No, I did not attend a meat-eaters' convention, I am merely responding to the pressure to post more about FOOD

Tonight I had so much work to do that I went out for a healthy round of blogger martinis and cosmos. It did not end there. What started out as a meeting for a drink ended as many drinks and then some meat-eating. I think there were other foods proffered that evening. I think. Or maybe it was all about martinis and protein? I feel set for another night of work now. Really. Not sleepy at all. Not at all.

hunger struck 

Polish lessons

Today’s front page of the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza can stump a foreigner. On the one hand, there is a headline where only one word is unrecognizable to the English-speaking person:

New England Patriots Zdobyli Super Bowl!

I mean, you can guess what “zdobyli” means in a second – consider yourself then a fluent reader of the Polish press. But in another story, I read about an asteroid discovered by a young Polish astronomer. The young man has naming privileges now and he solicited suggestions from the general public. Thousands sent in names and most demonstrated Polish pride (okay, maybe I would not have submitted “Kiełbasa,” even if is suggestive of Polishness). What they also demonstrated was the inscrutability of my native language. Forget the Super Bowl headline. Try saying these out loud (any of which could easily be spoken by a Polish kid):

Brzęczyszczykiewicz, Chrząszcz, Szczebrzeszyn.

We are a mixture of the unpronounceable and the Polenglish. A mysterious lot. But predictable as well. The winning entry for the unnamed asteroid? Karol Wojtyła.

The Gates

I know, it is wrong to be in Rome and not do as the Romans do, but I am a football ignoramus and so I benevolently tolerate the Super Bowl craze, but I never participate in it.

Instead, tonight I went over to a friend’s and we watched documentaries. Your adrenaline flow could not surpass mine, because I finally got to see Running Fence, the film about Christo’s art project in California from the 70s. Why is this exciting? Because Christo is again setting up his miles and miles of terrain art (titled this time “The Gates”) and the unveiling of this two week wonder (26 years in the planning) will be in Central Park this Saturday, coinciding with my trip to the city. Will I blog about it? Stay tuned.

And speaking of mincing (garlic, etc.)…

A reader kindly requested that I increase the number of posts devoted to food. I cannot. I have a confession to make: I am taking a (rather extensive) break from major cooking. Indeed, today I restocked my refrigerator and this is how it now looks:

an exciting array of foods and beverages 

It would be even less full if someone hadn’t packed in a dozen cans of Klarbrunn many weeks back.

Have I grown tired of the culinary arts? Have I thrown in my polka-dot apron and replaced it with the now ever-present in the kitchen Dell Latitude? No. I continue to love to cook and I diligently have the Food Channel on every time I am at the gym, in case a new creative cooking idea pops up on the screen. But everything needs a pause and a rest in life and this is the season for me to withdraw from cooking (the exception: when people come over – then I am all about pots and pans again).

Do I not eat? Oh, I’ll broil a fish now and then. But I am discovering the simplistic beauty of eggs, cheeses and raw vegetables – hardly postable material! Not to worry, though. My trends never last. Today’s cooking calm may soon develop into a cooking mania. One never knows.

Ocean proceeds mincingly

Brian writes that if you type in ninacamic into Blogger, the spell check will suggest a replacement: mincingly (M-W def: “affectedly dainty or delicate”). Although some would scoff and say that a person who plunges into each day with spirit cannot lay claim to any such finespun imagery, that robustness is incompatible with something balmy and light, let me (timidly) suggest otherwise: Ocean does indeed at least aspire to be more subtle than bold, more whimsical than forceful, more delicate than coarse. Bottom line – Blogger spell check and I are friends. Mincingly is a better fit than schoolmarmishly.

Neither prudish nor school-marmish

Last night a friend mentioned that my reputation may run the way of Marion the librarian in some blogging circles. Oh, how wrong you, who think that, are! [And I am not referring to episodes of skinny dipping in my employer’s pool with the lively crowds that frequented the Connecticut summer residence where I once worked as a nanny.]

I want to raise a quiet thumbs up to references to sex and nudity (caveat: in their non-exploitative form, and I don’t care if that is a hard line to draw, it can be done!) though I’m still firmly negative on gore and violence. Just because I refrain from dotting the Ocean pages with words that would make Margaret Spellings ears turn pink, I see no reason why others cannot express themselves more *creatively*. There’s a long stretch of road from acknowledging our interest in sex and the various fascinating parts of our anatomy, to plastering highway billboards with pictures of naked women and men having sex with animals.

It came as no surprise that the public response to nipple-gate was usurped by those who were eager to turn this into an all-out campaign against any positive reference to gays or even cohabitants on network TV. A cleaned-up Super Bowl is a blimp of an event. An absence of racy dicey commercials may lead to a boring half-time, but in the scheme of things, it is just a moment in television history. The pendulum will swing back and Paul McCartney in a turtle neck will again be replaced by something more representative of our lust for the daring and the obscene.

But the door has indeed been propped open for regulation of a more invidious kind: the banning of references to sexuality (sad in its own right) has spread to a standing ovation in favor of the clean, the morally upright, the perfect heterosexual couple, raising the clean the morally upright, the perfectly groomed pair of children.

I say no. I’m all in favor of getting rid of violence and meanness, of cleaning up our discourse so that degrading offense is not bandied randomly, endlessly. But please, let's not go the route of a sanitized nation, where even this splendid Ocean post would be regarded as inappropriate for public viewing.

Parental discretion advised: the post starts out in a gentle, bucolic tone and then turns towards violence and murder

It seems that for years now I have been foisting Indian Lake Park on friends and family. They always tell me they like it, but when I suggest a return visit, they balk. Too far (it’s only 15 minutes northwest of Madison), too doggy (people do like to take their dogs for a walk there – it’s permitted), too hilly (why is this a drawback?)!

But today I may have found an Indian Lake sucker and she packs a camera – meaning she doesn’t tsk tsk with annoyance every time I myself pause to take photos. In fact she takes even more than I do.

Indian Lake is splendid. A birch forest covers a hilly terrain on one side, and on the other, fields stretch upwards, from the lake toward the tree line. In spring the birches dazzle. But in my current “I love February every since yesterday’s post and ever since it decided to be a record-breaking 50 degrees today” mode, they are equally beautiful now.

Two small incidents did remind me that we are not always at peace with the animals that roam the wild, or even those under human stewardship: two dogs were (playfully, we were told) mauling each other and in their exuberance, one decided to entice Ann into the game, nearly knocking her down in the process. Then, as we retraced our steps, we came across a large bone. Those dogs! -- we said. But a few paces further, there was another large bone, this one with a perfectly preserved deer hoof at the end of it, leaving us with these tricky questions: who attacked the deer? And are we next in line?

Oh, it did not strike me until now that maybe Ann will not be so fond of returning to Indian Lake County Park after all!

They look like they're swaying to music. 

Are they bat houses or bird houses? 

A flash of color: a skier passing through. 

From a distance, the ice fishermen look like they are suspended in air. 

Crooked timber? 

A lovely path: heading in one direction, we find it littered with branches, on the return trek, it is littered with... other things. 

Law School: a place where enduring friendships emerge and where you're supposed to learn how to think like a lawyer. These are not mutually exclusive.

If someday you are lucky enough to have a class as together and as bonded as my Torts section from the Fall is, you don’t have to imagine you will never again come together as a group when the semester ends.

In spite of horrendous time/place scheduling issues, a reunion was indeed orchestrated and it took place at the Orpheum last night. [For non-Madison readers, this is an old movie-house-turned-restaurant (and theater).]

It was perfect. You’re all terrific. Thank you!

Are they announcing our arrival? 

The table is set... let the festivities begin! 

Posting on a quiet Friday afternoon

Yesterday, in an email exchange with a blogger and friend, we noted how little we actually knew about each other. One could argue that bloggers are people in search of stages, with not always a very interesting story to tell, that they seek audiences, that they reveal too much for no good reason.

And yet, my blogger friends (at least a good many of them) are some of the most guarded people I know (me included). If Ocean speaks for me, it does so quietly, I think, and the story it tells often is not an obvious one.

And isn’t it always like that with people? How many of their stories do we really know? I am reminded of a conversation I had a few years back with a relative of mine (whose identity and relationship to me, for obvious reasons, shall remain an Ocean mystery). We were sitting around a kitchen table, talking (this is a favorite spot and manner of communicating for me) and suddenly he got up, paced back and forth, faced me and said: “I killed a person once. You never knew this about me, did you? With my own bare hands.”

No need to worry, I do not think I am predisposed, by virtue of my relation to him, to commit heinous acts of this sort, yet it did strike me then that not only did I really not know of this particular episode of violence in his life, it is not the only thing that I did not know.

It seems to me that the dissatisfied person is the one who cannot live with that degree of mystery. The calm person accepts this inability of ours to find out much about the other, through blogs, conversations, or otherwise, even as he or she enjoys both the experience of perusing what little information is made available, and the experience of putting forth a little of his or her own life for someone else to take a look at.