|
You are using an insecure version of your web browser. Please update your browser!
Using an outdated browser makes your computer unsafe. For a safer, faster, more enjoyable user experience, please update your browser today or try a newer browser.
|
|
reader, writer, unregenerate comma-splicer |
Kris: “I finished the second season of Downton Abbey already. Now I have to wait another whole year for more.”
Michele: “The new Sherlock season is out.”
Kris: “Oh thank God. Although I might have to wait for this crush on Matthew Crawley to fade a little before I can move on.”
Christine: “No, you’ll be able to transition to a crush on Benedict Cumberbatch pretty much immediately.”
Gene and I were sitting around staring at computers when he very sweetly put on some music for us. I listened for a few songs and then wrinkled my nose.
“This guy sounds like a boyfriend,” I complained.
“What does that mean?” Gene asked obligingly. *
“It sounds like when you’re dating a guy and he wants to play you this song he wrote, and it only has like three notes and he sings kind of off-key and it lasts FOREVER. And you have to just keep listening and smiling and at the end you have to say ‘Oh, that was so good,‘ so you can trick him into sleeping with you.”
“Ah,” Gene said, and went back to whatever mysterious thing he was doing online that didn’t involve my vocal cords and the noises they make.
*It is so wonderful that he’s always willing to ask “What does that mean?” when I make a deliberately vague pronouncement. He knows that being asked to explain myself is what I live for.
Gene and I are sitting in the unheated office, chafing our hands like two shivering Dickensian orphans, while I prowl around the onlines looking for jobs.
“Brr,” I say.
“Brr,” he agrees.
“It’s really just the first joint of my fingers that gets cold,” I say. “Everything else can be covered in sweaters and stuff. I need fingerless gloves.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Wait, I have fingerless gloves!” I remember. “But, oh, they cover my thumb. That won’t work, my thumbs are two of my four typing fingers.”
“Heh.”
“Do you think it would be good to write in my cover letter that I want to work for this company because I’m pretty sure they have central heat?” I say.
Ha, ha, ha! We laugh.
But seriously, hire me. It’s cold in here.
You might think eight a.m. is too early to be choosing cuts of lamb, but you would be wrong. Even slightly hungover, I have no problem looking at pictures of raw red meat. The weirder part to me is that I’ve actually met the lamb I’m planning to cook. I mean, I’ve defended this lamb from drunken wedding guests who wanted to go play with it. And I am so much happier about eating this lamb than I am about eating the other meat I eat, because I know it lived its life on a lovely, peaceful meadow surrounded by its friends and two caring farmers, only occasionally disrupted by drunks. It had a good life and now I need to eat it.
Or, the short version: Katy and Evan will be harvesting their first crop of lambs soon and we have pre-ordered some, and you know what that means? It means there are going to be some kickass, gourmet poolside barbecues this summer. Brace yourselves.
If you’d like lamb of your very own, I don’t know whether this crop is already spoken for. If is is, I expect you can get on the list for next time. Here is the info.
Ian: I just read a book that you and Gibney have probably read.
Kris: Oh, yes?
Ian It’s called The Hunger Games.
Kris: Yeah! So awesome, right?
Ian: So badly written.
Kris: What? No.
Ian: Come on, you have to admit that —
Kris: Augh! Why do you like everything that is bad and hate everything that is good? What is wrong with your face?
Ian: …
Kris: …
Ian: …
Kris: Hey, are you making us pizza? That looks great.
Later on, watching TV with Tracy.
Kris: [pointing to a glamorous dark-haired girl on the TV] Hey, is that a Kardashian?
Tracy: [giving me a funny look] Yes?
Kris: I guessed right! Because I know what hair color they have.
Tracy: [still believes I am pulling her leg] Do you…not know what the Kardashians look like?
Kris: No. Why, do they have a show or something?
Tracy: They have a million shows.
Kris: Oh. Well, at least I recognized one. Hey, [pointing to a dark haired, dumpy, make-up free girl on the TV] is that a Kardashian?
Tracy: Sigh.
“Come look at this bird,” I said. Gene obligingly came over to the window. “Look how little and fat he is,” I said.
“He is very little and fat.”
“I love fat little animals. Look how happy he is on his branch. He’s giving himself a good all-over shaking and feather-fluffing.”
“That’s true.”
“Do you know why he’s doing that?” I asked, leaning back into Gene affectionately.
“Is it because he’s so little and fat and happy?” Gene guessed.
“No,” I said. “It’s because he has mites.”
2011 was in some ways tough. My grandfather died at the beginning of the year, which was kind of an ugly, protracted process. And then near the end of the year, my mom’s brother Terry also passed away.
Terry and I were friends. When I was a kid I just had this impression of him as kind of an angry mustache, but as an adult I realized we had a lot in common. (No, it was NOT mustaches, thank you very much.) He was a bibliophile, although a much fancier one than I am, in that his book collection came from places like the Antiquarian Book Fair and mine mostly comes from library sales. Still, he had read all kinds of things and was as interested as I am in going into rooms of books and staring at them. We emailed a lot, sometimes about books and sometimes about other things. I was reading some of them today and I wanted to share a few little gems from our correspondence.
On his concerns for my safety:
“Kristen, I hope that you and Gene are doing well and that your apartment is not is jeopardy of collapsing under the weight of books.”
This one came after a list of museum suggestions. It might have been genuine helpfulness, or possibly a cutting remark about my love of animals; Terry was notoriously anti-dog:
“Of course, you being a dog type of person, might enjoy New Art from China at the Saatchi Gallery which has Liu Wie’s “Love it! Bite it! ‘copies’ of classical buildings made from dog chews.”
On where to find books:
Me: (Being facetious, since obviously what I want is impossible.) “Sometimes I am searching for a English translation of the complete 22 volume set of Cuvier’s Histoire Naturelle des Poissons and it is nowhere to be found and I realize that internet shopping has some real gaps for someone like me.”
Terry: “I can give you a link to buy the Cuvier set of 22 volumes in French for $84,000 or a small set of it in paperback for around $40.”
Me: “Excellent, I’ll take the $84,000 version. Gene and I don’t need to buy an apartment. ”
On the joyous occasion of my upcoming nuptials:
“Honeymoon? Hell, you’ve been living in sin with this guy since puberty.”
On book hoarding, of which we were both guilty:
Terry: “I am sorting books as I go along trying to decide which to keep, which to give away and which to try and sell.”
Me: “I can help you with the books, here is my help: keep them all.”
I miss those emails, in which he was by turns wise and wise-cracking, amused and acerbic. He was an impatient, angry, snobbish, well-read, urbane son-of-a-bitch and I loved him very much. Here’s to you, Uncle.
The camera is cutting from a close-up of John Cusack to a close-up of the world’s most adorable baby.
Me: AWWWW!
Gene: Yep.
Close-up of John Cusack. Close-up of baby.
Me: This is the cutest thing EVER.
Gene: Yep.
John Cusack scrunches his face. Baby obligingly scrunches his darling, uncanny-valley, huge-eyed face of cuteness.
Me: Oh, man, I want one. I want one so much!
Gene: I know, I know.
Cut to John Cusack. Cut to baby.
Me: Augh, the sexiness!
Gene: Yeah — wait, what?
Me: When can we get a John Cusack of our very own???
Do you remember those segments on Mister Roger’s Neighborhood where people would come on and talk about their jobs? And you’d be sitting there, five years old, bored off your head and waiting for the puppet part to come on? (Okay, maybe that was just me.) This little heartwarming video that Gene just sent me is like one of those segments, except this “expert” learned all her facts from reading it “in a Danish book this morning,” and also she is Bjork.
My god, my god, there are SO MANY THINGS I love about this video.
1. I like in the beginning when she talks about all the TV she’s been watching lately, which seems to be exclusively about how Icelandic people are handling the holidays, mixed with a little Icelandic standup. Is Bjork a good representation of the way Icelandic people are funny? Are the standup routines just the comic sort of wandering around the club, talking to himself? God I hope so.
2. Watch around the minute mark when she stands up. The TV she is opening up is from the past, but those silver spaceman tights are definitely from the future.
3. I love the surprise ending, where you think she’s making a point about how TV is taking over our brains, but it turns out to be poets! Bjork remembers “being very scared to it” (of it, she means, “it” being TV), because an Icelandic poet apparently told her how TV works, which is that it uses its electric light to take over your brain. But then (this morning) she “read the truth, and that’s the scientifical truth, which is much better. You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.” The more you know, eh, Bjork?
4. I think what I love most about this video is how at first I was desperate to know why she made this video, and then I quickly stopped caring and just loved her with all the brain parts of me. She is so great.
Edited to add more stuff, because I watched it again.
5. Where is she filming this? The industrial formica table, the sad little maps taped to the wall…is this an office park in Pleasanton?
6. She’s wearing two wristwatches. On any other woman I would assume it was a fashion statement, but on Bjork I assume it’s because she checks one watch against the other constantly, because maybe a poet once told her that time can be sneaky and try to trick you unless you really pin it down.
Yesterday we spent some time at Christine and Adam’s house. While we were there, Christine whipped up THREE blended soups (potato-leek, broccoli-cheddar, and lentil, which was oddly my favorite) and a roasted leg of goat with a (homemade, naturally) pomegranate glaze and pomegranate gravy. As far as I can tell, these were random ideas that occurred to her as she went along. HOW DOES SHE DO THAT? You know what I can make spontaneously if people happen to be around my house at the dinner hour? Ramen.
Anyway, we sat around eating the very fine goat dinner and I said “I think this is the best goat I’ve had this year.”
“Whew!” Adam said. “We got in just under the wire.”
“I think you’re forgetting the goat sliders Michele made on the houseboat this summer,” Christine pointed out.
“Ooh, wait, THAT was my favorite goat of the year,” I said.
“I don’t know about that. This one has fruit,” Michele said.
“Yes, but the sliders were eaten on a boat,” I said. It’s true: you can’t beat a meal which follows a day spent lying very still on a boat in 110 degree weather, and which precedes a day spent lying very still on a boat in 110 degree weather. I mean, by MY standards, though not by the standards of normal people who were never genetically modified with lizard DNA by bad scientists in a lab. Adam calls this the Cave and Castle factor (or something like that); the idea being that any wine you drink in a fancy cave or castle-type winery will automatically taste better. So, too, do surroundings affect enjoyment of goat. And nothing beats a boat.
HOWEVER, if the pomegranate goat were eaten on a boat, or even in a castle, surrounded by a moat (though it wouldn’t be too tough to get it to a boat if you put it in a tote and the tote you picked could float), you could shove it down your throat (but slow, avoiding bloat), crying “This cuisine is haute!” And then how could you promote tiny sliders made of goat versus goat in fruit compote? When they both deserve your vote?
In conclusion (and I quote): “Goat.”
(Jesus, I am sorry about this. I honestly don’t know what came over me; this was not my intention at the beginning of this post. I can’t even remember why I originally decided to write about this, but I’m just going to quit here, before it takes me over again.)