes” that electrifies my entire body. If I had the cash, I would spend a lot on Etsy and with other good small designers, and if I had the time I would thrift shop my way into many times more clothes than I have now. But I have neither, so new clothes are a big thing for me, even thrifted ones.

Enter Target, that vast wasteland of post-apocalyptic American stinkall. Because of the containers debacle (my business is all about debacles, I tells ya) I am constantly making furtive horrible trips to Target, which I once explained in this post but I’ll explain it all again anyway. Right now most of my cooler bags and containers for my meal delivery service are 3-5 years old, so I’ve been replacing them little by little as their shoddy craftsmanorwhatevership gives out. I’ve looked into ordering both wholesale, but it is actually more expensive than buying them at Target, can you believe that? So I go to Target. But they have this policy of stocking no more than 8 or so containers at a time, so I have to constantly pop into any Target I happen to be passing.

I’m usually pretty good about not buying excess plasticky shit there, but I usually have to walk past the horrid siren song of the clearance women’s clothes rack. This is super dangerous. The clothes are so cheap! And not as cheaply made as you might think! And, I’m so humiliated to be admitting this, but….they are, some of them, anyway, sort of….super duper rad.

So sometimes things happen. I don’t take drugs, I’m not an alcoholic, I’m not a major asshole—so maybe every few months I put like $30 (I swear to god, $30 gets you ridiculously far in that 75% off rack! It’s against everything I stand for in the whole world, but the allure of a $4 tank top that is insanely awesome still makes my heart beat fast!) into the pocket of Target, is that so bad? It sort of is, because there is a Goodwill 15 minutes from my kitchen that appears to be the final resting place for all the clothes that Target can’t even sell for 75% off. Has anyone else noticed this weird phenomenon—that Goodwills are sometimes filled almost exclusively with Target stuff? So I should just go there, but anyway anyway anyway, sometimes things happen, and what happened last week was this cute bra and panties set thing and believe you me, dearest internet, I am not a person who likes that I just wrote “panties.” My god. I wear “underwear.” Not panties. But these have a fucking bow, two in fact, so I guess that makes them panties. (As a saving grace, they are a sedate blue.) But for $10 I got a matching bra and since the only other bra-like contraptions I have are those annoying American Apparel (pre-AA ban, I should add) sports bras things that smush everything into an unappetizing uniboob (because everyone knows: boobs must be appetizing!), this bra is a fucking revelation to me.

Everything about the bra amazes me. I don’t know why this seems so fancy as I know that all bras have this, but I love the three sets of hooks so you can basically decide just how much of a girl you want to be that day. How much discomfort are you willing to trade for tits that defy gravity to ever more ridiculous degrees? (As I’ve learned from you peeps, though, some women want to wear bras because they are actually more comfortable, and I bow to you.)

That’s not the best feature of the bra, though. I’ve never owned one of these t-shirt bra deals before, because I thought that padded bras were ridiculous. I’m proud of my 32-As! I’m not going to plump them up at all. But the minute I put it on I realized that they have another benefit: nipple protection. Women! WOW. Yet another thing my mom declined to tell me about: padded bras don’t just exist to make your breasts look bigger, they are there to hide your scandalous nipples and evenly round out any scandalously pyramidy or pointy boobs you might have. (My mom mostly wore tube tops when I was growing up, and when she went into the supermarket she would throw on an old short-sleeve work shirt sort of thing. I’m sure she wore, and still wears, bras to work—dingy white mom-type stretched-out affairs—but all I remember are the hilarious and highly embarrassing tube tops.)

I personally love it when women walk around brazenly with no bra on and it gets cold and they just don’t care who notices. But I don’t love it when it happens to me, because you know the deal: people notice! So I always carry a hoodie, and that gets dumb. Today I was parading around the cold health food store with my thin t-shirt dress and my magical cheap-as-shit t-shirt bra in total confidence that no skanky hippie dude would be flirting with me because everyone knows that having a little headlights action going on means anyone can flirt with you.

It was wonderful.

Well, a hippie dude flirted with me anyway.

But his opening line was the blue in my hair, not my fantastic rack (speaking of, what’s going on with my dress in that picture??). Have you ever noticed that hippie dudes are the worst flirters in the whole world? The whole affair was a bit of a fiasco, as those types of things always are. I left wondering, as I always do, what all women always wonder: that mixture of “was I gracious?/Did I send clear enough ‘NOT INTERESTED’ signals?/But was he maybe just making conversation and not flirting, and if so, was I a giant asshole?” Repeat repeat repeat.

I don’t blame the bra, though. He was just a flirty hippie dude. My dips into the world of femininity do seem to have upped my propensity to be flirted with though. Which reminds me, I need to write a post about leg shaving. I’ll tell it to you in a haiku, instead, ok?

you never told me

about smoothness and texture—

softness, so quiet.

10 years of not shaving my legs, and one day (because a band who was staying chez moi left a razor and shaving cream in the shower, actually) I just did it. TEXTURE! Wow. I didn’t mind my hairy legs, they weren’t all that hairy even, but I am wildly in love with the smoothness of my brand new legs. I’m telling myself that it’s all about texture, and mixing things up, and fucking with people who think of me as a hairy-legged bitch. But I’ve been girling-it up pretty hardcore for a while now, and I can’t quite explain why. It’s fun, and that freaks me out a bit. Feminism is about having choices, right? Right?

randoms: my grandma’s racist, my boyfriend’s cute, I have a disease, but don’t worry, my hair is still great May 23, 2009

1) My grandmother (my dad’s mom) is one of those deeply racist people whose racism is so casual and built-in that it’s pretty much impossible to eradicate. She is of a generation that we just need to wait out, if you know what I mean. I think I’ve mentioned before how it took her a decade or three to stop referring to my mother as “your mother, the Jew.” I love my grandma, to the extent that she loves me. And I know that with this love comes a legacy of racism I will never entirely overcome. I think about it a lot, and try really hard to be aware of it. Cut to last week, and me mowing the lawn in intense heat and struggling with what I’ve now figured out is Lyme Disease (see #3).  Completely unbidden, I remembered what my grandmother used to say about being out in that kind of heat:

“I’m sweatin’ like a n—– on the auction block!”

Yep.

So when this thought came to me today, I tried to break it down. Was I remembering her saying that, or was I actually thinking it myself? I know that being tortured by thoughts like these is major conservative fodder for making fun of softie liberals, but the realization that I couldn’t decide what was happening in my own brain tortured me pretty much all day. There’s some pomo shit for you right there, right? What say you, Barthes? Lacan? Mons. Foucault? Do we ever think anything ourselves, or do we merely aggregate? What are thoughts, and how can the transitory nature of language ever truly convey them?

Anyway! In a racial/sexual politics of meat kind of twist, I very clearly remember that my grandmother’s other go-to “it’s hot” phrase was “I’m sweatin’ like a stuck pig!” Of course.

Do pigs even sweat?

2) On an unrelated note, while I was sweating my guts out and hoping to leach out whatever infection has taken over my body, my sweetheart was somewhere in California simultaneously needing a haircut and visiting the world’s largest tree, which looks, if you ask me, suspiciously small.

Look at that hippie!

Per this discussion, it seems appropriate for me to call him my “boyfriend” in the context of mentioning his cuteness, doesn’t it?

Per nothing in particular, last week Brittany got me drunk at the Planned Parenthood Mid-Hudson Valley 75th Anniversary Gala (it was a great night! I wore the heels she likes! Feet still hurt!). I went home and woozily Facebooked, and I can’t really explain what I said on a girlfriend’s page to provoke this response, but it made me laugh so hard the next day I cried:

Oy Lagusta. I am making sure that I get you drunk next time I am up New Paltz way. Goodness. Can’t say that I ever remember examining Jacob’s waist, but I’ll take your word for it that it is perfection itself.

And I love the lost in translation “noodle is keeping running into me.” Hope this morning isn’t bashing you over the head too terribly…

In my defense, Noodle is my little fluffy white cat, and she can bump into one in a most persistent (and, if drunk, painful) way.

3) In other why-am-I-sharing-this-with-the-internet news, apparently I have Lyme Disease, it’s awesome. If you love being exhausted all the time, that is. Are you friends with any conspiracy theorists? Take my advice and don’t ever talk to them about Lyme Disease. I didn’t know it was a magnet for conspiracy theories until this week, and listening to all the grandiose ideas about it people have foisted on me recently has made me slightly insane. I’m kicking it via the allopathic route mixed with the naturopathic: antibiotics + probiotics. I’m opening up the antibiotics and mixing them with soy yogurt, because the pills are too giant to swallow. Add kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, mix, repeat. Gurgle gurgle gurgle.

I actually think the whole thing is just a payback for telling the internet I never get tired. I’ve slept more in the past week than I have in years.

In other karmic news, immediately after I basically said people with bluetoofs should get cancer, I was pretty much forced to buy a Bluetooth. In my defense, I swear to you, universe, I will never wear it out in public. I can’t even wear it in front of Veronica at the kitchen. It’s that dorky. And also, I appear to have lost it. It’s too small!

4) Despite these obstacles, I have transitioned the Marie/Amy into something those sweet lovely Watson Twins might wear in a Jenny Lewis video—half up nice and high, half down. (PS: The Watsons have a blog! Go read it! Go hear their shivery-amazing voices live!)

It’s very hard to convey hair height in a self-taken photo, have you ever noticed that?

(Man oh man, how many links to my own blog can I put in one post? Hello navel! Why yes, I do like to gaze at you! I was restraining myself not to bring up the pill-swallowing debacle again!)

courage of your convictions vs. being a giant dick: help a sister toe the line, wouldja? May 20, 2009

[Before we even get into it: if you want to read these exact same ideas but written with the words in slightly different order, you can click here or here.]

Here’s what happens.

All the time.

Like, way too often.

Like, once a week or so.

Like, so often that I keep a journal solely devoted to it.

Seriously.

There it is, a tidy little Word file hanging out on my desktop: “Fight Diary.”

I’ve been keeping it for years. I started it one New Year’s Eve after I went to dinner and practically came to blows with a Magical Teapot believer who wanted to get into it about Jesus. Dude was wack, needless to say. And because Jesus crazies love to fight even more than I do, the fight began. The fight was awesome. I LOVE fighting with Jesus crazies. It’s the easiest fight you’ll ever have. You can knock those mofos out with a feather, I swear. Just ask them if they eat shellfish or something. Candy from a [spiritual] baby!

(I’m already doing what this post is about trying not to do! Failure already!)

The fight journal was intended, I swear, as a bulwark against me becoming my father, a man ruled by impossible angers. Let’s be clear about this: I am my daddy’s girl. I love being angry. I love feeling sweet smart-ass justifications pulsing through my body. I think best when I’ve got just a few cc’s of rage into me. My friends wake and bake; I wake and hate. I’ve talked about it before, you know all about it. It’s my drug, my vice, my sweet little dependency. My shame, my torrid affair. As Dexter would say, my Dark Passenger.

So can you guess what the journal has become?

Yes: victory laps. A place to deposit mean, hard diamonds.

Here’s how I justify it: my father was mean to his family, and we didn’t deserve it. I’m mean to idiots who disagree with me politically. I have sharpened my rage into a useful tool. It shouldn’t give me a free pass, I know, but I’m not mean to the people I love, and I’ve got to get points for that, right?

So when I slip and The Rage shows, I dutifully open up the Fight Diary (password: FUCKYOUASSHOLE) and recount the latest fight, and I do my best to learn from my mistakes for about five minutes. Then I get all hot and bothered, and use the good anger energy to cycle my laundry, and it’s all fine. It passes—for me. It ruins friendships, it makes people resent me. I move on. I pretend to be working on it. The truth is that I’m not getting any better, because, well, I don’t want to get better. Righteous rage has been my sister for so long, I can’t let the girl go.

But! I also don’t want to become—how to phrase it delicately?—a dickhead. And I live in a small town and I know I’m in danger of doing so. So the time has come to be straight with myself: I’ve got to either limit my rage to long-distance fights, or calm down.

Both seem completely impossible, so I’m confessing to the internet in hopes that my bloggie friends can gently take my arm in Green Party meetings, in the comments section of future blog posts, at restaurants, in the supermarket, on Facebook, and everywhere else and can calmly mention my very public desire to, you know, change and grow.

See, I don’t believe in mental illness, dear Internet, I really don’t. I don’t believe in shame. I believe in stone cold honesty, and I could care less if people think it’s pathetic to use a blog to become a better person.

One problem is that I tell myself that there are far too many yoga-addled new agey calm sweet people in this town, and it’s good to shake things up by being completely no-holds-barred. I love the East Coast because it’s supposed to be a place filled with people like me: Jews who love arguing. But my town is filled with refugees from that happy, loudmouthed way of life, it seems. We all are supposed to love rock-climbing and cookouts and sedate art walks. I like revolution.

Even more, I like screaming until someone apologizes to me for the sin of once taking an SUV cab when the hybrid cabs were all in use.

The only thing I like more than fights is having beliefs in the first place. I like surrounding myself with people who also have beliefs, so we can talk about them. Sometimes loudly. What’s the use of being opinionated and caring about the way the world around you is run if you’re aren’t willing to have a friendly little argument about it? I rarely insult people when I’m in fight mode, I try my hardest to use the inescapable fact of my deep-down correctness to wear them out. I show them all my cards: I turn my heart inside out and make them look at it to show them that I’m not (just) an asshole, I actually really care about what we’re arguing about.

But at some point my fellow arguee will say the inevitable beyond-the-pale comment and I will feel it firing through my body—pow pow pow pow! And my face gets all red and it’s off to the races. If it’s over email I will try to moderate myself. If it’s face-to-face I will begin breathing crazily and will start spouting.

This week it was email, which was good. It was your standard heartless Lou Dobbsian attitude toward illegal immigration that tangentially made its way into my inbox from a fellow community member.

At first, I tried so hard not to get involved:

Yuck, I’m an anarchist who doesn’t believe in America. If you’re going to talk about all this Jingoistic crapola, would you mind not including me? It makes me swear and that scares my cats.

Mr. X, your beliefs about illegal immigrants make me sick.

I was accused, as I always am, of not being “civil” and not being able to deal with people having differing views. This kiiiiiiilllllls me, so I was all:

Why have beliefs if you don’t believe they are the right beliefs? I’ve never understood that. I’m not saying I hate you or anything, Mr X, merely that your beliefs on immigration, quite literally, make my stomach ache. I wasn’t reducing anything to name calling or anything, just describing the literal reaction I have to such beliefs.
I’ll still read your blog and everything! I’ll just be thinking that your ideas are ridiculous (and I’d suspect that you think vice versa) and I’ll be hoping with my whole heart that you someday come over to my side. :)

Nice enough, right? I mean, I used a fucking emoticon and everything. I wouldn’t be offended if someone sent a response like that to me, my blood would pump in a most satisfactory manner and I would set about changing the person’s mind.

But Mr. X didn’t write back. I hurt the poor boy’s feelings! I was intolerant.

The “you’re intolerant” argument is just weird to me. What’s that all about? Yes, I am intolerant of people who refuse to understand that people from other countries who want to be here because they want better lives are not horrible people. What’s wrong with that? Your beliefs are intolerable to me. Should I be ashamed? Is one to be “tolerant” of Nazis? Sorry to skip to that horrible place, but I want a world in which we’re all trying to convince each other to be better, not some spineless hippie distopia where we’re all so “tolerant” that lunacy prevails.

I’m right, I want you to know it, and I want you to change. And when I’m wrong, I want you to tell me, because I want to change.

But then there is this. Later on a quasi-friend on the email list (these things always happen with groups watching, ugh) privately emailed me this:

I respect that you tell it like it is–you have passion and guts and good values. But telling it like it is needs to be measured within a larger social and poltical context, I think. You don’t get points for hurting people’s feelings and being an alpha-girl who doesn’t give a shit. You get points by working with others toward your mission. You should always be authentic, but you also have to make choices about the form that authenticity takes. It might be authentic to take a crap on Main Street, but we don’t do it. There are ways of arguing positions
without making people angry or hurt and I hope that you might at least consider this.

I consider it all the time, my quasi-friend, really, I do. And a lot of the time I actually do it. But sometimes you’ve got a Lou Dobbs all up in your grill, and what’s an alpha girl to do? And also: it shouldn’t really hurt your feelings if I say that your beliefs make me sick, unless you are not secure in your beliefs. And also: ugh with everyone trying to give me teh advicez. Ugggs.

Here’s the other truth though: I have recently gotten into two rather unpleasant fights with two rather unpleasant dudes about their style of interacting with the world. I like their politics, but they are so insulting and cruel to people that everyone is irked by them and it’s horrible to be around them. Am I acting like them with my willingness to have what I think are passionate arguments? I know the parallels have been made, and this keeps me up at night. In fact, if you read this post side-by-side with this one, you will pretty much die when presented with my apparent hypocrisy. I truly believe a careful reader of my screeds vs. those of the two unpleasant dudes would come away with the opinion that I talk about issues much more than they do and make many less personal attacks (not to mention am wittier and smarter and let my heart show much more and am able to admit that sometimes I am a dick, which they never are), but there is still much more of an argument to be made than I would like.

So we’re stuck. I want to change people’s minds without being a giant dick or a pushover. Is it possible? Maybe for someone, but is it possible for an anger-junkie East Coast Jew with a heart of gold and a quiver full of more swear words than Lily Allen?

Ugh. If it wasn’t a small town it would be easier to be all “let the bridges I burn light the way, fuckerz!!” but it is a small town, and I love this town. And here’s the schmaltzy “see, secretly she does love America!” ending: I love that my small town is forcing me to be a better person. It’s awesome. Lord knows, I need all the help I can get.

in which we change and grow, and all that shit. May 6, 2009

Hilariously and tragically, I had this post written before the one below. Ah, instant karma. Or, “isn’t it ironic.” Or something that’s been in a popular song, I’m sure.

I present to you: two stories of calming the fuck down and allowing the universe to make us better.

Or something like that.

ONE

Two years ago, my tour-managin’ sweetheart Jacob opened a case containing a pedal board* to find that one pedal was missing. He had just flown from somewhere to somewhere else, and since he didn’t notice that the pedal was missing at the show, and since the case had one of those TSA fliers inside saying that the Transportation Security Administration had rifled through it and read whatever diaries were inside or whatever, he figured an underpaid guitar shredder TSA drone had pocketed the pedal. Annoying, but life goes on.

Two weeks ago, one of the stagehands handed Jacob a package that had been thrown up on stage. He unwrapped it to find the pedal and a note:

[Pause for "awww."]

My god, my toes just curl with pleasure at the whole thing. Do you know what this story means? Someone in this wretched old world got better. Someone went to a show and got drunk and stole a pedal, but two years later decided they didn’t want to be a pedal stealing kind of person, so they made it all better. Wow. Wow! We change and grow. How wonderful.

Thinking about this story, I figured: if drunks can be all good and shit, so can I.

TWO

On the welcome sheet I give to my new clients, I have all kinds of information about the service, including this little gem:

Included with each delivery is a menu sheet that lists how to heat the meals, ingredients, and tidbits we’re excited about. The menu sheet does not list microwave cooking instructions, because although we know it is sometimes necessary to use a microwave, we aren’t crazy about the idea of gamma rays exciting our organic molecules. If you do need to use a microwave, remember to add water if the dish looks dry, and to stir to ensure that it heats evenly. (Actually, those are good tips to remember when heating on the stovetop, too.)

“Gamma rays exciting our organic molecules”! I liked it. Six years ago I did 2 seconds of internet research before determining that I was accurately representing the science behind microwaves, and the line has been there since.

One of my clients recently emailed me about it. Let me paraphrase the conversation:

Client: Yo, you sound mad ridic with that microwaves “gamma rays exciting molecules” shit. Thing is, microwaves aren’t dangerous. [Insert fancy scientific talk, charts, links and graphs here which I can provide to any interested parties.] You talk all this fancy talk about nutrients and shizz, but when you don’t know your eighth grade science, it’s hard to take you seriously. Like, me and my husband, we’re like, super cautious about stuff to the point where we don’t even own cell phones even though my husband rides his bike everywhere and could get hit by a car at any minute and vitally need a cell phone, but better safe than sorry, you know? But we use microwaves, because: teh convenience. So, um, just FYI, we excite your organic molecules all over the place, and it’s always been fine. ‘Cause “excite” isn’t what it does.**

Me: WTF yo. Better safe than sorry, you know? Here’s my thing: microwaves don’t make your food good. Done. Argument over. I do feel deep in my bones (which is where all scientific theories are best tested, right?) that I want to stay away from microwaves, but also: I just can’t believe that luscious food can be microwaved food. [I didn't say any of this to my client. I just thanked her for the info and moved right along. I am a stone cold professional, yo.] And? I always use my hands-free device when using my cell phone, so I’m, like, totes ahead of the game, no?

Client: Actually:

You’d think that a hands-free setup would protect you from a cell-phone’s microwaves — at least I thought so until I read the Wikipedia entry on possible cell phone hazards.  It’s at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_radiation_and_health and has a lot of very good information.  It seems that although wireless headsets (i.e. Bluetooth [editor's note: YOU MEAN BLUETOOTH DOUCHERS AREN'T GETTING CANCER AND DYING? DANG]) do indeed protect you, ironically some evidence suggests that wired hands-free setups do not.  Apparently the wires act as an antenna.  The electromagnetic wave travels up the outside surface of the wire, where it’s brought directly to your head!

Fortunately, it seems that you can prevent this by putting a magnetic ring called a ferrite bead around the wire.  I know this sounds bogus, but it’s quite legit — ferrite beads are commonly used in electronics for just this purpose: to prevent electromagnetic waves from propagating along the outside surfaces of wires, which causes electronic interference.  I’m looking at one right now — it’s built into the AC power supply wire for my laptop, for electronic noise suppression.  Here’s an article about using them with cell phones.

I hope these references are interesting and/or useful.

Hmm.

For some reason when my clients email me things I’m sort of predisposed to resist whatever it is they are telling me. Partially this is because sometimes it’s things like “So I read this article in Teen People about olive oil and how it will kill you and just FYI I can never eat olive oil again. Hope that won’t be a problem.”*** But probably it’s just because a client email is usually some sort of work for me to do, and like everyone else, I don’t want to do any more work than I’m already doing.

But! Instead of resisting the info as yet another set of things I had to do (change the welcome sheet, buy a ferrite bead, worry about getting cancer, be annoyed about not being able to be smug about not using microwaves and always using my hands-free thingie) and getting grumpy because there are twenty thousand things I want to do before I do the research to revise my feelings on microwaves, I just allowed the good vibes my client was trying to pass along pass into my body like, uh, an electromagnetic wave.

Knowledge is power, let’s make it better, whatever whatever. I’ll do it. I’ll learn and grow. I’ll take people’s good intentions to heart, and will listen to and learn from them. I won’t get a hideous microwave, mos def not, but I might not sneer the next time someone mentions using one. That’s progress, right?

Incrementally, with two steps backward and one step forward, I’m becoming a better person, dammit.

(Tangentially, I am also becoming someone who wears ribbon bows in her hair. Tune in tomorrow for the full report!)

**A pedal board is an, um, board on which guitar effects pedals are affixed. At least, that’s how I understand it. It usually stands near the guitarist at the front of the stage so they can step on any pedal at any time.

**Why am I slandering my client as a crazy talker? She is actually very smart and a nice person too. She is crazy to the millionth power as well, but all my clients are. And yes, I know this is probably a reflection of myself, and I’m cool with it.

***In fairness, I don’t really get emails like this anymore, because most of my clients are good-crazy these days instead of crazy-crazy, like they used to be. I don’t know why or how the balance shifted, but it did, and it’s great.

my mother makes a cake, in five easy steps. April 30, 2009

not it.

My mother is making a cake.

She is using a recipe of mine (the one in that picture above, in fact), and has called me six times to discuss the situation.

1) “So, the recipe says: ‘Oil 2 9” round pans.’ OK. Got it. My question is: what is a cake pan?”

“Um.”

“I mean, I think I know…but…what exactly does it mean when it says ‘cake pan’?”

And I talk about regular cake pans vs. springform pans and as it turns out, she owns neither. I tell her she could just make cupcakes (“Well….I have a muffin pan, could I use that?” “Yes. They. Are. The. Same.”), but she is set on a cake, so I advise her on what cake pan to get: first choice: two 9″ springform pans. I explain what a springform pan is, badly (“It has a latch thingie…..I’m tired.”). Second choice: two metal 9″ cake pans, preferably made by Chicago Metallic, available everywhere. Third choice: silicone pans, of which I am not a fan.

2) She goes to Target and calls me in the store: they have only one springform pan (“What a clever idea! The side just comes off!”), so could she make the cake in that? No, not really—why go to all the trouble of making a cake if it’s not a layer cake? And cutting the cake in half horizontally is too much trouble for my mom. She needs two pans. So she gets a regular metal pan: “It is definitely metal….at least….I don’t think it’s silicone.” “Is it flexible? It is plastic? Silicone is plastic.” “No….um….it is not plastic.”

How my mother can sound unsure about whether or not a pan is metal or plastic is part of the unending wonder and mystery that is my mother.

3) “So the cake is in the oven. It smells really good. You know, I had a big revelation tonight, with the new cake pans: I’ve never, in my life, made a cake that came out well. I never had the right equipment, or the right ingredients, or I was trying to make it vegan and it came out weird because of that, or something.”

It’s true. And it sort of makes me want to cry.

I hadn’t made a decent cake until I was about twenty. Childhood annoyances with cooking caused by the fact that we owned almost no kitchen implements might explain why today I rent a space to hold my insanely large collection of everything from a teeny little brush specially designed and reserved to clean pastry bag tips to three types of mandolines. In high school and college I used to get so angry at my failed cakes that I would punch them. Seriously. There really isn’t much more angry-making than spending the entire afternoon making a cake only to have it sink in the middle, or break in half, or never cook through, or burn, or any one of the million other cake issues I used to have. Jacob still laughs at the two birthdays in a row when I served him iced and decorated cakes with giant punch marks in the middle—because what do you do after you punch a cake, throw it away? No way. Cake is cake, after all. Punched or not.

These days I can throw together a perfect cake in 20 minutes flat, and every single time I put it in the oven I remember my decade or so of punched cakes. A deep part me thinks I will always be a cake puncher, and that my pretty cakes are just narrowly averted failures. It isn’t true at all, not in any way, but to see why I carry this idea around let’s go back to my mother and her cake.

Part of me loves that my mother is, in her sixth decade, just now having major revelations like the need to have the right equipment for the job. But, as the child who grew up in a cake-less household, it of course annoys me too. Mostly I love the sense of possibility I can tell she often feels in her life: with decent free time and no horrible husband around, she has a freedom she hasn’t had in thirty years. She pampers her cats and her dog, calls me too often, and tinkers in the world of homemaking. She’s sort of Benjamin Buttoning this part of her life, and that seems right to me.

Her interest in cooking began around the time I went to cooking school in 2000, when she began calling to ask me everything from “What is fennel?” to “Is sautéeing different from stir-frying”? (She calls every method of cooking “stir-frying,” which seems to come straight from 1975 and makes me laugh every time. Whenever I’m telling her that she should just sauté some vegetable or another with olive oil and garlic and salt, she says, hesitantly “…so, do you mean…sort of stir-fry it?” Also: might I mention that she does not own a wok? All her “stir-frying” is done in a battered skillet she inherited from her mother.)

4) Back to the cake. After the call to discuss the Cake Revelation, she called ten minutes later: “OK, just two more questions. First, when can I take the cake out of the pan?”

“Well, when it’s cool. At least 20 minutes, half an hour would be better.”

“Umm…OK.”

“Did you already take it out of the pan?”

“Well….I started to.”

Sigh.

“Did it break? You can patch it up with frosting if it did.”

“Oh good! OK, that reminds me: when can I frost it? Can I frost it when it’s warm?”

Clearly she is ready to frost it and be done with the whole thing.

“No. It’s got to cool, otherwise it will melt the frosting and it will be a big mess.”

“You know, I was thinking that. I think that’s what might have ruined cakes of mine in the past!”

“You used to put the frosting on when it was right out of the oven??”

“Well….sort of.” When I catch her being inimitably herself in the deepest and craziest ways, my mother has a way of saying “sort of” where “sort” is all floaty and high like she is trying to escape out of the room through the ceiling. “Sort of” means “always.”

5) The next day: “The cake was amazing!!! It was so delicious!! Well….in the end it was getting late, so I think I might have turned it out of the pan a little early, because one layer sort of broke apart….then I might also have put the frosting on too early, but it was great!”

Hmm.

again, not it.

monday miscellany: links & locks April 28, 2009

Hair project continues!  It was sort of old-ladyish that day. 1960s old ladyish, wouldn’t you say? I liked it. Bouffanty. Bouffanty would be a great name for a cat, no?

Randomness, GO!

Swine flu = caused by factory farms.

Conservatives = not understanding that Colbert is satire. I can’t decide which headline is scarier.

Vegans don’t have higher rates of calcium deficiencies than non-vegans. This is PAINFULLY OBVS (if anything it would be the other way around), but oh well. A client forwarded me this link, so I’ll pass it around.

Awww! My BFF Christy was profiled in this rad article in Portland Monthly! It was a while ago, but who cares? Babymamas who wear Chucks are so awesome, are they not?

Even though my camera seems to make all outside shots weirdly extra blue, those blue streaks are holding up quite nicely.That pin says “Jem” and it appeared in my house one day. Jem!

Wow. What IS this? Whatever it is, I like it. Upstate NY peeps arm wrestling wearing crazy outfits. Sure. I love it. Bring it on.

A blogreader has this fantastic blog: Vegan Brew. It’s so rare to find people who posses the magic combination of veganness, fermentation fetishism, and what seem to be great palates and seriously tasty chow. Keep up the good work!

Brittany took this one. What a rad photo!! And how odd that it was 90 degrees out on Saturday, yet no leaves on the trees.

I so so so SO adored Shortbus, didn’t you? And I am wildly in love with this dude (Jay Brannan) too. His song “Soda Shop” was a highlight of the movie. C*u*t*e!

Speaking of boys, the New Yorker article on Matthew and Michael Dickman, twin poets of amazing talent and possessors of adorable visages, was such a treat. I have this poem by Matthew tacked up in my kitchen, it knocks me out every time I walk by and glance at it.

Multi-tasking! As you can see, the Marie Antoinette has become a bit more of an Amy Winehouse. I think I’m getting better at doing it, though. I have a whole method now. Twist twist twist, pin pin pin pin pin pin pin pin, then flip the top part (the leftovers from the French twisting) up high and back, then twist those into the back twist. Did you follow that?

And do you notice that my wardrobe seems to be 100% Jenny Lewis t-shirts? (See previous post!) I am pretty much a scavenger with no shame and will wear any free swag I can get my hands on. Also, Jenny Lewis is amazing and all that.

Oh, if by chance you’re looking for a math tutor, my neighbor Leigh is the best around. Check it. Leigh is the sweetest dude in the world.

This is pretty silly, but I was excited about this new show made by the creators of “Arrested Development,” “Sit Down, Shut Up.” I Hulu’d the first two episodes (Hulu has taken away all my “I don’t own a TV, I am better than you!” cred) and it’s merely deeply OK so far. This trailer is about five times as hilarious as the show.

HA! For some reason this just came up on my Google alert (Hi, my name is Lagusta, and I am a narcissist.): Jacob and Lagusta’s Top 12 Vegan Things of 2007, as reported to Team Love Records. It all seems weirdly dated now. Jacob wrote it for the most part: I do not eat Oreos!

(But I would, if they were in front of me…)

The thing about the hairstyle is that it sort of deflates as the day goes on, which is sort of a bummer.

OK!

I’m off to Mon-ray-ahl (as we say it in my hizzy [did I just say "hizzy"?]) for a few days to rescue my “lover” from the horrors of the indie rock world and hang out with my “sister-out-law.” Don’t worry, though, Veronica will be making chocolates, wooo! Here’s a secret: she does a better job than I do. For one thing, she doesn’t spend half the day arranging and taking pictures of her hair. That alone makes her a better chocolatier. Although…she’s not too shabby in the self-taken-portrait department, either:

Oh, the cute! It knocks me out.

À bientôt! À tout à l’heure! À la prochaine! Au revoir! (I’ve been practicing, can you tell?)

spring, sprung April 25, 2009

Wednesday. Oh me oh my o. I basically just walked around and took pictures of the beauty.

S*p*r*i*n*g*!!

I was 18 when I experienced my first winter. Moving to western New York State for college brought all kinds of weather-related newness: thick coats, snow, and day after day of endless, bleak, seemingly unbearable, needle-like cold. I didn’t understand why people lived in such climates. It was beautiful for about five minutes, the perfect whiteness and all that, then I just shivered and waited it out.

In April, or most likely early May (Western NY being what it is), I finally understood. Spring.

Spring is why people live on the East Coast.

No one ever experienced a spring like I experienced the spring of 1997. Jacob and I had started going out two months before. We would take walks through the giant cemetery that bordered the campus, where Susan B Anthony and Frederick Douglass were buried. I marveled at everything. Little shoots coming out of the ground like miracles, flowers erupting all around, completely unbidden. I’m not sure I knew about annual plants when I was 18. Bulbs still pretty much blow my mind today. You plant them, and they just keep coming back. They know exactly what to do. Everything does. It’s spring! It happens all on its own, just when you think you can’t take the wet and the cold and the dark.

Seasons: I’m a big fan.

So, this Wednesday, here’s what was happening: