Parisian Flashback

This morning Dan drew my attention to a post from the Frugal Traveler about a week living in an apartment in Paris, and compared it to our Thanksgiving weekend there in 2003. It's fitting that today I would indulge in such nostalgia because Pablo, our long-lost-to-kilts-and-PhDdom friend, is descending upon our household this evening for another brief weekend. So without further ado, I present a few shots from Paris, back in the day. (Confession: The night these photos were taken, the four of us -- Dan's now ex girlfriend was there too -- bought four bottles of wine. Devon decided she didn't want any. So we took it upon ourselves to finish the rest. I think I could probably hack a bottle-plus these days, but back then I most definitely could not, and the night did not exactly end well for me. However, I have survived to post the photos on the Internet.)

The three of us. Check out my sweet PJ pants.

Possibly one of the most ridiculous photos of these two ever taken.

Shadowy me and Dan.

All IKEA, all the time!

If it's rampion you want, rampion you shall have.

Ok. All my cooking blogs have been talking about ramps this past week. I have not read too deeply into any of the posts to find out what ramps are, but apparently ramps have like the shortest season of any edible, although I maintain that my inability to get a good apricot tops this whole ramp season business. (I also exaggerate, I have no idea how long ramp season is compared to other seasons, but people are freaking out about ramps, so I assume it's short.) Anyway, I also have no idea how ramps taste. Are they like leeks? Onions? They look like leeks and onions... I think. A wikipedia search could easily solve this problem but I prefer to keep it all mysterious because a) I've never ever seen ramps in a store near me and therefore they are pretty irrelevant to my life and b) whenever I hear the word "ramp," all I can possibly think about is this episode of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" with a "Fractured Fairy Tale" bit where Rapunzel's mother wants to eat rampion.

Anyway, so the upshot of all this is that I'd rather tie my concept of "ramps" to an obscure cartoon than find out what it actually is. At least for the sake of blogging about it, and now I'm going to look that shit up because now I'm wondering if ramps and rampion are the same thing. Or if the latter even exists. Plus! I have the immense pleasure of presenting you with this, the product of my YouTube search efforts, and truly awesome:



(Just so you know, ramps are wild leeks that taste kind of like onions and garlic, and rampion is some rando flower in Europe.)

Really stretching back into memory now...

Something someone said at work reminded me to look this up. This poster was up in my dentist's office when I was growing up (it is probably still there), and I read it over and over again at each of my semi-annual teeth cleanings. It's totally cheesy, but something about it still resonates with me. Maybe it's the simplicity of the message (I especially like the parts I bolded below), and a little trick to its rhythm that makes it memorable, or maybe it's just the memory I have of it and of sitting in the slightly-too-cool room in the squeaky leather of the dentist's chair...

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.

These are the things I learned:
Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Road Trip America

I went into Dan's and my old roadtrip blog, just to see how we'd made the banner (I improved upon that method, I think), and had a moment of major nostalgia. That was such a fantastic trip. I wish I could repeat it. Whenever I end up changing jobs/careers/life, I am going to make sure to take some serious time off and travel around the country for a while. I keep talking to people who say that about the world -- they want to buy one of those worldwide tickets and backpack everywhere. And that sounds fun, but I still don't feel like I understand my own country. I want to travel the rest of the world, but I also want to go to the Deep South and back to New Orleans and out to the coast of Maine and finally actually see Yellowstone and Seattle and De Smet, South Dakota. I feel like we have such a great heritage here, and sometimes I forget about it, about the people who built up this country (yeah, I realize they also slaughtered the native population, but forgive me my moment of historical inaccuracy/ignorance/willful nostalgia), who traveled across it on horse and on foot. I like that we have such a large scope, that we are so big, and that our land is so diverse, and I think sometimes we forget that because we're too busy bitching about George Bush and evangelicals and SUVs.

Odds and ends

This sort of made me nostalgic for the Midwest that I've never known... Not sure why, I just kind of feel like I owe them something since my family was "originally" from there (not Minnesota though).

If you are a "Top Chef" fan, here's a pretty weird article about Padma Lakshmi. I did not know she went to school in La Puente! That is like 20 minutes from my house! Also she just sort of strikes me as being a bit all over the place. I still believe all the rumors about her being a total stoner.

Yesterday, I went to Barnes & Noble with my aunt. I was picking out Christmas cards (I have a LONG list of people to send cards to this year), and I was considering buying a pack featuring some popular cartoon characters (can't tell you which; that would spoil the card, wouldn't it?). Then I said to myself, "Or, is this too commercial?" Oh, the irony. Christmas is so weird.

I have this inexplicable want for this outfit -- I think it's the Swedishness of it all (to bring my odds and ends full circle!!)

Mom and I counted our top rated books on Goodreads.com. I had around 110 books rated 5 stars -- of those, only 35 of them were adult books. I don't know what that means exactly. Perhaps I'm too repressed and adult-y to give books 5 stars anymore. The only one I've given 5 to is "The Road," which I initially gave 4 and then I rethought it.

How I spent my Thanksgiving vacation (so far)... part 1

Well, today is what I would call a productive day. The boring stuff first: I woke up after 9.5 glorious hours of sleep, ate Grape Nuts (this matters to me: I love Grape Nuts), read 100-ish pages of The Satanic Verses. Around one in the afternoon, I embarked on the true adventure of the day. I had promised my dad that while I was home for this week, I would help him go through the boxes and boxes and boxes of junk and irreplaceable treasures which are currently intermingled in our garage. Armed with Barrel Aged Old Rasputin, we did this from around 1pm until 8pm, with a break for dinner. Seriously, it was one of those situations where it just keeps coming, like in cartoons when things pour out of closets. One box gone through just led to another... I was alternately disgusted, amazed, ashamed, you get the picture.

Notable Discoveries:
-Birkenstocks I wore for about a year in high school exclusively (I have this distinct memory of wearing them with green cargo pants and this pink peasanty top my Mom had bought for me). I wore them for the rest of the day, because I forgot flip-flops in my packing rush.
-A make-up bag literally FULL of Barbie hairbrushes. I would estimate that there are around 40 or 50 of them. We kept this.
-A box intended for 3.5 floppy disks, labeled and containing "Smooth Rocks." I'm not sure why. I almost kept this, except that I realized the likelihood of me bringing it up to San Francisco and using it for gardening/plants in vases was approximately 1%.
-Pogs
-Two Tamagotchis, lifeless, obviously

Lessons Learned:
-Do not keep stupid shit. I found about 4 decks of cards with less than 52 cards in each. Why did I keep these? I am not sure.
-I have a postcard problem. I know for a fact that I have 2 full boxes of postcards in my apartment. I found two more boxes here -- one from the Washington, D.C. trip I took in 8th grade, one from my trip to Spain in 12th grade. TONS of freaking postcards.
-It is true what they say about Americans and waste, or perhaps just about modern people and waste. We threw out so much junk -- stuff so useless that we can't even give to Goodwill. It's really quite frightening. Some of it was stuff that I know I never used -- things that I'm sure we got for Christmas one year and were excited about and then never touched. For example: A calligraphy set. A paper airplane set from Eddie Bauer (I don't know why). A Chinese brush painting set. A mosaic concrete tile set. A make-your-own Native American Moccasins set. A macrame friendship bracelets set. I realized today that we have around 25 Beanie Babies, and I would like to point out that we were definitely less into that whole trend than most other families in our community. (See below for my treatise on stuffed animals.) So think about the sheer weight of all that stuff in the landfill. Terrifying.
-All that said, stuff can tell a story. For example, in one box, I found a deck of Tarot cards and a Henna painting kit. Can you guess what phase of my life I was in then? (Hint: It was closely associated with the Birkenstock period.) I found the headdress from a costume from a Toyon special dinner I went to with Amelia and Laurel. I found signs from "Slappin' Ass Day" -- motto was, I believe, "Make a friend, slap an ass" and Cristina can really explain more. I found lots of cocktail umbrellas and origami paper and jewelry wire from the good ol' Stanford Craft Guild Days.

All in all, it was actually fun, although daunting by the end, when we had lots of "keeper" stuff out in piles, utterly disorganized still, and no place to put the boxes of yet-unsorted stuff. Also: We have yet to go through any of the stuffed animals. I am paralyzed in the face of stuffed animals. They look so pathetic when you give them away. (Apparently sympathy for inanimate objects is a major symptom of Asperger's. Just a side note.) The aforementioned Beanie babies really present me with a traumatic choice -- I feel like I can't give away one Beanie and keep another, even if the kept one is something rad and weird like a buffalo or a ferret (yes, I have both!! Who am I!!) and the other is something boring like a dog. We will see. When Lucie is here tomorrow we are going to go through all the stuffed animals together, and I have a feeling her sentimentality is not as strong as mine. I'm bracing myself.

I love LA?

I flew from San Francisco to LA today, home for a whole week for Thanksgiving. Words cannot express how thrilled I am to be somewhere I have almost no friends, where I can just sit around. It's sort of sad that I have to leave town in order to really force myself to relax and get sleep and watch those Netflix that have been sitting around since September. But, here I am.

Leaving a week early for thanksgiving as an "adult" somehow reminded me of that first Thanksgiving weekend during college, when leaving those friends you'd known for two months felt absolutely traumatic and wrenching. Breaks always felt like that back then. Now, life is much faster paced... things move so much faster, it's almost like we don't have time to feel wrenched. Either that, or we're just more mature.

Sometimes when I'm talking to someone who is leaving town for a bit, or when I'm leaving, or what have you, I end up talking like we're not going to see or communicate with each other for a painful or at least inconvenient amount of time, but the reality is that we are all online again within minutes. Or sending text messages. Or something. I guess when I was a freshman in school, I didn't have a phone, and I didn't sit around on IM over break - at least not all the time. So communication was less frequent over breaks back then. Because I have this weird, visceral memory for temperatures and lighting, I am currently flashing back to winter break freshman year. I remember talking to Pablo online, and I remember an e-mail from Miguel who had just watched Bridget Jones and, and this should speak to the fact that it was freshman year and I know weird people, felt like the "Nice guys don't kiss like that -- oh yes they fucking do" was really validation of his entire "nice guy" shtick. I feel like it was cool that year here, and sort of blue and shadowy. I think I remember someone calling me on New Year's Eve... which baffles me a bit, partly because I can't remember who.

It's very upsetting to me that my entire, embarrassing, awesome Diaryland.com diary has disappeared. It documents not only those first breaks, but my entire last year of high school -- a formative moment for anyone I should think.

As usual, upon my arrival to LA I felt like I was coming into a bit of a foreign land, and I felt as though I hadn't been here in ages, although the reality was I was here in September, for a weekend. It is a strange place -- it looks different from everywhere else. The smog is sort of weirdly futuristic feeling, like: post-apocalyptic. And I'm saying that on a pretty clear day. I was thinking about this today -- I don't think I couldn't ever live here again, even though I love San Francisco and the Bay Area. It's more like -- if I lived here, I would become a worse, or at least lazier, less challenged, version of myself. It's kind of easy to live here, everything is at your fingertips, everything comes to you, everything in LA takes 20 minutes (to quote Cher Horowitz' dad), you drive everywhere. The sad thing is that I'm kind of prone towards taking the easier option, possibly in part because I grew up here, and also just cause I think I can be kind of lazy, or stressed enough not to consider the possibilities that may not be totally obvious, whatever it is. So I can see it being easy to settle into a routine here, but I wouldn't want to do that.

Still, it's nice for a holiday. All I've done thus far since arriving here is help (er, I trimmed green beans and drank some chardonnay in the kitchen) make dinner, eat dinner, watched on DVR the winning play Stanford made against USC earlier this fall (it was so awesome, really -- I mean, the sheer horror on the faces of the SC fans), watched three episodes of Jeopardy Tournament of Champions, and stand/sit around talking to my parents. This is exactly what I want my vacation to be.

And, since its now 10:58, I believe it's my bedtime. This is great.

Veronica Mars nostalgia

I only know two people who have been disappointed in Veronica Mars after they started watching it. Seriously, it's so good. I delayed watching it for ages and then finally after about four friends told me I just had to, I borrowed it and promptly became obsessed. It's just really good and clever and in one show there are about 8 different genres. Sadly, it got canceled, but the director/cast made a few "mini pilots" showing what the fourth season could have been like - where Veronica is now in the FBI. As Entertainment Weekly put it, it's kind of like Alias, without Rambaldi, and therefore it is pretty damn awesome. I miss this show. It was such a great viewing experience - the kind you turn down invitations for. (I mean that.)

Part One:


Part Two:


Believe it or not, I'm going to bed right now. I am very excited about sleep.

A manifestation of the will to quote things...

"I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray."

"On the way out again, I suddenly saw everything clearly: Sigmund Freud painting cocaine onto his septum, the rising uproar of the past hour and a half, the idling Audi full of rash behavior that lay ahead, the detonating summer; and because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second."

"I felt another of those sudden onslaughts of love, the desire to run to them and embrace them both, to be seen in their company, to live my life among men and women who dressed up like this and then went down the sidewalk like cinema kings."

"This bar was esteemed for the quality or at least the profusion of the graffiti in both its gentlemen's ad ladies' rooms, which were rarely washed or repainted. I read this exhange:
WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT WOMEN, ANYWAY?
And, lower:
HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES
Then:
PLUS THERE'S THE MYSTERY OF LEARNING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD
A fourth man had concluded:
AND OF EVERYTHING THAT'S CONCEALED UNDER HER CLOTHES"

"That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver's head.
'Hey, bus driver,' I said. 'Can I smoke?'
'May I,' said the bus driver.
'I love you,' I said."

"How about 'a manifestation of the will-to-bigness.' "

"When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness -- and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything."

--The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

MSCL

I need more free time, for a lot of reasons, but one such reason is that I need to re-watch a lot of TV shows. I've been going through this weird (for lack of a better word) parental thing with Justin because he's watching The Office from the beginning, and I'm loaning the DVDs to him, watching occasional episodes, and receiving reports on the ones he watches by himself. (Not actually as formal as it sounds.) So I'm of course feeling this pang of nostalgia for the first watching of the Office, an experience really that no one can understand until they've watched them all and are witnessing someone else do it for the first time (hence my use of the word parental). I'm also feeling the need to re-watch all the Wes Andersen movies, because I saw The Darjeeling Limited a couple of weeks ago, and I need to re-read and re-watch Wonder Boys, because I recommended the book to my friend Peattie and now can't remember anything about it. This is a disturbing trend given how much new media I have that I'm behind on - my Netflix are gathering dust, I am still not done with Season 1 of Deadwood, and if I delay anymore on watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer my friend Santiago might just kill me. Plus there's all the books I need to read and the New Yorkers and Believers threatening to pile up... it's a problem. Anyway, with all of this it's a really bad time for the release of the updated, apparently awesome boxed set of My So-Called Life, which I already own in old, apparently not awesome boxed set form but, well, the point is my set isn't awesome, and now that I think about it I do kind of want the awesome set. I also want to watch My So-Called Life again, and get my nostalgia on for the first time I watched that, which was sophomore year in college, while I was finishing crocheting an afghan, and I stayed up until like 4am on a school night alone in the lounge watching MSCL and crocheting in the dark. It was awesome.

Just occurred to me: Is it wrong that I have nostalgia for watching TV?