big moves

my dear friend katie is moving to turkey on sunday.

in her honor, i'm wearing the shoes she bought me when non-date moved to florida [in perfect response to the shoes i bought her when ben initially moved back to turkey.]


these are my: "i'm sorry your boyfriend is moving to florida" shoes. love them. love her. can't believe she's leaving, but am excited to hear about her upcoming adventures with ben, with her new job, with her shopping excursions. the move to rejoin ben has been a long time coming, and i've no doubt that it will be every possible form of wonderful.

food! glorious food!

in recent years, i've developed an extreme interest and love for food.
how it's prepared, interesting dishes, ingredients i wouldn't normally want to place anywhere near my mouth...i don't know if i'd qualify as a "foodie", per se, but i'm definitely paying more attention to what i eat: how it looks, how it tastes, trying new dishes and recipes, etc.

i visit seriouseats.com with regularity, and it tipped me onto this site and it's post, the omnivore's 100. what a great idea! the list is highly varied, from pb&j to black truffle to pho. the post suggests pasting the list into your own space and highlighting which foods you've had and perhaps drawing attention to the foods you have zero interest in ever trying. like sweetbreads/#62...the thought of which sort of makes me want to vomit, no matter how many pages of anthony bourdain's writing i read that tries to convince me otherwise. [the wikipedia links to the more obscure items were provided by VGT in the original post.]

so, here it is. my omnivore's 100. the items i've consumed are in yellow. items that i have no intention of ever eating are in red.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart (jennifer and i eat way too many of these when in nyc)
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns (in fact, i had these for lunch on tuesday)
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras (i'm not saying i wouldn't try it...but after hearing how it's made i don't think i could choke it down without crying)
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu (i prefer my food without the ability to kill me)
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (i loathe the thought of a big mac; am wary of special sauce)
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads (see introduction)
63. Kaolin (yeah, no.)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian (according to wikipedia, the smell of this, "evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust." so, no.)
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis (again, no. i watched a special on the food network about how it's made.)
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette (no to intestines)
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie (one of my favorite not-so-secret junk foods)
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict (the best of which, in Rochester -- in my opinion -- is found at Jines)
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta (my mom and i always talk about how we're going to make polenta, even though neither of us really care for it. but then we make pasta instead because we're hungry.)
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

the [queer, squinty] eye of fashion

had lunch with my dad today.

his outfit: black jeans, black sneakers, [faded] black tee shirt under [more faded] black button down shirt. black baseball hat.

my outfit:



i enter the restaurant, sit down across from him. he looks at me, squints his eyes, and says:
"i don't think that black and brown go together."

such is the sage advice given by a man who dresses like he's johnny cash.

time has come today

i've been thinking a lot, lately, about time.
some exciting things have been happening to friends and family and it's made me reflect on the relevance, presence and dissolution of time.

what's been going on/what's coming up:

• non-date moved to florida, where he plans to stay until this time next year [something i try to not think about very often]
• my best friend from college is moving to turkey, where she's accepted a ridiculously fantastic new job, and where she will live with her ridiculously fantastic boyfriend, with whom she's been dating long-distance for two years
• my other best friend from college is getting married to boy she met while in college and has been dating for the past 10 years
• my niece starts pre-school this month [i like to pretend that this isn't happening]
• other friends are moving, starting new jobs, getting new degrees
• friends from the bookstore recently got married; the reception was a big ball of fun, completely reflective of their personalities and love for one another
• my mom will not be teaching this fall for the first time in almost thirty years
• children that i used to baby-sit for are: seniors in high school, college graduates, engaged to be married [thus, i am old]
• my nephew is 10 months old [and a cheeky monkey, which we encourage]
• my beautiful sister, who laments her absence on this blog [ha!] and has been married for 11 years, still gets asked if she's the younger or older sister [and rightly so]

so, yeah. time. when did we become old enough to move to other countries or get married or go to pre-school? the passage of time is baffling to me. just the other day, i shut my computer off at 5:22. by the time i got to my car it was 5:40 on the nose. where did those 18 minutes go? i know that i grabbed my salad bowl from the kitchen, chatted momentarily with bit, then hoofed it to the garage [which takes about 5 minutes.] but 18 minutes? to do all that? that's almost a full episode of 'friends' [sans commercials.] in 18 minutes, i could have prepped and baked a batch of cookies. i can drive to the mall and back, from my house, in under 18 minutes.

that time passes, even while doing mundane or necessary-yet-mind-numbingly-boring things, always blows my mind. i feel as though there should be some sort of pause button, to store that time up for really important events like birthdays or weddings or running through an airport trying to catch your connecting flight. but i suppose, were that the case, we'd lose a bit of the appreciation we have for those moments [i know it sounds like i'm describing adam sandler's movie, "click", but that is not the case.] even as i sit here, typing, neglecting the work on my desk, time is passing. it's almost palpable. heartbeats are biological representations of ticking clocks.

time: you're weirding me out. behave.

--------------

and now, a funny picture:

this is jorge. in a turban.
otherwise known as: what happens when there's not much to talk about at the morning bookstore meeting

it's just too damn cute

manga me

just for fun.



[just as i expected: cartoon me is cuter than actual me. i think it's because her hair doesn't move.]

re-entering the real world

i'm back from vacation. i'm less than thrilled about that.


i'm sure i'll be posting some stories from the past week, but for now i give you the single greatest reason to visit old orchard beach, maine:



the original pier french fries.
[weeping]