April 2005 Archives
Paper bag of snacks
Cool air, one block to my house
Sometimes it's easy.
That was the constant refrain over the past weekend in suburban Maryland, where my family celebrated my cousins Harry and Grant's double bar mitzvah. I guess food is often a central theme of anybody's family gatherings, where people are removed from their typical duties and have nothing much to do but hang out, try to get along, and eat, so our family isn't exceptional in that way, but it's still nice to eat well. My uncle John showed me how to make hummus in a "food professor" and do it up all nice with the tahine and olive oil and olives around the side of the plate. John grilled the best jerk wings and Lebanese-style lamb (sad, but yummy) of all time, which accompanied the hummus and pita. My Grandma helped me find noodle kugel recipes in her big binder of recipes gleaned from newspapers, friends, and family, and on the day me and my dad were going to return to Oregon, she said she and Grandpa were going to buy me a present: a food processor. My family is cool like that.
I love hanging out in the student center and snooping around on other people's shared music libraries. Scrolling through "Funky-Carl-Medina," I find a bunch of classical stuff, some disco, Barbra Streisand, Beyoncé and Air, and that's just through the B's. Who is Funky Carl? I look around furtively for other people with laptops in the room. I have no idea who Carl is. I vow never to underestimate the student body again for at least 15 minutes.
Monet was all about painting a moment while it was going on. If he was painting a sunrise, once the sun was up and the sky was blue, he would be like, "I can't paint this anymore. It's over." I totally feel that. If something cool happens, I have to write about it while it's still happening, or at least while I'm still excited about it. A few days later, it might still be cool, but it just doesn't seem as relevant anymore.
I was going to write something about my latest internet fixation, Allrecipes.com, which I was totally dorking out about last week. It's like Friendster but for cooking, and has the most extensive, elaborate, painstakingly designed, customizable database of American suburban recipes I have ever seen. But now I don't feel like it, so I am just going to post a link to the recipe for the awesome gooey chicken enchiladas I made for dinner last weekend.
1. Sliced strawberries with cereal and milk
2. Chicken caesar salad
3. Subway vegetable cheese sandwiches
4. Macadamia nut and white chocolate cookies
5. Salty peanuts in the shell
6. Taro tapioca milk tea
7. Ramen with pork slices from a noodle bar
1. white mochas
2. microwave popcorn
3. gooey caramel dip for apples
4. fashion magazines
The more I have that I'm supposed to do, the less efficient I am at getting it done. I managed to do absolutely no homework today by mucking about town doing vain errands. I made sure to spend a good deal of time stressing out about moving. At the end of this month I'm moving out of my studio apartment, which I've inhabited for two years, and moving into a larger apartment with Kevin, where we will live until the end of the summer when we move out again and I go to France. Yeah! Moving rules! To cope with the stress I give Kevin a hard time, eat through my kitchen as fast as I can put food in my mouth, and go through mad cleaning frenzies, deluding myself that I can whittle my possessions down to, like, two suitcases. It's a constant battle between sentimentality and an ideal of rationalism that may or may not be achievable. The more I throw out old bottles of mouthwash and magazines I haven't looked at in two years, the more my dusty cassette collection seems to glare at me. There are some things you just can't get rid of.
And there are some you can. Like this one time, I was three and still devoted to my bottle, and my mom was like, "Seriously, enough already." I didn't know how I was going to live without it, but somehow I managed to walk with my mom to the dumpster and throw the bottles in, and afterwards it wasn't such a big deal, I just started drinking apple juice out of a cup. After so much moving around, and traveling, and splitting my time between two homes, I can take comfort in knowing that I can go to the store and get a toothbrush and come back and put it in the bathroom, and everything else will gradually build up around it again. If some small things that were supposed to be keys to unlock entire past seasons are tossed out or lost along the way to a new toothbrush, I know that I'll find them again when I go to a certain part of town or hear that one song or whatever. It's kind of like when you get the point of research, that it's less important to have information than to know how to find it. It's the same with stuff and memories, I think.
