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this american life, live in chicago!

{29 April 2009}

i continue to hold out hope that one day, ira glass will give it all up and run away into the sunset with me. sigh. in the mean time, i had to settle for seeing the live show in chicago. btw, i think that the show is going to run this weekend on the usual radio slots around the US on various NPR stations. so, impressions:

+ holy shit is dan savage ripped. that man has guns. what does he need arms like that for to be on the radio? oh…wait. yes, i see.

+ starlee kine….is kind of whiny. her story, while adorably illustrated in post-it-note art on a video screen behind her, was a pretty run-of-the-mill dysfunctional family piece. also, she is a wee lass. she tottered out on stage on these enormous turquoise blue platform shoes and, when everyone lined up for an awkward, not-rehearsed-or-discussed-before-the-show bow at the end, she was still dwarfed by the guys on either side of her.

+ joss whedon can sing! who knew?

+ the video short by david rakoff sort of made no sense to me. i’m pretty sure it worked better for the watchers of CSI who were in the audience.

+ ira glass hosted and mixed the show live, sitting at his correspondent’s desk under a single source-4 spot, almost dj’ing it, punching buttons on several different decks to raise or lower or pause music and layer it over or under interview clips, and video clips, while doing his half of the narration live into a old-fashioned hanging microphone all in a beautifully synchronized sort of routine. i took, regrettably, no photos during the show because i was paranoid that my camera would insist on flashing in spite of me turning the flash off and then i’d be that jerk who flashed her camera right in the middle of the show when everyone else was clearly watching with rapt attention. not surprisingly, public radio listeners are a polite crowd. i don’t think the cocktail waitresses were selling a lot of drinks that night.

+ ira glass and joss whedon in the same room is pretty much nerd heaven. how do they even know each other? if you’re ira glass, maybe you can just call joss whedon up and ask him if he’d like to write a song and be on your live radio show. or maybe if you’re joss whedon, you can call ira up and say, “hey, i’ve never played the piano in front of more than 8 people at one time before, but i wrote this song and so…can i be on your live radio show?”

{28 April 2009}

WEEKEND IN MARIN COUNTY, PER MCSWEENEY’S LISTS

+ overheard: “after my palm reading last week i really had a come to jesus moment about my health.”

+ actual pickup line used on me in a cafe: “so which Meyers-Briggs are you?” he then proceeded to guess my MB type based on my sandwich order.*

+ flyer left on my car: “free organic dry cleaning with purchase of a solar-power pizza!”

+ upon meeting a potential landlord: “o-m-g! i totally used to have, like, the exact same one!”** we weren’t talking about shoes, here. we were talking about the $45,000 BMW M Roadster that, through happy kismet/the generosity of my brother, was mine to drive for the weekend. the car did, however, put me at a significant disadvantage when it came to negotiating rental terms: “$1300/month is really a lot for me,” she says as she rolls back the top on the roadster, dons sunglasses and a headscarf, ala audrey hepburn, and roars off down hwy 1, pacific ocean glittering in the rear view mirror.

+ cat on a leash.

* goat cheese and avocado with celery, walnut pesto, and watercress on multigrain. gastronomically, if not culturally or economically, i have come home. though i am still unclear as to where my love for the chevre-avo combo places me on the Meyers-Briggs grid.

** please read with your best so-cal valley girl voice setting turned to FULL

get thee to a lexicon!

{23 April 2009}

H was kind enough to alert me to the fact that today is, per Mayor Daley and Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, “Talk Like Shakespeare Day.” I’m pretty sure that has the potential to be even more annoying than International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

And, regrettably, as H points out, whoever wrote the suggestions of how to talk like the Bard thinks that that “thee” is plural, not accusative. Alas. How will our children ever learn to use “thee” properly if we do not set a good example for them?

But 445th Happy Birthday to the Bard, anyway. I got my start working in Shakespeare, and I do love it in (most of) its many many (many) forms.

more from the training log

{20 April 2009}

more stuff from the training log. i passed my 4th kyu test in aikido! this is something i’ve been working toward really for the entire past year, ever since testing for 5th kyu in april last year, but for the past two months i’ve been very focused on it and logging a lot of hours on the mat.

i passed! by the time i got to the end of the review week, i was no longer really worried about passing. i definitely didn’t have a perfect test, by any means, but i felt good and focused throughout.

so the 5th kyu test was first, and i sat through all of that, trying to make sure my legs didn’t falling asleep in seiza. when the 5th kyu test was ending i could feel my heart starting to pound, fight-or-flight instinct kicking in a surge of adrenaline, and i tried to summon calm and focus, breathing through it. then Sensei got that cheshire cat-like grin on his face and said, “we’re going to try an experiment.” what? as experiment? now? shit! he placed two sheets of paper in front of him, and said, “in xx other dojo…” and for a moment i thought what he was about to do was test me on some other dojo’s test requirements. then he went on, “…they conduct different level tests simultaneously.” so he called both me for 4th and tom for 3rd up at the same time, and conducted our tests simultaneously. which was chaotic at times, but otherwise worked just fine. a couple of times where the stages of our tests didn’t line up, he’d call for one of us to sit down. which actually meant that i got a 3-4 minute rest twice during my test! which, though it was nice, i didn’t really need. the endurance training i’ve been doing all spring came through for me, and though i was breathing hard and sweating, i never felt exhausted, never felt like my form and focus were suffering for exhaustion, something which i often see on other students’ faces at the end of tests.

my weapons work was not great, nerves and a serious case of sweaty palms (it was at the end of the test, in a warm room and i was a sweat monster at that point) made the jo stick to my hand and not run smoothly, and it showed up my lack of basic training. also i had been working on getting the correct knee down during ura and omote sankyo pins, and on friday Enmei had showed me i was using the wrong knee in both cases, and once i tried to fix them both i got them so tangled in my head that i could no longer remember which was which. and it seemed like i did a LOT of sankyo. he called sankyo for practically every attack on the test requirements. the other thing that really tripped me up was in opening taisabaki, Sensei called for ai hanmi katatedori ushiro tenkan. what? ushiro tenkan? that was definitely not on the test requirements. so i struggled with that one, my brain trying to parse the japanese, backwards and turning, backwards and turning, and with some recommendations from sensei i fumbled through it and he assigned it to me as “homework.” not the most brilliant start to the test, but i recovered. i f’d up the ura version of ushiro ryotedori ikkyo the first time, turning it into sankyo somehow, but the second time i got it right. and, most importantly, i didn’t freeze up over kokyunage. i biffed one attack, but otherwise the kokyunage went pretty smoothly. and i did a pretty good job of remembering to show variations before i was asked. i’ll get more specific feedback from the instructors and yudansha over the next week or so.

i’m most pleased with my endurance, and with my focus. i was almost completely unaware of the other students on the mat, it was just me, uke, and Sensei’s voice barking commands or corrections.

and i really feel so much more competent having done the work for this test preparation. i’ve made more connections in my head between attack, taisabaki, and technique. i have a long way to go, but i can see the glimmer of those connections much better now than i could two months ago. i’m also really really sad about leaving this dojo community. i will certainly benefit from broadening my training into other dojos and styles, of course. but i heart the people here. funny, that i can write “i heart” with regards to people who routinely inflict pain, isn’t it?

friday night i posted something on my facebook status page regarding the test, and someone commented, “you’re a martial artist?” and it made me kind of feel awesome to be able to say, well, yeah. i am. i’ve accomplished something here. i am different than i was two and a half years ago. in many ways, of course, but this is one of the significant ones.

what can Brown do for me? nothing, apparently.

{15 April 2009}

i walked into a UPS Store this morning. told the clerk i’d like to ship a package on a UPS account number.

“oh, we don’t do that here!” she chirped.
“what?”
“we don’t ship on account here. if the package is all labeled and ready to go you can drop it off, though.”
blink, blink. “but you’re The UPS Store.”
“yes, but we don’t make any money off of shipping on account, so we don’t do that here. you can get a form from your UPS delivery guy, or from the UPS dropoff box located across the street. fill it out and then you can drop off the package here.”
blink, blink. “are you aware that you’re wearing no less than 6 UPS logos on your clothing right now?”

i considered continuing on to explain that the reason for the brand-association between UPS and what was formerly Mailboxes Etc and is now The UPS Store is so that customers like me will come in, fill out a UPS form, ship my package on account, and impulse-buy a dozen envelopes and some stamps while i’m at it. i mean, what the fuck? The UPS Store doesn’t ship UPS packages? are they aware of the irony?

i went to Fed Ex* instead. am i trapped in some kind of commercial about small-business shipping-needs?

*That would be a Fed Ex Kinkos, to be exact. if one shipping company buys a copy shop, the rest of them have to, also.

cake post-mortem

{13 April 2009}

okay, so now that we’ve eaten The Cake, here’s the rundown: over all, the icing and the coconut filling were awesome. the cake itself was dense and a little dry. some notes (bear with me, people, baking is Science and requires lab documentation as such):

– the most likely cause of the dense cake is that my baking soda and baking powder are old – i’ve heard you should replace those yearly, and i’m pretty sure i’m still on my first can of baking powder since…oh, i started cooking for myself. which would make it about 10 years old. they should sell that stuff in smaller quantities.

– never mind with slicing the cake rounds in half (creating four very thin layers). i’d just make the same quantity of filling and slather on a much thicker layer between the two cake layers, instead of thinner layers between 4 rounds of cake.

– the directions just tell you to spread the filling to the far edge of each layer, but i’d go in and pipe a line of icing around the edge. it’ll keep the filling in and make it easier to ice the outside. i might go so far as to put a layer of icing between cake rounds in addition to the coconut filling, so that there’s some direct frosting-on-filling action.

– i also wouldn’t bother with the rum syrup. i couldn’t tell what it added to the cake (maybe if i’d used more it would have make the cake less dry….?) the rum-and-chocolate combo is a wicked one, but i’d just work the rum into either the icing or, more likely the filling.

– but i’m not convinced that more experimentation, beyond baking soda, isn’t necessary to get the ideal cake texture. this one was, as i mentioned, dry, and light in color. perhaps the flavor was intentionally mildly-chocolatey so as to contrast with the intense chocolate of the icing, but i’d rather just have good cake. so next stop is to experiment with different chocolate cake recipes.

overall i give myself a B+ for presentation (for my first from-scratch cake, it looked pretty damn good), and a B for flavor. good: using sharffen berger chocolate as the base chocolate. and the coconut/pecan/custard filling was holy-shit-that’s-good. bad: after spending $10 on chocolate, cheaping out on replacing my baking soda was a dumb thing to do, and the resulting cake was dry and dense.

the verdict? i’ll totally try this cake again (keeping in mind that it requires a very special occasion to spend SIX HOURS making a cake and that the ingredients were easily over $25). in the mean time, for my next dinner party i’d just as soon spend 1 hour making a kick ass fruit cobbler than spend six making this cake.

oh, but we’re not finished on the subject of cake, internets. next stop: meatloaf cake.

IMG_0578

101 in 1001: [no. 69] bake a cake from scratch

{12 April 2009}

so, the task was just to bake a cake from scratch. a four-layer german chocolate cake was perhaps overkill for my first attempt, but, well, i had to run with the inspiration i had at hand. i’m having a dinner party tomorrow night, and it was a perfect excuse to make a cake that (according to the recipe) feeds 16. and i pretty much love dark chocolate and coconut so much that i want to marry it.

the verdict about how it tastes will be out tomorrow. right now i’m just pleased with myself that the icing all went on smoothly – i have memories of trying to ice cakes as a kid and it always turned into a big botched up mess of icing and cake crumbs. also, the baking of the cake layers made my apartment smell awesome.

the useful lesson to be learned here is that it’s not enough to read the recipe for the ingredients – it’s also necessary to read through and make sure i have all the required tools, too*. so, some improvisation was required, but it all worked out in the end. necessary substitutions included:

pastry brush = damp paper towel
flour sifter = a narrow-mesh pasta strainer, shaken gently
icing decorator tips and bag = ziplock baggie with one corner sliced off
parchment paper = butter and flour the pan the way i learned to bake from my mother
cake lid for overnight refrigeration = carefully tented tinfoil

start to finish (including cleaning up) took…five and a half hours. i may or may not have gotten chocolate in my hair, i’m not telling.

*not dissimilar to the time that i got all the way through making my own pie crust for, what turned out to be, the first time, only to discover that i didn’t own a pie plate. emergency run to target ensued.

and now we are thirty-one

{08 April 2009}

So Owl wrote . . . and this is what he wrote:

HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA
BTHUTHDY.

Pooh looked on admiringly.

“I’m just saying ‘A Happy Birthday’,” said Owl carelessly.
“It’s a nice long one,” said Pooh, very much impressed by it.
“Well, actually, of course, I’m saying ‘A Very Happy Birthday with
love from Pooh.’ Naturally it takes a good deal of pencil to say a
long thing like that.”
“Oh, I see,” said Pooh.