5.16.03

i was born without the stir-fry gene. the veggies are always over-cooked before the chicken gets done, the sauces lack some basic quality. the problem might be blamed on a lack of proper tools (no wok, no gas range), or my unfortunate optimism w/r/t substitutions, but i suspect even in the best-equipped kitchen i’d still fail. encouraged by our recent successes with Pad Thai, tonight’s adventure in cooking was Thai Curry Chicken with Basil. “Everyone will love this dish!” promised the recipe included in the box of rice noodles. i checked the instructions carefully, but the word stir-fry was completely absent. saut&eacute appeared a number of times, but hey, i can cook italian food, i can saut&eacute. having just eaten the over-cooked veggies bathed in coconut milk that was the fruit of two hours’ labor, i suspect that the words stir-fry just got lost in the thai-to-english translation. unfortunately, i’m also not good with proportions, so there are vast quantities of the stuff left. maybe if we drink enough tonight i can convince andy to eat some of it as a midnight snack.

5.15.03 – recap

after berating paul for his month-long silence at metameat, i proceeded to take a two week hiatus myself. have been busy transitioning from day job at the weekly into full time at the idaho shakespeare festival for the summer. god, it’s good to give up my day job. not that i didn’t love the weekly and all the freaks and weirdos i encountered there, and the opportunities to write, and the chaotic atmosphere that comes with a small indie newspaper, but the rigor of getting up every morning and going to sit at a desk beneath a flickering fluorescent panel and performing rote administrative tasks was really more than i could bear. i’m just not cut out for that sort of work (ie, a normal, stable job). training the new receptionist is a painful process, in part because she’s about as bright as a box of rocks, and in part because i’m a control freak and turning my own projects over to other people (particularly strangers) is always a trying experience. perhaps it was a subconscious form of protest, i don’t know, but at any rate, approximately 3 minutes after meeting the new receptionist yesterday i proceeded to nearly snip the tip of my finger off with a pair of scissors. it didn’t turn out to be a terribly serious wound, but it was a gusher. and while i’m squeamish at the sight of movie gore or other people’s hangnails, watching own blood pulse out of my hand didn’t really phase me as much as it embarrassed me to be bleeding all over the newspapers. in the end i got a tetanus shot and one stitch in my left forefinger for my trouble. oh, and the nurse also gave me a Tasmanian devil band-aid for being brave.

5.4.03 – those who can’t, organize

in this biz, it’s always a good feeling when one job ends and something else is lined up to start right afterwards. it means business is good. i’m getting work. vacation time generally indicates involuntary unemployment. today, business is good. perhaps a little too good (although i’m not complaining), as the final performance of Stop Kiss ended around 3:50pm, and at 4 o’clock rehearsal began for my next project: stage managing Drop Dance Collective’s upcoming show, Kissing John Woo. i truly love to watch dancer’s bodies in motion. the combination of power and grace that go into dance honor the human form in a very fundamental way.

4.30.03 – at odds with my own thumbs

all credibility as a movie reviewer went down the drain with yesterday’s issue of the Boise Weekly, when my extremely positive review of Danish art-house flick Open Hearts was printed across from the thumbs-up/thumbs down movie listings, which gave the same movie a “totally worthless” thumbs down recommendation (as a result of a “on a scale of 1-4 where 1 is good or where 4 is good” miscommunication). i will never again trust those three-thumbs, two stars up, two bags of popcorn-but-one’s-spilling-over movie ratings, now that i understand the arbitrary way that the Weekly assigns them: on tuesday afternoon cynthia calls out the names of the movies, and anyone who is in the office is welcome to chime in with their opinion, regardless of whether they’ve actually seen a preview, the film, or even heard of it. the irony of the situation, however, is the fact that it’s actually my thumb providing the conflicting message (i was in the office the day they needed to make a new thumbs-up picture and somehow my thumbs were deemed most attractive. and thus began my career with the Boise Weekly).

4.26.03

this morning’s interview with Dar Williams went well, minus the fact that Madison, WI, has little-to-no cell service, so the interview was staged in several pieces. as one might have expected, she exudes warmth and approachability on the phone. no transcript of the interview to put up here, as i had no way to record the conversation, but i asked a few good questions, i think.

sle-e-e-epy tonight. i didn’t sleep well last night; in between anxiety dreams about not waking up on time for my interview with Dar Williams i had anxiety dreams about my vegetable garden. i’d wake up in the middle of the night and think, “that garden plot is huge. i’ll never be able to keep up with the weeds and watering and plant-nurturing. i kill house plants right and left! i’ll have to spend all summer in the backyard groveling in the dirt, and i’ll start to resent it, and… and…” god, i can be high strung sometimes. most people take up gardening to relax. i can get stressed out by my hobbies.

after tonight’s performance of stop kiss there was this swanky dessert-and-coffee reception with the theatre’s bigwig donors and board members. i always feel like the poor relation at these things; the actors go, so that the donors can get a chance to meet and congratulate the cast, and i am of course invited along, but as the assistant director i’m not exactly playing an important role in the evening’s schmoozing. so there i am in my jeans and sneakers and ponytail, looking really interested in my cup of coffee. halfway through the evening the room had stratified; the donors and board members in smart clothes chatting at one end of the room, the actors and company members on the other side. it’s not such a bad thing, but this is how these events always go; we’re the hired help, and ultimately, everyone feels more comfortable with their own kind.

4.25.03 – stone soup

that’s it. albertson’s grocery chain is being sued because they neglected to tell consumers that they dye their salmon pink. as i learned this morning, only wild salmon come in that nice fishy-pink color; fish-farm salmon are grey. only, people don’t like to eat grey salmon, because they’ve only seen pink salmon in the stores, and so fish hatcheries feed dye to the live fish or dye the flesh after death so that they’ll be a more attractive color. apparently, this happens with most meat in the US – bacon, steak, hamburger – it’s all injected with red dyes so that it looks more fresh and bloody. the thought of eating grey flesh dyed pink for my consumer satisfaction grosses me out even more. there’s a fish farm in Hagerman, ID, that offers wholesaler buyers a color chart with varying shades of pink, so that the buyer can decide what color the fish should be dyed before they buy them. ugg.

turning the subject to recent vegetarian culinary discoveries, i found this tomato soup recipe that rocks my world because 1) it doesn’t taste like ketchup, and 2) it’s about as expensive as stone soup. looking at the grocery receipt, the breakdown goes:

soup:

1 carrot – $0.11

1 stalk celery – $0.05

2 cans diced tomatoes w/ basil – 2 @ $0.89 = $1.78

1 yellow onion – $0.24

1 can vegetable broth – $0.88

2 cloves garlic ~ $0.20

2 TBS olive oil – 1 liter @ 7.99; 2 TBS = $0.24

biscuits:

2/3 c milk – 2 quarts @ 1.09; 2/3 c = $0.09

2 ¼ c bisquick – 1 box @ 2.78; 2 ¼ c = $0.45

total cost (figuring in 5% sales tax): $4.24. total cost/meal (makes 4 servings): $1.06. yay, poverty food! even better, if my garden experiment works, i’ll be able to pick nearly all of the ingredients out of the garden and make an organic version of this soup, for the cost of the olive oil and veggie broth ($0.29 /serving).

4.21.03 – village fighter

easter consisted of brunch at my grandparents’ house, a matinee performance of Stop Kiss, dinner at andy’s parents’ house, and an evening birthday party at our friend matt’s. this necessitated changing clothes four times, and we ate like hobbits all day – by the time we got to matt’s house, we were sitting down to Second Desserts. we came home to our cluttered hobbit hole and passed out before midnight.

some people turn to comfort food in times of turmoil; others use it as a crutch, looking to mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese or ice cream on a daily basis to provide comfort. for me, i’m not so into comfort food as i am a slave to comfort clothing. i’m totally addicted to worn-out levis, polar fleece tops, old sneakers, and ponytails. i don’t just put on sweats when i’m having a fat day, i need comfort clothing all the time. my skirt-wearing tolerance is about three hours, after that i get cranky and don’t want to do anything but come home and put on pants. i’m convinced that pantyhose were developed to subjugate women – i mean, how can one possibly think clearly when one’s legs are being squeezed by sweaty tubes of nylon? its not natural. my legs need full freedom of motion. no pencil skirts, no high heels, no un-breathable fabrics. no fringy bangs in my eyes or lipstick to be smeared and touched up again. i can’t even wear nail polish – the weight of the polish on my fingers is unpleasantly distracting, my fingers feel thick and clumsy.

this isn’t a body image thing. i don’t hide in over-sized t-shirts and baggy sweatpants. i’m still a slave to fashion. if anything, getting dressed is even more challenging for me – i want to look nice, but my body needs to wear the same jeans i wore the last three days in a row. thank god i’m in a business where no one really cares what the hell i wear to work.

andy and our friend duane are in the living room rehearsing a comedy routine for this charity event tomorrow night. i don’t know what the skit is, but it has a theme song that goes, “village fighter, village fighter, fighting for your village!” lots of guitar strumming. then cut to a series of musical farts (or elephant calls, i’m not sure what the difference is).

4.18.03

my grass germinated! this might seem like a little thing, but i nearly broke my back a month ago cleaning up the yard and then it snowed and nothing grew and i was thoroughly discouraged. anyway, it feels pointless to turn on the sprinkler when it’s like 50 degrees out there, but my mother swears that the grass seedlings will curl up and die if they aren’t watered daily, and my water bill is included in the rent, so…

new assignment from the Weekly: 20 questions with Dar Williams. her publicist called offering to set up an interview, and none of the staff writers were interested, so it got tossed to me. must look cool in front of dar, must look cool… what do you want to know about dar williams? andy got hired at the Flying M this morning, which means that there’d be the potential, if we weren’t such geeks, to be a pretty darn hip couple: he works for the independent-est coffeehouse in downtown Boise, i work for the Boise Weekly (independent media source and something of a liberal stronghold) and nights we work with the only two professional theatres in town. the good: free coffee, free tickets, free press passes. the bad: between the two of us, we have five jobs. our latch-key cat is being raised by the tv.

4.16.03 – dream no. 9

tossed and turned last night, my head filled with strange, lurking dreams, in which i’m in a house, comfortably-lived in, but not familiar to me, and empty but for myself and my younger companion, a student or sibling, someone known to me in the dream but no one i can recognize now. in the crux of the dream, this person is warning me of a negative, lurking presence that accompanies me, a sort of haunting that i carry around with me. this person has clairvoyant capabilities that make his perception of the haunting much clearer than mine, but as the dream goes on i become more aware of it as well. woke up before we got around to getting rid of the unwanted presence. obvious subconscious references to Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance, which i recently finished, but i wonder what the dream experts would have to say about say about me discovering i have a negative presence that i haul around everywhere.

4.15.03 – vampyres are more fun with a ‘y’

Stop Kiss opened last weekend, so i’m still trying to recover the parts of my life that have been put on hold for the past five weeks. which includes responding to email from almost everyone i know. i promise i’m not ignoring you, i’m just tired. stayed up too late last night watching Herzog’s Nosferatu, a film i’ve been meaning to see for ages. lots of long slow camera shots and a wonderfully measured pace, not to mention a frickin’ scary vampire. we were split 2 to 1 over the issue of lighting; i thought the highly stylized lighting was fabulous, creepy and theatrical.