Tastes a Little Like Car

I found an old transcript of a road trip I took with a friend. It was actually the move back to Minneapolis from Portland. I had a microphone and a mini-disk recorder (in one of my dream jobs, I was a reporter for NPR), and I spent the boring parts of the trip recording our interactions. Mostly we chatted about nothing. My evil cat was ill, so she made the first part of our journey memorably stinky. We had a gift for bringing out the humor in each other, and so we drove across Washington swapping the role of straight-man more times than I can count.

Partway through the journey, we decided to cook a meal by wrapping it in tinfoil, strapping it to some hot part of the moving van's exhaust system, and driving until it was done. My friend had been experimenting with this technique, made famous by the cookbook "Manifold Destiny". Here's what he said about his attempts to cook on his own small car:

I've tried cooking [garlic cloves] on the engine block which was the best deal for me, and that ended up getting it just a little bit warm, but not really cooked at all, and then the other two or three cloves that I've tried have ... either fallen off my car or they've been totally raw, and so I've eaten some raw garlic - really kind of bummed my coworkers out.

So, understandably, we were worried about raw food as a result of this experiment. We started with just one potato, figuring that if a potato came out raw, at least it wouldn't give us Salmonella. It was also a cold, windy day in early May, which brought some complaints from my friend as he crawled under the truck and wired a tinfoil packet of oil, garlic, and potatoes onto the exhaust pipe. Not wanting to eat carbon monoxide, I insisted on four layers of foil.

Here's what happened when we pulled the truck off the highway forty minutes later, and tried to talk into the microphone while struggling with wind and four layers of hot foil while crouched under a moving van in a post office parking lot in the middle of Podunk, Montana.

A: We have dinner. Well, we have something that resembles hot. J is unwrapping our dinner.
J: I still think it's bold to call it dinner.
A: Well, it was definitely just one potato. Whether it's cooked or not, it was still only one potato.
J: We're through the first layer. Looking pretty good. Oh, yeah. This looks good.
A: Smells better and better. It seems to be cooked in just that one spot.
J: Yeah. I wonder why that is. Maybe that's where the oil leaked out. But yeah, you're kind of right. Huh, that's interesting. All right. Here's the first food. It kind of looks cooked. Hey, want some potato? (chews) That's done.
A: We're geniuses!
J: I mean it tastes a little bit like ... car
A: ...carbon
J: Oh, my God, it is burnt. Look at this. It's totally burnt to a crisp. I mean some of these art OK, but most of it is just cooked. Wow. It was like it was on fire in there.

After burning our potato, we did make a second attempt. We wound up successfully cooking a complete chicken, broccoli, and potato meal, and eating it while crouched on my old furniture in the back of the van while the evil cat had the smelly cab to herself. The lengths I'll go to to avoid McDonald's...

Ken Ken (or How I Spent My Morning)

Unfortunately, the online New York Times has six Ken Ken puzzles available for free. This means that while I've been awake since six, I am only just tearing myself away from my laptop to get started with my day. Furthermore, the Minneapolis paper is sitting on my doorstep as I write this, and I can hear the siren call of the puzzle from here. It could be noon before I shower.

It's not a big deal to waste one morning, right? It's gray outside, anyway, and all I have on my list of things to do today is a complete overhaul of my kitchen. I have time, right?

RIP Book Club...Welcome Something Else

About two years ago, I responded to a Craig's List post about a new book club. At the time, I was recovering from the hermit lifestyle I had led with an ex-boyfriend, and I was trying to meet men in organic ways by doing things that I enjoyed doing. I was only just discovering that the things I enjoy doing are mostly things that other women enjoy doing. And the poster on Craig's List neglected to mention in her post that she wanted to create an all-women's book club. She was a bit crazy, but that's a story for another day. At any rate, she turned away the two men who showed interest in the club, and instead we had a lively group of ten women attend the first meeting.

I enjoyed the first meeting enough to commit to attending the second one. By the third meeting our lively group of ten women had dwindled to five, and the original crazy Craig's List poster was gone. The five of us carried on meeting though, through several books, some of which we read, most of which we didn't. At one meeting, Jessica announced that now that the five of us had been meeting monthly for so many months, she had decided that we had become friends, and so she collected our birthdays, and now she organizes birthday outings for the group.

We began to do other things, but we continued to not-read the books we were assigned. We had conversations about boys. They took me shopping for sexy new clothes. We went to movies about books we hadn't read. We baked Christmas cookies. Through Kate, I joined a cooking club, and for a couple of months, we cooked giant potluck dinners together. We even advertized for more members on Craig's List, making sure to warn the new people that we didn't always complete our homework for book club.

The men in our lives have always mocked book club. Emily has a friend who calls us SBC, which is short for Shitty Book Club, because we don't discuss books very often or say very deep things about them when we do. Rachel's friends made fun of us for having a movie date for "Three Christmases", which wasn't even based on a book. Or was it four Christmases? It was a shitty movie, at any rate.

Yesterday, Jess called and asked if I minded if we stopped calling our book club a book club. It will be just the same, she assured me. We'll still get together and talk and do fun things. We can even talk about whatever books we're reading. But instead of not-reading a book that we were suppposed to read together, we wouldn't even plan to read a book together. It sounded perfect. It's all of the fun of getting together with five smart women, and none of the guilt of not having read the book.

And so our new club needs a name. I have suggested "The Illiterati" or "NBC (Non-Book Club)". If you have a good name for our group, let me know. I'll pass it along.

Oh, and I'm still reading "Cold Sassy Tree", in honor of the days when our group, whatever-it-is, used to read books.

Wii Hangover

Family and friends gathered for a goodbye barbecue at Jimmy and Judy's house last night. There was swimming and a new game called noodle-balance-toypedo-catch, or noodle-toypedo for short. You have to balance on the noodle, standing in the deep end, while you and your friend(s) shoot the toypedo over to each other. If you fail to catch it, you have to surface-dive with the noodle between your legs to retrieve it. Good fun, and not overly strenuous, which makes it a successful Saturday afternoon pool game.

After dinner, I walked around the block with my mom, Buddy, and the one with all the N's and her children. How to make a walk around the block turn into an hour long adventure: bring two-year-olds. Finn dragged a car around the block. Cat climbed up every neighbors' steps and walked down the ramp when she wasn't busy trying to "get me". Eventually, Finn helped her out by yelling, "Here's another one, Ayah," as we approached a set of steps. Their play is evolving out of the parallel stage and into interactive play. He even let her pretend to wash the car. Fun to watch, especially if you're not in any kind of a hurry.

I was in a kind of hurry though, because there was a Wii party going on, and you know how I feel about the Wii. Well, my love for the Wii doesn't quite seem to extend to Mario Brawl, which I don't understand at all. Too many bright colors and moving pictures for me to keep track of my guy (who turns out to be kind of a crappy fighter - except when I accidentally set it up for the computer to control him). Tennis and golf are still where it's at. Somehow, when we're Wii-ing, it's possible to get so wrapped up in the game that it gets to be 1:00 in the morning, and we're still on the 7th hole and not about to quit without finishing.

And, so, this morning, when my body got me up at 7:00 as usual, my brain stayed in bed. Sure, I ran through the dog park with the dog (who now smells of mango-fish, because of his inability to resist the lure of a roll through a rotting fish carcass, and my mango flavored dog shampoo.) But I'm all disjointed and unable to focus. It took me three tries to finally call the newspaper and get it to stop while I'm gone. This is the Wii-hangover. If I lived in the same house as the machine, I'm sure I'd be having a little hair of the dog that bit me right now, because I could really use some practice on my putting, and I'd like to have a Wii age of less than 50.

No. Al. Must. Focus. Leaving the country in six hours.

Baby Mama

Also, I saw Baby Mama yesterday, and hard as I try to be hip (oh, I do, too, try), I just can't say "baby mama". I can try "baby's mama", but that's as far as I can take it. It just doesn't feel like English to this middle-class white girl. I can understand it, though, so if you want to say it, then, by all means, feel free.

Oh, and, if you run into anyone who was at the Riverview last night, I wasn't crying. I got some brewer's yeast in my eye, is all. Sheesh. I'm like a rock. I dare you to make me cry at a movie.

No fair bringing in Corinna, Corinna though. That's just epically sad.

The List

It seems unlikely that we were inspired by that Bucket List movie. (Aside: I don't know what the big hairy deal about Jack Nicholson is. Doesn't he always just play himself?) But at about the time it came out, Rachael, Fern, and I began to keep a list of New Things We Want to Try.

Fern started it with a suggestion that we take a spinning class, which brought us to a likable new fitness studio in town with the worst website of all time. Seriously. Don't click that link. And if you do click it, turn off your speakers. I told you it was the worst website of all time. Of course it has music.

Now, I've come a long way in my understanding of the words "spinning class". The problem I had when I realized it was an exercise class (and had nothing to do with wool) is that I heard about it at about the same time everyone was talking about the new form of exercise that uses bump-and-grind stripper moves and a pole. I put the two together and for a long time I thought that "spinning class" meant "pole-dancing exercise class". I was armed with my new-found knowledge that it was really just a stationary bike class when Fern suggested we try it, and so I agreed, because at least it wasn't some sexy dancing thing.

It was on the trip to the fitness studio that Fern and I learned that behind Rachael's placid and friendly exterior, she hides a deep inner core of curmudgeonliness. She only reluctantly agreed to go to the spin class with us, and she maintained throughout that she wasn't going to like it. Up until the class was over, she was the one who kept saying things like, "OK, I'll go, but I'm not going to like spinning." or "Are we really going to go to this spinning thing?" (Spoken with a hopeful lilt to the voice, as if she hoped the answer was no.) The class kicked my ass so badly that I rivaled the sweat production of the overweight man on the bike next to mine. Fern didn't like looking like she was working in front of other people. Surprisingly, Rachael the Reluctant took the ass-kicking as a personal challenge and signed up for more. She has become a regular at the spinning studio, and she has taken all of her aggressive curmudgeonly comments about spinning and turned them towards the studio's website (which deserves every last gripe and which she has to check often because the likable studio doesn't print paper schedules).

And, now, we have all three become a reluctant crew of try-new-thingers. The three of us, introverted, and inclined to stay home because it's easier, slightly cranky about the things we haven't tried, make an odd assortment of adventurers, but we've written a list and we're checking it twice, and we're going to do all sorts of New Things whether we want to or not.

Here are some sample items:

• Take social dance lessons
• Take a cooking class
• Visit a Minnesota winery
• Paddle on the St Croix

So, I'll see you at the social dance studio. But I'm not going to like it.

Take Two of These and Call Me in the Morning

So, for the past two Fridays, I've come home from school completely worn to the bone (which I'm sure you noticed from the previous post). And then precisely at 8:00, after a short introduction from Gillian Anderson, I get to immerse myself in Jane Austen for almost two hours, and I even get the luxury of not thinking about students who failed their finals because they are too blocked to learn math. Better still, I get to do so with a group of people who feed me and make me laugh and can imagine themselves learning English country dancing - and even invite me to join them in taking lessons.

These Jane Austen parties, it turns out, are my ideal tonic to a week gone wrong. Who could be crabby while eating homemade empanadas, and falling for Henry Tilney's flirtatious looks and dancing banter? How can I be sad when Selena hasn't even seen Pride and Prejudice yet, and I get to be there when she does? What can be bad about conversations that meander past using our "geek voices" to downplay our intelligence, and end with reminiscences about Ladyhawke and olde English spellings? Somehow I've bought more than a few hours more of weekend by spending a few hours with this kind of laughter and fellowship. It's even worth being up way past 10:00 to do so.

Wiiiiiiiii

Well, it's been a long time since my last video game addiction. I was into the Sims for a couple of months about three years ago, and I'd spend so much time feeding my little guy and sending him to the bathroom and getting him a job that I ran a risk in real life of starving to death and/or wetting my pants. Playing the Sims had all of the appeal of playing with my doll house when I was 7. I got to build a house and add onto it and buy furniture. I named all of my Sims after NPR personalities, so I got to be the hand of God that caused Nina Totenberg and Corey Flintoff to fall in love and start a family (until Nina started her little fling with Carl Kasell). Anyway, eventually, I realized that I was hungry and I had to pee, so I let the Sims gather virtual dust inside of my computer, and Nina and Corey and Carl returned to their original roles in my life as voices on the radio.

The Sims was one of those games that was designed to appeal to women, because the male video game market was already tapped, but women weren't playing. It worked (at least for me), because the Sims was all about relationships, and the slow building of a life. You begin with a little bit of money and a simple house, and you have to work from the ground up, gradually adding rooms, upgrading your stove and getting promoted at your job. You flirt slowly with the Sim next door, talking about sports and birds until eventually your thoughts turn to love, and then you get to work on living happily ever after by expanding the house and having babies. In the Sims world, though, I was always more into the house addition than the new family members, because the babies just meant more mouths to feed and trips to the bathroom.

So, it's no coincidence that my new video game addiction is also made for women and families. The Nintendo Wii, is actually about the relationships of the real people holding the controllers, though. You get to jump around and be silly with your friends and family, flailing wildly and ducking and weaving as your virtual selves box it out on the screen. You can team up and play tennis together, feeling like a well-oiled machine with your friend (or like a machine that has a couple of missing cogs as the case may be). You also get to slowly build up your skill points, which feels a little like being a Sim and finding your way in the world. And, of course, I can spend twenty minutes creating a "Mii" who looks just like me (sort of, almost, a little bit), which appeals to the doll house lover in me.

I'm just glad that I don't have to feed the Mii or take her to the bathroom, and, just to be safe, I'm not going to let her flirt with any other Miis. I don't know how effective Mii birth control is, but I do know a thing or two about abstinence, damn it.

My Musical Ear

I spent last night at the St Paul Chamber Orchestra listening to the Brandenburg Concertos. If you are one of the people who actually knows me, I know what you're thinking. It goes something like this: "What? You? Music?" I have a little problem with music. I can't hear it. For a long time, I thought I was tone deaf, but my 8th grade band teacher informed me that I was good at tuning my trombone (and finding the notes along the slide), so my problem is deeper than mere tone-deafness. No, I actually think I'm tune deaf. I can't piece together the individual notes in my brain and form a melody. I should say that I have a really, really hard time piecing together the notes, because I hate it when people say they "can't" do math, and, besides, I do know three or four tunes. I know the way "Take me Out to the Ballgame" sounds (and even Jimmy says that I mostly sing it on key). I can also sing "The Wheels on the Bus", which is an old preschool trick. I believe in singing to kids, but with my disability I didn't master every song, so I just made up new lyrics to one song. I'm not so good at "Happy Birthday" even though I've heard it at least 34 times, so I lip-sync that one. I do have the melody to a couple of Beatles songs stuck in my brain.

Mostly what I do when music is playing is I tune it out. My brain gets tired of trying to make sense of the tune, so I think about something else. Sometimes the something-else is the lyrics. I sometimes turn on country music, for example, when MPR is running a pledge drive, because I enjoy the stories in the lyrics, but I couldn't sing you the tune of a single country music song.

Once when I was relatively old, I was stuck in a record store with my dad (who loves music), and I was bored so I wandered around looking at things. I discovered a section of the store called "Movie Soundtracks", which is when I found out that all movies - not just musicals - have music in them. I flipped through the records marveling at this whole new world I'd never noticed before. "Bull Durham" had music? What? I never knew.

Anyway, when my old and dear friend T invited me to listen to chamber music with her, I was flattered and interested enough that I thought I would try it out. Maybe in person, with the instruments right there in front of me, I could pay attention to the music. Classical music, however, is the very hardest for me, because there are no lyrics to focus my attention.

The first song (concerto? musical piece?) caught my attention for a little while because it sounded like men and women arguing. The men were the baseline with slow, steady, repetitive, and well-reasoned arguments. The women were the violins arguing with passion and volume and eloquence. By the end of the song (movement?), both voices spoke with triumphant joy at winning the argument. The men knew that they couldn't have lost with such reasonable and steady arguments, and the women were just as certain that their verbal acumen had once again carried the day. I was proud of myself. I had found a way to focus on the music. I couldn't possibly hum one strain of what I had just heard, but even without lyrics I had a whole story figured out in my head.

Then T turned to me and said, "It's so festive, you can just imagine a room full of people in ball-gowns dancing, can't you?" So I smiled and agreed, because my argument theory was obviously the wrong way to hear the music. Still, it sort of worked, so I tried it with the next piece. I can't say I was always successful at making up stories to keep my mind from wandering back to school or the taste of my dinner still lingering in my mouth or my cracked and bleeding hands, but I can say that I stayed awake for the entire concert. Which is saying something since it went way past my bedtime.

Ambigasity

Fern and I coined a new term. I, of course, forgot all about it, until she reminded me last night. It was in response to a certain situation at a wedding last month. The wedding had square dancing instead of the traditional awkward couple-swaying so common at most weddings these days. Square dancing increased participation because the caller would tell you exactly what to do, and, even if you didn't have your own partner at the wedding, asking someone to square dance is a non-sexual advance, so it was relatively easy to participate as a single person.

At any rate, we each separately noticed a very particular unpleasant smell emanating from the crowd of people dancing. Because so many people kept swapping partners, it turned out to be nearly impossible to identify the exact source of this odor, but as the night progressed both Fern and I put forth several private theories, most of which didn't hold up to the long night of dancing. We also each worried that we were the objects of other people's hypotheses since we realized that we were just two more faces in the crowd of possible suspects. Eventually, since the smell continued no matter who was on the dance floor, I was left with just three surviving suspects.

First, I had to suspect the caller. He was the only common denominator whenever I was dancing (other than myself, and I ruled myself out because I'd know if it were me). He was also a logical suspect, the sort of crunchy granola, older dude who wouldn't hold in his farts if he had to cut one.

Second, since the dance floor wasn't far from the bathrooms, it could have been a plumbing, rather than a gastric problem. The women's bathroom seemed fine from my two visits there, but who knew about the men's? It could have been the source of a lot of unpleasantness.

And finally, I suspected the dinner. It had squash and pheasant in it, both of which could have been an unfamiliar irritant to several different stomachs on the dance floor. Maybe there wasn't a single perpetrator of the stank, but several emitters of silent but deadly gases. This "grassy knoll" hypothesis seemed at least as likely as the caller, and slightly more likely than the men's bathroom (because, really, wouldn't one of the men have mentioned it?).

At any rate, it was a rather unsatisfying mystery, because it remains unsolved to this day. I didn't even realize anyone else had noticed it, until during the car ride home, Fern abruptly announced that we needed a word to describe the lingering, but unidentified, fart smell on the dance floor. "Ambigasity" won the short debate. We don't have an answer, but at least we have a word.

Bridezilla

I was never the kind of kid who dressed as a bride and fantasized about getting married and having a husband and kids (well, at least not the husband part). Blame feminism. Blame divorce. Whatever it was, I just never got into the whole parading down the aisle thing. Well, never, except for that one time.

I was thirteen years old. My dad and step-mom used to take me up to the North Shore every summer for a week in a cabin on Lake Superior. We played a lot of board games, cooked homemade food, and drove up and down the shore looking for good hikes. We picked fresh raspberries and saw the witch tree, and then every year, we'd take part in some kind of indoor/cultural activity, too. There was a little play house in Grand Marais, we'd sometimes attend.

One year, my dad took us out to dinner at the Naniboujou Lodge up past Grand Marais. I fell in love the minute I walked in the door. It could have been the immense rock fireplace (the largest in Minnesota) with elaborate natural stone designs, but, since I'm not really a subtle person, I'm thinking it was probably the brightly painted walls and ceiling. They are decorated in rich primary colors with Cree Indian designs. After a lifetime of white walls and subtle trim colors, the effect blew me away. I couldn't believe that this abundance of color hid behind the sedate exterior of the place. There was a hush in the dining room. People talked, but, at least to my teenage ears, it seemed that they spoke with reverence. They were in the presence of great and unusual beauty. These were people who survived the grayest months of winter, so they knew how sacred it was to spend even one meal basking under vividly saturated walls.

I toured the rest of the public spaces of the Lodge. I discovered the "solarium" with the immediate infatuation of a dedicated reader. I longed to stay there instead of our simple cabin, spending my week next to the warmth of the fireplace and those improbable walls. I would have been reluctant to leave even for hikes and excursions to Witch Trees or Canada. I decided, since I knew it was too expensive for just a regular summer week, that someday, I'd get married at the Naniboujou, and when I did I'd spend one perfectly happy week in my own personal temple to beauty.

Anyway, this weekend I finally did get to attend a wedding there, even if it wasn't my own, and I did get to square dance under that fantastic ceiling, even if I didn't have a partner to swing round and round. I also finally lived my dream of sleeping at the Naniboujou, in a single bed, granted, across the room from Fern's single bed, and the bed totally sucked, even for a single bed. But I did wake up the next morning and drag my book down to the solarium for some quality time before I ate my final breakfast under a resplendent ceiling.

You Can Never Go Back

Fern and I drove to Carleton today to get new sweatshirts, eat Hogan Brothers' Sandwiches and breathe the Malt-o-Meal laden Northfield air. According to the radio, this is the last weekend for peak fall color viewing, although, for me, there's no point in viewing bright orange, yellow, and red leaves unless they are splashed across a clear, blue sky, and clear, blue skies have been in very short supply this gloomy October.

It wasn't until we arrived on campus and saw all of the prospective students milling about with their parents that I remembered that MEA weekend 17 years ago was the very weekend I decided to attend Carleton. I remembered walking across campus with my mother who spent that year riding a Sine curve of my annoyance with her and so treated me with gentle standoffishness that weekend in order not to jinx my Carleton weekend. We were near what later became my favorite spreading elm tree on campus when some current students saw a crowd of prospies walking across campus and chose to fuck with us by announcing loudly that they were on the way to the library to write their 30-page papers due the next morning. I liked that these existing students noticed us and created some humor for us. It was very different from Northwestern, where, if anyone noticed that I was walking across campus with 20 other high school students, he didn't find it worthy of remark. I remember turning to my mother to see if she got the joke and finding her at close to -1 on the annoying scale, which was how I knew that the Carleton campus was already having an effect on my mood.

It still does. A quick walk across the bald spot, staring at the little kids who currently pose as Carleton students is almost sure to bring a smile to my face. It was Friday today, so the student mailboxes overflowed with Friday Flowers and my heart joined them. Of course, we only get to visit now and bemoan our slacker senior year, when we had the chance to take such fascinating classes and we blew it by only taking the bare minimum load. We only get to see the outside of the windows of our old rooms in Nourse, and we can't head on over to Goodhue for a round of hall 'bee before dinner.

Still, we left refreshed with that feeling that we always get, that we were lucky for those four years, happier than we knew, surrounded for the only time in our lives by people at least as smart as we were. It's good to see that it still exists, even though we know that it's not really there for us anymore.

Volunteering with Singles

So I joined the Single Volunteers Twin Cities, and yesterday I attended my first event. I wore a tight shirt and everything, even though we were packing boxes of food donations and I was bound to get sweaty. It turned out to be a bit of a waste of a tight shirt, because I was by far the youngest person there, and I'm not into old guys.

My job was to go through bags of food donated during the mail carrier food drive. I checked expiration dates and put the good stuff in boxes. It turns out a surprising number of people donate really old food to food shelves. It's kind of silly, since food shelves toss it out, but I tried to give the anonymous donors the benefit of the doubt, picturing really old people on social security desperately trying to find something in the back of their cupboard to share with poor folks. I don't know how accurate my picture was, but I didn't give anything (not even expired food) when the mailman asked me for my donations. So there you go.

Anyway with another attempt to find them under my belt, the mystery of the missing single men my age continues to this day.