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!