Mardi Gras "This is all very interesting, [pause] but I probably wouldn't be interested." -Harris patron, 01/29/2009
"You have a cloak, you be our leader; take charge of this heap of ruins!"
Did not do anything special for Mardi Gras, except go buy Lauren some cola so she could make whiskey-coke. And carrots, so my hash browns can be a little more delicious. And lime juice and black beans, so I can make more black bean dip. Then I got was bored, and wanted to cook, even though I wasn't hungry. Bean dip takes like ten minutes to prepare, so I decided to bake.
Since I'd already been out shopping once, I was determined to use only what we had already around the house. Neither Lauren nor I knew what actually was in bread, but after reading the ingredient list on the breadbag we keep wrapped around the flour bag, we determined that we had everything but yeast and baking soda. So I set off to find a flatbread recipe I could use. I found a modified matzo recipe, and modified it a little more, which created a delicious and very nearly vegan bread perfect for the last day of indulgence -or for filling up the vast stretches of time created by unemployment.
Mardi Gras Whiskey Bread
Preheat the oven to four hundred and twenty-five degrees fahrenheit. In a bowl mix together two cups flour, half a cup brown sugar, half a cup honey, half a cup olive oil, half a cup warm water, and a quarter cup whiskey. Add a dash of nutmeg and three dashes of cinnamon. Grease a nine-by-thirteen pan or baking sheet with butter, and spread dough onto greased surface evenly. Bake for about fifteen minutes, until edges brown. About halfway through, perforate with a fork. Remove from pan or cookie sheet, cut in twelve and serve plain or with butter.
So that was what I did today. Well, and got me a date to the Pinchas Zukerman recital this weekend. And conspired with Lauren. And sang in the shower. And applied for jobs. And complained about applying for jobs. But mostly I bake a sheet of bread that has Jack Daniels in it.
So I went out dancing last night, it being Presidents' Day and all. The caller decided not too spare us the funny stuff; there were two Beckett dances, two square dances, even two proper dances, the latter of which is for sets of three couples only. An interesting little one, I wrote it down. There was also one with quite a lot of spinning for the gents; though not more, I'm sure, than there was for the ladies. A thoroughly enjoyable evening.
Happy as I was to have the night off work, I was less happy to find out I have the night off again tonight. It appears that hours are getting cut, and I've been informed that I will likely be out of a job -I'm certainly not one of the best employees they have, I'm afraid- within the week. So I applied for food stamps! And I'm ramping up the already-in-progress job search. <span style='speech-style: sarcastic'>So much fun.</span>
"Waltzes are ever so nice," said Mrs. Maggs who had just returned and given MacPhee his slab of cake, "So old fashioned."
Strange to me it seems, to read, in a book I tend to think of as comically old-fashioned, the calling "old fashioned" of something. That I, perhaps, might also think waltzes "ever so nice" and "old fashioned" rather stresses this than diminishes it.
Many books from my childhood I will re-read and think I could not have understood them the first time around. I say 'think' rather than 'believe' because such a thing is typically unbelievable, which is the attitude that invariably asserts itself upon consideration of my childhood regard for the book in question. There are a few things I from time to time that I failed to realize -or at least remember the realization of- on my first readings: the politics throughout the latter part of Lord of the Rings, the sexual episode in Hero and the Crown. But I remember there being one book in particular I just could not fully wrap my head around; and rereading That Hideous Strength, I can see the cause. It's just such an adult novel. The first two novels are fantasy, and fantasy, being based on experiences one is not likely to have had, is far more accessible to children. Strength is about adult things, the kind of things of whick any explanation would be extremely long, fairly tedious, and still very confusing, but which most adult have experienced, the actual experiences typically being often fleeting and generally memorable, but not infrequently still very confusing. Things like relationships gone stale, careerism, and seeking independence through wrongdoing (though admittedly, this is one of the first thing children seem to discover on their way to adulthood). My difficulty, and much of my delight, in reading, is because this contrasts with my thinking of Lewis as a 'children's author'. A very good writer he is, in any case.
Reading Timequake, I think it's the most pleasant Vonnegut I've come across. Most of his novels come strike me as... well, it's like when the prettiest, smartest girl at the party is the one in the ugliest dress, a not-uncommon ocurrance in our current society. An exuberance, a thrill, a joy, and yet something so distasteful as well. Not so (so far) with Timequake. This book makes me want to be Kurt Vonnegut for a living.
I'm just not sure I have the stones to pull it off, though.
Before I left for work this evening, Lauren and I decided to have a little DIY night, where I'd teach her how to use a sewing machine and she'd show me how to lubricate my chain. When I got back, we started things out with a DIY whiskey-coke, and I made a balaclava for Lauren, and then she made ten more for some poor balaclavaless shmucks. While she did that, I cleaned my new bookcase, and then built it into my existing shelving apparatus in a way that is fairly unlikely to kill me in my sleep. Then we tackled the bikes; Lauren on Joe's bike, and me on Terrence, after she showed me what to do. And swore a lot. There was a lot of swearing when she was looking at my bike, the kind of swearing people do when they're kind of scared, when they're nervous. She apparently also thinks I should have working brakes. "I guess this could be pretty OK if you never change gears," she said more than once. But I scrubbed the rust off with a toothbrush and so forth and adjusted the derailleurs and now the Terrence is better than ever. Hoo-ray! Unwilling to stop there, I then broke the sewing machine back out to patch some jeans; after that, I finally used the whetstone I bought five years ago so I could sharpen my pocketknife to sharpen my pocketknife. It was our most productive night since the day she made noodles and chicken noodle soup.
Which means, of course, that the apartment is a disaster of a mess.
So I was updating Wallaby (the shiny iPod), and I made a playlist of all my traditional music. In my entire digital collection, I have 260 tracks worth. I have some 5000 tracks, total. Remove from consideration the 260 traditional tracks, and anything by my four favorite bands, and there are -exactly, if as it happens- 4000 tracks. Whoops, getting sloppy. Also remove all the "Real Men of Genius" tracks and The Better Boyfriends, now we have 3846 tracks. And only 260 of old-time, bluegrass, ballads, cajun, pipes, and so forth all put together. Pathetic.
I'm also struck that four groups comprise 3/20 of my music collection by volume -though far more by play frequency. I haven't done the frequency analysis on the traditional segment yet.
Tuesday, fifth week after Epiphany "I'm sorry, you have called a wrong number." -answering machine message
So I got the flu, then recovered just in time to go out and visit my mom in the suburbs, where I caught a cold, which I recovered from just in time for a bout of warm weather and the 49th annual Folk Festival. My mom was in the suburbs to house- and kid-sit while my aunt and uncle had a nice long just-the-two-of-them vacation. She told me at least three times how glad she was to have raised boys. She got some relief that weekend, as not only myself, but two aunts and an additional cousin came out all at once. The sisters all caught up and Kelsey and I did the iPod swap-critique thing, traded music recommendations, and talked about temporary hair dyes.
And fun as that was, the folk festival was even better. Missing Friday night and half of Saturday (still fighting off that cold), I showed up on Saturday just in time to set up the party, my primary responsibility, and this year, also primarily my responsibility. The many congratulations and thanks I received seemed sincere enough to lead me to think it went well. I spent all of Sunday dancing and drinking and moving furniture, and running into people I had no reason to expect to see. First was Ellis Avenue Cyberling, the my extremely jaded trombonist deskmate from the Harris. He's a Sacred Harp singer, it seems, and one of the first people I saw as I walked in the door of Ida Noyes. Right at the end of the Irish set workshop, the second dance I went to that morning, I was waylaid by a Nancy Chang, which was not to be unexpected, and a Violette Green, which certainly was, as last I heard she was moving away. She was on her way into the middle-eastern dance workshop, so we didn't catch up until later, but we shared a dance and some conversation at the barn dance workshop, and it was all-in-all right pleasant.
After a brief lunch of cucumber and onion sandwiches, I made my way down to the flatfooting workshop, because heaven forbid -or at least, I forbid- that there be any dance I don't know how to do. An hour of chugging and so forth wore me out so much I'm still feeling it today, and I still could not master the Tennessee walking step, or even the basic. Thank goodness I have hardwood floors at home, ones that won't show wear from a little more beating-about. It was here that I crossed paths with Elizabeth, the redheaded midwife from Epiphany, who, as one forward young man observed to her later, was totally rocking those boots. This was recounted to me later as a worthwhile pick-up line; I have my doubts. Just missing the Scottish dance workshop, I met Elizabeth's friends and mopped the Cloister Club floor as Dot Kent began instructing newcomers about contra dancing. I finished just in time to be the example target in a lesson on how to ask someone to dance, which, by the applause, I must've done well. (What is that, the third time this post I've made sure to mention my lauds? What an ego on this one. And we haven't even gotten to the part where all the pretty young women tell me what a good dancer I am. Well, to be fair, a few had told me that already. But in any case:) I then set my weariness aside to dance another couple straight hours and with any girl who would have me, and even run into Allison, the girl who showed us the Bridgepartment and from whom we took over the lease. I gave a couple dance lessons and made some girls dizzy, tried to convince the free-workshop types to come to the concert and dance some more, and then got roped into cleaning up, just like always.
Both nights the concerts were great, the green room was great, and I went back and forth as I pleased, meeting musicians and undergrads, catching up with the people I hadn't seen since last year. Sunday night clean-up went as quick as it ever does, and I bought my two CDs and collected my purple T-shirt. Then, so many of our contingent being younger, and Jimmy's having no longer the tolerance towards smoke that it used to, we retired with what was left of our beer and other beverages to Moomers, the only Hyde Park apartment with a permanent stage. This party went even later than the one the night before, ending in a small, warm, and carefree singalong. In the middle, though, I saw a man play a crutch. That is, he took a medical assistance device for the pedomotively impaired, modified it slightly (though calling upon an impressive and occasionally frightening parade of tools to do so), referred to the bottommost end of it as a "mouthpiece", and made music with it. Mr. John Parrish, for so he was, was accompanied by Moomers' own Becca on the saw, and thus SAWCRUTCH was born. That's me standing in the background for the first half, with the struck-dumb grin on my face.
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