dinner plans

I made so much food tonight.  I chalk this up to the fact that my kitchen is amazing and living and working next to my two favorite grocery stores.  Though after Fairway, the Whole Foods at Bowery does begin to resemble a cheap knock off.

I'm really obsessed with savoy cabbage lately. Specifically making it into soup.  Or cabbage stew.  I usually think of soups as being more broth like, no chunks.  These are full on chunky, but thin broth soups.  Nothing but water and some pepper to fill out vegetables. Lots of freaking vegetables.  To be fair, the potatoes that I tossed in tonight flavored the water a good bit.

This is the 3rd time in a month that I've made savoy cabbage soup/stew.  That's a lot considering that each pot usually lasts me 4 days.  I've been eating savoy cabbage for half a month and I have zero complaints.

I also roasted leeks and brussel sprouts.   The brussel sprouts were to go with the grilled cheese sandwich that I was going to make for dinner.  Originally they were going to be green beans, but there wasn't enough of a selection at the Whole Foods to make them seem appetizing enough.  Instead I got brussel sprouts and another leek.  (There was already one week old leek in the fridge, left over from the last time I made savoy cabbage soup/stew).  I roasted the stalks and chopped and then tossed the coarse leaves into the soup/stew.

The best thing about soup/stew is that you can toss anything in.  Anything at all.  Last time I added ginger chunks.

I didn't make a grilled cheese.  There was too much other food.  And honestly, grilled cheeses can be a lot of work.


The next time that you're making dinner plans I highly recommend savoy cabbage be included in those plans.  You won't regret it.


PS: I finally got my Electric Object working at home.  Except unpaired. Because bluetooth.

Sunday Afternoon, on a Sunday.

How is writing a letter like a conversation?  If you make journals into letter writing, does that make them just letters to your future self?  If no one reads your journal entries, what are they then?

Am I any good at this?  Probably not.

And the more and more you start to wonder how much beside the point that is.  To be "good" at a thing.  Goodness doesn't matter.

But those things.  On my to do list.  What happens if I *do* finish all of them?  Like, what happens if I wrote down things that are entirely *finishable* for today?

That's never happened before.  Am I growing up?

I lunched with a friend today.  He's seriously pursuing writing.  He's got some 9,000* words of himself that he's readying to send to publishers, to editors.  To be read and parsed and edited and, hopefully, published.  I'm really excited for him.  I want to be able to make it happen, but I can't make things happen for people.  I have enough trouble making things happen for myself.

We talked about books, what makes a bad one, and writing and working and recognition.  Is it enough to be recognized as a writer?  How much of recognition is titles and raises and more stock option grants, and how much of it is something simple like deference of questions and latitude and being given a team or someone to mentor.  I wonder about these things.

Two quick story ideas :
- A survey of bacon sides at brunch establishments.  Based on meatiness (thickness), crunch, flavor (mesquite?), hot or cold when it arrived?, quantity provided. fat to meat ratio, appearance/plating, slice width, price, weight of the portion (note to self: bring your electronic scale).
- Scathing review of Jonathan Franzen's book (and the book that he reviewed and you subsequently read, A Hundred Brothers).  A double review?  A review of a review?  Like the meta book review, that both investigates how we, as book consumers find and appreciate books, and lambasting J Franzen for not only his terrible taste, but also replicating that terrible taste into a short book of memoirs.


I leave you with this poem:

I
I am terrible.
I am also drunk.
Caffeine is a wonder drug.

This martini has sugar in it.



* 9,000 words?  Dear god. Nine thousand words!**

** Before*** this comment, this blog post was 388 words.

*** Including this comment, this blog post is 408 words.

Habits

I do this all the time, she said, pulling out a pair of rusty scissors from her skirt's thick black waistband.

She cut off her left thumb.  Then her forefinger.

Then my right thumb.

Then my head.

A real exit interview

So, you've had a good run here. We're sorry to see you go. I've got just a few things to cover before we're done.

First, did you get my email about where to leave your things? Ok great. You don't have to leave your shoes, those will be hard to find a new owner for. Undies and socks go in the trash.

Now, how many of your coworkers know you're leaving? All of them? Good good.

Where did you put the flower pot? George has been following the treasure map you tried to throw away two weeks ago, but he hasn't been able to locate it.

Do you have a forwarding address for us to send the data we've been collecting on you? I think you'll take particular interest in the germ count on your tea mugs.

Are there any unresolved office romances that we need to clean up? Jenny and the cleaning crew are going to do a sweep next Monday. I'll add yours to the list.

Is there anything that you'd like to confess?

No?

Are you sure?

Well then, that about wraps it up. It's been a real pleasure. Best of luck in your future endeavors!

Tips for Myself, version 2010

Don't use a big knife where a small one will do.

Buy delightful, colorful, impractical, mundane things. Its literally investing in a brighter future.

Toothpaste makes a great souvenir. Ditto for deodorant. When you run out, you know it's time for the next trip.

Sam

I loved his bed more than him. It was a luxurious bed, musky smelling. The mattress sagged. The sheets were often knotted in hot, sweaty lumps. He had propped it up on risers, such that you were above the chaos that existed outside its sheeted edges.

The room itself, like the rest of the old clapboard house, was dusty, inhospitable. The ancient floorboards creaked when anyone in the whole two story affair headed to the toilet, which with four roommates, was often. The ceiling rattled when someone climbed the stairs.

The floor was often strewn with clothes. There wasn't much of one - a dilapidated corner sofa occupied much of the open space. In the corner was a clapboard white, now more grayish with grime, door  that led directly to his roommates' equally dusty, darker room. It was, as far as I could tell, never used.

He had a small desk in the corner, where I'd watch him play internet poker well into the afternoon, luxuriating beneath the covers as the sun snuck its way through the cracks in the dusty blackout curtains and across the body hiding there - me. He teased me for being lazy, but didn't seem to mind my woozy hungover presence.

I always wondered who else he had in that bed, if anyone. Who else it belonged to when I was not there, to fill a small corner of it. Time sharing, my love.

There wasn't much outside that bed. We talked sometimes, but of what I don't know. We went out for dinner once, at a fancy Italian place south of town. At parties, he smoked cigarettes, sometimes, when he drank. His kisses were heady, smoky then, wet and rich as my own drunken haze.  

Even now, I'm not sure how or why really, but without fail, every Friday for one long, sunny spring semester I would find my way back into that lovely, lonely bed.

Dear Abby, Fuck Endorphins

Dear Abby,

I need to preface this letter with a disclaimer.  I'm planning to complain about something that I feel guilty about complaining about.  I find it kind of fascinating though, so I'm going to ignore that guilt and write you about it anyways, mostly because it's become a serious problem in an otherwise great current state of being.

I ran the New York City marathon about 2 months ago.  I finished.  My time was solid, respectable, but nowhere near Boston quality marathon time.  The race was all kinds of terrible and I'm pretty proud of finishing it.

From August until race date (Nov 2nd) I invested an enormous amount of time and effort into training.  In three months, I logged over 238 miles, or about 40 hours of running[1][2].

All that investment paid off, and has continued to pay off.  I'm in great shape.  My recovery time from the marathon was about 4 days.

To put this into perspective, I ran my first marathon in Toronto in October 2012, a little over two years ago now.  After the Toronto marathon, I was totally broken.  My legs ached for days.   Two weeks passed before I wanted to run again.  I eventually ended up in acupuncture to help with a debilitatingly tight tendon in my left heel[3].  It took about a month and a half of semi-weekly sessions to fix the tendon.  I went through this then, but the injury and lasting physical exhaustion made it less noticeable.

So what's the problem?  I have no plans of running another marathon in the immediate future, but I'm still in great shape.  The maintenance on this great shape has gotten expensive, but I can't quit.  I'm addicted to the endorphins.

The great shape part is great, if you're using it.  If I spend a few days without a jog, my legs start aching from the lack of exercise.  I've got too much energy.  When I do go for a run, the miles I put in are never enough.  The endorphin rush that used to kick in after a quick 3 miles now takes at least an hour.  As a result, my attitude and overall well-being depends on logging bigger numbers of miles.

Running is great, but it's a huge time suck.  I don't want to be spending hours on the pavement in the middle of winter.  Is there some magic pill that I can take that would dial my endorphin dependence[4] down from "Marathon level" to "Half-Marathon level"?  I'm interested.  I may be talked into taking the "5K level" pill if you're selling one.

- Frustratedly Antsy


[1] This math works out -- that's just under 6 miles per hour.

[2]  Using the maths further, 40 hours divided by 12 weeks is about 3.33 hours per week.  This isn't exactly right, as with tapering up and down, some weeks were definitely busier than others.  Even so, in retrospect, this doesn't seem like *such* a huge time investment.

[3] I'm not sure why I eschewed normal physical therapy and jumped straight to eastern medicine.  Living right next door to Chinatown at the time may have been an influence.  Whatever the reason, it worked out for the best.  My foot was back to normal in about 6 weeks, and I've never had a relapse.  Also a plus, there were zero 'homework' stretches or exercises associated with treatment.  All the 'work' took place in the clinic.  They also took my insurance; I didn't pay anything more than a co-pay.  #winning

[4] I went on a 'short run' today.  It'd been 3-4 days since my last jog and the jitters were reaching a fever pitch.  I ran on a route that I'm really familiar with but had never done before (linking up old and new hoods), and at what felt like a leisurely pace.  I didn't bring a watch or a phone, so I had no idea how much time I was running for. Based on intuition, it felt like a 6-7 mile run.  When I mapped it out, the truth was almost double, closer to 11.5mi.[4a]

[4a] I'm still jittery.