Three Things

• Do you read I, Asshole? Well, you should. I started with this and then all of a sudden it was three hours later and I had read most of her archive. SJ, like Heather Armstrong and Ayun Halliday, is a living, breathing, writing reassurance that one can have children without your brain and your identity squirting out of your vagina along with the baby. For that, and for growing up in a small town in Illinois (just like me!), I voted for SJ in this popularity contest that will potentially send her to BlogHer for free. Please read her stuff and consider doing the same. Bonus: if she wins, there may be a naked ass! On the internet, of all places!

• Maureen Dowd finally got out of the hair salon and decided that the timely thing to do was to write an article hating on chick lit. Since my thoughts on this are already known, I direct interested parties to the extensive coverage available on GalleyCat. A belated thought, however: why is it that the one fictional arena that consistently features economically independent and professionally successful women is also consistently denigrated and shoved into the “genre fiction” closet, hmmmmm? And why is it that chick lit is the only “acceptable” (while simultaneously being derided as “unrealistic”) format for fictionally enacting that sort of success?

• Speaking of economic independence and professional success, I was patrolling my alumni website today looking for potential targets with which to network (please imagine an eyeroll here) in hopes of finding a new job in a new city. I didn’t find anyone to train my sights on, but I did find someone who listed their occupation as “sinecure”. After looking it up, I immediately changed my occupation to “sinecure” as well. It’s something to strive for.

 

Proustian, Really

There are basically two possible reactions when running into a distant college acquaintance.

1. “Oh, god, not (insert name here). Do I have time to cross the street? Where is my cell phone? No eye contact! Absolutely NO eye contact! Shit, they saw me. Here goes. They better not talk about that time on the bus during Senior Week /what aMAYYzing things they’ve been doing since graduation / the Division Street vomit incident. . . . . Hiiiiiiii!”

2. “Hey, I thought that was you! I’ve been wondering what you’ve been up to these last few years! I really wish we would have stayed in better touch. What are you doing these days? Oh, (insert something quirky and cool)? Great! . . . “

Needless to say, #1 happens (or used to happen) a lot more than #2. These days I’d be happy to run into anyone under the age of 35, regardless of whether or not they’ve witnessed me vomit publically. But I digress. The point is that I had an experience of the second variety last week when I found this at the library:

This cookbook was partially responsible for me and my three roommates senior year never, ever being able to start or finish any academic work on schedule. It is huge — 1000+ pages. It is full of stories (Ned. . . . sniff), and most of the dishes have, like, 2 columns of ingredients. The time frame for a procrastinating paper-writer to choose the exact right recipe, shop for the ingredients, prepare it, and then feed it to three other equally-adept procrastinators can easily extend over four hours. And then you can talk about how the writer’s name is Crescent Dragonwagon (I mean, WTF?!) for at least another ten minutes. All these memories are clouded in a pleasant fuzz of gin vapors and cigarette smoke (both now reluctantly given up) and the easy confidence of a 22-year old who takes close companionship for granted, has never witnessed the effects of last night linger much beyond the following morning, and has not yet learned that just being smart doesn’t really get you anywhere. Seeing this cookbook on the shelf took me back to — dare I call it a simpler time? — and I really wasn’t expecting it to hold up well over the intervening years.

But it has! Everything — and I mean everything, even the tofu recipes — that I have cooked out of this book in the past week has been delicious, more so than I remember. From staples (dead easy tomato sauce that’s nice enough to eat plain) to weird vegetables you have no idea how to prepare to desserts (the Triple Chocolate Mocha Caress cookies will leave you sodden and fuzzy-headed, but in a good way) to fast main dishes that have only 4 or 5 ingredients, this is the most comprehensive, tasty, and healthy — except for those cookies — vegetarian cookbook I have encountered. Crescent’s touchy-feely writing style (Keenly Quinoa!) is a little saccharine for some tastes initially, but it is guaranteed to grow on you once you realize that this woman is the Real Deal — I mean, look at the subtitle, and consider that she is holding a vegetable dish on her head. If you’re still not convinced, read about her name here. Love it.

Once you’ve joined the Dragonbandwagon, The Passionate Vegetarian becomes one of those cookbooks that is almost more fun to read and fantasize over than to actually cook from. I like to curl up with it in bed for the five minutes before I fall asleep and plan out the wonderful meals I would make for my three old friends/roommates, were they within easy dinner-party distance. But then I end up using it to cook a fast dinner for Maurice and myself (who wasn’t even a baseball cap on the horizon in the gin vapor and cigarette smoke days) and I feel satisfied that one book allows me to be completely nostalgic and completely practical at the same time. I bet Crescent would be pleased to hear that too. Then she would probably show me how to make some Time’s A’Changing Tortillas.

 

Festival Features Festive Activity

Maurice and I drove to lovely, lovely Kaikoura this weekend to enjoy a change in scenery:

Beautiful, isn’t it? We had heard that some event called Sea Fest was to take place on Saturday, but as the website for the event was not the most descriptive, we figured what the hell, let’s just go. What passes for a “festival” in these parts is usually pretty tame.

We left the car parked a few minutes out of town and enjoyed the walk along the beach into the city centre. I noticed that the other pedestrians we met seemed extra-merry, and then that they were also a tad unsteady on their feet, and a little bleary-eyed considering it was broad daylight, and are they wearing beer glasses around their necks?

Yes, yes they were. The day’s sights didn’t end there. At first I thought the level of public drunkenness was moderate, much like St. Patrick’s Day in New York — more people lurching down the streets than usual, some green vomit here and there, but overall not too bad. As the afternoon wore on, however, it merited an upgrade to Spring Concert level public intoxication (you fellow Carls know exactly what I’m talking about); basically, DefCon 5. I’m pretty sure I saw a drunk baby. No, for real.

You gotta hand it to Kiwis; they have figured out that binge-drinking enhances virtually any activity.

 

Oh, How I Wish . . .

that there was a way to travel back in time to 2004 and present my 23 year-old self with this article (link via Maud Newton). Then maybe I wouldn’t have been so distraught that I didn’t get into grad school.

“The problem is you can’t get to where I am now without going through a decade or more of immersion in a highly politicized and anti-literary academic culture. You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don’t know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional.” –Professor “Thomas H. Benton”

Or maybe it wouldn’t make any difference, as it seems to me that engaging in any sort of corporate professional career also requires fairly superhuman efforts to repress the self (and, been there/done that). I hope it’s not inevitable that any career worth pursuing won’t kill the passion that engendered its pursuit along the way. But I am happy to at last have a concrete reason for finding undergraduates so intolerable.*

*Sorry, Mary! Not you.