(sorry i couldnt help it)
Desire
I remember how it used to be
at noon, springtime, the city streets
full of office workers like myself
let loose from the cold
glass buildings on Park and Lex,
the dull swaddling of winter cast off,
almost everyone wanting
everyone else. It was amazing
how most of us contained ourselves,
bringing desire back up
to the office where it existed anyway,
quiet, like a good engine.
I'd linger a bit
with the receptionist,
knock on someone else's open door,
ease myself, by increments,
into the seriousness they paid me for.
Desire was everywhere those years,
so enormous it couldn't be reduced
one person at a time.
I don't remember when it was,
though closer to now than then,
I walked the streets desireless,
my eyes fixed on destination alone.
The beautiful person across from me
on the bus or train
looked like effort, work.
I translated her into pain.
For months I had the clarity
the cynical survive with,
their world so safely small.
Today, walking 57th toward 3rd,
it's all come back,
the interesting, the various,
the conjured life suggested by a glance.
I praise how the body heals itself.
I praise how, finally, it never learns.
Stephan Dunn
12.03.2009
beginings of a grilled cheese menu for my cafe-in-the-sky
some invented some found on the web, this list will be an ongoing project and i hope to name each one i try and love. feel free to offer names! and other suggestions!! im going to try all of these and let you know. ill take pictures if possible. last night i made number 7, the prosciutto and fig jam deal but we didnt use arugala and it needed it. so when i make it again ill take a pic.
tonight, number 1...
1. apple and aged cheddar on walnut bread
2. pear and smoked gouda and arugala on white
3. grape and taleggio soaked in grappa (read about this on a great site) on whole wheat bread.
4. roasted chevre and beets and sweet balsamic on french bread
5. sundried tomato pesto and mozz
6. sweet hot mustard and jarlsberg on pretzel roll (also on the web, have yet to try but UGH)
7. mozzarella prosciutto fig jam and arugal on ciabatta
8. black forest ham carmalized onions and cambozola
9. blue cheese bacon tomato and egg (like a cobb salad!)
tonight, number 1...
1. apple and aged cheddar on walnut bread
2. pear and smoked gouda and arugala on white
3. grape and taleggio soaked in grappa (read about this on a great site) on whole wheat bread.
4. roasted chevre and beets and sweet balsamic on french bread
5. sundried tomato pesto and mozz
6. sweet hot mustard and jarlsberg on pretzel roll (also on the web, have yet to try but UGH)
7. mozzarella prosciutto fig jam and arugal on ciabatta
8. black forest ham carmalized onions and cambozola
9. blue cheese bacon tomato and egg (like a cobb salad!)
12.02.2009
break the wishbone. and a heart while youre at it. fascinating how predictable we humans are.
Want To Break Up? 'Tis The Season, So Better Hurry
November 28, 2009 - NPR
It's not just turkeys that get nervous this time of year. Chances are high that a failing relationship will also meet its end during the holidays. That's because it's not just turkey season — it's turkey drop season.
"The turkey drop is that holiday breakup season where all the college students return home for their first major vacation, and everyone breaks up," Washington University junior Carly MacLeod tells guest host Robert Smith. She writes the romance column for the student newspaper.
It's often freshmen who do the majority of the turkey dropping, MacLeod says. After three months living apart and making new friends, high school sweethearts reunite to find their long-distance relationship is more burden than they want. Upcoming finals add to the emotional stress. "Go home, hook up and break up is pretty much the pattern," MacLeod says.
You're not safe from the turkey drop if you're out of college, either, according to relationship and sex advice guru Dan Savage. "For grown-ups," he says, "it's the anticipation of being stuck for three or four more months.
"You're a cad if you break up around Christmas. And then there's New Year's — and you can't dump somebody right around New Year's. After that, if you don't jump on it, is Valentine's Day," Savage says. "God forbid if their birthday should fall somewhere between November and February — then you're really stuck.
"Thanksgiving is really when you have to pull the trigger if you're not willing to tough it out through February."
Both Savage and MacLeod speak from experience. MacLeod was turkey dropped her first year in college, by a boyfriend who told her the distance was too hard to handle. "He was still a senior in high school," she says. "That one hurt even a little bit more than, I think, a regular breakup."
Savage doesn't have any advice to share from his breakup. "I'm actually bad at the turkey drop," he says. "I had a turkey drop that was coming, and I fled the state."
November 28, 2009 - NPR
It's not just turkeys that get nervous this time of year. Chances are high that a failing relationship will also meet its end during the holidays. That's because it's not just turkey season — it's turkey drop season.
"The turkey drop is that holiday breakup season where all the college students return home for their first major vacation, and everyone breaks up," Washington University junior Carly MacLeod tells guest host Robert Smith. She writes the romance column for the student newspaper.
It's often freshmen who do the majority of the turkey dropping, MacLeod says. After three months living apart and making new friends, high school sweethearts reunite to find their long-distance relationship is more burden than they want. Upcoming finals add to the emotional stress. "Go home, hook up and break up is pretty much the pattern," MacLeod says.
You're not safe from the turkey drop if you're out of college, either, according to relationship and sex advice guru Dan Savage. "For grown-ups," he says, "it's the anticipation of being stuck for three or four more months.
"You're a cad if you break up around Christmas. And then there's New Year's — and you can't dump somebody right around New Year's. After that, if you don't jump on it, is Valentine's Day," Savage says. "God forbid if their birthday should fall somewhere between November and February — then you're really stuck.
"Thanksgiving is really when you have to pull the trigger if you're not willing to tough it out through February."
Both Savage and MacLeod speak from experience. MacLeod was turkey dropped her first year in college, by a boyfriend who told her the distance was too hard to handle. "He was still a senior in high school," she says. "That one hurt even a little bit more than, I think, a regular breakup."
Savage doesn't have any advice to share from his breakup. "I'm actually bad at the turkey drop," he says. "I had a turkey drop that was coming, and I fled the state."
12.01.2009
to do/gift list, maybe if i make it public i'll make it happen?
- set up boarding situation for kitty over holiday
- write to eli to apply for internship
- investigate cooking, farming, teaching riding in geneva/switzerland in general
- get appt to get treadless tires changed
- get windshield wiper fluid, oil, water, everything fluid in the car because shes dry as a bone
- pass car inspection
- figure out why comcast sent me a bill for negative 80 dollars
- create poetry collections for dad, mom, grandmother, sandra, liz, steph, others
- make fortune cookies for sandra and dad
- bauhaus book for mom or book on how to draw for fashion, Fashion Design Drawing Course or Essential Fashion Illustration
- donate to EMA on behalf of friends, family and coworkers for holidays, send acknowledgements
this poem is the opposite of what im writing these days, but exactly what I wish to write
it also discusses a kind of person i am not, but exactly who i wish to be
I Foresee the Breaking of All That Is Breakable
Perhaps, after all, it is merely a desire
to use the word thanatopsical—
but if you can wash or handle
artifacts like this blue
tea mug, carried from Crete as a gift
from a friend, or this nacreous
orange bowl,
a honeymoon souvenir
bought in a now-defunct artists'
shop in Colorado, or
this antique Chinese mudman
carrying his sponges
and fish from a day at the pier,
without a pathological
fixation on the day you will stumble
and drop it, or smack it
against the sink divider or brush
it with a hand reaching
for the letter opener, you are junzi:
a superior person, as Confucius had it.
You probably make love
to your spouse without imagining
betrayal and pay taxes
without complaint
because you think nothing
in truth belongs to you.
They invented the earth for people
like you, and then salted it.
by john estes
I Foresee the Breaking of All That Is Breakable
Perhaps, after all, it is merely a desire
to use the word thanatopsical—
but if you can wash or handle
artifacts like this blue
tea mug, carried from Crete as a gift
from a friend, or this nacreous
orange bowl,
a honeymoon souvenir
bought in a now-defunct artists'
shop in Colorado, or
this antique Chinese mudman
carrying his sponges
and fish from a day at the pier,
without a pathological
fixation on the day you will stumble
and drop it, or smack it
against the sink divider or brush
it with a hand reaching
for the letter opener, you are junzi:
a superior person, as Confucius had it.
You probably make love
to your spouse without imagining
betrayal and pay taxes
without complaint
because you think nothing
in truth belongs to you.
They invented the earth for people
like you, and then salted it.
by john estes
when it rains it pours
today i feel like stars are aligning my poppers!
maybe tomorrow i will feel like stars are falling out of the sky and hitting me on the head burning my face into an unrecognizable pulp of scar tissue
but today, i feel quite positively positive about my prospects!
this poem breaks me a little
the planned child
I hated the fact that they had planned me, she had taken
a cardboard out of his shirt from the laundry
as if sliding the backbone up out of his body,
and made a chart of the month and put
her temperature on it, rising and falling,
to know the day to make me - I would have
liked to have been conceived in heat,
in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex,
not on cardboard, the little x on the
rising line that did not fall again.
But when a friend was pouring wine
and said that I seem to have been a child who had been wanted,
I took the wine against my lips
as if my mouth were moving along
that valved wall in my mother's body, she was
bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then
bearing down, pressing me out into
the world that was not enough for her without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea - none of it
was enough, for her, without me.
by sharon olds
I hated the fact that they had planned me, she had taken
a cardboard out of his shirt from the laundry
as if sliding the backbone up out of his body,
and made a chart of the month and put
her temperature on it, rising and falling,
to know the day to make me - I would have
liked to have been conceived in heat,
in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex,
not on cardboard, the little x on the
rising line that did not fall again.
But when a friend was pouring wine
and said that I seem to have been a child who had been wanted,
I took the wine against my lips
as if my mouth were moving along
that valved wall in my mother's body, she was
bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then
bearing down, pressing me out into
the world that was not enough for her without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea - none of it
was enough, for her, without me.
by sharon olds
11.26.2009
oh for christsake
im going to admit something: im a compete failure in the kitchen.
i love food
i love cooking it serving it learning about it comparing it savoring it playing with it sharing it
and yet
every damn time i go in the kitchen with the best of intensions, SOMETHING goes wrong
sometimes that leads to greatness, glory, the stuff of legends
but just as often it leads to chaos mayhem and inedible food that gets thrown out still encrusted to the container in which it met its doom
case in point:
tonight i spent two hours making double butter triple almond extract fortune cookies stuffed with a stubbs postcard cut into strips on which id hand written a favorite poem by jack gilbert.
the cookies were 200% improved from my first fortune cookie venture.
they were wafer thin, buttery, crispy as crackers and beautifully browned.
i folded in the fortunes, found a beautiful tin, layered them into the tin and was just lifting it up to put it gingerly in my room to bring to my godmothers for thanksgiving tomorrow when the evil sprite that seems to follow me everywhere threw down the banana peel.
i slipped, grabbed, thrashed, flailed and finally hurled the tin across the room smashing every single cookie to smithereens.
steph, roommate, saw and gaped, trying not to laugh but there was really nothing left to do except howl with laughter and hten sit down and eat the whole entire batch. i mean really.
anyway in their honor im passing on the winning recipe and the poem that was held in that sweet far too fragile shell
Ingredients
2 egg whites, room temperature
6 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour, sifted
1/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
Directions
Whip the egg whites until stiff and chill. In a mixer, cream the butter, then add the sugar and continue mixing. Add the flour and blend in, then add the vanilla and blend again. Add the chilled egg whites and mix on low until well incorporated and the batter is smooth. With a small offset spatula, spread batter in a circle about 3 per cookie sheet. Bake in a preheated 330-degree oven until light golden brown, 7 to 8 minutes. Quickly remove the pan from the oven and one at time place a fortune across the center with a bit hanging out. Fold cookie circle in thirds over fortune with flaps only slightly overlapping each other. Turn over and bring opposing sides together and pinch.
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
--Jack GIlbert
i love food
i love cooking it serving it learning about it comparing it savoring it playing with it sharing it
and yet
every damn time i go in the kitchen with the best of intensions, SOMETHING goes wrong
sometimes that leads to greatness, glory, the stuff of legends
but just as often it leads to chaos mayhem and inedible food that gets thrown out still encrusted to the container in which it met its doom
case in point:
tonight i spent two hours making double butter triple almond extract fortune cookies stuffed with a stubbs postcard cut into strips on which id hand written a favorite poem by jack gilbert.
the cookies were 200% improved from my first fortune cookie venture.
they were wafer thin, buttery, crispy as crackers and beautifully browned.
i folded in the fortunes, found a beautiful tin, layered them into the tin and was just lifting it up to put it gingerly in my room to bring to my godmothers for thanksgiving tomorrow when the evil sprite that seems to follow me everywhere threw down the banana peel.
i slipped, grabbed, thrashed, flailed and finally hurled the tin across the room smashing every single cookie to smithereens.
steph, roommate, saw and gaped, trying not to laugh but there was really nothing left to do except howl with laughter and hten sit down and eat the whole entire batch. i mean really.
anyway in their honor im passing on the winning recipe and the poem that was held in that sweet far too fragile shell
Ingredients
2 egg whites, room temperature
6 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour, sifted
1/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
Directions
Whip the egg whites until stiff and chill. In a mixer, cream the butter, then add the sugar and continue mixing. Add the flour and blend in, then add the vanilla and blend again. Add the chilled egg whites and mix on low until well incorporated and the batter is smooth. With a small offset spatula, spread batter in a circle about 3 per cookie sheet. Bake in a preheated 330-degree oven until light golden brown, 7 to 8 minutes. Quickly remove the pan from the oven and one at time place a fortune across the center with a bit hanging out. Fold cookie circle in thirds over fortune with flaps only slightly overlapping each other. Turn over and bring opposing sides together and pinch.
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
--Jack GIlbert
11.16.2009
i feel high im laughing so hard
have we all heard of FU Penguin? because i hadnt and now, an hour later having gone shamelessly through all the posts laughing til i peed a little all the way, i am a happier person.
its like dane cook ala "punch every bee in the face" crossed with cuteoverload. the combo is LETHAL.
example posts:
subject: I think you may have sat on your own face, clown monkey
Mandrill, I'd like to introduce you to a concept called restraint. Here's how it works: I don't make fun of the fact that you think chewing on a twig is cool, and you refrain from looking like your mom had sex with a box of Fruit Loops and made you. Honestly, of all the ridiculously insane monkeys out there, you have to be the craziest one of all. You're a primate, Mandrill, not a fucking Care Bear.
And as if it wasn't enough that you have a Van Gogh painting on your ass, you just had to get like an all-time amazing shampoo/blow out at the local salon. HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE IN THE WILD. It's so silky and planned, you are way too entirely ready for a night on the town in your rockin' unbuttoned shirt and puka shell necklace. Please stop your misguided search for a mate, wipe that shit off your face, and start eating a banana or something so other monkeys won't talk about you behind your back so much.
subject: Stay away from my family, Gerenuk
What is it about weird antelopes? Gerenuk, you are so adorable, yet so terrifying, like a Disney character that ends up torturing Bambi's mother while Bambi watches. You have a normal torso, but other than that I am creeped out by literally everything else about you.
It's the head that really gets me, though. You could have weirdly long legs, a bushy mohawk tail, a weirdly thin, long neck, and ears with pitchfork marks inside of them, and if you had a normal-sized head, I would be like, "Touché." But your head basically makes me want to write my congressman about starting a government agency to monitor your movements and make sure you haven't started any international money laundering networks to pay for your secret takeover of my brain. So just keep eating from that tree, hold your hooves where I can see them, and don't appear in any movies where you can talk in a funny voice, Gerenuk. I wouldn't want to have to do anything we'd both regret.
Subject: Never work with an alpaca
How come every time alpacas feel like the energy is low at work they have to do the worm from Labyrinth? Listen, Alapaca, obscure references to 80s cult movies are no excuse for your fuzzy hair, your bushy tail, your fucking face. And why are you always smiling? Are you purposefully trying to make me love you?
Well you and your whole species have tried to avoid the truth for a long time. You have poor dental hygiene, you look goofy when you get your hair cut, and your small talk is possibly the worst I have ever heard. NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT YOUR COMMUTE, ALPACA. You are a poor man's llama. So stop pretending you don't have legs and get back to work.
Go to the site. laugh your ass off. thank me later.
its like dane cook ala "punch every bee in the face" crossed with cuteoverload. the combo is LETHAL.
example posts:
subject: I think you may have sat on your own face, clown monkey
Mandrill, I'd like to introduce you to a concept called restraint. Here's how it works: I don't make fun of the fact that you think chewing on a twig is cool, and you refrain from looking like your mom had sex with a box of Fruit Loops and made you. Honestly, of all the ridiculously insane monkeys out there, you have to be the craziest one of all. You're a primate, Mandrill, not a fucking Care Bear.
And as if it wasn't enough that you have a Van Gogh painting on your ass, you just had to get like an all-time amazing shampoo/blow out at the local salon. HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE IN THE WILD. It's so silky and planned, you are way too entirely ready for a night on the town in your rockin' unbuttoned shirt and puka shell necklace. Please stop your misguided search for a mate, wipe that shit off your face, and start eating a banana or something so other monkeys won't talk about you behind your back so much.
subject: Stay away from my family, Gerenuk
What is it about weird antelopes? Gerenuk, you are so adorable, yet so terrifying, like a Disney character that ends up torturing Bambi's mother while Bambi watches. You have a normal torso, but other than that I am creeped out by literally everything else about you.
It's the head that really gets me, though. You could have weirdly long legs, a bushy mohawk tail, a weirdly thin, long neck, and ears with pitchfork marks inside of them, and if you had a normal-sized head, I would be like, "Touché." But your head basically makes me want to write my congressman about starting a government agency to monitor your movements and make sure you haven't started any international money laundering networks to pay for your secret takeover of my brain. So just keep eating from that tree, hold your hooves where I can see them, and don't appear in any movies where you can talk in a funny voice, Gerenuk. I wouldn't want to have to do anything we'd both regret.
Subject: Never work with an alpaca
How come every time alpacas feel like the energy is low at work they have to do the worm from Labyrinth? Listen, Alapaca, obscure references to 80s cult movies are no excuse for your fuzzy hair, your bushy tail, your fucking face. And why are you always smiling? Are you purposefully trying to make me love you?
Well you and your whole species have tried to avoid the truth for a long time. You have poor dental hygiene, you look goofy when you get your hair cut, and your small talk is possibly the worst I have ever heard. NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT YOUR COMMUTE, ALPACA. You are a poor man's llama. So stop pretending you don't have legs and get back to work.
Go to the site. laugh your ass off. thank me later.
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