Couch Life

I've already elaborated on the non-stop eating that I do when I go home.  Much of the eating takes place on our living room couch where my mom and I basically remain rooted throughout the day, like small and chirpy devices in a cushion-bedecked charger.

Sample interaction:

Me, looking through The Sartorialist for haircut ideas:  "How about this one?  Oh...My hair already looks like this."

Mom: [kicks me]

And then, just now, my mom singlehandedly came up with a brilliant scheme for how to potentially decide on some rent details in our Singapore apartment.  It's a good, good time.

Anyway, here I am, back on the couch again, and in dependable fashion, both Star Wars IV and The Fellowship of the Ring are on cable.  

Inexplicably, I've had two conversations with completely unrelated people recently about The Lord of the Rings.  I'm never sure how enthusiastically I should chime in...geeking out is kind of an all or nothing deal.  And yet I feel strangely tepid about arguing the case for my favorite non-humanoid Star Wars characters (Admiral Ackbar, Nien Nunb).  Or, sure, my own passing regret over no Tom Bombadil or Farmer Maggot scenes in the first LOTR movie.  But being a fan of anything, except maybe the Penn Music Department on Facebook, doesn't really feel like me.  These days.

Another beautiful quotation, this one posted high on the wall of a beautiful home furnishings shop in Hudson:

It was the queer old complexion of the long straight street, however, that most came home to me: Hudson, in the afternoon quiet, seemed to stretch back, with fumbling friendly hand, to the earliest outlook of my consciousness.

Henry James

I wish I'd taken a photo now to depict in what an uncanny, and graceful, way, this summed up my own feelings about boutique-hopping in the quietest town ever.

Never Full and Never Hungry

Something about being at home flips a switch in my appetite.

Such that it is always on.  It doesn't really matter what I've eaten during the day, or how my food habits have been.  As soon as I get back into the house where I grew up, my stomach expands into a bottomless pit.  To wit, since coming home five hours ago, I've eaten:

• 2 crab-stuffed shrimp(?!)
• barley and vegetable soup
• pomegranate chocolate torte
• tofu casserole with rice and kimchee
• a sweet potato
• cauliflower and chestnut gratin
• 3 glasses of red wine
• cheese cubes

Perhaps more?  Well, I just ate another bowl of the soup.  And I just took out two pies out of the oven, so I might cut myself a sliver of one, just to taste.  

I always think that it'll subside by the next day, but then it doesn't.  Maybe this time?  

When I get nervous, my brain prompts me to say the second or third thing it thinks, and not the first.  I'm playing against instinct most of the time.  It can be confusing to auditors,  to say nothing of myself.  It is extremely distasteful.

Also ... I'm absolutely petrified now, watching the coverage of terrorist attacks in Mumbai.  I saw one man say that he saw "bloodshed and all that" in a way that was eerily familiar to me. Oh, and a man who just put his mother on a plane to Mumbai said, "I'm a little concerned, but I told her to use her wits."  Did they make a point to only interview the most flippant Indians they could find, or is flippancy just a built-in feature of English as spoken in India?  

To learn more about my trip upstate today, please refer to this article on the Hudson Line.

Stranger Things Have Happened

Recently, I thought that I had had a revelation about Bedouin Tent, which is a fantastic restaurant a block away from our apartment that is my "go to" takeout spot.  I felt confident that it was that I preferred the merguez platter to the chicken platter.  So, imagine my resulting dismay and bemusement(!) as, when I shoveled the merguez platter down my gullet about three weeks ago, I didn't feel a sense of joy.

In fact, I figured out tonight that it wasn't the merguez platter that I liked.  It was the merguez sandwich!!!

There is something so wonderful about eating a pre-assembled sandwich, wrapped up with love and dripping with merguez juices, that can never be duplicated at home, even with the platter components and pita at hand.  Thus, I felt wonderful, not only for having eaten a delicious sandwich but, for being right about the world being a little more perfectable than I had previously thought.  Truly, truly, a sandwich is more than the sum of its parts.  And, sometimes to get something done right, you have to stand back and let the experts do their work.  Facile expression of two important life philosophies.

Today, I bought my one-way ticket to sunny/rainy Singapore, Singapore!  Tomorrow, I'll take part in an organized communications outreach to people I've been working with for the past two years.  Life seems to be wrapping up right on time.  And yet I seem to be making the same mistakes.  Again and again, word for word.  Although, if the only mistake is "being myself", I don't know whether I can reproach myself out of it.

For example, my preciousness and sentimentality.  Something I simultaneously value and despise.  And something that I can't shake.  I think it always stems from guilt - or rather, a wish to feel guiltier than I do.

About polar bears treading water in the middle of the ocean.  Or swearing.  When I walked away from someone on Saturday night, I don't know why I felt such immense regret.  My selfishness? My cowardice?  Or a simple inability to make nice?

Why, after such a long time at striving towards flatness, do I feel like I'm crumbling into a complexity I never sought?

Surprisingly for a book I didn't much like, certain passages of Immortality have stuck with me for a long time:

"...even her handouts to beggars were based on negation: she gave them money not because beggars, too belonged to mankind but because they did not belong to it, because they were excluded from it and probably, like her, felt no solidarity with mankind.

No solidarity with mankind: that was her attitude.  Only one thing could wrench her out of it: concrete love toward a concrete person.  If she truly loved someone, she could not be indifferent to the fate of other people, because her beloved would be dependent on that fate, he would be part of it, and she could no longer feel that mankind's torments, its wars and holidays, were none of her concern."

Milan Kundera

Rainy Day Music

Of course, we used to drive around, and all the time.  It breaks my heart now a little, to think of all the gas that we burned up, driving from Poughkeepsie to Rhinebeck, or New Paltz, and back - sometimes in circles because there was really so little else for us to do.  I wonder whether kids are allowed to even do that anymore.  An expensive habit now.

It's kind of a given in our reliquaried memories of those days that we listened endlessly to Weezer.  We each championed other music, of course.  Let's say, The Flaming Lips for Anand, Solex for Andrew, Belle and Sebastian, somewhat weakly, for me.  Phoenix later, probably when we came home the summer after freshman year.  But pretty consistently, I think we listened to, and would say now, that we listened to, Weezer.

I just came inside after taking out the garbage for collection.  Wet yellow leaves freckle the sidewalk, and drizzly roars come from cars making their way down Atlantic Avenue.  I put Summerteeth on, and it somehow reminds me more immediately of that time.  Listening to Pieholden Suite makes me remember nights spent looking out the window of Anand's car, watching the lights of Route 9 flicker by.  Summerteeth came out in March of 1999, so it's been nearly ten years.  It doesn't sound like music from ten years ago, which makes me glad.

New Robot Friend

Roomba, move over!

There's a new friendly white robot in my life.
My new 13-inch MacBook!

I've been playing with him off and on, all night.  I loved the way he 1) knew that all I wanted to do right away was to get online, and 2) didn't complicate my already complicated wireless router password authentication.

Sara helped me discover the crucial shortcut: Command + ~, whilst we VIDEOCHATTED.

To bed now.  But won't I be pleased to wake up with my smugly demure new friend on my nightstand?

Yummy Sunday Leftover Party

I really want to go grocery shopping, but can't bring myself to buy anything new until I eat what is in the fridge!  Hence, today's menu and the erstwhile languishing ingredients usefully employed therein:

Couscous with garbanzo beans and prunes

• chicken stock
• leftover canned chickpeas
• prunes
• couscous

Tuna marinated and baked in green curry sauce leftovers from Joya

• delicious green curry sauce that I can't bear to discard, plus it's gross to see it in the sink
• tuna filets from Trader Joe's

Also on deck: nori to make miyeok-guk later on for dinner...