Socially Distant Cuisine

Omelettes are such fun to make when you toss them off, as shown here. A fresh green salad, a glass of white wine, and an omelette make a lunch worth waiting the 30 seconds it takes to make one, and I say fie to those oenophilic spoilsports who insist that wine goes with neither eggs nor salads. Wine is essential with anything! Particularly omelettes for lunch. .Julia Child. How to Cook.

The Minimalist Meals in 10 Minutes or Less .

Today was my first full day in Massachusetts. I spent the morning getting lost again and again by car, while trying to run some errands. But as a result I made peace with the U-turn and bought a box of Jello Pudding Pops with French on it, so it was not all in vain. After the agitation of driving in circles all morning, this evening, I decided to go for a long walk, and just be. No iPod. No real place to go. I had a scoop of Coconut Butterfinger ice cream at Christina's, and looked in the windows of the billion furniture stores on Mass Ave, and ended up on a bench by the river to finish Philip Roth's Everyman and watch the sunset. As rowers sculled by and the water sparkled in the fading light, I read the following: "Why do you laugh sometimes at what I say," she asked him the second time he took her out to dinner, "why do you laugh when I'm being perfectly serious?" "Because you charm me so and you're so unaware of your charm." ...

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say The breath goes now, and some say, No: So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move, 'Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love. Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did and meant, But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent. Dull sublunary lovers' love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. But we by a love so much refined That our selves know not what it is, Inter-assur'd of the mind, Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss. Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are...

I've been hitting the collected nonfiction of Joan Didion pretty hard recently... good stuff: With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan Baker took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident." Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character , a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its...

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 ...

For reference, links to posts on Kindlingflames, my grad program's blog. Posts: 8/7/2006: Steamy Young Kozol 4/10/2006: Too Esoteric for Words? 3/20/2006: The Teacher/Policymaker Divide 3/15/2006: Marx's Efforts at Amhearst 3/14/2006: The "Right" Take on Higher Ed 3/13/2006: GWU to Ill Student: Withdraw or Face the Consequences 1/22/2006: Reverse Gender Gap, Continued 1/19/2006: I'll Admit, I'm Surprised 1/10/2006: Vocational Education Enigma 10/19/2005: NAEP 4th Grade Data Trends By Race 10/19/2005: Spinning Again, Spinning 9/28/2005: Proud of Their F 9/12/2005: Battle Metaphor: Revisited 8/29/2005: What Does Average Joe Know? 8/26/2005: Focus on HBCUs Places I left comments: 10/4/2005: Merit Pay for Teachers 11/7/2005: Million Dollar Question 1/3/2006: The Bell Curve Rises Again 1/6/2006: Right Plan, Wrong Reason 1/6/2006: FL Supreme Court Takes Away Choice 2/22/2006: A Different Type of Portfolio Assessment 3/16/2006: Testing and NCLB 5/22/2006: JennyD and...

Okay, so today two "news" articles have made me laugh out loud. First, Slate reports on the " Meatlifting " epidemic. Now that pseudophedrine is behind the pharmacy counter in many states, home meth chefs have been replaced by "aspirational meatlifters" as the scourge of the grocery industry. Who are they? Gainfully employed women between the ages of 35 and 54, who think that every once in awhile they deserve the filet mignon, and are willing to shove it into their purse. Second, the NYT home and garden section has a hilarious vignette of "MTV’s Real World with a slovenly cast of Democratic power brokers," Rep. George Miller's (D-Calif.) Capitol Hill crash pad. Apparently Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is known to kill rats with his bare hands, but they make Senator Schumer (D-NY) take care of the mice.

Just started reading my first for-fun book of the holiday season... The Russian Debutante's Handbook. I'm not very far in, but this paragraph, from one of the first pages, portends good things. "Janus-faced sandwich"? Delightful! Meanwhile, in the cluttered back office, junior clerk Vladimir Girshkin-the immigrant's immigrant, the expatriate's expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times-was going at it with the morning's first double-cured-spicy-soppressata-and-avocado sandwich. How Vladimir loved the unforgiving hardness of the soppressata and the fatty undertow of the tender avocado! The proliferation of this kind of Janus-faced sandwich, as far as he was concerned, was the best thing about Manhattan in the summer of 1993.

Really interesting article in NYT today about Rick Lowe, an artist living in Houston. His work with young single mothers, artists, and low-income renters boarders on urban renewal, and gentrification of a low-income neighborhood is following his work. Will be interesting to see whether the project (and its multi-constiutency coalition) can work to maintain some diversity in the neighborhood in the future. I liked the quote: “We can approach our lives as artists, each and every one of us,” he said. “It’s a choice people have. You don’t have to make houses the way people always have. If you choose to, you can make every action a creative act.”

Just read John Banville's The Sea . It was sad, meditative, and truly beautiful. Choice quotes: Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much a matter of accumulation, of taking things--new experiences, new emotions--and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self. But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentus change of all?

More at the NYT on the boy crisis. Why, I wonder, are they so obsessed with this topic? Good quote from Sara Mead at Education Sector , wondering whether this is a symptom of feminist backlash: I'm troubled by this tone of crisis. Even if you control for the field they're in, boys right out of college make more money than girls, so at the end of the day, is it grades and honors that matter, or something else the boys may be doing? Bottom line: being male is still an advantage in the workplace. How could this be? Oh, I've got it. Just combine the Slacker Boy Phenomenon with the Opt-out Revolution that NYT is equally happy to pump. Boys don't *need* to be high school and college all-stars... they'll still have great jobs, because so many of the well-qualified, high-achieving women simply don't want to work! I can't wait for the forthcoming article blaming the opt-out women for the slacker boys' choices to play video games 6 hours a day rather than stud...

Sharp gusts of wind tugged at the joints of her arms as if they wanted to pull her into the sky, up and away from the Oregon shore where she stood. The clouds were all shades of gray, ranging from pure white to angry, thunderclap dark. Her kite was a lonely patch of bright against the dark of sky, reflecting a bit of light from somewhere unknown as it was pulled here and there in the blustery fall. The dark sand was cold and firm against her bare toes, and as a bigger gust inflated the u-shaped patch of fabric, she dug deep into her spot, fixing herself to the ground as the kite pulled her arms further up to the sky. For a moment, she felt like a tree, her toe-roots strongly anchoring her to the earth, and her branch-arms reaching upwards, straining away from her body and its center. It was the kind of kite with two long strings and two yellow plastic handles, the model that professional tricksters can guide into figure-eights and impressive loops. She had tried these tricks at th...

I've been watching too much television. DVR and digital cable are evil, evil tools. The electronic guide makes searching the billion available channels far too simple, and with 300 channels, there's always something on. Luckily for me, the new set of roomies was down with scaling back to the "normal" cable... hopefully this will help me cure my addiction. Another proven cure: find a new hobby. Enter: piano playing. I have always wanted to learn to play the piano. I played the flute from fifth to tenth grade, and the oboe in 11th, so I'm not a complete musical novice. I just have never had the chance to learn piano. In a rush of inspiration, I bought a beautiful "electronic piano" (didn't these used to be called keyboards?!), a book of excruciating exercises (like taking your medicine--has to be good for you, right), and found a teacher. He is Russian and was trained at the Moscow Conservatory. We had our first meeting on Sunday, and based on...

I'm obsessed with n+1 . I read the pieces, and I want to talk about them... to spend time with ideas. One of my favorite things to do as an undergraduate (o, idealistic days of yore!) was to sit down to a mediocre dining hall dinner and talk with people about what they had learned or thought about that day... we were always full of ideas. Now, even though I am surrounded by people just as smart, we spend our days thinking about functional things. I should cancel old credit cards I haven't used in awhile. I should call the power company to switch over the bill to my name. I should book a rental car for my trip to California. I miss the luxurious days filled with thoughts beyond the mundane. Until I can live those again, I'll be a vouyer via n+1. *This issue, there was an inventory of "American Writing Today." From this, I realized that I am well-versed in short stories, but functionally illiterate in contemporary poetry. So, I have resolved to read more p...

Great (if long) piece in the NYT magazine about the implications of a digital universal library... this still seems very sci-fi to me, but the possibilities for reorganizing knowledge are amazing. What if all books were linked together in a web like the internet? I can imagine that it would be incredibly useful, but also a bit overwhelming. Sometimes, as it is, I get sidetracked from a journal article by the footnotes... imagine what would happen if you could link directly to the books/articles/pages that were referenced! Would I ever be able to finish a complete thought?

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, ...