Dad picked me up in Ft Lauderdale this evening. I’ve grown very fond of Mara’s parents and I think of their home as my own, but I believe Miami (by which I mean most of South Florida) will always be where I feel most at home.
Made fudge this weekend. I was told the recipe off the marshmallow fluff bottle was easy-peasy, no fail. So I tried it, never having made fudge before. 1st mistake, didn’t have proper amount of semi-sweet chocolate. No problem. Substituted unsweetened and added sugar. (Thanks, Nate, for the suggestion.) (I thought I’d be fany and used brown sugar - don’t know if that made a difference.) Then, I was supposed to melt certain ingredients until a candy thermometer said it was like 450 degrees. Oops - don’t own a candy thermometer. Does anybody really own a candy thermometer? I mean, other than candy makers? Seems so obscure! So I roughly guestimated. Then, it came time to add the whole bottle of marshmallow fluff. Oops, I’d already eaten like half the bottle! Well, not quite, but quite a bit! It never seemed to blend up quite right. When I poured it into the dish, I noticed there were burnt portions of chocolate in the saucepan, too! But, my friends, my chocolate came through for us. The fudge survived! The chocolate remained strong! Mmmm…fudge… :P
Today (or was it yesterday?) I bought 2 barstools - my latest furniture addition for the apartment. I had always felt something was missing as I ate standing up in the kitchen. Now I can sit in comfort at the counter. Why, you might ask, did I not sit at my lovely table in the dining area? I do not know, my friends, I do not know. (Actually, I would wager to guess it was sheer laziness.) Funny how at home in Miami we also preferred the barstool option over the kitchen table. But isn’t is just lovely to have so many seating options? Nate and Mara will have to test them out next month. They even have seat cushions for your seating pleasure. No sore tuchuses at my apt! :)
So, a friend of mine mentioned to me once that flights cannot come into the SNA airport after 10pm, so for instance, if you have a flight for 9:55 and it is late, you’re taken instead to LAX, 30 something miles away, and then take a shuttle to SNA. I found that farfetched. Then another friend told me that when you take a flight out of SNA, they turn off the engines briefly while flying over Newport Beach, so as not to make too much noise for the residents there. I could scarcely believe this, but I found several online entries re: this, including the following scary post. I won’t post the answer b/c it’s even scarier.
“I know that due to complaints of excessive noise from area residents, aircraft departing from SNA are required to make a rather steep take off and must scale back their engines shortly after departure. I’m not real comfortable when flying to begin with and I find these departures to be a bit unsettling. Do these requirements make SNA departures more cumbersome to you as pilots? Also, do these steep departures and scaling back of engines cause any increased stress on the aircraft? And finally, are these types of departures considered, well, “tricky”, for lack of a better word? Please be candid as I have often wondered how commercial airline pilots feel about departing from SNA given what I would think are unique requirements for departing aircraft.” Pretty scary stuff!
Today we finished the aufruf and wedding programs, while Dad, Adam and Joe worked on maps for out of town guests. While the other siblings went to visit Grandma, Mom and Jes came with me to Kinkos. The aufruf siddurim were layed out as full pages and were therefore easy to print. The wedding programs were folded, and I hadn’t correctly accounted for the fold and had to adjust the margins. Printing is one of my least favorite things to do, and I nearly broke down right there in the store. I kept telling Mom how much I hate printing and hate Kinkos. How did she put up with me? Several printouts later, we finally produced an adequate proof, and after briefly considering going with white programs, Mom and Jes convinced me that Mara would prefer color and found some color paper suitably within the wedding color scheme: orange, red, and greens. Mom and Jes ran another errand while I copied and collated four versions of the programs: red-orange, orange-red, darkgreen-lightgreen and lightgreen-darkgreen. Wondering whether or not to pay the hundred bucks to have them stapled, Mom called Monika for advice, and Monika recommended using ribbon instead. We stopped at Pearl for a frame for the ketuba
because Mara is concerned that people will try to sign it like they’re at a bar or bat mitsva party. We didn’t like any of the ribbon at Pearl, so we went to Jo-Ann Fabrics and found some there.
When we got home, everybody started tying ribbons. Mara’s parents came to the house to drop Mara off and while they caught up with Dad, Mara and her grandmother joined in the ribbon effort.
Last night Mom slept like a normal person while the rest of us stayed up late playing games, but tonight she stayed up super late helping me finish writing and laying out the wedding programs. Mara had already written a first draft of the copy, based on programs from other weddings she’d been to, but I’m a tweaker (someone who likes to fine tune, not a methamphetamine addict) and a language obsessive and wanted to tighten it up a bit. We consulted several websites and quoted liberally from Farrah and Barry’s wedding program. Adam also stayed up with us, at least to some degree. He chose to lie down on a mattress in the living room and rest his eyes, but every time Mom and I reached an impass, he woke up to give a helpful suggestion.
David and I have been working all week on the materials for the aufruf. The first challenge is to create a service complete enough to be respectful of our more observant guests and short enough to be respectful of our less observant and non-Jewish guests. The second challenge is to find the appropriate prayers and liturgy in a usable form. The third challenge is to make sure the translations are appropriate to my world view, and the fourth challenge is to lay out the English, Hebrew, and transliteration. It doesn’t make sense to me that the liturgy isn’t all available online in all three forms, but it isn’t, so we ended up scanning from several siddurim, pulling in some prayers from a pdf to which the Rabbi directed me, and typing a lot. There’s still more work to do, but it will have to be done tomorrow (later today) and what if it’s not perfect, so be it.
After saying goodbye to Mara and her family, I turned around and returned South to Hollywood to join my siiblings for a swim. This time Mom and Monika sat on the beach, too chicken to come in the water, but Joe and Adam joined David, Jessica and me. Today it was just to cold to bear, and after I realized that my ears were throbbing with pain, we moved to the heated pool again. David, Adam, Jessica and I raced each other, just like back in the day; Jes consistently triumphed as the family olympian. When we got tired of swimming, we went upstairs and had dinner, capping off the evening with a late running round of Carcassone and some leftover sufganiot to sweeten the deal.
After visiting the florist, Mara and I continued North to join her Aunt Helene and Grandma Sally for brunch. As usual, we were greeted with enough food to feed a minyan — bagels, cheeses, vegetables, fish, egg salad, blintzes. The homemade blintzes are my favorite, and I’d be happy just to have blintzes, though the egg salad and the rest were certainly quite tasty too.
Modern Hebrew doesn’t use the ch sound, but the tsadi and a geresh (apostrophe) can be used when transliterating from other languages into Hebrew. The last time I was in Tsfat, I saw a menu listing “בלינצ′ים″ which tranliterated back into English would be blinchim — blinches. I’ll have to ask David if he’s seen that.
After brunch, it was again time to say goodbye.
We stopped by the florist to drop off my tallit for the huppah. The man just had a stroke, but thank God he was lucky and it wasn’t too bad. Don’t forget to stop and smell the flowers. No seriously, take it easy.
The separation between church and state may slowly be eroding, but the separation of meaningfulness and bureaucracy remains well defined. Mara and I went to the Coral Gables courthouse this morning to file our marriage application, and the building was a mess — the kind of dump you associate with local government. Nevertheless, we had trouble containing our excitement. We took a number, sat with several other couples and one triple, and filled out one another’s individual forms, quizzing each other on personal trivia such as birthdays and social security numbers. We were given the option to get married on the spot, but we opted to wait. Mom once told me she would cry if I got married without her. What kind of man would knowingly make his mother cry when he could avoid it? Not the kind of man Mara wants to marry.
We headed up to Hollywood in two cars in anticipation of Adam and Monika’s arrival. Adam texted me from the plane: “Still trapped in a grounded pile of poo due to congestion/weather…” but by the time we got to the condo he had texted me a second time: “We just restarted engines…”
David, Jessica and I hopped in the ocean just before sundown and watched the sun as it disappeared behind the condo buildings. Joe and Mara joined us as far as the beach but were too chicken to go in the water. It was certainly cold at first, but it was fine once we got moving. By dusk, as twilight began to roll in, the five of us moved up to the pool deck to warm up in the heated pool before going the rest of the way up to the apartment.
Eventually, Adam and Monika arrived and we sat down to eat. David gave them an oil hanukia he’d brought from Israel. Though Hanuka was technically over, we lit it and exchanged gifts.
David and I went with Dad to pick up Joe. We got a little lost on the way to the train, but I kept my mouth shut. Joe looks good. He wore his iPod the whole drive home, though he claims it was off.
When we got home, Mom was ready to light candles. There was a hanukia out for each of us.
When David first moved to Israel, our cousins mentioned Sylvester to him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. “But we’ve seen it in all the movies,” they answered, “and we know that you Americans take it very seriously — staying up till midnight with your friends, drinking.” Eventually, David realized that they meant New Year’s Eve. We looked it up and it turns out that many in Europe still call the evening Sylvester in honor of Pope Silvester, said to have cured Emperor Constantine of leprosy and converted him to Christianity. The name has made its way from Europe to Israel where it confuses people like David.
Whatever you call it and whyever you celebrate it, I’m happy for the excuse to drink egg nog.
David went to shul, Mom and Dad went to get Jessica at Miami International and I went to get Mara at the Fort Lauderdale airport. On the way back I thought I saw David walking home with his friend Max. When he didn’t come home for a long time, Jessica and Mara and I walked over to Max’s house to retrieve him. I hesitated at Max’s front door believing it would be rude for us to burst in uninvited and take David away with us until one of the girls suggested that maybe David would welcome the excuse to leave.
Dad and I lit candles together. He pulled out his slim, off-white, hardbound bencher and a couple of kipot. After the repetition of the brakhot (blessings) eight times a year for the last thirty years, I hardly need a bencher, but seeing it brings back all sorts of memories: dozens of candles burning in each of Mom’s hanukiot, playing dreidle with my brothers and sister for the high stakes of the family penny jar, unwrapping chocolate gelt, anticipating the liberation of Lego sets, Tonka trucks and Star Wars action figures from my Mom’s closet.
After Dad and I finished reading Maoz Tsur, he retired to the newspaper and I to the computer. I emailed Jessica the links to several Hanuka songs and the brakhot. I called her in the evening and sang the blessings with her as she lit out in California. Afterwords, we sang songs together. It was just like old times.
Dad asked me a week ago or so: “You know how to make turkey. Will you make a Christmas turkey for your grandmother?” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I find the tactile experience of meat grease mildly repulsive, and succumbing to the weight of generations of guilt I volunteered. Fortunately, Mom got me out of it and Dad took care of dinner himself. We called Grandma to let her know when to expect us and brought over turkey, spinach, corn, cranberries, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, baked apples and pumpkin pie. Dad was proud of himself, Grandma was happy and no one mentioned the Boston Market containers. Grandma, for her part, made latkes for us and made sure she had apple sauce on hand, knowing my predilection for the yellowy substance. She was proud of herself, we were happy and no one mentioned the Golden frozen latkes package.
Hey, I’m not knocking it. I had to lift hardly a finger and got to enjoy a good meal. Later, I washed the dishes — small payment.
Dad picked me up in Ft Lauderdale this evening. I’ve grown very fond of Mara’s parents and I think of their home as my own, but I believe Miami (by which I mean most of South Florida) will always be where I feel most at home. It was hard saying goodbye to Mara, even for just the week we’ll be separated. I miss her already.
We’re looking through the response cards. People have written all kinds of fun things: “We can’t wait!” “Looking forward to it.” “Thank you!” “Mazal tov.” “Just try and keep us away.” “Congratulations.” “Best wishes.” One changed “accept with pleasure” to “accept with great pleasure”. One wrote 3 attending “but one will not eat or drink, as she will be six months old.” We also received several hearts and smileys.
Well, we’re off to Mara’s parents — first stop on the way to getting married. From here on for a while most posts will likely be wedding related.
Mara wins the first place Biting the Feeding Hand award. Despite my fever, she made me stand outside while it was snowing. We stopped at a gas station to fill the truck tires with air, but there was a car parked in the way and no sign of it budging, so after a brief wait we moved on. We went to a second station, I put two quarters into the air pump and it started whirring, but after much trying I realized it wasn’t actually pumping a thing. I begged Mara to release me from my responsibilities until I felt better, but we went to a third station, and this time the pump worked. To be fair, when I got back in the car, Mara brushed the snow off of my shoulder.
Why does Mara get an award? Because though I might tease her for telling everybody I’m just adjusting to the winter (as though I haven’t already been through several Chicago winters and instead of just telling them I have a fever) she has literally been feeding me. On Thursday night when I was too ill to pick my sick tukhus up from the couch, she made me Macaroni and Cheese, as per my request. On Friday morning, I made myself a fruit salad with the delicious pears and pineapple she’d bought just for me. On Saturday, she bought my meal at La Unica. Today for brunch I enjoyed some of the oats she bought me the last time she was at the grocery store.
My mom wins the second place Biting the Feeding Hand award. Despite my fever, she made me talk her through resetting Jessica’s wireless network. It’s not my favorite thing to do, but we got it working quickly. Why does my mom get an award? Because while I was talking with her, I was curled up and warm under a super warm bedspread she carried all the way back from China and a quilt she designed just for me. Aside from that, she has certainly fed me plenty over the years: body, mind and soul.
My dad wins the third place Biting the Feeding Hand award. When I told him I have a fever he recommended I send Mara out for a thermometer and asked me if I knew the difference between an oral thermometer and a rectal thermometer. The answer is in the comments.
Daddy’s got a brand new phone, and in other news, Hell has frozen over. Obviously I’m not going to publish the number, but I’ll give you a hint: when the numbers are converted to letters they spell out the names of a bird and a Star Wars character. I called him and got his voice mail. He called back several hours later and complained that he’d been in the bookstore when I called and didn’t know how to get the damn thing to shut up. He already hates it — now that’s more like it. As far as Hell — that would be Chicago in the winter.
We met my classmate Carmelina and her husband Al today at La Unica, a Cuban market up on Divan. They have a short order counter and tables, but Cuban food just can’t beat home cooking or, short of that, Irazu. The market, however, is the most well rounded Latin markets I’ve ever seen — not just Cuban food, not just Mexican food, not just Caribbean food but food from throughout Latin America. You can bet your platano maduro we’ll be back.
Thanks to some Target brand ibuprofen, I was well enough this afternoon to go to school for a meeting to finish up one of my final projects. Afterwards, I popped a second dose, picked up Mara and her classmate and headed over to dinner with Adam, Monika and Veronika — yummy Chinese food.
I’ve got the fever bad and that ain’t good. I’m curled up in my Chinese bedspread and quilt, and I’m wearing two shirts, two fleece vests and a hoodie. Mara says it’s drafty in the house and I should get used to it. I’m almost done with finals, so I’m due for sick. Thankfully, my body more or less holds on when I need it to and then falls apart when it has a chance. I think I had a slight fever last night, but nothing as bad as today. No worries. Mara’s taking good care of me.
Oops, I hear Miho again. Same song. Maybe we’ve stayed too long. And there’s the DJ Earworm mashup again.
Mara and I are sitting at Red Eye Cafe, a local coffee shop that serves up wifi along with its quiche and coffee. We’ve worked here on a few occassions. They’re playing some fun music. I heard Miho Hatori earlier and a Beatles/Aretha Franklin/others mashup. I’m trying to catch up on email etc. Don’t take it personally if I’ve been hard to reach. We’re sitting by the window and it’s a bit chilly in here. Mara is teasing me because I’m still bundled up in my sweater, coat, scarf and such.
Well, some of it comes from Plasticine M. Hilary. Spam, I tell you: sometimes you do make me smile.
Today (or somewhere thereabouts — this is a backdated entry) I headed toward Merchandise Mart to take the train home from school. As I passed through the turn style, I noticed my train waiting on the other side of the tracks. Normally, this would mean it would be gone by the time I got to the platform. Today it seemed it was waiting just for me, and as my gait picked up speed I realized that I just might make it. Then I spotted at the bottom of the stairs an idiot just standing there blocking my way. Without thinking, I lightly brushed him aside as I leapt past him into the closing train doors. When I realized what I’d done I felt a bit bad. But only a bit.
Happy Turkey Day. I’m looking forward to some good eats later today. We’re flying out to be with family. That’s right, we’re flying on Thanksgiving Day itself.
I have to say, watching the original King Kong on Turner Classic Movies is really getting me excited about Peter Jackson’s remake due out next week. Before you tell me the original hasn’t aged well, consider how ambitious it was for its time. TCM also ran a biography of the director, Merian Cooper — interesting guy.
I learned an interesting new trick from Chef Ming which he called fingering a banana. Peel it and press your finger up from the bottom and it will split into three long segments. I tried it. It works!
A little while ago I got a spam message with the following text in the body:
“can you ride upon the beast, while that poor little lad there can cleansing his feathers as often as he would, he could not change owners, wounded with a sword the Mule carrying the treasure, make me provide the meat also. themselves in the depths of the pool. But as soon as they”
I must admit I wonder where this inspired prose originates - is it plagiarized poetry, a computer concoction, a non-native speaker’s nicely nonsensical speech?
I went to breakfast with several friends and had a tasty chocolate waffle with chocolate butter on top. It was just a sample. Than I ordered corn fritters, though I don’t remember actually eating them.
I met Dick Cheney and he was actually very sweet. I’ve never been able to bring myself to hate him because he reminds me too much of my dad. Privately, Dick expressed dissatisfaction with the administration and admitted that he had made mistakes and done a lot of things for political reasons that didn’t really sit well with him. We went to a public community center and eventually the conversation turned to my laptop with which he was very impressed. I think I might have made another Apple convert. After a while one of his handlers came and told him he had to go but first he collected information about the community center so that he could make a donation.
Well, it began to snow yesterday. Just a little, but enough to officially usher in Winter. And this morning I’m feeling crappy: tired, dizzy, unfulfilled. My body doesn’t deal well with the end of Fall — just one of the reasons I don’t like the seasons. I’m a Miami boy through and through. Give me just two seasons: Wet and Wetter.
It started with an ill-conceived attempt to set up my friend Laate with Mara’s friend Carol, ill-conceived because Carol was visiting from Ohio. How was that a good idea? Mara and I have entirely too much time on our hands. One day after a meeting with my Demo group at school, I asked Laate what his plans were for the upcoming weekend. Taylor, another member of our team, mentioned going apple picking with his girlfriend which sounded so splendid I coerced him to invite the rest of us: Laate, Carol, Mara and me. Carol preferred to see a bit of Chicago, however, which seemed perfectly reasonable and she and Mara and I ended up walking through the art and design galleries of River North instead. I always enjoy the gallery hop which you might know if you’ve visited me in Chicago. Still, I was disappointed to miss the apple picking. The following week I had a conference and Mara went down to Ohio to visit her family. Last week we were supposed to go with another friend from school, but she and the weather flaked out on us (that makes it sound like snow, but really it was just a bit of rain and some general dreariness).
So this weekend we invited Adam and Monika to go apple picking with us and made plans to meet Monika at her grandparents’ house and continue on to the small airport where Adam is learning to fly. Of course, this was before we checked the websites of the closest apple farms and found out they were all closed for the season. Disappointed, Mara and I nonetheless drove out to meet Monika. Her grandparents asked us to come in and join them for cookies. We took off our shoes, as is custom in Monika’s family, and partook of several small, marmalade filled flaky pastries while chatting with the grandparents. After a while, we put our shoes back on and left for the airport. We met Adam and Monika’s dad, an amateur pilot who’s taken Adam up enough times that Adam has finally succumbed to fate, embraced his life long love of all things air and space, and decided to get his pilot license. Monika’s dad joyfully teased Mara and me about our upcoming wedding and eventually parted ways to meet Monika’s mom for lunch. Adam, Monika, Mara and I headed in the opposite direction to have lunch at a fish place. I often dread going to fish places because I find the smell of sea food unpleasant, but we all enjoyed our meals. I had fish and chips and we split a basket of sweet potato fries as well as a hefty piece of pumpkin pie, which seems to be one of Adam’s favorites.
Monika invited Mara and me over to play games. She has an affinity for European board games which has spread to Adam and to the rest of us. On the way home, Adam thoughtfully stopped at Whole Foods where he and Monika picked up apples of several varieties, some of which were as big as grapefruit. I’ve never seen apples that big! Adam cut up one of each and put them out with caramel apple dip. We played Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne.
We may have missed the apple picking and even the maize maze, but we ended up with a belly full of apples and had more fun along the way.
Ooo! Our favorite restaurant, Irazu was just featured on Check, Please! — a local show about local restaurants. Named after the volcano, it is one of only two known Costa Rican restaurants in the country. It also recently appeared on an episode of Food Network’s “The Secret Life Of”. Mara and I are excited for them, but hope they don’t get so popular that we’re not cool enough to eat there anymore.
This is as good a time as any to mention one of my pet peeves: when people don’t pronounce things correctly when they know better. I find it especially difficult to hear people mispronounce the word plantain.
Mara made falafel yesterday, despite our not even having chick peas. Yum.
It turns out that the pizote that Mara knows from Costa Rica is not the coati mundi that my parents know from Panama, though they are both procyonidae and thus related to raccoons.
Why does this guy’s impersonation of a racist’s impersonation of a Chinese man make me uneasy? Hypothesis 1: it’s not nice to make fun of people’s accents. Note 1: few seem to mind Italian, German, French, Russian, Spanish, British or Swedish impersonations. Hypothesis 2: it’s not nice to make fun of people’s accents when their people has been oppressed. Note 2a: few seem to mind impersonations of old Jewish people. Note 2b: impersonations of African-American people are not nearly as sketchy as impersonations of Asians (especially when they are impersonations of specific people and characters such as Mr T, Arnold Drummond, Bill Cosby and Fat Albert). Note 2c: whose people hasn’t been oppressed? Note 2d: the biggest oppressor of the Chinese has got to be the Chinese government. Hypothesis 3: it’s not nice to make fun of non-European people’s accents. Note 3: few seem to mind impersonations of American Southerners, Minnesotans, Canadians, Australians, South Americans, Caribbean islanders or even South Asians. Hypothesis 4: East Asians don’t have a sense of humor. Note 4: Margaret Cho aside, I think we can discount hypothesis 4. Hypothesis 5: It’s ok to make fun of people’s accents, but not to unfairly caricature them. Note 5: Ah, this one feels true. I know that when people make fun of me for things that I’ve done I feel sheepish, but when people make fun of me for things I haven’t done I just feel irritated. Is that universal? Is that what’s happening when Stephen Colbert impersonates a racist impersonating a Chinese person? Is it offensive mostly because it’s so far off? Note 6: I haven’t really heard many impersonations of Africans or Arabs that really attempt to mock accent.
So far Mara has used the new ice-cream machine to make key lime sorbet, yogurt flavored frozen yogurt and chocolate ice milk. This weekend we made chocolate ice cream, and I think it was the best yet. We used real cream, Baker’s chocolate (someone told us brick chocolate would yield a better texture than chocolate chips) and egg yolks. We saved the egg whites and Mara combined them with goat cheese today to make a tasty, honkey omelette.
Went on a hike today with Sierra Club. Joined my friend Jennifer and her friend Melissa for the event. We had a great time checking out the scenery — the mountains of CA, the red rock that constituted part of one of the mountains, a dead tarantula :(, a family of deer, lots of cacti, and the dreaded poison oak (the west coast’s analogue to poison ivy). As Melissa put it, though, “I expected to go on a nice leisurely hike. I didn’t think it would be a meat market!” Most of the hikers were single, and the alliances formed throughout the morning were quite amusing, as the men moved from 1 woman to another, in our single file line, trying, always trying so hard. Almost as entertaining as the landscape…But it was a beautiful day, wouldn’t trade it. :)
There is some dispute about when to celebrate Eid, today or tomorrow. Either way, Eid Mubarak to all our Muslim friends.
Mara and I found ourselves hankering for Indian food and went up to Divan street not (consciously) realizing tonight is Diwali. We walked around a bit before settling on a restaurant that was open and had a good number of people - not too many (we didn’t want to crash any Diwali parties), not too few (because don’t good restaurants have people eating in them). Their menu featured four sampler platters: Northern Indian, Southern Indian, Gujarati and Jain. “What is Jain?” Mara asked one of the woman taking our order. “It’s like Gujarati but no onions or garlic.” “Well, that’s no fun,” said Mara. After I kicked Mara under the table for potentially offending the poor woman, we told her we’d get the Gujarati platter and an extra naan. “Would you like onion or garlic naan?” she asked. “No, thanks,” I answered; “We’ll just get the plain Jain.” To all our Hindu, Jain and Sikh friends, Happy Diwali. And, oh yeah, Happy Halloween.
Absence really does foster the fondness for the loved ones. Mara’s return was certainly a happy homecoming.
Some suggest that the proliferation of iPods has increased our isolation from one another and decreased our perviousness to the outside world. Horse shit. When I walk through my neighborhood listening to Andy Bowers, I find myself even more engaged than I would be otherwise. Rather than replacing the sounds around me, I am juxtaposing my awareness of the local and the global. I do find it difficult to concentrate on music with all of the ambient street noise, but I enjoy hearing about Chicago’s restaurants on the EatFeed podcast while walking past the Korean joint next to our house, and I am moved when listening to a report on presidential melancholy while walking through Lincoln Square. Mara once expressed concern when I drove home from a grocery trip wearing my earbuds, but it’s not as though I couldn’t hear anything except the iPod. Really, isn’t it safer for me to wear my earbuds than for me to futz around with the car radio transmitter gizmo that works better on long car trips?
Well, Mara borrowed the iPod for her trip to Ohio, and I realize that my love for podcasts has cut into the already minimal time I have for book readin’. On the way to the conference today, I was relieved to see that I can still read while walking and I was delighted to disappear into the pages of a novel for the first time in far too long.
Years ago for some special event my mom bought me a blue blazer with brass buttons. After the event, it sat in one closet after another for several years, rarely seeing the light of day. I may be a button down kind of guy, but big, brassy-buttoned, blue blazers are too preppy for me, especially when the buttons have little boats and anchors and stuff on them - a little too yacht club preppy. Then this morning I had an urge to wear it to the conference this weekend. A suit would be too much and I’m wearing my camel-hair-esque sports coat tomorrow. So I just pulled out my blue blazer and cut off all the buttons! Mara left this morning to spend the weekend in Ohio with her parents and grandmother, so this was my opportunity. I found her little sewing kit and sewed on some antique elephant buttons that my dad once bought for me in New York (or did Brian and Anthony buy them when they bought me the antique carved elephant lamp topper). So now it’s a blue blazer with brass buttons, but it’s my blazer - with elephants, not yachts.
I saw Adam the chef this morning. He looks good — happy. And he’s gained some weight. He was too skinny. I need some of that skinny. I’m glad he looks like he’s got more meat on his bones. And Alina sounded good yesterday when I spoke to her on the phone.
I split my time between busy and exhausted. Not a complaint, but an explanation for why I might go for so long a spell without posting. Sometimes I think I should stop posting, because afterall, I’m the only one who reads this blog. But then Jessica or Mara will tell me not to - that they enjoyed reading a particular post.
