Vagina Toadstools

Thoughts for a Sunshiney Morning has something very special for you today: a guest-poster, Ivy Wilson! (Found here and here). This post involves Germany, yeast, and mushrooms. Or, as Ivy Wilson deems them, Teutonic Toadstools:

Vagina Toadstools

I’m not a great baker, but I know that bread is supposed to rise.  Now that I live in Germany and no longer have a full time job, I spend more of my day cooking that I did back in America.  When my bread dough didn’t rise, I blamed myself for getting the cheaper of the two yeast brands at the super market.  I promptly returned to the grocery store and purchased the more expensive yeast.  It was made by a well-known, high quality German brand, but it was dead too.

I consulted my most Martha Stewart of German women friends.  “Oh – the dry yeast in Germany is crap,” she said.  “Go for the fresh yeast.”  I don’t know what fresh yeast is, so I said to hell with this nonsense and baked a chicken instead.

But, there was one place that day in Germany where yeast was alive and well.  It had become itchily apparent that there was an overgrowth of yeast in my females.  I’d had a few yeast infections before, and I was well aware of the symptoms.  So – what’s the big deal – you might think.  Surely women in Germany have vaginas that occasionally get a little yeasty.  Surely they have drug stores in Germany.  Just go to one and buy a German yeast infection treatment.  Well, not so fast.  

Peak Peak

So, I went on quite a grueling hike up Picacho Peak today (if you click the link, you'll see that there was a Civil War re-enactment going at the same time! Did you know that Westernmost skirmish battle of the Civil War was fought at Picacho Peak? We didn't see the re-eanacment but we did occasionally hear cannon fire during the hike). *Also, apparently "Picacho" means "peak" in Spanish, so the name can be translated as "Peak Peak." **Also, apparently, the whole Peak is a lava flow, but scientists have never been able to figure out where the volcano that exploded the lava was (clearly, aliens involved somehow, no?).


I've passed Picacho Peak numerous times; it's one of those landmarks that indicates you're leaving Tucson for real when you head on a road trip. It's right by the similarly iconic Ostrich Farm and it's not far away from the prison sign that says "Do not stop for hitchhikers."


I thought that after a shower I was gonna collapse into a heap. But instead, I find myself looking at pics and movies from the hike and wanting to post them (admittedly, I am doing this lying in bed, from which I shall not stir). I haven't even got all the photos that my friend N. took, but I the ones I have are so GOLD that I MUST post them. 


This one should not make laugh as much as it does, given that it's me (trying) to be funny. 

Here are the boning flies referenced:

Things That Are Sad and Signs of Life in Norway to Cheer You up

Hey, I reviewed the Spring 2011 Virginia Quarterly Review for The Review Review. 

Here, I detail my feeling-y feelings about reviewing literary reviews and problems I sometimes encounter therein.

After the review was all done and published, I found about this, which I had had no idea of before. It makes things in my review echo uncomfortably -- but also, not really. Blergh. I'm glad I didn't know about any of that beforehand. THINGS THAT ARE SAD.

I guess, for once my obliviousness helped me out.

To cheer you up....pictures?

Signs of Life: Montreal Edition (Really Old Pictures of Not-Food)

I made another (terrible) attempt at Paintbrushing some pictures, with all due acknowledgment of my rip off inspiration by my girl crush fellow blogger hyperbole and a half.

This is a building near(ish) this guy's apartment in Montreal:

Seems fairly inoffensive. But let's look more closely at the French, shall we?

Sauna mixte = Sexy times!

Extermination = BUGS!

So let's look at this picture again:

Meattreal

Montreal, Part Deux!

My basic reaction to Montreal:

These hearts are outside the Fine Arts (sorry "Beaux Arts") Museum (Musee des) where this guy and I saw an exhibition of contemporary surrealist art called "The world is blue like an orange" (which we went to full of skepticism but it turned out to be awesome).

So I'm doing post #2 about Montreal, even though this guy claims not to read anybody's blog, as they are all "masturbatory." I tried to explain that my blog is not masturbatory but rather narcissistic and insecure. Subtle but distinct difference.

It Lives!

I have a short story up on The Fiddleback. It's called "Witness My Hand and Seal" and you can read it here.

And because you should never say that I didn't give you nothin', here's some pictures of Montreal Food.

It's Poutine! This type of Poutine is called L'eau a la Bush. I don't know if that means it subscribes to the Bush Doctrine or what. This Poutine comes with steak, oignons, and champignons. That's steak, onions, and mushrooms, for those not familiar with all that Frenchy Froggy Montrealy funny business:

Poutine is now such A Thing that they serve it at Burger King all over Canada. I saw this sign in at the bus station in Barrie, Ontario:

This is Poutine a la Mexican, and it is not from Burger King, but rather from the Secret Menu at Frite Alors:

Yeah, that's Salsa. Viva la Mexican et la Poutine!*

*I'm from everywhere.

Poutine looks really gross, huh? And I went to eat it after 1) Eating a smoked meat sandwich; 2) Then going to hot yoga. So I was like, "Non! Non! Le Gravy and le cheese curds on les frites make me sick! I desire only le side salad!"

Then I took a bite and discovered that it was, as this guy puts it, "Not un-tasty." Quite the reverse, actually.

More on smoked meat sandwiches, Montreal, thoughts, and sunshiney mornings, coming soon!

Nature Taunts Me

Hey, I'm up at my family's cabin in Canada, so I'll probably be out of touch for a bit, as we really like to rough it when we're up here--ha ha, I'm just kidding, there's high-speed internet. It's actually nicer than any apartment I've ever lived in on my own.

My brain failed to process the fact that May in Canada does not = warm. I also didn't check the weather because I don't do things like "check" the "weather." I optimistically packed:

1) Two swimsuits

2) Two pairs of sandals and a nice pair of dress shoes (?).

3) A bunch of tank tops.

4) Several skirts and light dresses.

So I've been going around in sweatpants, a sweatshirt I found here, and old fuzzy slippers.

I also just wanted to share:

The night before I left for my trip, I dreamed that my bedroom had a swimming pool in it. Cockroaches started coming into my room and took over, draining the swimming pool and filling it up with their gross little bodies. Cockroaches were everywhere: flying through the air, wriggling on the ground, writhing in a huge mass in the pool. Then the King of the Cockroaches (which manifested as some sort of voice emanating from all the roaches in the pool), taunted me and said I had lost to the cockroaches because I had not given them sufficient respect.

Yes, a pool full of cockroaches. Taunting cockroaches. Why, brain, why? Why would you think such a thought?

A pool full of cockroaches. That image was in my head. Now it's in yours, too! You're welcome.

I'm Not Dead, Just Resting My Eyes

Hey lookie! It's me. Among the many things that cause me on occasion to lie sleepless and twitching in my bed, trying to sleep but unable to as the many things I have left undone dance tauntingly before my eyes, there's the fact that I did an awesome residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and told them I'd do a write up of my experience on my blog, to give the Center its due kudos. And then I never did. SO I AM NOW. AFTER I SAY A FEW OTHER THINGS.

Warning: this is going to be a links-a-palooza. But which I mean: lots of links! Because it is my terrible misfortune to know lots of talented and successful people, to whom I wish to give due kudos. Also, you should know that I am not only famous but also a great listener.

MORE LINKS! The fabulous Ms. S (or, as I like to call her, "Pants, Bossy" -- not to be confused with Tina Fey's Bossypants; first name Pants, last name, Bossy) has a blog, Yogurt is Cultured! It's on my blog list, but right here I linked you to the entry where she talks about seeing an opera with me when I visited her in New York, cause we shouldn't get confused about this not being all about me.

Speaking of ME, I recently finished the second draft of my novel, so I'm now emerging from the cocoon of writing, blinking a little at the harsh sunlight of the world outside, forced to deal with all the undone tasks, neglected friends, etc. Amelia recently blogged about the empty nest syndrome of sending off her manuscript, but then her novel manuscript has been sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux because she's a motherfuckin' rockstar, while mine is still at, em, an earlier stage of the publication process. So it feels a little bit presumptious to be like, "Yeah, I totally know the feeling, right??" But I am feeling oddly empty-nesty. I miss my novel. It must be Stockholm syndrome, considering how much I moaned about it. I've come to identify with my captors! They just wanted the best for me! They loved me in their way!

I just read Zadie Smith's collection of essays, Changing My Mind, in which she has an essay called "That Crafty Feeling." (Originally published in The Believer -- I believe (pun totally not intended, but nevertheless awesome) that you can find it online.) Anyway, she says that in novel writing there are "Macro Planners" and "Micro Managers" (bold mine):

You will recognize a Macro Planner from his Post-its, from those Moleskines he insists on buying. A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure—all before he writes the title page. This structural security gives him a great deal of freedom of movement...I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for one another, who take characters out and put them back in...
I can’t stand to hear them speak about all this, not because I disapprove, but because other people’s methods are always so incomprehensible and horrifying. I am a Micro Manager. I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose among three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it...Macro Planners have their houses largely built from day one, and so their obsession is internal—they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.
Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line...the whole nature of the thing changes by the choice of a few words. This induces a special breed of pathology for which I have another ugly name: OPD or obsessive perspective disorder. It occurs mainly in the first 20 pages. It’s a kind of existential drama, a long answer to the short question What kind of a novel am I writing? It manifests itself in a compulsive fixation on perspective and voice...months are spent switching back and forth. Opening other people’s novels, you recognize fellow Micro Managers: that opening pile-up of too-careful, obsessively worried-over sentences, a block of stilted verbiage that only loosens and relaxes after the 20-page mark is passed. In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first 20 pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first 20 pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It’s like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

I'm a Micro Manager, and so I wrote the whole first draft from the first sentence to the last, in order. I reworked the first few chapters a ridiculous number of times (over the course of...four years?). Then I started over and rewrote it. I stalled, once again, about the third/four chapter mark, got some feedback, pseudo-started over again, and then kept writing till the last sentence.

MY POINT, and I swear that I am getting to it, is that I couldn't have done it without the residency at KHN, in a very real and very literal sense. Like I said, that first draft took about four years (and then I did a little tinkering with it before starting over). The second draft, which was longer and more structurally complex, took about nine months. Of course there are lots of reasons for that, but the residency at KHN helped in several crucial ways:

Cupcakes

I don't really like cupcakes all that much. Really, I don't. (And for someone with a sweets obsession, that's saying something).

I've moved to New York twice in my life: once at age nine (Cathedral School of St. John the Divine! Holla!) and once at age 22. Neither time was a conspicuous success (read: conspicuous non-success. Conspicuous!).

But both experiences left a few indelible imprints. And at age 22, it was the Magnolia bakery, which made me fall in love with their cupcakes. Which I am fully aware is a cliché at this point, but I don't care, as I am not very cool.

I went to the Magnolia bakery with my friend Serena, who has an unearthly ability to find both cute British teashops and awesome bakeries in any place she lives, from the Midwest to the Northeast to the Southeast. We went and dutifully stood in line (this was 2004, pre the SNL digital short paean to the Magnolia bakery but after the Sex and the City mention). I got a box of cupcakes and followed Serena, zombie-like, to a little park in the West Village (I was not functioning at the tip-top of my mental capacities at the time. See: conspicuous non-success). And, oh man. Those cupcakes. So amazing. With none of the cloying sweetness of supermarket cupcakes. Delicate and amazing. I munched on a few and felt that maybe life was worth living after all.

"Hey Laura," said Serena. "Is Liv Tyler pregnant?"

"Yes," I answered.

I was at the time reading gossip magazines on the regular, as I'd buy them to read on the subway. Serena was aware of this.

"Then I think that's Liv Tyler," she said. And I turned around and, indeed, there was Liv Tyler.

It's a very random memory and full of every New York cliché groaner (cupcakes! celebrity sightings!) but it was a nice memory in the midst of a very bleak time, and I feel correspondingly affectionate about it. It was gentle moment: things were what they were supposed to be. The cupcakes that were so famous were actually good. Think that's Liz Tyler? It IS Liz Tyler. Life is simple!

And since then, I've made the Magnolia cupcakes whenever I can. I don't really like cupcakes. I like these cupcakes.

Here's the recipe, which I ganked from the Magnolia cookbook (which I gave to Serena at one point) and which is available online.

If you follow that link, you'll see that several comments complain bitterly that this is not the actual Magnolia bakery recipe (the texture is slightly off, etc.). To which I say: duh. Obviously. Also, you know that Santa Claus person your parents told you about when you were a kid? That was them. Why would the bakery make their secret public property?

But what's available is still a great recipe, and I recommend it. The texture in the icing is a bit off, a little grainy and little too sweet, but I think the recipe for the base is amazing and the icing is still good, it just may not look as pretty.

I made cupcakes for Fourth of July (making this another installment of Really Old Pictures of Food). I find that red food coloring never works out, however. Blue and white was fine, but the red just looked like sludgy pink, no matter how much red coloring I put in, so I minimized the red I used. My attempts to make designs in blue and white didn't go over very, well either, though, and the cupcakes ended up looking diseased:

The next day, I found that the red icing had settled and looked more actually red; going with a simpler concept produced cupcakes that looked more "fourth of July":

Then, I made another large batch of cupcakes. Feeling ambitious, I decided to make the chocolate version and ALSO the vanilla cream version that the Magnolia bakery lady explains online.

Making three different kinds of icing was probably a little ambitious. I ended up essentially destroying the entire kitchen. I will say, however, that the results were edifying. I recommend the youtube vanilla cream version; the milk and flour base produces a creamy texture closer to the ideal texture of your dreams (a lot of the comments online were flipping out about the lack of confectioner's sugar, which also concerned me. I'll say that you don't strictly need it in this version, but also that it doesn't hurt to add up some when the frosting is done. I'd recommend it, actually).

I made A LOT of cupcakes this round. Some were decorated:

What's the theme of the decorations, you ask? Why all the crosses? Well...the each cupcakes is actually inspired by Spenser's The Faerie Queen. Yes, the poem. The epic poem. It's a long story. Yes, I'm a nerd. We know this. Why ask?

The chocolate icing looks aesthetically the best, I feel. In all the Magnolia bakery cupcake pictures, the icing has this lovely, smooth, swoopy texture. I can't quite seem to emulate it in my cupcakes, no matter how much I try. I've gotten better, in some fairly common-sense ways: using a knife is better than a spoon; put the icing in the fridge, but not for too long, etc. But...it's still not as pretty as I'd like.

I had leftovers after my Faerie Queen batch; I made some Big Cupcakes, to threaten their smaller brothers:

Here's wot I've learned from the cupcakes-baking. Some details do matter:

1) Sifting flour. It's easily done and it's making a difference. You don't need a special flour-sifter. Any strainer will do.

2) Make sure your butter and eggs are room temperature. You can cheat by running the eggs under water. But it makes a difference.

3) Beating the butter for the recommended three minutes matters, too. It releases the lipids or whatever. I swear, it matters. Beat all the ingredients a lot, actually, and scrape the bowl a lot.

4) Don't fret about the cupcakes not being done. The recommended time in the recipe is fine. Don't give into temptation because a few of the cupcakes look like they have a bubbly center. They'll be fine.

Even if you fuck up all of this, it won't matter. Even if your cupcakes look sludgy pink and runny, people will still ask for more, even if they claim they don't like cupcakes. Because this recipe fucking rocks. You seriously can't lose. No, it's not the same as going to the Magnolia bakery and seeing Liv Tyler. But it's close.

Old Guest Poster: My Dad

Okay, the title is not a slight at my Dad for being old, but simply that this post is old. It's my Dad's quite hilarious account of spending Christmas Eve in Bethlehem -- you know, back forever ago when we spent Winter Break in Jerusalem.

I didn't end up going to Bethlehem, as I was feeling crappy and simply went back to our short term rental apartment in Jerusalem to go to bed. My parents came back at about late at night, pale and trembling. Here's what my dad wrote about the trip:


Julia arranged in advance for us to go to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, with St. George’s church in Jerusalem. It is the Anglican church in East Jerusalem, an easy walk from the Damascus Gate. It has an English and an Arabic congregation. Bethlehem used to be a sleepy Arab village, near Jerusalem. It is now one of the fenced in Palestinian areas, under the Palestinian Authority.

We needed to be at St. George’s by 7 pm, and arrived well before. People began to arrive en masse about 6.45. Our leader, Father Bob, was a huge man, wearing a bright red beret. These turned out to be valuable attributes. He greeted us jocularly, and we started to get on the buses. Each person had to identify themselves as they got on the bus, and have their names checked against a pre-established list. There was a waiting list, and I have no idea how many of them got a seat. As our names were checked off, we were given a badge and we were told to display it in easily visible place. This, like the red beret, turned out to be crucial. We had been told earlier to bring our passports, although it turned out we didn’t need them. I still don’t know whether we might have needed them to prove that we weren’t Israelis going into Bethlehem, or that we weren’t Palestinians coming out. The careful procedure was followed as each person got on the bus, and the third bus was delayed in arriving, making for a tedious wait. Finally, we were given our marching orders: Display your badge prominently, keep together when we got off the bus. Walk briskly together straight to the church. Don’t dawdle or stop for something to eat or drink. Look friendly but avoid eye contact. Return straight to the bus after the service. The bus will not wait.

Father Bob’s large and comforting figure took the seat immediately in front of us. His cell phone was constantly ringing. He always answered “Ho Ho Ho. Merry Christmas. Father Bob speaking.” * The calls were all from people in Jerusalem and Bethlehem keeping track of our progress. About a kilometer or two from Bethlehem, all three buses pulled over. We were assured this was a planned stop, to pick up an escort. We soon got back on the road and the escort turned out to be a HumVee flying two large Israeli flags. This did not make me feel safer.
Soon we drew up to a huge wall, made up of prefabricated slabs colored a drab beige. We stopped, and were briefly investigated by a border guard. We were then ushered through the gate, apparently made extra large for the influx of visitors on Christmas Eve. It turned out that about twice as many pilgrims came as were expected.

From then on it was utter chaos. The environment entirely changed as we went through the gate. The traffic was gridlocked; it took us 45 minutes to inch our way a few hundred meters to the bus depot. The streets were garishly lit, and full of people, some going about their business, some tending their shop or restaurant, most young males just lounging around. The scene was in the manner of most border towns: souvenir shops and cafes. Many people smiled and waved at us, yelling out “Merry Christmas”. Father Bob said, “Smile, but don’t encourage them!” **

We eventually got to the bus terminal, down a hill and around a sharp corner. We pulled into the half empty, underground bus depot. I wanted to make a joke about never realizing that Jesus Christ Our Lord was born in a parking lot. When we stopped, we were told again: stay together, go straight to the church, don’t stop, return straight to the bus afterwards, display your badge prominently at all times. We climbed out of the buses, left the bus terminal, and started to walk up the hill and around the corner to Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity. The streets were full, and got more crowded as we approached the church. Our group soon spread out, and it was impossible to tell if the person you were following was a member, as we all wore our badges on our front. It was here that Father Bob’s stature and red beret proved invaluable, as you easily see his large red-topped figure moving confidently through the crowd.

More and more Palestinian soldiers were in evidence; their uniforms were entirely black, from their helmets to their boots. And most had machine guns slung over their shoulders or carried at the ready. As we approached the church, thousands of pilgrims jammed up against crowd control fences, with ranks of armed soldiers manning the fences. Behind us in the square, there were loud celebrations that were, as far I could tell, entirely independent of Christmas and the pilgrims. I think it was a Palestinian rock concert, and I was fairly sure I was hallucinating when I thought I saw and heard boy scouts playing bag-pipes. This turned out to be a Palestinian tradition.

Father Bob started to wave his red beret, and shout “St George’s, St. George’s”, and eventually, “Let’s go!” One of the security gates was drawn back, and a group of soldiers formed a gauntlet through which only people wearing St. George’s badges were allowed. There were thousands of people crammed together, all waiting to get into the church. Although they didn’t rush the opening, they didn’t exactly fall back to let us through, either. It was only by pushing and being pushed that we made progress.

Things were complicated by the fact that there were two-and-a-half high concrete bollards at various places, and as one was pushed against such a thing, one had to make artful, or clumsy, adjustments to get around it. As we arrived at the gap in the security fence, several nervous young men, armed and uniformed, looked anxiously for our badges, which we equally anxiously displayed. Emerging into the empty spaces between the security gates and the church, we hurried up to the latter. We entered the nave, but rather to my surprise, we didn’t stop there, but were ushered through to an empty courtyard. I have only the vaguest of memories of what the interior of the church looked like. None of the pictures of the Church of the Nativity look familiar. After many of us had gathered in the courtyard, we ducked through a four-foot doorway into a small chapel. Here I finally realized that we weren’t going to a Christmas Eve service in the church, for which St. George’s had a few places reserved, but to a small carol service, put on for St. George’s alone. For all I know, there were dozens of other such special services put on. In fact, there probably wasn’t a Christmas Eve service in the Church of the Nativity at all that evening. The Church of the Nativity is an Orthodox church, and they celebrate Christmas at a later date. The big Christmas Eve service on Dec 24 was probably held in the nearby St. Catherine’s, which is Roman Catholic. I should have thought of all this before. In Jerusalem, the western churches (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal; I didn’t notice any others) were very much in the minority, even among Christians. There were several varieties of Orthodox, Coptic, and Armenian churches in bewildering variety. For instance, the main Armenian church (in fact a cathedral, I think) is St. James, in a large monastery in the Armenian quarter. But there is also an Armenian Catholic church, with the wonderful name of “our Lady of the Spasm”, on the Via Dolorosa.

The carol service itself was very simple: eight lessons and about a dozen carols (no choir or accompaniment). The service was all very familiar, except one of the lessons was in Greek (read by, I think, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem), and one of the hymns was in Arabic. The Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, Suheil Tawani, read one of lessons, and read a long prayer on behalf of Palestinian Christians. This latter was in part to thank the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Rather to our surprise, he was present for at least part of the service (who was present for at least part of the service, rather to our surprise). The service took about 45 minutes, and then we left the chapel, and the church. Now the crowd was even larger, and the Palestinians partied on in Manger Square. Father Bob and another leader (a Palestinian, I think) tried to persuade the soldier in charge to let us return another way. He decided against it, and we once again surged through a gap in the security gate, this time into rather than away from the crowd. It was easier, somehow. We easily got back to the bus about 10 pm, and I even had time to buy a glass of tea from a young boy manning a stand in the bus terminal. ***

All in all, I am extremely glad to have gone to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve. It was quite an experience, though I don’t think I would describe it as spiritual.

David, Jerusalem
Jan 3, 2010

* My note: What is up with Father Bob?

** Seriously, what is up with Father Bob?

*** My dad drinks tea approximately every five seconds. Or coffee. Think I drink a lot of coffee and tea? Haven't met my dad. My dad is kind of the best.

My dad didn't take any pictures at Bethlehem. Here, instead, is a picture of my mom and me, at the Dome of the Rock/site of the second temple/end of the world:

Learn How To Park! You Are So Inconsiderate! Smiley Face!

Back in Minneapolis. There's a ridiculous amount of snow. And parking sucks.

I got on the wrong side of a snow emergency and had to wait multiple hours to get my car out of the impound lot. Multiple hours. Nearly three. And an hour of that was waiting outside. It was such a bizarre experience, actually, that it was almost worth it just to have the story. Almost.

The first hour (and this is at 10 pm at night, by the way) was, as I said, outside, and even with FUR-LINED boots my feet were freezing. The line was one of those lines that move so slowly that it seems as if it's not moving at all and how you progress forward seems mysterious and unlikely.

The lady in front of me had had a tracheotomy and talked by using one of those electronic devices that you press to your throat, which only compounded the surreality of the whole thing.

"I...want...my...car...back..." she said several times. "Just...give...me...my...car."

I sympathized. Also, she wasn't wearing a hat, which...what?

Once we got out of the cold into a makeshift covered waiting area, which was heated, the quality of life improved greatly, though the line moved even more slowly.

What was remarkable about the whole thing was that for the most part everyone was quite nice and well-behaved. You wouldn't think that, as we crept into the next day, in the cold, without our cars, having to face the prospect of paying a lot of money, that we wouldn't take it out on each other. But I think the fact that the line was so completely terrible, and that we were all in the same boat, and, to a certain extent, it was our own faults that we were in this situation (I mean, the snow emergency rules are confusing, but they're not impossible, and I certainly should have known better), combined to make us reasonably pleasant. Someone had written a note and hung it up: BE KIND TO EACH OTHER. NO ONE WANTS TO BE HERE. And for the most part, people followed this principle.

When I got the window, finally, the guy working there was even in a fairly decent mood. He couldn't read my handwriting on the form I'd filled out, and joked, "What, are you a professor or something?"

"Uh...yeah," I stammered. "Sort of."

"Really?" he said and we both laughed. "Why do professors always have such terrible handwriting?"

I'd actually never heard that before, though I'm willing to believe it's true. I thought he was going to say "doctors" since they're the ones who have the reputation for terrible handwriting. I guess professors do too.

I'm actually pretty confident I know why my handwriting sucks, but I'll explain that another day.

Anyway, I eventually got my car back. Here are two other parking stories:

1) Now, you can't park on the even side of non-snow emergency streets until APRIL. Which means available parking is cut IN HALF. This BLOWS. It used to be easy to find parking in my neighborhood, unless you came home past, like, one in the morning (if, for example, you were coming back from claiming your car at the impound lot). But now, even coming home at seven it's nearly impossible to find a place.

2) I've written before that parking at the University where I work is difficult to come by. I used to come to teach at an insanely early hour, meaning I could usually get a spot. Now, I still have to come early, but not insanely early, so parking is very difficult to come by. On Friday, even the metered parking was reserved for a special event. And I didn't have tons of time to find a spot. I ended up accidentally parking blocking a driveway. Which is awful, I know, but in my defense, the block where I parked makes it very difficult to determine what's driveway and what isn't, since snow basically covers all of it, the driveways don't occur in regular or logical intervals, and there are no signs. Anyway, when I got back, I realized what I'd done, and somehow I'd escaped a ticket. However, there was a note tucked into my windscreen wipers, written in cute, curly handwriting:

LEARN HOW TO PARK! YOU ARE SO INCONSIDERATE!

The contrast between the message and cute handwriting was so great that I almost expected them to add, HAVE A NICE DAY!

I also love how Midwestern all of this was: you are enjoined to be nice in a horrific line in the middle of the night, and the worst insult anyone can think to level at you is that you are "inconsiderate."

Anyway, parking sucks. And I suck at it. Please stop, winter.

Happy New Year!

So, it's New Year's Eve, and I'm chillin' in the Jerusalem apartment with the parents. Not that I'm complaining -- I have notoriously bad luck/bad timing with New Year's Eve celebrations, which in the past have included being hospitalized, falling asleep in a cab on the way home from the airport, and being stuck in a supermarket parking lot in the freezing cold. So being in a Jerusalem works for me.

To be fair, the past few New Years have been totally pleasant, often including going out and dancing to eighties music with Mary and friends, afterwards eating Mac and Cheese at 2:00 am to absorb the booze. Last year, I joined Kate at Mancini's, where she informed me she is going again this year. Hi, Kate! Happy New Year!

What have I been up to? Well, I had ambitions to do a chronological account, but that's clearly not going to happen, nor would be very interesting. Instead, I'll give pictures with captions!

Okay, so in continuing crazy-cat-person-ness, I bought some cat treats that I have been giving to stray cats. I made friends with a cat that lives in the Armenian quarter, near the Armenian Catholic church. Also, there was a cat in the Monastery of the Holy Cross that DEMANDED so serious loving:
We went to the Temple Mount and saw the Dome of the Rock, which I will talk about in more detail later. I just wrote a bunch about it and deleted it -- there's so much complicated history there, so it's hard to write about it, particularly in the flip way that I usually write.

I will say, from the Temple Mount, you can see the Mount of Olives and the Valley of Josaphat, which according to some traditions is where we are all going to go when the world ends:
I sat and looked at the view for a long time. Not bad!

Speaking of the world ending, I generally don't wear crocs, but there are some cases where I make exceptions:
Cute:
I wonder if I wouldn't rather go here when the world ends:
Or maybe here:

Petra-fied

Happy Boxing Day!

My family and decided to spend Christmas in the Holy Land -- we've got a little apartment in Jerusalem, across from Ye Old English Tea Shoppe -- Kosher!

Getting here was an adventure, delayed by snowstorms on the East Coast and a taxi cab ride to the wrong address when I got to Jerusalem. Once I safely arrived, I was right away bundled into a rental car by my parents and we drove to Eliat, a resort town on the border of Israel and Jordan. The next day, we took a tour into Jordan, to see the "lost city" of Petra. Crossing the border from Israel to Jordan was quite the experience -- you literally have to cross a "no man's land" of dirt and barbed wire.

Our guide was a young Bedouin who looked like Jeff Goldbloom, if Jeff Goldboom were a Bedouin. There was a long bus ride to modern-day Petra, the outskirts of which are a plain-looking town. Then you take a hike through some canyons, beautiful and unreal:
There's carvings and tombs in the rocks, which is lovely and unusual in and of itself. Then, you turn a corner, and oh
Holy

Shit
Yeah, that's carved INTO the rock, people.
It's kind of like beautiful American Southwestern canyons COMBINED WITH beautiful Hellenistic ruins with a little bit of ambitious Egyptian tributes to the dead thrown in, for good measure. Those Nabateans could make some beautiful shit.
Being me, I got distracted by the animals.

No, not the camels. The cats!

Totally cute, undernourished, and clearly diseased, apparently they're kept around to keep lizards and scorpions away from the tourist areas that sell souvenirs. Sniff! I want to take them all home. Because yes, I'm one of those crazies that cares more about cats than people.

However, the donkeys and horses that give rides through the canyon have an open-to-the-public clinic sponsored by Princess Alia, so there's for sure concern about animal welfare.

So: Petra. Holy fucking shit. I'm not one of those tourists given to Shock and Awe -- I'm a pretty lousy and easily bored tourist, to be honest with you. Today, for example, now back in Israel, we went to see the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum and I was like, yawn, I'm hungry. But Petra. Not a bad place to go when you die, huh? Look at these tombs:

Pop-culture reference points: Petra was where Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed (they have an "Indiana Jones" stall in modern-day Petra) and nearby is Wadi Rum, the desert that's the backdrop for much of Lawrence of Arabia, I think.

Petra was really incredible, that's all I have to say. Not very profound.

Let's look at the Treasury, just one...
more time...
Sigh. Lovely.

Old Pictures of Food

I mean, the pictures are old. The food was not old IN the pictures, if that makes sense.

These are pictures from a little over a year ago, when I was up in Muskoka with my uncle and aunt.

We made homemade sushi! Wasn't it pretty?















I actually don't remember what this was:
[ETA: This is obviously the seven-layer dip, photo taken from above. DUH!]




We also made seven layer dip:




Sigh. Looking at these pictures makes me nostalgic, though I'm not precisely sure for what.

Is always weird to see pictures from a year ago, I s'ppose (Dude! Didn't put up pictures of me, but - I look different. Shorter hair, not a red-head, thinner, and hey -- good news! Invisalign works! Bye, bye snaggle tooth. I was all, "Oh, look at little me! I look so young!" and then I was like, that was a year ago. Huh.)

I dunno. Is silly, obviously. Life is not hanging out in your summer cottage, writing, swimming, and making homemade sushi. Although that was very nice.

If you want to check out a real food blog, check out "Instead of the novel..." at right. Pretty pictures of food!

Canada: Day Eight. Million.

Okay, so I'll say upfront that I haven't gotten any prose pages done. Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday. Yes. I know.

However, I have finished the play. Yes. It is done. So that's 73 pages worth of play. And now that's done and out of my head and I think I can get back to work on the whole "BP" (big project) thing.

I'm also up here on my own now. Uncle and Aunt back in Toronto. They'll be back Friday. Honestly, it's weird. Weirder than I thought it would be. I'm really...all alone. In the woods. By a lake. For the first time ever, I'm freaking out about bears and psychotic killers. Isn't this how most horror movies start? A writer goes to a solitary retreat, but LITTLE DOES SHE KNOW...

I mean, okay, it's not that bad: the neighbors, whom we are friends with, are very close by and swim by pretty much every day and said I could call anytime if I wanted a ride into town. And I can bike into town really easily. And I have the internet. And the landline. But still...

I'm doing my darnedest to eat real meals and stick to a schedule and be active and not wallow in my own filth. But you all know I'm not good at those things at the best of times, let alone when the accountability is precisely zip.

Good things I have done:
(1) Made a delicious salad, dressing from scratch, with smoked trout (haven't axed trout from the list of Fishes I'm Not Eating, yet).
(2) Made portobello mushroom/tomato thing that was delicious.
(3) Went swimming twice on Sunday and biked into town. And did yoga on the boathouse.
(4) Remembered to put the sheets down on the porch furniture when it started raining.
(5) Finished play.
(6) Read Patrimony, by Phillip Roth.
(7) Started Under the Volcano. Has made me think about very useful things regarding novel structure.

Bad things I have done:
(1) Located and watched episodes of Secret Diary of Call Girl and Weeds.
(2) Tracked down all chocolate and ice cream in cottage yesterday and consumed it.
(3) Ditto for leftover rice pudding and macaroni pie.
(4) May also have eaten much breakfast cereal yesterday, not at breakfast times.
(5) Perhaps because I had slept in past social acceptable breakfast times.
(6) In part because rain had woken me up at 4:30 am, at which time I remembered I had not put sheets down on porch furniture. Sprinted over to cottage from cabin in the rain to do so, also to unplug all electronics. At which point I was so discombobulated that I
(7) Read Our Man in Havana (anyone seen this movie, by the way? So good) until morning. As sun rose, went back to sleep.
(8) See beginning of blog, re: no prose writing. Though lots of prose thinking? Thinking about prose?
(9) Reading books like Patrimony, Under the Volcano, and Our Man in Havana rather than Infinite Jest; also being dilatory in posting about Infinite Jest.

I think it's fair to say that the bad outweighs the good. But tomorrow is always another day to tip the balance.

Canada: Day 4

Didn't post yesterday -- sorry. Happy fourth of July, everyone! I've traditionally been out of the country on the Fourth and this year is no exception. My aunt Carrie did create a "Fourth of July" tree, though. A real little tree that we cut down. What should we decorate it with? Popcorn? Red, white, and blue?

Yesterday, Big Project progress came to a screetching halt. Big zero.

Pages written on Big Project: 0
However, pages written on play: Eleven!

So...that's good, right? Some progress? I also think I very much see the end of the play -- a few more scenes and it's done (a short two-acter). The thought of finishing something is intoxicating; maybe that's the advantage of writing a long-ass Big Project (BP): you get so crazed with frustration that you finish other things.

And I started the BP when I was trying not to write a philosophy paper on the metaphysical reality of fictional characters...so I'm all for procrastination.

Things I've done instead of write, yesterday and today:

1) Bike ride into Port Sanfield. A mile both ways. I know you real bikers are like "Man, I do two miles before breakfast," but for me it was a big deal.
2) Finish Philadelphia Fire.
3) Ditch all the books I've brought up here to read a ratty paperback edition of John Updike's Couples, about which I have complex thoughts, but I just vented them in an email to Matt, and am now bored with thinking about it.
4) Take the boat up to Windemere with family and have sushi (!) on the lake.
5) Swim to neighboring cabin and back.
6) Make scones.

No progress yet today. Bad Laura. No cookie. It's possible today might be salvaged, but I'm not sure. I really do have to start first thing, peeling myself away from my bed and going out onto the porch to write, before I talk to anyone. I have a coffee-maker in the cabin, so there's no excuse not to get up, make coffee, and get to work. If I don't, if I wander over the cottage and eat breakfast and chat to my uncle and aunt, I end up collapsing on the bed on the veranda and reading and then getting sucked into some scheme for the day. Doing delicious vacationy things like drinking gin and tonic far too early and napping in the sun or swimming or cooking or taking a bide ride or going on an expedition in the boat.

Read in the paper that eating chocolate in the morning combats your cravings for sweets later in the day. At night I dreamed I ordered pasta made out of chocolate. In the morning Carrie gave me a piece of chocolate with pepper in it. I ate it too fast and it burned my mouth and didn't reduce my chocolate cravings at all.

I miss all of you and talk to you my head a lot.

Canada: Day 2

Pages written today: 7.

Finished section 5.

Went swimming again. It was very cold. Didn't do yoga; bike ride tomorrow.

A more shameful objective of my trip here is to lose five pounds and get in a little better shape. Or, at least not to let the awesome food that my aunt and her mum make and all the lovely booze and lazing around in the sun opportunities make me swell out of control.

I feel like I have more exciting and interesting thoughts; then when I post them, I feel the most boring person ever.

BUT, the objective of this is to motivate me to write (the thought of posting that I'd written nothing was shaming today) and to keep it short and snappy. So, I will. Signing off. I'll be funny or interesting sometime, I promise.

First blog: Canada, Day 1.

So. This blog. Created it. Purposes:
1) I'm going to try and and document how much I write every day I'm up here, at the family cottage in Canada. I'm up for a month and writing is the primary objective-o. Yes: objectivo. It's a word. Sort of. We've got high-speed ethernet internet up here now, so instead of frantic emailing, I thought I'd try and post up how much I've gotten done in a given day.
2) To try and write in a short, pithy fashion on various pertinent topics of interests a la conversations with Emily and Jake.
3) To post my Deep Thoughts on Infinite Jest for the Infinitive Jest virtual book club (TM!).
I've named this after my old MySpace blog, which I did very much enjoy for a while there. Yes, I had a MySpace blog. I am not ashamed. I'm not going to tell very many people about this at first...see how it goes.

Oh the rambling! I can feel it coming! I'll try and keep it short.

What I've written today: 4 pages (so far). I'm staying in the cabin (the tiny little cabin adjacent to the Big Cottage) and I actually got right out of bed, went to the tiny little screened in porch and wrote! Before doing anything else! It was the first thing I did! So weird, right? I've got a table, a little porch, an outlet, and a little coffee maker out there in the cabin. All I need, baby.

I also swam. And then I did some yoga on top of the boathouse.

This is all strangely productive and healthy.

Right now, my aunt, uncle, and my aunt's mom are up here, so I'm not hitting the writing too hard, although I'll still devote the mornings to it. I'm still leaving time for for cooking, talking, and watching Canada-Day specials on TV. When I'm alone I'm hoping to crank it up a notch.

Happy Canada day, by the way!