Socially Distant Cuisine

There were concert halls in Europe to which Father Booty would soon return, opera houses where music molded entire audiences into a single grieving or celebrating heart, and where the applause rang like a downpour... But could they feel as they did here? Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty-half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows. With passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one... and They were falling back into familiarity, into common ground, into the dirty gray. Just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation, composite of contradictions, easy principles, arguing about what they half believed in or even what they didn't believe in at all, desiring comfort as much as raw austerity, authenticity as much as playacting, desiring the cosiness of family as much as to abandon it forever. Cheese and chocolate they wanted, but also to kick all these bloody foreign things out. A w

On my way to work today, a song I have listened to probably a thousand times played on my iPod... for some reason, though, it seemed like I actually heard the lyrics for the first time: I guess we're all the same, we walk our days looking for a little more fire And we all sometimes have to sit on our hands We try to hold ourselves together We try to talk about the weather When all we really want to do is take each other by the throat and say Won't you dream my dream with me Don't you leave it here drying on my pillow Won't you just soak a little up for me Won't you give it just a safe place to go It just needs a little safe place to go .Kris Delmhorst. Moscow Song. Don't worry, I'm not going to strangle anyone. But this struck me as a particularly pretty sentiment in the unseasonably pretty morning, as I walked past the office buildings and construction sites of the city.

This is a really interesting paragraph from a generally interesting article (entitled Babes in the Woods ) by Catilin Flanagan in this month's Atlantic : The primary engine of MySpace's stupendous growth isn't the Internet or the additional opportunities for cattiness it provides, but the fathomless narcissism of the young. There's no more ardent devotee of a MySpace profile than its creator, lovingly adjusting the lighting on the perfect self-portrait, changing the song that serenades it, the graphics that surround it. The page can speak broadly to others, but others are almost beside the point; every profile is a sonnet to the self. Today's girls spend hours looking at their MySpace profiles, fiddling and tinkering with them—much as I once sat in front of my vanity mirror, holding my hair up and letting it fall, smiling one way and then the other. For girls, the powerful need to be alone in their bedrooms—dreaming, writing in diaries, looking at themselves in the