Beer
If you can get your hands on a Brooklyn Oktoberfest, I strongly suggest that you pick it up and drink it up. Bars around here unfortunately seem to be running out of it all the time, however. This is because it is so good; indeed, it's easily the best Brooklyn brew I've ever had. Indeed!

Film
The Squid and the Whale. It's quietly great.

Home
Metal shower curtain rod hangers. I just invested in a set of these and my classiness level has flown off the charts.

Life
Go to a corn maze before it's too late!

File under DAILY. Posted at 11:05 AM

The first dish I learned to cook was spaghetti. I don't know how old I was when my mom (or dad -- this is something he can make, too) taught me how to do it, but up until some time in high school, spaghetti, toast, Ellio's Pizza and sandwiches were the extent of my culinary repertoire. I remember that during those long, excrutiating summers before I had a job, I would daydream about the sandwiches I'd make for lunch later that day.

Okay, two tangential thoughts just occurred to me now, and I see no reason why to keep writing in a format that doesn't accommodate them:

1. My dad pretty much never has had to cook. He makes fruit salad when my parents have brunch, and he buys bagels on the weekend, and he cleans the bathroom and buys groceries and sweeps the porch (he loves sweeping the porch when my parents have company so that my mom doesn't yell at him for not being a better helper), and he does his share of general errands in the household, so that's great. But man, it must be nice never to have to make dinner. I barely ever make it, but still.


2. I would seriously love to have a jobless summer. I can clearly remember how bored I would get, how I'd watch a certain program mentioned in the previous entry twice on A&E every day, and then later would watch Moonlighting and thirtysomething, both of which later prepared me for writing insightful analytical essays on 1980's television, which, come on, is a crazy, pointless subject to have studied, when you think about it, but then, maybe not, because it can be expanded to examine larger issues in contemporary art, but again, still.

   Anyway, boring summers! Man! Why didn't I write a book THEN? I actually started one, and I remember my brother found it on my computer and read it and asked me to keep writing it because he liked it a lot, but I didn't, and now I really wish that I could read it, because I remember feeling like it was pretty good. It was going to be about a fourteen-year-girl in the summer. It's on a five-inch floppy disk that fits into an Apple IIGS... and I don't know where the disk is.

The second thing I learned how to make was "breaded chicken." This is a key ingredient to my dad's favorite meal of breaded chicken, white rice, and broccoli, and my family ate this a lot. I'm not really a fan of this meal, even though it's not bad.

The third thing was lasagna. And for a long time, this was all I knew.

It wasn't until recently that I started experimenting with making my own dinners on a semi-regular basis. I will probably prefer eating dinner in restaurants for as long as I work from home and/or live in New York, I think, but it's financially more sensible, at least in theory, to make one's own meals. (The problem is when your boyfriend eats what you'd expected to become leftovers.)

So anyway, the food I make actually tastes good! It surprised and pleased me to discover how well recipes work and how easy it is to make most things, as long as I have some time. There's a whole new world of food, inside my very own home. If I ever DO have a summer off, I'll start a recipe blog.

File under DAILY. Posted at 09:15 PM | Comments (9)

I've been twenty-seven since Monday. Twenty-seven sounds a lot older than twenty-six, but it also sounds better.

Recently, I've gotten into a couple of different discussions about what my adolescent self would think of my present-day self. Honestly, I'm not sure. If my teenaged self got to preview my current self, she/I would probably be kind of freaked out by the very fact of what was happening and might not be able to evaluate it clearly. I think she'd be disappointed about some things (what? I'm not famous? I haven't written a book yet?) and happy about others (ooh, cute boyfriend! and I have boobs, phew!). Or maybe I would have seen something else in myself, the thread that ties me to all of my past selves, the thing that lets me remember what it feels like to be five years old even when it also feels like more than a lifetime away, and I wouldn't have been surprised or disappointed about anything.

I wonder what I would see if I got to preview myself at forty. I may not even be alive; that's usually the first thought that comes to mind when I think about the distant future, though it's sort of self-protective, as if acknowledging that I might die will somehow prevent it from happening, because those sorts of tragedies are more likely to get you when you're not on the lookout for them, according to televesion.

Relatedly, I now own the first season of Columbo on DVD courtesy my dad, so in the face of my impending death, I have at least the pleasure of having seen all of those episodes. Andy, a Columbo novice, says he can see "how old people would like the format" of each episode, because there's no real mystery and the audience is just watching someone do his job. This wasn't a dig on my age, I don't think. I mean, I've always liked Columbo.

Anyway, Andy also says that twenty-seven is the age that all the hot famous people seem to be, so maybe I have something to look forward to.

File under DAILY. Posted at 10:41 PM | Comments (4)