Well! My musings on Mexican food in Europe generated an amazing amount of interest (four comments!). I am so glad we share this, my countrymen, my kinsmen, we few, we proud, we strong, we AMERICANS, Americans who love to distraction another culture’s food, considering it our own, considering it a taste of home, even as we fight passionately (not you and me, but others) to keep the people who invented that food off our shores forevermore (from the Onion: “Stop making delicious food I can’t stop eating and go back to Mexico”), it’s so fitting, it’s so “us,” you know? GIVE US TORTILLAS OR GIVE US DEATH.
I emailed my lifed partnered and told him to put a huge pot of beans to soak tomorrow morning so they’ll be ready to cook when I get home. I am going to eat a pound of pinto beans with corn tortillas and blackened tempeh and it’s going to be spicy as shit and I’m going to eat so much I get uncomfortable and then I’m going to have a warmed armagnac to help me digest. Thus, like the best American traditions, I will be combining a bunch of shit I half-assedly co-opted from other people (Mexicans, hippies, and the French: greatest triumvirate of cultures in history? You be the judge (by looking at that dinner I’m gonna have)).
Yesterday was my last day in the archive. I looked at some ballet programs and just felt like “Ugh, all these people died so long ago.” It depressed me, so then I spent 3 hours writing a bunch of job letters. The line between “exaggerating to make yourself sound fancier” and “just straight up sounding like an egomaniac” turns out to be a very fine one. How to convey that you are the world’s greatest genius when (a) you aren’t and (b) you can’t just SAY that? Truly the classic battle of academia.
Last night I had a really vivid dream that I was performing the song from Little Mermaid (“Up where they walk / up where they run / up where they STAY ALL DAY IN THE SUN”) at a huge, ornate, opulent opera house, and when I finished the entire crowd rose to its feet in a hysterically fervent standing ovation, but I felt like a fraud because the whole time I was singing my voice was coming out as late-period Dietrich Fischer-Diskau’s rich deep baritone and I felt I didn’t deserve the accolades because it wasn’t my real voice.
HMMMMMMM WHAT COULD THAT DREAM POSSIBLY MEAN?
