C is for camping and D is for dirty

August 9, 2007 by Wendy

Oh hurray, a new poet laureate who does not suck. Please read and dig Charles Simic. Under him, the Office of Poet Laureate will be awesome! It’ll be a room with doors that open to blank walls and dark mirrors! And there will be a blind dog and an empty coat with mice who whisper in the sleeves! Then again, can he really make things in Washington any more creepy and surreal than they already are? I kind of think not.

One Michigan camping trip down; one more to go! I don’t know if I mentioned that all our road trips this summer have also been camping trips. Back in April we impulsively bought a tent on sale at Dick’s Sporting Goods (who really needs to fix the typo in their sign, since after only ten minutes there it was abundantly clear that they’re supposed to be called Dicks, Sporting Goods, but never mind). And so for our Iowa and Wisconsin and Michigan trips we’ve loaded up the car with sleeping bags and an air mattress and set out like the Joads, except without all the abject despair and tin pans.

I know a lot of people find camping sort of horrifying, but it’s how my family did a lot of our summer vacations when I was growing up. And it was fun, though how much I truly enjoyed it depended on how old I was. From the age of five through about ten my attitude was: yay, let’s check out the rec center, maybe they have pinball and Tombstone Pizza! From eleven to sixteen it was: oh, fuck, I’m just gonna sit in the car and listen to my Walkman and constantly reapply my makeup using the rear-view mirror. Now it’s: wow, I totally have not checked my email for the past twelve hours. And part of me still can’t believe it all works, this tent thing; it’s crazy! Of course, all this time we’ve camped at places where there are showers and roads and picnic tables. THIS weekend, however, we’re going up to meet up with a big group of Chris’s friends from college and camp along the east shore of Lake Michigan. And instead of showers there will be… Lake Michigan. It’ll be some dirty, dirty camping, to be sure. I will be brave! And probably a little drunk, too.

Thursday night

August 2, 2007 by Wendy

There’s no air conditioner here in the guest room/office, so tonight I’ve been just spraying myself with fancy water from one of these little Evian Brumisateur cans. I love these damn things: half the label is in French; the English part says that this product is particularly recommended “for infants and for babies.” Sometimes I put my Evian Brumisateur in the fridge to make it extra awesome. It is hot as all get-out but now I am well misted, like a fern. Or a lettuce.

And, speaking of produce, maybe you have been wondering how the farm share thing is going. For awhile we’d been just cruising along and we’d found a way to fix whatever turnip or mystery green the hippies tossed our way, and all of itâ€”even the tetragonia, which sounds like some dipshit kingdom in a Star Wars prequelâ€”turned out pretty well. Then recently we got a head of radicchio, a big purple fist lurking in the corner of our box, so I spent a day looking up recipes to see how I could use it.

Okay, apparently you can grill radicchio, but that seemed like a lot of trouble, so I picked a simple pasta recipe that involved sauteeing the stuff in olive oil with some garlic. While the penne boiled, I chopped up the radicchio and put it in the oil to wilt. After a couple minutes it began to look like wet leaf compost and I sadly pushed it around and around the pan hoping that it would stop looking like the stuff in rain gutters. And then I picked a shred off the spoon and tried it: it tasted like coffee grounds and desolation and like when you spray Deep Woods Off! on yourself and accidentally get some of it on your tongue. I’d heard radicchio is supposed to be “bitter” but it was beyond bitter; I swear it tasted like it could key my car. I read that the red parts of the leaves aren’t as bitter as the white parts, so I tried the red parts. The red parts were only slightly less spiteful. I finally called in Chris to try it. I watched his face as he took a bite. I couldn’t read his expression.

“Wow,” he said. “Can we please not eat this?”

“Oh my God, thank you,” I said. We scraped it into the trash and I made a primavera sauce instead. Maybe there was just something wrong with the recipe, something that put the “dick” in “radicchio,” but next time one of those things turns up in our box, I’m trading it for something else. But that’s really been the only snag so far.

Tomorrow morning Chris and I are headed up to Michigan for the weekend. After all this working and BlogHerniating, it’ll be good to get away.

Farm! I'm gonna live forever!

June 21, 2007 by Wendy

So we’re doing yet another Thing this summer, and it’s the dorkiest Thing yet, and I have not been able to shut up about it in real life conversation. It’s a Farm Thing: a farm share community- sponsored-agriculture kind of thing, where you give a local farmer a big box of money and in exchange he gives you a big box of organic seasonal produce every week. Every week for like, five months. The idea is that you do this to support local agriculture and organic farming and to infuse yourself with the sort of crunchy wholesome goodness that makes the Amish so upsettingly attractive. (No, really, their skin, it is peachy and gorgeous.)You also do the Farm Thing because you are just a tiny bit insane and wish to stage your very own personal hippie-food edition of Iron Chef. You get one week! To figure out! How the fuck to cook all this bok choy!

But I think we’re up for the challenge. For the past year now we’ve been shopping less and less at the Jewel and the other supermarket chains, and more and more at the produce stores, which have better and cheaper veggies and decidedly fewer Bad Times. (Though it must be said that Stanley’s has way too many foodie douchebags crowding the aisles on weekends to ever truly be good times, but whatever.) Anyway, I hope I’ve learned a few things from all my pseudo-frontier-wife soup-making antics this fall and winter. Like I know that kaleâ€”aka the curly leafy stuff that hotel caterers use to decorate salad bars because it practically never wiltsâ€”is actually edible, once you steam out all its latent anger and sorrow and serve it with chickpea curry. I bet knowledge like this occupies the part of my brain that used to be devoted to POINTSâ„¢ and super fun POINTSâ„¢-related SAT math problems calculating how many light-hambuger-bun-and-fat-free-cheese-singles sandwiches I could afford to consume per day. But I would be stupid and useless on Weight Watchers now. I don’t know how many POINTSâ„¢ anything is anymore because that stuff isn’t printed on the bok choy. Which, yes, we somehow figured out how to cook this week.

We got our first box last Saturday and this Sunday, on our way home from a little weekend trip, we’re picking up our second box from the actual farm. I am so stupidly excited about this you have no idea. You know it’s only a matter of time before we freak out completely and sell all our crap and move into a soy-powered geodesic dome.

I've been meaning to get back to you about these things

May 2, 2007 by Wendy

The New York and Boston thing: Oh jeez, so much fun, though what I saw of New York this trip was pretty much limited to Williamsburg and Midtown, and what I saw of Boston was limited to the Great Scott and the neighborhood thereabouts. But I did get to drive around the block once in Brooklyn, because Jami had double-parked her car to get coffee and while I was waiting a cop drove up. Don’t Wait Until the Cop Comes Up to Yell at You is an important driving rule around there, I believe, as well as Hasidic Dudes in Minivans Always Have Right of Way. But then I let Jami have the car again and she drove it up to Boston, where she and Janice and I read to a couple dozen people. And I didn’t throw up. (For a minute there I thought I would. Don’t ask why.) And then the three of us held a competitive read-off where we read snippets of the most lurid parts of our books. Obviously I lost, since I’m Not the New Me is not so much about the sex and drugs than it is about awkward makeouts and binging on white bread. But I did my best against Ms. Nerve.com Stories and Ms. Tales of Clubs and Cocaine, and I had a blast trying, at least.

The bike thing: Chris bought himself a bike a couple weeks ago, which means that we can ride together, which means that I can worry less about falling off my bike and breaking something and lying in a ditch all wounded and covered with ants for days and days. So on our first day out we headed up the North Shore Channel Trail, which goes through Lincolnwood and Skokie. We went as far as Dempster, which in my mind is so far north that it’s nothing but tundra and fur traders (but no, it’s Skokie), and then we got lunch and turned around. When we looked at the map later we realized the round trip was nearly twelve miles. Twelve miles, and we were not even remotely dead. Last night we went out again, but we could only do about seven miles before it got dark. This Sunday we’re going to try the work route.

This Thing thing: Oh, ho ho, I say, because the other night I had a big Argentinian steak after the wedding of some friends of ours, and that ponderous Steak Feeling is with me still, and it sits, like a giant cat, on the metaphorical keyboard of my good intentions. No, I tell it, you can’t has cheezburger. That’s just how it is at the moment.

Reading thing: Friday night I’ll be reading with Jami (again!) and Alpana Singh at the Book Cellar. You know that means there will be wine, right?

No Punchline

April 27, 2007 by Wendy

One day in the fall of 1991 my friend Michael and I were in a lounge at the student union at University of Iowa. It was my junior year, and I spent an astonishing amount of it smoking cigarettes in the Wheelroom with Michael. It was a cold, shitty gray Friday; somehow we decided this was enough reason to ditch our afternoon classes. So we set out up the hill through campus and downtown; we stopped to rent a couple of movies, then continued up Washington Street another half mile or so to my place. There were flurries in the air. It was November 1st, which was way too early for snow.

I had never seen Female Trouble so Michael insisted we rent it. I can’t remember what else we rented. We sat around my living room on my yellow couch and watched Divine scream about cha-cha heels. Out the big drafty window we could see the flurries getting heavier. We were glad to be inside. We might have even ordered pizza or made popcorn. Near the end of the movie Divine jumped up and down on a trampoline, and then she took out a gun and started firing away at people. I’d seen Multiple Maniacs and this was even better.

At some point between movies I went into my room and turned on the radio for a moment. It was on KRUI, the campus station. The student deejay was saying something like just stay inside until we find out more. He spoke in that usual flat student deejay tone, so I didn’t think to wonder what it was besides the weather. I could see it was snowing steadily outside. Maybe it was worse than it looked. “Something weird’s going on with the weather,” I told Michael. But we weren’t planning on going anywhere for a while. I started playing a tape on my boom box, or else we watched the second movie, whatever it was, I don’t remember.

It must have been a couple of hours later when my roommate’s mom called. Yes, I told her, Kelly’s at work. No, I hadn’t heard what happened.
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