Lofty goals

Tomorrow I am handed the keys to this:




[The suburban house where I am currently living is not quite sold yet, but one needs to secure new shelter in this town fast if one is fussy about one’s spaces.]

To me, a loft is the epitome of urban living and I am aiming to put urban-ness into the interior of the apartment. On my way to a seminar today, I stopped at the bookstore to leaf through magazines on urban spaces (which are, BTW, outnumbered 10 to 1 by magazines urging you to go country or at least cottagey), just so I wouldn’t make some major errors in the way I created lofty urban-ness. I like the idea of pipes and bricks and beams running every which way in the loft and I want to do right by them.



So engrossing was this project that I never noticed the time and I missed the seminar completely. Sorry, seminar.

It has been a while since I have moved (and officially I will not change residences until September 1st). Decades ago I would make arrangements weeks in advance of a move to get phone service started. Today I am worrying that access to the Internet will be uninterrupted for me. Phones? I don’t even know what people do about getting a number in the new place. Everyone I ask tells me they no longer use “land” service. Land service. How quaint. I need land service! What if my Internet breaks down and I need dial-up?!

And ordering things on line. Does anyone even go to stores these days? Mr. B and I are chasing around town thinking we are one up on everyone. We’re doing it right. We go, I buy, we leave. That’s what’s supposed to happen, correct? No! all I see is store-people bringing up screens on computers, informing me that the floor samples are just fluff and decoration, the real stuff being on line. And no, nothing can be carted home. So, can I have it delivered by this week-end? I ask this with my very best smile, the one reserved for judges and important people.

Stunned silence. I mean, the clerks can't recover from the incredulity and shock of the request. We regret to inform you that it all comes from small islands in the middle of the Pacific and the next boat is expected to dock and pick up the stuff on November 28th. If the weather holds. You can expect delivery in 36 weeks. Next time I'll stay home. At least there are blogs to read in moments of great frustration with the world.

Lofts have great heights, and a wonderful expansiveness. I’m hoping to feel the waves of euphoria and bliss from all sides and corners, sweeping over me soon, very soon. I am hopin'! Along with Internet service. It has been confirmed: I cannot live without NinaNet.

jeffery, jlp, oscar, earthgirl, andrew, kerry, bert and dear dear old brando* and all you food/travel lovin’ readers, this one’s for you!

* brando, I am so sucking up! You have a book contract – get me one!

So where am I and what am I doing?

chocolate-covered gingerbread hearts

No kidding: I am right here in Madison. There is a Polish deli in this town, in a yuppified strip mall. It is so wrong for so many reasons but there you have it. Each time I enter (all of two times thus far), it is completely empty. I should buy something, I should! But the selections are too…. Polish.

yum! sour cucumber puree!

they (I cannot align myself with my homeland here) cannot live without this stuff

Alex owns the place and he was there today when I poked in. I want to refer all lonely people in Madison to his store immediately. The man is a talker! So Polish it hurts. It is one long sentence, sort of like this one which you cannot interrupt because it is joined together to form a whole and if you jump in and say something like I really must get going then you appear totally rude and like you’re really not listening to any of it and so what’s the point…

I just want to note that Polish people really are rotten spellers (in foreign to them languages) because we have a basically phonetic approach to words. A spelling bee would be a joke! How do you spell szczypiorek? What, you’re kidding, right? There is only one possible way: szczypiorek (meaning: chives). Try not to make fun, therefore, when you see signs in the store that seem somehow off. We are not trained to find fault with something like this:

Alex, the highlander (the moustache says it all). He hasn’t been back to Poland for a while, but on the counter he keeps a picture of his old highland home. Next to it is a cheap replica of the Statue of Liberty. Behind it? A portrait of the pope. No, not the new one. The real pope. All we need is a fake-autographed photo of George W. Bush and I'd feel like I entered a place straight out of the Chicago Polish community.

"When I lived in New Jersey, I wanted to get a degree at Princeton, but it's all about money here. I settled for menial work. It's okay, it's okay. It's the American way."

Virgin voyage

Or – are the proper terms maiden voyage and virgin territory?

Last night I was happily blabbing about something or other and a person in the same room said .. Nina, do you know you just said someone was “painstakingly shy?"*

I do that sometime. Wrong words, wrong meanings. Most people, when they learn a language through immersion (as I did by moving to the States at age 7), adultify it as they work their way through the school system.

Not me. I went back to good old Polska for high school and a chunk of college and so I never shed that elementary school pidgeon-toed (what the hell is that?) language, perverted at the playground and never subsequently corrected by exasperated teachers who would know better.

Ocean is written by a person who, at times, is still capable of talking “tenement for rent, inquire within, when I jump out, you jump in” talk.

A commenter notes that it does create a very distinct voice for blogging here. It’s an interesting point. I do think that I plunge ahead without heed and often without much awareness of the quaintness of my choices – words, topics, all of it. It must generate a (sympathetic) smile. As “painstakingly shy” did for the group I was with.

I read all your comments to yesterday's post very very carefully and I cannot thank you enough. No, really, they blew me away. So generous! That’s what I see – your utter generosity. And that is what shook me out of my alternately tearful and morose state of being, it’s what made me come back so quickly.

What’s with the virginity in the blog title? Ah. You could say that this is the virgin post of a new, refreshed Ocean. But actually I titled it thus because it is the first time that I am blogging from a new computer. Isn’t it wonderful when events sort of merge and coalesce and it appears that the chaos of yesterday can resolve itself into a quiet ride the next day?

[And virginity has another moment in this post: I have to admit that my last year in an American school was in 7th grade, where we graduated from singing about rental properties to belting out “...I don't want no fire truck, I want one that I can…” The awful truth is that I thought this was hilariously funny.]

* this kind friend followed up today with an email, noting: there are 43 google entries for "painstakingly shy" (in quotes) as opposed to 50,000 for "painfully shy".

Dear Ocean readers,

Mr. B and I went for a spin today. More – I rode with him very very far, because when I want to make decisions, I cannot do it sitting still.

I am stepping back from what it is that I do here, on Ocean. Time to think more, write less.

Why? Because it has become apparent that you can take the water out of a real ocean sooner than I can take the emotion out of this Ocean. Even though this blog says really very little about the events and people that fill my days with boundless excitement and sometimes exasperation, it does reveal my moods. If I am not chipper, Ocean gets that sour taste to it, so that inevitably I get emails from people who wonder if I perhaps have come to need something stronger than martinis to pull me through the hour. (Someone did ask me that in an email – if there was perhaps a drink more potent and still legal that I could concoct for myself on a regular basis.)

I pick episodes, at times almost randomly, at times very deliberately and I write about them. They are from my day, and I spin them in the way that feels right. But now, I am afraid that I have become too wedded to being so true to a mood that Ocean has become too …well, honest and personal. (But not journalistic! Ever! There is a difference!) I hear the words articulated by someone just a few days back: "you write such a personal blog!" Do I? That would seem somehow wrong.

There are the other things, too: I have never been comfortable with the one-sidedness of the conversation. It gives me too much freedom to say things without worrying about reactions. And it gives you too many opportunities to lean on the blog to keep abreast of my life. I do not like that.

So here are my initial decisions:

First of all, I am immediately enabling the Comments function. The one-sidedness has got to stop. And, I will limit somewhat my writing for the rest of this month. I will resume regular blogging if I feel the problems identified by me can be addressed. I welcome your input here. You know what my limited talents are and what I can and cannot do. I don’t want to try to please everyone, I’m just looking for ideas and evaluating what has and what hasn’t worked before.

Feel free to write in and let me know what you think is worth keeping, if anything. Oh, and also feel free to react to the comments of others, but do not feel pressured to do so. It really is okay if I receive no comments and readers move on to other blogs. I can always go write a book or something.

One more thing: I will permit Anonymous comments only because it is hard to otherwise post comments if you are not a blogger. But I will basically not pay attention to anything written by someone who doesn’t at least sign with her or his first name (or initials) so that I know who you are.

And I will be ruthless in banishing comments that are in any way hurtful or mocking of others (or of me!) – even if only intended as a joke. If the last thing I do on this blog is give my support to highetened standards of blog discourse, I will be satisfied.

I’ll start with my own comment about Ocean: I think Ocean works best when it takes a trivial, very very trivial episode and makes a story out of it, no? So, your turn. Click on "comments" and let me know what you're into here in the murky waters of Ocean. Comments follow the photo of the turtle whom I came across during my bike ride. Note the readiness to jump (slowly) into the pond's own murky waters. I am aiming to emulate her (his?) pace in life.

…living up to expectations…

If someone were to ask me what bugs me most about being fifty-two I would say, without hesitation, that it is the way in which you are pigeon-holed by younger people. Even well-meaning younger people. There is hardly a single younger friend that I have (and I would say that purely for idiosyncratic reasons, most of my friends are currently younger than I am) who hasn’t at one point or other said something or done something that shows how much they keep my age very prominent in their attitude toward me. I don’t mind. Usually. Sometimes though, I mind intensely.

I’ll give you a trivial example.

A friend said this a few days back: I ought to hang out with younger people more. Younger people are into music. Older people are not. (I am eleven years older than her.)

My immediate reaction was to actually want to land a punch at the side of her jaw and watch the teeth fall to the floor. But I love her dearly and so instead, I embraced my inner calm and made some lame comment about music this and that.

Music. When I moved from Poland to the States the first time around at the age of 7, I was sent to summer camp for two months. Even before falling in love with junk food and television, I took to the guitar that summer. I played in a self-taught sort of way all the way through high school (back in Poland for that). My boyfriend taught me interesting plunking techniques and I spent pretty much every evening of my adolescence fiddling with my guitar.

When I turned 16 (still in Poland) I collected my first paycheck for cleaning up refuse in the city parks of Warsaw. With that first paycheck I bought a violin and then paid for a year’s worth of violin lessons from a university student whose name I grabbed from the campus bulletin board (I was then a student too, but in Poland universities were free and students lived at home so you could use earnings to indulge your music cravings.)

Did all this die in middle age? No. One could well trace my midlife rebellion right back to music, in fact.

It’s just that, well, it’s just that when you are plunging ahead with your life, you look squarely at your options and, in years where you are strong, you set your priorities straight and you move forward. That movement included, for me, many years of scant contact with music.

Age? It has nothing to do with it! You either are a person who loves music, in all its shapes and sizes, or you are indifferent to it. You don’t outgrow it though. Ever.

Tonight, I spent some hours hanging around guitarists. They didn’t play nearly enough to keep me happy. But the grilled burgers made up for it.

Nocturnal guest

It is late, I am on the phone, the doorbell rings. I light up – he’s there! It's funny how such a visit, one that you weren't really sure would happen, can light up your entire day.

“I didn’t think you’d make it!” I tell him. “Oh, I am so happy to see you!”
He comes in, sits down at the kitchen table, we talk. I show him my new computer, he admires it, tries out a few keys. “Nice…” he comments.

He paces around the house and says eventually –“Do you mind if we go outside?” It’s a dark night. He’s not familiar with my yard. I feel conspiratorial as I get the flashlight. The beam isn’t strong. I remember that the last time I checked the batteries of this light was when my daughter needed it for camp some half dozen years ago.

“It’s buggy,” he tells me. Inside again, I look at his mosquito bite, right there, just above the fingers of his hand. Good sturdy fingers – should play the piano, I think to myself, even though I know the keys he touches are mostly those of a computer keyboard.

It’s nearly 11 now. “I really have to call it a day” he says. “Tomorrow, I'm going to try to arrange it so that I can come back to morrow morning, okay? If not, then we'll have to plan on early in the week.” I smile. “Of course! I am so grateful to you!”

He leaves quickly, as if it only now strikes him that he has stayed too long.

Now, in the morning, I am waiting for the doorbell to ring again. I am hopeful.

UPDATE: Phew! He just left. Worked up a sweat today, that's for sure! He's younger than I am used to seeing here -- all enthusiastic about going to grad school to become a physical therapist. He likes being around people, he tells me. I can see that!

[this post is dedicated to him, the Internet repair person from Charter Communications.]

Bloggerrantics, part 5

I did take a handful of photos before wallowing (see post below) set in good and hard. Here we go, outside Cafe Zoma, then inside the Cafe, waiting (with my flawed mechanicals) for the threesome to hike over and join up for a cool drink:

gold on blue: a swallow and a sparrow?


gold on gold: Jeremy shows up for the cool drink


gold and blue: Ocean author, reflecting

Bloggerantics, part 4

I am being tested today for patience and anti-wallowing. The most obvious challenge comes from the world of computers. The less obvious ... oh why even go there when there is the obvious to talk about!

Two computers: one old, one new. Neither are working well. That is not a good turn of events when you are to spend a day with bloggers blogging.

At home, the Internet is down (I am on dial-up again) and time's a wastin.'

Because I spent hours on these problems, while bloggers roamed the Willie Street neighborhood taking pictures for their blogs, I sat at various places and said to myself "I am a patient and anti-wallowing person, I am a patient and anti-wallowing person..." pretty much over and over again.

The patient part at least worked and I screamed at no one.

I do wish my grandma, the one with the ample bosom and endless cuddling invitations was alive and by my side right now.

Bloggerrantics, part 3

Why are you so quiet?? -- I am asked.

I don't know, I think I remind myself today a little of him:


Outside Mo Fool's

Bloggerrantics, part 2

Blogging fools at Mo Fools?

Bloggerrantics, part 1

He was a portrait taker! How could you not understand my post title?! Blogger query of the morning.

A day of blogging around town: Oscar’s choice for a birthday celebration. Stay tuned – all we’re doing this day is … that.

Fretting

Tonya writes this on her blog:

This is not a meme. But, you are free to join in the fun and list some stupid things that you worry about on your own blog. I'll list 10, but my list is actually much, much longer. Worrying is a way of life for me.

I read her list. Interesting. Check it out. It seems pretty tame to me.

It took me no time at all to post a comment. I wrote:

This is the truth: I worry that one day I will say "what's the point" and I will eat bagloads of M&Ms and not wash my hair ever again and wear flip-flops to the grocery store in the middle of the winter.

Doesn't anyone else worry about that?

Tea and sympathy

When I worked for years and years at a non-profit, we had these words for new staffers: don’t treat this as a place where we all come together and drink herbal tea and talk about our relationship problems. This is a place of work! Write grants, keep regular hours, and don’t spend time on the phone with your sweetie.

It had to be said. Private sector jobs can be terrifying. Non-profit organizations pay less and it is hard to get some employees to take their work seriously. The metaphor of tea-sipping on the job stuck in my head and I always combined herbal tea drinking with the type of person who would also keep a journal and talk about their inner feeling on all occasions, including at work. Ugh.

I like herbal tea and I'm okay with feeling-talk, but the combination left me ...cold.

When I started blogging I hadn’t, I don’t think, a "blogger voice" – to use writers’ fave little characterization (“you’re just developing your voice” one travel editor once told me when I gave her a travel story to look over). But I absolutely positively knew one thing. Ocean was not going to be a journal-type blog. You know, of the type: and I did this and this and I feel that and that. NO!

I do not take journal writing seriously – I kept journals when I was a kid and stopped (for the most part) as an adult. It seemed even more self-indulgent than blogging, if you can imagine (okay, kill me all you journal writers! I just do not like any of the journals I ever wrote. In fact, five years ago, I took a big trash bag, packed some twenty journals that I had written as a young adult into it and threw the whole heap away in the trash container next to Bagels Forever. I had almost died a couple of years earlier and one nagging thought I had then was that if I did die, someone inevitably would read the garbage I wrote and think I was demented.)

So today I am sitting at a blogger’s kitchen table and sipping herbal tea brought over by another blogger and they tell me: Ocean is awfully much like a journal…

NO! IT IS NOT!

So there.

ang, tonya, tea

Bridges

I walk my little one (actually she is twentyyears old) this evening via cell phone through remote parts of DC as she heads home late, in the dark. This is a modern way of caring for your older children.

I tell her that I have been listening to a Tonya mix a lot. She asks what’s on it. I read the titles. She says about one (Cannonball) – oh! did I know that this has been a favorite of mine? No, really? Yeah.

I got a date with the night, burnin down my finger, Gonna catch the kids dry, gonna walk on water

What I actually have had is a permanent date with the sponge and scouring pad as each day I am either cleaning the house for a showing or doing endless stacks of pots, bowls and cooking utensils (in the case of yesterday: both).

Cleaning a kitchen after a cooking binge is like grading exams after a semester of teaching – an unfair punishment for an otherwise challenging and stimulating set of tasks. There is no shortcut, you just have to do it. If you’re lucky, you’ll have company during the tedium of it all. Most often you will only have your thoughts.

And so what are they, those thoughts that accumulated with the four-hour stack of pots this morning? A blogger whom I had the great pleasure of meeting last night had recently asked how much of oneself does a person need to put out there [on one’s blog]? My personal answer is: perhaps not nearly as much as would appear at first glance.

Today, all you get is the facts:

After commenting on Jeremy’s blog that we keep too much useless stuff and we should all get rid of unnecessary “things,” I noticed that I had just last week purged old useless spices and therefore no longer had the black sesame seeds I needed to coat the chicken bits rolled over scallion, to be dipped in spicy pepper sauce at the grad student going away party (at JF's RV) for Katy and Jeremy.

The photos posted yesterday are from a rushed trip to Penzey’s Spices for a replacement jar of seeds.

I had balked initially when it was suggested that I throw some snackies together for this event. I love these guys tons, but I am not very good at throwing things together for any party, especially one that is not my own. If you want to point a finger at me and say “There runs Fusses With Food,” go ahead and do so.

In the end though, I could not resist, especially since blogging Ang agreed to stand by my side at my kitchen counter and take orders for a significant chunk of the day. Jesus, how often do you get that kind of assistance!

Facts, facts, stick to the facts:

There was a lot of vodka at the RV. It was good to see all that vodka and gin lined up on the kitchen counter. It was like an army battalion, scary, really, reminding me at the outset that it was poised to fire and kill if I drank too much too fast, especially since I hadn’t eaten (purely for reasons of being completely busy the entire day and completely out of it the day before).

So I drank with restraint. Probably more restraint than I have ever had at a party of this type. Others were far less restrained and still others did not drink at all. An interesting mix.

We played a game of associating weird facts with either Katy or Jeremy (you had to pick which if any had had a certain experience) and I walked away with a pair of striped socks for knowing, among other things, that neither Jeremy nor Katy had ever eaten an entire Thanksgiving meal naked. Someone else in the room apparently did eat it in such fashion, but if you walk with someone at dawn (Katy) and travel with another to Poland (Jeremy) you get to know a ton about each of them, including that they are not the type to leave their clothes behind when invited to share in the yams and pumpkin pies.

I can only speak for myself and so I will only repeat the toast I made in the round of saying something nice about either of the two celebrated persons. So: to their leaning in their work away from sociology – something that I myself had done twenty five years ago and now, in a different context, am doing yet again. Here’s to those leaning away, may they (me too!) find their true leanings truly rewarding.

And, speaking of rewarding, perhaps the most rewarding for me aspect of the evening (and there were many aspects of all shapes and hues) was meeting some people, blogging people, sure, but not only: all sorts of people, whom I’d never met but had always wanted to. The talk on the bench -- priceless.

great friends

lost in prayer

the key to success

tough act

post prelim bliss

Fruity Pebbles??

something's cooking

Ocean takes a pause today because of this:



and this:



tomorrow, I'll explain tomorrow

breathing lessons

Twenty-four years ago today, I was taught to breathe for the first time. When my oldest daughter was born. The entire trick in childbirth, I was told, was in breathing. You do it right and the baby flies out and you go home laughing. You do it wrong and you lose your sanity. It’s all in the breathing.

I read Tyler’s Breathing Lessons more than fifteen years ago. Remember the story? Ira and Maggie, married for twenty-eight years get in the car and head for a funeral. (She’s so chipper, that Tyler is!) Hey, I’ve been married for twenty-eight years!

I like Tyler enough, but never quite in the way others do. Her heroines and heros are either numbed into some kind of pathological acceptance of their bum deal in life, or they are crestfallen from day one and they spiral down, as Maggie did, toward some great abyss of hopelessness before turning around and plodding ahead anyway. So that toward the very end of the book Tyler writes: Maggie had a sudden view of her life as circular. It forever repeated itself, and it was entirely lacking in hope. Thanks, Tyler! Such a nifty little idea to put down on page 315.

When my younger daughter auditioned for the various levels of the symphony orchestra, she tended to concentrate so intensely on her violin playing that inevitably she would be told, just before heading out to play before a judge: don’t forget to breathe. Because breathing isn’t a given. I guess we can forget to do it. I wonder what happens if you forget. Do you get nudged by the person next to you? Hey! You haven’t been raking in your free share of oxygen lately! Catch a breath already!

Tonight I realized that the red pepper I bought earlier in the day had a bruise. A significant bruise. I need an unbruised pepper. I also need more blueberries. So back I went on Mr. B, with my unsatisfactory red pepper, peddling to Whole Foods, somewhat in a hurry because I have a lot to do and in addition I have an early morning showing of the house to prepare for. Yet again. On the return trip I took the shortest route – up Old Sauk hill. With the 11% grade. Breathing will get you through! I told myself. But actually, after a summer of biking, I would say that my leg muscles rather than breathing per se allowed me to get to the top without getting off in shame and humiliation halfway up.

Just as in her violin auditions it was my little one’s talent and hard work that got her to the top. I truly think the breathing was incidental to her success.

So let's say you want to leave town, but you can’t, because unlike Maggie and Ira, you have no funeral to go to and so like it or not, you need to plod along from page one. What about the old childbirth breathing trick? Concentrate on breathing in and out, I mean really concentrate and you'll fly through the day laughing so hard that the tears will make your eyes puffy. Breathe in, breathe out.

I think breathing lessons are way overrated.

In the still of the night

If you go and go and go and then get to a forest at night and stop and look around, you may see this:



And then you understand that what you do on a daily basis is pretty insignificant. That's if you're lucky. In the alternative, one could regard it as, well, almost worthless.

I interrupt Ocean’s typically bland and/or morose posting to deliver the second* important announcement this year: my little S turns twenty-four today

You have now lived one fourth of your life away from home. Not fair – you are not even half my age!

I know you remember this:

enthusiastic

And this:
Tell a story, spin it from your own fantastic thoughts, spin it for your little sister, spin it for me!
"S******* everywhere!"

I love you more than any love told in any storyform, more than Charlotte loved Wilbur, more than any character in the long line of Chestnuts ever loved anyone.

Happy birthday, little S.

* first important announcement told here.

This post is about bras. Too racy or undignified for you? Move on.

A house showing is a big deal. The outcome can set the course for your entire month, year, nay – future. It is imperative that you do all within your power to make the place presentable. Good tips include such things as: eliminate clutter, put out flowers, turn on lights and vacuum carpets. If sellers had done any of these when we were on the market, we would have snatched many a house in moments of great indecision. We’re all shallow beings, easily taken in by fluff.

Sigh, our buying was so long ago…

Wait, return to the topic at hand: bras.

I cut it close with the house cleaning and organizing today (in anticipation of the open showing of the place by the realtor). A couple of hours before the set time I decided that, as a final touch, I’d change all the sheets on all the beds. To give it a crisper look and feel. In case what – you may ask. I mean, only bears try out beds. But still, omit no detail! – was my motto.

And I ran a load of laundry with the sheets, in case someone looked inside the laundry chute. It’s gross seeing a strangers’ soiled stuff lying in a crumpled mass. Omit no detail.

Having over the years shrunk more items of clothing than I would like to admit through the act of machine drying, I tend to hang certain delicate items out on a line in the street-facing, large and airy laundry room.

A sheets load takes certain delicate items that absolutely should not be shrunk and so I threw those in. And then hung them out to dry. A nice parade of dangling straps and cups. Mental note: take them down on way out. Because it’s just so unseemly. Embarrassing, I think, to reveal to prospective buyers what size you wear. They may infer something from it. Too big, too small – who knows, it may reflect somehow on the house. Woman with Hooters’-sized knockers lives here (or, the opposite -- I’m not sayin’).

Oh but you know where this is heading: I forgot to take them down. I dashed out at 1:01 and I forgot.

Crap.

the reason why I am not over-the-edge stressed as weighed against the 100 suggested reasons as to why my house remains, as yet, unsold

First, a sampling of the proffered by others and imagined by me forces that are, almost a month after its entry on the market, keeping this spectacular house… still on the market:

1. There are way too many people out there wanting to shake up their lives and move on and out (thereby glutting the market with “for sale” signs);
2. It’s the dark wood exterior. People like light wood these days;
3. Yes, perennials are nice, but suburban types like marigolds and geraniums and not phlox and coreopsis and campanula, all growing in a crazily mixed up way;
4. Summer is the slow season because people celebrate the Fourth of July for a long long time;
5. It’s like wanting to and not wanting to get pregnant: you’re more likely to have it happen if you do not really want it to happen;
6. It’s Bush’s fault;
7. It’s the economy, stupid;
8. It’s the end of life as we knew it;
9. It’s the weather;
10. It’s weird.

So why am I calm?
No mystery here. I have stopped making lists of things to do. Instead, I am compiling a huge list of things NOT to do, on the theory offered elsewhere on the local blogosphere that one is more likely to not do things than to do things. My list of things that I will not do includes, so far, the following:

1. I will avoid turning on the AC unless there is someone else, other than me, in the house;
2. I will avoid using the aging car (this is helped tremendously by the fact that it now takes quite the number of minutes to get it started and typically only a loud and abusive “damn you!” will shake it into power);
3. I will avoid getting angry at anyone for any reason (this one is the easiest by far, as no one is especially making me angry these days; or maybe it is because I have fallen into a benign indifference to pretty much everything, knowing that once I crack the emotive door, I will be flooded with such violent reactions to even the smallest of annoyances that I will not be able to stop pounding and expounding until forced to do so by people from the local mental health facility);
4. I will not succumb to stress. There you have it – just like that. No more stress. Zip it out, turn it off, flick a finger at it – be gone, you devil!

So there.

Rock rock rock around the clock

(I've got mail: )

Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 18:51:54 -0500
From: Saul
Subject: what r u up to?
To: Nina Camic

[M] has the urge to go for a couple drinks.
Are you in the mood?
We can pick you and go some place fun.

Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 19:33:37 -0500
To: Saul
From: Nina Camic
Subject: Re: what r u up to?

Actually I was about to watch Mean Girls. Should I postpone it one more night?

(other irrelevant details are exchanged, then:)

Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 19:44:31 -0500
To: Saul
From: Nina Camic
Subject: Re: what r u up to?

great, thanks. tshirt okay or are you upscale?

Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 19:56:32 -0500
From: Saul
Subject: Re: what r u up to?
To: Nina Camic

low scale.

(a minute later: )

Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 19:56:18 -0500 (CDT)
From: ang
Subject: Re: Whoops
To: Nina Camic

Would you like to get coffee [tomorrow] at, like 8? And then we can go to the market?
I know the market's less busy earlier but I honestly don't know if I can
get up at like 5:30.

Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 19:57:22 -0500
To: ang
From: Nina Camic
Subject: Re: Whoops

Okay. Name your favorite place and I'll be there.

Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 20:00:05 -0500 (CDT)
From: ang
Subject: Re: Whoops
To: Nina Camic

Hmm. I usually go to Fair Trade - the one on the corner of State Street at
Gorham, across the street from Tellus Mater & the Jamba Juice.
They're nice there.

Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 20:05:19 -0500
To: ang
From: Nina Camic
Subject: Re: Whoops

Oh sure. I love to watch others flirt.
See you there at 8. I may show up a little earlier and jot down ideas.

(Bragger! But in reality, I showed up a few minutes late because of this: )

Spotting a Cow at the Crystal Bar on Willie Street

(…and because of this: )

next door, I was shown some prize items for sale by the proud store owner, who opened up the place at around midnight so we could see, for example, this:


for the wall...

…and this:

for the coffee table...

…and this:

for the ???

(…but no. it doesn’t end there; back at home – note the hour please: )

Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 00:43:55 -0500
To: Tonya
From: Nina Camic
Subject: Re: Re:

I just got home. Are you up? Probably not.

Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 00:48:01 -0500
From: Tonya
Subject: Re: Re: Re:
To: Nina Camic

I am up -- finishing my blog post about last night. Call if you want to talk.

(Then, this morning, reflecting on my level of alertness on the drive home after the Crystal night:)

Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 07:23:08 -0500
To: Saul
From: Nina Camic
Subject: Re: what r u up to?

I think I demonstrated what it means to fall asleep in mid-sentence last night!
Thanks again

Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 09:08:57 -0500
From: Saul
Subject: Re: what r u up to?
To: Nina Camic

that was classic!!!!

Hey, I did shop in the end. Flowers for the house showing tomorrow and lots of bags of food that is to turn into snacky things:






...while the stool looks on

A do widzenia for Jeremy

One could say that I will use any occasion to entice people over for a meal. Tenure decision? Birthday? My birthday? Spring day? Friday? – all good reasons to cook for people.

Jeremy, whom people mistakenly believe I met through the great blogging project, but who is really also sort of kind of a colleague and certainly every inch the greatest of great friends (even if those inches are dropping off rapidly), is about to take off for Cambridge MA. And of course, I needed to cook one last blogger meal before he goes out and punting, or rowing, or whatever it is that he intends to take up on and around the Charles River.

Or, was it that I just sipped wine at the side, while others prepared the food?

Bozzo and Freese, making sure the rest of us eat

No, not exactly. In fact, there were so many dirty dishes after the meal that I had to wonder if in some drunken stupor I kept taking random plates and throwing junk on them just to see how many I could splatter with mush before the evening was done. Except that I did not get drunk.

I also did not take many photos – I was too busy. If you can believe it, I was so busy that I think I forgot to sit down and eat one of the courses.

Brito, putting up with blogger-rations

But Jeremy deserved a super meal.

To you, pal. Stay chirpy.
Freese again, positioned on a notoriously famous kitchen stool

Deconstructing the day

Face it: life, for the most part, is made up of a multitude of very tiny steps. Never is this more obvious than when you are cooking (as I am all day today). You organize your tasks (and there are a million steps that need to be ordered and followed) and you take a breath and plunge.

And then you deal with everything that does not follow the logical pattern that you set forth for yourself. You know, things don’t emulsify as they should, your Italian parsley is too bitter and so you need a different batch, the kiwi puree produced too much liquid.

And so you compensate. You turn on noise – for cooking, either a TV talk show or the radio will do; working in silence is a no-no. You cross out steps taken and add new ones to your list. You tell yourself that you are damn glad that you no longer work in a restaurant, because cooking for friends is fun whereas cooking for strangers is stressful. You look at the clock a million times and reprogram your tasks, piling more and more into the afternoon part of your grid, as the morning slips away on tasks that take longer than you would have anticipated.

At this point, the kitchen remains a place of ordered calm.

And the doorbell is ringing and you think – what the hell?? But you have made this deal with yourself that you will never ever not pause to talk to someone who stops by and as you drop everything to put on decent clothes (as opposed to the scrappy t-shirt you have on, along with something that resembled shorts twenty years ago but now could easily be mistaken for men’s underwear), the doorbell falls silent. You go out anyway and you see a neighbor’s 5-year old son (let’s call him Dennis – it’s apt) retreating. Ah. He has a habit of bringing my Times to my door and reveling in the heaped praise that is bestowed on him for his efforts. And when he does not reach me in time, he tosses the little blue sack aside, always missing the driveway, so that the paper habitually mauls what few blooms remain in my dry perennial bed.

And then you bike over to get the baguette and more kiwis and avocados (it’s green, I tell you – yellow and green on your plate today; and of course there will be flowers to eat as well) and you think to yourself – this day, made up of a thousand little details and a grand moment where it all (sort of) falls together – rocks.

tasty blooms

Sometime in the middle of each semester I make my way downtown to teach a seminar at the Department of Justice. The seminar is always on Wednesdays, always in the mornings. There are many benefits to rubbing noses with real lawyers now and then, especially those who are representing you and me in the numerous cases filed against the State of Wisconsin. It's good to keep informed about these things.

A secondary benefit is that I get to go to the downtown Wednesday market on these DOJ days. It is scary how you can go with a list of two items and come back with a truckload of foods. What can I do… I am starting to prepare the Last Supper for this week-end, fittingly named (by me) because of a bunch of rites of passage to be commemorated then, though none of them quite as horrific as those about to take place on the heels of this meal (cunningly displayed on someone's lunchbox, possibly as a reminder that every meal could be, indeed, your last):



This post, however, is not about that. It’s about asking vendors for edible flowers. I need edible flowers and not many fit the bill. You can make yourself sick by eating the wrong kind of pea flower, for instance, whereas a nasturtium or a violet will go far to create a culinary masterpiece.

Unfortunately, most vendors are shocked when I press them on this topic. And most are suspicious when I say I only want one particular flower out a huge bouquet laid out there for me. And it is hard to explain the whys and what fors. Why do you want to eat flowers when there are so many truly wonderful other foods there for you, in stall after stall?

If I had to search out the reasons for why I do the things I do – it would keep me up all night and scare you away. Best to just assume that I get these notions and they stick and if an edible flower is one of them, then I will chase it down until it is positioned on the palm of my hand ready to be plunked into … the dish under consideration.

So, just one photo today, taken during a discussion of how I can have more of one kind of flower so that I can EAT IT. (In the end I bought the whole bouquet – so pretty, how can anyone resist...)

Taking care

In this world, there are people who are destined to take care of you. I’m not talking about parent types. I’m talking about those who peer into your eye and notice that you are indeed far more grateful for that act of taking care than you let on.

I’ve never actually admitted to liking this. It is a rare person whom I will allow to tilt the balance so that I am not the one marmishly looking out for them. People with deep anxieties about life are like that – they appear fiercely independent and they can’t ever owe anything to anyone. I’m not saying this is good or bad and I’m not saying all good friends should assume care-giving tasks. All I am saying is that some have gently pushed aside the recently wobbly sign I find myself routinely hiding behind...



...and I am grateful.

Of course, it would be the case that much of taking care of another for me orbits around food and beverage. And indeed, there have been many lattes and Macaroni Grills and scrambled eggs in the past months that have been direct answers to my often unexpected and often pesty calls for company.

And then there have been these two who have taken the art of taking care to another level: for the past several months, Tom and Suzanne have taken to cooking dinners for me on a fairly regular basis – like just about once a week. And when I bike over there, I am, predictably perhaps, in some state of tumultuous anxiety. So that it takes more than one bottle of wine tucked into Mr. B’s pouch to get us through the evening. And they appear to not mind. Maybe they do mind, maybe they are doing this out of some vow that they made, in the manner of: dear deity (or whatever), if only you allow our hostas to grow, we promise we will cook regularly for any loser who comes our way in the months to come, maybe I wreck their routines – but they do not let on.

I feel that I cannot thank them enough for this period of feeding. Last night, after a supper of gazpacho and blueberry pie (because, of course, they would have picked up from my blog that I am all about blueberries) I biked home late, reflecting on this and I knew that the next blog post will be about the act of taking care: because really, if you have a friend who is resisting being taken care of, don’t take them at their word. Do it anyway. Being looked after, at least for short periods of time, can be awesome!

Frumpiness then and now

A long post on age and frumpiness, as written by a blogger who is older than 99% of the bloggers she links to and interacts with

Tonya writes about her weak enthusiasm for older men. Oscar comments that men haven’t the gall to publicly admit their lack of spark for older women (as he then takes himself out of that category, fearing the wrath of all his older women friends, I’m sure). Ehhh, men don’t have to admit it – we know it’s there. And I understand, because I am, unfortunately, equally tough, if not tougher, on older men.

And yet, I think Tonya isn’t completely forthright in her asserting indifference to this category of older guys, since she and I have counted off men we know who are significantly older and yet, by our standards, by any standards – they are damn attractive, both intellectually and physically.

However, the counting was limited to the fingers of one hand.

If it’s possible to find these attractive types, then why are we finding them so rarely? Because as people age, a significant number don’t find it worthwhile to pursue the war against frumpiness, natural proclivity toward obesity, to say nothing of intellectual and emotional slovenliness and self-indulgence.

And just to let you know: things don’t get any easier. Each decade it becomes a tougher war. Take the currently hot bloggers’ topic of body shape and size: I watch with amusement Jeremy’s and Ang’s discussion of how few food points they are allowed on their diets. When you pass age 50, your permissible “points” just to maintain a decent [meaning healthy] weight are so few that you have to admit that some degree of hunger will always be your bedfellow if you want to avoid the bulge that promises to make you look pretty much like the Michelin tire guy for life. Picture me on Mr. B huffing and puffing and looking something like this:



So often you conclude, however, that the struggle isn't worth it. Who wants to be constantly yelling at her or himself for looking with lust at a Twix candy bar. (A couple of days ago I watched my friend eat a chocolate bar in the car and I almost ripped the soft piece of candy from her hand – temptation is everywhere!)

In assessing the desirability of young people I’ll just say what everybody knows: sure, appearance matters some. Yes, yes, it matters a lot. Yes, there are those who hook up with women within minutes of meeting their object of attention simply because these beings are cute and bouncy and they never have a bad hair day.

But even if you are not in that category, even if you consider yourself living in a state of permanent bad hair days, you know that youth gives you a significant boost. Nature has done this for you, because we need to ensure that the human species will survive pop culture’s assault on physical imperfection. Nature has given you some combination of peachy skin and shiny hair and eyes that twinkle and hands that twist lids of jars without hesitation. It’s enough to get the job of finding a mate done.

There really truly is an old Polish proverb that states: men fall in love through their eyes, women through their ears. I don’t buy it. Men will pick out the woman who admires them to death even if she is not a looker. And of course, for women as well, in the context of youth – rarely is a guy’s appearance so totally off-putting as to have her walk away from someone who actually has something witty to say or holds some claim to a powerful position that is oftentimes more sexy than any muscle added during a gym workout.

But for me (and I am sooooo not the only one my age to be saying this) – oh, I am significantgly more fussy now. Significantly more! It comes as a surprise to most men that so many women my age would rather be alone than be with someone who doesn’t have both wit and some degree of physical presence going for him. Frumpiness may not have been as much an issue at age twenty or thirty, but it is now. We who have disciplined ourselves to maintain higher levels of mental and physical energy, we’re less and less interested in those who have caved in and let go. We were the caregivers, the conversation makers, the arrangers once, don’t assume that this is the role we are to take on yet again as you, men of my generation, find yourselves repeatedly in doctors offices or staring blankly with nothing interesting to entertain us with, because you were all about self- indulgence years ago.

So, note this please, you young bloggers: follow those diets, keep moving, and no less importantly: step outside your work boots and develop your interests, your ways of relating to people, to the Greater World Out There! Not because that’ll get you a desirable mate now. You’ll get her or him anyway. Do the above so that you will be an interesting human being when you are fifty or older. Or else you may find yourself spending even more time on match.com then than you are doing now.

UPDATE: In answering a reader's question I decided to insert the clarifier here as well. When I write about physical discipline and vigilance, I do not mean weight. I was careful to write the post in a way that focused on robust health and fitness. I know people are all about weight loss. To me, that is only a proxy for something far far more significant: strength, muscle tone, shapliness, stamina and zest, etc. -- attention to this creates a physical presence that is indeed attractive, knocking down physical frumpiness every time.

Celebrate we will Because life is short but sweet for certain

What if for years you have used every conceivable strategy to get yourself auditorium seats at Alpine Valley for the Dave Matthews Band concert, with no success, and then, one March day when the summer tour is posted – bingo! – you get lucky? What if you were so crazy about Dave Matthews that you readily admitted that you’d give up most anything (maybe not your son, but pretty much anything else) just to spend an hour telling him to his face how spine-tingling wonderful he is?

I’m describing Tonya, of course. Tonya and I have been great friends for a while now and we have talked about every conceivable topic out there in the course of the years. But not one brings out as much passion, joy, animation in her as the mere mention of this walking god, with his intensely furrowed brow, his strong arms wrapped around a guitar, and a stage presence that makes thousands strain just to breathe the air that touched his countenance.

Last night I got to slide in on Tonya’s piece of heaven: I was there, standing with her in the auditorium next to these prized DMB concert seats (why do they sell “seats?” Technically, of course, there are seats, but I promise, my butt never touched the chair with the designated number – not even for a second. A good pair of flip flops will put you right in the groove for the three hours of standing and five miles of walking from the car park; oh, and don’t forget the exposed skin: bring lots of exposed skin as you will be surrounded by others who have lots of exposed skin – and it will be 100 degrees amidst all that youthful exposed skin, and after one beer, the hot summer evening will seem like a blur of skin, sweat and sultry jazzy pop rock notes).

In truth, I loved the concert. DMB’s music is supremely well suited for a live performance. The lyrics are bold and uncluttered and the jazzy instrumental jams are so good that I found myself thinking – wow, if this is what young America (average concert-goer’s age has to be in the mid twenties) puts at the top of the rock charts, then I’m going to give all that taught youthful exposed skin another chance. Maybe there’s some good stuff lurking underneath after all.

DMB

enthralled

rhythm and skin

sea of fans

(After Washington D.C.) daughters, redux

Saturday, dusk. The streets of Georgetown are crowded now. I pause a lot, looking at buildings, stores, people. Sometimes I take pictures, sometimes I just watch. They walk ahead, arm in arm, laughing at their jokes, looking back protectively, patiently, to make sure I haven’t been swallowed by crowds or run over by the meandering cars.

We enter a store and try on clothes. They tell me what looks dorky and what’s in. That looks great on you, they say. No, too bold. Come on, it’s fantastic! The one with the beads. Here, let me pick a top to go with it.

The sales are good. I watch them select things with such care – they are so attuned to the way things go together, often in funky ways, always with an eye toward novel styles.

We sit at a window table at a California-style bistro. Napa cuisine! It is very late. We stuff ourselves with grilled calamari and zucchini flowers filled with pecorino. At the end, we try a California desert wine: good! – says one. sweet! –says the other.

Georgetown at night. Weaving into its depths, we look at mansions and calculate what kind of income would make this part of town affordable. No one in my world could ever live here. Their world is more varied. They hang out for hours upon hours with the homeless in shelters at the same time that they know people who have horses and boats.

I leave their apartment before dawn today. They wake to say good-bye. I’ll see them again in three weeks. But there are never too many days that you can have with those you love. It was for one day really; it could have been one evening, one dinner and it would have been worth the travel, the hassle, the scheduling accommodations. Connections. Rare, beautiful connections to people who are the jewels in your life.

Georgetown at dusk: a Scouts' urban crawl

Georgetown at night: she belongs here somehow


Georgetown at night: Mr. B's soulmate


Georgetown at night: pan roasted grouper, baby summer squash ragout, sweet corn flan, in a pool of basil pan sauce -- a table with a view


blueberry and peach cobbler: fresh and honest