Just add water.

How is that you can give someone a grocery list full of items and they return with a bunch of snack foods and other assorted crap that doesn't actually help you make a meal out of anything?

This baffles me. This is why I buy food for the house. Clearly, the other person with a car cannot be trusted.

But maybe I'm being too hard on her. After all, I've never seen her cook a damn thing since we moved in here. How would she know that snack foods aren't meals?

Dani is leaving soon, and our new roommate, Miss Ashley, will be entering our strange universe. I can only hope that she will adapt well . . . or we will completely scare her off. One of the two.

You gotta work blue.

(Dave Chapelle is on TV in the background)

me: You know . . . I don't really like any black comedians.
heather: Dave Chapelle?
me: Not funny.
heather: Chris Rock?
me: Chris Rock is really smart, but if he weren't so damned annoying I might like him.
heather: Well, what about Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy? Ok, like, 80's Eddie Murphy.
me: Maybe a little 80's Eddie Murphy. And I don't really know Richard Pryor's stuff.
heather: What kind of comedy do you like?
me: I like Jewish comedy a lot.

(About five minutes of silence pass as we change channels. We come across Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Conan.)

me: Well, I do like Triumph.
heather: Stevi . . .Triumph's not black.
me: He is a rottweiller. Of course he's black.
(Heather stares at me incredulously.)
me: Oh, come on, he has black fur!
heather: Oh, I am so putting this on facebook.

I've missed your sweet clacking.

I have returned from the darkness that is the loss of the internet. A new adapter has finally been purchased, and I may begin again to chronicle my Costanza moments as well as the cooking adventures we embark upon.

Soon I will regal you with tales of: Cambodian food, raging dykes, Danish food, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Egyptian food and the porno I bought my coworker for Christmas.

But not tonight.

Tonight, I write Christmas cards.

The Bee Box Revisited

I want to personally extend my thanks to poet Lowell Parker who added his poem in a comment on my post "The Bee Box." I read his poem some years ago and it came to mind again when I saw the sparkly peach mummified bee ring at a jewelry vendor on campus. I'm very glad he provided the text so that others may read it and understand the sacrifice that love ought to be. I've reposted the text below so you won't have to search through the comments for it. Thank you, Mr. Parker.

"The Bee Box"

In this small box, my love,
you'll not find a ring,
but instead, a brave, little bee.
He'll be dead by morn, having given his life
defending his flowers against me.
I felt his sting
while picking the small, purple pansies
growing wild along the roadside,
in hopes of an afternoon bouquet for you.
And I grieved the sting,
more for him than me,
knowing full well the price he paid
for my small pain.
And I allowed him his victory,
leaving his flowers as a memory,
and brought you instead
this brave, little bee,
who proves there is love
even in the smallest
of things.

-Lowell Parker

Not Your Advert Whore

Due to the fact that people are using my comments section for their own devious purposes, I've changed my comment policy.

I realize that the internet is a public forum, but comments are intented for commentary (hence the word), not for advertising.

B is for Britain

Pip-pip, cheerio and all that rot.

We have successfully pulled yet another international meal out of our asses, or, rather, our tiny oven.

The Menu:

• Cold Cucumber Dill Soup
• Creamed Artichoke Hearts
• Coronation Chicken
• Bangers and Mash
• Cinnamon Plum Crumble
• Blueberry Scones
• Tea

I would like to state, first of all, that I am the soup master. Yet again I made a soup out of something you would not normally expect to be a soup. Granted, cold soups are meant to be palate cleansers, so something made from a crisp-tasting cucumber seemed a natural choice. You've really just got to taste this stuff. We still have a bunch left over.

The coronation chicken is a British excuse for a chicken salad. It's literally shredded chicken, onions, mayonnaise and pureeded apricots. It's deceptively good. All it's missing is bread.

This was my British discovery: with the exception of the bangers, everything we made could be eaten by people "wif no teef." Hmm . . . sausages and foods meant to be gummed? You do the math, people. I see what those dirty Brits are up to.

Right now, I've a Shepard's Pie in the oven.

A is for Argentina

In one of our typical post-midnight kitchen chat sessions, the roommates and I hatched a brilliant plan to learn about the world by having one international food night each week--that will be prepared entirely on our own through recipies we find on the internet.

We started with Argentina.

And we pulled it off.

The menu:

• Sopa de Manzanas
• Empanadas (chicken and cheese)
• Argentinian grilled eggplant
• Flan
• Argentinian fruit salad
• Sangria
• Red wine

It was a pretty amazing feat. None of us had ever made anything on our menu before, but somehow everything was entirely edible. (Though, the flan did take two tries and didn't turn out so much as flan but as a sort of cakey custardy thing.) Corey made the empanada stuffing, while Kirsten covered herself in flour and kneaded dough. Cassie and Heather figured out the flan. I made the apple soup all by my lonesome. Cassie grilled eggplant while Corey and I fried the empanadas. Dani made fruit salad while I conjured up a pitcher of Sangria and Liz photographed the entire event.

We all dressed like tango dancers and listened to crazy latin music.

If we can manage Argentina, I think we can take on the rest of the alphabet with the greatest of ease.

Next week, Britain, including shepard's pie, bangers and mash, spotted dick and other naughty-sounding taste treats.

The Drag Party

This is all the crazy shit you missed.

30 people in my apartment. Hotboxing the bathroom. Jello shots. Lady-boys. Fabulousness. 7-in heels. Crotch-socks. Absolutely nothing straight allowed. Moustaches. Stuffed bras.

A party so good, the cops had to shut us down.

After all, it's not a party until something gets broken.

Obey or suffer the consequences.

These are things we do not do.

1. Name our children after superheroes. I suppose that naming a kid "Bruce Wayne" or "Peter Parker" or even "Clark Kent" wouldn't be so bad . . . but Kal-el? Nicolas Cage is a Piasano . . . only someone who actually knows Hebrew should be allowed to do this and have anyone respect them.

2. Have sex with Katie Holmes.

3. Rename products to demonstrate your sensitivity to global catastrophes. Case in point, I was at Jamba Juice the other day and I ordered that I thought was a new item, a Strawberry Surf Rider. Only after I ordered it and tasted its strawberry goodness did I realize that something was terribly wrong. I knew this taste. This taste belonged once to the Strawberry Tsunami! I understand the need to be culturally sensitive, but, fuck, tsunamis are not going to cease just because there was one really bad one. Should we rename all carnival rides called "hurricanes" and all little girls named "Katrina" as well? It's one thing to remove the Twin Towers from Spiderman because of 9-11, but to attempt to remove any evidence of a natural phenomena? Something about this is a little off.

4. Park in my space when all I want in the world as I return from work at 1 am is my parking space and a peice of fucking cake. (Yes, in the whole world, that's all I want.)

Jenrikay's Music Tag

I've been tagged, and I am probably going to give her the strangest responses she'll ever see.

1. "Coin-Operated Boy" by the Dresden Dolls
2. "Hallelujah" by Rufus Wainwright
3. "Save My Soul" by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
4. "These Words" by Natasha Benningfeld
5. "Shiksa Goddess" as performed by Norbert Leo Butz, from Jason Robert Brown's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful little show The Last Five Years

You couldn't get past this without at least one song from a musical.

Be suprised that there aren't more.

The Bee Box

I stopped by the vendors who like to entice me to spend more money at my University than I need to only because I heard Mercy trying to talk herself out of large earrings.

I promptly talked her back into them. "Mercy" and "downsizing" are not words that belong in the same sentence.

She tried to talk me into earrings. This is Mercy. This is what she Does.

Instead, I saw one of those giant plastic pseudo-mod/semi-rave rings with a bee inside it.

I was immediately lovestruck. And it was $3.

It is peach, with sparkles, a mummified bee inside it, and it is in the shape of a heart. It reminded me of a poem I read once, "The Bee Box," in which a male lover wants to get flowers for his beloved, but finds that he gets stung by a bee in the process. Noticing how the bee bravely chose to give up his life to protect the thing he loved (in his bee way), the man decides instead to give his beloved "this brave little bee, who proves there is love even in the smallest of things."

Wide awake, despite appearances.

Received a note in the mail today from Mr. Cardoza that was written on a peice of paper he'd found in his desk . . . with a quote I wrote down sometime after I (inevitably) must have had a breakdown in his office. My quote read: "I think I'll be better when I get out of high school because then I can learn to, like, sleep."

Ironically, this arrived today. Of all days. I got about 5 hours of sleep last night, woke up at 8 am, was in class until 4:30 today, and then had a film screening from 6-8. And I cannot sleep yet because I have to hang out at work while we get our floors waxed.

I still haven't learned to sleep.

Am I better?

Waterworld.

This is the progression of hellish plumbing events that occurred on Saturday, September 18, 2005 at the Colonial Apartments in Isla Vista, CA:

1. Apartments 13 and 14 flood during the early morning hours.
2. I wake up at the crack of noon and find that we have no hot water--which is highly unusual because our building doesn't have legitimately cold water ever.
3. This progresses towards us having no water at all because the plumbing in the two flooded apartments needs to be fixed ASAP. (Note: This was not a good thing because I was not feeling well and it was very hot in our building that day, both of which would have been fixed by a shower.)
4. At about 3:30 PM, we get water again and all three of us at home take showers to revel in the glory of running water.
5. Now Dani and I cannot get our water to turn off. We have a scalding hot bathtub for about an hour until one of the plumbers on-site can get a chance to fix it.
6. My sink is backed up and it takes literally two hours for a sinkful of water to drain down. Plus, the garbage disposal spits food up the other side. Wonderful.

Everything is back to normal by today, but nonetheless, Saturday's plumbing disaster was horrible. I have never been so happy to do dishes as I was this morning.

Ring-a-Ring O Roses

Marcus and I are up in Ashland for the weekend. Tonight's adventure was Kit Marlowe's Tragikal History of Dr. Faustus in the Elizabethan Theatre.

So, the Elizabethan Theatre is, as the theatres in Shakespeare's day were, open air.

Ashland is, as Northern coastal states are in September, prone to rain.

I am now a resident of Southern California. I no longer own real shoes.

All of this is a recipe for my tiny little body to have a true Elizabethan theatrical experience.

It drizzled on and off throughout the course of Faustus, and I, in my lack of warm clothes and vastly inappropriate shoes, was soaked to the bone by the end of the show. Therefore leaving me, as well as other members of the audience, the possibility of returning to our hotels to develop pneumonia/catch the plague and die.

But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Here's how Marcus and I summed up the works of Kit Marlowe:

Me: You know, all the funny bits with Robin and Wagner didn't really come across on the page.
Marcus: That's because Marlowe isn't funny on the page. In Edward the 2nd, someone gets a spear shoved up their ass.
Me: Now that's comedy!

The God of Small Things

Heather and Miyuki are here, and they've come bearing massive amounts of small but wonderful gifts.

Miyuki brought us all little gifts to say, "Thanks for letting me stay with you because the University screwed me out of housing." We all received a little paper folding cup-thing with various designs. Mine, naturally, is red. She also gave us all a small notebook, and these things truly are the Way to my Heart, notebooks and the like.

Heather, after 5 months in Japan, returned with a host of little goodies for each of us. We all recieved a sake cup, a soup spoon, and an individualized rice bowl. We all also got two fans, one with a cultural design, the other with a Disney character because the Japanese are evidently all about Walt and his creations. (Cassie got Ariel because she loves mermaids, Dani got Marie from the Aristocats because that's her middle name, and I, naturally, got Tinkerbell. Jen also got Tinkerbell, but that was more of a default "there were only 4 designs" kind of thing. Hers is not as awesome as mine.) We all got a Japanese candy, and from there the gifts begin to vary. Jen got two great Engrish shirts and a pair of Japanese Ped socks, which Japanese girls wear with their high heels. Her pair is brightly striped. Cassie got a lot of weird-ass arcade items, because she asked Heather for 'random crap,' and an Engrish shirt that Heather said reminded her of fart jokes. Dani got an Engrish shirt that actually made sense, as well as a purse from Hiroshima that was hand dyed. Dani and I also got hairclips, which was odd, because we both have short hair. My Engrish shirt was the most awesome of all, though. It is a white tank top with piles of pink glitter over the letters that reads: "I can't dance / I'm a bad driver / Fuck rockn & roll / I like to jerk off / Spiga jeans girl." And I am totally wearing it to class tomorrow.

Heather also brought each of us a unique cultural gift. Dani received a geisha doll, Jen a lace fan used in tea ceremonies, Cassie an opium pipe, and I got a Japanese calligraphy stylus.

I could not be happier. Last night, I was sleeplessly perusing eBay for antique pens because I hadn't acquired any new ones since Venice last summer, where I purchased a lovely red glass pen with changeable nibs. I found a couple of unique antique ones that I'm vaguely interested in, but this pen is just what I needed. It's the first Japanese pen in my collection, and, to go along with it, Heather bought me what turned out to be a marriage record book, which is intendd for a married couple to record their wedding and the fruits of their union. I am going to treat it like a pillow book, because, in a way, that's what it is. Regardless, it's lovely, and the absolute perfect gift for me.

These small things are the way to my heart.

Do not touch the electric third rail.

The fact that my landlords are ridiculously bad at explaining things is very problematic.

Somehow, they keep finding more and more ways to suck money out of my bones as though it were chewy tasty marrow and they starving junk-yard dogs.

There has been a green sheet of paper sitting around my apartment for a week with some kind of inexplicable charge on it, which, naturally, no one has investigated and it becomes my duty to do so on my day off because I am Responsible.

Evidently, we were supposed to have called and changed the billing name and address for our non-included electrictricity. When I moved in two months ago, you think they would have told me this. But no.

So now, in addition to the extra 60 dollars they started charging us on our rent every month to include the originally non-included cable, I owe them $23 for July's electric. And I owe the electric company an $80 dollar security deposit and another $12 dollars for changing service.

I cannot get a fucking break from these people. And if they would just do their tennants the service for telling them shit, I would be far more prepared for the slow draining of my resources.

The Rise and Fall of Kevin Bacon

Work last night = totally awesome.

Tyler, Josh and I played the movie game for a good hour and a half, interspersed with running returns and helping customers as punishments for lost rounds. Josh and I totally schooled Tyler, but Josh stumped me really well when I couldn't name anyone else in Swept Away besides Madonna, who linked us to that damned crappy movie in the first place. (Really, could you, off the top of your head, name the Italian man in that movie?)

Then Tyler and I played 6 Degrees until close. Well, to be fair, it was mostly Tyler giving me challenges, because I'm much better at it than he is.

These were my 3:
1. David Carridine : Robert De Niro
David Carridine was in Kill Bill with Darryl Hannah, who was in Splash with Tom Hanks, who was in Forrest Gump with Robin Wright Penn, who, besides being married to him, was in Hurlyburly with her husband Sean Penn, who co-starred in We're No Angels with Robert De Niro.
2. Helena Bonham Carter : Bruce Willis
Helena Bonham Carter was in Fight Club with Brad Pitt, who was a sexy drifter in Thelma and Louise with Susan Sarrandon, who was one of The Banger Sisters with Goldie Hawn, who was in Death Becomes Her with Bruce Willis.
3. Topher Grace : Cary Elwes
Topher Grace romanced Scarlett Johannsen in In Good Company, and she was in Lost in Traslation with Bill Murray, who played a ventriloquist in Cradle Will Rock with Cary Elwes.

My job is awesome.

The snowy plovers cry for us tonight.

I am well aware that my university's reputation as a "party school" vastly precedes any other reputation it may have. However, I don't believe that the current decision by AS Legal Resources to allow the fraternity Kappa Sigma to use the university's name for its new calendar is going to help the University of California, Santa Barbara in its life-long quest to bolster its academic reputation and extinguish the party school stigma.

Though I am a feminist, I am not offended by the images from the "Girls of UCSB" calendar that have been posted on this website thus far. I rather like pin-up art, particularly pin-up art from the 1940s. I feel that the pin-up actually controls the male gaze, rather than being controlled by it. I not-so-secretly want to be a 1940s pin-up. Like everyone else, I like to look at beautiful women. I like to look at women in general. I even have a subscription to Maxim.

The biggest problem I have with this calendar is the use of the university name. We are an academic institution that has had 4 Nobel Laureates chosen from our faculty. Playwright Naomi Izuka teaches here. Stephen Hawking visits our Physics department regularly. This calendar and the AS Legal Resources people's decision to allow the university name on this calendar is certainly not helping us to promote the academic merits of UCSB. It's promoting everything that we don't need to promote.

It doesn't matter that portions of calendar sales will be donated to the Shoreline Preservation Fund. If the university name is going to help preserve the shorline, it would be better done through a direct donation from the university or, perhaps, Kappa Sigma and other student groups could go out and clean-up beaches instead.

I'd like to believe that everyone who decides to attend college is doing so because they truly want to, because they are genuinely invested in their educations--not just because college is the thing you pretty much have to do in order to get ahead in the world and maintain the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed. Unfortunately, I know that the reality is the latter. People go to college because it's what you do. The natural progression of things. High school, college, career, marriage, babies, more career, retire, die.

The function of higher education is not to party in Isla Vista, and that's the general image of my university that this calendar is helping to promote. I do party in Isla Vista, but I'm here at UCSB to foster academic criticism and participate in a scholarly community of ideas. I'm here to continue to live a life of the mind.

The Kappa Sigma "Girls of UCSB" calendar is not helping the university, and those of us who are truly invested in our academic lives, separate itself from the surrounding community of Isla Vista. And I could not be more sad than I am right now to learn of this backward step taken by AS Legal Resources in further entwining the university name with the party school stigma.

Lead-based paint chips are indeed good for your health.

Realization: I have not yet posted about the glorious oddities of my new apartment. This shall be rectified.

Item 1: I have no idea who could have possibly wired our house. We technically have no real lighting in this place. We have two cute little contemporary/art deco style wall lights in the kitchen, a hall light of the same style, and matching lights in each of the bathrooms, plus vanity lights in the bathroom. But that's it. Seriously. The bedrooms do not have lighting systems at all. Just really large windows, which don't do me a lot of good at night. Now, about the wiring . . . in those rooms that don't have lighting systems, there are curiously still light switches. What exactly are they for? The two light switches in my living room turn on the lights in my kitchen, the light switch in my kitchen doesn't turn on anything, and the other light switch in the living room goes to the hallway light. What? Also, there are three switches in each bathroom: one for the vanity lights, one for the light, and, presumably, one for the fan. One switch does indeed light the vanity, yet the second switch turns on the light AND the fan while the third switch sits on its ass and does nothing. I think my apartment was wired by Sarah Winchester.

Item 2: I just realized today that the wall separating the living room from Jen's room (aka The Den) is not a wall at all. I always found it odd that it was made of plank wood when the other walls weren't, but only today did I knock on it and notice that the boards BENT INWARD as I did so.

Item 3: My bathroom doesn't really get cold water. The hot and cold taps are switched on both sinks, yet the "cold" tap becomes scalding hot after a minute of running.

Item 4: My ceiling is crooked. It is very hard to hang things.

Item 5: Dani's side of the room does not like things to be stuck to its walls.

Item 6: When I first moved in, my garbage disposal would chew up food, and then spit it up the other side of the sink where food is most certainly not supposed to be.

Item 7: Due to the layers and layers of paint that IV landlords heap onto the walls/doors/cabinets of their rental units every time someone moves out, half of the doors in this house either will not shut or will not open without serious application of force.

Item 8: There might be a ghost who really likes to change the channels and volume. Yesterday, I was hanging things in the living room listening to VH1, and suddenly, the TV was turned to a Nascar race.

Maybe its a good thing Mrs. Winchester's people wired this place with confusing light switches.

Exchanging.

Dani and I spent the past weekend hangin' in the East Bay with exchange students from Norway, Sweden and Holland. And that shit was gangsta'.

I convinced my mom and dad to get exchange students through Lions Club because having a cool host family is a key part of the exchange experience. Two of my Italian host families were awesome, and that made my time trapped in their small mountain towns awesome. So my parents offered up their house to Sara and Mirjam from Sweden and Holland, respectively. Our friend and fellow Lion Bill had hosted a couple of years ago, so my parents convinced him and his wife Darlene to do it again. They got Rebecca from Norway, who does everything with our girls. I think my dad and my like having the girls around, since I'm not home anymore. My dad really loves schmoozing and being with young people. (I mean, he is a teacher, after all.) So I think they both are really enjoying the company of these young ladies.

Dani and I arrived Thursday afternoon, and Thursday night we took our foriegn girls to their first American baseball game. It was also Dani's first baseball game. So after a lot of explaining of rules and strategies, I think my Dad and I managed to clarify the game and got the girls into it. We took the girls to another game on Sunday, during which Sara told the man sitting in front of her that she was married to Jay Payton, the Rockies' left fielder we got in the Eric Byrnes trade. Everytime Payton made a play or came up to hit, this man would look over at her to see if she was paying attention to her "husband." My family sits in the section right next to the wives and family section, so we know for a fact that when baseball wives come to a game, they are not even paying attention to the game at all. I don't think I've ever seen Alex Chavez even notice her husband (with all his Golden Gloves) make a catch or get a hit. In any case, this dude totally believed Sara. Which was pretty funny to the rest of us. Unfortunately, Sunday's game went into extra innings--5 extra innings. So after 5 extra innings, Bobby Kielty hit a long ball to right field just over the wall to win. Finally! I think the girls all liked baseball, but extra innings was a little much even for someone like me who goes to a lot of games.

On Friday we went to Muir Woods and Stinson Beach--two places to which, in my 18 years of Bay Area residency--I have never been. Naturally, as I never go swimming or to the beach at home in the bay, I did not bring a suit. So I fell asleep in the sun at Stinson and burned the back of my calves very nicely. That night we went disco bowling up at Travis and no one in the bowling alley could figure out why Dad and Bill were hanging out with 5 college girls. The music wasn't loud enough at the bowling alley, but Sara and I were nonetheless trying to dance like Beyonce when "Crazy in Love" came on.

On Saturday, I took the girls shopping on Telegraph. European money is worth so much here, and my money worth so little there, so the girls had a lot of vacation cash to spend as everything seemed cheap to them. They found some cute clothes to wear that night to the Lions Club installation dinner, at which their presence was required. Before dinner that night, Bill had us hunt for District Governor Walter's wedding ring out in the rock garden where he had lost it earlier that day. Walter promised us $300 if we found it, and found it we did--after only 4 minutes of searching. (Word from my Dad is that Walter paid the girls yesterday, so $120 dollars is coming down to SB for Dani and me via mail.) The dinner itself was super-ass long and boring, so Dani started passing notes around the table.

When the Lions dinner was over, we headed into San Francisco to hang out with my best friend, Eric. Eric had planned an evening out dancing for the girls . . . but we wound up at some weird 80s club where only 30-year-olds were dancing to the worst 80s music ever. And this place was rated one of the hot 18 & Over clubs by SF Weekly . . . And we found this out after waiting about 30 minutes for our second cab to arrive at the club! In any case, we all had a really good time. I think Rebecca had the best time out of all of us because she was only 17, so we snuck her into the club with my military ID.

Dani and I had to leave on Monday, but we went with the girls to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory before leaving. They're all such cool girls it was a difficult good-bye. Sara wanted us to stay until Saturday, but, unfortunately, we both have to work. We miss them already, and I hope they had a good time with us!