Under the Tuscan Kale

Life is a bowl of metaphor

I joined a CSA this summer, which may have been a foolhardy step for someone who a) doesn't like to cook, b) has no one to feed but himself, and c) spends most mealtimes outside of the house. There is the added complication that my pickup date is Wednesdays no later than 7:30, which will be a problem when orchestra rehearsals start up again in September, but we'll burn that viola when we come to it.

The main challenge is using all the food before it goes bad. People keep telling me to freeze stuff, which is a very practical suggestion, but I just know once it goes into the freezer it'll never come out. There's also the suggestion of drying things, like herbs (which I am in fact doing with the chamomile, because what the hell else am I supposed to do with it), but that seems to defeat the purpose of having fresh herbs. Still, I may take some of these recommendations, because storing it all in the fridge and blasting through it before nature reclaims it is not exactly working at 100%.

My main strategies are these:

• Invite friends over for dinner. My friends are starting to realize that when I invite them over for dinner, I'm really inviting them over to cook for me (well us). It's not your traditional dinner party, but it works well for my friends who like to cook, who have small kitchens, and who like free food, and it works especially well for me.
• stilltasty.com is a website that will tell you not only how long you can expect your food to last, but also how to store it. From it I have learned not to put basil in the fridge.
• Bring the fruit to work. Nothing makes a bunch of coworkers happier than a bunch of free fresh fruit. My first week I left two pints of strawberries in my fridge to die, but the second week I brought the cherries in to share (plus made this at home) and used almost all of them. Current challenge: plums. I just ate two of them while typing this bullet (and now my keyboard is a little sticky, but fortunately it's my work computer).
• Just give it away. Farm-fresh produce makes a great thank you gift. My neighbor who watched my cats availed herself of some broccoli, and my friend who picked up my CSA haul one week relieved me of the minzuna and epazote, and thank goodness.

My very limited cooking repertoire needed to be expanded, but it served me well the first few weeks when it was raining kale in here. I made my mainstay African pineapple peanut stew twice, which took care of some of the kale, onions, garlic, and cilantro. With the remaining kale I made this extremely basic massaged kale salad, which required only buying a lemon. Lately, the kale tide has been stemmed, and I've rediscovered a forgotten food processor and made pesto twice (once with garlic scapes, and then just with garlic). 

Signing up for the CSA was a little bit like immersion therapy. With each week I get more and more comfortable with the mountain of agriculture I bring home. I even start to look forward to Wednesdays and finding out what Iron Chef-like ingredient they'll saddle me with this time.

The people I interacted with on my #selfdate

After much hemming and hawing, I took myself on a #selfdate* on Sunday. It was a day that could easily have been spent entirely at home, immediately following an exciting but busy Fourth of July, and with a Netflix disc (yes I still do that) in waiting and an infinity of internet to watch. What got me out of the house was the fact that is was closing day for Wolf Hall on Broadway.

Seeing Wolf Hall meant giving up my entire Sunday because it's a two-parter: Part One was offered as a 1pm matinee and Part Two as a 6:30pm evening show. Plus, a desire to pay as little as possible meant getting to the box office at 10am to wait in line for $39 rush tickets (which turned out to be unnecessary as there were plenty of empty rush seats at both performances).

There were two large holes in my day (11am-1pm and 4pm-6:30pm) which I passed looking for food and eating food. With one exception (a friend who happened to be at the show), everyone I spoke to on my self-date was a stranger, which made Sunday a very different day than most. Here are the people I interacted with, in order:

1. Arriving at the line for rush tickets, I took my spot behind a young woman I would later learn is named Jane. In fact, she introduced herself to me with her full name, which I've now forgotten but wouldn't have posted here anyway. We didn't start chatting until after her friend Sara(h?) arrived and then left to get tea. I think the impetus for our conversation was my obvious struggle to make myself comfortable without letting my ass touch the sidewalk. After that we had a pleasant conversation about Broadway, books, and life in NYC.
2. Sara(h?) and I didn't interact much. After announcing to Jane that she was going across the street to Mcdonald's to fetch some tea, I almost asked her to get me a sausage biscuit or fries, but we hadn't broken the ice yet so I stopped myself.
3. There was an older woman behind me who was a true New Yorker: happy to help her fellow citizen but not extremely interested in talking to a stranger. We started talking when she offered me a page of her newspaper to sit on (my struggle was apparently obvious to all). I asked her name and she gave it, but I've forgotten it. After a brief discussion about rush tickets and lotteries, she went back to her newspaper, not even speaking much with the man behind her, whom I'd assumed was her companion.
4. The rest of the day passed largely without human interaction, with the exception of quick transactions with restaurant employees, Starbucks baristas, and theater ushers. The next person I spoke to for more than a few seconds was June, a theatergoer who joined me in my box for the evening show (you get BOX seats for $39 when you rush, which is ludicrous and wonderful, as long as you don't want to see one half of the stage). We talked all about Wolf Hall the book and the TV series, and then branched out to A Man For All Seasons the movie and the play, which is the only other Tudor period play I've seen.

If I realized I was going to be writing a blog post about this, I'd have tried to talk to more strangers, but I guess this post is long enough.

*Hashtags appear to be useless on Blogger, so allow me to link you to the blog post where I first saw the term "selfdate."

Curating your reading year like a mix tape

I wrote this piece to submit to a (different) blog and figured I'd post it here as well. 1 of 2

Mix tape wisdom says not to repeat artists on a single tape. You may love Dave Matthews Band (a dated example, like the concept of a mix tape itself), but the idea is to create a collection of music that is varied and broad. You choose one DMB song, and then instead of another one, or even something similar, you go to the other end of your taste spectrum (Madonna, perhaps?) and then keep ping-ponging around, hopefully not back and forth, but to varied points on a circle.

I try to structure my reading year in the same way, in that I try to restrict myself to one book per author per year. There are authors I love with prolific lists of works, and limiting myself to one annually ensures that I will have something new to read by them for a long time, even if they stop writing. As for authors I love who’ve only written one book (or whose other books don’t interest me), it angers me less that I can’t read another of their books because I’d have to wait at least a year anyway, and perhaps by that time they’ll have written something new (still waiting, Erin Morgenstern).

It can be hard to resist sticking with an author especially when you’ve discovered someone new. Last year, I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, my first Murakami, and I loved it. I was tempted to grab another, but then I realized I can add him to my list of authors I read once a year, and that sated me. Plus, remaining in Murakami’s strange world seemed like it could have permanent, adverse effects. I chose instead to glide gently into Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, keeping Japan and war and feelings of inadequacy and a small amount of mysticism but leaving the absurd (wow, those two books are a lot more alike than I realized).

I’ll make an exception for series. After all, you wouldn’t break up a symphony, would you? Actually, I would, and have, so this isn’t a great analogy. I made this change after reading the His Dark Materials series, or rather, two thirds of it. I read The Golden Compass and then a year later The Subtle Knife, but never made it to The Amber Spyglass and now I never will (which is a shame because I like its title the best of the three). Even though installments in a series are meant to be read years apart since that’s how they’re published, why wouldn’t you read them back-to-back if you could?

This whole planning-my-reading-year-like-a-mix-tape thing is all in retrospect. There’s very rarely any advance thought given to it (except for the anticipation of reading the next Sarah Vowell book on my list when the new year rolls around). In the post-Christmas lull of holiday week I reflect on the reading year that was, assess which goals I achieved -- including my Goodreads reading challenge -- and examine the variety (or lack thereof) of my selections as I get ready to create another mix tape.

How do you choose what book to read next, and what do you do to ensure diversity in your reading choices?

More precious than rubies

I just wanted to share with you a bible verse that popped into my head today:

Happy is the one who finds wisdom,
The one who gains understanding
For its fruits are better than silver
Its yield greater than fine gold
It is more precious than rubies
No treasure can match it.

Note: You may be surprised to see the bible quoted in my blog, dear reader(s?). I assure you this post has nothing to do with God or faith or anything like that. I post this quote as I might a verse from a pop song that resonates with me, and the rest of this post is not about the quote itself, but how it came to be knocking around in my head.

The above passage is from Proverbs 3:13-15. That link uses the New International Version (NIV) of the bible, which is the default translation for the website (biblegateway.com). The one I transcribed above is how I remember it, and I found it quoted in an academic handbook after Googling "more precious than rubies." I read this text for the first time (and then over and over, year after year) in my childhood synagogue's prayer book. It has stuck with me all these years because it praises knowledge, not God. It also places the value of knowledge over that of wealth (a point it really drives home, as if speaking to the Jewish stereotype). Now, if you read the preceding verses, this is totally demeaned because it warns you against thinking for yourself, and admonishes you to only trust in the Lord, but let's forget we learned that (besides, I think the prayer book takes it out of context anyway).

Growing up Jewish, I had no concept of where specific bible verses came from. Of course there would be a reading from the Torah, and that reading would be the one that follows the one they'd read the previous week. There would also be a Haftarah reading linked thematically to the Torah portion. All of this went down in Hebrew, of course, and I was a child, so if there were ever any geographical markers (like in church, when they announce the book, chapter, and verse before they begin reading), I missed them. I remember learning that the entirety of the our religious texts consist of the Torah, and two other parts called blah blah and blah blah but let's focus on the Torah portion for your bar mitzvah (oh yeah, and the Haftarah portion, which I only now know from research comes from one of the other blah blahs).

Even in a Reform Jewish temple such as the one I went to growing up, the Torah is read as it is written: in Hebrew. We were encouraged to learn the English translation of our bar/bat mitzvah Torah portion so we could talk intelligently about for a few minutes from the bimah, but the focus was on the Hebrew, a language many of us learned to read, but not understand.

Everything in the service that wasn't the Torah, or the Haftarah, or the calendar of events or the fundraising ask, was in the prayer book, and that's where (I think) the above passage from Proverbs lives. The books we used were Gates of Prayer (on Shabbat) and Gates of Repentance (on the High Holy Days), and yet I can't locate the passage in either of those on Google Books (even if I reduce the search to simply, "rubies"). Even though I can't tie the anointment of wisdom back to where I originally found it, I can now trace it back to its source, which is Proverbs 3:13-15, in "the poetic books" of the Ketuvim, also known as "Writings," or in my previous description, the second of the two blah blahs.

First Thoughts on Welcome to Night Vale

Many months ago, my friend Sara pointed me in the direction of Welcome to Night Vale.

I listened to the first episode alone in my apartment at night and was too creeped out to continue. It was a similar experience watching X-Files in my room at 1am: not exactly a gentle prelude to sleep. For me, X-Files requires either daylight or company, and so does Night Vale (ironically, I guess).

Fast forward to Monday, I decided to give WTNV another chance, this time at work. It is much more palatable there. I listened to the pilot again, and now I'm seven episodes in and ready to talk about it.

Thoughts:

1. Most unusual objects that appear (and frequently disappear, leaving no trace, or so we are instructed to believe) in Night Vale are accompanied by a sound (described, not demonstrated). I like that there's a lot of low, sotto voce humming going on.
2. There is also a lot of glowing. One episode I've listened to is devoted to the presence of a glowing object. Occasionally, we listeners are counseled (by the Council) that the glowing of everyday objects is normal.
3. On more than one occasion, "a word from our sponsor" is literally one word ("carp," for example). Once, it was a sound.
4. I am worried about Carlos. Night Vale is a rather dangerous place to live, all the more for those who would dare to examine it.
5. As if the show weren't already immersed in beautiful, haunting non-sequiturs, each one begins with a demented aphorism before Cecil announces, "Welcome to Night Vale." There is also a closing proverb, read by one of the producers after the credits. One such proverb: "Men are from Mars; women are from Venus; Earth is a hallucination; podcasts are dreams."
6. Although the podcast features a lot of background music (and some foreground music), it and Cecil's voice are the only things you ever hear (with only one exception, so far). As I mentioned in point #1, sounds are described, but you never hear them.
7. I felt the need to address the corrupt, totalitarian regime, but I suddenly and mysteriously no longer do.

That's enough for now, lest I spoil anything. Most of the universe can listen on iTunes. As an Android user, I've been listening via Podbay (which you can do from your mobile thing or computer).

New Yorkiversary

It was ten years ago today that I moved to New York, which, by the prevailing definition, makes me a New Yorker. I can't find the source of this conventional wisdom (the closest I came, after some cursory Google searches, is this brief Gawker article). As an alternative, I offer the following formula courtesy of WNYC's Jody Avirgan (via the Brian Lehrer show):

From here

Beyond time, tears shed, and MTA knowledge, here are a few of the things that make me feel like a New Yorker:

1. I never pay full price for Broadway. Growing up on Long Island, I was acquainted with TKTS (or "the two-fer line" as my grandma called it) at a young age, but living here has opened me up to all the various ways you can see a Broadway show at a significant discount. The best way: be friends with people in the biz.
2. I know the secret parking spots. It's a fairly uncommon thing to have a car in NYC (and yet, there are cars all over the place!), so driving in the city would seem to make me not a New Yorker, or at least not a typical one. What sets me apart from the visiting motorists is that I know how to get around on four wheels in this city. I know that sitting in traffic on the FDR is better than navigating the streets of East Harlem. I can parallel park like a boss (ask anyone), and no, I'm not telling you where the secret parking spots are.
3. I know what time brunch is. It's at 2pm. It's called "brunch" because breakfast slammed headlong into lunch and they both tumbled into late afternoon.
4. I sleep on the subway but always* wake up at my stop. *except when drunk.
5. I understand that $3 umbrellas are single-use.

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Missed Connection

I order my cat supplies from wag.com. Because this story will quickly veer away from the subject of cats and cat supplies, here is some adorable product placement:

You hope the cat goes in the box but you live with what you get.

Wag.com is great because, above a certain amount, they will deliver next day for free. I placed an order on Friday, and my packages faithfully arrived on Saturday, but apparently not to my apartment. I was awoken yesterday (Sunday) by a loud rapping at my door. I opened it a crack to see a stranger (not someone from my building) who calmly explained that my (large) packages were delivered to him by mistake. He was on his way to church, but he'd stop by on his way back so I could come pick them up. I said thank you and he left.

As I gradually woke up more and my senses returned to me, I realized I didn't know where he lives (he identified himself as a "neighbor" of mine, but I didn't know on which side or if he was using the term more broadly than next-door), and I didn't know how long church was, but I'd probably be gone for the day before he returned, and I had no contact info for him. I wrote him a note with my phone number explaining myself as best I could and left it on the front door of the building. I also tried peering into each of the buildings on either side of mine to see if I could figure out where my packages were, but no dice. I set off for the day and hoped for the best.

The day went by and I didn't receive a call from him, and I returned home to find my note taken down, but no correspondence in its place. I had enough cat food for a few days so solving this package problem wasn't a top priority, but it still galled me. Today I received a text from the president of my co-op board saying a note was left for me today with a phone number on it. I assume it was from him, but the phone number was one digit short. I remain at an impasse.

To be continued...