Summertime, and the living is… well, getting easier

July 20, 2006 by Wendy

This has been the first time in weeks that I haven’t needed to give my time and energy over to moving boxes or houseguests or column deadlines or IKEA pilgrimages or I Love The 70s or grotesque, soul-withering heat. For the next three hundred words or so I’m devoting myself to YOU, the people.

Hello! How are you? How are your walls? Do you have stuff hanging on them? Do you have stuff on your shelves, too? How did that happen? How did you do that? Did you ever know that you’re my hero? And everything I would like to be? We’re definitely making progress, but it’s taking awhile. Right now, we’re at the point where almost everything with a power cord is plugged in where it needs to be, and all the electronic displays are sentient and unblinking. However we keep buying power strips, which baffles me. I mean, X is the number of things we need to plug in and Y is the number of available wall outlets, and in the course of changing apartments, X remains constant, at least for now, and Y, thank God, has increased, AND YET, this means that Z, the number of power strips we need, somehow increases as well. I mean, first the logic was: if X > Y, then Z, right? So why is it now X â‰¤ Y+Z = EVEN MORE FUCKING Z?

But of course, I’m glad we moved. Here is a list of totally mundane things we have in our new place that I did not have the pleasure of experiencing in my old building, and, in a few cases, my entire adult life thus far:

Garage space.
A bathroom exhaust fan.
An open-air back porch.
One of those sprayer thingies in the kitchen sink.
Three-prong receptacles in every outlet.
Water pressure. No, really.
Enough room to comfortably walk around the bed.
Basement storage that is clean and dry and well-lit and does not appear to have been dug out by Jame Gumb.
A laundry room that can be reached without having to go outside and through the alley.
Lights in the (get this!) CLOSETS.

See how easy to please I am? I know this might sound totally absurd to those of you who live in suburban areas and/or newer buildings, where everyone has central air, and remote-control windows, and wet bars in every cathedral-ceilinged walk-in-closet. But for the city, and for an older building, what we have is pretty good.

I didn’t have a chance to link to it before now, but I have to agree with Mr. Walter’s letter in response to my NY Times piece about the Eno Incident (the news of which also somehow managed to reach The Guardian, as well, so you really ought to be pleased with yourself, O Unknown Rossi’s Jukebox Prankster). I feel I should add that while “Thursday Afternoon” is best experienced in a quiet environment with a quality sound system, Here Come The Warm Jets is best listened to in a new apartment, while cooking dinner, on the quality sound system your boyfriend somehow managed to set up and get all plugged in.Â Or so I learned last night.

Change of address

June 30, 2006 by Wendy

I keep meaning to tell you I moved. WE MOVED. On Sunday the Starving Artists came and got my stuff and put it in the truck. They would have put Chris’s stuff in the truck had there been enough room, but apparently I have an astonishing amount of stuff. I mean, I don’t hoard used tinfoil or collect Franklin Mint chess sets, but still all my things could fill an eighteen-foot truck. So they unloaded the truck here at the new place and then got Chris’s things and brought them up the three flights. It took about seven hours.
I’ll write more later. I’m still too tired to think straight. See Flickr for more!

Whisper while you work

June 8, 2006 by Wendy

Of course I don’t know what kind of voice you hear in your head when you read these entries of mine, but for this particular entry, it needs to sound something like Demi Moore’s voice, a little raspy, since I’m getting over a cold. People always say, oh, but that sounds sexy! And maybe it does, if you’re a few feet away, but when it’s right between your own ears it sounds complicated and fuzzy, like the tuner knob on your radio is just a little off. I don’t enjoy it. This weekend it was much worse, and sometimes I had to whisper, which would have been fine if I’d happened to see dead people, or else wanted to say things like “not our class, darling,” but for everyday life it did NOT suffice. And I know it’s been only a week since it started, but my morning cough has become depressingly second-nature, like it’s something I do to ward off predators.

But I’m better, and I almost sound like myself again, and tomorrow Chris and I will be driving to Michigan, because there is nothing like ditching two apartments full of half-packed boxes for a short road trip. Maybe we will go to Cereal City and mess with people in trademarked-character costumes. Who knows?

I am counting the days until the move, when my morning commute will no longer include having to stare at this billboard, with its unsettlingly straightforward headline (it’s a Sean Paul lyric; it’s a product slogan; it’s both!), and the grim specter of Sean Paul’s head, which is huge enough to be in a zone all its own, hence the slogan (and the song). Every day I sit in traffic and consider the Zone of Sean Paul’s Head. Clearly it’s a zone in which one can legally have a first name as a last name. I suppose there are worse zones (i.e., construction, demilitarized, Dottie’s Weight Loss), but I can’t wait until I don’t have to look at this dude’s great big crunk face at 8:35 every morning.

You may have read over at Jen’s blog about how our heads were in the zone Saturday night after our event (though I am proud to say Smirnoff Ice was NOT involved one bit, and it was a fine time indeed. And yes, we had sashimi at the Four Seasons, and yes, it was a very bad idea. Because (and Jen is too kind to mention this), not long after I took a bite it occurred to me that the contents of my stomach were wanting very much to be in the same zone as my head, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. So I had to excuse myself, though I didn’t tell Jen what I had done until she confessed she needed to go home to do the same thing. We ladies of the Penguin imprints, we sure do* it up!

*and by “do,” I mean “throw.”

The things I do for you

May 31, 2006 by Wendy

So last week I had to do a reading at Barnes & Noble. Or I mean, a “reading,” since this crazy mackerel book of mine is all pictures and captions and there isn’t exactly a yarn you can spin. I considered doing a slide show or having a special big book made so I could pretend I was some kind of deranged Montessori teacher. But it soon became painfully clear that I just didn’t have time to put together anything elaborate like that, because I’m in the middle of packing, and lately my apartment looks like Aunt Sylvie’s place from the book Housekeeping. So I decided instead that I’d prepare and bring one of the 1974 recipes, and I know, that sounds elaborate, too, but I decided to make the EASY one, the Slender Quencher. Specifically, the “Skinny Devil,” the clear brown beverage garnished with celery and abject sadness.

So I went to the supermarket and found beef boullion cubes and celery and even a fancy glass that looked exactly like the one on the recipe card. But I couldn’t find sherry extract. Do they even make sherry extract anymore? I went with rum extract instead. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to subsitute one kind of fake hootch for another, as I’m told they all smell a little like diluted Night Train. About an hour or so before I had to head to B&N, I found my Slender Quencher card and got started. It was going to be simple: dissolve two cubes boullion in some boiling water; add extract; chill; add celery. I’d bring a container of it to the reading, pour it in the fancy glass, and present it avec cÃ©leri to the audience. I mean, it wouldn’t be gross. The Slender Quencher, after all, is the most innocuous of all the recipe cards. Who could be afraid of a little beef water?

I dissolved the boullion. I added the extract. But when it came to the “chill” part, I worried I wouldn’t have enough time to let it cool before the reading. Plus, it looked like it needed more water. Why not add ice? So I added ice.

Okay, I didn’t think about what is actually in those bouillion cubes. I mean, obviously, it’s powdered beef, right. But I didn’t follow that line of thinking long enough to consider what is actually in beef. Oh, God. I don’t know if things would’ve been different had I let the stuff chill slowly. All I know is that when I poured in the ice, there was suddenly something new in the broth. And it formed a waxy yellow layer so that the whole concoction looked like a gel candle, except not even as classy.

Slowly it dawned on me that the Slender Quencher was full of BEEF FAT, which floated around in horrifying little loogies. I held up the container in disbelief. Really, you’d only have to install a 20-watt bulb underneath the whole thing to make the most fucked up lava lamp ever. I shook the container, and then the waxy bits whirled about in tiny flakes like a snow globe, like a snow globe souvenir from the fatty winter wonderland inside us all. Oh, no. People, it’s not just a cute name: the “Skinny Devil” is a verifiably evil drink; it’s some kind of ritual Satanic fat-letting in beverage form. Far from being the harmless cold weak soup we’d imagined it to be, the common brown Slender Quencher turns out to be one of the most shit-awful gruesome recipes in the whole collection.

I didn’t think I could bring a plastic pitcher full of full-fat Slender Quencher to show to an audience at Barnes & Noble. No, it was too disgusting. So I strained the stuff. I poured it through a mesh strainer and a coffee filter to get out as much of the yellow crud as possible. By this time the ice had melted, and you could even call the stuff “chilled.” I scraped out the ring of fat that had collected around the sides of the container (yes: a ring of fat; I wish I was kidding) and poured the Skim Quencher back in. Then Chris and I drove to the bookstore, where I proudly brought out the damn stuff, poured it into the fancy glass, and YES I DRANK SOME OF IT. FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT.

It’s boozy-scented beef water. How do you think it tastes?