Personal Archives

One would think that, upon moving to New York, my life would become exciting and weird, and that I would have all sorts of crazy stories and experiences to relate. This coming weekend will mark 2 years since I moved up here from Georgia, and while I have had a lot of fun, I can't really say that I've had any real "one for the book" episodes. I've met smart, nice people, gone to a lot of cool shows, restaurants, parties, etc., but nothing all that bizarre or hilarious has happened to me. (My date with Face Down Ass Up and the handing off of the Uterus Piñata are two notable exceptions; I may go into those later.)

It seems counterintutive, but all the weird, funny stories of my life center around the 13 years I spent in Georgia, particularly the 3 1/2 years that I lived in Crawford (population 600). So, in the coming weeks, when it seems like my stories of Eating, Reading, Listening, etc., just don't have enough sparkle, I will trot out my memories of Johnny, Little Johnny, Rollin' Joel, The Murderer, Snout, Lois, Venerable, The Yard Dogs (a.k.a. Shane and Kitty), and other Southern Gothic characters who populated my stranger-than-fiction life down there. I can't exactly say I miss them, but they make for damn interesting cocktail-party talk.

Things I've Been Enjoying Lately

I'll do a real post after my run tonight, but here are a couple of things that have been amusing me:

Gawker's week-long vivisection of the Meatpacking District. I've only hung out there twice; once included a nice meal and was early enough in the evening to be fairly low-key, but everything about this small part of town makes me shudder. It's everything that's bad and shallow about New York. Even Frank Bruni thinks this neighborhood has jumped the shark. That's like your dad pointing out that your clothes are out of style.

Season 3 of Arrested Development. The final season lacks the magic of the first two, but it's still better than most of the crap on TV by a long shot. My hat is off to them for quitting while they were still ahead; the concept had a limited shelf life, a la The Office (British), and they packed it in before it got stale.

Basil and tomatoes. The family loaded me up with basil, parsley, heirloom tomatoes, squash, and eggplant from their garden over the weekend, so I've been enjoying some fine, fresh produce over the past few days. Despite that, I feel like I might be coming down with something.

Gary Shteyngart. I loved The Russian Debutante's Handbook a few years ago and had been eagerly anticipating his sophomore effort, Absurdistan. It's not out in paperback yet, so I went on half.com and got it for, well, half price. I read it last week; I could easily have read it in two evenings, so I only allowed myself to read it on the train and made it last the whole week. It was funny and sarcastic and surprisingly romantic, though he used the phrase "squishy paws" a few too many times. Minor quibble.

Crocheting. I'm getting the hang of it pretty nicely and am looping up a cute little red beanie for winter.

The Eating: Spice Market

Okay, as posted earlier, there's been too much going on for regular updates. But I have plenty of material to dole out over the next few days. I just got in from my weekend in Maine, but will start with mention of Friday night's dinner at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Spice Market. I'd been there once before, last summer, but just for cocktails. The sapce, in the way-too-glam-for-me Meatpacking District is huge and stunning: a bilevel layout with multiple bars and dining areas decorated in a luxurious Southeast Asian style. Think lots of carved wood, gauzy draperies, metal chandeliers. When I was there before, I was tantalized by the fragrant food that was carried past and ever since have been meaning to return to sample the curries, chili pastes, seafood, noodles, and bright veggies. As I mentioned earlier, my girl from Miami was in town for the weekend, so I met her and her lovely family for an early dinner there. Decor and service were as wonderful as I remembered. The food was very good (I was pleased that the kitchen complied with my request for extra spice on my shrimp and chili noodles), though maybe not quite as transcendent as the reviewers had led me to believe. It's definitely ideal for large-group meals--food is brought out at random and is intended to be shared. As I stated in my write-up of Kuma Inn, I'm a devoted grazer, so I was happy to take a bite or two from most everyone's plates. In addition to my chili shrimp noodles, I sampled mussels steamed with lemongrass and coconut juice; vegetables with green curry and rice noodles; lobster rolls; wild mushroom spring rolls; mango salad; and some yummy salt-cod dish. It's a bit of a chore for me to get over to that part of town, but I'll probably make it back some time in the next year or so for more grazing.

Coming up: some Reading, Watching, Listening, and more Eating, perhaps with some Family thrown in.

Also...

I doubt I'll have much time or energy for blogging over the next several days. The coming week holds for me: Sparklehorse (Tuesday); knitting (Wednesday); Lambchop (Thursday); dinner with an out-of-town friend (Friday); Brucefest III in Portland (Saturday); then driving back to NY (Sunday). That's a lot of scampering for this Squirrel, so I hope you'll forgive another lapse and look forward to an exciting update early next week.

The Eating: Eggplant

It's been ages since I had some good, fresh eggplant, so I was pleased to see bins of beautiful little baby ones at the greenmarket this Saturday. I bought a small bag and finally had a moment to myself this evening to cook them up. I was tired and hungry, so decided to go quick and easy. I peeled and cubed them, sauteed them with some olive oil and garlic, and then simmered them for about 45 minutes in some good imported canned tomatoes with fresh basil and crushed red pepper. I cooked up a quick helping of angel hair pasta and served the sauce over the top with a little Parmesan cheese. The young eggplant had become almost silky without disintegrating into mush. If I'd had more time, I would have gone all the way with an eggplant parmesan, but that's more of a winter Sunday afternoon affair. Maybe I'll treat myself to that for my birthday.

Weekend Roundup

It's been a busy weekend...after taking a friend out for a birthday dinner on Friday (seems like most of our friends are September babies), we bought tickets for Magnolia Electric Company's show at the Knitting Factory on Saturday. Will introduced me to their music a little more than a year ago, and I quickly became a fan of Jason Molina's langid, plaintive songs. I think we were the oldest people in the audience by a good eight years or so. But it was an earnest crowd and a very good show.

Today, I met a friend for brunch in Park Slope and then we took the bus over to Red Hook for the monthly Sunday's at Sunny's reading, which I hadn't been to since April. I was shocked to see that a new Fairway supermarket now occupies the ground level of my favorite waterfront warehouse next to the bar and that the cute little park across the street has been partially paved over to make a parking lot for the market. Part of what I loved about that part of town was its isolation and quiet. Now it's overrun with strollers and SUVs. Still, we had fun at the reading, which featured three young writers known for their saucy sex/relationship essays and columns. After the reading, my friend decided to catch the water taxi back to the Upper West Side, and I enjoyed the late afternoon light as I rode the bus home (I'm weirdly fond of the bus, for some reason).

Tomorrow's News: File Under "No Shit"

I love the New York Times, I really do. Yes, it's self-important and stuffy, but somehow, it's also comforting. It's the print version of NPR. Sometimes, though, I have to shake my head and, like a teenager embarrassed by dorky parents, pretend I don't know the Gray Lady. The online verion of the Sunday Styles section (my guilty pleasure posted every Saturday afternoon) carries just about the dumbest article ever to appear there, which is saying a lot: You Are Cleared for Takeoff carries the shocking--shocking!--claim that people often pop a Valium or three before a flight. Um, really? They devote a good 1,000 words or so to the news flash that: sometimes people take antianxiety pills without a prescription; sometimes they mix them with alcohol; sometimes they get sleepy; doctors frown on this; that makes no difference. Don't come between a business traveler and his Ativan. (For the record, I am a nervous flier and could easily get some happy pills myself. I would, except I'm too lazy to visit the doctor every time I travel. I rely on Benadryl or cold medicine to knock me out.) What really gets me, though, is this article's placement in the Styles section. Wouldn't it fit better in Travel or Health? The whole thing is beyond stupid. It would fit much better in the Post or Daily News--at least that way, there would have been some kooky puns in there to distract me from the painful obviousness of the article itself.

The South: Where Learning Is Fun

Usually, academic conferences stick pretty close to business and have a few stodgy "activities" thrown in to distract attendees every 12 hours or so. (I know this because I edit lengthy programs and proceedings for these types of events. They read like slow death.) Sometimes, though, organizers try to spice things up a bit; I think the distance-learning professionals are in for quite a party this fall:



Nobody anthropomorphizes food animals like Southerners.

Three Strikes

So I guess it's just time for me to give up, move to some dustbowl town, and get a job as a Wal*Mart greeter. As I was complaining earlier, I've already been relegated to third-class citizenship by virtue of being female and petite. Now, according to Gawker, I'm a lamely employed social retard in the bargain. They have generated a taxonomy of editors, which, like all good pieces of snark, does contain a kernel of truth. I guess I would fall under the "benignly batty" category:

Just a total crazy
There are variations on this theme, from the malignantly Regan-ish to the benignly batty. But there are a WHOLE lot of them. People who are traumatized as children often look to books in order to escape from their painful realities, and then they become big readers, who in turn become editors.

I wasn't exactly traumatized as a child, but my family, to put it gently, is a little eccentric. They thought nothing of their 8-year-old locking herself away for hours at a time with mildewy Victorian novels. My (Catholic) elementary school had a belfry, for god's sake; when I moved over to public education, I was considered odd, to say the least. As an aside, my early overconsumption of the Brontë sisters probably also instilled in me the tendency to choose wet, cold, desolate places for vacations (northern Scotland, Nova Scotia, Iceland, etc.).

The Eating: Kuma Inn

One dilemma about living in New York is the bewildering range of dining choices available. When I find a place I like, the temptation is to become a "regular," but then I worry about all the other great places I'm not trying. I first tried Kuma Inn about a month after I moved here and was instantly hooked--the Asian tapas-style menu appealed to the grazer in me, and the cozy converted tenement on the Lower East Side appealed to the dinner-party-goer in me. I went there a few times with various friends during my first six months or so here, then got distracted by shinier establishments elsewhere. I finally made it back there tonight for the first time in nearly a year and fell in love with it all over again (and indoctrinated another friend). We sampled four little dishes between us: fresh vegetarian summer rolls filled with shredded jicama and carrots and dipped in a dark peanut-soy sauce; edamame bathed in basil-lime oil; squid sauteed with chilis, soy, ginger, and black beans; and adobo-crusted tilapia fillets with a ginger-soy dipping sauce. Everything was as delicious as I remembered and served in perfect proportions. I'll have to treat myself again soon.

Ketchup

The weekend was a fairly busy one, with two birthday parties and my semimonthly volunteer shift at MoMA. We celebrated my friend Michael's 30th birthday at a karaoke bar in Chinatown (much 80s cheesiness was enjoyed, naturally), then followed up with a party for Will's friend Beatrice at her home in Park Slope (insanely sugary Romanian pastries enjoyed at that one). I also fried my brain with another marathon session of a freelance project that I had characteristically put off until the last minute.

Tonight I attended my first meeting of a book club over at McNally Robinson Booksellers in SoHo, which turned out to be a much more stimulating and fun group than the first one I joined when I moved to New York two years ago, probably because almost everyone there was in publishing (and we're the best and most interesting lot out there, of course). The book under review was By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño; it's a surreal, stream-of-consciousness novella in the form of a deathbed confession by a priest and literary critic who was a tragically impotent puppet of the Pinochet regime. There was a spirited discussion of the role and responsibility of artists, the media, and the clergy in the face of oppression and corruption. We didn't really reach a consensus, but there were a lot of interesting viewpoints. It was nice to be among people who really put some thought into their opinions beyond "I didn't get/like it." Next month's book, continuing our Latin American theme, I guess, is The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Judging by the first 30 pages or so, which I read on the train this evening, it's even more hallucinatory and disaffected. Apparently, there's also something in there about an obsession with Louise Brooks. Interesting.

The Reading: Not Fair!

I have long chafed under the knowledge that, no matter how many "advances" are made toward equality, I still make about 20 to 25% less than my male counterpart in a similar professional position. Now I learn that I'm probably making about another 10% less because I'm short! Slate is carrying an article that cites several studies showing that tall people are both better paid AND more intelligent.

While height, on its own, bears a strong relation to pay, when adult height is included along with measures of childhood intelligence in pay analyses, it no longer does the explanatory work on its own. Height appears to matter, when intelligence is not included, because taller people are, on average, smarter.

I'm definitely below average height, but I do flatter myself that I am above average intelligence. And yet...well, the smartest person I know does measure in around 6'4". But I also know many brilliant people who are my size or smaller. And we shorties? We're all pretty poor.

Back Again

Sorry again for the lapse in posting...life does get busy sometimes. After a hectic week, one of my oldest and dearest friends graced New York for his annual birthday visit, which has taken up my time for a few days. We met up for various wonderful meals with large and interesting groups of friends. We also played in a few parks, mused on the unnatural size of birds and squirrels in Central Park, and finished up with a huge lunch of dim sum and odd, gummy pastries in Chinatown today. I also enjoyed a rainy, blustery visit to the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket on Saturday and a quick visit to the Brazil Day parade on Flatbush Avenue this afternoon. In my downtime, I practiced my guitar, learned to crochet, and started and finished The Great Gatsby, which I am ashamed to say I had never read before now. Another classic crossed off the list. Fall is setting in and I'm feeling the old back-to-school excitement. The next few weeks promise some interesting events, including birthday parties, readings, and concerts, so there will be plenty to post on if I can keep up.