Socially Distant Cuisine

His goal in life was to be an echo The type of sound that floats around and then back down Like a feather But in the deep chrome canyons of the loudest Manhattans No one could hear him Or anything Wilco. Hummingbird.

Robert Hass Many are making love. Up above, the angels in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold rivers. They glance down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy-- it must look to them like featherless birds splashing in the spring puddle of a bed-- and then one woman, she is about to come, peels back the man's shut eyelids and says, look at me, and he does. Or is it the man tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater? Anyway, they do, they look at each other; two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious, startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet lubricious glue, stare at each other, and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically like lithographs of Victorian beggars with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags in the lewd alleys of the novel. All of creation is offended by this distress. It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes, ...

Frank Bidart up or down from the infinite C E N T E R B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time the voice in my head said LOVE IS THE DISTANCE BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE * then I saw the parade of my loves those PERFORMERS comics actors singers forgetful of my very self so often I desired to die to myself to live in them then my PARENTS my FRIENDS the drained SPECTRES once filled with my baffled infatuations love and guilt and fury and sweetness for whom nail spirit yearning to the earth * then the voice in my head said WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS REVOLT AGAINST IT WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE 1984

That man he had no resistance in him Even as they brought him to his death I resist every moment that I have I fear the future I rewrite my past Maybe it's peace that lies beyond fear and desire Maybe it's peace that's calling me home If I pass through the doorway of fear and desire Maybe it's peace that will welcome me home I knew there must be a way for the finding Though I feared it could not be of this world If I worry or speak ill of you I'll just say a prayer or two And my soul will remind me I'm still loving you Chorus ©2004 Heaton/Marotta

This morning on the Orange Line train to work, Singing Metro Man made an appearance. If you ride the Orange or the Blue Line, you may know of him...I’ve heard from other passengers that he’s been around for years, though I can only confirm the last three. He’s an elderly Asian gentleman, well-dressed, who steps onto the train right before the doors close. Once the train begins to move, he clears his throat, says a polite but insistent “Excuse me,” and begins to sing a hymn from his songbook. The effect is eerie. The silent morning train, everyone still half-asleep before their first cup of coffee. The whoosh of the tunnel. The man’s gentle, earnest voice singing a capella (he’s not half bad) about how we should trust in Jesus. As he reached his crescendo this morning, I half expected the train to explode or something—the moment just felt very... cinematic. Luckily, life is not a movie, and after the song was done, he wished us all a good day, exited the train and moved to the n...

The most e-mailed article in the NYT for 2 days running? A ruminition on Mac N Cheese, with a couple of recipes. I tried the one for Creamy Macaroni and Cheese tonight-- and Lord! So good. Just to test the recipe, I followed the directions to the letter... it was delicious, though I think I could have easily included about 50% more pasta for all the sauce it made. It was super easy (no yukky white sauce to make/burn, don't need to precook the pasta), and amazing. It probably wouldn't taste that different with lowfat cottage cheese and 1% or skim milk... next time, I'll try that.

Everyone talks about The Unbearable Lightness of Being-- it's one of those novels that's considered a character trait. What I mean is that, if a writer gives his character The Unbearable Lightness as a favorite novel, we're supposed to understand something profound about the character. Anyway, I've finally gotten around to reading it, and I understand the hype. It's beautiful. This symmetrical composition--the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end--may seem "novelistic" to you, and I'm willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a perma...

Today was gorgeous... I took a long walk down around The Mall this afternoon, and it was incredible. I took my parents down there, and they went to the Museum of the American Indian and the Botanical Gardens, while I went to the Hirshhorn. I love the Hirshhorn. Their "Gyroscope" exhibition of the permanent collection is always changing, and the Fall 2005 presentation recently went up. There was an Ann Hamilton installation piece that is new since the last time I was there; it was pretty amazing. It consisted of a room papered floor to ceiling in probably a thousand little pieces of parchment paper, each covered in writing... snippets of story, little confessonal memoir bits. Each one was attached to the wall by a pushpin at the top, and the paper kind of rustled and fluttered because a fan was set up to blow across the room. The floor was similarly tiled with the pieces, though these were under a layer of beeswax, and couldn't be read. I was just really moved by the...

In the past 2 days, I've had probably 5 different people forward me Maureen Dowd's Sunday piece from the NYT. I think she's partly doing the thing that the NYT is wont to do in their social commentary--they see a few instances of something and take it as a broader trend. Did you read the piece she refers to about Ivy League women wanting to be mothers? The reporter interviewed three Yale roommates for that one. I question whether it's really a trend... I talked about it with several friends from college, and we don't think it was at Wellesley. We are certainly concerned about how we're going to balance work and family, but I didn't know many who outright wanted to get married to a rich man and stay home with the kids all day. Maybe Wellesley's not the norm on that one, though. That said, I think the stuff she says about dating is interesting... she's written a lot in the last year about how men only want passive, unaccomplished women, and she...

Okay, so I was spurred by the Didion love to go read some stuff I wrote early in college... so cute! Was I ever that young? Earlier in the evening, she twisted the top off of her first bottle of Bud Light self-consciously, as if everyone was watching. In her mind, this room of strangers just might base their opinions of her on whether or not she could gracefully complete the task. It’s the kind of insecurity that plagues a novice drinker’s mind as she tries to embrace the complicated and nuanced practice of social alcohol consumption. Judging by the ease with which those around her were rid of their lids, she was obviously surrounded by people who had been acquainted with the process longer than she. A guy across the room, a football player type wearing a muscle shirt, had used the skin of his forearm to grip and twist the cap, a move that both impressed and repulsed her. How many beers did he have to drink in order to learn that one? No doubt, many nights of slovenly drunkenness ...

So sad-- just realized yesterday that Joan Didion is doing a reading of her new book at the Folger Shakespeare Library, but that it's sold out. I called to see if I could show up for some standing room love, but no dice. I'm hoping that someone will answer my Craigslist ad for a ticket, but something tells me that the bulk of the PEN/Faulkner Society crowd doesn't use CL. I'm an underliner-- when I'm reading, there are always passages or sentence I want to mark to note... for their beauty, or their truth. When I'm reading Didion, I want to underline everything. Freshman year in college, in my Women and Memoir class, we read Goodbye to All That , an essay she wrote in her early 30's about living in New York as a young woman. Choice bits below in an homage to Didion, and to being young: Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first perso...

My elementary school, Centennial Elementary in Mt. Vernon, WA, was featured in the PBS special, Making Schools Work . They were chosen because of pretty incredible increases in student performance as a Success For All school. Eduwonk has an interview with the filmmaker . A lot has changed at Centennial Elementary since I was a student there. Though Mt. Vernon is a rural community, Centennial had a largely white, middle class student body back in the day. Now, it has a significant population of children of former migrant workers, 35% English Language Learners, and 75% qualifying for free and reduced lunch. But looking at the school's website, one thing struck me as constant: the teachers. Several of my former teachers were still teaching there: Mrs. Raschko, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Prange, who taught me 4th grade, and Mrs. Moore, who I had in 3rd. Several other teachers also worked in the school when I was a student. I remember these teachers, and the things I learne...

New NAEP data out today. NCES doesn't have up any charts of trend data by race, so I used the NAEP Data Explorer to make my own. Posted them, along with some thoughts over on Kindling Flames . Call me a nerd if you like, but man... do you see any improvements since 1990?

The Times today talks about the "new" popularity of beer pong . Total ridiculousness: The recent tournament in Philadelphia was sponsored by Bing Bong, a company that sells portable beer pong tables for $150. In the past year, Bing Bong has sold more than 2,000. "It was something a lot of people needed," said Tom Schmidt, the 27-year-old chief executive. He added that he wanted to turn the game into a socially acceptable barroom sport, like darts. Now, I love an occasional drinking game as much as the next girl. But one of the main points of these things is that they're completely irrepsonsible. Your future hangover is totally in the hands of fate and the "skill" of increasingly drunk teammates and opponents. Yeah, Schmidt. Beer pong is some good, clean fun--can't wait to transport my Bing Bong table to my next family Thanksgiving. I also loved Anheuser-Busch sponsoring "Bud Pong" promotions, where they supposedly encourage hos...

The arrival of Fall always makes me reassess my life. Maybe it's something about the life cycle of a student--it's the beginning of a new year, and spending some time on self-evaluation and goal-setting is well advised. Or maybe it's that it's starting to get cold out, and all I want to do is sit on the couch and drink cocoa and stare off into space, which gives me plenty of time to think. Either way, I've been in an introspective mood recently. I've come to a few conclusions about my life. Ask me about them, and I'll tell ya. This mood was assisted by reading Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel. It was great. It was outlandish enough and true enough and sympathetic enough... just right. Highly recommended. I started trying to write a review of it, and realized that it's been WAY too long since I took an English class. And most of what I wanted to say, was said already by Michael Agger in Slate last week, anyway. I'm not about to become a Democ...

After attending a brown bag lunch on optimizing Outlook Express, I'm spending some time cleaning out work e-mail this afternoon, and came across this gem, which was prompted by a lunchtime conversation a couple of months ago. I thought it should be saved for posterity: Baby corn really IS immature corn. But baby carrots are, as some knew, long skinny carrots chopped into little pieces . Ask yourself this: how did you ever live without that knowledge?

Reading this post was like deja vu for me! I took a class just like this as an undergrad... (surprise, surprise) in the education department. I made it through that semester by taking solace in two facts: (a) I was also taking The Sociology of Education in the soc department, with a professor who actually taught the material and (b) most of us in my little liberal arts bubble wouldn't end up teachers, thus wouldn't have an opportunity to inflict such pedagogical torture on kids who needed to actually learn stuff. It would appear that Newoldschoolteacher has neither of those to help her out. God save her. The professor in my class repeatedly insisted that we were a "democratic classroom" and that she wasn't any more of an expert on the material than us. WHAT? I paid good money for that course, money that employed her to teach me. I hope that she was more expert on the material than I was! Also, when I "took responsibility for myself" and said that ...

Last Friday, a project I've been working on for the past year released 2 reports. All the hoo-hah around getting it out the door and following up meant that I haven't had time to post about it until now. But it's pretty exciting! It's titled Who's Left Behind: Immigrant Children in High and Low LEP Schools . We break public elementary schools into 3 categories: those with high concentrations of LEP kids, those with fewer LEP kids, and those with none, and compare across the three types to examine differences in student populations, teacher and principal training, and special services and programs. For a summary of findings, check out the press release , or go to the whole thing . The demographic profile, which was done by the immigration group here, also has really interesting info here . This project really turned me on to the wonders of the Schools and Staffing Survey. SASS is a Department of Ed data set compiled from a group of nationally-representative s...

Yes, the life of an undergrad. So filled with useless information! N: there's a cricket somewhere in my room N: it's loud, and i can't find it E: it's a male E: as far as we know, only males sing E: he's looking for a lovely lady E: using trills and chirps that make up the calling song E: with a 5 kHz frequency, and an interchirp rate of 30ms

Anyone who's ever been to a company potluck should really appreciate this . The funniest thing is that I find myself making bizarre casseroles and jello salads for these events too, despite the fact that I'm a pretty good cook. What is it about lunch in Conference Room 5A that makes me reach for the cream of mushroom soup?