here were four teaspoons in a tablespoon and, well, there's not. I will be using the leftover pumpkin puree to make some cookies. Today I bought a glass bread pan from Meijer, but it seems to have partially broken in the oven. Sadly, the loaf has some shards here and there. I suppose it will stop me from inhaling the whole thing at once. Matt has another show this evening at the Blind Pig. Something tells me this is not the last of the band's shows before we take off. (As for the band, they recently won the third spot for MTv's Subterranean Indie Music Video of the Year award, and this week they received a rather favorable review on Pitchfork.) And as for taking off, I have no more information to offer. We have set up a half-baked Plan A, and here's to hoping we will not be needing to cook up a Plan B. We are currently waiting for some e-mails from Berlin and my job, letting me know whether or not I have been granted a store transfer. Until then, no vacations, no silk tops, not much of anything (except for baked goods). Matt's been awarded a writing scholarship to Prague, but it is still all up in the air at this point.
For Christmas my dad was generous enough to give me money to buy a new laptop. I have had my Powerbook for over five and a half years. I am in no hurry to give it up, but my 'T' has a permanent stick, and it lags like an an overweight labrador. May I say once more, this has been the best machine I have ever worked with. I have doubts that the new MacBook will be able to perform up to my expectations, but I will try to be a bit more optimistic.
Optimism. Isn't that the word of the season.
I was especially (and not terribly wrongly) optimistic about my first loaf of homemade bread. Last week I made a loaf of white (with a little bit of wheat flour worked in). It was delicious, made good toast just like the recipe had promised. But it didn't rise enough. I beat the hell out of the dough, but it still wound up looking like a run-over baguette than a bread suitable for peanut butter sandwiches. I will be trying again. Hopefully this time I will get started before 9:30 at night.
On Wednesday, Matt and I made plans for a date out to Detroit; our success was moderate.The MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit) is in between exhibitions. Due to terrible weather, our arrival to the Detroit Institute of Arts was delayed and we only had an hour and twenty minutes to run through the museum. We were unable to find a decent café (the Cass Café was a bar, Amsterdam Espresso burned down last year, Traffic Jam was too much of a restaurant, the Mercury Coffee Bar was not at our fingertips), so we inched in rush hour traffic through metro Detroit up to Birmingham, ate some gnocchi and fettucine alfredo at Buca di Beppo, and snuck into the movies. It was our fate to see Gran Torino, a Clint Eastwood modern-day samurai western with race cars set in none other than our Motor City. It is a strange movie, folks. The bad acting is overwhelming. The racial slurs are not funny, although a large majority of the audience seemed to think they were. Some of the thugs wear American Apparel. Not to say that it was all bad, but quite unusual for a Hollywood blockbuster-type. The blatant criticism of upper-middle-class Midwestern family values was a first for me, but spot-on.
This past New Year's Eve passed peacefully. Matt and I house- and dog-sat in his brother's farmhouse while he was down in Oklahoma. We burned a few firecrackers that I picked up from the dollar store, and we prepared what is perhaps my favorite dinner to date. Coconut tofu keema over basmati rice with flatbread and sautéed spinach. I don't recall the exact alterations I made, but I cut
out a substantial amount of the tomato sauce and in place of the red pepper paste added in some red curry paste. With only one glass of scotch and some coffee, we all (the two of us with the two dogs and two cats) watched the ball drop on CNN. The next morning we watched The Assassination of Richard Nixon on television, and went to a New Year's Day showing of Milk at the Michigan Theater. I never realized how great Sean Penn is until I saw these two movies (or who he was, for that matter). Milk comes from me highly recommended. The beginning of this month I purchased a continuing student membership to the University's gym facilities. Several times a week, usually after work, I go to the CCRB and run laps (3 miles' worth) around the indoor track. Despite it making quite a difference being inside and on a completely flat track, I still impress myself by keeping an average of 7.5-minute miles and by running a near-5k in 22:30 the first day -- my best time seven years ago.
Ah, Nina Simone. You come close to being the cure to my recurring nightmares. My post-graduation anxieties have not gone far -- I still struggle to find things that I am good at doing, to recognize those that I am not, to discover how much ambition is healthy to have, to realize prestige is worth only so much, to strike the balance between adult independence and familial abandonment. I suspect that these troubles plague all adult lives, that they will not be coming to a stop anytime soon.
When we talked the other day about the Clint Eastwood movie, there was something hanging around the margins of my awareness, but not ready to be articulated. It was this: the hypocrisy of his arrogant son, expressing concern about his widowed father's well being in "the old neighborhood" - the neighborhood that he abandoned to the riffraff (immigrants)but not willing to take his father into his own home. This hypocrite presumed to now what his father needed (a phone with big buttons?)when he actually had no idea at all that his father was demonized by wartime horror but he was not demented; he was certainly not incapacitated. That was what he represented for me - cluelessness! - not middle class suburban materialism. And the drive down Lakeshore Blvd at the end, if anything, showed a young man on the way to a good life instead of jail. I am sorry you were disappointed. I liked it a lot.