The Importance of Being Alix

Sparkly O'Clock

2012-02-24T08:20:00.001-05:00

Five years ago, L and I accidentally studied abroad on the same program. Most people who knew us during our first two years at college would probably not believe this was an accident, as we were fairly inseparable. But indeed, we ended up picking the same program for exactly the opposite reasons and somehow landed ourselves together in Paris for nine months.

For the first time in two years, we were not living in the same room. This was an adjustment, but we were happy to be situated in neighboring arrondissements, her in the 15^e, and me across the river in the 16^e.

The mid-point between our two apartments was the Eiffel Tower, about ten minutes from either side. The Eiffel Tower became the meeting point for not just us, but for all our friends, and most evenings were passed on the Champ de Mars with a bottle of wine and a tranche of cheese, marking each hour with the lights on the Eiffel Tower going off, a time we dubbed "Sparkly O'Clock."

Now, for the first time in a long time, L and I are no longer living together. She and her boyfriend moved in together in September. Like in Paris, she's only in the next neighborhood over, but sometimes it feels like those few blocks stretch across an impassible, infinite distance.

Partly this is because I'm lazy. But mostly, it's because our lives are diverging onto different paths, or maybe the same path, just at different speeds. It takes a lot more effort to spend time together now, and the dynamic is rarely the same as it once was.

Sometimes, I catch myself wishing things could go back to how things used to be, dancing around our dorm room or arguing over perfume ownership.

I know I don't really want that. Both of us have grown so much since the first day of college, or those evenings on the Champs de Mars, or even the first couple years in DC. And I wouldn't want to change any of that.

Mostly, it scares me knowing that someday, probably sooner rather than later, she'll be more than a bottle of wine, a text message, and a ten minute walk away.

Happy Belated Christmas, LV. May we always have Sparkly O'Clock.

But at least for now, she is.

Five Ways British Television Is Simultaneously Awesome and Infuriating

2012-02-20T16:52:00.000-05:00

Recently, I've received a lot of complaints that my blog is not being updated frequently enough. Several of you have expressed concern that this is because I've dumped my loser blog for the cooler, more popular blog, Forever Young Adult. And indeed, I have been doing some writing for them, and also, designing some sweet T-shirts for their new store. But do not blame FYA for my absence! The real problem is that nothing is happening in my life. Or at least, nothing worth writing about.

At first, I tried to make Things happen. I thought that Ladies' Night at the hardware store was a sure thing! But, while drinking wine next to the snaking demonstration was both fun and informative, it was not particularly blog-worthy. Normally, I bring chaos with me wherever I roam, but I somehow managed not to knock over any displays, inadvertently light myself on fire, or put my new-found snaking skills to the test with a broken sink the next day. Instead, I just left with some free but unremarkable swag and got drinks with a friend. I'm as surprised as you are!

The more recent problem is that I've stopped leaving the house. After traveling for most of December and January, I kind of just want to loaf around in my pajamas. And I've been extremely successful at it, thanks to a little friend I have called British television. If you're going to blame anyone for my disappearance, blame British television. In the past week, I've managed to catch up on an entire season of Misfits, and then an entire season of Downton Abbey. If you are not familiar with either of these shows, you probably shouldn't start watching. In fact, you should probably avoid British television altogether, because ignorance is bliss.

Five Reasons British Television is simultaneously Awesome and Infuriating

Shorter Television Seasons
I have an incredibly short attention span. I can hardly stick to any American television shows for more than a season, and I'm about to murder the creators of How I Met Your Mother because at this point, I've already invested far too much of my life to not find out who the mother is, but SERIOUSLY? HOW MANY MORE EPISODES MUST I WATCH?

This is one of the reasons I love British television shows! You've barely started and then suddenly, an entire season is over! Skins has ten per season. Downton Abbey, seven or eight. Sherlock only has three. THREE! It's glorious!

It is also horrible, however. Thanks to Netflix, I've cultivated an expectation of instant gratification around television watching. I've been known to watch entire seasons of television in one sitting. It only took me three and a half weeks to get through all 64 episodes of Veronica Mars. At least with American shows, I'll watch three episodes and there are still 21 left in the season, an insurmountable task for a single evening. If you watch three episodes of a British television season, you're already halfway finished. There is absolutely nothing that can keep me from watching the remaining three to five episodes until 3 in the morning, even though I have work the next day.

Accents
American accents are fairly lame. British ones sound so fancy! Except when they don't. And suddenly you need subtitles.

Vulgarity

As far as I can tell, you can show just about anything short of actual pornography on British television. The upshot of this is that shows can get away with some pretty funny but extremely vulgar humor. Nathan from Misfits might be the world's most repulsive television character, but you love him for it. The show manages to walk the fine line between hilarious and straight up offensive.

Some shows, however, are not as adept at knowing their own boundaries. Skins frequently crosses this line to its detriment. Sometimes they throw in extremely gratuitous plot-lines featuring drug use and graphic sex just to seem young, edgy, and cool, and it doesn't work. I skipped all of Generation 2 for precisely this reason.

Also, it can be super embarrassing to get caught watching those episodes. I recently got EG hooked on Skins, and at one point during the season two episode "Tony," she became extremely concerned that we would hear the episode and think she was watching porn in her room. It's that bad.

Better casting

I don't know if there are better actors in the UK, or simply better casting directors, but the casting on these shows is AMAZING. Especially with the younger shows like Skins or Misfits, the demographic equivalent of a CW show in the US, perhaps, I just don't understand where they get these kids. They are so good! Whereas everyone in American shows seems to be cast based on attractiveness rather than talent, British shows are clearly cast for skill rather than looks (though often, for both).

Here is the problem, though. These actors are so convincing that I am unwilling to believe they are anything but the characters. With Downton Abbey being so popular now, it's hard to avoid seeing interviews or pictures of the actors in their real life clothes and personalities. IT'S HORRIBLE. Lady Sybil once showed up on Misfits as a brainwashing, religious zealot villain and I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MYSELF. I want to keep those actors in a character-specific box and never take them out again, which is problematic because they are so good that I'm sure they'll get cast in lots of other things.

Cassie, I want you to be successful, but I refuse to acknowledge
that you have any facial expressions besides this one.

Watching British television makes me feel both insecure and proud to be American
In sum, British television is better than American television. This depresses me and makes me feel unpatriotic.

Then I remember that, for all our bad television, including the worst of the worst of American Reality TV, at least we are not responsible for The Only Way Is Essex:

By the way, this show won a popularity award over both Downton Abbey and Sherlock at the BAFTAs last year. Thank you, people of Britain, for once again allowing me to feel superior to you.

Perception Filter

2012-02-01T07:34:00.000-05:00

Last night, as I waited for the kettle to boil, something disturbing happened. I turned to my right, faced the hallway, and saw this:

A beige, metal box was mounted to the wall where stairs once led to the basement. It had a small lock asking for a key, but nothing else. The Box was both brand new and immutable, as if it had been there all along. Having never seen The Box before, I stared at it for several seconds, contemplating reality. The Box stared back, mocking me with its permanence.

Eventually, I decided that reality needed a second opinion. I made my way to the living room, half-convinced The Box would disappear in my absence. I asked EG about it. Her interest was piqued. She returned with me to the hallway, where we stared at The Box together. She had never seen it before either.

We discussed the possibility of contacting our landlady, asking if The Box had recently been installed. This would seem a silly question to ask if it had, in fact, been there all along, although we were sure it couldn't have been. I replayed the past two and a half years in my head. Nope, definitely no Box.

Like Veronica Mars, EG got a chair and checked the top for dust. It seemed The Box had been there for a very long time.

I went upstairs and opened my computer, looking at all the photos we've taken during our tenure here, mostly from parties. I scrutinized each shot for evidence of The Box. The Box proved elusive. In every photo, it was hiding just out of the frame or behind someone's head.

Finally, I found proof.

Mind blown.

USPS: An Open Letter

2012-01-24T20:05:00.003-05:00

Dear USPS,

Last Tuesday, I came home to find a delivery confirmation notice in my mailbox. I was extra delighted because the return address was--well, it wasn't technically anyone I know because your postal worker is apparently too lazy to copy down the return address properly, but it was what I can only assume was Former Housemate, KS. This! This was the package I had been waiting for! It was the happiest Tuesday of my life!

Now, I was given two options on this notice. First, I could take the form to a post office in Northeast DC and collect the package with proper identification. This was clearly impossible, because a) if I had time to dick around in NE during the day, I would have time to be at home to sign the package and b) since the package was addressed to "Losers at [REDACTED] St, NW, Washington DC, 20001," it would be rather hard to bring appropriate identification. So I took Option B, which was to sign that the package could be left with no one home, and put the slip back in my mailbox.

Wednesday, I came home and checked the mail, and I have never been so disappointed to find a package with my penpal's handwriting on it. Not that she doesn't send great stuff, but I thought for a second that you had actually delivered KS's package, the very day after I signed for it! Like a normal shipping company! But no, instead I found the confirmation slip crumpled at the bottom of my mailbox under all the other mail, because your mail carrier was too lazy to do his/her job and pick up outgoing mail! So I got some tape and stuck it to the mailbox, sure that it couldn't be missed a second time.

Thursday evening came, and though the confirmation notice was gone, no package had arrived. "No matter," I thought. "I bet they just don't carry the packages with them until they receive the signed confirmation slip."

But Friday, it was still not there. Nor Saturday nor Monday. And then today I got home, and still no package.

Fuck you, USPS.

And don't try to blame local miscreants, stealing stuff off the front porch. Because I do a lot of online shopping. I haven't set foot in an actual clothing store since October. And that shit gets delivered and not stolen all the time. And sometimes my penpal gets her family members to creepily leave things on my front porch, and THAT doesn't get stolen either. I'm pretty sure you're the weak variable here.

Look, USPS. You have screwed me over a lot since I moved to this city. My housemates and I have had a lot of key pieces of mail go missing--thank you notes, my health insurance information, credit cards that were somehow activated and used despite never having arrived--and other things arrive three months after they were sent. THREE MONTHS. DOMESTICALLY. I could get things to Siberia, on foot, faster than that! And despite complaining about our mail carrier multiple times, nothing has ever been done about it. I have pretty low expectations for you, USPS. But never has something of such great import gone missing before.

Because USPS, I'm pretty sure that package contained my one true love: pineapple cakes.

Pineapple cakes are possibly Taiwan's greatest contribution to the world. (And Taiwan makes some pretty cool shit!) I was deprived of the glory of pineapple cakes for many years, because according to KLin, "They are too delicious to share." Seriously, girl brought eighty back in her suitcase this year. Eighty. But when I met her for lunch last week, she conveniently "forgot" to bring any with her. Luckily, KS is not so greedy as her and started bringing them back for us whenever he went home for the holidays. And then we finally understood KLin's hoarding, because they are AMAZING.

A box of pineapple cakes that K acquired by harassing A Taiwanese Person at her office

I was a little concerned that my supply would dry up when KS moved to LA last summer, so I started dropping subtle hints prior to his return to Taiwan. That is, for a month, I texted him things like "DON'T FORGET MY PCAKES" and "REMEMBER ALL THOSE CARE PACKAGES I SENT YOU?"

And now it is all for naught, because some assclown postal worker is chowing down on my PCakes somewhere, even though he or she almost certainly doesn't appreciate how delicious they are. If my package were here, you could currently be reading a post announcing my impending marriage to Pineapple Cakes, including some elaborately photoshopped engagement pictures featuring my beloved. Instead:

YOU EVEN MADE KLIN SAD, AND SHE HAS EIGHTY PCAKES STASHED IN HER APARTMENT IN MANHATTAN RIGHT NOW.

This is the last straw, USPS. I can't even complain properly because you took back the only documentation I had that my package existed. I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TA--oh wait, yes I am, because you are a state-sponsored monopoly, even though you are the very worst!

Ugh!

Sincerely,
Alix

Eight is a lot of legs, David

2012-01-22T18:45:00.000-05:00

Christmas this year should have been called Craftmas. I gave several homemade gifts, including but not limited to, etched beer glasses, screen-printed t-shirts, and the worlds ugliest-but-comfiest holiday sweater. But my biggest endeavor was my gift for my high school girlfriends' annual gift exchange, which involved elaborate papercutting, multiple canvases, and very special paint.

This year was the 8th anniversary of one of my favorite holiday traditions, the Christmas Eve Eve party with my friends from high school. Each year, on the night before Christmas Eve, six of us gather together to exchange gifts and watch Love Actually. The event has evolved over the years; we quickly realized that our gift exchange would be a lot cheaper if we did Secret Santa, and where we all used to crowd into mine or A's bedroom for a slumber party, old age has crippled our ability to have fun and everyone starts to crawl back home by the end of the night. I don't think anyone has paid attention to Love Actually since about 2007. As we've gotten older and moved away--even gotten married in some cases--there are fewer and fewer of us home for Christmas each year. But the one thing that hasn't changed: everyone knows that Christmas Eve Eve is sacred.

Come hell or high water, the six of us know we had better be near a computer with a web cam, a reliable internet connection, and a copy of Love Actually on the night of the 23rd. Technology is a glorious thing. There was even the year that I skyped in from an effing airplane.

Somewhere over Oklahoma

This year, only three of us were in Charleston, so we piled onto my bed and crowded around the computer. Gifts had to be mailed out in advance, so Secret Santa turned out to be not-so-secret. Happily, we'd decided to change up the gift swap and only give homemade gifts, so even if you knew ahead of time who your Santa was, there remained an element of surprise as to whether she had managed to make something not completely terrible.

To everyone's amazement, all six gifts were pretty awesome! AS made F some coasters featuring photographs of her friends, family and fiancé, F made E sparkly champagne flutes with chalkboard paint on the base, E sewed B some thematic throw pillows in anticipation of her upcoming marriage, B, after failing to make the same coasters as AS, made a wooden wall-hanging for A, and A framed photographs she'd taken for me.

I had AS, and after much internal reflection, decided that I would paint her a picture of the Cooper River Bridge:

To do this, I first drew the bridge onto freezer paper using a really large carpentry square (the man at the hardware store was very intrigued by my project). Then, I spent about a million hours carefully cutting away all of the negative space with an Xacto knife (this part SUCKED). I then ironed the bridge onto three canvas panels. This... didn't work very well. I think if in the next step, I'd used spray paint, it would have been ok. But because the cables of the bridge were so fine, they were easily disturbed by the brushes. It smudged pretty significantly, and I had to touch up the white, and as a result, the lines were not as crisp as I envisioned. Alas, it was a necessary evil for the special paint that I wanted to use:

That's right, this GLOWS IN THE DARK, BITCHES! And really, a photograph cannot adequately capture how creepy cool it is to walk into a dark room and have this glowing at you. I was sad to give the painting away, but happy to know it is much appreciated in its new home:

Mocha the dog admires her new artwork.

Cooking SuccessfulLee with PenPal

2012-01-16T21:11:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, I had to go to New Jersey for a thing, so of course I stayed with Penpal and her family. I'm not really sure why this happened, but it was A Good Idea. Penpal flew back from Houston because homegirl is wicked intense, and we planned for a fun weekend. And by "we planned," I mean I said "hey, do you want to learn how to make croissants?" And she foolishly agreed because she had no idea what she was getting into.

Around this time, Penpal was commissioned to do a monthly cooking segment for Forever Young Adult called "Cooking TragicLee". She had me watch her video before publishing, seeking feedback, and since "OMG I LOVE THIS" was not particularly useful criticism, I also shared it with Bright Contradiction, my local cooking partner in crime. Like me, BC thought it was the Greatest Thing Ever, and she is not wrong:

BC immediately demanded that we document our New Jersey croissant making extravaganza, and penpal agreed to the scheme. I packed a camera and a couple of ingredients I had lying around the house and headed north.

Penpal picked me up from the train station on Friday night and drove me back to her parents house. Even though we are in fairly constant communication via snail mail or the internets, we'd only met once before. Sadly, there are not clear social rules dictating how you should act when visiting your epistolary friend and her family, so things were kind of awkwardly formal, like that time in Anne of Green Gables when Diana first comes over for tea and gets drunk on "Raspberry Cordial." (side note: recipe idea for your cooking show, Penpal?)

But being a naturally awkward person, this didn't bother me too much. Plus, Penpal's parents are really, really lovely people. Even if her dad is kind of like the paparazzi and there are now about a million pictures of me and Penpal that could be featured on Awkward Family Photos:

The next morning, as we were lazing around after breakfast, I had to break the bad news:

Penpal: So should we get started on the croissants?

Me: As they will take about 8 hours, yes.

Penpal: 8 hours?!

Me: Give or take.

So we went to the store, grabbed the remaining ingredients and got started. I was too lazy to look up my recipe, so we kinded of winged it. We ran into several technical difficulties, both with the filming and with the cooking. Penpal's mother was extremely unsupportive of the entire endeavor. Every once and a while, she would sail through the kitchen, horrified by the mess we were making of her countertop, and say something like "You know, you can go down the street to the bakery and buy croissants. They're very good," or "You're still not done yet?!" or "I think you should give up now and go drink mimosas on the porch."

But we persevered. Croissant-making involves a lot of waiting around, so we filled the hours in between with chatting, drinking beer, and playing board games. We discovered that Operation is an infuriatingly difficult game, even as adults (how are you supposed to get the ankle bone attached to the knee bone? HOW!?), and I decisively crushed Penpal and her younger brother at Settlers of Catan. I felt really bad about this because they were all friendly and non-competitive about the game, and I've been conditioned to play ruthlessly by people who will temporarily break up with their significant other over a bad move. Eventually, however, the waiting was done and we finished baking.

Lucky for you, you get to watch the process unfold in mere minutes rather than hours:

To prove the worth of our 8-10 hours of baking, we organized a blind taste test of our product versus the bakery versus Pillsbury in a can. Drafting Penpal's parents and brother for the task produced hilarious results:

And now if you'll excuse me, I have to go check the expiration dates of everything in my fridge.

The Hanson Project: Part 3: The Epic Conclusion

2012-01-12T07:00:00.000-05:00

Hanson fans @ Toad's

Sometimes, I get really inspired about a blog piece. I start writing enthusiastically and then... I get distracted. Something else comes up, and the further removed I get from the event, the harder it becomes to write. I have a half dozen such posts sitting unfinished, collecting e-dust in my drafts folder. My friends start harassing me about why it hasn't been posted, but the more time that passes, the less likely it seems that they will ever be published.

Such is the case with this post, which I started over three months ago now. It would be really convenient to just never finish writing this, but alas, I am going to visit E and F this weekend and I fear that if I don't publish it, they may bind and gag me save my fingers below the knuckles, toss me in the trunk of a car with a laptop, and not let me out until I've produced a worthy post on the matter. So to avoid that inevitability, here it goes...

A long time ago (October), in a galaxy far, far away (Connecticut), I went to a Hanson concert. You may remember from back before I fell of the face of the internet that I prepared for said concert by listening to all of their albums in chronological order and then making the sweetest t-shirts ever, ~~at least until I made these epic Twilight shirts~~ after which I really should have re-evaluated my life-choices.

Anyway, one October afternoon, I found myself climbing on a bus to New York. Six excruciating hours later, I was finally greeted by the scent of 33rd and 7th, a welcoming mix of mediocre pizza, stale urine, and cigarettes. E appeared, already sporting her "I <3 Hanson" t-shirt, and we caught a train to New Haven. Neither of us had ever been quite as excited for a six week visit as we were that Friday night.

The beginning of the weekend passed in typical fashion--late night sushi, farmers market, eating, eating, and more eating--but then we got down to business. There were two more in our party so we slapped together shirts for them as well, including my all-time favorite thing I've ever made. I don't have a good picture of the original, but I liked it so much that I've screen printed several copies since then:

I have made myself the companion t-shirt, "Sorry, I was watching Court TV"

If I ever open my Etsy store for secretly-embarrassing-yet-superficially-cool-looking t-shirts, this will be the first thing I sell. I love this design. Inspired by one of Hanson's best-worst songs, "Man from Milwaukee," this shirt is for the Hanson fan that doesn't want anyone else to know they're a Hanson fan, but is maybe ok with the world thinking they buy nonsensical graphic tees at Urban.

Attempting to harness the glow in the dark properties pre-concert. It was a fail.

After getting all gussied up with our TOMS, t-shirts, and glitter make-up that would have made our thirteen-year-old selves die from envy, we headed out for the concert. On the way, a girl stopped and asked directions to Toad's in a state of urgent panic. "How did you know we were going to the Hanson concert?!" we asked in mock surprise. "Oh, I saw your shirt," she replied without a hint of irony. Apparently Hanson fans are not good with the sarcasm.

What Hanson fans are good at is being scary. Once inside, we discovered the venue was already packed. This did not bother me, as I am always one to throw a few elbows and dance my way to the front of the crowd in about three seconds flat. But I only got us about five feet further into the fray before being utterly terrified by the death glares surrounding me and retreated back to our original corner. Alas, actually seeing Hanson in concert was apparently not on the agenda.

Full zoom, on my tip-toes. Bonus though: the crappy quality makes Zac look topless.

It didn't matter, however, because as it turns out, Hanson is AWESOME in concert. Like, really, really good. They are so good that I strongly considered going to Northern Virginia (ew!) a week later to see them again (in the end, Hatred of NoVA > Love of Hanson concerts). I didn't even mind Taylor's whiny voice! Although, that's 90% because it turns out that Taylor is our prettiest man.

I like your scarves, Tay.

Even their terrible old songs sound good. I know this because the gimmick of the "Musical Ride Tour" was that for each city, the audience voted online for Hanson to play one of their albums in full. New Haven was given the option of Middle of Nowhere, This Time Around, and Shout It Out. If you will remember from my extensive notes, I loved Shout It Out, hated This Time Around, and thought Middle of Nowhere was hilariously awful. But Middle of Nowhere was going to be my only shot at hearing "Man from Milwaukee" in concert, so I put all my eggs in that basket. Lucky, too, because we only won by four tenths of a percentage point. I was four tenths away from having to listen to this shit in concert.

Instead, I got the great pleasure of hearing all my favorite least favorite Hanson songs. "A Minute without You!" "Mmmbop!" "Yearbook!" Plus, they included some good ones from their current album, and the less noxious songs from the ones in between. And to my delight, they closed the concert with my personal favorite, "Man from Milwaukee."

The best part about seeing "Man from Milwaukee" live is that, apparently, on the original CD, tracks 13-20 are blank. So in concert, it's tradition that everyone counts up to the song:

Now, I cannot tell you why the good people of San Diego here are not properly enthused, because in New Haven, the crowd went APESHIT during the countdown. I tried to film it, but all you hear is high pitched shrieking like it's 1964 and The Beatles just rode into town on a stallion called Ed Sullivan. I was totally party to this, which is why the camera is so shaky that I'm not even going to assault your eyes with the video I recorded.

After singing "With You in Your Dreams" as their encore (a bit of a letdown after the glory of "Man from Milwaukee") we decided it was imperative that we get our hand-crafted Hanson shirts autographed. I do not have much experience with such matters; the closest I've come to getting an autograph from someone not at Disney World is groping Kim at the end of a Matt & Kim concert. Knowing that just a few weeks prior, my penpal had gotten Zac's autograph on the shirt I'd made her, I sought her advice:

Find the tour bus afterwards. Put your hands on it for good fortune. With luck, a brother emerges.

Let me know if your mission is a success.

E eagerly awaits a brother's appearance (Preferably Zac)

We loitered with at least a hundred other grown-ass women for at least a half an hour, while they tried to clear us out of the street. But Hanson refused to emerge. Finally, we accepted defeat:

Heartbroken, we left and went on with our lives. Normalcy returned with things like eating lots of food and E embarrassing herself horribly at a party. We thought our Hanson weekend was over, but we were so very, very wrong.

The next afternoon, E and I packed up and got a train back to New York. I noticed how incredibly slowly the train was moving when I realized how much I needed to pee and that there are no bathrooms on the MetroNorth to New York. Finally, the train stopped altogether.

After waiting at a standstill for at least a half hour, I checked twitter and discovered that a bridge was out. Finally, they pulled up to a train station in the Middle of Nowhere, Connecticut. This is the point in the story where E and I realized that we were living the lyrics of "Man from Milwaukee," a song that was written when Hanson's bus broke down in the middle of nowhere. The Middle of Nowhere.

It started at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere

Bus stop, train stop, potayto, potahto. We all piled of the train and stood pointlessly in the parking lot, not sure of our next course of action. E went to find a gas station across the street in search of a bathroom. I sat down on a wall with our luggage and waited for something to happen.

This was only the first wave...

Sitting beside me was a man with no hair

A balding man totally came and sat down next to me.

From the look on his face and the size of his toes
He comes from a place that nobody knows

I didn't inspect his toes. But he was kind of weird and was carrying a big empty plastic storage bin.

Maybe I'm hallucinating, hyperventilating
Letting this big-toed bald man sitting here tell me about the sky

It was a really nice day. I think we commented on the weather, and how nice the clouds looked. E came back and took my place while I found the bathroom. In the meantime, she also befriended him. In fact, on my way back from the bathroom, he shouted "ALIX IS BACK!" Even though I'd never told him my name.

Maybe I'm hallucinating, hyperventilating
If you asked me now then I couldn't tell you why
I've been sitting here too long by a man from Milwaukee

Let's assume, for argument's sake, that our new friend was from Milwaukee. And we had definitely been sitting there way too long. It was looking more and more likely that I was going to miss my bus back to DC.

He's been talking too long on his yellow walkie talkie

Cell phones are kind of like latter day walkie talkies, right? Cause he had one of those.

He's been talking to Mars but I think he's wacky

Technically it was his sister-in-law that he was talking to... Maybe her name was Mars? She's apparently a very nice lady with twin infants and a minivan.

He says they'll come get him, come get him some day

At this point, they were trying to cram hundreds of people on to a handful of city buses to get us to the next train station beyond the broken bridge. The possibility of escaping this Connecticut hell-hole was pretty grim, and we were looking for contingency plans. He was trying to con his sister-in-law in to coming to come pick him up, and us too if we so desired.

E continues her weekend pose of "standing next to buses she can't get on to"

He says where he's from is called Albertane
There they use more than 10% of the brain
But you couldn't tell it from they way they behave
They run around in underwear and they never shave

He was not clean shaven, but happily, also not in his underwear. That would have been weird.

Or maybe I'm hallucinating, hyperventilating
Letting this big-toed bald man sitting here tell me about the sky
Maybe I'm hallucinating, hyperventilating
If you asked me now then I couldn't tell you why

{Repeat Chorus}

This is Mother Bird calling Baby Bird
Baby Bird come in, come in Baby Bird

For the love of Pete come in!
This is Baby Bird...sorry I was watching Court TV
Do you copy? Do you copy?
Of course we copy...24 hours a day...in color

Nothing could ever make this spoken interlude applicable to real life.

You wouldn't believe me if I told you the rest

Just as we were sold on hitching a ride with his sister-in-law, a bus appeared from nowhere and we forced our way on. We were deposited at another train station.

Never been so happy to be in South Norwalk

The man sitting by me who was barely dressed
Flew off to Milwaukee or perhaps Albertane
And left me at the bus stop just barely sane

After getting off the bus, the three of us sprinted onto the platform. And then we ran in opposite directions. Just like that, our new friend, with whom we'd share two bizarre but not unenjoyable hours, was gone from our lives forever.

I've been sitting here too long thinkin' about Milwaukee
I've been talking too long on my yellow walkie talkie
I'm talking to Mars you may think I'm wacky
I know they'll come get me, come get me someday
I know they'll come get me and take me away
I know they'll come get me, come get me someday
If not tomorrow then maybe today

Finally, we made it to New York with 13 minutes to spare before my bus left. Unfortunately, my bus left from Penn Station, and MetroNorth runs through Grand Central. We tried to get a cab, but none were to be had. Instead, we sprinted across town and made it to the bus stop just five minutes after it's schedule departure.

And for the first time in the history of BoltBus, the bus had left on time.

In the standby line, E and I nearly got in a rumble with some bitch and her two hulking boyfriends, and I had to argue my way onto a bus to Baltimore instead of DC. Then I caught the last metro from Greenbelt. I suffered a near mental breakdown when I discovered that track maintenance on the green and yellow line meant the metro would leave me stranded in Petworth, land of no taxis, but I managed to catch the last shuttle bus home. In the end, I think it took me 11 hours to get from F's apartment in New Haven to my front door, a trip that should really take no more than 7 or 8, max. But it was totally worth it to really live the Hanson experience. Now I can wear my "Sorry I was watching court TV" walkie talkie shirt with real Fanson pride!

Just kidding. I will never be a Fanson. Those people are insane.

Happy First Birthday!

2012-01-03T10:47:00.000-05:00

via KS

My blog is officially one year old today! Last January 3rd, I started my New Year's resolution of blogging once a week. I did great until mid-August, when everything went to shit. But hey! 8 months is a pretty solid timeline for a New Year's resolution! I have real concerns about that kind of longevity for mine this year: eat real vegetables every day. It's harder than you think! In fact, I already broke it, when I only ate things that can be purchased in gas stations yesterday, following an unfortunate roadside incident wherein R and I watched her boyfriend change a tire in the snow. NYE 2012 FTW!

Anyhow, I'm going to try to bring back the 1+ posts/week rule to my blog this year, if for no other reason than maybe my friends' parents will stop harassing me about it at church (hi Mrs. E!). But right now, let's step in a time machine and see where my blog took us last year... [Cue wibbly lines, soft focus and harp music]

Last year, I blogged 56 times and racked up a little over 18,000 page views. I'm pretty sure 16,500 of those belonged to K, who has promised to throw me a party when I hit 200,000, so keep up the good work, K! My most popular posts have been, far and away, my Neville Longbottom series (which hopefully I will bring back when I get a little more free time for reading (after January?), and, worryingly, this post about Jedward. In fact, "Jedward" is the most popular search keyword that leads to my blog. Thanks, Google.

The Search Keywords section of my blog stats is actually my favorite part of blogging. At first, it was mostly people looking for porn, who would disappointingly end up at my Korean Spa post after searching for things like "women naked in showers together," but as I posted more, they varied and in July, I started keeping track of my favorites in a little segment I like to call "Search Term of the Day." Here are my favorites from 2010:

they told me i could be anything i wanted so i became a god
Do Black people go to Spa World?
married neighbor hitting on me
jedward фото
gilbert blythe is my imaginary boyfriend
buffalo check Wikipedia
mike the headless chicken
Food choice gives me anxiety
i had to poop in a bag
jedward without stupid hair

They are less exciting now, almost exclusively relating to Jedward, Harry Potter, and Dima Bilan. But I still get that friendly reminder when I log in that people on the internet have filthy, filthy minds. Here is a list of today's terms, for instance:

I don't even know what regalia vodka is.

It makes me a little sad that my Jedward and Neville Longbottom stuff is so popular, because the posts that I like most from last year are not the most popular, nor the ones that were carefully planned and edited. Rather, these were spontaneous reactions to semi-disastrous situations, like the washing machine flooding, or my pet fish dying. You can't plan for that shit! Sometimes, life just happens, and the best thing you can do is to laugh about it with everyone you know.

I can't say that I hope that 2012 brings as much excitement as 2011 did, because I'm really, really tired right now. But when it inevitably does, I'll be here to tell you about it.

New Year's Eve: Worst Holiday Ever

2011-12-30T09:44:00.000-05:00

Ah, New Year's Eve. That charming holiday where everyone breaks out the champagne, is thankful for the presence of good friends, and sings Aude Lang Syne after finding someone adorable to kiss at the stroke of midnight, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Zooey Deschanel.

Oh, wait, that's not me! That's everyone else! I'm too busy celebrating a different holiday each December 31st, New Year's Catastropheve. I have never once had a halfway-decent New Year's Eve, despite having attempted to celebrate with people that I like in ostensibly-fun places every year. We're not talking "Oh no, I didn't find a cute boy to kiss at midnight my life is so sad" disappointment. We're talking "well, at least no one ended up seriously injured this year, so I guess that's a success..." Let's revisit the past decade, shall we?

NYE 2002: I don't have any recollection of this, so I can only assume that I stayed at home with my parents, who probably fell asleep at 10ish. I didn't realize at the time that things could only go south from here.

NYE 2003: I was extremely sick and went to bed early. Then I woke up at midnight when people started shooting off fireworks, and hey! This was the year I discovered that codeine makes me hallucinate!

NYE 2004: I was a senior in high school, but being that I was an incredibly uncool senior in high school (as were all my friends--I believe F had to spend the night praying in the New Year with her family, so I guess I have to be thankful that I've never done done that), I stayed home with my family. The only thing I remember about this night is that we had our traditional meal of cheese fondue, on which I managed to choke. The fondue part. Not the stuff you dip in the fondue part. How does one choke on melted cheese? I don't know either.

NYE 2005: I was home from my freshman year in college and excited to be going to an actual party with my actual friends. And, I got to meet A's future husband, Mr. A, for the first time, and I looked super cute in my new white coat! It had the promise of a good night.

Me photobombing B and A. White coat not pictured.

And then we decided to go and set off fireworks. Hey guys, guess what? This is also the NYE that I developed a healthy fear of fireworks! Somehow A, Mr. A, and I ended up trapped on a narrow, flammable dock in the middle of what quickly declined into two groups of people throwing explosives at each other. Not only did this freak me the eff out, but their strategy of throwing fireworks into the marsh directly underneath where we were standing ensured that my cute new white coat was covered in pluff mud. If you do are not familiar with the joys of pluff mud (which lacks a wikipedia article, apparently), it smells like ass.

NYE 2006: Following the previous winter term, which I had spent miserable and alone in South Carolina, and a tragic incident wherein my sister spent an unfortunate Christmas in a Broatel (brothel-boat-hotel) in Prague, my parents decided it would be best for everyone involved if I was shipped off to stay with her in Germany for the holidays. I had a fabulous time in Stuttgart and was excited about the prospect of jetting over to Ireland for New Year's. My family in Ireland is super fun, so it was sure to be a success. Right?

Rookie mistake! Do not set expectations for New Year's Eve, unless you expect that it will suck. You will surely be disappointed! Instead of going out with my cousins, we stayed in. "Not a problem," Sister and I thought. "We're all the fun we need right here!" Then we sat down in front of the TV. We watched the BBC equivalent of Dick Clark's Rocking New Year's Eve for a few minutes, until my cousin switched over to a local, Irish station, where we spent the rest of the evening watching a public access countdown program hosted by puppets. Not even famous puppets, like the Muppets or Zig and Zag, or even Dustin the Turkey. Just some C-List puppets we'd never heard of. And then... the countdown....

Ten ruddy-faced Irishmen came out on stage in nothing but leather chaps and underwear. As we counted down, they turned around one by one to reveal numbers written on their hairy cheeks, squished between their surprise assless chaps. "This is a new low," Sister and I thought.

Looking back, it's probably one of the best New Year's to date.

NYE 2007: The next year, we decided to stick with Germany. Sister and Brother-in-Law had informed me that the view of the fireworks over Stuttgart was spectacular from their apartment windows, and I was excited by the prospect of a nice evening at home, playing Guitar Hero, drinking champagne, and watching the fireworks from a cozy, heated apartment. Again with the unrealistic expectations! Instead, two of their friends came over and persuaded us that no, the view would be much better from a hill above the city.

We trudged up to the hill and discovered a war zone. Germany is famous for being orderly and rule-abiding, except, apparently for with fireworks, which evidently have roughly zero restrictions. Dozens of people were already drunkenly setting off fireworks, having trampled over a chain link fence designed to keep people away from a steep drop-off from the hill.

Given my recently-cultivated fear of fireworks back in 2005, it didn't take long for me to get incredibly freaked out. Can you blame me?

That scream you hear at the end of the video? That's my sister. Who'd just been f**king shot in the leg with a firework. She'd turned to her husband to get keys to take me home, and the at that moment, a rogue firework entered the fray, hit her in the ankle and then bounced onto my leg where it left a singe mark on my jeans. I completely lost it that point and was pretty hysterical the entire way home, including a long trip down an icy hill, where my sister could barely stand.

NYE 2008: I was back in South Carolina again, where my parents have a lime tree on their back porch. A couple of days before New Year's Eve, I took it upon myself to juice all the limes on the tree, afraid that a frost might come and ruin them all. I went on about my life, enjoying the lovely Charleston weather and the like.

Two nights later, I woke up in excruciating pain to discover that my hands looked like this:

I walked to my parents room, where my hands were so swollen that I had to bang my head on their door instead of knocking. I went to the doctor the next day, where she couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. I had no sign of allergic reaction or anything else that might elicit such a response; I basically just had an extremely bad sunburn, but only on my hands. I was supposed to go to a party, but being unable to either drink alcohol because of the steroids or even bend my fingers to drive, I stayed home.

Eventually the swelling went down and turned to blistering, which then turned to all the skin peeling off my hands. You can still see the scars whenever it's too cold, too hot, or too dry. Wikipedia now tells me that this was my problem, but I no longer handle lime juice when I'm cooking, just in case. Also, I had to walk around for the next month looking at best like I was really into fingerless gloves, and at worse, like I was suicidal:

NYE 2009: I went to Texas to visit my sister, but given our history, we decided not to inflict our New Year's Eve carnage on the rest of Austin. Instead, we stayed in, ate cheese fondue (didn't choke!), and then looked at her and her husband's high school yearbook. Which is not particularly interesting or fun, but also not dangerous.

NYE 2010: Back home in Charleston, I'd intended to to go to a party with some friends from high school. Then, my sister stayed in town several extra days, and instead of working on the fellowship application that was due on January 1st, I decided that it would be a much better use of my time to play with her. So I didn't start the application until December 31st. Which meant that I had to stay home and work on it all night.

I didn't get the fellowship.

So there you are. That's the past decade of New Year's Eve for me, ranging from bland to complete and utter clusterf**k. Tonight, I am supposed to be leaving to go to a cabin in Maryland to go skiing. I feel real concern for the 12 friends that are coming with me; they do not know the tragedy that will surely befall them just by being in my proximity on December 31st. The saddest part of it all is that they are probably expecting to have a good weekend, filled with champagne and winter sports and camaraderie.

Rookie Mistake.

I've got mail!

2011-12-26T23:55:00.000-05:00

There is something extremely dreary about coming home from Christmas, something which is made a thousand times worse by coming home to a cold, empty house, knowing your friends and roommates are still away with their families, eating delicious home-cooked meals, whereas you have no food in the house and have to get up and go to work tomorrow. The sad reality of it all came crashing down a few minutes ago, when I picked up my take-out order of palak paneer from down the street. "Just get back in town?" Either he could read the post-vacation dejection on my face, or I need to lay off the palak paneer, as my six-day absence was noteworthy. Neither scenario is particularly good.

The only positive note in my return was checking the mail. Mail makes everything better! Well, not when it's credit card offers, bills, and coupons for Ace Hardware, but today I am the happy recipient of not one but TWO real pieces of snail mail from Texas. First, a Christmas card for our house from a friend who recently moved to Dallas, and second, a letter from Houston. This letter is nothing special--just a few lines about an Ina Garten recipe and a champagne fountain--but it's enough that my house doesn't feel quite so empty on this sad, December night, alone with my styrofoam box of takeout.

I have gotten many such letters from Houston over the past several months, thanks to a blog called Forever Young Adult. One of the writers decided it would be a good idea to match up eager readers like myself with penpals, under the assumption that everyone likes mail. It was a really good idea. Penpal, seen here doing her best impression of ~~Drunk~~ Sober Kitchen, mails me stuff all the time! Not only do I regularly receive letters, but sometimes, I even get presents in the mail! And sometimes, she gets her minions in DC to creepily leave things on my doorstep that can't be easily mailed, like a bottle of champagne. Or this:

Yes, I came home from a particularly heinous day at work (post-thanksgiving sadness) to find a giant, homemade advent calendar sitting on my front porch. Each of the 24 little baby socks had a note and a thoughtful gift, including but not limited to: a toy dinosaur, a magnifying glass, fifty cents in pennies, a set of belly-dancing zils, a pez dispenser, a dreidel, three mini-bottles of liquor, and some tiny Ewok figurines which I plan to eventually turn into earrings.

You might think that would be enough effort for one Christmas for a person she's only communicated with in writing and met once. Au contraire! Look what Santa brought me from Texas:

For those of you that don't know me: that is a giant painting of my face. I had my suspicions when she started making shady requests like "Could you please send me a front-facing photo of your face with no teeth-showing." But never did I imagine something on such a vibrant and enormous scale! I am struggling to figure out where to hang it so that won't look totally narcissistic (my bedroom) or be completely mortifying (K's suggestion to mount it in the front hallway, like Eva Longoria in Desperate Housewives). The best idea I've come up with so far is to start painting a bunch of other canvases so that it's not the only thing hanging on my wall.

It is hard work keeping up with such creative genius.

My life, illuminated.

2011-12-14T15:59:00.000-05:00

Remember that time I said I was addicted to Korean dramas? Well, K and L just informed me that for Christmas, they are taking me to see a stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice--my favorite book not written by Oscar Wilde--tomorrow night. It got me thinking:

EVERYTHING MAKES SENSE NOW.

The Ten Shadiest Things Strangers Have Ever Said to Me

2011-12-06T06:52:00.001-05:00

Everyday, a harrowing journey begins on this seemingly pleasant street.

Since switching jobs, I started walking to work. I now spend an 35 minutes on foot each way, what would be a pleasant walk if it didn't also provide an easy 70 minutes each day to be harassed by random men on the street. Yesterday, I was honked at, got catcalled, and had a man ask me, "Haven't I seen you in a magazine?" I did not stop to hear which publication to which he was referring, but I'm willing to wager it wasn't the Wellesley Alumnae magazine.

Sadly, I'm very used to this behavior. I'm not sure why I am such a magnet for shady, shady dudes, but I am. It has some advantages--for instance, I sometimes get free food at restaurants, although I am usually just extremely confused about that ("But I haven't given you my money yet!")--but mostly, it's just super creepy and unwelcome. I guess it makes for good stories? For your entertainment, I've assembled a list of the ten creepiest things strange men have ever said to me:

10. Champ de Mars, Paris, France - 2008
"Anyone want to learn how to French Kiss? Or Vodka Kiss?"

I have to give him props--upon hearing this line, I was amazed that I'd never heard it before (the French kiss part. Not the vodka kiss part. That doesn't even make sense.). But he was still a miscreant French youth, so he would have been creepy no matter what came out.

9. Dharamsala, India - 2007
"I'm going to teach you Punjabi. Thohade aakha baut Suniya ne. That means 'Your eyes are looking amazing.'"

This would have been a lot less creepy had his girlfriend not been sitting directly next to him at the time. This was also the same day that I accidentally spent with a punjabi pop star, who I'm sure would have also had some creepy shit to say, had his command of the English language allowed it. Instead, he just kept shouting things like "CUTE BABY!" every few minutes.

Everyone's favorite Punjabi pop star/stalker. Me also wearing the worst pants
ever because they were the only thing that would dry in Monsoon season.

8. Library of Congress, Washington, DC - September 2011
"You seem like a nice girl, Emma. Are you Jewish?"

7. The Red Line to Shady Grove, Washington, DC - 2010
"Can I like, try something with your hair?"

6. Dharamsala, India - 2007
"really I feel in Love with you and Hope we can share some time with togethere and make Happy and Smile face othere you really so Beatifull & I have no wards to explain [sic]."

Apparently I'd caught the eye of a mustachioed local bookstore owner while on my quest to find the 7th Harry Potter, so he stalked my roommate every day until he finally caught her to give me the first of three love letters. In typical Alix fashion, I handled it spectacularly poorly and just decided to avoid his street entirely, which was difficult as there were only 3 streets to be had in Dharamsala. Eventually, I had to travel down it in quest of food, and while walking with my hood up and my head down, I literally ran into him. I gave him a very flustered no thanks which was way more awkward than if I'd just confronted him in the first place.

5. Safeway, Washington, DC - 2009
"I like your freckles. They're really cute. We should just get married, actually."

Be careful with whom you share an eye roll about that crazy lady in front of you holding up the Safeway check-outline. One minute he's a friendly-but-lonely 50-something buying a single can of Chef Boyardee, and the next he's a friendly-but-lonely 50-something buying a single can of Chef Boyardee who just proposed to you. And you're still trapped into the Safeway checkout line with him for another five minutes, thanks to that crazy bitch in front.

4. Tours, France - 2007
Excusez-moi, mademoiselle, mais vous êtes ravissante. Vous avez besoin de l'aide?

Translation: "Excuse me, miss, but you are ravishing. Do you need some help?" Only slightly creepy, but when compounded with the fact that I was in the process of unlocking my apartment at the time, it becomes pretty questionable. No, shady French man, I do not need your help getting into my apartment.

3. Just Outside of El Rinconcito, Washington, DC - Last Thursday Night
"You UGLY. You ALL UGLY! Y'ALL UGLY!" [Pauses to reassess.] "No you're cute. BUT YOU ALL UGLY. You're cute though I like you. BUT Y'ALL UGLY!"

This was not so much creepy as it was bizarre and terrifying. As L, K, EG, Matt IV and I were making our way to ACKC, a very drunk man in orange lipstick and a wig started screaming about how ugly we all were. Then as he got closer, he paused, looked me up and down, and apparently changed his mind about me and only me. And now until an unspecified future time, all my friends are going to make jokes about my evident cuteness any time I get preferential treatment.

2. New York, New York - September 2011

This next one requires a disclaimer. I am in my mid-twenties, but strangers usually grossly underestimate my age. Two Christmases ago, when I was 22, I got mistaken for an unaccompanied minor at the airport. You have to be 14 to be an unaccompanied minor. So in strangers eyes, I'm guessing I'm somewhere in the 15-19 range now. Which is why this next one, courtesy of a homeless man in Murray Hill, is so very disturbing:

"I like your dress... if you were five years younger..."

WTF? WTF?!?! EW!

1. Two Blocks from My House, Washington DC - 2011
"I like them titty bags of yours I want to milk them."

I went back and forth between this and the last one over which was the absolute creepiest. While I think pedophilia is intrinsically creepier than whatever infantilization/farming fetish shit is happening here, the fact that I had a really hard time even typing this one is what ultimately put me over the edge.

I guess its to these guys' credit that none of them tried to grope/molest/follow me home, which has happened enough times to merit it's own damn list. Congratulations on setting the bar so spectacularly low, menfolk! Now stop whistling at me on the way to work from the Waste Management truck.

The Importance of Being Alix's Friends: Film Class

2011-11-05T11:34:00.001-04:00

Hello friends! So remember that time I went to a Hanson concert a month ago and then you never heard from me again? Well basically, a bridge went out on my way home and I was forced to live in the wilds of Connecticut, skinning squirrels with my teeth to survive. I only just made it back to DC alive! Or something like that happened. I'll tell you the whole story later this weekend. But for now it's time for another installment of The Importance of Being Alix's ~~Friends~~ Family!

Last week, I received an email from a friend who was interested in seeing more films around Transgender topics. Knowing that I have never met a gender-switching plotline I haven't loved, she contacted me. But sensing that she was perhaps looking for a little more high-brow content than I habitually watch, I forwarded her request to my father. Dad is a philosophy professor who, among other things, has a particular interest in both LGBTQ issues and film. Despite all his protests, he is probably as close to a subject matter expert in transgender film as lay people like me and you will ever find. In my request, I accused him of having a Netflix recommended viewing category called "Obscure Transgender Art House Films from 1963-1978." The following is his most excellent response, which I enjoyed so much that I decided to post it here. Get ready to queue up Netflix/place holds at your local academic library!

I'm afraid I won't quite live up to Alix's billing. For starters, I can't name a single instance in the category of "Obscure Transgender Art House Films from 1963-1978." That was the era of Myra Breckenridge (1970), starring Raquel Welch as Myron/Myra B., and Freebie and the Bean (1974), a James Caan/Alan Arkin police action movie which features a cross-dressing seductress in a secondary villain role (who James Caan blows away in a public restroom--doubtless to the cheers of mid-seventies audiences). These were both commercial Hollywood exploitation efforts, not art-house, and quite execrable films. I wouldn't recommend either for actual viewing.

If it's obscurity you want, I would recommend Glen or Glenda (1953), Ed Wood's very first film, and absolutely, tragically, terrible--so much so that it's good camp entertainment. (As in, if you thought Plan 9 from Outer Space [1959] was bad...) Glen or Glenda was conceived as an exploitation film motivated by the press frenzy over Christine Jorgensen's sexual reassignment surgery. But the execution was something else again. It's actually pretty interesting as a period piece about what passes for (Ed Wood's own) socially "progressive" attitudes about gender back in the early Fifties. But as an art form, be forewarned: it is really, really bad. (It's also featured in Tim Burton's 1994 biopic, Ed Wood, which features Johnny Depp as the title character, and includes Martin Landau in the role of Bela Lugosi (of Dracula fame), who Wood persuades to play an absolutely ridiculous gratuitous part in this film at the end of his life. But I digress.)

Another obscure example, even more interesting as a period piece, is Sidney Drew's silent era kind-of-sort-of transgender film, A Florida Enchantment (1914). It's a cross-dressing romantic comedy of sorts, but unlike Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), there is a "real" gender switch involved. (Again, of sorts.) It might be a little hard to find, but it is available now in DVD, in a collection with other silent films, and also on its own. Your public library might not have it, but a DC-area university might. Sidney Drew is a member of the Barrymore acting clan on the distaff side, incidentally. He would be Drew Barrymore's great-great uncle, I believe.

I assume that what you're really interested in though, would be more contemporary films (last two decades?) that are reasonably sympathetic to the transgender characters that they portray. Many of them you may have already seen, or you already know about, but here's a reasonable list of readily accessible films that are generally pretty good, and some of them absolutely wonderful, in my opinion. I'm putting asterisks next to the ones that I think are most compelling...

The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)*
This film, one of the earliest commercial films featuring a trans character, as distinct from a cross-dressing character, gets some criticism in the gender studies academic world for being manipulative of audiences (which it is), and for portraying it's transgender character negatively (which it doesn't--readings to this effect are just ideologically obtuse, in my view). It's interesting to think about the impact of this film on 1992 audiences who didn't know what was coming (because, at Neil Jordan’s request, film critics played along; there is a lot going on in this marvelous film, so they had plenty of other stuff to write about anyway).

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliot, 1994)
Terence Stamp plays transgender character Bernadette, travelling with a couple of cross-dressing (but not transgendered) pals in a quixotically quirky road film.

Ma Vie En Rose (Alain Berliner, 1997)*
Belgian tragicomedy (upbeat ending) about a little boy who is determinedly transgendered in the face of a hostile world. It's an absolutely priceless gem.

The Adventures of Sebastian Cole (Tod Williams, 1998)
Clark Gregg plays the title character's transgendered father, Henrietta, in this coming of age comedy.

The Brandon Teena Story (Susan Muska, Gréta Olafsdóttir, 1998)
Compelling documentary about Brandon Teena / Teena Brandon's life history. Should be watched in conjunction with Boys Don't Cry (below), but definitely after seeing the latter, so as to get the full dramatic impact. It's interesting then to think about what gets included in the dramatization, and what gets left out--how the tale gets modified.

Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Pierce1999)*
A dramatization of Brandon Teena's last few weeks of life. This is the film that made Hilary Swank famous. Didn't hurt Chloe Sevigny's career, either. It's absolutely gripping, and will tear you apart. So if you haven't seen it, you might want to think twice about watching.

Better Than Chocolate (Anne Wheeler, 1999)
A charming Canadian romantic comedy featuring Peter Outerbridge’s square-jawed big-boned Judy as a secondary transgender character who does a great musical number. (It's not a musical, but there are some musical performances in it.) The central characters are a young lesbian couple, and the film takes place in a Vancouver BC counterculture gay neighborhood: what happens when oblivious straight mom and uninformed but open-minded younger brother come to town to stay.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)*
Very quirky (& wonderful) musical featuring Mitchell in the title role. There's at least one academic article criticizing it, quite fairly, as using transgender identity as a metaphorical vehicle for a discourse on gay identity. (Mitchell is gay, not trans.) I personally don't think that's all that's going on here, but the view is well argued.

Southern Comfort (Kate Davis, 2001)*
Very moving documentary about the last year in the life of Robert Eads, a trans man living in rural north Georgia with his trans woman partner, Lola Cola. He is dying, ironically and tragically, of ovarian cancer, after being turned down for treatment by various unsympathetic doctors because of his trans status. The title refers to the Southern Comfort trans conference held each fall in Atlanta, a pretty big deal in the trans world in our society (and quite fascinating; I've been once). Eads attends So-Con with his partner and friends for the last time during the film. The film will make you sad, but it is also very beautiful.

Normal (Jane Anderson, 2003 [made for TV: HBO])
Tom Wilkinson’s non-comic role as the awkwardly masculine Roy/Ruth Applewood going through transition in the rural heartland with his wife's help (Jessica Lange). This film is a sympathetic effort, but a bit too earnestly didactic.

Soldier’s Girl (Frank Pierson, 2003, [made for TV: Showtime])
Story of the tragic real-life romance between Calpernia Addams (played by male actor Lee Pace), a trans woman working as a professional showgirl when she first met Barry Winchell (played by Troy Garrity), an enlisted soldier residing at a not-to-distant military base. Calpernia Addams, who worked as an advisor for Soldier’s Girl, is a model of feminine beauty by western cultural standards. Lee Pace, a male actor, does an interesting and credible performance as Addams. (The real Addams appears as the fiddle player at Mary Ellen’s house party in Transamerica [below], if you've already seen that film. All the actors at the houseparty, with the exception of the "GG", are actually transgender individuals, incidentally.) Be forewarned, though: like Boys Don't Cry,Soldier's Girl has a very grim ending that you might simply prefer to avoid.

Transamerica (Duncan Tucker, 2005)
Starring Felicity Huffman; quasi-comic road film. Huffman does a good job in her role as the very repressed MtF Bree Osborne on her way to California for reassignment surgery, although like Normal, it tends to be a little too didactic in its aim to reach mainstream audiences. But not quite as heavy-handed in the education department.

Breakfast on Pluto (Neil Jordan, 2005)*
Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy) is the ambiguously-gendered central character in a wonderfully weird odyssey through life in this film. Kitten Braden is a liminal case, illustrating just how porous the boundary is between transgender and transvestite. Is Kitten a gay man engaged in expressing his feminine side, but ultimately self-identifying as male? Or does she think of herself as fundamentally female? The character’s performance is ambiguous on this point. For much of the film, Kitten goes back and forth between woman and nellie gay man. Her female presentation is sometimes performative drag—e.g., Braden’s Little White Dove act, early in the film, when she joins Billy Hatchett’s Mohawks for their cover of the J.P. Richardson/Johnny Preston 1960 hit,Running Bear. By the end of the film, however, she appears to be presenting exclusively as female. Dil, the trans character in Jordan's earlier Crying Game(above) is, by way of contrast, much more unambiguously female.

[Editors Note: This is my contribution to the list! It's awesome and everyone should go watch. If you live in DC, I have a copy you can borrow.]

Boy I Am (Documentary; Sam Feder & Julie Hollar, 2006)*Absolutely wonderful documentary which explores the challenges experienced by twenty-something individuals Nicco Baretta, Norie Manigult, and Keegan O’Brien, as they struggle with the real-life economic, psychological, and socio-political issues associated with undertaking top-surgery to become, in their own eyes, more fully integrated trans men. There is also some discussion of the significance of hormone treatments (two on, one not, until an epilogue at the end). This one again may be available only at university libraries. Definitely worth watching.

Happy viewing, everybody!

The Hanson Project: Part Two

2011-10-10T08:44:00.000-04:00

If you'll remember from part one, I was roped into going to a Hanson concert in New Haven this past Saturday. I'll get around to telling you about the concert later this week, but before we get there, it's time for a little craft lesson.

Since I was already going to the effort of traveling 400 miles and listening to 8 albums for a concert, I figured I might as well dress appropriately. Luckily, I've acquired some excellent costume-making skills over the years. One of my recent favorites--freezer paper stencils.

The process is fairly simple: cut a stencil out of freezer paper, iron it on a shirt, slap on some fabric paint, peel the stencil off. And the results look AWESOME.

Now, before you even suggest it, I will not be selling these shirts on Etsy. I understand that they are incredibly rad and that lots of people on the internet have more money than sense. But I could never sell these on the internet because then I would be the kind of person that sells Hanson shirts on the internet.

I can however, tell you how to make them yourself.

For this little endeavor, you will need:

a stencil
Plastic-coated freezer paper (you can find this in most grocery stores)
Xacto knife
cardboard
tape
pre-washed t-shirt
a tupperware (optional)
fabric paint, such as these ones
foam paint brush
iron
tweezers
patience

Step 1: The Stencil

The most important part of this process is picking out something to put on a shirt. You can draw your own, or find lots of stencils online that you can print off. If you need ideas, just check out The Google. Of course, we already knew what we wanted: Hansons. So I put my excellent photoshop skills to work, and went from this:

To this:

Because there were three of us, we obviously each had to pick a brother. Seeing as E was the real fan, I offered her first pick:

Me: Since you are the reason we're going to this concert, do you want to take Taylor?

E: DO NOT WANT TAYLOR ON MY SHIRT! I WANT ZAC!

Me: Isn't Taylor the hot one?

E: I LOVE ZAC! ZAC AND I HAVE BEEN MARRIED SINCE WE WERE 12!

I was a little taken aback, but it turns out that E has always been an rabid Zac Hanson fan. When she was 12, she asked for a law text book for Christmas (???) and the first thing she did upon receiving it was open the book to the marriage section and check the age restrictions for marriage in South Carolina. Seeing that she conditionally passed, she then made her mother PROMISE that IF she met Zac Hanson and IF he then asked her to marry him, her mother would give her legal consent. Her mother wisely acquiesced.

So E took Zac, I dibsed The Hot One since I was putting in the effort to make the shirts, and we gave Isaac to F since she already has a tendency towards attraction to old men (j/k W!!!!).

Step 2: Cutting

Now that you have your stencil, tape it to a piece of cardboard thick enough to use an Xacto knife on without cutting through the bottom. Take a piece of freezer paper larger than the image you're cutting out, and tape it plastic-side down on top of it.

This is the part that takes a lot of patience and attention to detail, depending on the complexity of your stencil. Our Hansons definitely fall on the complex end of stenciling (Curse you, Taylor, and your girlie neck-scarves!). Since I obviously wasn't going to cut out all the different textures of their hair and clothing that had come through in my somewhat hasty photoshop work, I had to figure out what to keep in each image. We chose to maintain most of the structural elements of their clothes (collar lines, pocket squares, etc) and a couple of details in the hair, but avoided lots of the facial hair and clothing patterns.

The other tricky thing to worry about is saving enclosed whitespace. Think about if you were stenciling the letter A:

If you just cut out along the black outline, you'd end up with a finished product of this:

Which looks dumb. So instead, you need to cut out the middle first, and save it for later:

In a long string of words or in a stencil like this, where there's lots of little bits of enclosed whitespace, it can be difficult to keep track of all the pieces. If they are large enough, I number them before cutting out for ease of lining them back up. I also find it helpful to lock these away in a tupperware to keep them from blowing away.

It's usually easiest to start from the inside and work your way out. So in the Hanson case, I started with their faces, then extra details like hair highlights, ears and neck scarves, then cut out the the whole outline of the head. When you finish, you'll have a piece of freezer paper with a silhouette cut out, and a bunch of little freezer paper puzzle pieces you'll have to put back together again.

Step 3: Ironing

Next, you'll need your t-shirt. It should be pre-washed so it doesn't shrink after you paint it. Lighter color shirts are easier to work with. You can use dark shirts, too, but you'll need to use opaque fabric paint and more layers of it than with a light shirt, reducing flexibility. Since we were using gold paint, we thought we'd run with the dark shirts for contrast, even though it would be trickier. American Apparel makes great shirts for this purpose but has the severe detriment of a) forcing you go give money to American Apparel and b) forcing you to set foot in an American Apparel. You decide if it's worth the cost.

Turn on your iron and get another piece of freezer paper, large enough to be bigger than your stencil, but small enough to fit inside your shirt. Lay it flat inside your shirt and iron it on (I used to turn the shirt inside out to do this, but it was too difficult to invert the shirt with the freezer paper on and works just as well this way). This keeps the paint from bleeding through so is very important.

Take the silhouette part of your stencil and place it on your shirt, plastic side down. Iron on flat, being careful not to create puckers in the fabric inside your stencil.

Begin lining up your tupperware of puzzle pieces. The parts of the stencil you cut away can be helpful in placing pieces in the corret part of the stencil. It's most painstaking but also safest to iron these on one by one, since they are susceptible to flying away when you so much as breathe. Be careful to put the plastic side down, or you will end up with a ruined piece of stencil glued to the bottom of your iron.

Zac's superfluous hair is a guide for placing his face

When you're done, you will end up with the inverse of what you want your finished product to be:

Step 4: Painting

Yay painting! Get your foam brush and bottle of paint. After spending all that time carefully cutting and ironing stuff on, you will probably be eager to dip your brush in and slap on a lot of paint at once. Don't do this! When you put too much paint on, the freezer paper stencil will start to warp and then your paint will bleed and then Taylor Hanson's eyes will look really creepy up close. Instead, use a very little bit of paint on your brush at a time, dabbing paint slowly into tight corners and around edges, then smoothing everything out so there aren't any thick spots.

Be extra careful with Isaac's pocket square

If you need more that one coat of paint, wait until it's mostly dry to add more. I know you probably want to be done and hurry through this part, but I promise it's worth the wait.

Optional Step 4A: Glowing

Now because I'm awesome, I decided to make them glow-in-the-dark t-shirts. I didn't find any suitable glow in the dark paint, so I ordered some glow powder off Amazon and mixed it with some colorless textile paint extender and water. Once the gold paint had mostly dried, I put a thin layer of this on top. It only slightly affected the color of the gold.

Unfortunately, it also only slightly affected the glowing properties of the shirt. The shirts do glow, but you have to actually be in the dark, and not in say, a music venue where they have green tube lighting everywhere for safety and décor purposes. I intend to try again with a different brand of glow powder, or else some glow paint I've since found online. I'll let you know how it goes.

Step 5: Drying

Yeah, this part sucks, and I never take enough time. But you really want the shirts to be properly dry by the time you peel the stencil off . This means several hours of drying time, usually. I've been too impatient with this before and ripped off the mostly-dry paint with the stencil.

Step 6: Peeling

THIS IS THE MOST FUN STEP. When your shirt is finally dry, peel away your freezer paper. If you have lots of itty bits like in ours, you'll have to get tweezers for the more intricate stuff.

Step 7: Ironing

The final step is heat-setting the pain. You must iron your shirt once more to ensure the paint doesn't come off. After you do this, take the paper out of the inside, and voilà! Most epic concert shirt ever!

We also stenciled the Hanson logo on the back, which you can easily find with the help of google.

The Hanson Project: Part One

2011-10-06T23:31:00.001-04:00

Back in July, I got a hurried call from F asking if I was free the weekend of October 8th. That's when Hanson would be coming to New Haven. And she needed to buy tickets immediately.

Every six weeks or so, F, E and I get together in one of our respective cities, cook many things, and eat ourselves into oblivion. Excited at the prospect of this epic concert-going experience, we quickly rearranged our visiting schedule to accommodate everyone's favorite long-haired boy band.

Only problem: F and I are not actually Hanson fans. We both missed that boat entirely when it sailed into town around 6th grade. F lived under a homeschooling rock for most of childhood and rarely gets any musical references past 1890, and I... Well, I am a special case. Unlike nearly all my friends, I am the baby of the family. My sister is five and a half years older than me, and that means I sometimes get confused about which decade I grew up in. Having an older, significantly cooler sister meant that in an effort to also be cool like my sister, I missed a lot of pop culture boats, not just the Hanson one. Boy Bands in general were decreed totally lame, meaning I will never be able to engage in the time-honored debate: N*Sync v. Backstreet Boys (though, when pressed, I say N*Sync because I hate ballads). And it also means that until 3 months ago, my Hanson knowledge started and ended with "Mmmbop.

Luckily, what F and I lack in enthusiasm, E makes up for 1000 fold. Girl LOVES Hanson. I did not know this about her until a couple years ago, because it's kind of embarrassing and she kept it well-hidden until adulthood. But she is the reason we're even going to this concert. Hell, she's the reason I know that Hanson is still making music (which they apparently have been steadily since their Mmmbopping days).

E insisted that we at least learn their later (better) stuff and provided us with all the relevant albums. But if I was going to become a Hanson fan for this concert, I needed to do it right. That meant I had approximately 13 years of Fansondom to catch up on in just three months. And so, The Hanson Project was born.

The first (and most important) step was tackling the music. Hanson has released 8 studio albums since 1995. That's a daunting task. But thanks to a friend who probably wishes to have zero association with this project, I had a strategy. You see, this friend likes to experience new bands in chronological order. So let's say he's never heard a Beatles song but has decided to listen to the Beatles. He would not be able to skip ahead to Abbey Road without first listening to Meet The Beatles, Hard Days Night, Help!, Rubber Soul etc in chronological order first. Now, my friend has many good reasons for pursuing this strategy, but instead of enumerating them here, let's just pretend he likes being ridiculed a lot. Which I have done myself, on several occasions! But given the nature of this Hanson Project, I thought it would be good to to have a methodical structure for making it through these albums. This was a perfect way to condense my Hanson fan experience.
To the Music!

Ok, so here's what I knew from the get-go: back in the early 90s, three brothers in Tulsa thought it would be a good idea to start a band. This was probably not a good idea. At least, not yet, since none of their voices had changed and 8 year olds really shouldn't be writing songs. They recorded their first studio album in 1994 but didn't gain success until 1997's Middle of Nowhere. This is the period of Hanson that everyone remembers, the long-haired, awkward (pre)teen "Mmmbop" years. They got three Grammy nominations, probably because Taylor Swift hadn't appeared yet to show the world that children can write basic melodies AND have sensical lyrics.

The boys followed Middle of Nowhere with a Christmas album and the resoundingly mediocre This Time Around, got married super young, had a passel of children, and started their own record label. This is when their music supposedly starts getting better, beginning with Underneath. They subsequently released two more albums on their on label. Somewhere along this route, we got from this:

to this:

But in terms of musical style, actual songs, etc, I had no idea what I was in for. Which is why listening to 8 albums in a row was a little overwhelming. And it took me... a long time. As in, I just finished last night. That Christmas album slowed me down quite a bit, and I lost the will to continue for a while after This Time Around. But thanks to E's constant harassing, I finally made it.

Some notes on my reviewing rubric: rather than assigning a letter grade, which I did not feel could appropriately capture the extreme variance of quality in Hanson's music, I have created a category called "Musical Topography." For point of reference, let's assume that Paul Simon's Graceland represents the peak of Mount Everest on the scale of Musical Topography. All other albums can be compared in general goodness to Graceland by picking an appropriate topographical landmark on the globe. Don't like Graceland? GTFO. Haha just kidding. Just insert your (inferior) musical opinion here.

Also, I am nothing if not thorough, so I took detailed notes on every track of every album. I was recently telling someone about this project, and they asked if I am obsessive compulsive. "Hahahhahah, no!" I responded. "Well, maybe... yeah, probably a little bit." You can see all my notes here, along with two Hanson-loving friends' additional commentary.

Now the moment two or three of you have been waiting for, my opinions on every Hanson studio album, in chronological order:

Boomerang, 1995	Best: Worst: Everything Musical Topograhy: The Bottom of the Mariana trench You will notice that I left "Best" blank here. That's because there are no winners in this album, least of all me. It was actually physically painful to listen to. They covered a Baha Men song here. As in, the fools who were responsible for making me listen to “Who Let the Dogs Out” every time ARod came up to bat for the Mariners many moons ago. Why would you ever choose to cover a Baha Men Song? In my notes on this album, all I wrote was, “clearly trying to be the White Jackson 5; influenced by gospel, tragic synthesizer music.” And that’s all there is to say, really.
MMMBop, 1996	Best: "Day Has Come," although best is still a relative term. Worst: "Surely As the Sun," which I noted "sounds like a bad Christian rock" Musical Topography: Sea LevelWhile my initial reaction was more positive, I quickly realized that my metric was just off after listening to Boomerang. Not everything on this album was terrible, but it definitely needed some editing. On the heels of the success of Middle of Nowhere, they re-released a version of this in 1998 with Three Car Garage, but it was sadly a big step down for them. On the whole, falls between somewhere between bad and mediocre.
Middle of Nowhere, 1997	Best: "Man From Milwaukee," "Mmmbop" (of course) Worst: "Weird" Musical Topography: That super-fun hill you used to slide down in a cardboard boxThis is their first commercially successful album, and in a lot of ways is the first one that counts. This is not the best album I've ever heard, but it's certainly not the worst (Boomerang might hold that spot). This shows miles of improvement over their first two albums. There are some bad moments--"Yearbook" is like an unfortunate precursor to a Taylor Swift B-track--and the lyrics are pretty repetitive. The content of the songs made me uncomfortable at times; I feel anyone whose voice has yet to change should not be singing about lovelorn episodes. Shouldn't they be writing songs about super-soaker battles and dinosaurs? I found that I liked Isaac’s songs best, and maybe it’s because he’s the only one who’s not a child. But melodically, this album is miles better than the last two. Songs are overall pretty catchy, even if they are derivative and tend to sound the same. Is this album good? Absolutely not. I’m frankly appalled that they got three Grammy nominations. But it’s kind of so-bad-it's-good, and chock-full of nostalgia.
Snowed In, 1997	Best: "Everybody Loves the Claus" this might be the highlight of their career, actually Worst: It's a toss up between the "Silent Night" medley and "White Christmas" Musical Topography: A small iceberg, but one with really cute penguins playing on it. Listen, I do not do Christmas pop albums. I am very particular and I only like very traditional carols. Also, as any of my college roommates can tell you, I get pretty belligerent when people play Christmas music before Thanksgiving. I am pretty much the Ebenezer Scrooge of holiday music. Making my way through this pop Christmas in July was a serious challenge for me. So when I say that this is not the worst Christmas album I've ever heard, just know that that is EXTREMELY GENEROUS for me. The passing grade of this album stems from two things. One: they (mostly) chose to cover upbeat holiday songs which, while not my favorite songs ever, played to their strengths as a band. Second, there are some surprisingly bearable original songs, including one entirely about Santa's poor eating habits. It's kind of legitimately great.
This Time Around, 2000	Best: "This Time Around" Worst: "Love Song," "Hand in Hand" Musical Topography: Space MountainOn the plus side, the songs continue to sound better overall on this album, and they definitely picked the right lead single from this album. Now for the more critical: although their melody-writing has improved, their lyrics have not much. A lot of times, their songs are just as repetitive as the past couple albums, and when they're not, they read a bit too much like sixteen year olds think songs are supposed to read. Also, the amount of rhyming that goes on is distracting. This will not be the last time I say this, Hanson, but lay off the rhyming dictionary. It's almost farcical to listen to some of the lyrics and think that they already had several Grammy nominations at this point. Anyone who criticizes Taylor Swift for winning too many awards, I'm going to send them straight to Hanson's early stuff.I'm sounding super negative, and that's not entirely representative of my opinion. This album is not great, but it definitely shows musical ability, and I sure as hell couldn't write decent songs at age whatever this is (or at any age). They have come leaps and bounds from Boomerang and developed somewhat of their own sound. Taylor's voice annoys me, but that's more a personal preference than a comment on talent. There is a lot of potential for them to mature as musicians here and be really good.
Underneath, 2004	Best: "Lost Without Each Other," "Strong Enough To Break" Worst: "When You're Gone" Musical Topography: Mount St. Helens (started decent, then exploded somewhere around track 7 and blew off 1000+ feet of altitude, leaving a crater of crappiness in its wake)This album is what I like to call Hanson's "Swiftian Period." Because half these songs sound like they could have been written by Taylor Swift. This is NOT a criticism. I love to sing Taylor Swift in the shower as much as your next 24-year-old fake southerner. This is their first album where I might voluntarily listen to a couple of songs. But they still have some maturing to do in the song writing department. The music is pretty good, and they've added horns in a couple places--an interesting choice that we will visit again soon with Shout it Out. HOWEVER, we're six albums in and I fear that I can never be a true Hanson fan because I find Taylor's voice so incredibly grating. I mean, it made sense back in 1996 when he was a whiny, young teenager singing about love, but at this point he's a grown-ass man with a wife and a toddler. As a band, their music is richer, they've occasionally laid down the rhyming dictionary and started writing slightly better lyrics, they've enjoyed almost a decade of success and started their own record label, so WHY ARE YOU STILL SO WHINY, TAY?
The Walk, 2007	Best: "Great Divide" "Tearing it Down" Worst: "One More" Musical Topography: Mount KilimanjaroThe topographical reference for this album is particularly relevant because this is the album where they traveled to Africa, heavily endorsed TOMS, collected a children's choir for the backing vocals and donated some record sales to perinatal HIV care. And while that is all very nice and Bono, what does it mean for their music?Positive things! It was so refreshing to hear them deviate somewhat from their standard Hanson sound. The child singers worked pretty well, too. I wouldn't say the album is a complete success--I think they had trouble fully embracing the African vibe and incorporating it with their own style, so you get kind of cooler sounding songs like "Great Divide" next to typically awful Hanson ballads like "One More," and it doesn't quite mesh. But yay for musical growth!
Shout It Out, 2010	Best: "Give a Little" Worst: "Carry You There" but in contrast to the beginning of this project, worst is a relative term!!!! Musical Topography: Rocky Mountain National ParkDude, I unreservedly like this album. I KNOW! What happened? I have listened to it a few times more since last night, and it keeps growing on me. The songs are SO catchy, and I really like all the horn additions. I think what I like best about Shout It Out, though, is that I enjoy it despite the Hansonness of it all. There are several ballads, and I found them all at least tolerable. Some of the lyrics were still really, really dumb ("You don't need a Cadillac/Cause I'll be waiting with my bare back/to carry you there"), but I didn't feel the need to strangle something upon hearing them. In true Hanson form, there were songs that seemed to consist of the title alone, repeated over and over, and Taylor's singing continues to be totally incomprehensible. And I STILL LIKE THIS ALBUM. I appreciate someone that can convince me to like them without having to change the essentials of who they've been all along.

So what does this all mean? After an extremely grueling process, I can now say without a doubt that I... have listened to all the Hanson albums in chronological order. Sorry, were you waiting for me declare my undying love or passionate hatred for Hanson? Turns out this whole experience taught me less to be a Hanson fan, and more to be a Hanson connoisseur. I can appreciate their musical journey and how much they've grown as a band, but it's kind of hard for me to separate my opinions from the process I created here. Do I legitimately like Shout It Out, or do I just like it given my knowledge of all the rest of Hanson's music? Does it even matter if I like it based on its own merits or based on its historical context?

I'm not sure, but I definitely don't feel like a Hanson fan. But though I am hardly going to become one of those overweight Fanson groupies that follows them around the country, fueled by the sustenance that only fast food and sweat sprayed from Zac's sweaty locks can provide, I'll at least check out their next album.

Stay tuned to find out how to make some really sweet, glow-in-the-dark Hanson shirts for all your concert-going needs.

Меня зовут Эмма

2011-10-01T14:05:00.000-04:00

Unnecessarily fancy hallway
at the LoC

Hello friends! Have you missed my witty jokes and poignant writing over the past two months, when I seemingly fell off the face of the virtual earth? Of course you have! I promise I'll be better now. As I mentioned before, I started a new job, and ~~my commute got cut in half so now I am living under the (false) impression that I can go out socializing every night after work~~ it's difficult to adjust to a new schedule and workload! But I am ~~too poor to continue this pattern~~ finally beginning to become acclimated, so I should be back to my writing in no time!

Coincidentally, my dear friend Bright Contradiction also just started working at my new place of employment. Now we spend 8 hours a day together being thoroughly confused about our jobs, attempting to translate things in to French (mauvaise idée), and delighting over the triumph of opening two separate excel files in adjacent monitors (harder than than you think). We see each other allllll the time. So as I was preparing for Friday night via email yesterday, I was surprised to hear K say she already had plans with BC and BC's boyfriend.

Me: What are you doing tonight with K?
BC: We're going to this Russian thing. Want to come?
Me: Oh, I wasn't angling for an invitation. I just kind of expect to know every detail of your life now, and was really surprised that you were hanging out with my roommate and I didn't know about it.
BC: I know the feeling.

So I went on about my day, until lunch when BC mentioned the magical words "open bar." And then I quickly decided that yes, I would like to angle for an invitation after all.

Following work, we hopped on the metro and met up with BCBF at the Library of Congress, which should have been my first indicator that I was not fancy enough for this affair. Actually, my first indicator should have been that the event was invitation only and I was to be spending the evening as Emma Templeton, a friend of BCBF's who couldn't make it. Then my next indicator should have been that it was held at the Library of Congress, and finally the collection of uniformed valet attendants waiting at the entrance should have been my last warning that I should turn around and go home. But I blazed ahead and picked my name badge at registration.

Totally my fake name from now on. It's a great name.

Let me paint a picture for you. Yesterday was Friday. Casual Friday. I was wearing ballet flats and slightly-too-big jeans that spent the evening in a perpetual state of falling down, since I recently lost my only functional belt in the squalid pile of unwashed laundry covering my bedroom floor. On top, I had a lightly stained short-sleeved cardigan paired with a pink silk shirt featuring an assortment of holes. My hair was pulled into a messy french braid after not having washed it since Wednesday, when I got caught in a torrential downpour.

Everyone else... was wearing cocktail dresses and suits. Or in a couple instances, full on evening gowns and tuxedos. Even BC looked slightly underdressed, and she was sporting actual business wear as the invitation requested. I was literally the least appropriately attired person there. For someone that normally overdresses* for everything, this was extra embarrassing. K took the opportunity to make jokes at my expense, sneaking up behind me and saying things like, "Ma'am? The Library of Congress closed several hours ago for a private event. I can show you to the exit now."

*No really. Earlier this month I ruined my favorite cocktail dress running to the train after a US Open match, where I'd worn it on the off chance that we might go out somewhere afterwards requiring a cocktail dress.

No matter. After clamping my new identity to my wrinkled shirt (Emma is so lazy with her clothes!), we went upstairs to some sort of gorgeous, columned atrium filled with fancy food and beverages. We loading up our plates and headed to the bar, which only served top-shelf booze. As I started in on my first glass of (really good) champagne, BC snagged a table for us.

Sometimes, you go to a really cool event, and you think "wow, this is awesome and classy!" and you have a fabulous night that you remember fondly for ages to come. And then sometimes, there is a turning point, from which everything happening subsequently is increasingly preposterous. And that night becomes not just a fond memory, but an epic story that you feel the need to share with everyone you know. Yesterday, that turning point came in the form of a septuagenerian Republican National Committee employee who decided to join us at our table.

RNC was... a character. Every conversation he started was carefully crafted to be as controversy-provoking as possible. "So how do you feel about Putin replacing Medvedev?" "You are all very clean cut. I like that. What do you think about TATTOOS?" All the while, he kept staring at me with a level of intensity that did not make me strictly comfortable. BCBF said it best. "Every cocktail party needs a creepy old dude. And he found us!"

Finally, K arrived (someone had gotten the memo to go home and change first) and BC and I made our escape to refill our champagne glasses. The rest of dinner progressed in the same fashion, with BC, BCBF, K and I constantly rotating out for more food and champagne at any opportunity of freedom.

Meanwhile:

RNC: I HATE tattoos! I think they are awful! The only exception is that I read about some military men who got the names of their fallen company members tattooed on their arm. I think that sounds real sweet.

RNC (to K): Your eyes are so nice! I want to steal them.

RNC: Are you Jewish, Emma?
Me: Uh... no?
RNC: Isn't Templeton a Jewish name?
Me: No.

RNC: I've never met so many liberals in my life!

RNC: Where are you from, Emma?
Me: South Carolina.
RNC: Oh really? That's nice. You know, it's amazing that the confederates did as well as they did during the Civil War. They were really at a disadvantage, but they did well anyway. A lot more confederate women came out to be nurses for their soldiers than in the North, which is real nice.

RNC: You seem really good, Emma. But I guess I'm inclined to think that anyone who looks good is good.

By the end of the hour, we'd made our way through 3-5 glasses of champagne each and BCBF had engaged in a confusing conversation with RNC about contraltos and Amy Winehouse.

Luckily, it was time for a film screening. We processed downstairs to a fancy hallway lined with snack tables and men who looked like bellhops from 1925 (even the bellhops were better dressed than me!). The tables were filled with popcorn, movie snacks like Raisnettes and Junior Mints, and little bags of chocolates. We filed into a fancy theater and listened to Important People talk, such as the Librarian of Congress James H. Billington (want that job title!) and the Russian Ambassador to the US. We made our way through the movie snacks, including some truly bad Russian chocolate bars ("blueberry cream souffée"). The movie started and it was pretty great, excepting a couple of egregious and disturbing instances of blackface.

Afterwards, the Important People invited us back upstairs where would find dessert, two jazz concerts, access to the reading room, and a "surprise."

My money was on the surprise being a vodka fountain. It wasn't.

Lost opportunity: combination Vodka Fountain Ice Luge Kremlin.

Yeah, that's a FUCKING ICE KREMLIN. Sorry for the language, but a GIANT ICE SCULPTURE OF THE KREMLIN IN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS deserves some expletives. When you walk into a room and the first thing everyone notices is not the fully-staffed ice cream bar or the tables full of pastries, you know it's got to be something amazing you're witnessing instead.

After getting over the shock of the Ice Kremlin, we tried to eat everything in sight. Unfortunately, after gorging on terrible Russian chocolates and popcorn, none of us had much stomach real estate left. We had to move on to the reading room. Prior to this point, we hadn't taken any pictures because it was the kind of event where you only take pictures if you are a member of the press toting a very expensive camera. But the Ice Kremlin was kind of a game changer, and suddenly everyone at the reception had their phones out.

Posing like the statues up high. Appropriate use of the LoC Reading Room.

Finally, we made our way to another fancy hallway, entered another fancy room, and listened to some very nice jazz music. I was pleased to spot another party-goer wearing jeans and chucks, but even he had on a blazer.

Oh well. If I had been appropriately dressed, I think my head might have exploded from awesome overload.

"Soooo, we're doing this every Friday night now, right?"

A Proustian Moment

2011-09-07T09:43:00.000-04:00

Who is that outrageously adorable little Irish girl? Oh right! It's me!

When I was three, my father took a sabbatical and moved my family to his birthplace of Cork, Ireland. For nine months, we lived with my Great Aunt Kal, the sister of my late grandmother. Auntie Kal was a wonderful woman who in many ways served as one half of a surrogate for the grandmother I never met. I don't remember much from the following year--a game of blind man's bluff in the greenhouse, playing in light dusting of snow, a particularly foggy day--but the one thing that I will always associate with my great aunt are her scones and homemade raspberry jam.

Sorry to go all Marcel Proust on you, but I don't think there could be anything more perfect than Kal's jam and scones. There are entire childhoods wrapped up in those scones; for me, being scolded for cutting my own hair (and then lying about it after very obviously throwing both the hair and the scissors in the kitchen bin) to sitting in a different kitchen a dozen years later, cheating at a crossword puzzle with my cousin by filling in the remaining boxes with whatever words would fit. I know my sister has her own stories tied to those scones, and I'm guessing Kal's children and grandchildren have theirs as well.

Auntie Kal passed away while I was in college, and for the last few years prior to that, she was not in a state to be baking. The last time I had her scones and raspberry jam was during a trip to Ireland the summer that I was 17. Unfortunately, those final scones will forever be tainted with the realization that her sharp mind was already succumbing to dementia and that they would probably mark the last time I saw my Aunt as I remembered her.

Since her death, her recipes have been passed down to various relations scattered around the Anglo-Irish countryside. My cousins in Northern Ireland took over jam-making duties, while a cousin in Dublin is the keeper of the scone recipe. Both have generously shared the fruits of their labor, but an ocean is a long distance for a pot of jam, and scones do not travel especially well. I harassed both cousins until they handed over their respective recipes and cooking tips, and a year ago made my first attempt during a six-week visit with F and E in New Haven.

F found a nearby u-pick farm where you practically steal the fruit from the vines--something like $5/lb of raspberries. Sadly, we got super lost on the way and only had about ten minutes to pick two pounds of berries and so did not have a huge quantity of jam at the end of the day. I cautiously hoarded my share until my sister's birthday and Thanksgiving so that my family could approve, and it was at least enough of a success that we tried it again this year.

This month's six-week visit was scheduled for E's house on Long Island. After F put the fear of God in her, she called nearly every farm in the surrounding region until she found one with raspberries. Our chauffeur, Matt I (also known as E's husband) drove us there on Saturday, and we wrestled some bees to collect 6 pints of the best berries. These we supplemented with some frozen ones F had gotten at the u-steal farm in Connecticut, and we got down to making jam! I'm super lazy, though, so I just used pictures from last year.

Raspberry Jam

For every pound of rasberries, use a half a pound of granulated sugar (technically, the recipe we were given calls for equal weights sugar and berries, but we promptly ignored that and it turne out fine). This past time, we had three pounds of raspberries so:

3 lbs raspberies
1.5 lbs sugar
10 8 oz jars and lids for canning
2 large stock pots

To begin with, put the canning jars in the dishwasher. You want these to be extra clean so you don't get botulism and die. If you don't have a dishwasher, seriously? It's 2011, people. Update your kitchen.

Next, wash all your raspberries! If you got them from a farm like us, you will probably find all sorts of new friends living in them and will want to cry as you spend hours trying to drown them all.

Now put all of your raspberries in a large pot. Turn the heat to medium and simmer gently for ten minutes. The rasberries will begin to break up and your wooden spoon will start to turn a pleasing shade of magenta.

Add the sugar. This is where it gets iffy, because the recipe just says, "stir until dissolved and boil rapidly until setting point is reached. Pot and cover in usual way." That is not... terribly informative. Your guess is as good as mine on what the setting point is. Both times, F and I have just said, "Ok, I think that looks good?" and started canning. My best idea is to treat it like you would a custard--when it starts to thicken and covers the back of a metal spoon, call it a day.

I don't want to be responsible for you dying from canning incompetence, so you should read about how to "pot and cover in usual way" in this handy-dandy canning guide from Ball.

You can put any leftover jam in a covered bowl in the fridge for your immediate eating needs.

Auntie Kal's Scones

After some trial and error, I've come up with these Americanized measurements:

3 2/3 (3 lbs) cup all-purpose flour
Pinch of Salt
1 t baking soda
2 t cream of tartar
1 T sugar
Stick (4 oz) of unsalted butter
1 egg
1 cup (ish) buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425 F.

In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients. Cut butter into dry ingredients and incorporate with a fork.

Crack egg into a liquid measuring cup. Add buttermilk on top of egg until you have 1 1/5 cups (half an imperial pint) of liquid. Whisk together lightly.

Add liquid to dry ingredients. Mix together with wooden spoon, and then turn out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead gently, just until dough forms a soft ball. Flatten into a circle about a half an inch thick. Cut scones* and lay on greased (or parchment papered) cookie sheet. Brush tops with egg/buttermilk wash.

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until tops begin to turn golden brown. Serve warm with butter and Kal's raspberry jam.

Tastes like childhood.

*In my memory, the scones were round with a fluted edge (this could be inaccurate), so I normally use a fluted biscuit cutter. But sometimes I also use a fluted heart-shaped cutter because it's extra cute that way!

Dark Chocolate Raspberry Truffles:

While we were at it, we also experimented with raspberry truffles. They were pretty epic, especially considering that we made up the recipe as we went along:

1 cup raspberries
1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup heavy cream
2 1/2 cups dark chocolate, chopped (Do not use chocolate chips or I will come after you!!)
Plastic fork
Parchment Paper

Set aside 1 cup of the dark chocolate. Put the remaining chocolate in a medium bowl.

Cook the raspberries and sugar in a small saucepan on medium high heat until all the sugar is dissolved and the raspberries start to disintegrate: about 10ish minutes. Or not 10ish minutes--I wasn't looking at a clock and have a bad sense of time.

Add the cream to the mixture and bring to a vigorous boil, until the mixture is relatively unlumpy. Turn off the heat and carefully pour the mixture over the 1 1/2 cups of chocolate. Wait about 30 seconds, and then stir till all the chocolate is melted and the mixture is smooth.

Cool on the counter until room temperature. Chill in the fridge for about an hour.

Set parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Remove ganache from fridge. It should be solid enough that you can roll into balls, about 1"-1.5" thick. Place on the cookie sheet and chill for another hour.

Melt the remaining chocolate over a double boiler. If you want to get fancy, learn how to temper chocolate. But I'm guessing you either already know how or can't be bothered. Break the center two tines of the plastic fork and use this to dip the truffles in the melted chocolate. Place them back on the cookie sheet and cool at room-temperature until chocolate hardens, or if you're lazy and impatient, in the fridge.

Makes 12 truffles which won't last long enough for you to take a picture.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

2011-09-01T18:39:00.001-04:00

"Hold me, L!"

August was complete insanity. In the past week and a half alone, I've interviewed for, been offered and started a new job, put in notice at my old job, experienced my first earthquake, made poor life choices during a "hurricane," had EG move in, CS move back to California, and most dramatically, L move out. Let's just pause on that last point for a moment. I lived with L for six years. SIX YEARS. If our friendship were a child, we'd be starting first grade this week. From college orientation till now, we were never more than a hop, skip and a jump away from each other. We even accidentally studied abroad together! She now lives just 15 minutes away, but it feels like a chasm of infinite depth. I don't quite know what to do myself. Last night when she was picking up some laundry at our house, I was all "Hold me, L! I'm lost without you!" Needy? Perhaps. but SIX YEARS. I just had a major sad scrolling through our entire friendship on Facebook to find this picture:

Who will I pose awkwardly with atop ruined castles now?!

But enough of my moping! If you're clever with math, you will have noticed that

House - L - CS + EG = still one bedroom empty.

Time to find a new roommate! We used Craigslist to this end once before, but KS led the charge and he 1) put this weird, superfluous clause in the ad about K and I being vegetarians and 2) as far as we can tell, mostly chose to interview hot-sounding girls. But we got CS and it worked out great, until she RUDELY decided to move back to California.

So take two: K wrote up a nice little ad, this time without any strange comments about our eating habits. Now, if we were responsible adults, we would have posted the ad more than a week before we needed a new tenant. But of course we didn't do that! Luckily, housing in DC is such a complete clusterf**k that we took the post down after receiving 100 responses in less than 24 hours. People of DC: if you are ever feeling sad about yourself, post an ad for your room on Craigslist. Housing here is so impossible to find that you will instantly feel like the most popular person in the universe.

Sorting through those hundred responses was a bitch. We came up with a semi-arbitrary ranking system (how old are you? do you currently have a job? do you sound like a crazy person over email? are you employed in such a fashion as to get me free drinks?). K sent emails to a dozen or so of the chosen ones, inviting them to come over to see the house and endure a grueling interview process. Unfortunately for our prospectives, I'm only semi-joking about the grueling bit, as we scheduled all of the house showings for Saturday afternoon just as "Hurricane" Irene was getting started. When showing your house on Craigslist, it's best to add an element of danger to weed out the weak ones.

Sadly, I wish this was the point in the post where I would regale you with hilarious anecdotes about how terrible people from Craiglist are. But almost everyone was super awesome and nice and normal. There was only one potential serial killer in the mix, and even he wasn't that bad--just a touch of the crazy eye and a love affair with banana bread. So as person after person showed up on our doorstep increasingly drenched, K, EG and I felt worse and worse knowing we had to turn all these people down. Many were soon to be homeless, and we briefly toyed with the idea of setting up a collection of lean-tos on our back porch so they could all move in (well, maybe not Banana Bread).

Here's a Craigslist tip for you: don't interview the foreigners because you'll be wracked with guilt when you don't pick them. We had two Germans, one of whom might actually be Simon from Misfits (though hopefully less likely to accidentally murder someone). When asked about who he knows in the city, he enumerated all of his friends who recently moved away (basically: everyone he knows here). I kind of wanted to adopt him. Worse still was his female counterpart, a bubbly woman who is currently living in a hostel in Dupont and had recently seen someone stabbed in Petworth. I felt like a terrible ambassador to this country for not inviting her to live with us.

In the end, though, there can only be one winner. Because that's exactly what housing in DC is: a competition. Finding somewhere decent to live here has roughly the same odds as winning the lottery. Because we've all been through that agonizing process ourselves, it was that much harder to turn everyone down. We struggled between two front-runners for three days but finally made our decision.

K: Ok. I'm going to email New Roommate and invite him to live with us. What should I say?
EG: ....COME ON DOWN!!!!

Saddest part is, you'd probably be more likely to hear Bob Barker calling your name from his cozy retirement than to find an apartment in DC.

My Secret Shame

2011-08-18T09:00:00.004-04:00

I have an addiction. It crept up on me... I saw some friends doing it, and it seemed harmless enough. I thought I'd try it just once to see what the fuss was about, and then before I could realize what was happening, it had taken over me. I tried to stop, but I only went through withdrawal. Obsessed, I kept asking friends where I could get my next hit from. I even tried to convince other people to try it, when hours of my own life were missing. What's my drug of choice?

I am a Korean Drama addict.

So how does a white girl from South Carolina become a KDrama addict? It all started about a year ago, when one of K's childhood friends told her to watch a KDrama called Pasta. Now, I'm not normally not one to succumb to peer pressure so easily, but whenever this friend comes to town, we seem to be mutually bad influences on one another. It tends to be Bad Idea Jeans all around:

Drive four hours to learn a questionable French style of dancing? Sure! Wear leggings as pants? Why not?! Go out in public with a giant lightning bolt painted across your face? Great plan! Fanny packs for everyone!!!!

My point is, if Notorious B.I.J. is involved, I will probably do something I will regret. And no surprise, as K went further and further down the KDrama rabbit hole, I followed suit. Fueled my fellow addict friends, I have wasted hours of my life watching such gems as Coffee Prince and Boys Over Flowers. I've started making playlists of my favorite KPop hits on youtube and listening to them in the background. Sometimes at work, I leave Lee Min Ho's wikipedia page open, and when I'm feeling sad, I just click over in my browser and remember how attractive he is. Along with another friend from Wellesley, K and I have formed a Korean Cultural Club (which we attempted to call Korean Kultural Klub for about .2 milliseconds), wherein we talk about KDramas we're watching and share other noteworthy Korean things via facebook and email.

At least I know I'm in good company. Korean Dramas are famously addictive. It's not unusual to see that a popular one has something crazy like a 15% ratings share. If you have never seen one, this is all you need to know:

	Our Plucky Young Heroine is a poor and ugly. Her parents are probably irresponsible and/or incredibly embarrassing and she has to work 7 jobs to support her younger sibling(s). She has no special skills, except for being hardworking. At some point during the series, she will give a sad-sack monologue about how she is poor, ugly, talentless and has an unfortunate family.
	Our Hero is an asshole man-child who is spoiled, rich, and lazy. Every day, he spends at least 400% more time primping than our heroine. It's ok that he's kind of an abusive douchebag because he has a tragic event in his past, like being kidnapped or being secretly adopted.
	Secondary Guy is slightly less attractive than Our Hero, but he's a non-douchey, nice guy type. He's probably in the music industry to underscore his sensitive nature.
	Secondary Hot Girl is hot, successful, and talented. Basically everything Our Heroine is not.
	Female Sidekick is Our Heroine's best friend or sister. She's not important and there is only one of her because Our Heroine is kind of a loser who doesn't have more than one friend.
	Male Sidekicks are there to provide more eye candy and some B-plot padding so the writers can stretch the main story line out for an eternity. One of them will end up with the Female Sidekick and the rest will be completely irrelevant.
	Rich Matriarch is one scary bitch. She really, really hates Our Heroine.

Here's how everything will play out: Circumstances will conspire to throw Our Heroine in the path of Our Hero. They will hate each other, then Our Hero will find her obvious disdain strangely irresistible while she will fall for Secondary Guy because of his comparative non-doucheyness. Unfortunately, he harbors long-term lusty feelings for Hot Girl. Hot Girl, who should by all counts be a total bitch, is actually really nice and becomes a mentor for Our Heroine. Except she's also emotionally unavailable and leaves Secondary Guy for her career. Secondary Guy then shifts his affections to Our Heroine, but she's already moved on to Our Hero after finding out some tragic traumatic event in his past that excuses his doucheyness. They fall in love and everyone's happy except for Secondary Guy and Our Hero's Scary Matriarch, who resorts to nefarious plots to try to break up the couple. Eventually she realizes that Our Heroine has helped her son/grandson grow up a teensy bit and everyone lives happily ever after, because Hot Girl has also come back to Secondary Guy after realizing careers are not all they're cracked up to be.

A couple of other things are thrown haphazardly in the mix, including sports montages, a trip to the beach, makeover sequences, and stomach cancer. Somebody always has stomach cancer. Inexplicably this all takes 15-20 infuriating hours to play out. Most of these hours are filled with slow-motion flashbacks to things that happened five minutes ago.

Every single KDrama follows this rigid plot structure. But, despite knowing exactly what is going to happen, I cannot stop watching. I am currently halfway through Boys Over Flowers, and I keep thinking, I am in the wrong damn career.

The first time I thought this, it was because there were some random white supporting characters whose sole purpose was to stand on beach being vapid arm candy to the Male Sidekicks, and they were doing a terrible job. If that is what passes for white people acting in Korean Dramas, sign me up. I could act better and look more moderately attractive from a vegetative state than any of these so-called "actresses."

But that thought was quickly replaced with an even grander one. I shouldn't be acting in Korean Dramas, I should be writing them!! That would be the cushiest job ever! There is the slight problem that I don't actually speak Korean, but I'll just come up with ideas and pass the trivial details like filling 20 hours of dialogue onto someone else. Just to prove to you how easy it can be, I'll provide you with my sure-fire formula for coming up with a KDrama Hit:

First, you'll need a title. Any old string of words will do. Don't believe me? Consult this list of actual Korean Dr ama titles. I think my favorites are Attic Cat and Indomitable Daughters in Law. I'd recommend pushing buttons on this random word generator a few times, which is how I got my title:

Away, Wearable Courtier!

Great! Now we'll need a plot description with which to pitch our new KDrama to network execs. Just fill out this handy mad-lib:

Korean girl's name x2
Mediocre life goal
Really terrible-sounding, pedestrian job
Type of vehicle
Rich-sounding industry
Korean boy's name x2
Place of employment
Traumatic childhood event
Musical Instrument
Glamourous sounding career

Yoon-hee doesn't want anything more in life than to become a world-class juggler. But her family is poor! She has to work as an employee at a mid to large sized government contracting firm (jk haa! how about vacuum salesperson) just to make ends meet! All that is about to change though, when she is out making her delivery rounds and, losing control of her bicycle, she crashes into the heir to the fur industry, Dongjoon, and boy is he upset! Which will cause Yoon-hee to crack first, working hard at the pet store to pay off her debt to him, or putting up with his inescapable barrage of insults? Little does she know that his vitriol is a mask to hide his true feelings. Will understanding his tragic past of being sold into the circus be enough to kindle her affections? Or will she fall for Rain, a sensitive accordion player who, until now, has always been in love with Esther, the famous hand model? Find out on Away, Wearable Courtier!

Special thanks to K for filling in the blanks! Now for a quick poster mock-up....

Doesn't that look promising? Just make sure to include all the stock characters listed in the chart above, and you'll have a hit in no time! Now hand me that check.

The Blame Game

2011-08-11T14:33:00.001-04:00

Oh sweet readers, I have neglected you. I haven't posted anything in almost three weeks. I am falling so far behind on my Neville Longbottom goals that I had to return all the books to my library. I even hid behind KLang's post instead of writing myself. I didn't mean to do it! It just happened. It's not that I haven't had anything to write about, in fact--just the opposite. THERE'S TOO MANY THINGS. I have three or four unpublished posts sitting in my drafts folder right now, waiting for time or photos or inspiration. And then there are all the things I haven't started on, like The Hanson Project (epic!), or tubing two weeks ago (drunk!), or the Everton football game (epic and drunk!). And it takes time to do all these things I should be writing about. There are lasagnas to be made and beers to drink and Korean dramas to be watched--it all leaves very little time for writing!

You could blame me for not making time. You probably should. But it's a handy family trait of mine to shift blame, so instead, let me tell you about all the other people you should blame instead.

A & Mr. A

Jerks.

Three weeks ago, A and her husband, Mr. A, descended upon me in DC, and like, expected me to hang out with them. Now hopefully there will be a forthcoming blog post about their insolence, but until then just know that they forced me go to a totally lame drunken tailgate + soccer game and take them to museums and eat meals with them and stuff. I would have way rather have been sitting at home in a cave if antisocial solitude writing a new blog post, but I guess when your oldest friend comes to visit, crappy social norms dictate that you should spend time with them.

KS, KLin, S-Dubs and Genghis Khan

GK hiding just out of frame. Rest of culprits pictured.

A & Mr. A had barely left when a new series of house invaders arrived. Again, they kept kidnapping me and taking me to places like Bob's Noodles 66 (I love you stinky tofu!!), on a lengthy tubing trip, and to a remote island called Catan where I proved once again to be the most resourceful Settler. And GK practically held me at gunpoint until I made everyone oatmeal-cookie-cinnamon-ice-cream-sandwiches from scratch. I guess that's what happens when you let a centuries-old, murderous lunatic sleep in your living room. And in a haze of Stockholm syndrome, I also made KS and GK lasagna, homemade goldfish, blueberry muffins, and more cookies. After that, there was simply no time left for writing!

My new Penpal

Ok, so there was a little time left for writing. Which is why you should definitely, definitely blame my new penpal. Several months ago, I signed up for a penpal on Forever Young Adult. I heard nothing for a long, long time, and then a few weeks ago, I finally received my freshly-assigned virtual bff. We hit it off, even if I cannot ever hope to compare to Penpal's coolness. Just look at what she sent me most recently:

Yeah, that's a page out of a custom fairytale book she sent me called "Alix is a Ballerina Princess." So what if the plot makes less than no sense? It has my name on every page. Even my parents never loved me enough to buy me such a book!

In order to keep up with such generosity, I have been directing much of my writing energy into sending Penpal letters. And who can blame me? She also sent me a seriously excellent mix CD, WITH LINER NOTES. Except she forgot to put any music on it, so as an apology, she made me this sweet music video. Obviously, I had to reciprocate. I spent more time than I would like to admit making some elaborate stationery (it involved sewing), stenciling a t-shirt (you'll hear more about this sometime before October 8), and making my own CD to send back. This, in turn, fueled another blame-riddled project...

KS and GK

A rare, non-food-related picture.

Yep, so guilty they got two separate bullet points! You see, after KS left us forever and refused to hangout on google+, he decided he'd swing back to DC to pick up his car and drive across country with GK. They are currently somewhere in New Mexico, and as far as I can tell, eating and sending us pictures of their food comprises the full extent of their road trip activities. That, and listening to the 14-volume mix CD set I made for them.

It has been my job to make CDs for family road trips ever since college, when L and I drove to K's parent's house with only the radio at our disposal. This was also the time when "Hot N Cold" by Katy Perry came out, and it was literally all any radio station would play. We must have heard that song at least a dozen times during the short trip from Boston to central Connecticut before giving up entirely and listening to some Jesusy station. After that, I always take it upon myself to provide my own soundtrack.

Still, it's a far cry from making a single mix tape for a couple hour drive to making 14 CD set for a two week road trip in which I'm not even a participant. This is where Penpal is partially to blame. See, I was busy making my mix to send to her when something like this conversation happened:

L: Alix is really good at making mix CDs. She makes them for all our road trips! I got a 6-CD set for our last trip to Connecticut!
KS: You're going to make some for our Road trip, right?
GK: Yeah, you just bought a 25 pack of blank CDs just to make one. So now I expect no less than 24 mix CDs for our trip.

Being the idiot that I am, I actually went along with this plan. Ok, not all 24, but quite a few. I made one for each state they're driving through (two for Texas) and then wrote liner notes for all of them. I also tacked on a "mistake" CD, because I made the mistake of letting my father see some of my notes. And then my entire family felt the need to criticize my musical choices and harass me about all the important state-related songs I "forgot to include." I ignored most of their suggestions, but kept this one:

As you might imagine, this project took a hefty chunk of time. Which is why you should blame KS and GK for their selfish behavior. I, as usual, am faultless.

J.K. Rowling

Damn, these books are long! I'm in the middle of year four and it wasn't until page 167 that our hero, Hipster Neville, finally made an appearance! I still have well over 500 pages to make it through, and then ANOTHER THREE BOOKS. Normally I would be happy about having so much to read, but not in this instance. I'm beginning to regret this whole Neville project. Not enough that I won't do it, but enough that it's going to take me much longer than expected to finish. The preservation of my sanity is a good cause--please forgive me Jo Rowling.

AT&T

Since last Friday, I've been visiting my sister in Austin. Unfortunately, she just moved back into her house following some renovations and has not had the internet reconnected. This is not through any fault of her own, but I will blame AT&T, who scheduled the date to come and turn on the internet for THREE WEEKS after they initially called. As a result, there is still no internet. No internet makes it hard to blog. I am currently loitering in a coffee shop, where I think a mumblecore drama just took place in line behind me. Make sure to read this in your most expressionless voice:

Boy: What's that?
Girl: Quiche.
Boy: That's a quiche?
Girl: Yes.
Boy. Is that French?
Girl: Mm.
Boy: Oh. Because I think saw something like that at La Madaleine.
Long pause...
Boy: Can we get on the internet here?
Girl: I think so.
Boy: Cool.
Another long pause... boy points at menu.
Boy: You know how they like, write stuff? I couldn't do that.
Girl: Me neither. My handwriting is so bad.
Boy: You wouldn't be able to read it if I wrote it.
More Pausing.

At that moment, the barista finished ringing me up, so I missed the rest of that riveting conversation. Lucky, too, because another minute of that and I would have had to strangle myself on one of the many decorative lamps hanging from the ceiling here. Now all I have to endure is the emo cover of "My Boyfriend's Back" that's currently assaulting my ears.

Austin

But in the conspiracy for my negligence, the entire city of Austin is clearly the biggest offender. It's just too distracting! There are too many tacos to eat, bats to visit, fried avocados to eat, movies to see, pools to swim in, fried avocado tacos to eat... mostly there's a great deal of eating. It's a good thing I don't actually live here because I'd weigh about 300 pounds, and it's just too hot for that level of obesity. But for now, I never want to leave.

Fried Avocado = Best Invention Ever

The Importance of Being Alix's Friends: Traffic

2011-07-29T12:26:00.001-04:00

Last week, I saw a general request from my friend KLang to guest blog for one of her blogging friends on the subject of traffic. I decided to take her up on the offer in a new feature called "The Importance of Being Alix's Friends." Wherein my friends randomly guest blog when I/they feel like it. This might, as I suspect will be the case with Prince of Petworth's new "Looking for Love" segment, be the first and last addition to this series. Or maybe I will love it and harass my friends to write for me all the time. Only time and my fickle personality will tell!

But for now, I like KLang very much and she is a smart, funny lady, so please read what she has to say.

Traffic

I realized something the other day about traffic that I hope will be one of those breakthrough thoughts, like when you read an article (this most often happens to me when reading sociology articles and blogs) and you think to yourself, "now why did I never think about it that way before?" Hopefully this blog entry will be like that for you.

Now, traffic. I will clarify that I drove in/around DC for about a year before giving up my car entirely, and have now been living car-free for about a year (math! I have lived in the DC area two years). However today, while imagining one of my friends driving to their weekend beach destination on a Friday afternoon, I held an imaginary conversation in my head between my friend (let's call her T) and her husband (let's call him J).

T: If we leave at 4, that's too late. It will be rush hour by then.

J: Well I don't want to leave at 6, it'll start to get dark and it's Friday, so traffic will still be kind of bad.

T: Katy said she tried to drive up 95 one afternoon as early as 2, and she hit the worst traffic (reader note: this is true. It took me 4.5 hours to get from DC to Philly, a 2.5 hour trip).

J: We could leave at 11 in the morning. Let's just take the day off work and do that.

T: But we'll hit lunch hour traffic.

J: Let's just screw it, and leave at like 5 a.m. or something!

T: Silly J, that's morning rush hour.

And from this hypothetical conversation in my head, I concluded that there was literally no good time for T and G to drive to the beach. However, in this country we still operate as if there are magical "non-trafficy" times. We all do this! Sometimes it works, such as when leaving your house at 8 gets you to work slightly more quickly than leaving at 8:30. However there are times, particularly Fridays, when there is NO good time to be driving. And in fact, sometimes it feels like no matter what the time of day it is, there are a million cars on the road! Case in point, a tweet from one of the college friends I follow on Twitter: "I have found the only time to drive when there is no traffic! 9:30pm on Tuesday nights. The only time," and then her second tweet a few minutes later, "I take that back. #constructiontrafficfail."

So why do we all have this illusion about traffic vs. non-traffic times, if even sacred highway driving times like 9:30 on Tuesdays can be ruined by traffic? It's because of this (this is the hook right here of this whole post, so pay attention). Previous generations had more well-defined working hours (where do you think they got "9-5" from and by the way, why the heck doesn't it apply anymore?!) and thus, more well-defined "rush" and "traffic" hours. Most likely, our parents and their parents got up to go to work, drove the family car to the office, and then clocked out at 5. Back in the day, rush hour must have been awful! Every single breadwinner dad (note: super generalizing here, and gender- and era-stereotyping but bear with me) was going to and from the factory or office building at the same time, morning and night.

Today's workforce doesn't do that! We have teleworking, flexible work schedules, freelance jobs, and even metro incentives that encourage us to NOT go to work at regular hours (who wants to ride during peak of the peak and pay 50 cents more!? Me, actually - but that's besides the point). Now, we are so flexible that people are allowed and encouraged to be on the roads at all hours of the day and night. You want to come in at 6 and leave at 2? Fine! You want to come in at 10am and leave at 7pm? Fine! You want to work from home full time and randomly shuttle your kids around and go to the bank at weird times like 11:17am and 1:45pm? Fine! But what the heck does that do to rush hour? It just makes it last ALL. DAY.

The addition of flexibility into our transportation lives means that there is no longer a magic, secret, "gotcha I win!" time that no one else is on the road, because everyone else had the same idea as you - why don't I take advantage of this flexibility and leave work a few hours early to beat traffic to the shore? Well guess what - half your office had this idea, so you try to one-up them by leaving even earlier, but then you're hitting morning rush hour... see what I mean? With everyone so flexible, you really can't win.

Unless of course, you choose to drive to the shore at 3 in the morning -- except oh wait, CONSTRUCTION.

Happy driving everyone!

Neville Longbottom: Year 3

2011-07-26T08:39:00.000-04:00

I am very sorry it has taken me so long to write the next Hipster Neville installment. I actually reread book three over a week and a half ago, but I've been a very busy lady: playing host to some friends, visiting museums, dying of heat exhaustion several times over, writing to my pen-pal, studying up on Hanson's discography, getting hooked on a new Korean drama and even doing work on occasion. Then, there's my new boyfriend, Ján Mucha, who is a terrifying Slovakian man. I call him Slovak for short, and because I can't remember his real name from one minute to the next. He may also be a vampire if his proclivity to hide from sunlight is any indication. My very own Slovakian Edward Cullen! Here is a picture of him with my other new boyfriend, Cartoon Vanilla Ice:

Now, you're probably thinking, "two new boyfriends, Alix? You fictional slut!" I know! I'm kind of a serial polygamist in that respect. I tend to juggle several fake relationships at once. And since Glee has officially jumped the shark, a couple new spots have opened up. (Sorry Darren and Other Asian! Would this be a good time to mention that we're breaking up?) But of course the best place on my imaginary boyfriend shelf will always be reserved for my one true love, ~~Mr. Darcy~~ ~~Gilbert Blythe~~ Neville Longbottom.

Y'all, I don't want to spoil anything if you haven't see Neville Longbottom and the Sword of Gryffindor yet, but let me just say that fair isle cardigans have never looked so sexy. I went to a midnight showing with CS, to which we didn't have tickets until about 8:30pm the day of. I set up a craigslist notification on my phone, and while I was on my way to dinner, I literally stopped in the middle of the street in Dupont Circle to respond to a posting for tickets. This scheme also involved me sending the shadiest text message of my life that went something like, "I need you to get some cash, call this number, and meet a girl in Chinatown immediately." But it was totally worth almost getting hit by a car to participate in my first (and regrettably last!) Harry Potter Midnight Experience and join the whole theater in raucous applause for "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!"

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We're only in the third year of Neville's journey through Hogwarts! During the first two years, Neville maintained his cool factor despite being a perpetual punching bag for the rest of the school (haters gonna hate!) and started a really sweet rock group that's way too underground for you. Unfortunately, Justin Finch Fletchley ate all his bandmates at then end of last semester, so we're back to square one for 8th grade.

So how did Neville do this year? The good news is that he shows up in more than six sentences in this book. The bad news? We'll see how well I can spin this...

Neville Longbottom and the Klepto Cat

Dude, the weirdest thing happened to me the other day. Gran and I were headed to Diagon Alley via Knight bus (floo powder makes her queasy), and when they asked our names, this creepy guy with a monster case of acne kept insisting that I was lying. "'Choo talkin' about? I know Neville an' you int him. Neville is 'arry Potter's name." He kept asking what I was really called until Gran finally hexed him to shut him up. Thank God I'm not a complete fuck up like that guy. He's the kind of moron who would join the Death Eaters just because You-Know-Who promised he'd make him a flying tricycle. I'd better focus a little more on my studies this year or I could end up as the crazy person harassing children on the bus.

Unfortunately, I think I might have some residual memory problems from that time my uncle dropped me out a window. I keep forgetting things. Gran got really pissed when I lost my booklist. I don't know what happened to it! It was in my pocket when I went to buy some Magical Toad Serum in the pet store, and now it's gone. I also saw Granger in there buying the world's ugliest cat. Like this thing is possibly unloveable. And people make fun of me for Trevor.

The Hogwarts Express was way more exciting this year since there's an escaped magical mass murderer named Sirius Black on the lamb. I was just getting to the end of the On the Road when the train stopped and all the lights went off. I went into Harry's compartment to see if they knew what was up, but it was dark in there too and I sat on Hermione's cat by mistake. Then, the Azkaban guards appeared to look for Black and it got really cold and depressing until this homeless guy shot silvery stuff at them and gave us some chocolate. I guess he's our new Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher! I feel a little better about my future prospects, because even if I end up like that weirdo on the Knight Bus, Dumbledore will probably still hire me as the DADA professor. Dude is desperate! But in the kerfuffle, I misplaced my copy of On the Road. Now how will I ever find out what happens!?

As it turns out, the homeless guy is not a bad teacher! The first day of class was pretty intimidating. I'd just come from Potions class, where Snape threatened Trevor with my crappy potion and then took points away when Hermione helped me fix it. (side note: damn! that girl's taking a lot of classes! How is that even possible?) Before that, Professor Trelawney kept predicting my failure in Divination. It was not exactly a stellar day. And then Professor Lupin called on me to battle a boggart, even though we've learned approximately nothing in two years of DADA classes. But guess what?! I was awesome! The boggart came out as scary-as-hell Professor Snape, but I imagined him in Gran's clothes and it was both hilarious and disturbing! Ten points to Gryffindor! This almost as good as the time I won the house cu--Hey! is that Hermione's cat reading my copy of On the Road? Wait a minute, cats can't read!

I think I'm starting to lose it. I thought I saw that cat walking around with my Hogsmeade permission slip last week, too, but Gran sent a copy directly to professor McGonagall. Lucky, too, because security's much tighter now with Black on the loose. Harry has to stay home with the first and second years cause his uncle didn't sign his form. Sucks. Butterbeer is awesome.

Despite all the security, Sirius Black showed up at the castle last night and tried to get into Gryffindor tower. He slashed through the Fat Lady's portrait when he didn't know the password, and now she's been temporarily replaced by a painting of Sir Cadogan the Useless and his Fat Pony. It's really difficult to get into the common room now because he keeps challenging everyone to duels and changing the password every five seconds.

Meanwhile, my memory is getting worse, as is my sanity. My remembrall disappeared, and I could have sworn I saw Hermione's cat petting it like Gollum in the corner. I started making lists of everything to help me remember stuff, but those have been disappearing too. Then I thought I saw the cat hanging out with a dog the size of a pony over by the whomping willow, but that can't be right either. I also keep imagining seeing Hermione in two places at once lately. I don't know what's up with that. Maybe it's because Snape is being extra scary lately and I'm really stressed. He started taking over DADA classes once a month whenever Lupin wanders off mysteriously, and this time he assigned us two whole rolls of parchment on werewolves!!! We're not supposed to study those for ages! I'll never finish this work and I'm totally going to end up like that weirdo from the Knight Bus!!!

Holy crap! Sirius Black is back! IN OUR FREAKING DORM ROOM! Ron woke up the other night with him standing over him with a giant knife! Turns out he somehow got hold of my missing list of passwords and Sir Cadogan let him in. Great. Now even McGonagall is against me and the other Gryffindors have been forbidden from giving me the password. I just have to wait outside every night for someone to let me in. Don't mind me if Sirius Black comes looking to kill random students again! I'll just be sitting out here in corridor, easy prey!

The year finished as it always does. Me: social leper. Harry, Ron and Hermione: some crazy shenanigans way beyond the magical ability of third years that involve several near death experiences and Sirius Black escaping via hippogriff. Miraculously, no one dies or has their soul sucked out. None of it really makes sense.

But what DOES make sense is that I TOTALLY CAUGHT HERMIONE'S CAT STEALING MY ENCHANTED DOCTOR WHO NEEDLEPOINT GUITAR PICK HOLDER I BOUGHT ON WIZARD ETSY! That damn cat has been stealing my stuff all year and I AM NOT A CRAZY PERSON! Maybe I won't end up like that weirdo on the Knight Bus after all!

Most Badass Moment of the Book

Obviously the boggart scene. Despite being constantly bullied and threatened by Snape, even in front of other teachers, Neville still manages to finish off the boggart with the help of his gran's stuffed vulture hat (scary in itself). That pansy Harry can't even try to fight a boggart because he's too busy convulsing and hearing his dead mother's screams in his head.

#1 Reason Neville is Cooler than You

Neville gets some some automatic cool-by-association points from his grandmother. Anyone who can pull off that hat is fierce.

Lessons from Tibet

2011-07-18T11:48:00.009-04:00

Adorable Tibetan girl waits to see His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama speak on the Capitol Lawn

A week and a half ago, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama was giving a public peace talk on the Capitol lawn as part of his DC tour. New roommate CS and I went to see him, and I learned many important lessons as a result. But most of these are probably not the ones you are expecting:

Rebecca Black knows her shit. Ok, it was a Saturday, Saturday as opposed to a Friday, Friday, but do you know how much you accomplish when you get up at 7a.m.? A whole friggin' lot. Look at my schedule for the day:

7:00 a.m Waking up in the morning, gotta be fresh gotta go downstairs
7:30 a.m. Tibetan dresses sure are more complicated than I remember...
8:00 a.m. Head to the capitol to see the Dalai Lama
8:30 a.m. Make new friend
11:20 a.m. Die of heat stroke
11:30 a.m. Visit Botanical Gardens!
12:15 p.m. Lunch at the Museum of the American Indian*
12:45 p.m. Peruse the National Galleries
1:30 p.m. Chillin' in the Kogod Courtyard (National Portrait Gallery)
2:15 p.m. Library!
2:30 p.m. Call family
3:30 p.m. Reading!
4:00 p.m. Nap!
5:00 p.m. Clean kitchen/plan wedding/acquire tickets to Hanson concert
6:00 p.m. Make pasta from scratch!
8:00 p.m. Watch Michael Bay blow shit up for two hours
10:30 p.m Very scholarly conversation about what an asshat Michael Bay is and also how Transformers 3 is set in a completely fictional DC with tall buildings, narrow alleys and randomly old palatial apartments that do not exist anywhere within District boundaries.
11:45 p.m. More reading!
11:47 p.m. Fall asleep reading.

SO MUCH ACCOMPLISHMENT FOR ONE DAY. We hit up five Smithsonians in a two hour time period. I should get up at 7 every day! Normal Saturdays, I'm lucky to get clothes on. Heck, it's a Monday right now and I'm still in my dressing gown.

*Most delicious museum food you'll ever find. Seriously. I have never actually been to the museum part of that museum, but I have eaten there at least half a dozen times.

Randomly wearing another culture's traditional dress is a totally appropriate idea. You may or may not know that I spent a summer interning at a Tibetan high school in India. This means that I happen to own several Chubas (traditional Tibetan dresses, sometimes spelled Chupa) that I once put one on for work every day, but now have little to no opportunity wear them. And here was an almost-plausible excuse to pull one out of the closet! So what if it's a 10,000 degree July day, it takes me like 20 minutes to figure out where all the ties go and I feel totally self conscious being the random white girl dressed in cultural garb! It's festive! At least, that's what CS tried to convince me.

Rockin' a chuba with my teaching mentor in India. Not sure why I look so sweaty. I blame the monsoon.

Turns out that it was a good idea, because if there's any message that being a random white person in a Tibetan dress going to see the Dalai Lama sends to the world, it's "Hey, that random white person is almost certainly headed to see the Dalai Lama! I bet I could ask her for directions." Which is how I made a new Tibetan friend! Let's call him Tenzin.**

Tenzin was visiting from New York, where he's lived for the past 5 years. We chatted about the pros and cons of New York and DC, his job and of course, why the hell I was wearing a Tibetan dress. I explained my background with the Tibetan school and we talked a little bit about the Tibetan community in India. As we parted, he said I that I should try to go see some of the Buddhist teachings that were going on at the Verizon Center all week. He offered to ask around if anyone had extra tickets and let me know.

And then later that evening, I got a call! He'd gotten a handful of (really good) tickets for myself and some friends to go see the Dalai Lama's teaching the next day! All because I'd run into him in the metro in a chuba. Well, and also because Tibetans are collectively the nicest people the world, who will go out of their way to help complete strangers, but you know, the dress too!

**Hilarious Tibetan joke!!!

When you update your phone software, all of your alarms will reset. I had been wondering for several days why my alarms had suddenly switched from Seabear "Arms" to the factory default noise, but it didn't dawn on me until Sunday morning at 8:47, when I woke up exactly an hour and forty-seven minutes later than planned, that all of my alarm settings had reverted with my gingerbread update. Why 8:47? Well that was the time I received a text message from my new friend Tenzin, whom I was supposed to meet at 8:30 to pick up tickets. I then spent the next hour frantically running around the city, wearing yesterday's clothes and breathing my morning breath on everyone I met. So in summary, always triple check your alarms, because your phone thinks it's smarter than you and that you only want to wake up on time Mon-Fri. The saddest part is, I really should have learned this lesson a year ago when I almost missed a plane for the exact same reason.

Visors are cool. Somebody alert the Doctor. Fezzes are out, visors are in. Reason #782 Why I Love the Dalai Lama:

He even cracked some hat-related jokes.

Buddhism is hard, but not as hard as being the Dalai Lama's interpreter. This guy is my new hero:

Superpowers are pretty cool in comic books, but some of us possess less cool but extremely useful superpowers in real life, too. For instance, I have a superhuman capacity to open stuck jars. Glamorous? Not in the least. I would have the worst superhero name on the planet (Jar Lady?). But my powers do come in quite handy. Just ask my roommates.

Anyway, Geshe Thupten Jinpa has been the Dalai Lama's english interpreter since 1985, according to Wikipedia. But his interpretation skills extend far beyond the normal human level of ability. Sunday's teaching focused on some pretty complex (at least to me) Buddhist concepts, which I had a difficult time following. As the lesson went on, His Holiness abandonned trying to express the more nunanced ideas in English and would carry on in Tibetan for upwards of 15 minutes at a time. A normal interpreter's nightmare, but problem for Thupten Jinpa? Of course not! Easy Peasy! He would just spew it all back out in flawless English, some of which was so fancy that I couldn't really understand it as a native speaker. Dude has serious skills.

The Dalai Lama is like Santa Claus. If you've ever seen him on TV/heard him talk, you'll know that The Dalai Lama comes across as the world's jolliest man. He tells all sorts of self-deprecating jokes and has an infectious chuckle. Plus, he likes to dress in red and wear funny hats! But he resembles everyone's favorite portly gift-giver deeper ways, too. Not the flying around on Christmas and sliding down chimneys ways. The ways where he knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows when you've been bad or good so for the love of God stop playing with your damn cell phone while I'm talking to you.

I tried really hard to pay attention the whole time, but the teaching was three hours long and a lot of it was over my head/in Tibetan. So especially after my three friends had to sneak out early for a previously-scheduled event around hour two, I found myself losing focus. And then, as I was checking my email on my phone, I heard HH the Dalai Lama switch back into English and say,

"The modern world celebrates distractions."

He might as well have finished that sentence, "so stop reading Prince of Petworth on your phone, Alix." It was like he knew that I wasn't paying attention. He went on for the next ten minutes to talk about how easily we are distracted by material goods, and how for some reason this is considered a good thing, etc etc. I felt shamed. Also, now I can't help noticing every time someone checks their phone during a conversation/lecture/movie/concert/meeting/religious activity. Just stop. The Dalai Lama can see you.

Neville Longbottom: Year 2

2011-07-14T08:34:00.002-04:00

Hello again, folks! When we last left off, we'd just finished Neville's first year at Hogwarts, or a year of being shat upon by the entire school, including his so-called "friends" Harry, Ron and Hermione. I guess they must be jealous of Neville's inherent coolness! Let's see where year two takes us!

Neville Longbottom and the Mandragora

It's year two and I'm back at Hogwarts! I am laying low this year because I couldn't handle all of Harry & Co's shenanigans last term. It's only five minutes into the back-to-school feast when Harry and Ron fly a car into a belligerent tree instead of arriving by train. Those two are shining examples of how to make good life choices.

Our dreaded classes have begun again. Remember last year when I said Snape was the worst teacher ever? I was wrong. Since Harry offed our Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher last year, we got a new one in the form of celebrated author Gilderoy Lockhart. Only, I think he pathologically lied on his resume because it's painfully clear that even I would be more qualified to teach this class. The first day, he let a cage full of pixies loose in the room. I ended up falling from the chandelier.

But there's always Herbology. The only downside is that we have class with the Hufflepuffs. Justin Finch-Fletchley suuuuckkkks. He tried to name-drop Eton last week. Um, Hogwarts is the coolest school in the universe,* Justin. No one here has ever heard of Eton, and if they had, they wouldn't be impressed. But apart from having to listen to him and Ernie MacMillan compete for gold in the Tool Olympics, Herbology is awesome. We're working in greenhouse 3 this year, which is where they keep all the good stuff. I've been hanging out there a lot, especially since I formed my new band, Neville and the Mandrakes. We're pretty underground; no one can listen to our music or they'll die. I haven't even heard any of our songs.

Back at the castle, weird shit has been going down. Filch's cat was petrified, followed by some dopey first year with a camera, Justin Finch-Fletchley and Nearly Headless Nick. But that's just a normal Tuesday at Hogwarts. The strange part is that Harry, Ron and Hermione have been spending all their free time in an abandoned girls' bathroom, hanging around with ghosts. And Ron is not the only Weasley off his rocker--his little sister keeps wandering around covered in chicken blood and writing in her diary like some sad, friendless emo girl who also happens to torture animals in her free time.

The story behind all the petrifications is that some secret room in Hogwarts has a 1000 year old monster in it that's trying to purge the school of muggle-borns. Everyone is freaking out and rounding up protective talismans to ward of the unspecified monster. Harry made fun of me for buying a pointy crystal, an evil onion and a newt's tail because I'm a pure-blood and shouldn't have anything to worry about. I was too embarrassed to tell him that the real reason is that I have an addiction to Wizard Etsy. I nearly bought a purple denim fanny-pack with an undetectable extendability charm the other day, before I remembered that fanny-packs are never not a terrible idea.**

Since Harry and his friends do nothing but attract trouble, right as we were about to win the the Quidditch cup for the first time in about a billion years, Granger and Percy Weasley's sad-sack girlfriend were attacked by the unnamed monster. School really started to suck after that--Dumbledore got fired, we have to be escorted to all our classes, and curfew is 6pm. I can't even go to band practice anymore, but we still have exams because McGonagall is a sadist!

And all the curfews were for naught, because Ginny Weasley ended up in the Chamber of Secrets anyway. I guess she was being possessed by Voldemort this whole time and no one noticed? As usual, there was no one more competent around than a 12 year old wizard to save the day, and then everyone was happy. Everyone but me, because Madame Pomfrey cut up my band mates to feed to Justin Finch-Fletchley. I'll need to be finding a new hobby next year.

I gotta hand it to Ginny Weasley, though. Getting possessed and almost murdered by Voldemort was a necessary sacrifice for exams to be canceled.

*Second coolest. +1 Pigfarts

**Actual roommate bought actual non-magical product off Non-Wizard Etsy this week. If you see a diminutive sandy-haired woman tooling around the District with aforementioned fanny-pack, please confiscate it and light it on fire for the good of society.

Most Badass Moment of the Book

I'll be honest here. Neville was only in approximately six sentences of this entire book, and in one of those, he got strung up on a chandelier by some pixies. But for argument's sake, let's assume that he was pulling extra hours in the Herbology lab helping to cultivate the mandrakes, thereby ensuring the revival of Hermione, Colin Creevey, Penelope Clearwater, Mrs. Norris, Nearly Headless Nick and (regrettably) Justin Finch-Fletchley. Neville saves the day once again!

#1 Reason Neville Is Cooler Than You

I tried really hard to come up with something from the actual book, but I didn't have a lot to work with. When he does show up, he mostly just says things like, "Hey Harry! Someone broke into our room!" and that's the end of the scene for Neville. So we'll just have use our imaginations here:

Apologies for my lackluster photoshop effort.

UPDATE: Year 3

Neville Longbottom: Love of My Life

2011-07-08T20:40:00.006-04:00

Yesterday, Go Fug Yourself posted the above picture of the Harry Potter cast, featuring Neville Longbottom aka Matt Lewis. Let’s review the past decade, shall we?

His taste in ties has also markedly improved.

WHOA. As the Fug Girls wisely noted, this development is both unexpected and AWESOME. I linked the original post in my gchat status yesterday and received several comments on it, including one from a friend who asked if Young Draco there was Neville, because she couldn’t fathom that Hottie McHotterson Clive Owen, Jr. there is everyone's favorite dumpy Herbology enthusiast. But he is. The only thing that makes me happier than an adorably homely kid implausibly growing into his doofy eyebrows (see Hoult, Nicholas) is when that adorably homely kid represents one of my all-time favorite, deliciously awkward, oft-maligned characters. Poetic justice is sweet, my friends.

My love of Neville is so blinding that I never even considered the possibility that he is not everyone else’s favorite, too, until I had this conversation over gchat this morning (abridged for your sanity):

me: OMG HAVE YOU SEEN HOT NEVILLE?
Friend: ahahahah ive been internet stalking him since gfy put that picture up
he should have been harry
me: No!
Neville is my favorite
Neville was always my favorite
Friend: heheh that is why you are strange
  but ultimately vindicated
  by hotness
me: And badassery!
I've been saying since about book 4 that JK should just kill harry and make the next book "Neville Longbottom and the Herbology Hut"
  he's such a BAMF in book 7
Friend: yea
  it was kind of hard to believe for me actually
  like WOAH all of a sudden
  i felt like she should have given more clues that he had that potential
me: Um, maybe you just missed the clues
Friend: well he was always a doof
  up until book 7
like he tripped and broke that prophecy ball
and everyone was like "oh neville, good job you stunned someone (except they werent even paying attention at the time)"
me: No! he was so cool!
  I am re-reading right now
  I'll tell you whenever he does something cool
Friend: hahaha good
  because i never noticed really

So now I’m on an official mission to prove to this friend that Neville Longbottom is, always has been and always will be a Bad Ass Motherfucker, one book at a time. For each book, I’ll give you a brief plot summary from the perspective of the real hero of these books, and then a detailed analysis of exactly why Neville is cooler than you in this book. It goes without saying, there will be spoilers.

Neville Longbottom and the Disappearing Toad

Toad is absent because it vanished. Obvi.

Oh my gosh, it's my first year at Hogwarts and I'm so excited! If for no other reason than I get to get away from my terrifying grandmother and my maniacal uncle who keeps dropping me out of windows/trying to drown me. But they're so proud of me, they even gave me a pet toad named Tr--hey! Where'd he go? He was JUST here...

I got sorted into Gryffindor! I took the longest of anyone, actually, because I possess so many good qualities, the hat couldn't decide where to put me! Plus we had a nice discussion about song-writing, because that poor hat just sits alone in a cupboard all year with nothing to do but consult his rhyming dictionary and muse over the fact that nobody ever stops to say, "hey hat, how's it going? Have any new songs you'd like to try out on me?" We bonded over being severely under-appreciated as characters, and I get the sense that this little chat will prove really useful in about 7 years time.

The school year's going ok, except that everyone treats me like a moron despite being in no way the worst in my class. We were supposed to be making feathers fly the other day and Seamus lit his on fire. It'll be a miracle if Crabbe and Goyle pass a single class, and everyone knows that only idiots get sorted into Hufflepuff. The only thing I'm exceptionally bad at is potions and well... you can't win them all. The first day of class, my cauldron melted and I got boils all over me. Worst of all, Snape was more concerned with taking points away from Harry for some asinine reason than getting me to the hospital wing. Worst. Teacher. Ever.

Speaking of Harry, my friends are pretty cool most of the time. I say most of the time, because for kids that sneak off in the middle of the night all the time, you'd think they'd be better at it. I got locked out with them recently, and not only did we almost get caught by Filch, but we got locked in a room with a three-headed demon dog, like the River Styx is hidden in the third floor corridor or something. Apparently it was standing on a trap door, and Harry's all, "Let's find out what's underneath!" Because I guess he forgot about the DOG FROM HELL, LITERALLY, standing on top.

I swear, that kid has an invincibility complex. You'd think he'd be a little more cautious after that first incident, but noooo, he tells Malfoy a story about some dragon and then goes prancing around on the astronomy tower late at night with Granger. I tried to warn him that Malfoy was sending Filch after them, and then I got caught too, because the world is an extremely cruel and unjust place.

So as a result of just trying to be a good friend, I lost 50 points for Gryffindor, became a social leper and got stuck with Forbidden Forest Detention Duty looking for hemorrhaging unicorns. To make matters worse, Hagrid went frolicking off with Hermione and Harry while I was left with Fang and Malfoy, because that makes TOTAL SENSE, Hagrid. Leave the sociopath alone with the world’s most useless boarhound and a defenseless kid! Well, that punk snuck up behind me and I panicked, but can you blame me? It’s like Hell as envisioned by Lisa Frank up in that joint, all schizoid centaurs and unicorn-eating monsters. Who wouldn’t be a little twitchy?

After that delightful experience, I just focused on passing my exams and laying low, seeing as everyone hates me now for ruining our chances at the House Cup with my my craptastic roommate Harry. Then I heard that asshat of a friend was sneaking out with his cronies AGAIN. I tried to convince them not to, since their last little excursion resulted in a creepy detention and social suicide for all, and what happens? Granger HEXES me. So thanks for that, amiga. I had to spend all night paralyzed on the common room floor because of you. Fred and George drew all over me in sharpie.

Meanwhile, the three stooges were off to fight Voldemort, because that's a BRILLIANT idea when you're 11 and have mastered approximately three spells. Miraculously, they only slightly mangled themselves in the process. As a reward for their idiocy+luck, Dumbledore gave them back all the points they lost jaunting around the castle at night, but we were still only tied for the House Cup. Until I tipped us over the edge when I got 10 points for not succumbing to peer pressure. Yeah, that's right, I WON THE HOUSE CUP. And if you'll excuse me, I need to take advantage of being the most popular boy in school for five minutes before everyone forgets about me again in the next book.

Most Badass Moment of the Book

During a Quidditch match, Malfoy is busying himself by insulting Ron and Neville. Ron and Neville start a Gryffindor v. Slytherin rumble, with Ron going after Malfoy and Neville singlehandedly taking on Crabbe and Goyle. Unfortch, it lands Neville in the hospital, and yeah, it was a bad idea for runty Neville to take on those overactive pituitaried goons, but it's the thought that counts. Plus, it shows he has his friends' backs; even in the face of abject failure, he's willing to throw a few punches for a fellow Gryff.

#1 Reason Neville is Cooler than You

He has a toad. Toads are notoriously uncool:

“Sorry,” he said, “but have you seen a toad at all?”

When they shook their heads, he wailed, “I’ve lost him! He keeps getting away from me!”

“He’ll turn up,” said Harry.

“Yes,” said the boy miserably. “Well, if you see him...”

He left.

“Don’t know why he’s so bothered,” said Ron. “If I’d brought a toad I’d lose it quick as I could.”

The uncoolness of Trevor the Toad and the fact that Neville doesn't even care automatically makes it round the corner back to coolsville. Neville is the original hipster. And not those awful hipsters who stop listening to a band or switch canned beers because they became too "mainstream." Neville is a legitimately cool hipster who will drink PBR no matter who else is drinking PBR because he. likes. it.

Stay tuned for Book 2!

UPDATE:
Year 2
Year 3

Torchwood: Miracle Day

2011-07-06T20:31:00.005-04:00

I am a big fan of the Doctor Who reboot, so unsurprisingly, I am also a big fan of Captain Jack Harkness. This means that I have seen every episode of the Jack-centric Who spinoff, Torchwood and have been eagerly awaiting its American detour, Torchwood: Miracle Day. So I was SUPER excited to get an email from E Street Theater last week informing me that they would be showing an advanced screening of the first episode tonight!! For free! Of course, the show officially starts on Friday, but why would I wait to watch it on my tiny laptop when I could instead see Captain Jack on a big screen TODAY? I wouldn't, of course!

For those of you who don't know Torchwood (which, I'm guessing is about 95% of my readership, considering my failed efforts to get someone to come with me), it's basically CSI: Cardiff: Now With More Aliens + A Pet Pterodactyl and stars Captain Jack Harkness of Doctor Who fame. Captain Jack is an immortal, omni-sexual, time-traveling ex-conman who swishes around in a 1940s military jacket. Yeah, I realize I'm not really selling this, but the main thing you need to know is that Captain Jack is incredibly attractive, as is his smokin' hot partner in alien crime-fighting/ass-kicking, Gwen Cooper. I would even go so far to say that Gwen has the upper hand on this one, because she comes with a sexy Welsh accent.

So back to the present with Torchwood: Miracle Day: Advanced Screening. I blew off all my friends and sauntered down to the theater in plenty of time to get in line for tickets. I got slightly distracted when I stumbled upon a Tibetan street festival of sorts, but I thought, "Hey, it's on my way! I'll just walk through and see what's up!" Then I made the fatal mistake of stopping at the information table. All I wanted to know was who was putting on said festival so I could perhaps volunteer in the future, but as I was talking to the Nice Tibetan Man, I name-dropped the Tibetan school at which I used to teach. Well folks, name-dropping is a Karmic bitch, because no sooner had Nice Tibetan Man expressed his surprise and told me that it had been his school than this random white volunteer from Toronto accosted me about my experience, asking all these questions about how I got to work there, where the school was, their policies on Montessori education, etc, like we are best friends now just because we're both white and like to eat momos. Then she started harassing me about what yoga studio she should visit while she's in town. Um, wtf? I am not your personal DC Yoga tour guide. What I should have said was, "I'm really sorry, I'm in a hurry. In America, we have this crazy thing called Yelp. You should try it. Happy Canada Day." But instead I was all polite and friendly and answered all of her bizarrely specific questions, like which metro stops she'd need for which yoga studios.

Because of the Non-Tibetan Who Can't Use Google, I arrived at the theater 5 minutes after doors opened instead of 20 minutes before and the line was like 1000 people long. I had to wait behind this girl and her really annoying gay boyfriend*, and I just wanted to take her aside and say, "honey, your boyfriend is gay. I have terrible gaydar and even I can tell that. You should cut your losses and find someone new. Someone more heterosexual. Not all men are pansexual like Captain Jack. Some of them only like other men." And then at exactly 6:12, seven minutes after I got there, it SOLD OUT.

*Edit: I realize this could be read wrong. Annoying Gay Boyfriend's gayness and annoyingness are not correlated. He just happens to be both.

I missed it and it's all that stupid white woman's fault. But now I find that I have an extra hour and a half of my day to fill that I hadn't previously anticipated having. So let's take that time to pretend that I did make it on time and am writing a review here on my blog.

Note: even though there are obviously not any spoilers for Torchwood: Miracle Day below, I do make references to characters from the Doctor Who series 1-4 and Torchwood 1-3, so if you are ever going to watch those and don't want to infer what happens between Rose Tyler and the 10th Doctor, you should probably stop reading here.

Review of Torchwood: Miracle Day
Let's start with trailer:

Now after seeing that, I thought it was pretty safe to assume that Torchwood: Miracle Day would focus on this story of everyone suddenly becoming un-killable, so I was shocked when they dispensed with that plot-line in the first five minutes. In fact, that trailer is the actual first two minutes of the episode. Pretty lazy if you ask me; I think they were just trying to show off their new Michael Bay budget by blowing a bunch of shit up.

To solve this "Miracle Day" business, Jack, Gwen, and Rhys are forced to open up the ol' Cardiff rift for some reason or other, and in the process, the world implodes. Rhys sacrifices himself to save Gwen, and she, her baby and Jack tumble through the rift and end up in the parallel universe where the 10th Doctor and Rose have been playing house and running Torchwood for the past three years. I would say that if this episode had a weak spot, the first five minutes were a tad rushed and unconvincing. But it's worth it to suspend your disbelief, because the rest of the episode focuses on how relationships have panned out in this alternate time stream.

We run into alternate Gwen and Rhys, who are happily married with three kids and oblivious to aliens, Gwen never having come across Torchwood. Happily Married Gwen and Rhys then go away and we never see them again, ever. Tosh and Owen are alive and kicking, though not quite happy--Tosh is still trying to help Owen get over the loss of his fiancée, but a possible romance is hinted at for later in the season. But most intriguing of all is the relationship brewing between Ianto, Jack and Gwen, as Jack tries comfort Gwen in her time of loss, but is over-joyed to see Ianto alive again. Gwen is finally understanding her deeper feelings for Jack through jealousy, as she also beings to see Rose as a rival, both in Torchwood and in Jack's affections (albeit erroneously). Oh, and everyone wants to get into the Doctor's pin-striped suit pants.

Switching the focus of this episode from shooting at aliens to the emotional ties between characters was a bold but welcome choice. John Barrowman does a masterful job showing Captain Jack's inner turmoil, torn between his love for both Ianto and Gwen, and Eve Myles is amazing as usual in the role of Gwen Cooper. Can these crazy kids work out their polyamorous relationships? We'll see how it pans out over this season.

Best Part: Tosh and Owen finally making a breakthrough in their relationship without one or both of them dying first.

Weirdest Part: Back on regular earth, Lauren Ambrose is time-locked in a bathroom with Seth Green. Strange choice.

Alix's Rating: A++++

Aaaand I'm realizing I just wrote a Torchwood: Can't Hardly Wait fanfic. You drove me to fanfiction, Random White Lady! White people suck.

Graffiato

2011-07-01T09:00:00.014-04:00

Top Chef is kind of a big deal in my house. When KS still lived here (before he moved away and started REFUSING my invitations to hangout on google+), it alternated with The Office and Scrubs in the line-up of shows playing perpetually on our TV. So natch, when we heard twice-Cheftestant Mike Isabella was opening a new restaurant, Graffiato, in DC last week, we had to go.

Everyone has been talking about Graffiato. Besides being a Cheftestant, Mike Isabella already has a DC name for being former executive chef at Zatinya, a tasty Greek-ish restaurant that has brought me such delights as olive oil ice cream (best) and turkish coffee (worst). So when L made reservations for Graffiato, she couldn't get a table for more than four. I was one of the lucky three to sign up first, so Wednesday night, K, KLang, L and I sauntered down to Chinatown to try it out. Still in their first week, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they're still working out some kinks, because not all of my first impressions were positive:

There is a guy whose only job seems to be opening the door for people. As in, he just stands there looking happy to be opening the door all night for a bunch of reality TV fans. Besides being kind of degrading, I'm not sure this position is strictly necessary. The restaurant is just not that fancy. It's got that upscale casual dining feel. Most of the staff were in jeans, and Mr. Doorman himself was wearing jeans and a black Graffiato t-shirt. I think they still need to figure out just how posh this restaurant is and adjust accordingly.
It was REALLY loud in there. Eventually, it died down and we could hear ourselves talk, but we also started dinner at 8:30. To their credit, the is bar downstairs and the eating upstairs, so that keeps the dinner noise down a little bit. More restaurants in DC should subscribe to this model.
Mike Isabella needs to work on his temperature control, because Graffiato is the coldest restaurant in the world. To make matters worse, the chairs are metal, so the second we sat down, all four of us exclaimed things like "OHMYGOD MY ASS IS SO COLD OHMYGODOHMYGOD." Seriously, it felt like I was sitting on a chair that had just been pulled from the freezer. Mikey dear, this is summer in DC. We are city built on a swamp. It is hotter than hell here. We do not wear a lot of clothes in the summer. So while I do want to be welcomed into your restaurant by the cooling hum of modern technology, I do not want to get hypothermia of the ass from your metal chairs. Please turn the thermostat up a few notches.

Things looked up when we checked out the menus. It's a pretty simple affair, which I love because I hate having too much choice in a menu. Maybe it's all those years growing up vegetarian in South Carolina when all I could eat was a house salad, but too much menu choice gives me anxiety. The perfect menu has approximately three things I can eat, all of which are delicious and none of which are salad. Anywho, the drinks menu was more extensive than the food menu, but this was my favorite part:

If you've read anything about Graffiato, you probably know that they sell prosecco on draft (which, what?! How??! I'm confused and excited?!). But did you know that they ALSO sell champagne in a can? Bet no one mentioned that. I was torn, but of course I had to order the Champ Can, for several reasons:

I have been on the lookout Champ Cans in DC for a year, ever since I started reading Forever Young Adult. The writers proselytize for Champ Cans on an almost daily basis. Here was my chance at last!
Francis Ford Coppola makes decent wine, right?
KLang ordered the prosecco on tap, so I could at least try hers.
It comes with a straw. Oh right, and it's champagne. In a can. How could I possibly turn that down?

Unfortunately, there's no way to not sound like an idiot when ordering champagne in a can. "I would like the champagne in a can, please." But it came and I was the happiest person in the world. Just look at this unbelievably awful picture K captured of me, mid-laughter with mirth:

But my happiness was short-lived. In a statement that will surprise exactly no one, turns out champagne in a can does not taste good. In fact, it tastes kind of like high-class André. Although the lovely ladies at FYA might be inclined to disagree with me:

The saddest part was that instead of getting the best of both worlds as I'd planned, KLang's prosecco just served as a reminder of what decent alcohol tastes like. Oh well. Let's go back to that picture for a second:

Two important things in this photo:

That rack of knives looks awfully dangerous hanging right above where people are sitting! (Clearer picture here)
YES! That is Cheftestant Mike Isabella behind me!

Mike Isabella was doing the rounds, asking everyone how their food was, etc. We didn't have any food yet on which to comment (although, if he'd been interested in our opinions on beverages, I might have asked why he was tempting idiots like myself with Champagne in a Can when it clearly does not taste good), so he might have passed us by entirely. But he stopped for a second at our table to say "Hi, Ladies," before leaving again, possibly because L flashed him a terrifying smile and said "Helloooo" in the creepiest manner imaginable. It was enough to make anyone run away.

In due time, we ordered and received food. We started with breads and cheeses, both of which were tasty but not mind-blowingly delicious. Your standard cheese plate and breads. However, the cheese came with this bizarrely delicious garlic caramel sauce that should not have been good but was.

Our entrées arrived strangely not at the same time (leftover habit from Zatinya, tapas place extraordinaire, perhaps). My hand-cut spaghetti came first and was fantastic. Simple, understated, and fantastic. Shortly after, K and KLang's pizzas appeared, as did L's gnocchi. L's gnocchi/pork dish was supposedly very good, too, but as the rest of us are vegetarian, we'll have to take her word for it. The pizzas were a different story. My personal pizza preference is flat and crispy (Rustik does an awesome job with this), but these were flat and almost doughy, with very puffy crusts. Some people would love this, but alas, I am not one of them. K ordered a Vermont but replaced the bacon with arugula. It mostly tasted like greens on salty bread, but I can't fault Graffiato for that since it was K's choice. We encouraged KLang to get a "Countryman," consisting of black truffles, fontina, and duck egg. Intriguing, right? L loved it, but the rest of us were unconvinced. I think KLang was right in saying that it was not the duck egg that went awry, but the meeting of the truffles with the duck egg. Something was off in the flavor combination there.

Meanwhile, we waited for Mike Isabella to come back around to our table and ask how our food was. If he had any intention of returning, however, he was probably scared away by our maniacal laughter. KLang had been doing a spot-on impression of L declaring her love for the Countryman Pizza, and L was accusing us of driving Mike Isabella away with our lack of enthusiasm. We also had had several awkward run-ins with our waiter by this point, where he would sneak up behind us whenever we were saying/doing something not strictly restaurant-appropriate. He might have tipped off Mike to keep away.

Dessert arrived. We ordered raspberry gelato, nutella cookies and a chocolate tart with sea salt gelato. The raspberry gelato was delicious, though sorbet-like, the nutella cookies were ok, and the chocolate tart... oh, sad little chocolate tart. Like many things that night, the chocolate tart suffered from Weird Menu Syndrome. WMS is an affliction suffered by foods which you see on a fancy menu and think, "Wow, that is so weird sounding! But I bet it's good, because why else would they put such a weird food on the menu? I must try it!" And then you try it, and unlike the olive oil ice cream at Zatinya or the garlic caramel sauce, it's not good. It's just weird. Such was the case for the chocolate tart with sea salt ice cream. I have had sea salt ice cream before, and it was awesome. This one was almost too salty and had a strange aftertaste. The tart was not quite sweet enough to be coupled with the salty ice cream, but also not bitter enough to eat on it's own. On the whole, it was kind of "wah wah." I don't think we even finished it, while the raspberry gelato and nutella cookies were gone in a flash.

We sat around for a little longer, finishing our drinks and chatting. Eventually, we had to face facts. "Guys, I have bad news," said L. "I think Mike Isabella went home." She was probably right. It was already 10:30 or so. We paid and followed suit.

Overall, I'd give Graffiato a B. It had a nice atmosphere, and I'll wager they change many of the things I disliked after it's been open more than a week. The food was hit or miss, but the hits were really delicious. I'd definitely go back, but I'm not dying to return, either. If you go, take my advice: skip dessert, order the pasta, avoid the pizza and whatever you do, don't get Champagne in a Can.

Things I Learned at the Ethiopian Festival

2011-06-27T08:17:00.001-04:00

On Saturday, I helped out T & S by volunteering at the First Annual Ethiopian Festival in Downtown Silver Spring. Things were kind of nutso on the organization front--there were some difficulties in getting all the performers on in a timely fashion thanks to the Caribbean Festival in DC, some traffic accidents and the fact that we filled up all the parking garages pretty quickly. But overall I'd say the day was successful considering that a few people showed up. I'm sorry, did I say a few people? I meant a few thousand. Like 10,000 is the latest number I heard. In one city block. It was INSANITY. And once we did get the performers on stage, things were awesome. We had several musical groups and fashion shows, as well as the ever popular traditional dancers. But the most popular of the night was definitely this guy:

I guess he is super famous, because when he appeared in the middle of the biggest fashion show, the crowd collectively lost their shit. I thought maybe he was the Ethiopian Christian Siriano (seemed improbable that there would be one--one Christian Siriano is probably one too many Christian Sirianos), but it turns out he's the most famous Ethiopian comedian. Apparently he was HIGH-larious, but I had no idea what was going on since I don't speak Amharic. Which brings me to my next point: I've been looking for a new job lately, but I've been unsure about what kinds of jobs I'd actually want to do. Well, after my experience this weekend, I can definitely cross some off the list.

Some Jobs I Am Definitely Not Cut Out For:

Amharic Interpreter: No matter how much I might will myself to understand Amharic, I just cannot magically start speaking the language. I didn't understand 90% of what was happening around me on Saturday. The only word I can consistently pick out is "ishi," which means "yes" or "exactly," kind of like the Ethiopian equivalent of the German "genau." It's a very useful phrase, unless you have no idea what you're agreeing with.

Model Wrangler: You would think that getting a handful of models to show up and walk up and down would be no big deal. I mean, how hard could it be? Very friggin hard, as it turns out. Models suck. All the musicians and dancers just did their own thing, running up on stage, doing costume changes in a timely fashion, etc. But every time a fashion show was slated to start, it had to be a freaking production. Remind me never to work in the fashion industry, because it's nightmarish. Similarly...

Fashion Photographer: Despite the models being gorgeous, most of my pictures came out looking liking this:

I possess the special ability to only capture runway models in their most awkward moments. This is partly due to the fact that it was getting dark and I needed a flash but mostly due to my lack of talent.

Bouncer/Security Guard: People cannot follow instructions to stay behind ropes, out of the model runway, off the stairs, etc. By process of diffusion, every time you clear a space, an equivalent number of bodies instantly fills it again. Since the actual security guards were pretty busy all day, this meant that myself and other volunteers had to spend a lot of time shooing people away from the stage. Except the whole thing was pretty futile. Children apparently don't have to subscribe to any kind of spacial norms, and every time I was lecturing one person on why they couldn't walk somewhere, three people went that way while my back was turned. I make a terrible security guard.

I'm sure I could think of more jobs from Saturday that I'm incapable of doing, but my unemployability is starting to depress me. So I'll leave you with just one more: Traditional Ethiopian Dancer:

(Note--this video was from an event I worked on last year, but it's the same group. MoCo residents will be entertained
to see Councilmember Nancy Floreen dancing off the stage in the beginning of this video. Never gets old.)

Everyone loves some Eskista. Although, I have serious concerns for some of the dancers. Human heads are not designed to to move like that. Surely that is not sustainable.

5 Socially Unacceptable Things to Do at a Party

2011-06-20T19:25:00.003-04:00

I haven't written lately because the past two weeks have been pretty lackluster. Since I hurt my ankle, my day usually goes something like this:

Wake up
Work
Watch Veronica Mars
Look for some jobs to apply to
Wallow in self-pity
Paint nails
More Veronica Mars
Go to sleep

These activities are punctuated by shuffling back and forth to the kitchen to switch ice packs and, occasionally but infrequently, to eat. Showers and eating have become fairly optional. On an exciting day, I'll move from my bed to the living room couch, although this puts me farther from the bathroom. It's a tragic and self-perpetuating cycle; the more I stay in bed, the more I wallow, and the more I wallow, the less I want to leave. Also, all that Veronica Mars has been seeping into my dreamspace and making me paranoid. I wake up every morning feeling awfully suspicious of everything around me.

So really, the only thing I have to show for the past two weeks is crackpot dreams and my new and improved nail art skillz, and while I could write about that, it's been done.

By the way, it's impossible to take attractive photos of
your own hands. But crossword puzzles, yeah!

On the bright side, L & K have been doing their best to get me out of the house. Saturday was a Big Day because they convinced me to go to two different parties. Unfortunately, I was apparently not fit to be taken out in public by the second party. Due to my newfound geriatric tendencies, I was tired and boring. Furthermore, I had been hoping to impress KS's summer roommate replacement, CS, with her first post-college, East Coast, white people party and was pretty cranky that this particular party seemed determined to be decidedly average. All this combined into the perfect storm of social unacceptability as I morphed into the most awkward party guest since the Great Harvard Debacle of 2008 (story for another day). The only silver lining was that L was pretty complicit in most of my bad behavior, so at least I wasn't the only one.

5 Socially Unacceptable Things to Do at a Party:

1. Get in a debate about the differences between plaid, gingham, check and buffalo check. Any topic that requires you to fire up Wikipedia during a kegger is probably a topic best avoided. Spoiler: gingham is a fabric, not a pattern. Buffalo check does not exist on Wikipedia and ergo I deny its existence in real life.

2. Whine about the music selection, try to commandeer the iPod and then fail. I got really tired of hearing Robyn that night. At one point, I marched up to the speakers, took control of of the iPod and... only succeeded in finding more Robyn. I gave up and put on "Dancing On My Own," even though it had already been played at least 5 times. Then L complained loudly about how many times she heard that song already.

3. Within earshot of the party host, complain about the amount, quality or variety of alcohol. The endless Robyn playlist might have gone over better if they hadn't run out of beer around 12:30. L and I were unimpressed, especially as the low-key barbecue we'd visited in the afternoon had a better selection and supply of alcohol. Several conversations went like this:

L: I wish I had another beer.

Matt IV: If this were my party, this would be the point where I'd send someone to find more alcohol.

A: Just sayin', all of our parties have hard liquor.

L: Oh wow, we're listening to this Robyn song again. And everyone's dancing to it for some reason.

A: Maybe you would be, too, if you were drunk.

L: But I'm not.

A: Nope.

L: Wow, this party really cleared out fast.

A: That's what happens when you run out of alcohol.

Unfortunately, the party had cleared out immediately following the lack of alcohol, so I'm pretty sure a party host heard at least one of those conversations over the lack of people around. Which officially makes me a bitch.

4. Criticize someone's baking skills. In my defense, I wasn't trying to criticize someone's baking skills. I made a badly-timed observation that was misinterpreted as an insult. After all the beer was gone, there was nothing left to consume but a cake some guy made.

Party Goer: Man, this cake is awesome.

Party Host: Yeah, Joe made it!

Party Goer: I mean, it's totally from a box. No cake is this moist without some artificial additives in it. I mean it's really good! But it's definitely Duncan Hines or something. Definitely from a box.

Party Host: I mean, yeah, but he like doctored it up and stuff! And he made the icing from scratch!!

A: Yeah, I doubt it. This icing is definitely from a mix or something.

Party Host: No it's not!

A: I think it is.

Party Host: What do you know, anyway!?

L: Actually she makes wedding cakes.

Party Host: Oh.

Longest Pause in the world

Party Host: But it's totally from scratch!

5. Harass the neighbors. After we left, K discovered her metro card was missing. I remembered seeing one on the bathroom floor and went back to get it. The door was locked. I rang the bell seven or so times before realizing that I was actually at the virtually identical rowhouse next door to the party house. Oops. I ran away in shame and L had to go retrieve the metro card. My only hope is that the Ke$ha dance party on the back porch would have woken up the neighbors long before me. Meanwhile, the rest of us got harassed by some cockroaches and a clown.

So there you have it. K & L can't take me anywhere. Only two weeks of infirmity and I may have to become a recluse. I'm officially the worst party guest ever.

Thanks for the memories

2011-06-12T00:51:00.004-04:00

My grandfather, taken by a friend a month before his death

Yesterday, a little present appeared in my dropbox--my Aunt Fancy, amongst other snippets of family history, gave me access to my grandfather's memoirs. I only just learned of their existence and was eager to read them. He died a decade before I was born, and although I've heard stories about him over the years, I'm acutely aware now how little I know about him. Just last week, I found out that when The War of the Worlds was first broadcast, he was a freshman at Princeton. Upon hearing that the martians had landed in a nearby New Jersey town, he and his friends naturally went out looking for them.

This story is sadly not in his memoirs, as they are largely unfinished. He started writing as he was dying of colon cancer, and made his last trip to the hospital just a few months later. The entire document is only 36 pages long. My Gramma typed it up and added a foreword after his death--how, I know not. I never met the man and I didn't make it through the second paragraph without crying.

That is not to say that it's not happy book, because it is. Full of quirky anecdotes, from cheerful stories about his time in the army to a description of getting his hair cut in Camden, New Jersey at age four. The brief pages he recorded span three very different time periods--prosperity in the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II--all in the context of his quotidian life.

It ends abruptly with a recollection about how his father had really bad dandruff. Although most of the stories are comical and upbeat, there is an underlying sadness throughout, not so much for the loss of life, but for the loss of memory that comes with death. I found his introduction to be particularly poignant, so much so that I am going share it with you now:

Perhaps because I have read so many hack works I have concluded that anyone who completes the first effort at writing is pretentious. I never figured out how I felt about the author of the second book. O.K., If you feel that way, why are you sitting at a desk with pens and blank pads?

First, I am age 56, dying of cancer and have been forced to give up a very active and demanding career. I am ill prepared for an inability to be active. The temptation to vegetate, unshaven, in a bathrobe and stare at the TV is overwhelming. I hope writing will be a form of discipline that will lift me out of that situation.

Two, for years as a very successful trust officer in a bank, I urged the elderly to jot down their recollections for the benefit of future generations. I once knew a lady who personally had negotiated with John. D. Rockefeller. What a loss when she died without recording that event. I tried to impress on the elderly their obligation to share lives with posterity. I have lived more than 50 glorious love-filled years from a period when horse-drawn vehicles were not uncommon to the rocket to the moon. Surely someone someday may benefit from a description of life during such a swift-moving era.

Third, I desperately want to create some footprints. In contemplating my death, it occurred to me that approximately four billion people have died, and I wondered how many are remembered. My mother and father, thoroughly decent, kind people who led constructive lives, will cease to exist even in memory in another 30 years. The modest tombstones we erect are really small versions of the Egyptian pyramids. But we do remember the pharaohs, if only because of the stature of their monuments. A monument I am not attempting to create. It is my hope, though, that for a few generations at least some of my posterity will get some enjoyment of being exposed to Ed and Janet West. And maybe they will be inspired to do the same thing. Wouldn't it be grand if this became the beginning of a library of recollections? I hope I do a good job.

As my sister put it so eloquently, "I wish, for so many reasons, that he'd been able to finish it." What he completed barely scratches the surface of a lifetime of memories. About half of it is devoted to his parents, whom he says he hardly knew. This, while valuable, leaves even less room for his own life; he never even made it to my Gramma and their children. I also know that he nearly died in the war, but this is merely alluded to but never discussed. And though yes, I could call up my mom right now and ask for more details, I will never hear that story firsthand.

There's something very powerful about reading my grandfather's own words; even stories I've heard a dozen times seem significantly more vivid now, like seeing a painting in person previously only seen through a discolored, slightly blurry art history slide. I know I've been told on more than one occasion about my grandfather's brother being appointed the Blaine Anderson of his college a capella group despite being completely tone deaf. Apparently there was stiff octet competition between fraternities. Described as "positively the most handsome guy I ever knew," my great uncle's job was to stand there looking dreamy in his tails while mouthing the words to all the songs. Until yesterday, I would have gotten about 17 details of that story wrong and also could not have named the relation in question. But after seeing it as one of the things my grandfather chose to immortalize, I don't think I'll ever forget it.

Reading his memoirs was especially bittersweet because it reminded me not only of how little I know about my grandfather, but how little I know about everyone in my life. Even people I see every day--who was the policeman who marched their four-year-old self back home after trying to run away, as my grandfather did? What is their martian-hunting college story? And those are the people I can still ask. My paternal grandmother also died before I was born, my Gramma when I was twelve, and my paternal grandfather has suffered from Alzheimers for the past several years. I've missed the boat on all of these people. Aging and death are not inherently sad, but the loss of memories is.

I've decided to embark on a project--my own little version of StoryCorps--wherein every day this month, I am sending out a letter to someone I love, asking for a story in return. One is already in the mail. I'm not asking for a memoir, just something that makes me know you a little better. So if you get a letter from me, whether you're 85 or 19, please respond. My grandfather thanks you.

You have died of dysentery.

2011-06-09T09:30:00.003-04:00

Last week, my sister, brother-in-law and I went to visit my Aunt and Uncle Fancy in Fort Collins, Colorado, and boy was it exciting! That is not sarcasm. Some might argue that this vacation was a little too exciting.

It all started pleasantly, seeing their house for the first time, going to a pub and having some local beer, feeling foolishly out of shape due to the increase in altitude. Then the next day, we went up to Rocky Mountain National Park, and although we couldn't do much hiking due to the insane amount of snow still on the ground, we enjoyed a picnic lunch on a rock next to a frozen lake.

Not bad picnic grounds

We drove around at lower elevation and saw our first Colorado wildlife--a herd of elk--and also learned that everything in Colorado looks like a graphic from Oregon Trail.

You shot 324 pounds of elk, but could only carry 200 pounds back to your wagon.

Everything was going swimmingly until the next day. While Sister and Brother-in-law were out hunting for moose poop or something, I was busy racing Lance Armstrong down Long's Peak. I was losing when all of a sudden, HOLY SHIT! This mountain lion jumped out of NOWHERE and started chasing me! Well that was scary enough for me to pull ahead of Lance, but in the process, I felt something go awry in my foot. After leaving Lance to deal with the mountain lion himself, I biked over to an urgent care facility on the power of residual adrenaline alone. They x-rayed my leg and told me I had an avulsion fracture--not surprising given how incredibly athletic and strong I am. The doctor put me in temporary cast and told me to hobble around on crutches until I got back to DC and saw a real orthopedist.

One of the downsides of all this is that we were all supposed to go up to my ~~aunt and uncle's~~ family cabin (Quarter Dome Ranch) that night and were delayed till the following day because of my injury. I guess fate had intervened, because upon arrival, we opened up the cabin log-book (Volume 1) and found that I had arrived in Colorado to help build the cabin nine years ago TO THAT DAY! Not only was that a cool coincidence, but it also made me feel incredibly old! Due to my differently-abledness, I spent most of the day sitting on the porch reading about 5 years worth of log book entries and coming up with brilliant antler decorating ideas while everyone else explored QDR and discovered a talent (or lack thereof) for horseshoes. But one thing I was able to do was shoot my uncle's Red Ryder BB gun, which I'm ashamed to admit is incredibly fun and addicting. Everyone succeeded in hitting the tin can, and we saved our paper plate target for my dad, who (hilariously) has some NRA shooting medals from childhood. My sister even shattered the pin holding the target in place! At this rate, we will be hitting up Ladies Night at her local shooting range in no time.

In keeping with QDR tradition, we toasted to my grandparents, wrote about our adventures in the log book (Volume 2) and locked up the cabin to go back to Fort Collins--very sad, as I would have liked to be able to see the stars at night. We did have the consolation prize of seeing a marmot, gopher snake, a billion pronghorns and even a lynx!!! Of course, the lynx is nothing to that mountain lion who chased me the day before, but it was pretty cool nonetheless.

The next day, we had to return to Denver and eventually fly home. After meeting up with some people for lunch and watching a matinee of X-Men: Babies, we arrived at the airport super early so I would have plenty of time to get to my gate. As it turns out, being in a wheelchair will get you through security in record time, so no problem there. Plus, I got to board the airplane first!

K and L came to pick me up on the other end, and thank God they did because I was in a pretty pathetic state by the time I got back. (Crutches are a lot of work, as it turns out.) KS took me to the doctor the next day, where I got seven more x-rays and...

Surprise!!! My foot's not broken after all! Instead, I suffered "a moderate ankle sprain," meaning that I tore two ligaments in my foot. The doctor put me in an air cast, gave me some new instructions, and told me to come back in two weeks. I'm not entirely clear on how Doctor #1 thought my foot was broken when it wasn't, but at least I'm spending less time on crutches now?

Though, I'm not entirely sure I trust this new doctor. Despite being impeccably dressed everywhere else, he was wearing lavender novelty socks with daisies on them. Any adult who wears socks that my six-year-old self would have coveted should probably not be practicing medicine. I guess time will tell if I need ankle replacement surgery in a few years. Can you replace ankles?

I Have Found It!

2011-05-30T17:35:00.001-04:00

This weekend, I was stocking up on library books when I thought I'd check to see if Drumline was available. I recently discovered that K had never even heard of the movie, and horrified, decided to rectify the situation. I failed because my library evidently does not believe in alphabetization, but I succeeded in that I found this:

Historically, I have a love/hate relationship with Bollywood. I loved Bride and Prejudice in high school, though it is technically British and doesn't count. My first legitimate experience with Bollywood came sophomore year of college. Thanks to a spring break blizzard, Pats and I got stuck at her boyfriend's friend's Cambridge apartment with nothing but a hookah and a stack of Bollywood movies to entertain us.

Unfortunately, we watched Fanaa, thinking that it was going to be a cute romantic movie about an innocent blind girl finding love with her ne'er do well tour guide that she would change for the better through a series of highly choreographed dance numbers. How wrong we were. Two hours into the movie, the male lead (spoiler!) dies in a terrorist attack. Then the film completely changes genres, and suddenly the male lead isn't dead, but is actually a terrorist-mastermind who faked his own death, and some years later he is chased down a Kashmiri mountain on snowboard, but oh no, he's injured! And he he stumbles to the front door our Heroine's Kashmiri mountain shack and she nurses him back to health, only she doesn't recognize him because she got retinal replacement surgery and she can SEE now, instead of groping his face, and it turns out that before he faked his own death she got knocked up and they have a kid, and then they fall in love ALL OVER AGAIN! And then they sing this song, and then she gropes his face and realizes the truth, but they get married anyway, and then he kills her dad and some other people, and then she is forced to shoot him in the head. The End. Here is an extremely misleading trailer:

So yeah, Bollywood can really be hit or miss. Aishwarya Rai here has been in some awesome stuff like Bride and Prejudice, but she also has some more questionable credits like Mistress of Spices, in which some sentient spices get jealous when Aishwarya and Dylan McDermott have sexy times. The spices get up to all sorts of shenanigans, but it all works out in the end when the spices learn to share their mistress.

Ok, so I'm making Indian film sound really bad here, and in full disclosure, Americans/Brits are responsible for that last one. Bollywood can be awesome, also. Dhoom 2 is one of my favorite movies, and while it may not be a great cinematic work or even make sense most of the time, it is extremely fun. And the dance sequences are without comparison:

I Have Found It could really go either way:

Pros:

It is an Indian adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen retellings can be great--the aforementioned Bride and Prejudice, You've Got Mail, and Clueless for instance.
Aishwarya Rai! She's nice to look at if nothing else.
Not actually Bollywood! This movie is in Tamil and comes from different region of India. Maybe Kollywood has a better track record!

Cons:

It is an Indian adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen retellings can be really bad, like that Mormon Pride and Prejudice.
Aishwarya Rai has been in some really iffy films...
Not actually Bollywood! This movie is in Tamil and comes from different region of India. Maybe Kollywood produces exclusively terrible films.

So without further ado, let's find out which it is: awesome, bad, or awesomely bad.

Oh man! All I've done is put in the DVD and it's already looking promising. Just check out this screenshot of the DVD menu!

We open with some soldiers dropping out of a helicopter in the rain in front of a waterfall. I don't remember this part from the book, but every Bollywood film I've ever seen involves 1) a scene in the rain and 2) a helicopter, so maybe they're just getting the prerequisites out of the way. Uh oh! Gunfire! I'm not convinced this is the right movie... Now we're in the jungle in the rain shooting and stuff. Oh fuck! Someone just tripped a wire and there's a big ass explosion. Now it's time for the opening credits. Which are lackluster at best, just names on a periwinkle background set to.... a soothing sax solo? Sure, why not. This does not mesh well with the fact that we just saw people get blown to smithereens.

WHOA WHOA WHOA, Hold the phone: A. R. Rahman did the music for this movie?? I feel so much conflict about this movie and it hasn't even started! Still questioning his sax choice, though. WE SHALL SEE.

The sax music stops and we abruptly cut to what looks like a scene from an Indian version of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, only I'm pretty sure this is a woman. Oh thank god, we're on a film set and this isn't real life. Some guy we're supposed to care about is working on set as a skirt wrangler, and his father shows up to chastise him for studying film instead of engineering and tell him to get married to some girl. He's not interested. This must be Edward Ferrars?

Now we meet the Dashwoods! Grandpa Dashwood is about to kick the bucket, but it's cool because his nice granddaughters are out "working," aka swimming in ponds like in the DVD menu. Aishwarya is clearly Marianne in this version, because she declares that she wants to fall in love and see fireworks and shit, unlike her boring sister Elinor, who's content with the prospect of arranged marriage. Then Marianne sings a song in a field and literally rolls around in some hay:

The song kind of goes downhill from there:

THAT WAS 7 COSTUME CHANGES IN ONE SONG! It wasn't even a very good song! I already forgot what it's about! Woman has only been in the movie for approximately 5 minutes and has already worn 8 outfits. I'm going to have to keep a tally of how many times she changes her clothes.

Elinor is getting married. This is definitely diverging from the original plot. I will give this movie points, though, for keeping Madge in this movie. She was always my favorite sister. Oh, nevermind, her arranged marriage doesn't work out because she was engaged before and her fiancé died, and when her future in-laws found out they decided this was grounds for canceling her second engagement.

We cut to some characters we haven't seen before, and they are total weirdos. Man holds a cat wedding.

Back at the Dashwoods, E Ferrars shows up. Elinor answers the door and it is love at first sight, or it would be if they weren't so studiously avoiding each other's gazes. There's a comic scene where they think E Ferrars is here to propose to Elinor. She says yes, but actually he just wants to know if he can film at the house. It's awkward for everyone.

I think the cat people are supposed to be Sir John and his Mother-in-Law? They seem to be in some kind of matchmaking line of work. And oh no! Nonononono! I think Colonel Brandon has just been introduced:

Things are not looking good for Marianne. Also, let me take this moment to say that E Ferrars is a total ass in this version. He keeps teasing Elinor about how she agreed to marry him even though she's clearly embarrassed by the whole situation. The E Ferrars I know and love is too white bread to ever do such a thing.

And it's time for another song from Marianne. The lyrics of this one go, "Isn't your body my attire/Even after bathing in an Ocean of milk/your complexion hasn't changed./Dive into my heart and your complexion will change." Uh, I'm not sure about the racial undertones of this song. But I have to hand it to Marianne for keeping her costume changing to a minimum (4 changes, 3 outfits).

Unfortunately, her song is interrupted when Brandon trips on a step and his prosthetic leg falls off. Really, it wasn't bad enough that he is old and mustachioed? You had to give him a prosthetic leg, too?? That's just cruel. He's drunkenly whines about being a veteran for a while, and Marianne argues with him about it being good that he's alive, and tells him to stop drinking. Then we get a flashback to the war scene from the beginning of the movie, this time with more bloody stump.

E Ferrars stalks Elinor some more. He likes her, but doesn't want to get married until after he directs his first movie! He tries to woo her with a confusing song that takes place on a railroad track in the desert. Elinor holds a pot. Maybe this is some sort of fertility symbolism? I think I learned about that in art history. Is Elinor trying to say she can't wait because she's old and her womb is dying?

Ew, I hope not, because then she pours water from her pot all over his face. Scratch that metaphor.

UM WTF? We're in Egypt now. Or I guess, we have been for this entire scene, but it only just became apparent.

When we return from the most confusing song in the world, Brandon has bought Marianne some sort of musical instrument. She is on outfit number 13 despite having only been in 4 scenes thus far. She sings some more, and Brandon replaces alcohol with working out in a Benetton sweatshirt from 1989:

Meanwhile, E Ferrars shows up and tells Elinor he loves her, but she has to wait for him for a year while he proves himself by making a movie. Elinor wears an ill-advised scrunchie. HOLY SHIT there is still an hour an 40 minutes left in this film. We are still in the exposition! We haven't even met Willoughby yet!

Speak of the devil, I think this must be Willoughby! But man, things are really, really not looking good for Marianne.

Miraculously, he ended up looking like Mario Lopez in this screenshot, but trust me, this guy has nothing on AC Slater. He is also some kind of investment banker, which is incredibly unsexy. This movie is completely failing on the man front.

Willoughby floats on a raft and starts singing, Marianne, who is busy frolicking in the rain nearby, hears his beautiful music and is overcome by his dreaminess, especially when he inexplicably rolls off the raft and rises from the water in slow motion.

She slips and falls, probably by design so Willoughby has to carry her home. It is instant love, despite his suspenders. In fact, Marianne is so smitten that she forgets to change outfits once during this entire scene!

The usual Sense and Sensibility stuff ensues--Marianne is an oblivious bitch, Elinor is embarrassed, Brandon is mopey, Willoughby reads poetry. The only difference in this version is that there seem to be wind machines inside.

GRANDPA DIES! I was wondering why they were still living in that posh house this whole time, but crappy uncle (John Dashwood) and wife (Fanny) who've been conspicuously absent for 10 years just showed up. Presumably they're going to take over the estate and kick out the Dashwood ladies posthaste. It's extra tragic because ailing grandpa had been pointing to the chest with his will in it saying "Willll!" for like a year and Elinor told Madge to ignore it.

Meanwhile, Willoughby's ponzi scheme has collapsed, and people are not so happy. Least happy of all is Marianne, because she's a selfish bitch who only thinks of herself and how sad she is that she doesn't have his phone number. Fanny is not helping matters by ordering Marianne around like a servant, claiming Elinor falsified the account books, etc. She is exquisitely villainous. The Dashwood ladies decide to move to Madras.

Elinor can't find a job, and Mom has to sell all her jewelry for rent money. Marianne, being the useless bitch that she is, just sits around wasting money trying to call Willoughby. Luckily, their newfound poverty doesn't seem to have affected her sari budget, since we're now on outfit number 25. They can't even afford furniture, so they all just sleep in a pile on the floor.

Elinor gets a job as a telephone operator, for which she's way overqualified. Brandon and Sir John come to Madras looking for them, and find Momma Dashwood working in a kitchen in a hotel. She's like SO ASHAMED! She has to work, even though she's from a royal family! It's terrible! Marianne complaines to Brandon about how she's bored, and he finds her a job as a music teacher or something, because her life is just so fucking peachy. While she's at it, she whines about how miserable she is without Willoughby, so Brandon goes out of his way to track him down for her. When he finds him, Marianne ditches Brandon and slow motion runs to Willoughby. They sing a song about their love on a boat. Willoughby wears a cape. Ugh. They deserve each other. Brandon is very sad.

I'm not even clear if they've eloped or if this is a dream sequence. I cannot believe there is still an hour left of this movie. Now we're in medieval Europe? Someone in chain mail shows up and there's a lot of storming the castle metaphor happening. I'm not one to look for sexual undertones in everything, but the imagery in this song is a bit heavy-handed:

There is a giant arrow pointing to his crotch!! And, I don't even know what to say about that flute.

Back in "reality," E Ferrars is trying to make an Indian version of Speed. Sounds awesome. I think I'd rather be watching that movie at this point. He meets up with Elinor and it's all very dull. Some other boring stuff happens. I find myself missing Marianne. There is a sub-plot involving an action heroine movie star that is legitimately awesome, or would be if it didn't involve E Ferrars. Something leads to E Ferrars dancing on set in what may be the greatest (worst) musical number of our time. I didn't think dancing was included in directoral duties, but what do I know about filmmaking.

I think the action heroine might be our Lucy Steele come to steele* Edward away, unfortunate because she's way cooler than Elinor in this version.

*Sorry, this movie is really long. I couldn't resist.

After having to sit through a full 24 and a half minutes of E Ferrars plot, Marianne is back with outfit number 36! For once in her life she decides to listen to someone else's problems and feels sorry for her sister for a whole scene. I just noticed that Elinor has man hands. No wonder no one wants to marry her. Elinor is only allowed to wallow in her sadness for a moment before returning to her role as the only responsible person in her family, because now she's been promoted and has to get a home loan. Marianne is recording music and stuff, at Brandon's insistence.

In an AWESOME turn of events that is not in the book, a beam collapses on John Dashwood and he DIES. Sadly Fanny lives. Momma Dashwood gets the house in the will, but because Marianne is out of her fucking mind, she tells Fanny that she can keep the house instead of kicking her out on her ass where she belongs. Fanny's heart grew three sizes that day.

Back in Madras, Marianne runs into Willoughby...

...and his new fiancée! Awkward! Too add insult to injury, she's kind of fugly. Though pretty much anyone would look fugly next to Aishwarya Rai. Marianne is understandably distraught. She walks home in the rain and... falls into a flooded manhole? Well that's overly dramatic. But Brandon is chilling on the sidewalk nearby and rescues her, natch. She sustains some serious injuries, I guess because ol' peg-leg didn't get to her fast enough. Does a hospital gown count as an outfit? I'm counting it.

Brandon is there creepily watching her sleep, which is oh-so-romantic by Marianne's standards. These two are well on their way to getting hitched. While she's been in a coma or whatever, she's suddenly become a super successful recording artist. So once again, her life is just peachy.

Brandon is pretty dense and tries to sell her to his incredibly hot friend who likes her music. She is not interested and confesses her love, which he doesn't take very well. "He's got two legs! What more do you want?!"

The indoor wind machines come back to signify that everything is alright.

Things are less alright for Elinor, who keeps having to read about Lucy Steele and E Ferrars in the tabloids. She decides to take a job promotion in California. Just in the nick of time E Ferrars shows up. He can't understand why Elinor is pissed at him! He was like, totally busy making his movie and didn't have time to call her! It's her fault for believing the tabloids! Elinor cries a lot. As he's leaving, he looks up and sees her on her balcony. "Will you marry me?" "Yes!" Um, way to resolve conflict there. Good luck with your marriage.

Their romance ends in slow motion running AND wind machine. I guess this means it's more valid than Marianne's.

And at last, a double wedding!! As every good Jane Austen film should end.

I MADE IT TO THE END! I can't believe it. That took an eternity. Let's take stock, shall we?

Swoon Factor: 0 Not only was there an egregious lack of man candy in this movie, but they managed to make Edward even more insufferable than he is in the book. He was always kind of a wet blanket, but now he's a douchey wet blanket. The only likable man in this movie is Brandon, and they gave him a mustache and a peg-leg. Plus, there's no kissing in Bollywood. Surprisingly unsatisfying.

Faithfulness to the book: 8 As adaptations go, this was not bad. Both the sisters did a great job, and I'm so glad they kept Margaret in the story. The timeline was a little jumbled, but not to the movie's detriment. I didn't mind the few things they changed (John Dashwood dying, for instance). I docked two points for the men, though.

Music: 3 A.R. Rahman, you have failed me. The music was fairly inoffensive, but it hardly blew my mind either. Two and a half hours of this movie and I still have the theme song from Fanaa stuck in my head, and that movie SUCKED.

Costumes: 9 Sometimes Bollywood goes a little tacky with the costumes, but for the most part, the clothes in this movie were beautiful. I only wish Marianne wore any of her outfits for more than 30 seconds, because they were gorgeous (final count: 50). Minus 1 for the men's costumes. Seriously, where did they get that Benetton sweatshirt?

Insanity: 4 I like my Bollywood movies to make zero sense. And while there were certainly moments that confused the hell out of me, this movie was surprisingly tame. While having Marianne fall down a manhole and rescued by a peg-legged Brandon was a valiant effort, why wasn't there a collection of cross-dressing troubadours providing background music for the scene? Why wasn't Edward's adaptation of Speed set in space? So many lost opportunities here.

Overall Score: 4.8 Yeah I wouldn't recommend checking this out at your local library. It's not worth your time. But also, there's really no need to watch the movie if you've made it to the bottom of this extremely thorough recap. Go watch Bride & Prejudice instead.

Eat Your Heart Out, Starbucks

2011-05-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

via @anhptran

One of the cool things about my job is knowing cool people. Take my coworker S and her husband T, an extremely fun and gregarious Ethiopian couple. Not only are they inherently awesome, they are also starting a B-Corp coffee company very shortly.

As any Ethiopian will tell you, coffee originated in Ethiopia. I guess a goatherd and a goat discovered coffee after the goat didn't come home, but I can't tell you what happened after that because I always get distracted before the end of the fable. But my point is this: people in Ethiopia have been cultivating coffee longer than anyone else in the world. It's a vital part of Ethiopian culture, history and economy. And it's delicious.

Coffee is such a fixture of Ethiopian life that people roast i t themselves. I have witnessed S do this on several occasions with very tasty results, and last Christmas S&T hand-roasted more than a pound of coffee for me to take home to my dad (!!!). That went down like this:

A: Hey S, I really want to get my dad some Ethiopian coffee for his Christmas stocking. Where is the best place to buy some?
S: I'm not sure, let me check with T.
A little while later...
S: Ok so I checked with T, and we don't trust anyone to use the right kind of coffee. We'll just roast it for you.

And then they spent like a day roasting coffee for someone they've never met, simply because they're amazing. The best I could offer in return was some jars I painted to say "Tea" and "Coffee" in Amharic.

After that, I really wanted to learn how to roast coffee myself. I arranged with S to come over and learn, which quickly snowballed into a medium-sized dinner party and business meeting about T's new coffee company. In a turn of events that surprised exactly no one, we all got too distracted catching up and eating food to talk about business. We did make coffee, however, and I documented with my trusty phone.

You start with green coffee beans. Coffee begins it's life as cherry, picked when it is a ripe red. The fruit is then washed off and the bean dried. The raw beans are very difficult to chew and taste exactly how I would imagine the color green to taste. These particular beans are of the Harar variety (whatever that means) and come from the union T is working with for his coffee company.

Next, you put the coffee in a special little pan and roast it over some charcoal over this ceramic stove thingy. Gas flame will do in a pinch, though apparently you have to shake the coffee beans around more so they don't burn. Delicious coffee aroma will begin to emerge and everyone is offered the chance to waft it towards them.

One time, I sat really close to S when she was roasting coffee and my hair and clothes took on that amazing, freshly roasted coffee smell. I never wanted to shower again (spoiler: I did).

After the coffee is the appropriate roasted-coffee-hue, you take it out of the pan to cool, and pick out the discolored bits and fan off the chaff.

Then you grind it up and put it in a special clay pot with some water:

As you heat the coffee, you pour off a little at a time into a separate container. This cooler coffee is then added back into the pot as it starts to boil over. At some point, the coffee is declared appropriately brewed by undetermined means. Then it is magically poured into tiny cups without getting any of the coffee grounds in the mix. This part of the process is lost on me.

This part is not.

Butter, Butter Everywhere (aka In Which You Learn to Make the Perfect Croissant)

2011-05-20T10:38:00.008-04:00

When I turned 21, I was at the end of a 9 month vacation in Paris. Some people might call this time "study abroad," but I would argue that the only studying I did was a lengthy empirical study of wine potability and pastry quality, punctuated by brief moments of class at the Musée D'Orsay. Not very convincing as I was supposedly doing half my coursework in Economics. Luckily, my parents seemed to fully embrace this hedonist lifestyle and for a 21st birthday present, they gave myself and L a class in croissant-making.

Absolute genius on my parents' part. Croissants are delicious and notoriously difficult to make; the ones we can find in this country are complete crap 99% of the time. Mastering croissants would be an awesome addition to my pastry-making repertoire, something with which to impress people at parties for years to come.

The class was held at a massively posh cooking school nearby and proved to be pretty intimidating for both of us. L may know her way around a spice rack and a grill, but she is not historically a baker. And while I am a pretty successful baker, I'm really, really bad at following directions. I despise measuring things and always have this arrogant idea that I can improve a recipe, even if I've never tried it before. Unfortunately for me, the cooking class was run by the Anal Retentive Chef.

I wish I had the original recipe to share, but I think it's at my parent's house in South Carolina. However, it closely resembled the following (L can confirm that I am not exaggerating in the slightest):

250 g #56 Flour
325 g #62 Flour
16 g of cake yeast
250 g of water
330 g of butter
2 t salt

The combined temperatures of the flour, yeast, and water should be 102.5 degrees centigrade. Adjust the water temperature until the temperature of water + temperature of yeast + temperature of flour = 102.5 degrees

AND THAT IS JUST THE LIST OF INGREDIENTS! This recipe is insanely detailed. So it's no surprise that when I got back to the states and tried to recreate it, it did not go well, not least because I was trying to find american substitutes for the flours and cake yeast. My mom can attest that several tries ended in abject failure and tears.

I had pretty much given up hope of ever making edible croissants when I found a recipe for pain au chocolat in Jacques Torres' A Year in Chocolate. This is noteworthy for two reasons: pain au chocolat is just a croissant cut in a different shape with chocolate stuffed inside, and I trust Jacques Torres because he momentarily hosted the most useless (and also my favorite) show on the Food Network, "Chocolate with Jaques Torres." If you did not have the good fortune to ever see this show, it usually began with a sentence like, "Bienvenue à 'Chocolat weeth Jacques Torres.' I ahm Jacques Torres, and today we weell be makeeng a meeneeahture Las Vegas out of chocolat!" And then he would make a miniature Las Vegas out of chocolate. It was both marvelous and pointless, and ergo extremely French. This is why Jacques Torres is a trustworthy source.

Not only did his recipe use readily available American ingredients and quantities, but it tastes the damn same as the Anal Retentive Chef's recipe up there. After one last failure based on an extremely egregious typo (T of yeast does not equal t of yeast, you lazy frog!), I think I have finally mastered the art of croissant making. And now I will impart my knowledge onto you, so you can skip right over the tearful years of heartache that I spent trying to get it right. But be warned, the amount of butter you're about to witness may stop you from ever wanting to eat a pastry again.

Croissants/Pain au Chocolat
adapted from A Year in Chocolate by Jacques Torres

This recipe makes approximately 48 mini-croissants or 24 mini-pains-au-chocolat.
Prep time takes forever; normally I begin making the dough the morning before I plan to bake it. I've only made the recipe straight through once, and that was a week and a half ago at a former coworker's house. It took most of the day. This was ok because I got to play with her six-month-old baby in between steps, but I would not normally recommend this course of action.

For the dough:

1 c (two sticks) plus 5 T unsalted butter
2 envelopes (2 1/4 t each) dry active yeast
1/2 c plus 1 T water
3 1/3 c bread flour, plus more for dusting
1/3 cup sugar
2 t salt
1/2 cup plus 1 T milk
9 oz dark chocolate, chopped

For the egg wash

1/4 cup milk
2 egg yolks
1 large egg

Even with this recipe, some of the ingredients look like the Anal Retentive Chef got to them. But this recipe works! This is one of the only times I will carefully measure things when cooking, and you should do the same. Note: the following assumes that you understand basic principles of baking, like how to roll out or knead dough. If these are not things you already have a handle on, this is probably not the recipe for you.

1. Set out butter to soften. Add yeast to the water, which you can use at any moderate temperature you like so long as it's not particularly hot or cold. Melt 3 T of the butter and set aside.

2. Measure flour, sugar and salt into a large mixing bowl. Add the melted butter and milk, and stir briefly with a wooden spoon (about 5 seconds). Then, add the yeast and water. Mix until the dough begins to come together, and then begin to knead with your hands. After kneading for a couple of minutes, dough should come together easily in a ball, with moisture consistent throughout. Don't worry if it's still a little lumpy--the gluten in the flour has not relaxed yet (this means that the gluten has not had a chance to form long, tidy protein ropes, which makes though dough smoother and more elastic). Wrap in plastic wrap and set aside for 30 minutes.

3. Remove the plastic wrap and place on a lightly floured surface (always use a lightly floured surface for the rest of this recipe). Roll out into a rectangle approximately 8 x 15 inch rectangle (not an exact science--I roll it out to about the same size as my small silpat). Cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.

4. Take the dough out of the refrigerator and carefully spread the softened butter (2 sticks + 2T) over two thirds of it, leaving 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch around the sides uncovered. Once you have an even sheet of butter spread, fold the uncovered third over the middle third, and the final third over the uncovered third. This should look like an envelope:

5. Carefully roll out the dough again, into a slightly bigger rectangle this time. Take the shorter sides and fold them in, meeting in the middle. Fold one more time along the middle crease. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for a minimum of two hours, although 8-12 hours works best.

6. Remove from the refrigerator and roll out into a rectangle again. Fold into thirds one more time like in step three. Cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate one last time for two hours or overnight. The reason for all this folding is that you are creating thin sheets of butter in between the layers of dough. In the oven, the butter will melt and separate the layers of dough. This is what creates the flakiness of a croissant.

7. Roll out into a large rectangle until about an 1/8 of an inch thick (my rectangle is about 16 x 24). Trim off all the edges with a sharp knife. This may seem wasteful, but it allows the layers of the dough to separate more, creating a flakier pastry. When you cut the dough, you should be able to see the striations of butter in the edge:

8a. For croissants, cut into small isosceles triangles. You can experiment with sizes, but I like mini-croissants, so my triangles usually have a height of 4.5" and a base of 2.5" on average. To shape, take the base of the triangle and roll towards the tip. This should not involve effort--you do not want them to be either too tight or too loose. Place on a parchment paper-lined cookie sheet, tip down. Tuck in edges so it looks like a croissant.

8b. For pains au chocolat, cut in to rectangles, about 2.5" x 4.5." Just inside the first short edge, place a line of chocolate. Roll the dough over this first line, and place another line of chocolate. Finish rolling and place seam-side down on a parchment paper-lined cookie sheet. Note: no matter what size pain au chocolate you are making, there should always be two sticks of chocolate involved. Anything else should be called "sham au chocolat." In fact, if you are ever in a French pâtisserie and see that they are hawking one-stick pain au chocolat, turn around and leave immediately because it is clearly an inferior establishment.

9. Cover cookie sheet loosely with plastic wrap and allow to rise until they've doubled in size. This depends entirely on the temperature of your kitchen and will take anywhere from 1 to 3 hours.

10. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Remove plastic wrap, mix the egg wash together and brush the pastries right before they go in the oven. For the pains au chocolat, cut two diagonal lines with a sharp knife in the top of each pastry.

11. Cook for about 10-12 minutes, or until golden-brown. Cool on a wire rack and eat while still warm.

Stray notes:

Often, I only make a third of the recipe at a time. After step 6, I will cut the dough into thirds with a sharp knife and freeze the dough I'm not going to use immediately. When you're ready to make the rest of the dough, remove from the freezer the day before and thaw in the refrigerator.
If you are wondering why I didn't suggest you use dark chocolate chips instead of cut-up chocolate. There's nothing wrong with this per se, but I choose not to use chocolate chips because they tend to have more emulsifiers and less cocoa butter so as to hold their shape when cooked--that is, they don't melt as well as normal chocolate. And in general, I like to stick to the rule with chocolate the fewer ingredients is better. I usually buy my baking chocolate from that posh stand next to the cheese in Whole Foods with those big, rough-looking blocks of chocolate. They may look exorbitantly priced, but when you do the math per ounce, it's not much more than buying Ghirardelli baking chocolate. In France, they sell sticks of chocolate expressly for the purpose of making pain au chocolat, but I have never seen such a thing in this country. One time, I carefully melted, tempered, and cut chocolate into my own pain au chocolat sticks. This is a huge waste of time and I cannot recommend it.
After that marathon baking day, my coworker asked how long they would keep for. I laughed because mine have never lasted more than 12 hours. (ok, more than two hours. Maybe only one.) If you do have any leftover, my best bet is to put them in an air-tight container and eat them within a couple of days.
I also use this recipe for the crust of my Springtime Ramp Tart, the food with which I terminated my brief foray into veganism. Most delicious thing ever. I will post the recipe for that sometime, but this is already way too long so I'll hold off for now.