Lightning Strikes

I bought three pairs of metallic shoes tonight. I was with my friend Ganda (who has an excellent blog called eatdrinkonewoman, here) after a large amount of chinese food at a pretty good place called Amazing 66 on Mott Street. The piece de resistance of the dinner was this stuffed chicken dish that had to be ordered a day in advance. We were sort of expecting a roasted chicken type deal, with a sticky rice stuffing. What ended up on the table was what you see pictured; it was essentially a hollowed-out chicken, deep fried, then stuffed with rice and sausage. So there was no actual chicken in the chicken. Just skin (very tasty, but still). What did they do with the meat, we wondered.
Afterward, we felt it necessary to walk to try to move some of the massive amount of food we'd just eaten. It was a beautiful cool early spring night, the sun was setting in a fiery sky to the west, and Tootsi Plohound was still open. Twenty minutes later I was carrying three pairs of shoes AND a bag of leftovers. I'm not sure if deep fried skin is good the next day.

In Las Vegas, Nothing is Real

I know that's not the most original observation, but Las Vegas does really confuse me as a place. Why do people like it? Where's the thrill? The connection to beauty? I went out there with Patty, Shelby and Jane from my pool team, and Romy, a friend of Jane and Shelby's (they're friends from high school, which also blows my mind, but that's another post).
One morning Shelby, Jane and I went for a walk on Las Vegas Blvd. Massive hotels up and down the street. Massive! I said idly, "I wonder how many hotel rooms there are here." The next day in the NYTimes there was an article on exactly that. The answer: 150,000 and counting. MGM is spending $7 BILLION on a new complex. There are more high cranes in that one little strip than there are on the isle of Manhattan. That might be a slight exxageration, but only slight.

This crazy technology

Why can I not figure out how to create a hyperlink in my blog so that I can link to the story about Eric (Houdini) Schwarz being exhumed by his heirs from his grave in Queens? Maybe it's the universe telling me not to disseminate things I think are ridiculous. If he was murdered, which will be determined by excruciatingly high-tech forensics, are we going to exhume his murderer too?

POSTSCRIPT: Figured it out. Blogger doesn't like Explorer. Here's the link. I hope.

Nostalgia for Garrison

i like nostalgia. In measured doses with some good archival photos, it's a way to BANAL CLICHE HERE honor the past. For about five seconds. Before you decide whether to go to Bread & Co. or Dishes for lunch. I'm sad that CBGB closed. I wish we hadn't torn down the old Penn Station. SoHo WAS better before the megastores moved in. But Garrison Keillor's grumpy Salon article stereotyping gay parents really just cemented my feeling about him as beyond recovery. I bet I'm like a lot of people in that I used to love him but now I'm just so disappointed. I have nostalgia for him.

There's already been gajillions of annoyed responses to him (Dan Savage went postal, others more measured. The thing that drives me batshit about his nostalgia is that it doesn't acknowledge any bad in the Beautiful, Golden-hued, All-White, Gas-Guzzling Past. It was all safe and warm and smelled like puppies and freshly-baked cookies! Yeah, if you were WHITE and STRAIGHT. And being MALE doesn't hurt.

It would help a lot if he acknowledged that he was gilding like a mofo. One little "I'm hardly the one to point fingers, I've been married three times," or a "granted, the era that I'm romanticizing was also the era of Selma, homophobia, the Korean War, the Cold War" would go a long way to making him less patronizing.

Cake for breakfast

As I write there is a pan of brown rice and broccoli sauteing on the stove. I'm going to crack an egg in it in a few minutes for a healthy morning scramble. I am coming off a weekend spent in Rabelaisian mode, eating (Lupa, Craftbar, Cookshop TWICE) and spending about a thousand dollars on clothes (but these ballet flats are the cutest things you have ever seen). The new austerity starts today.
I'd like to get more comfortable in my body between now and June 1. Notice I'm very carefully not calling it a diet or putting a number on the pounds lost goal. It used to be that I'd say "I need to lose 40 pounds" but that's the kind of goal that I'm sure psychologists have a special DSM number for. It's difficult to achieve and therefore can be used to beat myself up when I don't achieve it. It's always good to have a few unachieveable goals in reserve so that I can always be sure of having something to beat myself up with.
The truth is, I'd really rather have cake for breakfast. If it weren't the worst thing ever, I'd eat frosting three meals a day. Buttercream, specifically. I'm going to a bar mitzvah with Kperl this weekend and I'm sure it will be a Festival of Food, but I hope if I'm conscientious this week I'll feel less blimpy when I meet his massive, sprawling family.

Week 7 recap

One of my weekly pool team recaps, always written after midnight and a testament to the adrenaline rush of competition.
Again at Amsterdam, a pool hall with all the excitement and energy of your parents' basement. Bad food, watery drinks, ugly carpet, and a soundtrack that consisted of five hours of Jimi and Janis. At least in your parents' basement you could smoke pot or make out or listen to 2 Live Crew. Our opposing team was perfectly nice, even though the captain, Diego, was the epitome of uptight pool nerd, using a well-thumbed copy of a pool instruction manual as the backboard for his score sheet. It was worrisome at first--was he going to be an unbearable rule sadist? No, just a nervous tightass who became a little cuter as the night went on.
Jane won her first match handily, and then I lost mine (against a 4; I didn't have the mojo I had last week. Perhaps because Kperl was not there? And because I hadn't had a lovely practice session first?) Then Lisa, fueled by her nutritious dinner of martinis and olives, lost to Galan (Garlan? Gerlan?) and it has to be said that the Shot of the Night Award goes to Garlan who managed to get the cue ball around a seemingly impenetrable block; it defied nature, really. Doug dispatched his opponent, a 3, in his usual hill-hill nailbiter fashion (although I never doubted for a second) and Shelby played a strong but ultimately doomed game against another 3. We finished 2-3, which I think will leave us solidly in the middle of the pack, in the middle of the season (we have 8 more weeks of play).
Talking points:
> I seem to have acquired a fan in Garlan, which I'm a little concerned about. Kperl, if he stalks me, we may have to instigate some kind of "hostile boyfriend" plan.
> The fact that we're older now, and automatically uncool to teenagers, is somewhat distressing to Shelby.
> Lisa should not be allowed to take a drink into the women's room, but it was incredibly generous of her to pick up the bar tab, and wonderful to see her, and Carrie, as always.

Next week we are at home, thank god! But I will not be there as I have a birthday dinner, which leaves us down two players (Patty will still be in Asia). I can pick up the sheets on Sunday and messenger them to whomover on Monday, and Jane has Patty's cue.
See you!!
xoxo

Hello, it's me.

This is one of my favorite of me taken recently by Leana, who I work with. I look saucy, yet serious. Intelligent, yet not toooo annoying. Or at least that's what I choose to believe today.