allow me to correct myself:

contrary to what I was saying the other night, the UMass Lowell men's ice hockey team is Division I. In addition to being Division I, they are apparently really really awesome and currently ranked 4th in Hockey East. So my apologies to anyone who was actually listening to me when I was making shit up about hockey. Remember, I'm the one who didn't know what the C in AFC stood for. So when it comes to sports, don't listen to me unless I'm talking about the infield fly rule.

ode to stansfield tire

It's not every day I'm happy about customer service - just thinking about my experiences with Verizon and Bank of America gives me tiny little heart attacks. It's even less often I'm satisfied with the experience of getting my car fixed. But the dudes at Stansfield Tire have made my heart grow three sizes today.

I happened upon Stansfield Tire about two years ago when I moved into the neighborhood. I had previously been having my car serviced at the Source of All Worldly Evil, so I was pretty psyched the first time I went to Stansfield Tire and discovered that I don't have to pay $600 to find out that nothing's wrong with my car (or that every single solitary thing that has ever been wrong with me car is in fact, my own fault/"due to wear and tear"/not covered by my warranty. EFF YOU, IRA!)

So, back to the story here... Today I had driven to work in four-wheel drive, and on the ride home I put the car back into two-wheel drive. When I took my first left-hand turn of the trip, I heard a really loud, really disturbing pop/thud coming from my back driver's side wheel. I drove out of my way to make sure I had to take both a sharp right and a sharp left, and the noise happened only when I made a left. Plus the car had started to make a sinister groaning sound when I was going straight. I've always had some issues getting my car to switch between four- and two-wheel drive, but this time, none of my old standby tricks were working.

So I pulled into a gas station and called my friends at Stansfield Tire to see if they could take a quick look at my car before the end of the day. The guy who answered the phone proceeded to ask me a series of questions, analyze my problem over the phone and talk me through fixing it. In the time it took him to do this (quite a while), he could have told me to come in and made me pay an hour's labor. I also have to mention that he had no idea who I was, that I was a regular customer, or any of that. He was just being nice. Un. be. lievable.

In the end, what he told me to do (put it in reverse and back up 30 feet, some other crap I don't remember) worked like a charm and I didn't have to take the car in. On its own, this episode probably isn't that exciting or groundbreaking. But I've been this satisfied every single time I've dealt with these guys, with the exception of one kind of fatherly lecture ("It's an oil change every THREE thousand miles, young lady. Not eight thousand miles, not nine thousand miles.") Their nice service and lack of desire to rob me blind are just so refreshing I feel like shouting it from the rooftops. And whatnot.

So in the immortal words of Ice Cube, go to Stansfield Tire for all your tire and car repair needs.

the lord's day

I skipped church on Sunday morning and went to the laundromat, where I washed some of my own clothes but mostly rags and cleaning cloths, soaked with homemade furniture polish from our training on Thursday. While I was there my boss stopped by with presentation copies from Kinko's, which all turned out to be missing the even pages. he went back and re-did them, and we met up later for some collating and a long conversation about organizational behavior.

after a long work-related afternoon, I took BART to Emeryville to meet up with Han, a friend from college. he lives with his sister in a cute little loft, where he cooked us some awesome thai curry. besides the sandwich I ate the first day we were here, it was my first home-cooked meal, and it was amazing.

after dinner we smoked some cigarettes on the porch and I talked about the strange hatred I felt towards the tourists I'd seen on Saturday. Living on Cape Cod for so long, I feel justified in hating the tourists there, because I depended on them for income and so often they were cheap jerks. But i was kind of surprised to find myself hating tourists here too, especially since technically, I'm one of them. Han made an excellent point, that there's a difference between the tourist who comes to "observe" from the outside, and the tourist who comes to be a part of what's going on.

While I'm certainly fascinated by the things that make this place different from my hometown(s), I make it a point not to come here acting like I'm at the zoo. In fact, I hate the very idea of zoos precisely because I think it's so offensive to observe animals like that. I'm sure I don't "fit in" here, but I try not to act like local things and local people exist simply for my enjoyment. I feel like a lot of tourists are here to extract and exhaust local resources, always ethnograph-izing about the strange and exotic things they see, which because they are tourists and confine themselves to tourist attractions suggested in guidebooks, aren't even representative of wherever they are.

So anyways, we talked shit about this kind of tourist for a while, then went to a store in Berkeley called the Elephant Pharmacy, where I tried not to ogle too much, despite the fact that it was the kind of place that inspires me to think I'm not in Kansas anymore. Oh, the irony. This "pharmacy," which I gather caters to UC Berkeley students, did sell all the regular pharmacy stuff, but was mostly stocked with stuff like $80 yoga mats and hemp stationery. We got some organic blueberry newtons and raw juice "health tonic."

sabado gigante

Since I got here I've kind of been avoiding hanging out with my boss and his wife, not always on purpose, but usually because our schedules don't quite sync up. Anyhow it was starting to make me feel a little guilty, so on Saturday morning I joined them for a trip to the waterfront area on the Embarcadero. We went to a cool arts and crafts fair at the end of Market Street and then an awesome farmer's market at the ferry building.

Being Saturday, the whole place was packed with tourists. It was insane, especially when we got down towards Pier 39, a place I hope I never get to visit again. There were some cool sea lions:

but other than that, it was nothing but fanny packs and visors and sandals with socks in every direction. I felt kind of bad because my boss' wife wanted to shop for souvenirs for the grandkids, but my boss seemed to think I was bored and kept trying to keep her moving. I wasn't so much bored as claustrophobic, but when they mentioned they were heading to In and Out Burger, I had to bail. I've been eating out for every meal since Tuesday, and it's hard enough to be healthy just based on eating out, never mind eating out at places like In and Out Burger. Plus if I saw one more fanny pack I was going to puke.

There were so many people out that the streetcars and MUNI cars were full and kept going right past every stop, so I decided to walk back. Even though it was only like 2pm, I already felt stressed out from all the tourism, so I stopped for a drink at a place on a little side street. I'm obsessed with bars and restaurants that have outside seating, and although the weather seems to be constantly gorgeous here, not many places have patios. I guess Californians are so used to the awesome wetaher that they're over sitting outside. But I'm not. So I ordered a gin and tonic, which I later found out cost $9.50, and had the extreme pleasure of eating these guys:

Healthy, delicious, and only $3 more than the drink. I walked towards the hotel and got accosted by a Greenpeace volunteer who wanted to talk to me about, of all things, Cape Wind. Well this poor guy, who approached me asking "Hey! Do you care about the environment?" sure picked the wrong passerby. I gave him a talking-to... told him about the time I met Jim Gordon... assured him that I, too, love renewable energy... signed his letter to Nancy Pelosi... and went on my merry way, feeling like such an educator.

After I got back to the hotel I collapsed on my bed for a few minutes, briefly stopped by the wine social, then met up with Hannah's sister Marisa in the Mission. We went to a tapas place on 16th Street, ordered a pitcher of sangria, and did some serious catching up. It occurred to me that I haven't seen Marisa since 2002, which is a seriously long time. Even though we had five years of personal life updates, we ended up talking about Michael Pollan and structural adjustments and other semi-dorky things i love to talk about. It was really refreshing to meet up with someone I haven't seen or spoken to once in five years, and feel like we hadn't skipped a beat.

The restaurant was ridiculously loud, so as soon as we paid the bill we got right out of there and headed to a bar called Delirium, where the people were dressed in black and the PBR flowed like water. Marisa ordered us pints of a delicious local amber beer called Boont's and we resumed our catching up. By the time we got to about 2004, it was already past my bedtime, which has gotten a lot earlier since I've arrived. The time change was actually really beneficial to my waking up early, but that night was probably the first time since I got here that I've been out past midnight.

dia cuarta: viernes

at this point I can barely remember what i did a few minutes ago, let alone what I did on Friday. but for the sake of all of you for whom a day without my blog is like a day without the Lord, I'm going to try.

I got to sleep a little later than usual, and we went to a meeting near the Embarcadero to check out the location of our second two trainings. the lady was a half an hour late, so we pretty much saw it without her help. But then she got there and we all went out to lunch at the ferry building.

The ferry building is kind of like Quincy Market, lots of food and food-related retail. Its customers seemed to be half tourists and half people who work in the neighborhood. We got some fresh bread from the Acme Bakery (lame name, good bread) and some interesting cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery (ditto). And I got gelato.

After the meeting I decided to walk back to the hotel, which turned into an epic excursion. I stopped at a few places trying to find tarnished silver, as is my custom, and got some [relatively] cheap pants at Anthropologie. Thank GOD there aren't any of those around Lowell, or else I'd be insanely broke.

I figured since I was already on a three-hour-minimum walk, I'd veer off and take an even less direct route and ended up back in the Mission. I wandered into a bookstore where I found this little gem:














if you can't see it clearly, it's Kermit the Frog saying "modernity has not come to terms with its own technics." true, I thought, and bought a postcard of some Mexican luchadores.


I made it back to the hotel just in time for the wine social. I was pretty thirsty after my four hours of walking, and ended up polishing off an entire bottle of white wine with another guest. He was kind of a strange bird, a dude from Baltimore who was here to visit his boyfriend. At first I was talking to a couple from England who were here celebrating their anniversary, and he was kind of off to the side, chiming in occasionally but looking a little like he was off in space. After the English guys left we bonded over missing our boyfriends (his lives in SF, but it seemed like something weird was going on between them) but things got a little awkward (for me anyways) when he started talking about personal stuff like his boyfriend's blanket-stealing habits.

All of a sudden I realized it was already dark out and I'd been drinking wine since 6pm on an empty stomach. My boss called to see if I wanted to go to dinner with them but I felt a little bit beyond the point where I felt like trying to make intelligent conversation in a family setting. So I took a long walk and ended up stopping at a dark, dank diner, where much to my own surprise, I ordered a beer. They had Newcastle, which I haven't seen much here, on tap, and I just couldn't resist.

day three: thursday

morning came very, uh, early on thursday. I woke up around 4am and realized that I had fallen asleep in my street clothes, with all the lights on. I turned the lights off, changed, went back to sleep, and woke up what seemed like 5 minutes later. We headed off to the train station with even MORE supplies, schlepped everything to the conference room, and prepared for our first training.

I was a ball of f-ing nerves, so I headed downstairs to smoke a cigarette before the training started. By then my boss had already caught me smoking for the first time, so I felt OK about telling him where I was going. In a way him catching me was a blessing in disguise. I had briefly considered making my first day in SF my "quit date" and trying to go cold turkey. In fact, I suffered through the entire day on Tuesday and most of Wednesday without smoking, not wanting to let him and his wife know I smoke. But after he caught me on Thursday morning, I figured, "who am I kidding? this is one of the more stressful times in my life, and trying to hide my smoking is almost as stressful as not smoking at all." almost.

so aaaanyways, I went downstairs for a cigarette. Although we were in a pretty busy area of downtown Oakland, only two people walked by me the entire time I was smoking. Guess who those two people were? Oh yes, you guessed it, the commissioner of the SF Department of Public Health, and a woman from the American LUNG ASSOCIATION. Jesus Christ on a bike. Of course, i didn't know who they were until i got back upstairs and found my boss talking to them inside the conference room. yes, these ladies and 20 other asthma activists were participants in the training we were about to do. The training in which I had to get up in front of the room and tell people about avoiding toxics in household products that can decrease indoor air quality and trigger asthma attacks. When he introduced me to them I nearly passed out. Granted, my area of "expertise" has more to do with chemicals in cleaning products and pesticides, but I've never felt like such a huge asshole in my entire life.

Other than that embarrassing little incident, about which no one said anything, thank god, the training went fine. Everyone seemed to really respond to the make-your-own cleaning products activity, which i was excited about, because it's kind of my forte. After we lugged all the supplies back to the hotel I went on another adventure, this time to the Mission neighborhood.

As you might expect, the Mission is full of old Spanish architecture and taquerias. As you might not expect, it's also full of auto repair shops, used book stores, and hipster-y vintage clothing stores, where used clothes cost more than new clothes from regular stores. I wandered around the Mission until I got hungry/thirsty/tired, then I stopped at an amazing bakery called Tartine to sit outside for a glass (OK, maybe closer to a bottle) of red wine and a ridiculously delicious prosciutto and provolone sandwich.

I sat down next to a girl with blond dreadlocks who weighed about 75 pounds. She struck up a brief conversation with me, something that people seem to do all the time here, which I actually find really refreshing. Coming from the heart of puritanical frown-at-strangers land, it's been so nice to find that people here are genuinely friendly (and not half as pushy as they are in Boston). We were both peacefully drinking and reading our books in the sun when her obnoxiously hipster friends walked across the street from the laundromat and sat down across from me, blocking my sun and loudly fawning over the "energy" of the vintage Russian Army hat they had just bought at one of those stores I just mentioned. They were arguing over who should take the hat - one of them had bought it for herself but decided that it matched the other girl's "spirit" better. I wanted to puke. But it only got worse.

I like to think I'm an open-minded person, I do yoga (when I'm not busy smoking and drinking and eating meat) and love my neighbors and all that. But these girls pissed me off so much that had I not been completely fascinated with their vapid conversation, I would have gotten up and left. It's hard to do the experience justice through the written word, I even tried to explain it to a few people on the phone and it was impossible, you just had to be there.

A homeless and somewhat not-quite-there guy had apparently followed them from the vintage clothing store to the laundromat, and eventually found them across the street at the bakery. he came over to the table and asked them for a cigarette. I was smoking at the time and he probably thought I was with them because we were all sitting so close together, but I kind of ignored it because at the time I thought he was a friend of theirs. Instead of saying "No, sorry," they went on an interminable tirade of cutesiness, throwing out gems such as "smoking isn't sexy," "we don't kiss boys who smoke," and "why don't you go to the public library and take out a book about yoga?"

Honestly, this poor guy was just confused by their egging him on. Like I said, there was something a bit off about him, I'm not sure if he might have been a little slow, or maybe just a little mentally ill, or both. But either way, their tactics were not constructive. They kept rolling their eyes at each other, and when he would wander off to ask someone else for a cigarette, which he did several times, they would say stuff like "oh that poor lost soul, I feel so bad for him, but I wish he would just leave us alone." But every time he came back, they kept going with their quasi-flirtatiousness and led him to believe he was getting somewhere. At one point he asked for one of the girl's phone numbers and she told him "I don't have a phone," although she had been texting a minute earlier. He said he didn't either, but he used a pay phone sometimes. they laughed, and i wanted to punch them. he asked them about their parents, and one girl said her father was an astronaut, winking at the other girls. again, I felt a twinge of violence. what they were doing was cruel, not kind like they thought.

after what seemed like forever, he gave up on them and asked me if he could have the rest of my wine. I said "no, sorry," and he said OK and rode away on his bike. After he was gone, the girls practically wet themselves laughing and saying "oh my God, i can't believe you just got rid of him like that!" Then, to top it all off, one of the girls felt some remorse and confessed that she felt like they might have been messing with him. NO FUCKING SHIT, YOU DUMBASSES. The other girl said, "no, you're just so kind, but people like him need to be with other people who are on his same level." Same level? Thank GOD they got up at that point, because that was seriously the last straw and I was about to break the bottom of my wine bottle off on the pavement and assault them with it.

before they left they told me they hoped I wasn't insulted by their "smoking isn't sexy" comment, saying that they all actually smoked. Like the pleasant person I am, i said "no problem," because in the end I'm sure they were nice people, just a little misguided.

sorry for that little rant.

day two: wednesday

In addition to the dopeness of having the room right off the courtyard, my room is also right next to the hotel kitchen. It's a regular kitchen like you would find in a house, with all the regular kitchen stuff like plates and glasses, ice, a dishwasher, and best of all, food. Food you can eat any time. Delicious food, like cheese danish and peanut butter and wasabi snack mix. On my second morning in SF, I discovered the awesomeness that is being able to roll out of bed and get coffee in my pjs. Instant gratification, and because my room is so close to the coffeemaker, I didn't even have to worry about anyone seeing me skulking around the kitchen with my ubiquitous morning cowlick. After four or five cups of coffee and four or five danishes, we went to a meeting at the office where our first training was.

We got on the subway to Oakland with bags and bags of cleaning product ingredients that I had shopped for on Tuesday night. It was quite a hike to the train station, and holding the stuff, which included two five-gallon jugs of vinegar, made the train ride itself into yet another workout. Between tooling around the city buying supplies and then taking them places, up and down these crazy hills, my muscles have been in a constant state of achy breakiness. But all the exercise makes is a lot easier to justify eating gelato twice a day.

After the meeting we went to Union Square - picture Downtown Crossing plus two thousand additional tourists plus cars. Pretty nuts. We ate at a New York-style deli, which wasn't nearly as New Yorky as anything I've experienced on the East Coast, but still pretty good. We got some latkes, and they were $10. This place is nauseatingly expensive. More on that later.

I left my boss and decided to walk back to the hotel. This took about two hours, what with my stopping at various antique stores and jewelers trying to find tarnished silver (to demonstrate our green silver polishing technique). When I asked, people generally looked at me like I had twelve heads, each one crazier than the last.

I stumbled upon a really cool farmer's market in front of the Civic Center. A lot of the produce was stuff I'd never seen before, mostly Chinese and Mexican vegetables and fruits. And yes, there was Durian fruit. I would have bought some, except it's heavy to carry, smells like ass, and tastes worse than it smells.

I was a little bit luckier finding liquid castile soap. When I finally got back to the hotel I decided it was time to stop fucking around and just go to a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. The point of this part of our training is to utilize ingredients that people around here can easily find at local (and cheap) stores, so I was trying really hard to not wuss out and go to a yuppie chain store, but my feet were killing me. So I mapquested the closest Trader Joe's (two miles away) and set out for Haight-Ashbury (on foot, not really solving my achy feet problem).

Well I never quite got to Trader Joe's, because I got distracted by gelato and then found castile soap at one of SF's many many MANY vitamin/herb/other hippie crap stores. I did end up walking almost all the way there, and I got to see most of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in my wanderings. All of the stereotypical legends about the neighborhood seem to be true. The whole place smelled like nag champa and cloves, alternatingly (I know that isn't a word.)

I walked up many a steepass hill through the Lower Haight and up to Buena Vista park (good views, as the name would suggest) and then Duboce park, where there was a doggie play group thing going on. In a word, it was f-ing idyllic. The area where Duboce park is is pretty much what the intro to Full House looked like - long rows of tall, skinny Victorian-ish houses on a steep hill, with wholesome-looking young family types all over the place, their kids in expensive jogging strollers and baby gap clothes. It was a far cry from the neighborhood where I'm staying (which I'll get to later).

I got back to the hotel, made some phone calls to my loved ones, and collapsed in a heap on my bed. I was going to just call it a night, but it was only like 9pm, plus I needed a burrito, like, asap. So I headed deeper into the Castro district, where I'm staying. By all accounts it's the most vibrant gay neighborhood in the city, which is really saying a lot. I was tempted when passing by bars like The Men's Room and Moby Dick, but I kept going in search of a sweet taqueria.

On Castro street, which is like the main drag (yes) of the neighborhood, I found a place that met all my needs, i.e, eggs and avocados. The B&B is awesome but severely lacking in the egg department. I got huevos rancheros that would bring tears of joy to your eyes. Fresh eggs, cooked juuust over easy, right in front of me, with warm corn tortillas, Spanish rice, black beans, some kind of delicious fresh green salsa, and a WHOLE avocado sliced over the top. And for san francisco food, it was actually pretty cheap. I ate the bejesus out of that thing and passed out cold.

day one

san francisco is the dopest. I am blogging to you from the courtyard


of my fabulous (in every sense of the word) bed and breakfast in the heart of the most fabulous (again) neighborhood I've ever seen. My boss' wife and I are the only two females in the entire place. We just might be the only two females on the entire block. There's a "wine social" every afternoon in the "sunroom," which as you can see from this picture of my fabulous room, is right outside my window.

We got here a little later than planned, after the weight of the plane crushed the tow bar that was trying to pull it away from the gate. So that sucked. I tried to sleep a lot on the flight but I was sitting next to a ridiculously lovey-dovey newlywed couple who kept making loud, gross (and they thought, hilarious) sexual innuendo jokes to the male flight attendant.

After we arrived we took a taxi to the hotel but our rooms weren't ready yet so we went to have lunch with my boss' daughter-in-law and granddaughter, who is a super-cute seven month old baby. My first California food was exactly what i expected after a lifetime of absorbing stereotypes about California food... lots of fresh vegetables in weird yet attractive combinations, avocado everywhere, sourdough bread, arugula, fennel, other assorted whole-foods-yuppie things, all on plates that were so "rustic" they bordered on precious. I forgot my granola bar in the morning and slept through boxed lunch time on the plane, so I found it all incredibly delicious and ate twice my body weight in snap peas that cost $15 a pound.

Then we walked up the hugest hill I've ever seen in my life, walked down the hill, and went to the hotel where I discovered the fabulousness that is my room. I messed around for a while unpacking and whatnot, then feeling a little parched, I decided to explore the neighborhood in search of cold beer. I learned that beer, like everything else, is crazy expensive in San Francisco. After looking at the menus posted outside a dozen bars, I settled on a huge can of PBR from the Chinese grocery on the corner. It was superb. I even took it in the shower with me.

Boss and Mrs. Boss went back to their son's house for dinner, and I stayed in, or so I told them. I was really exhausted from waking up at 5am and wandering around on foot all day, but I really just needed a break from the company. I ended up taking a super long walk from the hotel to a supermarket, where I did a little research to see which green cleaning products were available. I found only one, and took a picture of it:

good stuff. It was still kind of light out, so I tried to get used to the layout of the city by taking my super long walk a little further. But my feet were KILLING ME so I headed back to the hotel, made some phone calls, and passed out before midnight.

i'm oot

I'm leaving for San Francisco tomorrow morning for three weeks of alternating business and pleasure. I'm super excited, because I've never been to California before, and super nervous, because I'll be attempting to work en español.

Depending on my ratio of boredom to stress while I'm out there, this means I'll either be blogging a lot more or a lot less than normal, which recently, hasn't been much. Anyhow, I'm going to try to at least take a lot of pictures and put them on my Flickr, if I can remember to pack my camera cord...

april wasn't all that cruel this year

There are probably two or three people in the universe who I haven't [drunkenly] told about my plans to throw a Super Festive Post-Graduation Drunken Softball Extravaganza. If you're one of those people, I should let you know that I live right across the street from the best little league field in all of Lowell. I don't know what makes it 'the best,' probably just that I can see it from my porch, but whatever, it's the best. Anyhow, I was at school all day pretending to work but not really doing anything, so I decided to come home and pretend to work on the porch. That didn't really work out very well because there was an awesome game going on and also, somehow I get wireless internet out here. I've been totally unproductive, surprise, surprise.

But blogging is kind of like work, at least in the sense that it's something I haven't done in forever. I have an excuse though - I was really sick! OK, I was only sick for like 12 hours, but it was horrible timing. I literally haven't gotten sick since the first summer after I graduated from college, so I don't handle it very well. I missed an entire day of this conference that I was supposed to present a paper at, a paper that I've been working on for months with my boss/professor. So that sucked. But I made a full recovery and went to the conference all day on Friday.

Since I am mentally unable to sit in one place and listen for more than 15 minutes, I volunteered to photograph, which gave me justification to do what I do best - wandering around aimlessly for 7 hours talking to people and occasionally taking some pictures. As far as academic conferences go, it was actually a really cool one; people came from all around the world to present about community-university partnerships (in the past I've referred to them as 'stupid f-ing community-university partnerships, but once we finished our paper they seemed a lot less aggravating).

On Friday night we went to see Robert Randolph and the Family Band at the Avalon. Their music itself was along the lines of Medeski Martin and Wood, but they reminded me more of the North Mississippi All-Stars, a very Southern sound, long jams but with a lot of bass and a lot of energy. It was by far one of the best live shows I've seen in a while - possibly the best since the legendary New Deal extravaganza at the more-infamous-than-legendary Palladium. Palladium horror story #374: I briefly dated a guy who left a bouquet of dead sunflowers on the hood of my car. I should have known better - he had a Palladium "Gold Card."

Speaking of the North Mississippi All-Stars, the Beachcomber opens in just a few weeks! The first few Friday nights they have a special deal where the $10 cover gets you a free season pass. For anyone who hasn't been there, it's uh-mazing. It's a Cape Cod institution: a big shack-like thing with sand and sawdust all over the floor, overlooking the most gorgeous beach on the Cape, with incredible live music almost every night and a ridiculous raw bar. Opening night is May 24th - who's coming with me?

My yearning for home-cooked food struck again yesterday, and I spent pretty much the entire day cooking Syrian food. My ancestors did not mess around: the food is almost impossibly labor-intensive and time-consuming to make, and there are almost no shortcuts. There are definitely times when, although you end up with an equally "home-cooked" meal, you will have used the microwave, a store-bought sauce, or even spices from a jar. I'll admit I didn't make my own yogurt or grind my own lamb, but other than that I was faithful to the way I saw this stuff made when I was growing up.

I got home from the store around 2pm and started making tabbouli - by the time 6pm rolled around I hadn't even finished drying the parsley yet. This is as much a function of my procrastinating and puttering around as anything else, but still... I brought some of the food to a potluck at school today and a friend asked for the recipe, so here it is. Keep in mind this is one of my Not Recipes, and if you enjoy the tabbouli you get at the supermarket, or Lebanese tabbouli for that matter, you might be surprised at how this comes out. So feel free to omit ingredients you don't like, add other stuff, or change the amounts according to your tastes:

Rinse a cup of medium bulghur wheat and get most of the water out, then put it in a big bowl. Add 5 or 6 big tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of two lemons, about a teaspoon of salt, and a tablespoon of Syrian pepper (which I will explain below). Mix it up and let it sit and marinate while you deal with the vegetables.

Wash and drain 2 bunches of flat (sometimes called Italian) parsley. Spread out a bath towel and put the leaves on it as you pick them off the stems; let it dry out for a while then pick up the ends of the towel and shake it around to get more of the water off (you don't want to bruise and wilt the parsley by patting it dry - if you do pat it dry to save time, be gentle.)

Put about half the parsley in the big bowl on top of the wheat. Then add in the other vegetables, which are all chopped: three seeded tomatoes (or use beefsteak tomatoes and don't worry about seeding them), half a large peeled cucumber or a whole small one, a bunch of scallions, and bunch of fresh mint. Add the rest of the parsley, mix it all up, cover it tightly, and put it in the fridge for at least an hour. Then taste it and adjust the seasonings, adding more lemon juice, oil, salt, Syrian pepper, or whatever else you want. It gets better the longer it sits in the fridge.

Syrian pepper, or da'a, is what makes Syrian food taste like Syrian food, so don't skimp on it, and whatever you do, do NOT try to use plain black pepper instead! Over the years I've realized that everyone makes this a little differently, even within a single family, which is kind of weird. I prefer this formulation; it's a little heavier on the cinnamon than most, and easier to remember because it goes 3-3-2-2-1-1:

3 parts allspice
3 parts cinnamon
2 parts black pepper
2 parts white pepper
1 part nutmeg
1 part ground cloves

notes from underground

this may or may not come as a surprise to you, but I simply did not do any work this week. I last blogged on Monday, a day that was completely devoted to useless introspection and worrying about not doing any work. The maxim of the day was:

1. Write a crap thesis
2. Edit it

After blogging about it and washing some dishes, I called [GERTRUDE STEIN] and broke down, hysterically returning to "I'm a confused young child and I need my mother" mode. [GERTRUDE STEIN] is a professor with many misguided students of her own, but she was a little taken aback upon discovering that I have no "goal for the future." Oh well. We set up a meeting. I went out drinking in Nashua and saw some good live music.

On Tuesday I slept late, accosted [MARV ALBERT] and told him about my dilemma. He left me with the following:

Motivation does not cause production, production causes motivation.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. Then I had my meeting with [GERTRUDE STEIN], who assigned me a single task to be completed by the next day:

Make a list of things to do.

I made the list, divided the tasks into four categories of difficulty and time-consumption, and got ready to tell [JOSEPH STIGLITZ] that I had decided not to finish on time. He was, to say the least, not pleased. It was very awkward, I think he felt like has done all he can and failed. Of course, I'm the one who sucks, but I think deep down he knows that.

I went home, took a long scalding shower, went out drinking in Cambridge, and saw some good live music.

On Wednesday I slept late, and [GERTRUDE STEIN] stopped by my house to see my list of things to do. I showed it to her and we decided on some deadlines for things I should get done by our next meeting. She gave me some money and a foot-bath-thingy that she bought for my dead grandmother. Then I went up to Salem, dropped my vacuum cleaner off to be fixed, and went to the music store to see about my guitar. It would cost $150 to fix, a big expense considering I paid $25 for the guitar, so it's back to sandpaper and wood glue for me and my axe. The music store dude also tried to help me find a 4-track cassette deck with pitch control to slow down my interviews with, the cheapest used one was $180. I said to the dude,

I just don't have enough money to fix all of my problems in life.

When I got home I smoked a little [PLAIN OLD TOBACCO] and started rereading Notes From Underground. Let me tell you, there could not have been a worse time for me to get [PLAIN OLD TOBACCO] and read a narrative about inertia and alienation. The Underground Man said:

Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself.

So yeah, that was depressing. On Thursday I woke up early and got a phone call from my friend [JUDY BLUME], whose anti-procrastination advice seems to have failed both of us. I went to school and picked up the readings for the conference paper, put them in my bag, and proceeded along with my time-wasting. I did some emailing, checked out some phrenology charts, and considered doing radical brain surgery on myself.

[DOSTOEVSKY HIMSELF] approached me and asked how things were going. I told him exactly how things were going... He said that in the 13 years it took him to write his dissertation, the best advice he ever got was accept his own unique writing process, as different and/or crazy as it might seem to others. He told me he has noticed that I get myself worked up so much before I even begin writing, and that certainly adds to the amount of time it takes me to produce. A lot of people think that's my 'problem' because they can just sit down and write something. He told me:

Getting overwhelmed is the first step of your process, always. But in a way, you MUST work yourself up, so don't beat yourself up over it. Recognize that you do get overwhelmed, that you will get overwhelmed, and accept it as a part of your writing process.

That was some of the most sensible advice I've gotten so far. Everyone tells me to stop 'being hard on myself,' but it seems much more useful to frame it as accepting something I do and working with myself, rather than fixing something I do (or don't do) and trying to change myself. I also tend to believe that I ought to be hard on myself, considering that myself is a person who does very little work. Anyhow, that made me feel better and gave me the energy I needed to get through the rest of the day.

I TA'ed my butt off for the hour or two left before class, sharing some sage-ish advice about the group projects, while simultaneously trying to do the reading that all the actual 'students' had finished days before. Whatever.

To make a long story short, my thesis is no closer to finished than it was two weeks ago. But I got a slew of [hopefully] good advice nuggets in my travels, I have a dozen new articles to read and a new paper to write, and I did a lot of yoga, drinking, and live-music-listening. Now I have to go make some lentil stew, lest I lose my not-writing-my-thesis momentum.

weekend of culture

I keep finding out about incredible things going on this weekend! I can't make it to all of them, but I figured I'd let people know:

sex workers art show in coolidge corner
bread and puppet at cyclorama
lizard lounge poetry jam 10th anniversary
bamako - at the mfa

sledding

conversation while out sledding, trying to climb back up the hill:

me: i'm so winded! i need to quit smoking.

him: but you know, you only go sledding a couple times a year. smoking is something you can enjoy every day.

tha wood

Last night after the scintillating (really) Grad Student Association meeting, I went down to Norwood to get all up in some greek food with Roo Roo and Laurie. We went to a place called X&O in Stoughton, and it was delicious. I could detect the Greek ownership the second we walked in the door: big black menus, lots of overwhelming "art", corner table (in an otherwise empty room) full of 30-something guys dressed in black, drinking and talking on cell phones. It made me a little wistful for the days of yore when that might have been my table. It would have half-sucked because those guys, at least three of whom would be named Benny, would get everything comped and run me around like they were the only people on the planet... But it's always a pleasure to wait on people who know how to eat, know how to drink, and know how to walk that fine line between familiarity and sexual harassment.

As always, I have digressed. The food was super-delicious, the waitress was obviously brain-dead but had a cute headband and got Amanda to order a Viagra Martini ("You had the Viagra, right?"), which was also super-delicious. I got a cucumber martini with Hendrick's and frankly, it scared the shit out of me. I'm not usually one to fear alcohol, especially gin, with which I've developed quite a rapport since college. This martini was nuts - not even Amanda, after two other martinis, could get it down. Laurie suggested I give up trying to drink it and just wash my face with it. It stayed, we left. I pity the unsuspecting busboy who went to clear the table and drank it in one gulp, thinking he'd stumbled upon a treasure trove of almost-untouched "shift drink" deliciousness.

At the bar, Amanda and Laurie taught me some life lessons I'll not soon forget. I was lucky to have been in the company of two such wise women of the world, whose sage advice I'll be trying out sometime soon, once I grow a pair of [metaphorical] balls. I'm 25, but a lot of times I think that movie "13 Going on 30" (not that I've like, seen that movie or anything) could be based on my life.

it's all over

Thank GOD. School has officially stopped torturing me for the year. I know I've said it a million times, but WHAT posessed me to go back to school? I sucked at school before, I suck at school now. I will continue to suck at school until I finally convince myself that perhaps school is not my life's calling. So far, however, waitressing is the only thing I've found that I don't suck at, and I refuse to accept that waitressing is my life's calling. I have way too much in green cleaning at this point to end it all before I change the world (i.e. before I convince at least 12 million people to drop their Windex.)

So I've been told that Bullet Points "really get the point across." This is convenient because I don't have the energy to get creative and write "paragraphs" right now. I haven't blogged much since the last disaster (thesis proposal rejection,) so here's what has happened since I last blogged, in Bullet Points:

-I rewrite my proposal and never hear whether it's OK or not
-I worry, but I have bigger fish to fry
-My love for baking soda gets increasingly obsessive
-Some jerkwad in my group decides to plagiarize her section of my final project
-I have an ethical dilemma
-I have a nervous breakdown
-My professors take pity on me, one gives me an extension
-Mother Nature takes pity on me and sends a flood
-I feel bad for all the people who lost their cars and houses in the flood, but I'm secretly psyched because school is closed on the day my finals are due
-I still somehow manage to get all behind and don't sleep for a week
-I am cracked out to the extreme
-I pull a few more all-nighters, try my best to deal with the jerkwad's section
-I give up on the project
-I take that bitch to Staples, bind it, and get it out of my life
-I have another nervous breakdown, pull another all-nighter, and pour every fiber of my being into writing about green cleaning
-I email that bitch to the professor and drive to Boston for Alexis' graduation
-I miss the graduation itself but am just in time for a delicious Bloody Mary
-I proceed to the RESD party and drink some more, make pleasant conversation with the plagiarist, who I admit is actually a nice person
-There are balloon animals
-I go to Kelly's baby shower, give her some pesticide-free organic cotton baby clothes
-Amanda and I drive to Braintree to get a thing so we can play our Ipods in the car
-The Ipod thing attacks us viciously
-We make our way towards the sweet sunny South
-There is a rainstorm
-There is traffic
-There is a hailstorm
-There is a plague of locusts and I see the seven horsemen of the Apocalypse riding beside us on 95
-We stop at an unsavory location in New Jersey which is both a bar AND a package store, buy some wine, anticipating that we will REALLY need a drink when we get to DC
-We get to DC, drive past our hotel, and proceed to get lost in DC for an hour while trying to call the hotel
-No one picks up the phone at the hotel
-We finally get there at 4:30 in the morning, the little birdies are tweeting
-The desk clerk is "auditing the system" so we can't check in
-We do not even think about opening the wine... We sleep
-We go to some Smithsonians, see some cool insects and the Hope Diamond
-I have my picture taken with the Swedish Chef, my favorite Muppet
-We eat a ridiculous amount of food
-We smoke cigarettes at the bar
-We eat more food
-We suffer food comas and can't seem to motivate ourselves to go back out
-We watch some show about this crazy person who wants a room in her house to look like Hilary Duff's sewing room
-Hilary Duff is a stupid human being
-I get to my green cleaning seminar an hour early
-I eat some danish, scope out the scene at the Holiday Inn
-There are no hot building service contractors in the house
-A guy from Norwood tells an extremely tall tale about the flood, I keep my mouth shut
-I "network" with the guy from Norwood, who makes cleaning products that come in a self-contained biobased film
-I forgive him for being a liar because he's so green
-The seminar would be better if I could keep my eyes open
-We get back on the road, I pray
-We get lost in the ghettoes of Maryland for a while
-We play Twenty Questions, coming up with some killers, including: Army, Lighter Fluid, Jack o' Lantern, Johnny Appleseed, and Picture Frame
-We play Trivia towards the end of New Jersey, but years of pot-smoking seem to have destroyed my memory
-We play Categories through Connecticut and Rhode Island
-I get home and sleep like I've never slept before
-I go to work for about an hour, come home, and sleep some more
-I wake up to an email from the jerkwad plagiarist saying she got an A on the project

So that's my story. It's been a crazy few weeks, and I wish I could express more eloquently how ridiculously happy I am that it's all over. Suffice it to say this is going to be the goddamned best summer of my entire life. Even if I wake up tomorrow and I have no feet, I will be happy. If you'll excuse me, I have to whip up a baking soda paste for the dishes.