Paris and Other Pretensions

Thank you, Captain Obvious

2011-05-02T17:03:00.000-07:00

Have you had the baby yet?

a) No.

b) Yes and no. I had the human baby already, but its alien twin has a longer gestational period, apparently.

c) Yes. I had the baby last week, then developed a spontaneous case of morbid obesity strangely confined to my abdomen alone.

d) Yes, but I missed the last month of pregnancy so much, I had a special fatsuit made.

Daily Conversation

2011-04-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

Husband: "What would you like for dinner tonight?"
Wife: "Hospital food."

How I Cheered Myself up About Not Already Having this Baby

2011-04-26T17:05:00.000-07:00

I am more of a Francophile than an Anglophile (note the title of this blog).

However, I am excited about the royal wedding coming up. This is probably because I am the same age as the prince and the right age to have been reading a certain type of magazine *cough cough Tiger Beat cough cough* when it featured photos of him. . I may have played out a few royal wedding scenarios in my head involving Prince William (hey, no hard feelings, Wills. I got myself a good man). I might be even be planning to wake myself up to watch the Royal Wedding, if I weren't 9 months pregnant, when sleep is a very precious commodity.

If, however, the following conditions apply:

a) I am up at 5 am anyway, and

b) I am still pregnant and not in the hospital, and

c) I have not eaten all of the cake in a depressed frenzy because of condition (b),

Then I shall have a slice of this:

Chocolate Biscuit Cake

~1 stick butter, plus a little for greasing the pan

~8 oz Rich Tea Biscuits

Not the same as digestive biscuits, although those are delicious. I found a brand called Lyons at our international food store. Check out the British section. You might find McVittie’s Tea Biscuits or Lu Tea Biscuits.

~1 c. sugar

~16 oz +8 oz good dark chocolate—about 60%--cut into small pieces.

I used half nice quality semi-sweet chips, which I think are about 50%, and half fancy 70% bar chocolate. You could go a little lighter, but I wouldn’t recommend milk chocolate.

~2 beaten eggs

~¾ c. cream

~Grease a springform pan.

~Break biscuits into small pieces (Bite-sized, but don’t crush them. I’d just break them by hand).

~Melt butter and 16 oz chocolate over a double-boiler. Stir in the sugar. Give it time to melt.

My sugar didn’t really melt, it stayed kinda grainy, but it still tasted good. I might not have let it get hot enough in the double boiler. It didn't ruin the cake by any means.

~Add the beaten eggs and stir constantly, removing the top of the boiler from the heat.

Don’t let them scramble. I left it on the heat for a bit because I am careful about raw eggs right now, but if you prefer you can take it off the heat before you add the eggs.

~Stir in the biscuit pieces until well-coated. It will be very lumpy. That’s okay. Pour it into the greased pan and refrigerate it until it’s set, at least a couple of hours or overnight.

Once the cake has set:

~Rinse out a small saucepan and pour out the water without drying it.

This will keep the cream from scalding on the bottom of the pan.

~Bring the cream to a boil over medium heat, watching carefully and stirring. Pour over the remaining 8 oz. of chocolate, stirring constantly with a fork, and then using a whisk once the chocolate is melted. ~Allow to cool for about 10 minutes.

~Pour over the top of the cake (without de-molding it). This will fill in the cracks and gaps and give it a nice shiny top.

That’s why I did a ganache instead of melted chocolate. Looks prettier and fills in the gaps more fluffily. A few lumps might show through. If this bothers you, close your eyes when you eat it. But don’t count on your slice still being there--you might end up stabbing at the air with your fork.

~Allow to cool in fridge for another couple of hours before removing the outer ring. Serve in small wedges and refrigerate any leftovers.

*I adapted this heavily from another recipe. This other recipe did not make nearly enough chocolate filling to cover the biscuits, and it used melted chocolate instead of ganache over the top. So I didn’t make it up and am not gonna try to make money off it, but I’m not going to give credit to a recipe where the proportions were all wrong either.

Better than Puppycam, While Probably Not as Good as Dr. Horrible

2011-04-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

I have a new brilliant money-making scheme, based on the idea that someone should be getting something out of the excessive awkwardness that plagues us in the last months of pregnancy.

It’s a series of brief tv episodes (or webisodes, whatever) about our new superhero: Super-Cute-but-Awkward-Hugely-Pregnant Woman (still working on a shorter hero name, or at least one that makes for a better acronym). Although she is all-powerful because she is, you know, creating a life inside her body, certain mundane tasks pose significant difficulty or simply elude her completely. There’s a running existential subplot about the cruelty and inevitability of the laws of physics.

Episodes include:

1) Pregnant woman tries to tie her sneakers.

2) Pregnant woman swims the backstroke (this is what I was doing when I came up with the idea. It’s actually pretty easy to do, but I bet it is also really funny to watch).

3) Pregnant woman tries to get out of the bathtub. (In a bathing suit, perv. It’s not that kind of show.)

4) Pregnant woman tries to roll over in bed. Or get out of bed.

5) Pregnant woman tries to clip her toenails.

6) Pregnant woman tries to reach forward to get something while seated.

7) Pregnant woman tries to sit in a booth at a restaurant.

Stay tuned for times and channel listings.

What to Say Postscript #1

2011-04-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

4) I/my wife/my friend had the worst labor. I shall now proceed to tell you the inappropriate details.
Do not relate to me now, or to any pregnant lady (or really, anyone, ever), the horrible things that you or someone you know endured during labor, if unsolicited. If I want to know, I will ask you. Plenty of my close friends and family have willingly shared their labor stories, and I've found that helpful. BECAUSE I ASKED. No one should have to hear traumatic stories about how you thought your wife was going to die. We survive the anxious weeks before delivery by imagining that labor will be two hours long, involving soothing music and puppies and three big pushes that kinda pinch a little.

What to Say

2011-04-22T14:17:00.000-07:00

Things to say to me right now:

1)You look adorable.

Very cute, lovely, beautiful, resplendent—all acceptable adjectives. Props to my local friends who have been telling me this a lot. Please continue, because I feel like an awkward cow.

2)What can I do for you right now?

Then be ready to follow through with whatever my response is, whether it is to pick me up a Slurpee, let me vent to you, or move some furniture.

3) Babies with longer gestational periods are usually very smart and well-behaved.

I am completely okay with you telling me this kind of lie.

Things not to say to me right now:

1)You still haven’t had that baby yet?

Completely unacceptable, unless you are legally blind. Even then, it’s borderline.

2) When is your due date?

Alright, you can ask my due date, but don’t suddenly act like that is when the baby is going to come. If you are 10 years old this is an acceptable understanding of what a due date is. If you are over 18 you should know better. If you don’t know better, let me break it down for you: the due date is an estimate. Though my baby is VERY advanced, she/he cannot read a calendar (plus, it’s dark in there). The sole purpose of the due date is to anchor the FIVE-WEEK-PERIOD around which it is considered normal and healthy to have a baby. So please don’t tell me I only have six days left. I might have a baby tomorrow, or in 20 days.

3) Sleep now; you won't be able to when the baby comes.

Trust that this thought has occurred to me, and I am sleeping as much as any awkward cow in a human bed.

I'm warning you

2011-03-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

Oh dear. Here’s a link to an old post wherein I gush about the arrival of our first nephew. We now have three nephews and a niece (and soon will have another niece!), and I love them to pieces.

This is meant to serve as a warning that I am going to be insufferable once our own child is born. Is there a word for narcissism when it revolves around your own children?

Parenthood. I think that's the word.

Little Dutch Boy

2011-03-26T20:03:00.000-07:00

Saturday night, 11 pm. After dinner, I sat on a footstool and chatted with my husband while he did the dishes. Then I got a rag and a scrubby pad and a cup of hot soapy water and scrubbed the fronts of all the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen where they had gotten filthy from grubby fingerprints and food spills.

I don’t think nesting is about preparing for the arrival of the baby. The baby can’t see well enough when it comes home to notice grimy fingerprints, let alone give a shit. Nesting is about trying to impose a sense of order on your little world when you know it is about to turn upside down. Nesting is putting your finger in the dam.

Statistics is another handy weapon against internal chaos. Six months ago, I was looking for trends in the popularity of baby names to make sure the names we were considering weren’t about to go the way of Emma or Aiden. Tonight I Googled “distribution of actual delivery dates around due dates.” Nobody put that kind of information in any of my birthing books. In case you are interested: it actually does kind of look like a normal distribution if you just look between weeks 38 and 42.

My other recent Googling in search of commiseration: “hospital childbirth class awful”. More on that later.

Quittin' time

2008-11-20T14:11:00.000-08:00

It was not a normal morning to begin with. I showered. I put on clean clothes. I mean actually clean clothes, ones that were just washed, no sniff-test required. I even put on mascara. As in make-up! That's 12 minutes of my morning devoted to hygiene, which has got to be some kind of a record since I started graduate school in August. I was then going to spend 5 complete minutes drying my hair. Yes, folks, this is 17 whole, precious minutes. To put in perspective, that's like two full pages of psychopathology reading.

It was shortly after that, though, that it happened, something so terrifying that I decided it's time to quit graduate school, after completing about 7% of the required time to get my degree. Because I'll put up with a lot, but there are some things I did NOT sign on for.

Here's what I DID sign on for*: more work than I could possibly imagine. I signed on for 35 scheduled hours a week, not including the time it takes to plan my lectures, grade assignments, write papters, do research, prepare for therapy sessions, and most time-consuming of all, complete the hours and hours and hours of assigned reading each week. I signed on to deal with the occasional snot-nosed, entitled undergraduate (but most of them, I must say, are delightful). I signed on for asking my husband to take over nearly all home-management duties, minus a therapeutic toilet-scrubbing here or there, all of which burdens my husband has shouldered nobly on top of his very demanding regular job. I signed on for the word "day off" to become an elusive memory, the realm of fairy tales, the substance of dreams incurred while catnapping under my desk. I signed on for studying Analysis of Variance on the elliptical machine. I signed on to consider it a big night when I have time to make english muffin pizzas (from scratch-ish!) for dinner. I signed on to feel guilty if I sit through an entire movie without at least grading a few dozen quizzes. I signed on to spend so many hours in the office that I have to keep breakfast food, snack food, lunch food, dinner food, and a toothbrush in my desk.

I did not, however, sign on for gray hairs. I'm outta here.

*I reserve the right to end this clause with a preposition and retain my grammar police badge.

Soy-Peanut Slaw

2008-06-20T11:26:00.001-07:00

I love the idea of coleslaw in the summertime; I often serve myself a big spoonful from the buffet. Then I sit down to eat and recall that I don't particularly care for mayonnaise, or for the texture of raw cabbage.* I try to shovel it discreetly onto my husband's plate.

But I do like cabbage, and my sainted husband bought a beautiful one at the farmers' market last week. I fortuitously overheard my uncle discussing Asian Slaw, but I couldn't recall the details of his recipe the other night, so I made one up.

This should perfect for a potluck, as it makes a ton and nobody else has the recipe--unless you are going to a potluck with me, in which case, I have dibs.

1 T. sesame seed oil
1 T canola oil
1 T. natural peanut butter (crunchy or creamy)
Soy sauce to taste (I used about 1/4 cup of the reduced-sodium kind)
Rice vinegar to taste (about 1/4 cup as well)
1 Head of cabbage
Half a bag of frozen edamame (if you have it)

Cook and shell the edamame (if using).

Shred the cabbage. If you like it just a little more tender, steam it for a minute or two (I recommend using your asparagus steamer , even if a little bit of cabbage will fall through the bottom grate), then drain and cool on the countertop for a bit.

Whisk together the oils and the peanut butter. You might need to microwave the peanut butter
for about 10 seconds to soften it. Add the soy sauce and the vinegar and whisk vigorously. Dip your pinky in to taste and adjust to your preference. Mix the sauce into the cabbage and taste again.

Scoop from the bottom to dole it out to make sure the first few people served get plenty of sauce. Serve with whatever (I can tell you that it's tasty with whole wheat pita pizzas).

*Don't worry. I make an exception for barbecue sandwiches.

A Footnote on Vehicle Efficiency

2008-05-09T12:14:00.000-07:00

I do recall some word problem from my Algebra II class regarding the maximum efficiency of a car. It clearly did not sink in, though; as soon as I started driving myself to school I was perpetually barely-on-time, arriving breathless and wet-haired nearly every day. I definitely did not consider efficiency in my highway travel to and from school. This habit lasted well into my adult years, and, though I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket, I have certainly deserved several.

Something must have stuck with me, though, because during the last few long car trips I’ve taken I've decided to set cruise control to the speed limit and settle into the right lane. After the initial battle with my impatient nature and leadfoot genes (mostly paternal side), I realized it is actually kind of relaxing in the right lane. You can get your excitement from a gripping book on tape rather than trying to pass people, which you will pretty much never do if you drive the speed limit.

The best part, though, is our sacrifice of a little time at our destination translated to an average of 37 miles per gallon on our last 400-mile trip. This is about 7mph better than our in-town rate, and a solid 15% improvement on our usual highway mileage. Woohoo!

The Open Road

2008-05-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

Day 1 of the experiment involved the choice to bike to work about 5 miles away. We live on top of a really big hill, probably the biggest one in town, and to get nearly anywhere you have to go down this hill and then back up it. My plan was to chuck my bike in the back of my husband’s trusty wagon and hitch a ride both down and back up this hill, then hop out at his office and ride the rest of the way.

I am not much of a morning person, though, and on this particular morning when my husband kissed me good-bye I was still in my bathrobe mumbling incoherently. Though I tend to take a casual attitude towards my babysitting attire, I felt that showing up in my peignoir might be a bit of a liberty, so I changed my plans.

I decided to coast down the hill (whee!) and walk my bike back up. Yes, I am that person. I also wear a helmet, and I don’t take it off to walk my bike up the hill. You wanna make something of it? I’m never going to be one of those ladies who glides along on her bike in a sundress, hair flowing. I have not figured out how to be decent on a bike in a skirt. I give up trying to look cool, because

a)I’m already married, and my husband married me despite (perhaps because of) my dorkiness, and
b)I’m biking around in a helmet on my mother’s old bike, which was my brother’s before her, and
c)I’m about to go back to school for five years.

It would be pointless to act like I’m anything other than a geek at this point in life. (I tried similar arguments, to no avail, in convincing my brother that he’s a dork, his wife knows it and married him anyway, and he will destroy his back if he doesn’t suck it up and buy a rolling bookbag for the many 25-pound law books he carries around, but he was not persuaded)

Here’s what I learned on Day 1:

~I am not that fast on my bike. It is still a lot of fun for me. Probably equally fun for spectators.

~Drivers in this town are pretty happy to share the road, or at least the 25-mile-per-hour street.

~If you go into the bike shop with a flat tire, they don’t refuse you service on the basis that your weekly mileage isn’t high enough, your bike it too old, you’re a little wobbly at slow speeds. They are actually quite friendly.

~Going downhill is awesome.

~In spin class we imagine an outdoor setting for challenging portions of the program. The reverse works well for the final uphill leg of my trip home.

~In the past week, my husband and I have used, according to my calculations, exactly 7 car-days. Hurrah for us!

The Car-Day

2008-05-09T11:42:00.000-07:00

I apologize for being a slacker. But I have plenty of excuses. My favorite one is that I’ve been saving electricity by not working on my computer. This is the same template I use for why I never wash my car: saving water.

How many of our proclaimed sustainable behaviors are really self-serving? How many of us are only really, really starting to reconsider our driving habits since driving across town became a splurge?

Over the course of 5 days last month I drove 150 miles in town. This distance may be well under par for 5 days in L.A., but in our medium-sized city, most things are not too far away. The gym, the grocery store, work, and most of our friends and relatives are all within about 8 miles. I took what felt like 12 trips back and forth across the river that goes through the middle of town and got really, really sick of driving.

As the driver of a Honda Civic, I’m used to feeling smug at the pump, but the combination of driving recklessly close to the bottom of the tank, until the warning light came on, and recent price hikes wiped the self-satisfied smirk off my face the other day.

So the combination of being a cheapskate, feeling like a rat in a maze last month and and an affinity for new units led to the creation of the car-day.

So here’s the idea: there are 7 days in a week, and we have two cars, making for a potential maximum of 14 car-days in a week. I’d say that, on average, my husband walks or takes the bus to work once or twice a week, and I don’t use my car once or twice a week. So let’s just say that out of 14 potential car days, we usually use 10My initial goal is to get to 7 car-days in one week by carpooling, walking and biking.

I know this is a bit of a blunt instrument, and we should really chart our weekly mileage and try to reduce that, but I don’t think that would be as much fun. But I don’t have “fun” out of selfish enjoyment. Remember that I am always thinking of you, dear readers, and your enjoyment of my blog. Oh, the sacrifices I make for your sakes!

Do you care about DWTS?

2008-04-17T14:41:00.000-07:00

If you don't know the acronym, the answer is "No".

I've been out of town and unable to watch and blog about Dancing with the Stars.

Do you miss it? I mean, really? I plan to catch up on the missed episodes online, then give you some capsule reviews. Unless anyone reading this is really a diehard fan. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one I know.

This is not about Dancing with the Stars

2008-04-17T14:37:00.001-07:00

Gentle Reader,

Before the ethical considerations of this post strike you, let me treat you to the following tasty rationalizations:

a) Eavesdropping is a really good antidote to writer’s block.
b) I’m not making fun of someone’s religion, just something someone says while talking about religion.
c) I can quit anytime! And I will! Just as soon as strangers stop saying ridiculous things within earshot.

In the meantime, iTunes off but headphones one, I’ll take notes.

The three people next to me are apparently missionaries, and they are having a pretty serious discussion about their work, faith, the place of Christianity in the world, bad things happening to good people, etc. This begins as a non-absurd conversation, thus poor blog fodder.

They move on to the challenges of raising their children to be Christians and missionaries, and one laments that his teenage son has recently rejected Christianity. (Still within the pale. Still no movement on the nuts-ometer needle. Parents want their kids to share their values.) They start talking about how much the world is changing, what a different world their kids are growing up in with the internet, less widely-censored TV, etc. (Okay, whether or not I agree, I’ve heard this about 50 times.) It’s a lot harder to control their children's environment and influences when they are exposed to so many different cultures and viewpoints. (I’m registering something here; the needle gives a slight quiver. It cannot prepare me for what is the earthquake to come). “You almost have to have a compound, like the one in Texas.”

Yes, THAT ONE. The one where they force underage girls into polygamous marriages, where state just took temporary custody of 416 children. I don’t need to tell you about that, you don’t live in a hole.

As I try to recover, they continue to have a very reasonable discussion, making me wonder if I had a latte-induced hallucination. I should probably give him the benefit of the doubt, but it makes for a better story if I don’t.

I swear I will take ethics much more seriously as a clinical psychologist than I do as a writer. Count on plenty of questionable quoting until then.

You're Dying to Know, I Can Tell.

2008-04-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

What happened on dancing with the stars this week?

Well, during every show our host Tom praises the band and its leader and has the audience applaud them in particular, and every time he does it I wonder if he is just trying to convince himself ( that whole “attitudes follow behavior” thing). I’m not really qualified to comment on the skill level of the musicians, but they sound technically fine. It’s their taste I question: their choices in arrangements and singing styles frequently wander over the border from the land of questionable to the abyss of atrocious.

Exhibit A: Kristi danced to a distractingly terrible tango-tempo version of Duran Duran’s “Rio,” complete with synthesizer and a quasi-jazzy singing. It evidently drove Mark crazy enough to make strange fishy faces like he was headed to the top of the tank to get swallow some of those shiny flakes.

Exhibit B: Poor Mario got his lowest score on a disappointing performance of a tango to an operatic, flat tenor rendition of “Roxanne.” Not even The Police are spared this vicious musical mutilation. Is nothing sacred? Being a musical man himself, Mario might have known ahead of time that this was going to ruin his mojo, and that’s why he kept pointing out how little time he had to practice—just trying to soften the blow by lowering our expectations. He still comes across as such a good sport, and it’s great PR for his music. He is such a gentleman, not even making a stink about the fact that he and Marlee were inappropriately given the same score of 21 that Steven and Adam got.

The judges claim Adam is improving. I agree he is getting better, but is he getting better at dancing or at distracting us from his inability to dance? By the by, just who are all these people voting for him? Who watches “The Man Show” and then votes on “Dancing with the Stars”? I just can’t pin down that demographic. He did crack me up last night, though. He’s willing to admit he’s terrible, and his comments are hilariously inappropriate (e.g. telling the giddily just-spared Marisa the he and she will share the electric chair the following week).

At the other end of the optimism spectrum, we have Steve, the most positive guy on the show, possibly the planet, who should win just for being such a straight-up nice guy. His “I’m pretending to be mean” face was hilarious during his tango Monday with Anna and Tuesday with Jonathan. (I am ready to admit I have a crush on Jonathan, the way we get crushes on gay boys, or gay-straight boys, as the case may be.) Steve who took up airtime after his dance on Tuesday to praise the costume designer; whose first move when he got sent off the show was not to grab the mike, but to hug all the contestants and shake hands with all the judges.

Could someone please marry this man? Or put him in a movie? Time for a “15 Years Later” sequel to Three Men and a Baby. 3 fathers + 1 teenage daughter=a good dose of wholesome hilarity. Has anyone seen Tom Selleck since his brilliant stint on “Friends”? Ted Danson could probably use some cash as well. Lindsay Lohan could play the teenager. Then Steve could take her under his wing and shower her with his messages of love and hope and puppies and butterflies. Does anyone know a Hollywood producer? Or a Hollywood adoption agency?

Ahem. Pardon the digression.

Cristian. What can I say about Cristian? While watching him dance Monday night, I wrote that he was “not much of a russuuabn”. Loosely translated, that means his energy was better, but a 25 was a little high for the technical quality of the dance.

Shannon was adorable and really threw herself into it. Other than sneaking a few looks at Derek for her cues, she did great, and I think she deserved the good scores and comments she received.

Tony seems to be getting nicer; poor Marisa, though, got worse this week. She just wasn’t putting much into it. Maybe she was concentrating too much on her steps to give it the pizzaz it needs, or maybe the girl just doesn’t have the what I so desperately want her to have.

Len is such a ntujob. He pretends to be tough, but then he praises the narrative of Priscilla’s tango, noting how she gave Louis “ a quick flip up the codpiece”. Don’t tell me British people talk like that. Len talks like that. I think he’s his from his own little country, somewhere between Wales and kooky-dom.

I fully agree that Priscilla was wonderfully communicative—funnily enough—in her facial expressions. From the waist up she looked perfect, good enough to draw attention away from her legs not being quite as sharp as they could be.

Last week Jason’s score was a little inflated, and I thought his 23 was a little high this week. Their jive was a little slow and ponderous, and he kept looking at his feet. He’s a little like Priscilla—great from the waist up, if you don’t count his looking down at his feet. He does have great arms. Edyta has great everything, as I and 5 million Americans know. This week she was pretty much naked except for all the make-up. Seriously, I think she danced without clothes, and the editors just came back and painted clothes over the important bits for the on-air broadcast. (No the audience didn’t blink—it’s Hollywood-naked young women are as ubiquitous as Starbucks).
Marlee remains infectiously charming, but her dance was missing a little oomph. Like Mario, though, she was, technically speaking, clearly better than Adam and Steve.

So if the nice guy left this week, will it be the nice girl’s turn next week? Or will Marisa get over her inhibitions and bring it all to the table next week? Will Edyta and Julianne be fined by the FCC for obscenity? Tune in next week.

New Pastime

2008-04-01T16:55:00.001-07:00

I've got a little extra time on my hands these days (you may have gathered as much, considering the amount of energy I have been devoting to Dancing With The Stars). I'm not working a 9 to 5, and I probably won't get one before I start graduate school in the fall.

I'm trying to use my time well. I'm writing a little every day, I'm hitting the gym a lot, and I'm volunteering every time I have the chance. I still need a little something more to occupy my time.

I live in a Southern town with some great history. This includes the history of my family, both sides of which have roots here. I've been doing a little research and learned some surprising stuff. My great-grandmother was a fairly proper lady, but her brother was a wild character, and a big-time fox hunter.

If you don't live around here, you probably picture fox hunting as a relic of Old England, but it's still happening around here. On the internet I found a local fox hunting club, and I signed up to join them on their next outing. I don't think I'll be handling any guns, since I'm not exactly handy with a weapon, but I'll be participating, still, and will experience the thrill of the chase. I'm hoping it will bring me a little closer to my family's history.

Dancing With the Stars, March 24 & 25

2008-03-31T13:02:00.000-07:00

A note to readers: if you watch Dancing With The Stars, I hope my regular commentary throughout the competition enhances your viewing experience. If you would rather listen to yet another expert’s attempts to explain in lay terms the conditions of J.P. Morgan’s purchase of Bear Sterns, well, bookmark the Wall Street Journal on your web browser and come back here in a few months. I may have other things to say before the end of the competition, but you’ll have to sift through my notes on my favorite show of the moment.

I wrote this as I watched, so think of it more as a running commentary than a cohesive summary. Some of it is in the past tense and some in the present tense. I know that, and it bothers me too, but I need to post this before the next show comes on tonight, so put away that red pencil and suck it up.

In waiting a week to write about the show last time, I made a big boo-boo and forgot to mention my favorite competitor: Marlee Matlin. She has long been a beloved actress in my book; doing more than justice to Aaron Sorkin’s terrific scripts as a regular guest on The West Wing. It turns out the woman can MOVE, and she is even hotter on “Dancing” than she was as Joey Lucas.

Here’s my take on Monday night’s show:

Steve, again, looked like he was having a great time, though his steps were not very fluid. The mambo seemed a bit slowed down for his skill level, but what he lacks in grace, he really makes up for in likeability. He would be unbearably cheesy if he weren’t so sincere about believing that the show really does make the world a better place.
The judges were a bit harsh on him, I thought. Really, a 16? To bad his partner Anna is so annoying. Her protestations to the judges are less than charming.

Cristian can move his hips, but not as skilled as Mario. I do think he and Mario are head and shoulders above the other the men. He was clearly not as comfortable in this ballroom dance as heddd was with the Latin dance. His footwork seemed imprecise, but his posture was definitely better. But then, maybe he was a bit distracted by Cheryl’s missing one side of her skirt. This seems to be a common problem on the show---the women’s seamstress’s work really hard on a costume at first, but they start to get bored with it, knock back a few G and T’s and decide they don’t need that last seam or that extra yard of fabric. Their score of 20 seems fair, maybe more than fair.

Oh, Monica. I want to like you more than I do. You seem so dull, and your dancing is pretty bad. I do like Jonathan quite a bit, thought. Monica’s sort of the opposite of a natural showperson. She is really trying with those shimmies, but it’s just not working.
I don’t know if she really deserved a 15, the absolute lowest score. I don’t think that even the humorously horrible Wayne Newton got a 15. (Do I err? Correct me.) At any rate, it’s all a little unfair. I think it’s a lot easier for the male competitors to fake it than for the women. It stuck out like a sore thumb last week when Marisa part didn’t have much real substance, and I think it’s easier for the men to get away with letting the professional ladies dance around them.
I do like Jonathan quite a bit. He’s a sweetie. I hope he has himself a nice boy or girl to dance with at home.

Here’s Penn, illustrating what I just wrote during the commercial break about Monica. His partner’s just dancing around him, and he’s faking it pretty well. Here come the comments. Wow, he didn’t seem to have as much of a sense of humor as he did last week about taking the criticism. He seemed defensively fake-funny, rather than self-deprecating. NO WAY! He does not deserve two points more than Monica Seles. Q.E.D.

Will Priscilla’s impressive work in the ballroom dance cross over to the Latin round?
(watching)
I’m going to go with “No” on that one. I’m still awfully fond of her, but I thought it really showed that she did not have the sharp leg movements she needed. It needed to be a little looser. Her partner, objectively young and handsome, has got this lecherous old man look on his face that I find frankly creepy.

Shannon: I thought she was wonderful—there were moments when you could not tell who was the professional. She made a few mistakes, as I could see, but she was pretty great. I like her more than I want to, kind of like the opposite of Monica Seles. I am, however, already over the backstory on the whole “self-pity of the genetically gifted.” It wasn’t cute on Jennie Garth, and it isn’t cute on her. I’m really not sympathizing with your lack of self-esteem. Won’t I make a good therapist?

Um, who the hell are the Jonas brothers? They keep saying they’ll be on the show, dropping their name like I’m supposed to know them. Sorry, but I’m way more excited to see Kylie Minogue next week. She is the energizer bunny of the 80’s crossover pop stars. (Not Madonna, no).

Jason and Edyta came on, and I got so excited that Edyta was wearing a skirt! A whole one! Then she turned around. More like a bikini with a tail. And sleeves, sort of. I get it. She’s hot. Now put a muumuu on her, ‘cause I’m over that too.

Once again, I think he faked it a little and let Edyta dance around her. If they give him the same score as Shannon Elizabeth, I think I might be pissed, because he just did not dance as well. 27! (bold=outrage) That’s what Kristi got last week, and I cannot say he danced as well as she did.

Marisa, Cheer up girlfriend! She needs to dance with someone like Jonathan. She deserves a better partner than Tony; I really think he kind of stinks. Oh well. He did give her more to do this week, and I thought she handled it pretty well. She still seems like she just can’t quite get the precision. It’s like she can’t reign in her hyperactivity. I think I want her to be more like Sabrina than she really is. 21 is a fair score for her.

Adam Reminds me of that guy we all know, the one who insists he can’t dance, then gets really drunk at a family wedding and proves his point. He really can’t dance. But he is kinda funny. Did they think if Julianne was naked and streaked her temples with a highlighter we wouldn't noticehis lack of talent? That we’d be so distracted wondering if her non-skirt would give us more information about her personal hygiene than we’d care to know and wouldn’t notice that he’s just really, really bad? 17 is generous.

Whoa, did he really call Carrie Ann a bitch last week?* He can suck it (oops, did I just lose my PG rating?). Now she has to give him a 6 instead of a 5, otherwise he would be justified. Frankly, a 5 last week was too generous, and so is a 6 this week.

Here’s my new plan. I should go on dancing with the stars. I would kick ass! At least, I do in my imagination!

Marlee: WOWOWOW. She is phenomenal. Her footwork seemed fantastic to this amateur judge. All the criticisms were choices her pro partner made—they’re not her fault! 24 seemed like a very fair score.

Kristi did a great routine. Very complicated steps, but I still think she’s got a little work to do. Last season’s best contestants, Mel B and Sabrina, and even sometimes Helio, would be hard to differentiate from the professionals. Kristi is not there yet.

Mario was pretty good, I think not quite as fun to watch as last week but a little more accurate on his footwork from my perspective. He is pretty charming and is taking things well. I didn’t think he was cute until he started dancing. Then he got pretty darn cute. 26! Not bad. I’m not quite sure he deserved such a high score, but, who knows.

Here’s how I’m voting tonight:
Steve 3
Priscilla 1
Shannon 2
Marisa 3
Marlee 3

* He did, in fact, mouth the word "bitch" when she gave him his score last week. I watched the clip again online. What a creep

Tuesday March 25, 2008
Yay! Steve has been saved.

Last night I had never heard of the Jonas Brothers. Now I just wish I had never heard them. Oh good gracious, they are terrible. They did their darndest to ruin an 80’s classic with an off-tempo off-key version. (I love this song. I love the video, and I once did a dance to it as a cheerleader—yes, you read that right, you wanna make somethin’ of it?) So they can’t sing, they can’t play instruments, they seem unattractive to me (though I suppose that’s okay, since I’m an old married lady and they can’t even drive, so it would be kind icky if I thought they were cute.) I think I’m drifting off into doddering old lady land, talking about these young hoodlums with crazy clothes that don’t even fit properly, making music that just sounds like noise.

I really can’t stand watching this whole hour. I could do without all the fluff, I have to say, and the drawing out of the elimination, but I guess that’s par for the course on any competitive reality show.

I’m sorry Penn was voted off, because he really is pretty funny, and a lot less of a sore loser than Adam Carolla. Maybe I’ve just pent up all this anger against Adam Carolla for all the jerky sexist stuff he’s been doing since I remember him existing.

This big fancy Macy’s dance, I thought that was going to be the contestants working with a pro choreographer. It kinda ruins the vibe of the show to see a bunch of professionals dancing around and hanging from the ceiling, especially not to a Meatloaf song that I had the good sense to hate the first time around, at age 11. They did some amazing stuff, sure, and I would love to go see Cirque de Soleil sometime, but this is just not what I watch the show for. I watch it because it makes me want to dance, and this kind of thing gives me no desire to get out on the floor and get hung from a wire cage by my toenails.

Then the Jonas Brothers came back on, I definitely heard (and saw) high-pitched screaming from women who were well into puberty when these boys were born. I mean, I understand having a thing for a college age cutie like Zac Efron, (not that I do, or anything, nothing like that, oh no) but these guys can’t sing, can’t play, and apparently can’t write, either. Who is buying this music and making it go platinum? They’re like Hanson minus the catchy.

Shannon is winning me over bit by bit. I have to admit it. Derek thinks he’s gonna hit that. Derek, you’re cute, but in a best-friend’s-off-limits-little-brother kind of way. Honey, I don’t think it’s happening. Go find some college girls.

Finally, the results: Monica was a no-brainer. I would have rather seen Adam leave the show than Penn, but hopefully Adam will get voted off next week.

Guilty Pleasure: Part 1 of a zillion

2008-03-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

Last season I got hooked on Dancing With the Stars, and I developed plenty of opinions about it. Nobody else I know watches the show, so I had to keep all these opinions to myself. I don’t like doing that. So this season I’m posting them on my blog! Lucky you!

Marisa Jaret Winokur is absolutely adorable. She is even bubblier than Sabrina last season and, like Sabrina, has not an ounce of fakeness to temper her enthusiasm for dancing. She doesn’t have Sabrina’s natural talent, but it was hard to tell, since her partner mostly just danced circles around her and gave her a few moves that involved wiggling her fingers. Oh, Tony, she’s not going to explode you let her twirl around a few times! (Last season he danced with Jane Seymour, who was a fine dancer but an uptight, ungracious competitor.) In one of the most unfair aspects of the judging, Marisa’s score was reduced for lack of content, which was not her fault. Even the lack of actual moves did not justify Len (a gentler version of Simon Cowell’s moodily critical British head judge) giving her the same score as Penn Jillette.

In Penn’s support, he did throw himself un-self-consciously (and literally) into the routine, and he gets props for going for the gold that way. I enjoy him as a magician, disagree with his politics, and appreciate that his lack of talent didn’t temper his enthusiasm. Still, go to abc.com and watch the 2-minute clips of their dances (Penn from Monday night 3/17 and Marisa from Tuesday night 3/18) and tell me if they honestly deserved similar scores. Marisa scored 2 points higher overall, thanks to the other judges not being on crack.

Priscilla Presley had been coming across as snotty and stiff in the previews, and her lack of enthusiasm seemed to be more than just the consequences of her membership in the Doctors-Say-Yes-Cosmetic-Procedure-of-the-Month Club. It turns out she’s actually rather shy and was quite nervous about the competition. I understand that much of the persona projected backstage can be affected by editing, but I still kinda like her in spite of my early prejudices. She also danced very gracefully.

I thought Christian should have gotten better marks for his footwork, but I agree his posture was not the best, and I suppose that’s why they have professionals to judge these finer points.

Steve Guttenberg may win my support just by being so disarmingly enthusiastic about being on the show.

Kristi and Mario, the judges’ favorites, danced very well, but they haven’t won me over yet.

I’ll have more to say after tonight’s competition. Feel free to reply with your impressions of the show.

Good food

2008-03-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

In addition to being my favorite magazine, Real Simple has a great (free) website with a searchable database of recipes. I tweaked this one slightly and ended up with something delicious.*

I added a thinly sliced green pepper and used whole wheat angel hair for the noodles.

I also have a lot of free time on my hands right now, so for an extra-savory-mushroomy soup I removed the shiitake stems in the morning and made stock out of them. I sautéed onion, celery and carrot in olive oil, added the chopped stems, 6 cups of water and a good dose of salt and pepper and boiled for a little while. Don’t be shy with the salt.

Plain vegetable stock would probably work fine, although I’d cut out some of the soy sauce since commercial stock tends to be so salty.

*I have made plenty of their recipes without tweaking and still had delicious results.

The Truth Ain't Pretty

2008-03-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

I was all set to berate my sister-in-law to for not updating her website. It’s been over a week! I mean, gosh, the nerve of her. Then I remembered my own sad and lonely blog, languishing away in a forgotten corner of the, uh, wherever the internet is. I can’t quite wrap my brain around that one.

Gentle reader, I assure you: I would write, but it takes so much time to get ready. To explain, I must take you into the mind of an amateur writer and near-professional procrastinator, and it’s not pretty. I am about to expose you to the shocking, seedy underbelly of the writing process. It might be uglier than sausage-making. The following is not for the faint of heart.

You see, before I write, I must:
Use the bathroom. Wash my hands. Stretch. Feed the cats. Drink a glass of water. Have a snack. Use the bathroom again. Wash all the dishes in the sink, as well as a few suspect ones from the cabinet. Straighten my desk. Sharpen my pencil. Check the typewriter ribbon. Charge the laptop. Straighten the office. Sit back down at the desk.

I’m ready to buckle down and get to it now. Here’s what typically happens next:

I begin on the typewriter, but I realize the humidity is making the keys stick, so I switch to pencil and paper. I quickly decide pen would be better. I start to hunt for the nice inky writing pen. I look under the bed, notice the dustbunnies, and vacuum under the bed. I vacuum the rest of the apartment, then figure that I might as well mop the bathroom while I’m at it. I finally find the pen in the silverware drawer, along with a knife I borrowed from the neighbors. I knock on their door and have a nice little visit before returning home. I’ve lost the pen again. I find it on the desk, but can’t find the paper. I decide to use the computer, since I can type faster than I can write (well, faster than I can write legibly). I turn on the computer, run the virus scan program, and check my e-mail. I go to the bathroom. I open a text document.

I engage in a vigorous staring contest with the computer.

I lose. I get up and stretch.

I feel truly ready to write now. I just need a little inspiration; perhaps I’ll just consult a few other websites. I’ll start out with hip, intelligent sites like Slate magazine, perhaps, then switch to a select few highly literary blogs. I’ll come up for air 3 hours later, cross-eyed and sluggish, somehow having ended up on the site of Germany’s answer to UsWeekly. I am useless. I can’t look at a computer screen anymore, much less write something witty. Oh dear. Now, friends, we arrive at the real reason that I do not write. What if it doesn’t come out very witty? What if my mother is the only who reads it? I might not boggle your mind! I aim to boggle your mind at every turn. I’ve hit the nail on the head here. That’s it. That's why I never get around to writing.

Well, that and Facebook.

Fabulous Squash

2007-12-28T11:53:00.000-08:00

Wake up hungry one morning, hankering for melon. Make one deep cut into a lovely oval one until your dear husband, who is rather more awake than you in the mornings, points out that you are handling a spaghetti squash, not a melon. Mope a bit, then put the melon/squash back in the fridge.

Three weeks later, observe that your diet is lacking in vegetables. Unearth the squash and, using the handy incision you have already made (you really are so very clever!), cut it in half. This takes a rather sharp knife. Scrape out the seeds and tendrils as you would for a jack-o-lantern. Daydream about tootsie rolls for a moment. Place face down in a pyrex dish (small enough to rotate in your ancient microwave) with an inch or so of water and cover with a paper towel. Microwave for 20 minutes on regular setting. Try to pierce the skin with a fork; nearly break tines of said fork. Microwave for seven minutes. Try again to no avail. Take a shower and have someone else microwave for somewhere between 5 and 30 minutes. Remove when you can pierce it easily with a fork. Let it steam for a bit before flipping it over and scraping out the strands into a large bowl. Toss with just a little butter or olive oil, a pinch of oregano or thyme, and a generous grating of parmesan cheese. Eat the entire bowl with your husband while watching "Dancing with the Stars". Feel virtuous. Repeat.

Must_Not_Throw_Laptop_at_Strangers

2007-11-16T15:47:00.000-08:00

I pretty much like everyone. I’m just one of those “Can’t We All Just Get Along” people. Ask my high school friends—it really used to piss them off that I couldn’t just badmouth a few folks every once in a while. I’ve gotten a bit better (or worse), but I still rarely dislike people, especially strangers. You’ve got to do a lot to annoy me, even more to anger me.

There is, however, a certain type of person who, with just the briefest of contacts, makes me want to stomp my feet and punch the air with frustration: he who has an answer for everything, one that is completely impervious to any sort of rational dispute. No one could teach him anything, he’s so sure he already knows it. He raises arrogantly talking out of one’s ass to an art form, and he does it with an astonishing lack of self-awareness. I say “he” because the ones I meet are usually men, also usually white. Perhaps I just haven’t come across a specimen who wasn’t a Caucasian male, or perhaps it bothers me less coming from anyone else, or perhaps this is just one more sad example of the confirmation bias.

At any rate, two of them are in the process of ruining my evening. They are, apparently, experts in each of the following topics: child-rearing, mental health, the economy, and EVERY SINGLE THING THEY DISCUSS. They base their persuasiveness on the fervor of their opinions, rather than anything minor like, oh, say, LOGIC or EVIDENCE. They just started chatting, and in an hour they’ve driven everyone but me out of the crowded café and still have things to talk about. I wish they’d give up pretending to be straight and just start making out so they’ll at least SHUT UP. So much for trying to get some work done (oh yes, did I mention they give no thought to the fact that they might be annoying the pants off of the girl at the next table, preventing her from getting any work done by talking so loudly and demonstrating such a lack of rational thought that she wants to jump out of her seat and beat them over the head with a big bag of REASON).

(Deep breath)

Ahem. I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned from them as I’ve eavesdropped:

Putting a fussy baby in a quiet, dark room until she stops crying is like locking an elderly person asking for a glass of water in a quiet, dark room until he stops talking.
People should just accept sadness and not lazily resort to medications. Nor should children suffering from ADHD (those lazy kids!).
The US economy is in bad shape because, unlike in European countries, kids don’t move back home after school and stay until they get married.
Children were better off when their parents used corporal punishment, because then the kids didn’t mistake their parents for their buddies.
Northerners are responsible for the urban sprawl in the South because of their demand for urban amenities in the suburbs.

Do I need to tell you how much self-restraint it took me not to jump up and tell them about the deep, dark hole depression carves in your life; that babies sometimes just get themselves overstimulated; that, even though it’s fashionable to bash Ritalin, it seems to work miracles with certain children; that those European youngsters who stay at home so long tend, from my experience, to take a lot longer to achieve emotional maturity and self-reliance; and that hitting kids isn’t the only way out there to establish clear parental-child roles, and oh jeez I’ve worn myself out and lost control of the punctuation?!

I can’t tell you how satisfying it is for me to tell you about them. Am I being passive-aggressive? Probably, but it is so satisfying. I still might get up and smack them around with my soft little hands and my hard, cold logic. In the meantime, I’ll just smirk.

The Pit of Despair and Other Surprises

2007-11-15T20:25:00.000-08:00

You should know that my husband is not a filthy person. His dresser and side of the closet are neater than mine are (family and former roommates now point out that that’s not saying much). When it comes to the chores, we have a general division of labor that works for both of us. I wash the dishes, and he puts them away. He scoops the litter box daily; I wash it out weekly. He straightens up while I go after the baseboards with a toothbrush. Don’t ask me to take out the recycling, and don’t ask him to clean the toilet.
We both appreciate a neat, well-organized home, and, though we haven’t quite figured out how to put that into perfect practice, nothing inside our apartment ever approaches icky; we would never even be considered for those house-cleaning reality shows. All in all, things work well and stay pretty darn clean. Except for his car.

The typical filthy, rather-walk-than-catch-a-ride-in-it car is littered with fast-food wrappers and just enough remaining bites of hamburger to attract pests, ankle-deep in garbage, unopened mail and dirty tissues. My husband’s car is quite a different beast, though still beastly. A friend once compared it to a compost heap, a particularly apt description if you stretch it a little to include the tool-shed next to it. You’ll find apple cores, landscaping supplies, and enough dirt to pot a few sapling trees. I think he might actually be transporting mulch and compost loose in the back of his car; he himself admits to considering it more as the flatbed of a truck than the back of a station wagon.

Last Christmas, I gave my husband a homemade gift certificate to clean his car, driven by a dangerous combination of the seasonal spirit of giving, a desire to find out what color the upholstery really is, and a good dose of eggnog. I had to make good before the next Christmas or lose all credibility, so yesterday I tackled the unthinkable.

In addition to as much dirt as expected, if not more, I found the following:
~89 cents (28 cents of which remain in the car, firmly stuck to the dashboard with some sticky substance I’m trying not to think about too much)*
~3 feet of weatherstripping
~A pair of new pants still in the shopping bag, along with a 5-month old receipt
~4½ pencils (one was broken)
~2 pens
~1 Sharpie
~1 good old-fashioned paperclip
~1 large new-fangled paperclip
~2 unidentified objects that look like they are meant to cap the sharp ends of a piece of furniture or entertain cranky toddlers or…something
~1 Water Ace Transfer Pump (for, you know, transferring pumps, or pumping transfers, of course)
~a bagful of brand-new gardening gloves
~5 or so of those little orange flags on dastardly sharp metal sticks that are used to mark baby trees and discourage people from cleaning out cars
~An unidentified object that I think used to be a piece of fruit. It sort of looks like a huge peach pit, so I’m going to go with peach. Once I figure out how, I’ll post a picture of it. In the meantime, it’ll make a nice paperweight.
~An unlocated source of a brown sticky liquid that somehow got all over my left forearm. I think this was under the driver’s seat. Again, I’m trying not to think about it.

The whole job involved a lot of contorting and awkward maneuvers and was very tiring, especially since I seem to have lost my crevice attachment. No one gave me a medal once I finished, but I sure am glad to have gotten that “for worse” part out of the way early on in the marriage, and I’m looking forward to 60 years of “for better” from here on out. Right? Right? Am I right?

*My husband now informs me that this substance is superglue, which leaked out of a tube he'd left on the dashboard. I kid you not. Good thing he doesn't toss hundred-dollar bills up there. Oh, does anyone know of a superglue solvent?

2007-11-12T13:10:00.000-08:00

After three months of marriage I fell helplessly, madly in love with someone new. So did my husband. With the same person. No, I did not steal this plotline from the soap opera you watched last Tuesday. The object of our mutual affection is 17 weeks old, and I saw him for the third time this weekend.

When we first met him, he had bright blue eyes and the soft, almost featureless face of all babies, though people made immediate pronouncements that he resembled his grandfather's baby pictures, as well as me, his adoring aunt. Now he reminds me of no one more than Santa Claus, with his cheeks rosy from the windy streets of Manhattan and his big, open-mouthed, half-moon grin showing little ridges where he'll soon be teething. He giggles with delight when sung to. He sleeps pressed up against you in the snuggly, gripping your finger tightly until he enters the deepest phase of sleep.

There is something distinctly different about this contact with a baby who belongs to me. An increased emotional closeness, sure, but also a wonder at both the responsibility of being present throughout his life, and the possibility of who he will become as he grows into a child, a teenager, an adult with a personality, opinions, intellect, and talent. I speak French to him when I'm with him, hoping not only to take advantage of his developing brain's capacity to learn, but also to establish an unique link with him, something just for us.

He lives a six-hour drive but a short flight away, and I plan to see him as often as time and funding permit.

A Few More for You

2007-09-27T12:35:00.000-07:00

*Blogger's note*
*This isn't supposed to be a blog exclusively about food or recipes in particular. It just happens to be that way right now. Perhaps I will take you all by surprise by whipping out some galvanizingly political diatribe for my next piece. Until then, try some tasty food.*
If you are annoyed by my overuse of our little friend the asterisk, sorry, I just don't know yet how to do any fancier formatting. Or, rather, get over it, it's my b*l*o*g. At least it's not a comma splice.*

I got all het up about this-here recipe experimentation, then the responses stopped coming and the excitement fizzled. Perhaps a few more recipes will get things going. Every one of these looks delicious! I hope to try a few this weekend and report back to you.

In the meantime, a friend of mine reports that the taco pie is delicious.

*A lovely lady from Alabama sent the two following recipes:

MEXICAN WON TONS

Ingredients:
1 lb cooked, crumbled, drained sausage
1 green pepper diced
1 sm. can chopped black olives
1 8 oz. bottle ranch dressing
2 cups shredded Mexican cheese
1-2 packs of wontons (60 ct.)

Directions:

Preheat oven for 350 degrees and get as many mini muffin pans as possible. Cook, crumble, drain sausage & mix in all the ingredients in large bowl. Take wontons and put into mini muffin pan to form a basket. Cook wontons for 5 minutes to make crispy. Then spoon 1 heaping tablesppon of sausage mixture into wonton baskets and put back into oven for about 7 minutes until wontons are golden brown.

* They make great appetizers for a party!

CARAMELITAS

(I acutally melt real caramels in a double broiler - 1 pkg mixed with some half-andhalf - for this recipe instead of using caramel ice cream topping and if you are a caramel lover, it's amazing! I also don't include walnuts b/c I don't like nuts.)

Ingredients: 2 cups all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups quick-cooking oats
1 1/2 cups brown sugar, packed
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups butter or margarine, melted
1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 (12 ounce) jar caramel topping
Preheat oven to 350*F
Grease bottom and sides of a 13 x 9 x 2-inch baking pan.
Combine 2 cups flour, oats, brown sugar, baking soda, salt and butter in a large bowl.
Firmly press half the mixture into the bottom of baking dish; reserve remaining half for the top.
Bake for 10 minutes.
Sprinkle the chocolate chips and walnuts over the crust.
Mix the caramel topping with the 6 tablespoons flour, mixing well.
Drizzle caramel mixture over the chocolate chips and nuts.
Sprinkle the remaining oat mixture evenly over the caramel.
Bake for an additional 20 to 22 minutes.
Cool completely before cutting into bars.

* These last two recipes are from a woman in Israel.

1)Spinach Angel-hair with a tomato/garbonzo sauce
1pk of spinach angel-hair pasta
1 can of chopped tomato
1 pk of cherry tomatoes
1 can of garbanzo beans
oregano
basil
sage
2-3 garlic cloves (pressed or chopped)
salt
pepper
red pepper
To make the sauce:
heat up in a sauce pan some olive oil. then put garlic
in heat that up for about 30 sec add the other spices
as much as you want
then add the tomatoes and lastly add the beans.
Heat all of that up and then mix the pasta and add parmesan 0n-top.

2)Tofu with asparagus:
Grill asparagus in oven with olive-oil rosemary and
garlic until somewhat crunchy.
Finely chop tofu (extra firm) then put tofu in hot pan
with olive oil tumeric, garlic, salt, pepper, basil
until brown and somewhat crunchy.

Recipe number two

2007-09-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

**Blogger's Note**
I am changing nothing but the formatting of these recipes. The only suggestions I'll make will appear above the title of the recipe. Everything from the title on is copied, pasted, and then spaced and underlined to look pretty.

This comes from an equally prompt resident of the great flat midwest.

Tomatoe Soup

This soup is my husbands favourite, I hope you enjoy it as much as he does.
Ingredients:
4 to 5 medium ripe tomatoes
3 cups chicken broth
1 Whole lemon juice
1 teaspoon finely chopped onions
1 table spoon flour or a little more dissolved in some water.
1 teaspoon sugar
1 table spoon soy sauce
cream
paprika
Ground ginger
salt n pepper
( Note the igredients are approx since I dont really follow a recepie, soyou can adjust according to tatse )
Directions: Make a small slit in tomatoes and soak in a hot bowl of water for about10 minutes, then peel tomatoe skin, and blend them in a blender.stir fry onions in butter or olive oil, add tomatoes and let cook until itboils and its red darkens abit. Add broth, ginger, paprika, sugar, soy sauce, dissolved flour, then lemonsalt and pepper let it thicken then serve with some cream on top. Hope you like it.

Woohoo!

2007-09-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

I got my first recipe, and it has filled me with glee. I bet it is delicious with ground turkey or boca crumbles (if you are using the latter, though, be sure to add plenty of oil to the pan, and don't skimp on the seasonings).

Maybe I'll test these before I post them, and maybe I won't.

This is fascinating--we could see what kind of recipes we get from different regions, or from people I've met at different stages of my life. Ooh, I am so excited. Geesh, I am such a food-geek. Perhaps just an everything-geek

Well, this recipe comes from a lovely (and apparently very prompt) lady in the South. I did not ask her specific permission to include her name, so I won't.

Taco Pie

Ingredients

1 lb. lean ground meat

1 packet of taco seasoning mix

1 package of crescent rolls

1 egg

2-1/2 to 3 Cups grated cheese (I use sharp cheddar plus a mexican blend)

Sour cream (optional)

Tomatoes (optional)

1 small onion (optional)

1 small can green chiles (optional)

Pie pan

Directions Preheat oven to 350 desgrees. Brown 1 lb. of lean ground meat, add taco seasoning, following the packet directions. Add finely chopped onions (if you like) and simmer for a few minutes. While meat is browning, place the triangles of dough from the crescent rolls into the pie plate, pressing together so they form a pie crust in the pan. Place pan w/crust in oven for about 5 minutes. Remove pan from oven. Mix egg and pour into the pan, spreading it around. Next, cover the bottom of the pan w/grated cheese. Add green chiles to meat mixture (if desired). Pour meat mixture into pie pan (on top of the egg). Add remaining cheese to the top (sometimes I mix some of the cheese in with the meat mixture, just depends on how much I have). Place in oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove and let stand for 10 minutes. Cut in pie-like slices and serve with sour cream and pico de gallo. Goes well with a small side salad, also.

I dream of a pool full of quick, delicious recipes I have not eaten once a week for the past six months.

2007-09-20T10:58:00.000-07:00

This is a copy of an e-mail I sent this morning, including the forwarded chain letter portion at the bottom, which I obviously did not write. I went back and counted, and I sent it to 19 people. Now you can start your own, unless I already sent this to you, which I probably did.

Hi,

When you were nine, it was a chain letter for new friends and penpals. Then you got a little older, and somebody tried to convince you if you sent a dollar to the person at the top of the list, you would receive three kajillion dollars and never have to do another book report (like all pyramid schemes, irrationally tempting, despite its fishiness and eventual illegality. Kind of like the lottery, which is still legal). Then it was a panty exchange, in which I did not participate, mostly because I hate the word "panty".

Now we are all grown up. Well, sort of. Ok, not really, but we all have grown-up kitchens, with stoves instead of hot plates and freezers that are completely separate from the refrigerators. All you big city folks about to contradict me, move to Richmond and you can have all this and more!

I will post all delicious recipes I receive on my blog, so all three of my readers can try them out too.

Read on for the instructions, as well as some rather fuzzy math about how many recipes you should eventually receive (perhaps they are trying to predict how many people will actually forward this, then how many of their friends will actually send a recipe. I doubt that much effort went into it, though, and the random number 36 has more to do with daydreaming about what you would do with all those dollars arriving one by one through the mail and turning your bedroom into a Scrooge McDuck-style swimming pool instead of paying attention in math class).

It all goes out the window, anyway, because who knows exactly twenty people who are computer literate, enjoy goofy things, and like to cook and talk about food? I've assessed you all to meet the above-listed criteria, and if you don't, or you're annoyed I sent you this, I'm sorry. Just delete it, no hard feelings. At least not on my part.
xo,
Me

1. myfriend@something.com
2. me@something.com

You've been invited to be part of a recipe exchange. Please send a recipe to the person whose name is listed in the number 1 positionabove (even if you don't know them) and it should preferably be something quick, easy, without rare ingredients. Actually, the bestis the one you know in your head, and can type out and send right now. Then, copy this letter into a new email, move my name to the number 1 position, and put your name in the number 2 position. Only your nameand mine should appear in this list when you send out your email.Send this to 20 friends. If you cannot do this within 5 days, pleaselet me know so it will be fair to those participating. You shouldreceive 36 recipes. It is fun to see where these recipes come from!Seldom does anyone drop out because we can all use new recipes! The turn around is fast because only 2 names are on the list.

2007-08-21T09:19:00.001-07:00

Sorry to keep you waiting, friends.
Sunday night we had those frozen potstickers. I'm okay with it, though, because we made it all the way to the end of the week without relying on convenience food, which I consider a major accomplishment.
We stepped it back up on Monday night with the fantastic Hot Pasta with Cold Tomato Sauce, a recipe from Craig Claiborne that is so delicious that you will drink the leftover sauce off the edge of the plate and dribble a little down your chin and onto your white shirt, because of course you are wearing a white shirt when you eat this liquidy red goodness. (Ahem) I mean you would do that if you were not a classy broad like me.
Basically, you take a whole lot of very ripe, fresh tomatoes (preferably grown by you, a family member, or a friendly organic farmer) and blend it in a blender with garlic, parsley, olive oil, and salt and pepper. This is one of those recipes you just keep tasting until the flavor balance tastes right to you, but you won't mind because it is so easy and good. While you (or your cooking buddy) adjust the seasonings, throw some pasta into boiling water. When it's done, strain it, put it back in the pot and stir in some olive oil. This is one recipe where I don't like to mix the pasta and sauce before serving because contrast in temperatures is rather refreshing. I don't recommend skimping on the salt; I do recommend a bit of crumbled blue cheese on top.

Tuesday night...
Well, some may call Tuesday night cheating. I went to the grocery store on Tuesday night after yoga and wrote a check for the groceries. I just couldn't quite handle waiting one more day. The thrill of shopping wore me out so much that I had a peach and cottage cheese for dinner. It was actually quite tasty.

I sometimes wish we had spent hours and hours poring over our cookbooks and cross-referencing them with our pantry list to create fabulous five-star stone soup. But it's just the two of us, and we both work outside the home, which often means we lack not only the time but the energy to be fabulously creative in the kitchen during the week.

We made a few trips to the grocery store in between, for the bananas (medicinal purpose!!) and also for milk and cereal (I am even less capable of creativity in the morning.). I'm fairly proud that we made it through the week without dying of hunger or ordering take-out.

An Update and a Recipe

2007-08-12T17:11:00.000-07:00

I’m sorry, I cannot tell you why the fonts are so funny on that last post, and I cannot seem to fix it. Please post a comment if you can help me.

We left off at dinner Thursday. Friday we went to my cousin’s for a splendid dinner (we grilled our eggplants there), and Saturday we went out of town for the wedding. My parents reminded me the bride might take it amiss if we asked for a doggie bag, but they did arrive to pick us up with a bag full of reinforcements: canned salmon and tuna, raw sunflower seeds, a little tomato sauce and a hunk of real Parmesan. (That’s right, not even Pecorino, but Parmiggiano Reggiano!) Nothing too obvious, no meal in a box, but raw materials to challenge our creativity. They dropped us off with a box of peaches, too. Hurrah for parents!

Wednesday is payday, so we’ve got three more nights until we go grocery-shopping (unless we break down and put it on our credit card, which might make my thrifty Dutch/Irish/Louisiana French heart stop ticking).

Before I forget, here’s the recipe for the lovely and versatile black bean spread. It’s like hummus, except it’s made of things you’ve always got on hand. Sometimes we mere mortals run out of tahini or even garbanzos. If you don’t have a pantry full of black beans and all-natural peanut butter, I probably don’t know you well enough for you to read my blog. I suppose I should be a bit more welcoming though, and relish the chance to expose you to the rabbit food I so dearly love (a label my co-workers attached to my cuisine, and one I won’t deny, as the my auto-spellcheck underlines every third word in my postings. Someone needs to expose these poor computer programmers to the healthnut foodie side of life.)

Black Bean dip
16 oz.-ish can of black beans or 8 oz. dry beans, cooked overnight
½ cup lime juice
3 cloves minced garlic
½ c. chunky peanut butter (fresh or all-natural nothin’ but peanuts is best)
2 jalapeno chilis (I use a honkin’ tablespoon canned
½ c. cilantro (or parsley)
salt to taste
2 Tbsp. olive oil to top

Drain the beans. Blend lime juice, garlic and peanut butter in the processor. Add beans and process until smooth. If it is too thick, you can add a little warm water at this point, but I never seem to have to. Add the chilis (You could probably do the recipe without these. I’ve never tried, but I bet you could use crushed red pepper.), Add the greens and pulse. Taste and season with salt and more garlic or lime juice, according to your preference. Drizzle olive oil on top.

I like to roll it up with fresh vegetables in a tortilla for a wrap sandwich that will not go soggy in the work fridge. It’s also great as a condiment for sandwiches or for dipping tortilla chips, crudités or toasted pita.

The First Forty-Eight Hours

2007-08-09T16:59:00.000-07:00

Tuesday dinner went much as planned, except my husband had cereal.

<>Wednesday night things got tricky.
(Aside: Does this sound familiar? You just got home from a good hard workout or a long day at work. You are jazzed to be home and your dinner starts out fantastic (at least in your head). You'll add a little of this and a little of that and throw in an extra somethin' somethin'. Then you start to get tired; your creativity fizzles into laziness and you forget to read the recipe or measure things and start to eat your half-cooked meal with your fingers standing up over the sink. At this point, put down the plate, have a big glass of milk and go snuggle your life partner/cat/stuffed animal. This will spare you a) having to eat anything as awful as a chopped beet, hardboiled egg, chickpea and peanut salad and b) the humiliation that you suffer when, in an attempt to prove to your husband that you do NOT need to go out to dinner and there is plenty to cook at home, you prove just the opposite.) We started strong with the appetizers. I sliced the leftover Italian sausage into discs, then sauted them in a nonstick pan until crisp. Seeing how many paper towels they went through when I drained them, I decided to forgo the goat cheese for something a bit lighter (husband, this is where you Stop! and Say No! to excess) and served them toothpicked onto little squares of bell pepper. Delicious. Next time I might add another layer in between. Like a bit of folded lettuce. Or a grape. Or something smooshy. Hummus?

Why didn't I quit while I was ahead? Or just make an omelette? The answer, gentle reader, is tricky and involves years of therapy to figure why I do not like deviating from written plans without several weeks notice.

<>I've included the recipe for chickpea cakes below (and to which you might consider adding a splash of soy sauce to heighten the savory side). I, for reasons both within and beyond my control, did not follow the recipe. All started to go downill when I realized I didn't have the cornmeal. This is a key ingredient I used at little flour in the mix to keep it from being to goopy, then tried to use breadcrumbs for the outside. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Instead of tasting like the lovely little summery cakes they were upon their invention, they tasted like chickpeas and yogurt and lemon and parsley all mixed together with Panko smooshed in on top. (Note—these fancy Japanese breadcrumbs are delicious with fishcakes, but just do not get along with my friend the Garbanzo bean) I also forgot the garlic (I really was quite tired) and did not mash the chickpeas enough.

They didn't exactly taste bad. At least, they didn't make me gag (not a good sign, describing one' s dinner as non-vomit inducing). I suffered through a few bites before remembering: We have pesto! Not only do we have pesto, but we have some of the tastiest pesto I have ever had, thanks to my husband not listening to me when I tried to convince him not to make it (another long story for another day, or maybe never, as I am ashamed to recall it). I smeared a little pesto on the cakes and they were perfectly palatable. My husband had been exercising outside in the record-breaking heat, and, fortunately for him, I had thrown the remaining cakes in the garbage by the time he recovered. The lucky duck had a tomato/cheese sandwich.

Chickpea Cakes

1 can chickpeas
Juice of 1 leomn
1/4 large sweet onion
7 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 c. chopped parsley
1/4 c. plain yogurt
salt & pepper
cornmeal

Drain the chickpeas and mash them very well with a potato masher (don't puree them, though, just make sure you don't leave in hunks of skin). Saute the onions and garlic in a little olive oil. Mix with the chickpeas, lemon juice, parsley, yogurt, a little salt & pepper and a Tablespoon of cornmeal. Form into patties. It's okay if they are loose, but add more meal if they are liquidy. Should remind you of lumpy oatmeal. Dip the patties in a plate of cornmeal and fry in lots of hot olive oil until golden. Serve on a bed of greens.

Thursday supper was greatly improved (something to do with knowing our limits, I think. Don't get used to it). It was 99 degrees and humid when we got home from work, so grilling was out. My visually and culinarily creative husband made an appetizer tray of crackers with either blue or goat cheese and slices of fresh peach on top. Divine.
We then had a sage, basil and parmesan frittata with slices of fresh bell pepper on the side. Also lovely and simple.

In the interest of full disclosure, I now relate to you the following incident, by the end of whose description you will surely agree that we had little choice but to do what we did. Thursday night is Date Night, and we planned to have a non-spending date by going out for ice cream with a gift card we received for our wedding. When we arrived, we were horrified to see a note on the door that their card machine was down and they could not accept credit or gift cards. We remained horrified, pondering the sugar-free popsicles in our freezer, and chose to withdraw the cash to buy ice cream. It really couldn't have gone any other way.

A Pudding Cup Saved is a Can of Beans Earned

2007-08-07T18:43:00.000-07:00

My regular boss is out of town. I have two other partners I help, but they generally don't have much for me to do, since the one who is out of town takes up all of my time. After checking the real news (NY Times), the fake news (The Onion), and the trashy news (gofugyourself, usweekly) online, I broke down and asked everyone in my department if they needed help. None of them did, so I balanced my checkbook. This is an activity I actually enjoy, especially at work, because a) there are always pencils with sharpened tips AND working erasers, and b) that’s where the good calculator is.
The cockles of my penny-pinching heart cooled, however, when I learned that, once outstanding checks are cashed and the gold dust settles, we’ll have $90 to spend until our payday eight days away. This is a particular challenge since we face it at the beginning of a week, meaning we have to make it cover two sets of groceries and dry-cleaning.

I acknowledge that I have lived on less than that, even less than half of that, but it was when I had no gas to pay, no insurance bills, did not require coffee (i.e. was not bored out of my mind at work) and lived in a country with socialized medicine ($45 for an overnight hospital stay!).

I wrote my husband an e-mail warning him of the situation and asking him not to buy the pudding snacks I requested (it’s his week for groceries), intending to save us a whopping $2.08. I then erased the message and called him. I asked him what he thought of skipping the grocery store and getting as much as he could at the farmers’ market with the cash he withdrew for the purpose yesterday. He happily complied, as he prefers to live off local pork, cheese and vegetables. He also, like me, enjoys a challenge, so we decided to see how long we could go on goods from the farmer's market and the contents of our kitchen. And now we are officially committed, beholden to all two people who may potentially read my blog!

This what we have on the kitchen counter:
~Five tomatoes
~Two eggplants
~Two red peppers
~Eighteen peaches (I’m a bit of a fanatic)
~One lime*
~Two half-loaves of drying bread
~Three boxes of cereal in various stages of fullness**

In the fridge:
~One leftover Italian sausage
~Three cups leftover pasta
~Two cups leftover tomato sauce
~A few celery stalks
~Assorted condiments
~A little black bean hummus
~Various hard and soft cheeses
~Two dozen eggs
~Skim milk for me, whole milk for him
~3 pudding cups
~Two small flour tortillas
~A bag of pine nuts
~Other bits: some jam, half a jar of peanut butter, half a jar of salsa, cilantro, rotting hot peppers, wine.

In the pantry:
~Chickpeas
~Black beans
~Hominy (what is this? can I have it for dinner?)
~2 boxes of pasta
~2 of mac & cheese
~2 boxes of tofu (Cha-ching! Protein jackpot!)
~Powdered Gatorade, tea, cocoa and all the regular staples ***

The freezer:
~Sugar-free popsicles we accidentally bought and will never eat but will never throw out because one day we might eat them
~Other desserty things containing plenty of sugar, thus much more likely to be eaten
~A box of puff pastry that has been through at least one move
~Frozen potstickers (I’m going to try not to eat them in the first two days)
~A three-pound chuck roast
~A bit of raw frozen corn off the cob
~Edamame
~A Tupperware with heavily-freezer-burned chicken cacciatore (I’m guessing here. I’m also guessing we will never eat whatever it is, since I didn’t know what it was the last time I cleaned the freezer four months ago, and it will continue to take up ¼ of our tiny freezer and support the ice trays until we move out and have to de-frost the whole appliance.)
~A box of lima beans
~Plenty of pesto
~One small frozen tilapia filet

Joshua’s garden has:
~All kinds of herbs
~Swiss chard
~Lots of garlic
~Egyptian onions
~Peanuts
~Some other stuff, blah blah blah I’m a bad wife and never help so I don’t know.

MENUS
This is as far as I have gotten tonight. I didn't get too far on the lunches, but I am hoping for a burst of creativity tomorrow. Or help from my readers! Suggestions! Or a big fat check!

Tonight:
Toasted crusty bread with bean spread. Sliced tomato and peppers. Hard-boiled egg.
My husband will have leftover pasta.

Wednesday lunches:
My husband: leftover pasta with sauce
Moi: black bean hummus & vegetable wrap (ooh, I think I have a carrot at work!)
Wednesday supper: bits of toast with goat cheese and re-sauted sausage. Chickpea cakes with sliced peppers.

Thursday:
Grilled eggplants. Marinated, grilled tofu

Friday:
Mac & cheese? We’re usually pretty wiped out by Friday

Saturday:
We are out of town for a friend’s wedding. I wonder how big the pockets in Joshua’s suit are?

Sunday:
Lunch at a friend’s house. Maybe we can put on a little yellow face paint so we look sickly and she sends us home with lots of leftovers.
If not:
Sunday dinner
Modified Pasta Carbonara (sauted green onions instead of bacon)

Phew, I think I just wrote right through my usual post-yoga eating binge. Score! Money saved.

I’ll keep you posted.****

*All but the lime came from the farmer’s market, where today they were serving free hot dogs, chips and baked beans. He ate a hot dog but did not even think about filling his pockets for me. I’m going to line them with Ziploc baggies tomorrow in case he comes across any more free food.

**I refuse, however, to eat the raisin bran, it angers me more than any breakfast cereal should. It has twice the sugar of a serving of Lucky Charms. TWICE! Beware if you are trying to encourage your tummy to decrease in size. Fill up if, like my husband, you are trying to encourage your tummy to expand in size.

***I think this is key—we would not survive the week if we were out of the necessaries like soy sauce, olive oil, vinegar, sugar, and four kinds of hot chocolate.

**** After I finished writing, my husband called from the gym to say he’d gotten a Charlie orse and was going to buy a banana. I tried to talk him out of it (“Maybe you can borrow a banana! Gatorade has tons of potassium! [a lie-1% of the RDA] Not really! But you can’t buy any food because I just said on my blog that we weren’t spending any money on groceries and that would make us hypocrites! [another lie—I was still in the proofreading stage]” I finally caved and asked him to buy me one, too. He bought 2.83 lbs for 96 cents. Hey wait! Sounds like an emergency medical expense! We have a whole savings account for that!

The Emperor's New Blog

2007-04-30T18:32:00.000-07:00

I just got up the guts to create a blog, and I posted my first piece to it. Maybe I didn’t give anyone the URL, but it’s still a step towards renewing the great work and great pleasure that writing is for my. I clicked “post” with a satisfied, almost smug look on my face, and the computer flashed back “congratulations! You have just posted your first blog! And we think it’s just plain terrific!” So maybe I read between the lines a little, but still, the perceived (if fictional) compliment made the satisfaction turn the corner to smugness until I clicked “view my blog” and discovered that there was nothing there. A frame at the top, but that’s all—no clever blog title, no first-step-to-a-pulitzer posting. Just a blue line at the top that let’s me read other people’s blogs. The girl in the blog next to me is showing up JUST FINE, and she’s not even literary! I can be a real bitch when I don’t get what I want. My fake blog page even taunts me with a button to add another posting, as if I want to go through the whole dejection phase again. No, I’m well into the angry-for-a-stupid-reason and gonna write about it phase. Oh, those little programmers at google—they’re so hip, so rich, so clever, so why doesn’t my blog work?

Paris Dreams

2007-04-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

I’ve been dreaming about Paris lately. Not that I’m living there again, but that I’m in the midst of a “pop over for a long weekend” trip. I see old friends and older friends and meet a new baby who isn’t new anymore. I go grocery shopping (mmmm---the grocery stores of France. Not even the markets, the bakeries or patisseries, but the grocery stores, with rows of exotic chocolate bars and familiar shampoos, with more varieties of dairy products than you can begin to understand). I walk across bridges and consider myself lucky—two of my favorite activities while I lived there.

I pause in the middle of this paragraph to pull banana bread muffins out of the oven. Mmm. No banana bread muffins in Paris. Unless I made them. Which I wouldn’t. I’d never be able find a muffin tin or baking soda. There were things like this that I missed, comforts—foods and things I couldn’t seem to find, baby powder and Fresca and microwave popcorn and big, heaping plates of nachos. But these all fade into the background, along with the hassles of living away from your native country, dealing with bureaucracy in a second language, finding a time to call your brother nine time zones away and not being close enough to attend any but the most monumental family gatherings. These are all forgotten, and as I dream of walking down the narrow alleys around my old apartment I don’t even have to pause to sidestep dog poop.

The hardest thing about my time in Paris was ultimately that I had too much of it. Too much free time and looseness. I worked 12 hours a week in a high school and gave the odd English tutoring cum babysitting lesson for an hour here or there, but mostly I watched bad tv made worse through dubbing. I wandered. I rode the metro from one end of the city to the other and then back around on the other side of the river. I woke in the morning with no plans, nothing scheduled, nothing expected of me. This proved deadly for me—the most structure I ever implemented was a food-centric project here or there, such as trying every kind of chocolate mousse in the store. All that got me was that I had to safety pin closed my bridesmaid’s dress to my brother’s wedding.
I could get up in the morning and wander all day. I could visit parks or settle myself among the mosh pit of gravestones in the cimetiere Pere Lachaise. I couldn’t do much more than wander, though, because my sketchy teaching job involved even sketchier pay. The first year, I could go “visit” my favorite pieces of art; the Chagalls at the Centre Pompidou, michelangelo’s slaves at the Louvre. The second year, however, my intimacy with dead artists abruptly ended, the romance ruined when they stopped letting teachers in to the permanent collections for free and made us shell out 8 euros like common tourist. I couldn’t afford to spend that much on a whim, and I wouldn’t enjoy staying long enough to justify the expense, so I found myself back at home, watching “Little House on the Prairie” or “Starsky et Hutch” (Starsky et Hutch, Starsky et Hutch, les nouveaux chevaliers au grand coeur mais qui n’ont jamais peur de rien).

So maybe I didn’t get much accomplished. But the point was that I could have. I think these dreams don’t mean that I actually want to hop over to France for a weekend. I’ve got a job that won’t let me, a bank account that won’t let me, and personality that dreads doing anything that hasn't been planned for at least a month in advance. Oh, all that, and I’ve got a wedding to plan.

Yikes! I’m getting married. Freud said that dreams, as well as symptoms of mental illness, were the realization of a desire. When you dream of killing your brother, and you counter that you don’t want to kill your brother, he explains that all these desires are balanced by counter-desires that keep them in check. Maybe he’s just making you crazy, which makes a teeny little part of you want to kill him, while the rest of you wants to continue to love him and grow up with him, at least until the next time he teases you about that big zit on your forehead. While I'm not crazy about most of Freud's theories, I've gotta say I think he's right on the mark when it comes to dreams.
In case you forgot I had one, this is my point. Marriage is scary. Case in point (there’s that word point again!): as I am about to connect myself permanently with another human being, I begin to dream of a city that meant, for me, no schedule, no rules, no boyfriend, few attachments, and lots of time to wander aimlessly and ponder difficult questions like “where the heck am I going” and “no really, where am I going, this street must be stuck in the crease of my map” and “ nutella-banana or nutella-coconut?”
Suddenly it seems there will be no more wandering. No more not knowing where I am headed. No more getting up whenever and going wherever. I am attached. I have a job, an apartment, insurance, two cats, and a fiancé who will soon be a husband. The thing is, I want this. I dreamed of this. My fiancé, my Joshua, is a fantastic, funny, and loving guy who is a good cook and an even better dancer. My cats snuggle with me at night and call me mama (that’s “mow” in cat, in case you were wondering). I like my apartment and this city and my job. I like our neighbors. I like being close to my family. I even like getting up at the same time every day. I like Tupperware and the satisfaction that comes from using a powerful lightweight vacuum cleaner. I like the rituals of home life, and I know that there are more to come as we move into a house and start having babies.
I do want to go back to Paris, but I don’t want to pop over for a weekend. I want to live there for a year with my husband and our young child. We will both have jobs and will have planned to make this move. We will continue our adventures, the two of us, hand in hand through those narrow alleyways of Paris with a little one in tow.