When pigs fly...
One of my co-workers sent me this e-mail and it cracked me up because it was so darn unexpected (despite the groan factor, there was a perverse delight to it):
*Epiphany*
It was once said that a black man would be president "when pigs fly". Sure enough, 100 days into Obama's presidency . . . swine flu.
Gourmet Cathedral
I spent about an hour today at the Trader Joe’s in Cobble Hill. I’ve been meaning to go in there for the longest time and today, wanting to escape in the worst way possible, I went grocery shopping.
This sounds weird, but the truth is that the place is peaceful. Housed in an old bank built in the 1920’s, it is spacious and serene. The staff is helpful and friendly. The selection is spectacular.
I was hungry, never a good idea…
I was supposed to go in there for a small jar of dill weed. I got it, but I also got a jar of lemon pepper (with a built-in grinder!). I bought these beautiful salmon filets, stuffed with shrimp, cucumber and dill. Each one was less than $3 and it makes for quite a pretty dish. [More on that after we dine on it.] And I bought a bowl of pasta (tortellini with pesto sauce) for lunch. [Delicious.]
I cannot call myself a convert yet, I was a little overwhelmed. The place is big and I was like a kid in a candy store. It was not the frenzied lust for taste I experienced my first time at the Garden of Eden. I can admit to being very impressed. But I need to do it again, this time focusing on just being there.
Eating is about to get a lot more interesting around here!
Visualize unicorns!
I went to the lab today for my blood test. I tried not fret about it, but I truly hate needles. I’d be the worst junkie on Earth. “We’re getting high? Wooooooo! Wait, we gotta shoot up? Yeah, screw it, I can live with reality.”
He called me in within 2 minutes of my arrival. I stood to meet my fate, but not without whining, “But I don’t wanna!” He stage-whispered to the other tech on deck, “I think we got a runner.”
It wasn’t as bad as all that. In fact it was pretty hilarious. The tech was great.
I kept my head down and told him that I wasn’t trying to be rude. I explained that I preferred to make no eye contact, because when I had nightmares about this moment – and I will! – it’d probably be rude to give my monster du jour his specific face.
He played some music to try to relax me. The first selection was some uninspired ambient thing. “Is this appropriate, you think?” he asked. I smirked, “Why? Don’t you have any industrial goth?” But really, it was very sweet (he told me he uses the music to drown out the screams of kids) until that one line in the song when I heard, “And I just wanna lay down and diiiiiiiiiiiie!”
Dude.
I sat down and the chair had a flap like our old school escritoires but with a padded top. I eyed it suspiciously and asked, slightly alarmed, “Is this to, hmm, restrain me?” He smiled, a little too pleased with himself, “Yep.” He waited for it, because he knew there was a comeback. “Oh. No. Honey, I’m not into bondage. But thanks! I feel pretty now…”
He was very appreciative that I promised neither to kick nor bite him. I did inform him that I may be making some commentary about his parents’ marital status and that this in no way should be misconstrued as a sign of outward disrespect towards his lovely mother. “After all, I am a momma’s girl. It’d be wrong!”
I caught a quick glimpse, across the hall, at the waiting room for the lab that does the mammograms – the next big thing I am
not looking forward to – and it freaked me out that it had the same (exact) layout, color scheme and furniture as the waiting room at the surgical wing where Mom had her thyroid operation last summer. Not the sweetest memories. But worse, and I don’t think they realize this: it looks like a high end funeral home. How do they expect you to relax there? Are they on drugs?
I miss naked Shaheen!
Streaking Baby
I spent several hours at the doctor’s office this morning, just sitting around waiting for a test that takes a full minute and a half to do. Of course, I got my money’s worth: the tech did it 3 different times. She even looked horrified and consulted a doctor who seemed unimpressed by the results… The last time that happened, I heard my doctor refer to the tech as a complete idiot and walked me over to the EKG room and did it herself.
One thing that annoys and befuddles me is why parents allow their children to roam unsupervised. At some point the little ones end up near me and I don’t mind, but these adults do not know me and I don’t think they should rely on a toddler’s instinct that I am cool.
There was a tiny girl named Shaheen (or some close facsimile) whose name is imprinted in my brain because for well over half an hour all I heard amidst the chaos of the corridors of the examination rooms was this:
“Shaheen come here. Shaheen sit down. Shaheen take that out of your mouth. Shaheen don’t…”
Mom refers to this as
“Honey Don’t Parenting” and it creates monsters, but each generation gets the monsters it deserves.
At some point I fell asleep (pure boredom) and awoke to a growing chorus of screams that began at the far end of the south wing and carried over and transformed from a solo to duet to trio to quartet and so on. Shaheen stood at the door to the EKG room looking at me. She was very interested in the sounds. She grabbed her little dress, yanked it over her head, swung it like a flag and ran off, effectively streaking a whole wing of patients as my laughter drowned out the cries. Shaheen’s mother sprang to action a little too late and dragged behind trying to catch the half naked child.
She should buy comfortable shoes because I have a feeling this won’t be the last time she finds herself chasing a naked Shaheen.
FTW: Solidarity!
I was waiting for the bus and watched a young woman crossing the street, her colorful skirt flowing in the wind and creating a spectacle of spring in the living flesh. She was a goddess!
An SVU turned into the corner and immediately began to frantically beep his horn, because apparently she wasn’t moving fast enough for his liking. This proud young queen slowed just enough to turn to face him and give him the finger.
I, quite involuntarily, cackled and it echoed across the boulevard. A man engaged in a neighborly conversation with another gentleman exclaimed, “Ah come on she has the right of way!” A woman drinking water from a bottle shook her head and commented, “So impatient!” Eye contact between all present was established in milliseconds and civil accord was reached swiftly but fairly, if I say so myself. People of several colors, races, political and religious affiliations agreed and acted for the common good. Because that's the way we roll in Brooklyn.
And just like that, in implicit solidarity for pedestrians everywhere, a half dozen people turned to the driver and gave him the finger. Dude got a flock!
Have a lovely weekend and please respect the laws of traffic.
The things you do for a salary...
Years ago, as a result of extraordinary skills no one would’ve guessed I possessed, I somehow got stuck doing everybody’s expense accounts (yes, the girl that has trouble counting past 10 unless she does it in Spanish and
s l o w l y). According to the finance guys, my reports were things of absolute beauty. They even printed a copy of one of them and would hand them to new employees as an example of what was acceptable. You haven't lived until you see finance geeks all atwitter! It was beyond bizarre.
I hated doing it, but it gave me an opportunity to lock myself up and be left alone for hours at a time – nobody messes with you when you are doing work that’ll get them money back! People would become especially competent at things they thought beneath them if it meant they didn’t have to do these reports and face the wrath of the VP of Finance when they (inevitably) got it wrong.
Some of it was tedious and boring, a matter of putting it together in some cohesive fashion that could be easily audited. The problem was that it was never handed to you ready to go; I had to do a lot of forensic work. To get through it my mind wandered a lot, and that was not helpful. I had to focus and also be able to be somewhere else to survive the experience without going insane from the inanity of it all – especially when you realized that some of these people spent more on drinks a month than I did on groceries.
So as I put the receipts in order and created a sturdy ancillary document for the report, I fantasized about what I used to refer to as Mt. St. Pippen – six feet and eight inches of solid, rich chocolaty manhood. I know, I know, but it kept me steadily going at it with a gusto not usually witnessed in financial matters.
I’m neck deep in production for one of three big projects for the year. It is tedious and mind numbing. I’ve retired the zenith of my dreams from so long ago and gone in a softer and gentler route, a path of beauty that screams geek…
It’s awesome but he keeps slowing me down!
What's love got to do with it?
For some reason I can’t begin to fathom someone sent me an e-mail asking for a definition to love. Ay, there’s the rub! Throw an eternal question, I say, and you never know what you’ll get.
There’s the Louie DiPalma definition, “The end of happiness!”
Love is a double-edged sword. A mother’s kiss. Respect. The proverbial thunderbolt.
Artists, poets, songwriters, philosophers, and millions of others of every age, color and creed have been asking that same question for millennia. Somehow she thought a quick e-mail would settle the deal once and for all.
I’m not sure what the sender of the message had in mind, but I’m fairly certain she was not counting on my response and she’s probably rounding up the rest of the distribution list for a prayer meeting on my behalf.
My first instinct, uncensored answer was this:
[Love is...] A delusion or a force of nature. You know, like god… Why?
I heart Lee Pace!
I awoke hopelessly in love with Lee Pace.
“
Pushing Daisies” was adorable. His role on “
Miss Pettigrew” had its charm. But it was “
The Fall” that made me swoon.
His was a deeply flawed character, suicidal and manipulative, to be sure. That wasn’t it.
I saw the preview and was pulled in by the colorful fantasy. (If I ever get married, I soooooo want that headpiece!) There was a profound terror that watching this movie would reignite nightmares – especially so close to Easter. Having spent such a large portion of my days in hospitals, I knew I’d identify with the little girl. She even looked a little bit like I did then.
But instead of the painful memories, I was left with the state of wonder that every child manages to retain through the most damaging experiences.
There was a point when I was almost transported, with a young doctor putting me back to bedand telling some ridiculous fairy tale he was making up as he went along -- something about the moon -- as he waited for me to fall asleep, his head resting on the pillow next to mine, while I played with his hair and listened to his comforting nonsense...
Plus Lee Pace looks hot in gauchos.
It’s Spring!
I know because there are pretty tulips in the tiny garden next door. The tree is blooming, with thousands of beautiful and lethal white buds littering our stoop. My eyes are tearing, my nose is leaky, I have a semi-permanent tickle in my throat, my voice is cracking (when I do have a voice), I have lava head and I’m pretty sure I am fighting a sinus infection, I’m a sneeze machine and I keep coughing up hairballs.
God bless, it’s Spring!
Here’s the thing about April: if it’s not the pollen, it’s the mold.
This too shall pass, of course. It might take a couple of weeks while my body readjusts to the weather changes. It’s the journey that will kill you!
Still, what’s to bitch about?
It’s Spring!
Dreams and words and colors and music
When I was a little girl, the highlight of my days was often lunch. I’d sit to eat and on the radio, one of Puerto Rico’s preeminent writer’s and griot of folkloric tales would read one of his stories (sometimes he’d choose someone else’s). His name was Abelardo Díaz Alfaro and he was my personal storyteller. He helped fill my head with colorful imagery and my ear with a multicultural argot that carried percussion and strings and even a brass section.
I love short stories and mourn the fact that there is not a bigger market for it.
I just finished Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” and for a quick second wondered,
“How do I follow that?!” Well, with more Gaiman, of course!
So I just picked up “Fragile Things.” I’m reading his introduction and feeling energized with growing levels of expectant electricity. At the same time, I realize that I couldn’t compete with that man’s brain if all the god’s banned together and injected me with brilliance. And I am also extremely jealous that he has read a lot more than I ever could – even if I read nonstop from now until my last breath!
That last part is all on me. Somewhere I stopped reading and took up other things, many I shouldn’t have done. No regrets though, I can just write about them now.
Novels are ambitious works of art, but short stories fuel the imagination and my dreams. I look forward to a new cast of characters and dreamscapes!
Bunnycide makes it all better
On Friday, I stopped at The Family Store and bought exactly 8 shrimp. They were jumbos and absolutely beautiful. Sam seasoned them for me and my intention was to grill them.
By the time the late evening rolled around, I had decided that the shrimp would be made al ajillo (in a garlic sauce). By Saturday, it morphed into a less classic garlic sauce but still quite succulent treat.
I made white rice and used the leftover blanched green bean and carrot salad in mustard dressing that Mom had made earlier in the week to flank a row of shrimp. It made for a beautiful presentation, but it didn’t occur to me to photograph it…
I cooked the shrimp in a little bit of olive oil and butter and removed from the heat once they started to get pink (a couple of minutes on each side). Then I sauteed finely chopped garlic until golden, added capers, cracked pepper, butter and parsley and brought to a quick boil, put the shrimp back in and a dash of lemon juice and covered for another minute and turned it off. The shrimp finished cooking in the liquid while I plated.
Tonight I have lamb kebabs. These will be grilled. The question is what the side dish will be. Spanish potatoes? Pasta? Couscous? Rice (again?) with peas? I’m too hungry to think about it right now.
Speaking of food, the new column is now up at barbarabretton.com (link on the nav bar at right). It's a little different than previous columns (you'll see) but it is highly recommended.
For the moment, I am happy to bite the head off a Peep bunny -- while making disturbing, horrified screaming noises that mute once the head enters the mouth lair of the dragon. Mom impaled the bunny on a stick and the bottom of the lollypop is a marshmallow dipped in chocolate and sprinkled with pretty jimmies. Once I'm done with my bunnycide, I will rethink dinner.
Update: I went with modified French fries – which start out as French fries (not too crunchy, just till golden) and are set aside – then minced garlic is quickly browned in olive oil. The fries go back in, with thin slices of salad olives with pimentos and half a cup of chicken stock with red wine vinegar (to taste) and lots of pepper. Cook uncovered until liquid evaporates and repeat with another half cup of liquid. Finally, top with fresh parsley and cover (off the flame). It’s tasty!
The Easter Bunny rocks the house!
When I was a little girl one of the greatest joys was opening the boxes that came addressed to me, from Mom. She was my Santa Claus, my Easter Bunny, my Tooth Fairy, my Fairy Godmother… The Easter baskets were absolute works of art that perfectly evoked joy. Pure, unadulterated joy in a stamped box!
This is not difficult to achieve if you have ever experienced joy yourself and if you are capable of giving for the express purpose to invoke bliss.
Tonight, we opened such a box from a friend that literally sent us Easter in a box. I am fairly sure Mom and I had simultaneous reveries of new dresses and bonnets and the simple pleasures of spring.
Just a friendly reminder that even when things don’t go your way, there are blessings – not the goodies within, thou the bejeweled box of truffles is
priceless! – but that there is love and support in the family you make for yourself.
I celebrate chocolate
The very idea of holy week is painful to me.
My earliest memory of Good Friday was a passion play in Puerto Rico. The crowd was dozens deep, mostly I saw penitent kneecaps. Then it got interesting: if the bloody Christ wasn’t enough to freak me out (I was about 2 ½), or the keening women following closely behind, the Roman soldiers had, for some reason, been outfitted with black hoods and all I remember after spotting two coming my way was a scream that propelled my little body like a tiny rocket. I was sprinting for my life and dozens of hands reached out to grab me and stop me, but I managed to dodge them, continue my terrified screech and run faster.
A few years down the road, on Easter Sunday I had a little accident that sent me to the emergency room and I remained in the hospital for a very long stay. I had to learn to walk all over again. There were tears, fears, recriminations. Atheists prayed, the devout fell into depression. Old (bad) habits resurfaced and it marked the beginning of the end of what had been a happy family unit to my naïve eye.
Later still, the endless, joyless masses and the admonitions that we could not even play because it was disrespectful to god were just another nail in the coffin of my already iffy religiosity.
Years later, it signified a trek to New Jersey for “family time” – to this day, the very mention of Jersey City creates a huge knot that encompasses my whole being and gives me an instant migraine.
Hosannah!
Thank goodness for pagans and chocolate or this holiday would be positively unbearable.
It's Spring! (Yay.)
Today had a sort of psychotic quality to it.
When I left this morning, it felt around 40º and it was cool but comfortable. By the time I reached downtown, howling winds came upon us like band of icy demons on a mission to steal our souls and it felt raw and somewhere in the low 30s.
During my mid-morning break, the sun was shining and it felt like the temperature had risen. In the time it took me to go across the street and retrieve some cash from the ATM, the sun was hiding under cloud cover, the winds returned and my hands and ears – which were exposed – became a lovely shade of crimson.
When I went out to lunch, it was snowing on me. After I did a few minutes of shopping, I returned to the surface streets and it rained on me. Again, the temperatures felt as if it’d dropped a good 20-degrees.
At the office it was a stifling 81º (at last count, it may have gone higher). I was stunned most of the afternoon and even got a nosebleed!
I’m telling you, man.
They’re trying to kill me.
Easter: cancelled and then dipped in chocolate
Since her injury a couple of weeks ago, Mom has had good days and rough ones. Last week, after going out for a spell, her foot swelled and she started limping again.
I told her she needed to consider that since neither one of us is 18 anymore it might take longer for our bodies to heal… I even tried to forbid her from standing longer than the minute and a half it takes to hobble to the bathroom.
Of course, she laughed at me.
(For the record, there is no point in trying to forbid a Watley anything. We won’t listen and generally feel you should go frak yourselves. Laughter is the lesser of the weapons we’ll throw at you if you try to forbid us. Ours is a running joke on an old Woody Allen movie, Manhattan Murder Mystery: "I forbid you! I forbid you to go! I'm forbidding it! Is that what you do when I forbid you? I'm not going to be forbidding you a lot."
She also sadly commented that she’d just have to cancel Easter. This would be the first time in time immemorial since this is so. But it’s not a complete cancellation. She made lollipops and chocolates (adorable). I suppose it was easier to stand in place for clips of time than the back and forth of preparing and baking and then decorating cookies.
I am packing the stuff now to mail out tomorrow. She is slightly dissatisfied she couldn’t yield her usual bounty of goodies, but pleased she can share a little joy dipped in chocolate and festive sprinkles shaped like bunnies and chicks and tie-dye butterflies.
I remain in complete awe of the woman. I want to be just like my Mommy if I grow up!
Not a food snob!
I have been beating my head against an air wall for weeks, trying to come up with a good topic for my food column over at barbarabretton.com. I think the last idea I grasped at was mangoes. I love the fruit but I couldn’t make myself write about them. I was out of inspiration…
Then Friday night we finally got the Penelope Casas cookbook that was pending from our Boxing Day shopping spree. I noticed that for the third or fourth time this past year, I have opened a book to find a recipe with canned tuna as one of the main ingredients.
Earlier,
Barbara had sent me a newsletter that included a thirteen-page article on premium canned tuna. This prompted a conversation with Mom and the idea that I needed to do something with this newfound information.
This morning it all came together in my head, the product of an internal monologue on food snobbery. I submitted it tonight and I’ll link to it when it is up.
The other highlight of my day was the lamb kebab lunch. I know it sounds silly but the meat is so tender it literally melts in your mouth. The yogurt sauce that coats it with some heat element (cayenne, I think) just makes the onions sweeter… To give you an image of food porn at its very best check out Sam’s
gallery and you might come close to understanding why I can’t shut up about his food. (You can reset the timer for each image, I recommend 5 seconds – make it last. Play a little Barry White in the background. Enjoy!)
April Fool's Classic
Back in the land of the upright (as in “on two feet” not necessarily respectable), I found myself as sneezy and sniffly as the rest of the poor schlubs.
It was a dark and wet day, cold and damp. Nobody can manage to look attractive under those clouds.
Google’s CADIE had me laughing all day long. It was all sweet, though I thought they’d hit genius by the time they rolled out the website with the panda wallpaper. Then I caught the YouTube channel (OMG, is that Tricia?! Tricia is Google’s Head Six!), and I laughed my ass off – from the HAL parody, to the AI parroting Gordon Gecko, to my favorite moment in “Blade Runner.”
It made me miss some of my old friends. Somehow it was little consolation that across the land and a few oceans they were doing the same thing, following links and enjoying the elaborate
in-joke.
One of my co-workers sent me this e-mail and it cracked me up because it was so darn unexpected (despite the groan factor, there was a perverse delight to it):
I spent about an hour today at the Trader Joe’s in Cobble Hill. I’ve been meaning to go in there for the longest time and today, wanting to escape in the worst way possible, I went grocery shopping.
I went to the lab today for my blood test. I tried not fret about it, but I truly hate needles. I’d be the worst junkie on Earth. “We’re getting high? Wooooooo! Wait, we gotta shoot up? Yeah, screw it, I can live with reality.”
I spent several hours at the doctor’s office this morning, just sitting around waiting for a test that takes a full minute and a half to do. Of course, I got my money’s worth: the tech did it 3 different times. She even looked horrified and consulted a doctor who seemed unimpressed by the results… The last time that happened, I heard my doctor refer to the tech as a complete idiot and walked me over to the EKG room and did it herself.
I was waiting for the bus and watched a young woman crossing the street, her colorful skirt flowing in the wind and creating a spectacle of spring in the living flesh. She was a goddess!
Years ago, as a result of extraordinary skills no one would’ve guessed I possessed, I somehow got stuck doing everybody’s expense accounts (yes, the girl that has trouble counting past 10 unless she does it in Spanish and s l o w l y). According to the finance guys, my reports were things of absolute beauty. They even printed a copy of one of them and would hand them to new employees as an example of what was acceptable. You haven't lived until you see finance geeks all atwitter! It was beyond bizarre.
For some reason I can’t begin to fathom someone sent me an e-mail asking for a definition to love. Ay, there’s the rub! Throw an eternal question, I say, and you never know what you’ll get.
I awoke hopelessly in love with Lee Pace.
I know because there are pretty tulips in the tiny garden next door. The tree is blooming, with thousands of beautiful and lethal white buds littering our stoop. My eyes are tearing, my nose is leaky, I have a semi-permanent tickle in my throat, my voice is cracking (when I do have a voice), I have lava head and I’m pretty sure I am fighting a sinus infection, I’m a sneeze machine and I keep coughing up hairballs.
When I was a little girl, the highlight of my days was often lunch. I’d sit to eat and on the radio, one of Puerto Rico’s preeminent writer’s and griot of folkloric tales would read one of his stories (sometimes he’d choose someone else’s). His name was Abelardo Díaz Alfaro and he was my personal storyteller. He helped fill my head with colorful imagery and my ear with a multicultural argot that carried percussion and strings and even a brass section.
On Friday, I stopped at The Family Store and bought exactly 8 shrimp. They were jumbos and absolutely beautiful. Sam seasoned them for me and my intention was to grill them.
When I was a little girl one of the greatest joys was opening the boxes that came addressed to me, from Mom. She was my Santa Claus, my Easter Bunny, my Tooth Fairy, my Fairy Godmother… The Easter baskets were absolute works of art that perfectly evoked joy. Pure, unadulterated joy in a stamped box!
The very idea of holy week is painful to me.
Today had a sort of psychotic quality to it.
I have been beating my head against an air wall for weeks, trying to come up with a good topic for my food column over at barbarabretton.com. I think the last idea I grasped at was mangoes. I love the fruit but I couldn’t make myself write about them. I was out of inspiration…
Back in the land of the upright (as in “on two feet” not necessarily respectable), I found myself as sneezy and sniffly as the rest of the poor schlubs.
