lizzielazarus

I have a chance to be the top model

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 22:05:09 GMT

vote for me here
https://www.peacecoffee.com/blog/

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 02:01:00 GMT

It's come to this. I'm about to post a recipe.
But god it's a fabulous one. And simple. And summery:

1/2 lb okra, cut into little rounds
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp tumeric
pinch cayenne
pinch black pepper
15 big leaves--fresh curry leaves OR thai holy basil OR straight up regular italian basil
enough oil for frying

Mix the tumeric, cayenne & salt with 2 tbs water. Set aside.
Heat oil over medium-high until hot enough that it sizzles when you drop in an okra circle. Add okra and stir. Pour water-spice mixture over the top and then stir in. Cook the okra over medium-high heat. If it's starting to brown too fast (i.e. before it starts softening a bit) turn the heat down a touch. Cook this way for about 6 minutes. Add the chopped leaves of your choice and sprinkle on a bit of pepper. Cook a few more minutes, until the okra is tender.

Overheard

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 01:23:21 GMT

In the parking lot of the strip mall at Hiawatha & Lake Street, behind my office:
As the parting shot, just after one woman slaps the other in the face, "I got my own Myspace account now, bitch. And I ain't gonna call yo' nasty ass a friend on there."
After that, both switched their babies onto the other hip and flounced off.

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 03:08:24 GMT

Summer!
Marvelous time of year to eat. I made an incredibly ugly yet still quite tasty strawberry pie. There are salad greens--arugula, lettuces and not quite enough of those, so they're bulked out by handfuls of oregano and mint which complement a mild honey-miso dressing splendidly. And then there are garlic tops, like pre-flavoured green beans. All delicious.
And, while I generally prefer dark beer, I've found that Leinenkugel's Sunset Wheat makes for the tastiest beer kisses. Perhaps I've been in the midwest too long. What's your favouite?

A Question

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 23:27:06 GMT

One more thought.
Is the goal with a task to reach a point of autopilot?

i think that's a general wish, based on various conversations I've been having.
I always prefer to keep the edge, the almost-too-much point.
You?

The almost essential Spring post

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 03:17:42 GMT

It's around the corner. Right around the corner.
In my apartment building, you know that because the tap water smells like mud and dead fish. Take a shower, close your eyes. The Mississippi could be cascading over your shoulders, dead carp, muddy brown from the smell of it.
The bag lady who shuffles down Clinton, up to Franklin, then right every morning around when I leave for work changed clothes. No more big, puffy greyish lavendar ski jacket. She has a new spring coat: white, princess seams, fitted. The full skirt flows from the tailored shoulders and the shoulders hang awkwardly off her hump back. Her sweatpants remain unchanged.
It's open season on buildings. They took out another one today, between 25th and 26th on Chicago. A little off my normal route, so I don't know it intimately, can't remember what it looked like standing. It must have been a newer building--soft cotton candy blooms of insulation puff pink and greeen in splintered plywood paneling.
And, of course, the girls with naked legs.

More on Houses

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 21:25:28 GMT

Riding through the streets of Minneapolis, especially in the congenitally poor neighbourhoods, row upon row of square 2-story houses are interspersed with vacant lots, picket fence, ratty grass, driveway to nowhere. Used to be a house. They disappear fast sometimes. This fall, a 3-story green triplex, mustard yellow shutters, 2 stories with sunporches became empty. Two days later, the orange "condemmned" sign on the door, then only a few weeks later, I passed the massive scooper machine parked on the side of the road, filling my little bike lane. The next morning, the house was gone, all three stories crumbled into the walls of the limestone basement.
Another house across the street from a beautiful brick line of old shop fronts at 24th & 5th has stood beige, empty, an exhausted old rental since August. They were fixing it up for a while, they got the mega-dumpster, stripped out some insulation, made a few attempts, then left it. Someone bought the house next door, landscaped it, beautifully yet not pretentiously, this summer--tomatoes and flowers out front, etc. Maybe there was a chance for the neighbour house. In December, the city put up warning notices that the utilities would be cut off at the end of the month. Last night was another late night at work. Riding home through the damp early spring glory, I could smell it from across Portland--the dusty, moist, sweet smell of all that old wood when it cracks. The years-old smell of basement liberated into the air above. The triumphant scooper sitting on a heap of wood, the careful strips of what was once trim catching the street light strangely, shiney damp. Next lot over is a parking lot for the projects-style 60s highrise. The line of sight to the freeway is now clear.
Only a few blocks from home, my mind wanders to all these destroyed houses--maybe it's silly to personify them, feel sadness and pity at their destruction. Yet I am not the only one to personify them--so many get the metaphorical wrecking ball, the wrecking scooper, as penance for their owner's sins. Up the street, the Art Institute's parking lot has paved over the site of a hotel of ill-repute. Shady old flophouse, its tenants had so corrupted it that there was no redemption to be had. In St. Paul, a grand old hotel was destroyed in the '40s after the body of a murdered woman was found there. I don't recall if the killer got the death penalty, but his brick accomplice did.

Coffee, After

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 00:12:07 GMT

More notes from my trip.
Obvious disclaimer, if you're tired of it, don't read.

After a day with 11 hours of driving, 4 different flavours of Kerupuks (crisps, deep-fried something puffs, including buffalo skin, goat skin, shrimp-flavoured something, cassava), I am in a tiny office, air temp probably 90 and humid outside, and inside, no AC and the roaster's running. A tiny little sample roaster, and it's 8PM and we're going to do what we've come 8000 miles to do: taste coffee. My counterpart, their warehouse manager whose name I forget everytime I relearn it, something like Wurdi, is a little man, gamine is the first word that came to mind to describe him that night (it's the wrong word, he's not girlish per se, but he has features and mannerisms that would be charming on a young, graceless girl. On him, they're characture). He wears sandals, has delicate hands that he flips at the wrists, and the punniest sense of humour. Before leaving, I mused some on the difficulties of describing the flavour of coffee through translation; it turns out that that problem pales by comparison to keeping up with his rapid-fire puns and double-entendres. Mary's our intermediary, translating Bahasa Indonesia with a lot of gestures into her Oklahoma twang. After two days of having the world interpreted by someone who needs to maintain control, who aims to translate not just words but facts, it's a relief to have her throw up her hands, laugh, and say "I don't know."
We roast up two samples, a third was waiting when we arrived. The room grows hotter, sweat cannot bead on faces, it forms a gloss across the skin. Mary has a little fan that she waves; it's a relief to talk to her. Wurdi lines up the cups of coffee, three different samples, two cups of each and a cup of water each to rinse the spoon. The first step is to smell the grounds. Sniffing the first one, I can no longer smell just the close office and everyone's warmth--it's spicy, dark, warm, earthy, there's a pungence to it, agressive, Wurdi says "jagged." If the second one were a colour, it would be golden; there's a fruity syrupness to it, in fact it's all the fruitiness of sumatran coffees distilled into a cup, full body, etc. The water comes to a boil, is shut off and forgotten twice as we stumble to describe to each other what we smell.
Finally the water is poured, I break the crust on a few of the cups, belatedly remember that there are other people who may want to play along, share, and then start slurping. Mary's in the middle translating a funny hodge-podge of words, few of them probably off the Coffee Taster's Flavour Wheel that hangs above us for guidance. Maybe it's merely the euphoria that sets in from slurping coffee after sweating a few litres and not having had a cup in six days, but, although I lack the vocabulary to understand, the onomatopoeia of what Wurdi's saying describes the coffee beautifully.
Perfect specificity--when I was in the mountains the day before, I picked up and smelled a handfull of dirt--familiarity wafted over me: a smell in the grounds of Sumatran coffee. These coffees, what are the differences in place, processing, harvest time, anything, that makes it so that one is the essence of one set of the flavours that we know as Sumatran and the other, the essence of the other set? I ask for records, data, numbers, locations, villages--oh, I am always asking. But they live on the old black Compaq behind us and Lina's gone for the day, it's 8PM and we're leaving for another region in the morning. A hunch, maybe it's worth staying to unravel the mystery--a morning of pouring through Excel files, somewhere in them, lot numbers will tie back to tangible proper nouns, the standards of organic certification say that they must. But these samples are fresh from the fall harvest. The records have not made it down the mountain yet. I must be patient.
And then I am awake until 2AM, buzzing with coffee. Mary, Diego and I drink Bintang, the skunk of beers, in the hotel bar, that strange non-zone where a Chinese girl plays Greensleeves and then November Rain over and over on the piano. We've learned how to order finally--don't ask what kind of beers there are, there are but two kinds: Large Beer and Small Beer. In some places, not even that, just beer in a bottle or in a glass, same thing, same size, they'll just stand and pour it in a glass for you if you prefer. Our conversation wobbles back and forth--like dectectives, we want to understand the "why" of it all. How does this coffee taste one way and that one another? We've mused on the same things a hundred times over round the stainless "cupping table" in the warehouse, but here we're so close it's tempting to make the joke that you can taste it. I describe the processing plants, fields, dry mills I just saw and we theorize about what causes the idiosyncrasies in the beans...up until I'm laughing. The endless quest for causes. Two days later, another conversation, trying to pin down what caused the migration from a hunter-gatherer society to a less transient agricultural one. Etc.

Specificity. Causes. Large Beer or Small.

Coffee, Before

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 23:46:13 GMT

I am by no means one of Peace Coffee’s most developed palates; I have never tasted cucumber in a coffee and have always laughed at the flowery descriptions on wine bottles. Yet part of our on-going partnership with farmer groups is to continue to develop a picture of what we mean when we say that we want “quality coffee.” Some of that has an objective measure: there are elaborate official SCAA coffee scoring sheets that can give a coffee a rating out of 100 based on the perceptions of professional cuppers, and grading based on bean size also takes place. Yet some of it is also subjective and nuanced and has as much to do with the standard expectations for what that particular coffee will taste like, what you want to do with it, and your own personal tastebuds.
                All that said, I sat our roaster TJ down and talked with him (or, to be more precise, stood and slurped with him) in an effort to understand some of the details of the coffees grown and processed by the farmers I will be visiting.
                The short sound-bite description of Sumatran is that it’s a semi-washed coffee with heavy body, low acidity and a fruity, earthy taste. Those are the basics; the Sumatran is one of the most variable coffees that we roast.   Some of the lots are super fruity and heavy, some thick and funky, all, as we’ve learned to say, mostly without giggling, with a great body.    Yet Sumatran coffee always seems to have a surprise in store. I took a big slurp of some new crop Sumatran, roasted to a medium dark roast, and zing! Something acidic, zingy, like cheap wine left out overnight when you expect port in a cup. Fruity, very fresh—you could taste the newness of the coffee. We struggled to describe the way this coffee displayed the typical earthy Sumatran flavours and settled on the idea that if the old crop was rich, brown earth, this was the bloom on an unripe fruit, an earthy quality to that too, but… different, green. We had another Sumatran on the table for comparison, something we would most definitely not want. There the fruitiness had a musty quality, it overpowered all other flavours. It filled the mouth in a way I describe as round, but not with a pleasant flavour.
             Are you still with me? I’m not even sure if I am. It’s hard describing a sensation that we rarely focus on with such a lens; even in my native language, I struggle with weak metaphors, a few hand gestures and faces to convey what one ordinarily leaves to the words “yummy.” I have looked up some relevant words in my phrase book, and, when that fails, an online dictionary –but, if I say that I think good coffee is like “buah,” fruit, is my apple-grape-raspberry concoction going to match the listener’s picture of “buah”? maybe we’ll end up with some coconut-banana-durian-i-don’t-know-what tasting “buah kopi.” Even if we understand each other through some hand-waving and nodding, then what? Does the coop have the information and detailed record-keeping to know where the stuff we like came from, how grew it and how…and then replicate that year after year? I don’t know, but I’m awfully excited to find out.

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 01:59:22 GMT

Stories of tropical beautifulness, heat, langour, smells, colours--these are things one has brought back from the "spice isles" for hundreds of years. I add mine to the mix. What a different coffee trip however. The story of the coffee trip as we generally do it at Peace Coffee usually entails a few rides to remote mountain locations, a few hours in the back of a pickup truck, staying in a shack for a night or so, no flush toilets (always a gringo who cannot stomache that inability to flush it all away). This trip however, different. There was a higher level of protection--I set foot on public transportation once (in Singapore, cleaner than Mpls); we were always driven somewhere, AC, SUV, escorted to hotels. Such a sensation--the mugginess, exhaust, clove smoke giving way as I pass through the metal detector into the lobby of the international hotel in Medan, air conditioning and piano music creating a vague space with palms and fake orchids. Twelve floors, two karoke options, 4-5 cafes, and a bar, haven in a Muslim country. The view from the room looks over the tennis court, past the swimming pool to the satellite dishes and laundry hanging beyond.
We are the protected ones, we buy the bottled water, when we need to eat, the search is on for a relatively clean cafe (and still we're fussy). I may wish to put it aside, I ate adventurously, whatever, but those are merely symptoms. We are taken on a drive to see the "degraded lands," abandoned during the decades of conflict in Aceh. Now, since the peace treaty in August, there are thoughts of returning. 20,000 hectacres of once productive coffee fincas overgrown. The one-time road, a three hour shortcut from the mountains to the port, is a narrow track through the long grass, burned out houses on both sides. Throughout the drive, hints: "You could have your own cooperative out here, there is need for much." The serio-comic role of being a player for a moment. In that moment, I may feel small, slightly nauseous from my fried goldfish at lunch, slightly exhausted from the endless role I'm playing of strong business woman (I chose to wear pants, no headscarf--did I offend? Is there any way, any need to mask the cultural oddity that I am?), different from it all, not really a typical American, badge of my simplish life, my righteous job--and yet, those are small, silly personal concerns. I have walked into a stratified, classist society, and my national origin, my skin, my walk, my money, who I AM, all catapult me towards its upper echelons. That offer--"you (meaning Cooperative Coffees, not me, but still) could have your own cooperative here..."--everything changes and yet it remains the same. Fair Trade aims to rethink the global commodity trade, and we do a damn good job in many ways.... and yet that does not undo, deny, or change a relationship that goes back hundreds of years. We could have our own (fair trade) plantation.*
In Singapore, there is a Fort Canning.

*yes, that's an oxymoron and a bad joke.

On driving in Indonesia

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 01:27:59 GMT

--or rather, on being a passenger, I would hardly have been fool-hardy enough to get behind a wheel. As Wira, one of the staff who drove us around a lot, said, "Medan traffic is like Kung-Fu," motorcycles, bicycles, cars, trucks, all passing each other on both sides, often risking head-on collision or catastrophe for the children standing in the middle of the street, collecting money for their mosque. Turn signals are rarely used to indicate that you're going to turn; instead, on a 2-lane road, you keep your blinker on if you're considering passing, or if you don't want on-coming traffic to pass into your lane. You keep your hazards going for the same purpose with just a bit more emphasis, or if it's night and you want to be sure people see you (this is not an invented interpretation from the phenomena, I asked Wira for an explanation of his behaviour). The speed limit is rarely posted; I think I saw a sign that said 40km, though it's hard to be sure as we were zipping past it at 130km/hr.
The exception to the wild driving is in front of military installations--as they pass the interminable yellow-tipped bars of the fences of the minty green, beautifully landscaped barracks, everyone slows down to 15mph, no passing, even the dogs stay out of traffic. One of Mr. Bachtiar (our host in Aceh)'s many stories was about one of his driver's encounters with this rule; like many of his stories, it began by establishing his place within the world it took place: "I was at the time working with a NGO on a very important project, and the Governor of the province had some very important papers that I needed to sign, and I needed to sign them fast and then get them to another town. This was all before email and fax machines, so I called my driver to go pick up the papers--it was a two hour drive to get them to me and then another 3 hours to get them where they needed to be, so I told him to move fast. And so I am waiting for him and waiting for him and he does not come. And this is before there were handphones so I could not call him. But finally, six hours later he arrives. He tells me that he was driving so fast to get here that he drove fast past the military office and forgot to slow down. They pulled him over and asked him if he knew he was supposed to slow down. He acknowledged that he did, he was just in a hurry, sorry, won't happen again, etc.
But that was not enough and the soldiers jeer. If he can't tell how fast he's supposed to be driving, how do they know he can count? Would Mr. please count the number of bars along the fence? There are many soldiers now, big-booted, and so he starts, 1,2, 3, but they shout at him "louder" so he starts counting out loud, but that's not enough, he has to whack each of the bars with a stick as he counts. He starts over again, but no, he has to count louder, louder, louder, until he's shouting as loud as he can, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...541, 542, 543, 544. Done. He collapses. It's 90 degrees, sun beating down, he's been shouting for ages. But the soldiers kick him up again; he got the count wrong. He starts over, 1, 2, 3, 4, louder, louder, louder, he vomits, staggers. They bring him water and he starts over. Louder, he has to start over. LOUDER, he got the count wrong again. LOUDER, he reaches the end, but he got it wrong again. He starts over, counts, whacks the bars, counts, counts, counts, stumbles, falls down. The soldiers start kicking him again, but he can't haul himself up yet, just resting and getting kicked. He can't count anymore, vomiting, hoarse. Finally the ordeal is over. Somehow he gets back into the car and delivers the documents, looking like hell. Bachtiar's comment to close the story: "He was always a lazy driver."

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:03:20 GMT

When I went 13 timezones away, my default wake-up time became 3AM, bolt awake, ready to rock the day, until 2 days before leaving when I could sleep until 7 again. On returning, it seems my special time is 2AM. And so I"m typing.
Yesterday back at work, I was wearing a little scarf bought in Bali. Around my neck all day, that wonderful, strange, awful Indonesia smell, the Bali version: spicy with green vegetables; mud; incense; warm raw chicken; fish; fruit, mostly acidic sorts; exhaust, lots of it; and second-hand clove smoke (Djarum blacks are everywhere, the logo and the clouds of smoke), and the smell of crowds, delicate hint of body odour, lunch, tea, everything about a person, multiplied. A marvelous smell, delectable in the streets, though now, bringing it into my living room, it's a bit overwhelming.
I am disappointed in my photos--the greens are not true. Indonesia is a thousand shades of green, rich, extravagant ones. East Timor, a thousand different ones, shown in brighter light. Our flight out of Dili was delayed three hours (at least it ran, often it doesn't. At least our seats were bolted in on the flight out, they weren't on the flight in)--an opportunity that couldn't be passed up for a walk. It was 40 degrees centigrade (fahrenheit approximation=double that and add 32) and humid, heavy air. By the time I reached the roundabout, I felt light, the liters of water I was drinking out of little plastic bottles could do nothing to compete with that quantity of sweating. The road was lined on both sides with corn, huge tropical corn plants, tall, these ones glorious, cultivated, unlike so many, which were straggly, growing over last year's tired stalks. Green, that coarse corn green, the little fibers on the leaves make it less reflective, a yellowy matte finish. The road here is fairly quiet, Dili is fairly quiet, it seems sparsely populated compared to Indonesian cities (horrible fractions of the population have been massacred, one wonders if it's always been quieter). As I walk along the road, a single old woman gets out of a mini-bus. Another passenger swings down a tiny dog by the scruff of the neck and she introduces it: "Hello Missus. Dog." She's also passed a bucket of little fish, heads and tails randomly up and down: "Fish, Missus. Goodbye."
I get to the roundabout and there is no more quiet. School here gets out between 12.30 and 1.30 and the street is packed. On both sides, children from 8-15 or so walk 7 or 8 abreast on both sides of the road. Hundreds of identical uniforms, a darker corn green, white pin stripes. The girls, jumpers with white blouses, the boys, pants and white shirts. I walk ahead, the waters part a little so everyone can step back and stare. The greet me over and over, "Hello Missus. Where are you going?" Then some clever boy, adolescent, bold, has a new idea: "Hey mama, you not so bad." It moves down the line, soon more and more boys are saying it; passed on like a game of Telephone, they don't know what they're saying and the pronounciation blurs "HeeyMama, youn ots oo bed." Green. It's on every side until I get closer to the lower school--hundreds of little girls in red plaid dresses with white peter-pan collars.

Home Again Home Again, Jiggity Jig

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 15:55:05 GMT

I'm back from the 2 week tour de coffee of Singapore, Sumatra, then Bali, then East Timor, then Bali again, then airports and then home.
It was marvelous, I didn't want to come back. So much: colour, strange taste, smell, heat, people all in a press, complicated dynamics. The continuous joyful feeling of being almost completely overwhelmed, but still processing and interacting moment after moment. Sort of a big cultural orgasm.
Moments--
walking in a dark market, boquets of chicken feet, fish, veg and baskets on all sides, mud underfoot, a thin crack drain between the two lines of thatch where the light (and the rain) comes in. Incense everywhere, old women without teeth smiling. A sweet taste between bile and happiness in my mouth.
Eating a fried goldfish. Whole. One eye still in, the other fallen out. There's very little need to gut a pond goldfish--even when they're about 9 inches long, they're mostly just scales and bones.
Dili, East Timor, walking down the decayed sidewalk, past a decayed colonial mansion, tops of pillars broken off and laying in the middle of the sidewalk, so long broken that there's moss on the breaks too, moss fusing them into the middle of the sidewalk where they lay. Once a gated mansion, now the wrought iron has been replaced with rebar. In the courtyard, straggly tropical corn growns 7 feet tall. A man stands amidst the corn, cigarette in his mouth, pouring coca-cola into some porridge. I greet him & he offers it to me.
Walking into a room of women sorting coffee, the men lean against the wall watching, supervising. The intelligent yet deceptive impulse to identify after days of feeling the struggle, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, to be taken seriously as a woman in business. A complex nausea of emotion.
Picking up a handful of dirt on a coffee plot in Sumatra, there's a smell in the dirt that is familiar--that same smell in the roasted coffee grounds from that place.
A meeting on the top floor of Bank Mandiri in Dili, 4 international investment bankers and me. The impossibility of lending within the conventional system in a country where the government has taken over all titling of land and there are conflicting claims to land, based under the Portugese government and the Indonesian regime (which the UN and US never recognized)--and thus, no collateral to lend against. How thoroughly a country can be broken.
And more.

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 14:41:43 GMT

This morning on NPR, an expert was talking about the difficulties of identifying someone after shooting Hellfire missiles at them from an unmanned drone. They have gathered family member's DNA with which they could, theoretically, ID the person they were after in Pakistan, but "once the missile strikes, any bodies are, like, sort of atomized."

Sort of atomized. Like only molecular-ized?

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:46:22 GMT

Absolutely tiny update to say that i am awfully happy listening to Ladytron and am obnoxiously delighted to be leaving.
"I think it's time to blow this joint...."

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 02:55:50 GMT

Aujourd'hui maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. Terrible, but those words are always what comes to mind first on the topic of death.
Mur died this today, the sweet, crabby little cat we got from Venkatesh several years ago. She's been slowly wheezing away and dying the past month--ill with the feline equivalent of HIV plus lukemia. She was a marvelous little creature, definitely an academic cat--she could sit staring at the wall in the bathtub for hours in the morning, contemplating something or other. She was so well-versed in the concepts of free will and self-determination that, until she was quite ill, she wouldn't stand for being picked up and cuddled in a lap. If she was going to be in a lap, it was on her time schedule and how she wanted it. And if you moved, you got bit. I think Vail was the only exception to this, due to his manly love & house-sitting.
It's strange having a wild creature dying in your house. All my notions of comfort are foreign. I wished to find her a soft place, somewhere near people, somehow, I wanted to console. She wanted a corner, preferably cool, dark, alone. Once milk has lost its appeal, they are beyond being tamed and stop pretending.

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 01:56:08 GMT

It has happened. I find the cold "invigorating."

That said, I wonder: What is the freezing temperature for the matter that eyeballs are made of? Biking to work when the windchill was -22 the other morning (gratutious brag), I was wondering. It's not pure water, so it's below 32.... I swear I could feel them expand.

Frivolous

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 22:32:26 GMT

If only every meeting with the boss man entailed Really Good Belgian Beer
Happy
7%
Mmmmmmmm

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 13:45:40 GMT

Last night, the 50-something yr. old ladies in my French class discovered assorted volumes of the work of the Marquis de Sade in the stash of donated books that passes for a library. They were absolutely shocked at the number of words that bear a striking resemblance to English words. They each, separately, assured me that they'd no idea who he was, and that happening on this book was an accident. The book did however seem like kind of an easy read, so they each took a copy home.

Pillowtalk

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 12:40:58 GMT

Riding down 24th Street this morning, just in front of the bus shelter with the ad against smoking around kids that has a beaming little boy with two lung-shaped ashtrays on his chest, I found still life with roadkill. A little black baby doll lay on its back, head turned to face a dead squirrel, which lay on its back, broken neck slumping its face towards the baby doll. They looked like they were chatting a little before going to sleep.

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 22:07:04 GMT

Something in the air today as I was coming home:
3 different groups of children screamed obscenities at me as I rode past.
A man sat in the middle of the packed mud that made up his backyard, flat on the ground, legs straight in front of him, howling, bawling, the kind of crying that makes your heart move.
I stopped at the library on my way home; the woman in front of me at the self checkout couldn't get it to work. She kept scanning the wrong barcode, running it under the laser with her hand in the way, etc. She turned to me & asked for a suggestion, then just started smacking the palms of her hands on the display screen.
Unlocking my bike to leave, a man was standing against the building, eating M&Ms one by one. In a deep, slow drawl he says "Men have given their lives for bodies like that," and pops another M&M in his mouth. (Was that supposed to be sexy? I don't begin to understand.)

Calling in

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 16:41:06 GMT

Why is it that when calling in sick, regardless of the alleged ailment, people feel the need to feign a husky voice? If you've got stomach flu, it's generally not accompanied by either nasal congestion or a sore throat.

Jesus

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 16:20:15 GMT

Small break at lunch to read my friend's list. Jesus.
The world's a bit crazy right now, y'all.
I say we all sit down by our the nicest window in our apartments/houses, put on helmets, fasten seatbelts & have a cup of tea (or a gin & tonic, depending on your need). Love to everybody.

small notes

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 12:37:55 GMT

The bullet points of my life continue. While I have some thoughts I'd like to spell out on what a classist snob I am & on our relationship to probability & chance, I have to decide how much coffee we need to roast instead.
So, the exciting stuff:
The dew point in MN this weekend was the highest in the world @ 86 degrees. Who wants to come visit?
Also, got a nice raise.
Also, CK & I may be in Santa Fe some time after the 22nd of September. Who might be around?

when it rains, it pours

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 21:24:56 GMT

& then a car accident to top it all off. What a weekend.