zin for breakfast

happy halloween!

emergency situation

This beast is in my bathroom. What do I do?! Seriously, it's a monster. I've got a fail-proof strategy for killing bugs on the floor, but I can't throw my Environmental Law textbook into the crack between the wall and the ceiling. The force of gravity would not be in my favor. Medicine cabinets would break. What the hell is this thing? If there's anything more terrifying than spiders, this is it. Oh god, so many legs. And the antennae!

I'm going to alert my roommate. Please send suggestions/killing tools ASAP.

UPDATE:  Thanks to www.whatsthatbug.com, we have confirmed the beast's identity. It is a common house centipede, which sounds deceivingly nonthreatening. Further research has produced some more troubling facts: house centipedes feed primarily on spiders, bedbugs, termites, cockroaches, silverfish, ants and other household arthropods. So not only do I have a giant centipede, but I have, potentially, a whole slew of other problems. Do I let the beast live so it will eat the other beasties? Let it do my bidding? I guess so, at least until I can think of a better way to kill it.

still life with knish

This was taken a while ago at Housing Works, one of my new, semi-regular, reading/writing spots.  I remembered this knish today as I sat down to enjoy a bowl of delicious mashed sweet potatoes. What a fantastic vegetable.

[Insert segue]

I went home this weekend and had a lovely time. Mostly because of this guy right here:

I told you my house was freezing! Even the dog gets cold. These folks were pretty fun to see too:

Don't tell Ric that his picture is on the Internet. People in prison might see him.

I'm feeling pretty psyched about fall, which is why I rounded them up to go for a hike up Sleeping Giant, where we haven't been since I was about 9, at which point they were the ones forcing me up the mountain. Okay so I thought I hated nature. I didn't really, though, see?

I was promoting the World Wildlife Federation and doing hiking-boot ballet for crying out loud.
 
Anyway, I failed to capture New England fall in all its rapturous beauty, and I'm too lazy/inept to Photoshop said beauty back in, but here's an idea:

 

If you thought it couldn't get any more wholesome, I'll just add that on Saturday we baked an apple pie. Sorry, no pictures. It was not a complete failure, in the sense that it was edible but sort of raw. Turns out underbaking doesn't work as well for pie as it does for cookies. To console myself, I made cookies the next day, and I underbaked them, and they were delicious. I win.

Also unearthed this weekend:

  

Laser photo! I didn't even remember this one. I'd say first grade, judging by the horrifying bib dress and the giant hole where my teeth should have been. Also the haircut. Very Uncle Joey from Full House.

I know, right?

I'm back in the city now, feeling rested and content and full of sweet potato. I have reading to do, Survival in Auschwitz actually, which, while not exactly comfort-reading, is certainly worth my time and attention. So, this post has turned out to be pretty light on content, but look at all these pictures! No complaining. Yes, I'm talking to you, you five Google Reader subscribers.

times past, passing time, no more cookies

The smell of an elementary school cafeteria is wafting through my windows this morning. I know you know what smell I'm talking about. It's a warmed-over smell, the smell of food that's been cooking at a low temperature for a little too long. It's tater tots, soft carrots, and salty minestrone soup. It's pizza bagels, thick and gummy. I'm even getting hints of breakfast-for-lunch day, with some powdered eggs and fake maple syrup coming through. I love New York at times like this, when it becomes something unexpectedly familiar. Like a frisbee game in Morningside Park, a farmers' market, or immaculately dressed Jewish parents with immaculately dressed (and adorable) children everywhere I turned on the Upper West Side yesterday. Happy Yom Kippur! The weather helps too. It's sunny, and even the birds are chirping.

So am I subconsciously aching for childhood? I've written about ice cream trucks, laser photos, and school lunches at this point, so something must be up. Maybe turning 22 last month has me trying to regress. It's funny, I've been very caught up with moving forward lately--at school, with writing, with the relationships I'm forming here--but I'm going the other direction too. Working on this next story for workshop, I'm realizing that I'm still mining my childhood for material...and still coming up with stuff to say. Is it just a perspective thing? Do I have to wait until I'm 40 to start writing about my 20s? Hopefully this blog will be around to jog my memory. (Ha.)

And as I write this, tragedy strikes. This is probably the worst news yet about the financial crisis we've found ourselves in: No more circus animal cookies. More details here. This doesn't count as childhood nostalgia because I didn't discover these chemically delicious cookies until college, but they seriously stole my heart the minute I tried one in the TSL office. What is to become of Animal Cookie Parade? My favorite flavor at 21 Choices has these tasty morsels ground up in it! I have been known to order Animal Cookie Parade with a topping of Circus Animals. Just putting that out there.

I wonder if people are fighting in the supermarkets for the last bags. I'm going to go stock up, right after I empty my bank accounts and hide my money in the wall. 

everyone loves early-90s nostalgia

A more substantial post (with pictures!) to come, but in the meantime, something to keep you busy.

In my many years of school portraiture, more than a few unfortunate photos endure. A look back through the pages of West Woods Elementary School/Hamden Middle School yearbooks is one long cringefest that I like to put myself through every now and then, reminding myself that everyone has awkward years, before realizing that, in my case, it's pretty much the entire decade. But there was second grade. My picture was mostly terrible. If I remember correctly, there was a mistake in the printing that made it look like I had a mole on my cheek. But that didn't matter because second grade was the year my mom paid to get me the LASER BACKGROUND!!! Hell yes! Best school picture of my life, and that's why this site makes me so happy.  Mom, let's scan that photo so I can put it up and show people how awesome I looked.

Did "I Love the '90s" cover this phenomenon? Because they should have. And from that site, I found this one, which is actually a little terrifying. See Glenn, for example.

In all seriousness (read: in an effort to redeem this post) I'm really interested in the portrait as a form of documentation. I'm sure there's an entire subfield of Art History devoted to this study, but I'm more curious about why portraits more than ten years old always, always look ridiculous. Is it fashion and hair style exclusively? Tacky laser backgrounds? Or is it those big grins that make it clear we think we're the shit because of our rainbow-colored braces and brand-new-for-picture-day sparkle vests?

Simon Rich should write a New Yorker column on this subject. Thanks, Andrea, for reminding me of his brilliance.

brief and of little consequence...

Since I've been here, I've acquired three umbrellas. Here's why. When I wake up, and it's sunny, I expect it to be sunny for the rest of the day. So when it's 3 p.m. and the sky turns gray and the wind picks up, it doesn't occur to me that it might actually rain. When it does, in fact, start to rain on me as I'm walking 20 blocks south, I'm actually shocked. Weather? Change? But why? Getting rained on is miserable, but at first I fully refuse to buy an umbrella. I have one sitting in my closet; I will not buy another umbrella. Instead, I eat falafel at a Lebanese restaurant and hope it's a passing shower. When I see it lighten up, I head back out, only to get dumped on a minute later. Still ten blocks from my destination. Cursing rain, cursing Manhattan, and cursing my own lack of forethought, I walk into a Rite-Aid and pay six bucks for a blue umbrella that threatens to flip inside out the minute I open it on the street. I curse the umbrella along with all the things I cursed before as I keep walking. But then I'm at the theater, and people are clustered around the door, milling around inside, and I walk into this warm, lighted space and find my seat, and ten minutes later--what do you know?--there's Salman Rushdie, bashing American politics and MFA programs and talking about this year's Best American Short Fiction, which he edited. And then these two actors are reading to me from the book! One story is by Tobias Wolff, and it's nicely competent, and the other is by Kevin Brockmeier, and it's inventive magic realism, but sort of gimmicky, but altogether it's very nice to sit in a comfortable chair and listen to people read you stories, especially when one of the people is Anthony Rapp, who I'm much more used to hearing as he belts out "La Vie Boheme." And then I found a hundred bucks.

No, but I did drink hot chocolate with whipped cream.

Oh, and this just in: California is suddenly running out of money? Shouldn't someone be keeping track of this stuff? Isn't that someone's job?