January 2006 Archives
Coworker: I have a pronounciation question for you. I'm trying to tell my friend over IM how to pronounce "shiva." What's the "ih" sound? How do I write that? What makes that "i" sound? Shiiiv...
Liz: Hmm..."shit?"
Coworker: Ha ha
Coworker: (types to friend)
Coworker: ...
Coworker: That's awful.
Liz: Or "shin."
Coworker: Yeah, that works, too.
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Krista, J, and I got ready for the big grilled cheese competition tomorrow by making a dinner that would put us in the right frame of mind.
I ate about one sandwich in 10 minutes, give or take. Plus some chips.
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Today I went out to brunch with Real Girl, who happened to be in my neck of the woods, and who bought me a belated birthday meal. I was excited that the weather turned drizzly because it allowed me to test out my brand new umbrella with vents that supposedly will not turn inside out in gusts of wind. I have thrown away enough $2 bodega umbrellas to make owning a fancy real umbrella a certifiable Event in my life. It is turquoise with a very grippy handle and works fabulously. So Real Girl and I moseyed in the rain and I made her buy some boots that she didn’t need but that were really cute and were so on sale that they practically bought themselves. Then she split to do laundry and I met up with some friends to see “Brokeback Mountain.”
Everyone told me how sad the movie was, so I was expecting it when I felt sad after the movie. What I wasn’t expecting is that it would have a lingering, delayed, sadness effect, so that four hours later when J and I were watching TV, I would think of the shirt in the closet and my eyes would all tear up and I would turn to J and say, “It was just so sad!”
A lot of time was spent on subways, this weekend, wishing I didn’t have to take subways anywhere. I’m eager for the spring to get here quick so that I can get back to riding my bike a lot and walking places just because it’s pleasant outside. I’m also eager for spring to get here so I can wear any of the hypothetical clothes I’ll be buying with some gift cards. I’m assuming these hypothetical clothes will be spring clothes because it is, oh, January and thus time to clear the stores of sweaters and long sleeves and bring in the spaghetti-strap dresses and flip-flops.
I am also eager for Wednesday, for Wednesday is the GoldenPalace.com World Grilled Cheese Eating Championship and Krista, which I are officially covering for Digest. Do you think the tables come equipped with ketchup?
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Take some noodles needed; put them into the enough boiling water evenly and separately; and stir the noodles slightly with chopsticks.
Begin cooking with strong fire for 1-2 minutes and then with moderate fire while adding some cold water, smooth and delicious noodles are ready to server.
Condiment can be added if desired; moreover, the noodle can be prepared by frying, boiling, and cooling ( after boiling with water removed).
If frying, cook the noodles up to 80% done; separate the noodles the cooker and rinse them with cold water. Thus the noodles are more delicious.
I know that the humor behind foreign text being poorly translated into English isn’t exactly FRESH, but isn’t it entertaining each time you encounter it? I mean, I don’t look forward to the day when “Thus the noodles are more delicious” doesn’t register on my humor-meter.
Bad cats
Over the years, we have probably tried every cat-deterrent on the market to keep Max from climbing where he doesn’t belong. He loves being squirted with water, he rolled in the spray we put on furniture; his obsessive behavior borders on psychotic when he gets it in his head that he needs to be up on a shelf or eating the dinner off your plate. He responds most of the time (up to 80%) when I raise my voice and tell him sternly to, “Get down!” But finally, we stumbled upon the perfect scare tactic. This works every time and with such efficiency that Max runs in terror if he even thinks we’re reaching for it. Meet our new friend…party horn:
Tom brought us these horns on New Year’s Eve and we managed to keep them with us when we made our way home to our apartment. The first few times we blew them in the apartment, it was a little amusing how freaked out it made the cats. They freak out over a lot of things, though: the doorbell, someone knocking at the door, a buzzer from a game, a kitchen timer, etc. Usually it is Pinky who gets really nuts with the big tail and the hiding under the bed, while Max just skitters across the length of the wood floor. But, we soon realized, the party horn HAD THE POWER. Max not only REALLY didn’t like it, he quickly developed a Pavlovian response we’ve been looking for in a deterrent from day one. Now if he hops up onto the keyboard while you’re typing, you only have to pick up the horn and wave it at him and he bolts out the door. Luckily, he’s still too dumb (smart?) to hold onto this fear for long and he goes on to do something else. Leaving you cat-free to type or eat or have a bookcase that isn’t knocked over. Bliss!
Birthday horn, I love you.
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Let me tell you something about flaming drinks: yes. Also, you know what is surprising? When you order a frozen drink and the bartender jams a straw into the middle of the drink and then fills the straw with some ungodly strong liquor and you don’t see this happen? Your first sip is…a bit of a surprise. After you finish blowing fire across the room and replace the eyeballs that you squeezed out of their sockets, your friend Tom might tell you that, oh yeah he saw something on some show about some tiki bar doing that, ha ha.
Heather joined us later and gave me what might be the best present, if not the most obscure, I’ve ever received: two tubes of Toms of Maine toothpaste and a bar of fancy chocolate. It takes someone who’s known you for 17 years to know that you love some Toms of Maine toothpaste but maybe don’t splurge on it like you used to. This is a friend who appreciates the subtle generosity of a practical gift. My gifts were all about practicality this year. In addition to the kitchen gear, I also got a kick ass yoga outfit (thanks, Krista!), cookies from one of my favorite bakeries (thanks, Christina and Penny!), clothing gift certificates, a cookbook, and a spatula/whisk/gripper tool (which came looking a little used. Thanks, Grandma!).
Which "Lost" star was aware that it was my birthday? Flickr tells no lie.
I am still slammed at work, working extra hard to finish this “being funny” project. I came to the conclusion that the more stressed out you are about being funny, the less funny the thing you are trying to make funny actually seems, regardless of actual funniness to a later, more relaxed audience. I’m not sure if this is good or not.
J and I just got back from a meeting with someone who is a bit of an eccentric. She invited us for dinner, but then spent the first half hour we were there pulling out random vegetarian things (low-sodium crackers! Rice cakes! Sour cream!) out of cabinets and tossing them on the counter for us to help ourselves to. This included uncommented-upon incidents where she pulled a bag of corn chips out of the fridge and cooked a pile of phyllo dough triangles in a microwave. She gave J a piece of frozen cheesecake for dessert. I drank ¾ of the bottle of wine I brought.
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In this picture I seem to be a little preoccupied with a present. And I may have recently spilled fruit punch all over the table. And am I eating a giant corn chip, too? Or is that a cookie of some kind? When did my mom wear her watch on the outside of her sleeve?
We had our holiday lunch today (delayed from the transit strike), and between the impending birthday celebrations tonight and the glass of wine with lunch, I’m having trouble concentrating on work. Although if you know me in real life, you may know that what I’m working on is a strange, strange work thing to have to do. It involves me having to be funny. Which is hard to do when it is a task!
Impending birthday celebrations involve going to dinner and a gathering at a tiki bar. Let it be known: I’m a sucker for a drink with an umbrella. Or a little plastic monkey. Umbrellas and little plastic monkeys make everything more fun. I’m also scoring TWO out-of-town guests for the festivities, so lucky me. I count that among my gifts, which so far include a pizza stone, a pizza peel, a silicone whisk, and an iron skillet. I guess it’s a cooking kind of birthday, more lucky me.
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Tomorrow, however...tomorrow is my birthday and I will post up something nice for you.
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It was almost midnight. I’d been on the computer or watching television or movies almost the entire day. “That,” I said to J, “is exactly what has happened to my brain today.”
I put myself on a television-ban the next day, which lasted all the way until “The Bachelor in Paris” came on and I watched two hours of it in row. I don’t even like this show! At least the first couple shows of the season are still full of the crazies, which are always fun to watch. That’s my whole excuse: crazy people are entertaining. This is also my excuse for watching two hours of “American Idol” last night. I did cut it with some “Scrubs,” because by the third set of singing siblings, even bad singing starts to sound bad.
I’m still on track for reading a book a week (I know it’s only the third week, shut up), but my question is: when do I read my New Yorkers? Do so many New Yorkers count as a book?
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Liz: Okay, if I asked you to get me a Slurpee, and you went and the only flavors they had were Coke, Crystal Light, or banana, which would you choose for me? J: Crystal Light. Liz: What? Why? Crystal Light is disgusting in Slurpee form. Banana is the answer! J: Yeah, but it’s fake banana flavor. Liz: But you know me! I love fake banana. I always eat the bananas out of the Runts. J: Sorry. Liz: Crystal Light? That’s just so gross. It’s like a highly condensed slush of NurtaSweet. Blech. J: … Liz: That’s what Willow thought I’d want, too. When we were in Denver I asked for a Slurpee and faced with those choices, she brought me Crystal Light. J: I think it’s because you think: Slurpee = fruit flavored, and Crystal Light’s the most fruity seeming choice from those three. Liz: I guess so. But it’s just such a bad idea for a Slurpee. I can’t believe you’d pass up banana for Crystal Light. J: Look, I didn’t even get you this Slurpee! Liz: I know, I know. But, I mean, would you drink it? J: No! Liz: See! Willow wouldn’t drink any either.
--------I’m totally excited for the upcoming grilled cheese eating competition in New York. If I continue to attend eating competitions, does that count as a hobby? Krista and I spent a fevered few days trying to figure out if it was reasonable for us to go to Vegas for the Big Daddy Burger competition (9 pounds) on the 21st. Ultimately, no, it wasn’t. It seems as though the competition is notorious for comparing the size of the burger to David Hasselhoff’s head and now they are out to prove it by convincing the man himself to agree to a “(non-surgical) weighing procedure.” Now if they were doing that AT the competition, that might have been enough to persuade us.
My dad sends me email forwards constantly, so I didn’t think much of it when he sent me this one about an artist who’d locked his feet up in chains in order to draw them, and then proceeded to lose the key was reduced to hopping 12 hours across a desert to get help. However, Ahe brought my attention to another article on the guy, this time alerting me that we actually went to school with him. This is a guy who was in my dorm freshman year, with whom I had multiple classes, and who I may have drunkenly kissed the first week of college. Well, anyway: that’s how THAT turned out. Haa. Don’t you wish you could travel back in time every once in awhile to give yourself some fabulous insights into other people’s futures?
In other news…dun…dun…DUNUH: New Lost! New Project Runway! Could this Wednesday night television BE any better? I don’t think so. Last night at dinner some of the ladies were crabbing about how much sports their boyfriends watch* and how utterly time consuming it is. One said that if her boyfriend plunks down for two football games, it’s eight hours of television watching and she doesn’t understand how he could do that for so long. I agreed, but then took it back when I thought about all the hypothetical marathon showings of television series that I would totally sit down and watch for eight hours. Time flies when you’re watching good TV.
*Dear J,
Thank you for having no interest in watching professional sports on the television. I apologize for watching Sex and the City even though it makes you leave the room.
Love, Liz
We caught ‘Big Fish” on television over the weekend and I sat there and watched the whole thing, bawling at the end just like the first time I saw it. (A lot of my friends who I recommended the movie to ended up h-a-t-i-n-g it, so some of you reading this are probably in that camp: hi.) But I think what I liked best about the movie was the subtext of this man having a life fraught with complicated emotions that he was only able to relay through a mythology he built and maintained for himself. The son doesn’t get it until the end, but it isn’t about the stories themselves, but what he was trying to say with those stories.
It’s nice for the movie and all; I’m not sure how I’d really react to a relative or friend who could only tell me things through complicated, obviously false stories. But how far do we extend that expectation of honesty to memoir writers? Isn’t it their life they’re telling us about? And even if some facts are mushed around or even blatantly wrong, should we forgive them the myth they’ve decided to build for themselves?
And what if it extends to an ENTIRE PERSON? The JT Leroy thing really hits me in a strange way. It’s that the writer were made up, but more than that, it was that the entire person was made up. I have friends who have met him! J was there behind the scenes when he ducked out from a reading he was supposed to do for McSweeney’s. A lot of people believe the people behind the fabrication of this character with AIDS are guilty of exploiting the public’s generosity and compassion for the disease. Have all the writers here gone too far, or some more guilty than others?
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One of those dreams woke me up last night, and it hadn’t occurred to me until then how strange these nightmares are. Do other people have recurring dreams that manifest themselves physically? It’s not really even the dream that’s recurring for me. I lay there in the dark thinking that if a stranger were telling me about dreams like these, I would assume they had grown from some early trauma to the body that had to do with the lower back. But since my first memory is having one of these dreams, I don’t think my mind was forming impressions before then. Could my body have been? And really, what could have happened at such a young that would have given me such a deep bodily memory?
The other half of that first memory is waking up from the dream. I was young enough to be in a crib, because I remember looking through the bars. My mom was sitting across the room in an old striped pink chair we had and she looked up and smiled at me. So the memory, while having a weird nightmare mixed in, is actually a pleasant one for me, thinking of my mom watching over me as I slept. Last night I felt similar warmth of safety, having J sleeping soundly next to me. I don’t think there is anything more comforting than having someone you love in the room with you when you wake up from a bad dream.
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Remember Halloween? Remember decapitated cookie pictures I promised but never delivered? Here they are! Krista finally uploaded them, and after picking myself off the floor from where I'd fallen in surprise, I quickly jammed them into a Flickr set. Here is another fun Flickr set, Mike's visual food diary he's just started. I love it! UPDATED TO ADD: This is actually part of a bigger project where Mike is trying to lose 30 pounds faster than his friend Les can gain 30 pounds. Les's food diary is here. You can read the details of the competition on Mike's blog.
Also I am too lazy to change the book I am reading. I finished Zadie Smith some time ago and have read The Secret History and Garlic and Sapphires since then. I liked both of those better the On Beauty, which I had to work very hard at enjoying. In the end, too hard. I suspected it when I couldn't finish White Teeth, and think I've confirmed it here: I am not a Zadie Smith fan.
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Turns out going out to dinner, playing a psychology board game, getting drunk on Celebration Ale, and watching fireworks from the roof while blowing Happy Birthday horns at pedestrians is a PERFECT New Year's Eve!
I know we're supposed to be making resolutions, but I can't think of any. It's less that I can't think of anything to improve upon, and more I can't think of anything that sounds both doable and fun. Like, I should probably not let junk mail pile up so much, but in the end my life will just not be better off because I sorted mail more often. I would like to put travel down somewhere, but funds are looking low for awhile. Reading is always good, but I'm doing that constantly anyway. I like Sally's goal of reading a book a week, and while I'm not sure I can do that, I'm curious to see what I log in at. Having a list of books I've read over the past year would be fun, too, so perhaps I'll just be a copycat. Flattery!
Perhaps a goal would be to question things more. Not necessarily in the big scope of things (though of course that's important; no reason to lose the cynic) but about lots of little things we take for granted in our daily lives. Like cashews, for instance. Think for a moment what you believe a shelled cashew looks like. Do you have an idea? Are you thinking big tough shell? Are you thinking underground? It doesn't matter, because unless you are one of the people I've thrust this knowledge upon in the past weeks or you have somehow picked this trivia up somewhere in your life, YOU HAVE NO IDEA. Are you ready for this? Let me introduce you to the cashew apple:
The apple grows on a tree and produces its seed at the bottom of the fruit. The apple is edible, but spoils quickly. The cashew is in that fibrous casing and has to be heated when removed to get rid of caustic oil that gets in it when shelled.
I mean: HONESTLY. I had no idea! Is that not the most bizarre thing you've seen?
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