Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
What a lovely weekend. On Saturday I got to see Moss and Julia and Sumana for brunch (which was this really delicious baked egg thing with leeks and braised short rib, plus brioche doughnuts, yurm), then went to the Strand and came home to K., where we cooked asparagus and boiled new potatoes and lovely rich aromatic chicken soup and then watched a ridiculous CGI documentary about sea scorpions and shieldfish and burrowing tusky reptiles.
Our boiler had been out for two days, meaning no heat or hot water, but on Sunday it was back on, and I had a nice hot shower, hung out with K. for a bit talking about books (we've both been on a major fiction binge lately), then went downtown to meet two steno students and show them all the stuff in my CART bag, including the semi-useful new version of Plover (http://ploversteno.blogspot.com for details), and came home two hours later with a bag of madeleines and brownies baked by one of the students. K. and I had breakfast for dinner (potatoes, toast, and eggs), then we tidied the apartment a bit and I transcribed five ophthalmology interviews in time for bedtime around midnight. The cat has been a finch lately, waking us up every morning around 4:00 or 5:00, but today he settled down relatively quickly after a few squirts from the spray bottle and summary confiscation of his catnip gumball. It was a busy weekend, but somehow greatly restorative; I feel happy and full of momentum.
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11:19:41 AM,Monday 22 February 2010
One of the best photos ever taken of me. By K., of course.
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08:32:08 PM,Tuesday 16 February 2010
Me: The transcript says "A portrait of (inaudible) and his wife, Nouche."
K: That should be the title of your autobiography.
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07:30:16 PM,Saturday 13 February 2010
Two steps: Alone and alone.
A walk in the dust of a crater.
The bath that draws the pain out,
that draws it out and up and up,
to float there, trapped like vapor.
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09:33:33 PM,Friday 12 February 2010
I love Philip K. Dick. I find him pretty hard to read, which is common enough among the people I know who've read him. But man, the shapes he bends my brain into... It's got to be good for something. Here's an excerpt from an essay of his on The I Ching and Schizophrenia.
If you're totally schizophrenic now, by all means use the I Ching for everything, including telling you when to take a bath and when to open a can of cat tuna for your cat Rover. If you're partially schizophrenic (no names, please), then use it for some situations - but sparingly; don't rely on it inordinately: save it for Big Questions, such as, "Should I marry her or merely keep on living with her in sin?" etc. If you're not schizophrenic at all (those in this class step to the foot of the room, or however the expression, made up by you non schizophrenics, goes), kindly use the book a very, measured little - in controlled doses, along the lines of your wise, middle-class use of Gleam, or whatever that damn toothpaste calls itself._
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08:07:09 PM,Wednesday 10 February 2010
I walked past one of those little fake motorized racecar rides outside a store, where you put in a quarter and it goes up and down for five minutes. The car had all these fake sponsor stickers painted onto its chassis, and one of them read "Fairbanks Torque Converters". I liked the sound of it. Was there such a thing? Who took the notion to paint it on a little car ride? I googled it and found thousands of hits, but the entire first page seemed to be nothing but comment spam. The tenth hit led me to a page of comment spam that included dozens of imaginary companies besides Fairbanks, my favorite among them being "Hatshepsut Tooth Misidentification".
It remains a mystery, but I am delighted.
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02:04:46 PM,Sunday 31 January 2010
Who Was I Made From? A Guide For Parents of GE Kids
#picturebooksfromthefuture
(I post it here because I only use my Twitter account to keep up a boring sanitized businesslike front; I never get to play the games.)
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11:27:58 PM,Thursday 21 January 2010
So. The semester has started, my work situation has been nerve-wrackingly precarious for a week, but I'm more hopeful than I was that it'll turn out more or less okay. In less stressful news, K. and I saw an incredible show on Sunday that involved a symphonic orchestra playing David Bowie songs with a variety of incredible singers -- one a Broadway belter; one a creepy dude with a toothpick behind his ear; one who looked just like Manny-Moo from Black Books but had a beautiful white-hot rock scream; one who didn't know the words and made up for it by consulting a crib sheet, posing dramatically, warbling like a Weimar cabaret star, and then flashing her boobs on the final chord; one french horn player who sang and soloed in turn and appeared to have endless reservoirs of breath; and one gentleman who apparently lives in our neighborhood, who sported ravishing eye makeup and the best vocal Bowie imitation since Jemaine Clement. Then there was the band leader, who was adorable, and tried to get his old and proud-but-confused Iranian parents to come on stage and dance. It didn't work, but his little brother did come up dressed in a Jareth wig and did an extremely inept but charming performance of glass-ball sleight of hand. Also, David Bowie + bassoon solo = utter win. It was a wonderful night. But since then it's just been working and waiting and trying to get used to my new schedule, and bracing myself for what my new schedule will be when the axe falls one way or another. We shall see, we shall see.
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01:20:01 PM,Thursday 21 January 2010
Via Liz, a graph of health care costs and benefits that pretty much says it all.
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09:01:50 PM,Friday 15 January 2010
Just came back from an amazing tapas feast with my girl. One year married! My life is indescribably awesome.
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09:50:38 PM,Tuesday 12 January 2010
Ha! The background music in the Jeeves and Wooster TV show made a Lark Ascending joke, and I got it. I feel smrt.
Plaidder writes a wonderful entry on Holmes slash. It was my first fandom, starting around age 8, and until I discovered the internet at 12, I thought I had invented slash. An easy enough mistake to make, eh? Anyway, as usual, Plaidder says it all. Holmes still kicks around in my head pretty often, but I must say I'm very glad I'm not married to him.
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07:39:32 PM,Monday 4 January 2010
Epic 2000 - 2010 wrap-up post! This is gonna be long.
2000: New Year's Eve found me on a bus going from Missoula, Montana, to Sidney, Montana, 577 miles and 10 hours away. I went to visit my then-girlfriend, S. Even though we were living together in Annapolis, Maryland and were both home for Christmas break to visit our parents, we wanted to ring in the millennium together. It was actually a pretty good time; I met her mom and her mom's water dragon and climbed some snow-covered hay bales and played some cards and then got on the bus for another 10-hour drive the next day. That spring, though, our relationship continued rocky. S. didn't like Annapolis, so she convinced me to put in for a transfer to my college's other campus in Santa Fe. After getting the confirmation that I'd be transferring, she told me she'd decided to move to Austin, Texas, instead. Did this mean we were breaking up? Apparently not; just living in different cities. I finished my sophomore year, got enabled despite a tangled and much-sweated-over essay on the St. Matthew Passion (I'm still proud of its content, but the execution left a lot to be desired, and I spent my entire oral exam apologizing for it, which in hindsight was probably not the best strategy to employ.) S. and I went back to Bigfork for our second summer there, and then she went off to Austin while I moved into Polyhymnia, my new dorm in Santa Fe. Even though I missed Annapolis terribly and didn't have many friends except for Neil, who had transferred along with me, it was a damn good year academically. I liked all my tutors and my classmates and wound up really digging the material -- especially seminar and lab. In November, I voted in my first presidential election, having made sure to register in New Mexico rather than Montana. If you remember, New Mexico wound up going for Gore by a margin of 366 votes, so I'm glad I did, in spite of how it all turned out. Highlights of the year: Seeing the Remedios Varo exhibit in D.C. before the Millennium March on Washington; starting this blog (yay!); getting Jezebel:
(the only picture I have of her, though I think it was actually taken in 2001) and winning Rapelje (my vinegaroon; sadly no picture available) in a count-the-bugs contest.
2001: That spring, S. came to visit the College of Santa Fe, to see whether she'd like to apply. I was excited, because I thought if we were in the same city again we'd have a chance to pull the relationship out of the long-distance stasis it had fallen into. After her first night on campus, she told me that she was planning to move back to Fe and attend CSF, but that she and I were quits. Somehow, my brain still not having gotten the memo, I decided to visit her in Austin for spring break. Not the best idea I ever had, though the town itself was pretty great, and I was able to see Remi, who was living there at the time. Summer was another season at Bigfork, during which time S. and I sort of got together again, until I finally realized it was all kinds of not working and pulled the plug at last. I almost wonder if she got back together with me just so I'd have the chance to break it off myself; if so, I'm grateful, because it seemed to do the trick. I went back to Santa Fe feeling much better about the whole thing, even though we were in the same city again. September 11th was the one morning in my entire college career that I'd gotten up early, meditated, done all my math homework, and still had enough time before class to sit out in the sun contemplating the rightness of the universe. Then my music tutor told me what happened. Never did that again. Highlights of the year: Eating my first coconut lychee gummy; joining the SJC Torpedo Fish, a water polo team so inept that after two semesters of training we still weren't good enough to play an actual game against anyone else; finding a rhyme for "Antisthenus".
2002: The rest of my senior year was pretty uneventful. I continued to spend lots of time being a hermit in my room, missing Annapolis. I joined a jazz band. I wrote my senior essay on King Lear and suffered the agonies of the procrastinatory, but I made it out alive. My entire family came down to celebrate my graduation. I foolishly assumed that they would come say hi to me beforehand, so I didn't set my alarm clock and wound up almost missing the whole thing. When they called my name and I wasn't there, my brother legged it up the hill to my dorm room hollering, I sprang out of bed and put my gown on over nothing but my jaybird self, and I made it just in time to get my hood dead last. Oh, the humiliation. I was already feeling kind of depressed about having to leave college and, combined with the spectacle I'd made of myself, I spent most of the day bawling. The evening was fun, though.
We had prickly pear margaritas and good New Mexican food and sang bawdy songs and I decided everything would be okay. Then I had to figure out what to do next. When I finally looked at my SJC grades for the first time, I realized they weren't as bad as I'd feared. I'd wanted to be a doctor all through my childhood but discarded the idea when I met the other kids who wanted to be doctors in a pilot program I took in high school. After getting my BA, though, I couldn't think of anything else I'd like to do, so I applied for a bunch of post-bacc premedical programs to get the science credits I needed to apply to medical school. I got accepted to two of them: One at an all-girl college in Georgia, and one at a big public university in Maryland. I chose the second one because it would bring me closer to some of the people I'd left behind in Annapolis, and also because all-girl colleges scare the living sniz out of me. So off to Towson I went. I spent the summer in a dorm room, studying chemistry, eating Chef Boyardee, cheese-inna-can, and blue margarine, flirting with someone over the internet (who lived in New Mexico and whose existence I'd learned of... A month after leaving New Mexico), and generally feeling at sea. When the summer was over, I moved out of the dorm room into a hotel suite with a Dane and a Mongolian, studying a fistful of sciences (the program was intended to pack two years of science into one calendar year), learning cornetto, shawm, and curtal in the university's Early Music Ensemble, then burning out, freaking out, realizing I'd never make it, withdrawing from all my classes except the ensemble, spending a month in my windowless, bedless room trying and failing to write a NaNovel, and generally being a royal mess. With my tail between my legs, I left Towson in December and went back to Montana to figure out what on earth to do with my life, since doctoring was definitely out. Highlights of the year: Seeing my first live opera, Idomeneo, at the Washington National Opera House; road tripping from Santa Fe to Annapolis for Croquet -- 30 hours to get there, 24 hours to spend there, 30 hours to get back; riding the Greyhound bus from Baltimore to Missoula and back.
2003: My parents were happy to see me and weren't too mad about the tuition I'd wasted. (They bought a house when I was a kid and sold it when I graduated college, then gave me the option of using the money either to pay off my undergraduate student loans or to do the post-bacc year at Towson. I'm still paying off the loans, but I feel better about it than I would have if they'd spent their last penny on Towson.) I found a job working the night shift at a group home in East Missoula for developmentally disabled adults. I bought my first mp3 player and spent my nights off walking all over the valley from midnight until around 4:00 am, listening to music and enjoying the empty streets. I lived with my parents. I was careful not to make new friends or to reunite with old ones. I knew the pleasant torpor of early 20s slackiness would have to end soon, but I didn't know what was next. A few of my friends decided to join the Peace Corps, and I couldn't think of a better idea, so I signed up too. I knew a little French and wanted to learn Arabic, so I picked Morocco. I preferred digging ditches and doing other sanitation work, but I told them I could also teach English if I had to. That fall, as the application process was slowly moving ahead, I started noticing posts on my then-favorite LJ group, Queer Opera Punks (now mostly silent, sadly), from a new and shockingly witty member. She was an aspiring opera singer in New York City and her interests included Classical Latin, Syncretism, and William Gibson. I was, to say the least, intrigued. We started talking a bit, back and forth. I became more intrigued. I took a trip down to California to see Orfeo ed Euridice with Moss and Julia, and showed them her pictures and some things she'd written. They told me that if I didn't try to win her I was a fool. They were right, and I knew it. I started saying things like, "Well, I'm planning to take a trip to Maryland in spring, but I suppose I could swing by New York City on the way and see an opera..." And she started saying things like, "Well, if you're in the neighborhood anyway, perhaps we could have a coffee." "Or," I said, "You could come see the opera with me." "Or," she said, "You could sleep on my couch." That clinched it. The Peace Corps had maintained radio silence for many months. I started thinking about my upcoming trip to New York. Wheels were turning. Highlights of the Year: Winning NaNoWriMo for the first time; Seeing Ariadne Auf Naxos at the Met in NYC (several months before I'd made the online acquaintance of the girl in question) and getting a question accepted on the Met Opera Quiz; getting my tattoo in my first autonomous palindromic year.
2004: We had our first phone conversation on my birthday in March. We met for the first time in April. We saw Serse at City Opera and then I dragged her down to Annapolis and she met all my friends. I had set up a job interview, barely daring to think that I might actually contemplate moving to NYC, but I didn't get the job, and when I came back to K.'s place there was a message waiting for me that the Peace Corps had finally cleared all my documentation and I was due to ship out to Morocco sometime that summer. I broke down. When K. came into the room, we talked for a bit, and I realized that I had to try. I had to see what happened. When I got back to Montana I gave the Peace Corps my regrets. I had one more brief trip to New York in May, K. came to visit me in Montana for my brother's wedding in July, and then in August I moved to the city permanently. I got a job selling books at Shakespeare and Company, a block from K.'s college. I found some lovely roommates in a huge apartment in Washington Heights. Later I quit the bookselling job for a better-paying one, working the night shift as a personal care attendant for a retired lawyer with ALS. Unlike in Montana, when my graveyard schedule kept me more or less permanently nocturnal, I stayed up all night during the week and tried every weekend to wrench my sleep patterns around so that I could spend some time with K. It left me bleary and zombified, but happier than I'd been in years. Highlights of the year: Eating deep-fried hunks of coconut for the first time; sitting on the fire escape with K., watching the arguments and domino games and generally awesome street scenes of my neighborhood; learning how to play whist.
2005: Decided to apply to Hunter's MA program in British and American Literature. Preparatory to that, I took a really great class on poetry and short stories, studied feverishly for and finally acquitted myself pretty well on the GRE, revised my senior essay so that it wasn't quite so embarrassing, and generally kind of pulled myself together. The night shift thing was really wearing on me by that point, though, so when I found a freelance gig transcribing pre-production television audio, I made the change. The first few weeks were crazy busy, but then the work dried up, K. went off to work in Greece for a month, and I spent most of the summer sitting in my room every morning waiting for them to call me and tell me to come in, freaking out when they didn't call me (which happened more and more as the weeks wore on), and going into debt. Along the way I got my acceptance letter from Hunter, but realized that I couldn't keeping afloat as it was, and had no idea how I'd feed myself if I actually tried to go through with it. Realized that I liked typing, though, and started looking into opportunities in steno, after I found the sentence in the Wikipedia article that talked about CART. Sent off my resume to every transcription and captioning house in the city and got a job with one. Signed up for steno school and borrowed money from a family friend to buy a steno machine and pay off the debts I'd accumulated in the last few months of underemployment. Was finally on a day schedule, though work and steno school ate up most of my free time. Highlights of the year: Transcribing the Miss Georgia pageant; seeing Der Rosenkavalier, La Clemenza di Tito, and Avenue Q; Teslamania.
2006: More of the same. Got faster at steno, fought for and wangled more money from my employers, moved into an apartment with K. and without roommates (yay!), registered as domestic partners with the City of New York, hung out and was happy. Saw Taymor's Magic Flute. Got a new steno machine.
A transitional time. Highlights of the year: Going to Aquavit with K. for Valentine's Day and eating venison in pine broth; going to the NCRA Convention and meeting actual professional stenographers and stuff; my parents coming to visit.
2007: The bet I made with my brother when I was 16 that I wouldn't drink for 10 years came due, and I won! Dude still hasn't paid up, but I got a nice sense of smug satisfaction from it. I had some sipping whiskey and a mellow party in our tiny living room/kitchen. Shortly after that I passed my last 225 test at steno school. We saw Eddie Izzard at Radio City Music Hall. I interned with my CART mentor all that semester and labored to get my realtime up to snuff. In May, I went to Missoula and CARTed for my hard of hearing dad's 80th birthday. In June I started moonlighting on evenings and weekends with the theater captioning company. In August I quit my full-time job and started working as an actual professional freelance CART provider, and it was everything I ever wanted. Borne on the wings of hubris, I attempted NaNo again and failed. Still, the year ended on a high note, and I went home to visit my family in Montana for Christmas with my head held high. Highlights of the year: Going to a wedding of one of K.'s friends in Boston (and staying with Moss and Julia!) who had a photo booth with various costumey accoutrements; learning a tiny little bit of Python and writing my first dinky program; watching an earnest but not very good performance of Julius Caesar in Inwood Park get heckled by a catastrophically drunk gentleman who kept yelling "Hail Spartacus!" "Viva Cuba!" and "I am the warrior! I have the sword!"
2008: I kept working with the other CART provider for a semester, then went off on my own. I started studying ASL. I attempted NaNo and won! So did my favored presidential candidate, to my immense relief. We found a cat in the park. I continued to completely adore my job.
Highlights of the year: The Chanteysizer; tasting Miracle Berries; going to Dances of Vice with K. for what pretty much turned out to be our bachelor party (Martin came along as well, which was kickass) and watching a burlesque dancer pupate from a green cocoon into an orange monarch hoochy-fly.
2009: Married! Freaking married! Hell yes. You'd think it'd be all downhill from there, but it actually turned out to be pretty fantastic. (For me, anyway. Other people we knew and loved had a ridiculously rough year, and it was hard to see and not be able to help.) We saw Leonard Cohen. Twice! Also Steeleye Span. I finally passed the CCP. We went on our honeymoon to Montreal, which was unspeakably lovely. I found my coworking space and started studying Python in earnest with a tutor. (Plover is well on its way to being actually useful, you all will be surprised to hear.) K. finished up her degree. My mom came to stay for a couple of months, which made me very happy. I started playing violin with a harpsichordist, but had to give it up when work got busy. K. and I both got better at cooking and started making some seriously tasty dishes on a pretty regular basis. We worked and read and studied and exulted in our life together. Highlights of the year: Going home to Montana and having one more six-hour late night walk for old time's sake, though I didn't bring home any weevils; reading all the books in the seminar of a student I was CARTing for and getting so wrapped up in each night's conversation that I had to bite my tongue to keep from weighing in; ringing in the new year with K. and my first CART client and an old friend from St. John's (Who work at the same law firm together, in a building that also employs someone I carpooled with in middle school. NYC is weird.) and all their friends and relatives, eating fish soup and flipping through beautiful books and being generally blissed-out and hopeful for the year to come.
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05:23:16 PM,Friday 1 January 2009
I know that people do it to some degree even today with yogurt and things, but I like to think that the pharmakopion of the future will include hundreds of complex calibrated starter cultures full of friendly bacteria for various organs and body parts, to cure or fend off various unpleasant invasions of inimical flora. I like to think of humans as so many loaves of sourdough.
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09:46:48 PM,Tuesday 29 December 2009
Via Leonard.
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12:12:54 AM,Monday 28 December 2009
K: It's an egg sac timer. That's arguably useful if you're a frog, but not something I want in my food.
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06:49:51 PM,Sunday 27 December 2009
I've been reading a lot of genre fiction lately (mostly SF and mystery) and, while my brain keeps asking for more of it, I'm getting increasingly impatient with clunky, obvious writing. Time was I could ignore all that as long as it had a satisfying plot and/or setting, but I've about reached my limit. It's likely cyclical; I'm sure I'll be back in the pulp trough before long. I've always gone back to it before. But for now, can y'all recommend either some skillful, subtly written genre stuff (e.g., Sayers, Chandler, Butler) or some literary novels that go down relatively easy in the lassitude of wintertime (i.e., aren't unrelentingly grim, dense, or static; I think I could just barely handle someone along the lines of Iris Murdoch, but would prefer Robertson Davies or his ilk)?
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12:19:23 AM,Saturday 26 December 2009
Last night's dinner (photo by K., preparation by K. and me):
Sauteed spinach with garlic, grilled corn with herb butter, baked butternut squash, roasted potatoes with oregano, and homemade tzatziki on the side.
Quiet, sweet, and mellow.
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12:31:40 PM,Friday 25 December 2009
I think I will do one of those decade wrap-up posts in the next week or so, cliche as it may be. But Moss started this blog for me in 2000 (January 2000, if I remember correctly, though all the early entries got eaten, so the archives only go back as far as March), and my ex just sent me some pictures from that year.
