uh, stuff
by shoshanna
1. This photo filled me with the kind of tranquil happiness that calms the palpitations of a lifelong neorotic.
2. You can go to Projections and see an awesome video of the Panic New Year's Party 2005. Man, I missed out. Also on projections is a reading from a zine I wrote almost two years ago. It's embarrassing and incriminating. The harder I try to bury my zine involvement in the past, the more vengefully it comes back to haunt me. Well, I guess it's probably a good thing that it wasn't totally forgettable. Thanks to Mikey for finding and posting the reading. It's part of the IPRC Audiozine.
3. Kevin is the best boyfriend ever.
Posted on January 28, 2005 | Comments (0)
A Gross Story
by shoshanna
There's this vent in my bathroom that's connected to some airshaft that ends up in one of those jiffy pop-looking chimneys on the roof. Everybody else's bathroom or kitchen vents from the apartments above and next to mine are also connected to the air shaft. The air shaft basically functions as a speaking tube and you can hear anything anybody says or does in the general vicinity of a vent. Usually you hear people talking or playing the radio or TV. There was one guy with a smoker's cough. It was pretty scary and disgusting. A while later somebody else had a cough, a woman. It woke me up in the middle of the night. Hack, hack, hack. I got up, went over and shut the bathroom door, and went back to bed. In the morning, I looked out the window to see what the weather was like. The window looks directly onto the roof of the adjoining garage, which comes up to a couple inches below the bottom of the window. So I looked out, and there were big fat globs of phlegm all over the roof outside the window.
Rad.
Posted on January 26, 2005 | Comments (4)
ice!
by shoshanna
We were iced in, but only for a day. After last year's marathon snow and ice shutdown week, the brevity of the freeze was both a relief and a disappointment. It was fun and quaint being stuck inside, wearing pajamas, making cookies, and gazing out at the layer of ice that covered the city like glaze on a donut. I read Henry James while Kevin did stuff to his computers that I didn't understand. Schuyler played Half Life II. It was sweet and cozy as all hell to spend the day indoors with Kevin, but on the other hand, I don't know how much more domestic confinement our relationship would have been able to take. The one really annoying thing is that now the roads will be full of gravel for the next six months, which really sucks for us bike riders. They should have used salt, or nerds, or something.
Posted on January 17, 2005 | Comments (0)
Yes, I have no computer
by shoshanna
The old Toshiba laptop I was borrowing from Kevin died. It was sad. He took it away like a computer undertaker. I get much more done now. That's going to change, though, when I buy a new computer. I really want to get a Mac Mini and hook it up to my Mac Plus, but Kevin won't let me.
I am taking a hella wack class in the University Studies department. University Studies is the single most annoying thing about PSU. It makes me feel like a sullen 13-year-old and want to drop out of college. The idea is good, but the execution makes me want to slap people. Basically, instead of having a regular general education program, we have interdisciplinary classes in broad social disciplines like American Studies, 19th Century Studies and sexualities. The courses emphasize discussion, group work and "exploration." The way it generally goes is the professor will launch a discussion like, "What is humanity?" and she or he will inevitably say, "There are no right or wrong answers." Then people will say lots of disjointed things until somebody hits on what the professor had in mind, the right answer which supposedly didn't exist. I know the faculty wants to make education more inclusive, but when they pretend to encourage open discussion and then guide it toward a conclusion they already decided on, it just feels condescending. Like, either give us the topic and thesis up front and let us discuss its merits, or just have us talk about our feelings. Don't pull this camp counselor runaround crap on us.
I had a dream about living in a one-bedroom apartment instead of a studio. It was really nice. Then I woke up. I will probably not move out of my studio for several years. It could be worse, though. At least I have a bathroom.
Posted on January 13, 2005 | Comments (2)
pancakes
by shoshanna
I made myself pancakes today. Because I wanted them. I wanted corn pancakes because my mom and I used to make them in Berkeley. We usually made them from the Cafe Beaujolais cookbook, which calls for sifting and all kinds of things like that, but yields very good pancakes. We also made them once or twice from the recipe on the side of the Jiffy corn muffin box. They weren't as fluffy, but still delicious. Corn pancakes are almost always delicious.
One weekend morning me and my mom were cooking Cafe Beaujolais cornmeal pancakes in the kitchen of our godsend enormous rent controlled north Berkeley home, which was later sold, which sucked. We were frying pancakes and looking out the kitchen windows. The sky was kind of orange, and looking toward the hills, in the east, we saw a wide, flat, barrelly looking cloud of black smoke. It was evidence, we soon found out, of what the media named East Bay Firestorm, a rapidly spreading hill fire that burned about 3000 homes and killed 25 people. That was in 1991. Most of the houses have been rebuilt, but you can still see some scraggly black burned trees when you drive through the hills. It's weird because most of the houses that burned were those of the wealthy, and there was this attitude that even though it's terrible when anybody's house burns down, it was lucky that it happened to people in the hills with comprehensive insurance plans and not to the much less well-off people in the flats. Pressured to take full advantage of their insurance, people rebuilt their homes even more extravagantly than before, adding new luxuries and only stopping when they ran out of money, so you'd see things like glass shelves full of random expensive looking vases inside, and half-finished swimming pools outside. The fire is built into the memory and culture of the East Bay. There isn't really anything to say or do about it now, except for keeping dry brush within reasonable limits.
When I was visiting my mom in Berkeley this winter, we had breakfast at Rick & Ann's, a restaurant not far from the area that burned, at the foot of a road that goes through the hills. It's across the street from the Claremont Hotel, a huge, old, supposedly haunted resort that is a regional landmark or something. People were really worried about it burning down. It might have been the last extra motivation that caused the firefighters to finally get the fire under control, or maybe it's just a coincidence that the hotel was spared by a tiny margin. Across from the Claremont's tennis courts are a yummy frenchy bakery, a weekend warrior bike shop, one of the original Peet's shops, some other assorted yuppie shops, and Rick & Ann's.
My mom and I have streamlined our breakfast habit to one restaurant that we really like (Chester's in Walnut Square), and we rarely bother to go anywhere else. It would just be courting disappointment. But even incurable creatures of habit can get bored, so we checked out Rick & Ann's for the first time in years. My mom swears she saw Joseph Fiennes there. Anyway, it was a totally awesome dining experience. The dining room was light and airy, busy but more in a cozy way than an annoying way, and the staff was professional and efficient with the rush and had everything under control. The food was excellent. We ordered a decadent, cakey gingerbread waffle, chicken apple sausages, eggs with salsa, and amazing, incredible cornmeal pancakes. They were fat, moist, and so, so fluffy. Damn, were they good.
Since then I've been thinking about corn pancakes. I'm lazy and don't own a sifter, so I used a simpler recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook. I couldn't find it online and am too lazy to copy it here, but you can take any pancake recipe and substitute cornmeal for half the flour. It was surprisingly easy and successful. I also substituted soy for milk, which was no problem. The trickiest part was frying them in my relatively small (10") skillet - they tended to cook unevenly and stick together, so I had to turn them around in the pan and it was kind of a mess. It would probably be better, if you have a small pan, to make one big pancake at a time, or do silver dollar pancakes. Also, pay attention to the heat of the pan. Cast iron gets really hot really fast, and you can burn your pancakes. The one really annoying thing was that by the time I sat down to eat they were already getting cold. It might be a good idea to keep them warm in the oven.
Generally though, pancakes are apparently really easy and straightforward to make, and they're hella good, especially corn pancakes. Now that I don't work in retail and actually have weekends free, I will definitely have to start cooking them more often. Wanna come over for brunch?
Posted on January 2, 2005 | Comments (1)
Dancing Queen
by shoshanna
OMG! So, me and Jennifer were going to go on a hike in the gorge today, but it was so yucky out, so instead, we went to Oaks Park and went rollerskating! I can't believe how much fun it was! I'd never been to a roller rink before. When we got there, I could not even go two feet, and had to go around in the beginner pen. But soon I could glide around with Jennifer in the rink. She was very helpful and held my hand and kept me from falling over. I also made a new friend, the wall. It's carpeted and you can give it a big hug. Like, I would lose control and then smack into the wall, but it was nice and soft. We played a skating game and won free soda. Then we played the hoky poky, and then - this is the best part - we got the DJ to play Dancing Queen by Abba!!! It was like, the crowning moment of my whole life. It was so rad. And by then I could actually skate halfway decently, I mean like skate without wrenching Jennifer's arm out of her socket, so gliding around the rink, I really did feel like a dancing queen! We thought it would be pretty cool to take our boyfriends there on a double date, but they will probably never agree to that. Anyway, it was the best ever, and was the perfect way to enjoy the second-to-last day of winter break and the first day of a brand new year. Sweet!!!
P.S. The Dancing Queen thing was subconsciously inspired by Lisa Carver's excellent book of the same name. I think she talks about rollerskating to Dancing Queen in the book, and that's why it's called Dancing Queen.
Posted on January 1, 2005 | Comments (0)