a la fin du journee

steak au poivre, mussels in a big blue pot, my erik's opera ... conversations about life and art and politics so animated that random englishmen ask to join in ... teeny tiny crumbling montreuil sur mer with its pre-medieval ramparts so small the town can be crossed in minutes ... madame renard (in france she is hunted with only her cunning to protect her) who gives me corn flakes/croissant avec confiture/suc d'orange for breakfast and says my french is very good ... ideas for short stories springing to mind ... train times to arras and paris for tomorrow en suite i will board the night train to rome ...

but what the @?#! is this soreness in my throat???????

To Do Before Leaving for Europe

the lists I typed up at the beginning of the week, designed to create an organized going-away so that I wouldn't be scrambling before my flight to Europe which departs at 8:15 PM on December 4th. As of the wee hours of 12/4, they stand:

To Pick Up:

• Batteries (two packs)
• Travel toothpaste (Tom's of Maine)
• long underwear (have enough clothes to layer)
• sneakers
• notebook
• new pepper spray (KMart?)
• offerings for the RBC, the Nonna and the Zio (for the latter, New York stuff from Chinatown?)

To Do: (please notice the glaring Have Not Yet Dones in red)

• Buy France 'n Italy Eurorail Pass
• Make hostel reservations
• Listen to more French CDs
• Arrange for Heifer's care (Jean/Frank and Diego)
• Pack
• Wash comforter/laundry
• Clean room
• Pay bills/rent
• Deposit money
• print out e-tickets, hostel confirmation, directions to the RBC's apartment
• Call family members in Italy
• Set aside important documents
• write "out of country" mass e-mail (pecking at it right now)
• remind the L that i'll be away
• Refill prescriptions
• Send "out of country" mass e-mail (in a minute, in a minute....)
• Renew library materials
• Turn in office expense form
• *Decide where the heck to go*

I Knead a Little Love

Only one of a feline's fascinating - or, if you're a hater, "odd" - habits is kneading its paws against a soft object - very often the tender flesh of a nearby human being. This "kneading" is almost always accompanied by loud, rattly purring, and sometimes even by a little drool. That purring is involved would make the action seem to be borne out of contentment, but what of the sharp, sometimes aggressive, pricking? As Freud would have it, the genesis of this baffling behavior harkens back to the feline's kittenhood, from a time when kitty was nestled near its warm mother and - assuming its mother wasn't some abusive shrew - was blissfully content. Not surprisingly, the impetus for this particular happiness comes from feeding time; kittens knead their hungry little paws against their mother's belly in order to stimulate milk flow. The mother cat relies on the kneading - and the resulting piggy purring - to know when her kitten has had enough. When an adult cat salivates and/or kneads its paws against a human's softer parts, it is deeply content and is associating the contentment with the old kneading action.

unfortunately, this kind of love can cause a little unwitting damage ... say, in the middle of the night when an adult cat decides to wake up a sleeping human by expressing her love in the most basic way she knows how:

Out of the shower, I couldn't figure out at first why I had such odd red marks on my belly (please, please, not a reaction to the C.O. Bigelow's Lemon Body Lotion!!) until I got a load of Little Miss Innocent stretching her guilty white paws out on the bed.

Thank you, Heifer. I love you, too.

When Life Gives You Lemons ....

...make Body Lotion.

Smells like a fat slice of lemon meringue pie - with just a hint of milky cold cream in the dry down -leaves behind a healthy sheen and keeps my winter-parched skin soft for hours. My only reservations: all-natural ingredients or no, it's ridiculously expensive for the amount of product you get (and I just bought the travel size); it would also be nice if the scrummy scent lasted longer than a couple of hours but at the moment, with buttery soft lemon-and-cake-scented hands, I'm kinda fine with it all (ask me again, though, once the novelty wears off and I start to wish I'd just bought the $2.99 quart of Queen Helene's Mango Cocoa Body Butter). Lemon-scented body lotion; it's really all about the little pleasures... thanks, C.O. Bigelow; you've made post-bath time such fun...

...hmn. maybe I do miss reviewing cosmetics after all.

No Darn Wonder

This is pretty belated, but kudos to Peaches for posting this excellent article about the ongoing riots in france. It's exactly the sort of deeper analysis plus answers I was looking for from the beginning and after reading it several times, I have to agree with Doug Ireland - it’s just no damn wonder. What is perhaps most striking to me in the article are the paragraphs on the truer translation of the phrases Sarkozy used to denounce the youths involved:

...But Sarkozy only poured verbal kerosene on the flames, dismissing the ghetto youth in the most insulting and racist terms and calling for a policy of repression. "Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would karcherise the ghettos of la racaille-- words the U.S. press, with glaring inadequacy, has translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum". But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. Karcher is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peels away the outer skin of encrusted dirt -- like pigeon-shit -- even at the risk of damaging what's underneath.

To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights. I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of the word in French? The translation of karcherise by "clean" just misses completely the provocative, incendiary violence of what Sarko was really saying. And racaille is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers -- it has the flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious and dehumanizing insults one could launch at the rebellious ghetto youth. Kerosene, indeed

Racism in too many other countries is at once silent and shrieking, fixed at both poles for the same reason: it isn’t considered to be any big deal. So, again - it’s just no damn wonder.

ph-ph-ph-ph-phases

Oh, that Heifer. She is the weirdest. She provides me with such joy, with such amusement, with such hair-covered furniture and vomit-stained carpets, and occasionally, a little inspiration for a blog post when i haven't got much else to say. My roommate's friend's lover's mother tired of her as she hit her teenage years and 5 years after she was trundled to our Washington Heights apartment, squalling in a zippered messenger bag, she streaks through my living room, gnaws on my fingers, kneads her paws onto my back like a masseuse and nestles into my side in a tight stripey ball, purring all the while. She has her wild moodswings, her destructive turns, and, curiously, goes through phases like a child - choosing to only sleep on the plum colored velour cushioned chair near the window for three weeks, ignoring it to sleep only underneath the window seat, and then picking up a brand new fascination or habit seemingly out of nowhere. Bored at two in the morning, trying to calm myself down from a keyed-up night at work where my coworkers flung wadded up papers at each other at intervals all night and i found myself compulsively swearing over my chicken enchiladas, i give you - in no particular order - a Best Of catalogue of Heifer's various phases:

• The Toilet Fixation Phase - By far, the funniest and weirdest. When Heifer was a teenager, she came hurtling out of nowhere each time a toilet was flushed to stand on her hind legs, paws draped over the edge of the bowl, to stare at the water as it swirled into oblivion. This phase lasted for a few months. Freak!
• The Straw Phase - Heifer took to stealing our plastic drinking straws out of the glass canister on the kitchen counter, carrying them around in her mouth and chasing them throughout the apartment. Tired of having to pick up her collection of gnawed plastic straws every day or so, we eventually put the glass canister up on top of the cabinets to keep them out of her reach. our plan worked until one night, a great crash came from the kitchen - Heifer had leapt to the top of the cabinets to retrieve her precious straws and knocked the entire thing to the floor where it lay in a crushed glass mess. This phase ended abruptly as we banished all plastic straws to the security of a drawer. And that was that.
• The Nesting Phase - before leaping on to the bed to sleep with me (also a thing that ebbs and flows), Heifer took to making several trips around the apartment to carry her various toys onto the bed so as to have them around her while she slept. In the afternoon I'd awake and find a strange assortment of delights on the edge of the bed: a bedraggled cheep cheeping fish, a cloth mouse, a wavy plastic ring, a velvet pouch (something that was mine that she appropriated for her own use), and several pens. The collection varied according to whichever "toy" she was most "into" at the time. This phase lasted, also, for a few months and now she tends to drop her toys on the rug near the foot of the bed before she cuddles next to me for the night.
• The Stealth Attack Phase - for a while, Heifer was very fond of hiding behind doors or corners and leaping out at me as I passed, wrapping her front paws in a bear hug around my leg. When she realized that I was too slow to give her much sport - a few weeks - she grew tired of this game.
• The Music Critic Phase - I love to sing in the shower and usually sing something from a musical - most often, it's "Little Shop of Horrors" or, more recently, "Spamalot". Heifer simply cannot abide my singing and for a few months, when I would sing the reedier notes in my pathetic warble, Heifer would shriek and - no joke - leap up onto the edge of the tub to caterwaul in protest, stopping only as I stopped my own caterwauling. Brat! Lately, however, she has given up and allows me to sing as badly as I like - she merely stays out of earshot.

Heifer's More Recent Fixations:

• The Paper and Plastic Bag Phase - after years of not giving a crap about bags, Heifer has recently suddenly begun to care and will crawl halfway into a bag to inspect its contents, her ass and tail the only part of her that stick out. (she never finds anything).
• The Blanket Tunnel Phase - Heifer now likes to tunnel under the blankets with me and curl up into a ball, completely covered by said blanket and forming a strange lump under the covers. She apparently needs no oxygen because she can stay under there for hours, purring and protesting with a meow or a bite if i move too often.

I've said it before and I'll say it many, many more times: Heifer. Is. A. Freak.

oh, jesus

What's going on in France right now is pretty damn nuts, and like most people, I'm disturbed by the unrest that has spread and as of yet shows no clear sign of settling. I say "like most people" because in an attempt to dig a little deeper than most American media would allow - and not speaking French well enough to make much sense of the French papers or blogs - I very foolishly visited the most recent crop of AOL chat boards. I don't know why I'm shocked any more when I read such bile - posts so awful that when I tried to click on them again they'd been removed by the AOL community (thus, no linking). Smug, righteous, and ignorant all in the same breath; in one corner viciously denouncing Islam and in another, blaming Bush's war on Iraq for the entire history of French sentiment about Arabs in the first place, curiously seeming to (or at least at the time I read them) avoid the whole wrenching "morte pour rien" issue. And perhaps just as sad; if only I could say I'd ever encountered such bigoted idiocy through the cold remove of AOL boards....

Thankfully, the New York Times has got a really excellent article up on its site today about the whole mess; extremely thorough, managing to get past the equivocative standards of journalism and flesh out the issue socially, without being sensationalistic or partisan. Thank you, Craig S. Smith. As for the message boards (surely not confined to AOL) ... oh, jesus.

"Do you hear the people sing", indeed...?

some hot cross occipital buns for the poor little gamines, sil-vous-plait

...and it shall be, as was my trip to England in 2003, a thing of utter and complete dorkdom, of scholarly pursuits amid the drugstore browsing, scenery breathing, train riding, baguette-eating and nonna visiting. tracking down spots from Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera in Paris - the bridge above the Seine from which Javert flung himself; La Rue de Plumet (if such a rue exists), l'Ecole de Saint Denis (suivez il guide!), L'Opera Garnier - and, when trekking to Montreuil-sur-Mer, Montfermeil, Digne and Toulon fails due to time and convenience constraints, I shall feed my other inner geek and travel to the Dordogne - Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon country - on my way from Paris to Rome. Lascaux, Le Moustier, La Chapelle-aux-saints... of course, I can't hit all of them but at least one... at least one... the plan is, as of yet, still nebulous - coordinating trains, eurorail passes, figuring out exactly where the hell things are and how long it takes to get there, finding affordable hostels - but I am beginning to feel a little giddy over it all...

it will be mine. oh, yes - it will be mine.

I'm Number Two! I'm Number Two!

As if I wasn't feeling accomplished enough after cleaning the bathroom with Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap and drowning 4 loads of laundry in suds, I've just discovered that - all potty-mouthed connotations aside - I'm Number 2 in google searches for people with my name. Out of close to 300 hits, I've been moving up steadily through the ranks since starting a very enjoyable theater critic gig a couple of months ago. First, I was number 13. Then, number 8. And now I'm numbers 2 and 3, with and without quotation marks surrounding my name. For years I've longed to be googleable in the way my peers were googleable; type in our names and call up an on-line resume. Aside from that Argentinian woman, I am now one of the premier OIs on the internet. And as I'm on there for fairly positive reasons - as opposed to my father's friends who, as he's learned through his brand new discovery of google stalking, appear in felon lists - this is a lovelier thing than it is scary. Not too bad. Not too darn bad....

Welcome Back, Squatter (or, Sweet Home, Bumble Fork)

More ridiculous, punny dueling titles. o, the debatable cleverness of me. having actually gotten done with work relatively early - 1 a.m. - and skipping out before any after work drinking movements could begin, i was determined to get to bed in order to try, at least try, darnit! to wake up early enough to make use of the daylight, but 3 a.m. sees me still awake and with the internet idling before me, i yawn...

this past weekend saw me back home, Bumble Fork- a brief jaunt to attend Buttercry's lovely bridal shower and cram in as much Highway 4, no see 'ums (not to be confused with u-peel-'ums) and (speaking of which) cheap quality seafood as possible. Bonus: seeing my friend Moxy and her daughters, who I had babysat when I was a teenager and who are now teenagers themselves. Ulp.

a quintessential Bumble Fork shot, taken from outside Moxy's house:

Despite being the New Zen Liv, I still find such expanses rather bleak, but whatever floats the Snowbirds' boats.

And now for some inarguably beautiful Bumble Fork images, taken at Stan's Clam Stand where my father and I shared a remarkable lunch:

Crispy fried gator tail in the background, flavored with squeezes of lemon... the crowning glory of a Bud...

well, I might be able to get Egg Foo Yong at 3 in the morning here in New York City, but for me, nothing beats such a meal as that fresh from the Gulf, accompanied by hush puppies and tangy cocktail sauce, served on wooden boards. Add a couple of syrupy blood red slices of crabapples and it's all over.

And later, at Buttercry's house, juicy stone crab claws.

too damn hungry now to write any more. high time I actually got to bed. but - shockingly - the coolest part of the weekend? A Friday night spent watching - wait for it - a football game at my alma mater, Bumble Fork High; words I never, ever thought I would type. Hanging out with Moxy's beautiful daughters brought the invitation. While my first ingrained instinct was to laugh ruefully, I found myself unexpectedly tickled and after musing a bit, had to admit that the idea of attending a Bumble Fork Swashbuckler football game as an adult - removed from any bitterness I had as a teen - did kind of sound like... fun (!) Maybe the allure was something like the irony of eating at chain restaurants in Manhattan; after years of gorging one's self at all the trendy. ethnic, out of the way, one-of-a-kind places one can find, having dinner at the Red Lobster in Times Square is so corny that it's suddenly almost cool. And so off we went, after a brief trip to the KMart inside the Bumble Fork Mall to buy decorations for Moxy's girls' Halloween party. And, dudes? The mall now has a Spencer's. Bumble Fork, I remember when you were just this high. A moment of silence... please.

....

Ah, Bumble Fork High School, a.k.a, "Swashbuckler Country": Dundee High School in the neighboring town was made of bricks and looked like something out of an Archie comic, but BFHS is clunky, sprawling, a cream-colored ant farm of Lego blocks, garnished with stripes of blue and gold. BFHS, with its segregated parking lots; sections for cars/hoopties, sections for the trucks; with its halls named in honor of the school mascot; Gasparilla, Land Lubber, Treasure Chest, Pieces of Eight (which we called "Pieces of Poo" back in the day), and Swashbuckler. The school has grown since I graduated, so maybe there are more halls, similarly named (I suggest "Parrot Smarts", "Thar the Football Team Blows", "Johnny Depp Rocks"). Well, gosh. Only a few minutes back and I was thinking like a 16 year-old already.

Some impressions of the contemporary BFHS: it all smelled the same - wet grass, unidentified leftover smells wafting from the cafeteria - but, of course, looked ever so much smaller since I've grown ever so much bigger in the years since graduating high school. (Natch!) The kids, as could be expected: so young-looking. The game: shockingly sparse attendance, especially considering that we were playing Dundee that night. Feeling like a tool: at intervals! Me, teetering close to my 10-year reunion, sitting on the bleachers and hesitantly muttering all the old cheers I'd forgotten under my breath, seeing people who looked like my old classmates but weren't. Odd, too - my BFHS was before the cell-phone revolution; to me, seeing students texting each other was a little eye-catching, interesting, and contributed to my feeling as "old" as someone my age can rightfully feel. In my day, we just yelled across the room, y'all. Sometimes, when Buttercry and I were feeling ambitious, we wrote each other notes emblazoned with original cartoons, usually depicting our glamorous future lives and/or some fantasy scene: me, in a slinky dress against the backdrop of a city skyline, on the arm of a ridiculous Elvis-coiffed marginally talented actor I had a Lifetime Movie-star crush on; she, surrounded by throngs of Michael Stipe look-a-likes, cuddling with them underneath afghans and sipping steaming mugs of cocoa (with plenty of little curls above the mugs to denote steam). We had creativity in the old days.

Football games were so magical to me as a Freshman - the lights, the green, the thundering music, the realization of all the high school dreams John Hughes inspired in me - but as I went through adolescence and, due to various events, grew increasingly anti-social, bitter and angry, the allure gradually dropped away until pep rallies became a thing to shudder at, as did the phrase "Swashbuckler Pride". By the time graduation rolled around, I was as thrilled to get out as someone empty and apathetic as I was could be. And then, last Friday night - gleefully texting my ex-Pirate friends: " @ BFHS game; holy crap, dude!" Who would have thought...?

and now, bed.

For You ... Momo? or Preparati, Zia Vittoria

After months of hemming and hawing, the long-discussed escape was finally booked today. said decision took so long due to having to figure out the perfect time to go - before the year was up so as to not let my paid vacation days go to waste - and waiting for my darn bank to reissue my bank card after the bank-wide security measure which made all of our old bank cards defunct. But, yes - the first leg of the trip is planned and paid for and we are quite glad about it. Now roughly a month and a half to plan it all out and work myself up into an appropriately giddy state. I will be flying Iceland Air - cheapest tickets by far, and this is after searching through back routes and side routes. Who knew? I've always wanted to fly over, er, Iceland.

In Which it is Yet Again Proven that I Am a Sick Woman

Boredom at work tonight led to chatter; not about office gossip or sports or the weather, not about food orders or politics but, of all things, parasitic twins. A google search was implemented and while I felt stirrings to join the group as they gasped in horror, I remained seated and didn't check out any images until 4 a.m. while supposedly finishing up an Off-Broadway play review.

It's incredible just how much can go wrong in the human body; the shuffling dance of genes knowing no limit to the combinations, to the mutations - sometimes, as in the evolution of camouflage, enabling a species to survive or, on the opposite end of the scale, proving lethal.

Well, here's what my gene shuffling did for me - it made me a sick, twisted bitch because the first thought that popped into my mind when I saw this picture was not "did she survive and how?" or "poor thing!" but

...it's my [birthday] and I'll cry if I want to. You would cry, too, if it happened to you.

Sicko - get back to work....

Crazy Cat... Crazy Cat... What Are They Feeding You?

Last August, I brought home 8 tamales from Guate, frozen, layered in sponge wrap, lovingly packaged by Elena in a cardboard box. After a little experimenting, I discovered that microwaving them is just as effective as putting them in the oven (it's certainly quicker and takes far less time). Had been hoarding them but in the past week was seized by cravings for tamales tamales tamales and have eaten 2 out of my precious stash - nuked to steamy perfection and doused with lime juice.

Two more discoveries:

1) Heifer likes them, too

2) Heifer. is. a. freak (there's always room to say it again)

No, kitty, that's my tamal! No, kitty, that's a bad kitty!

October 1st and 68-72 degrees; it is time, friends. Yes, time. Time not only to wear my new fall jacket that I picked up from Joyce Leslie the other day.




And time... for the boots. Last October 1st saw me mostly bedridden, clomping around at intervals on my walker (left leg always tired from balancing most of my weight on it, the ball of my foot burning, constantly having to rest) and plotting to allay my boredom by putting fuchsia streaks in my hair. This year sees me free, practically as good as new and on this nice round date it is time to put away the sandals and begin wearing my beloved knee high high-heeled boots once again.


... let boot season begin...

Playing With All the Pretty New Features

listening to the usual songs on loop; biding my time. keyed up still, unable to sleep and doing my best to think of something else.