When I say my house is a wreck...

during, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

See? I was NOT KIDDING. This is my kitchen right now. That back wall offended the eyes of Contractor Mike, so he removed it and is going to replace it with one that is insulated, and made out of actual lumber rather than like cigar boxes and yard waste.

Which is good, but it came as a surprise to me.

Here it is from the outside. Note sagging floor corrected.



Note also the blizzardy conditions that shut down schools in the entire Great State of Wussyland except the city (and Harford County).

And this is what it used to look like (from the inside).

Say bye-bye to the drop ceiling, the vinyl flooring, the greeny-black painted paneling, and the white cabinets. Give me some ideas what color to paint it.

What you say

Oh my Jesus Christ.

Oh actually I have a really funny story about the five-year-old swearing in Pennsylvania last week, remind me later.

Our kitchen looks a lot like a barn right now. You can see the roof, for one thing, and the inside of the outside walls if that makes any sense, and, across the back, the floor isn't there! They took it away because, well it went like this:

Contractor Mike, frowning at the back of the house: Now that the deck is gone, I'm looking at your kitchen floor, and do you see that sag?
Me: Yyyes.
Mike: Well it looks like when the previous owners enclosed the back porch and made it part of the kitchen, they took out a support.
Me: Yeah, that's always looked like that. Did you not know about that when you wrote your bid?
Mike: No, no I didn't.
Me: [Sigh]
Mike: We can fix that, we'll fix it.
Me: Yeah, I know.

So the kitchen floor is open so that they can shove a beam in there and keep the kitchen from falling into the backyard.

We spent the weekend in our house, but I took the kids to my parents' house after school yesterday and we're going to sleep there all week. The kitchen cabinets get delivered Wednesday, and they're putting them in the LIVING ROOM thank you very much, and they don't get installed until Feb 11, so I imagine we will be living out of the minivan for a while. Right now I'm living in a coffee house in our neighborhood, because my parents live clear across town and if schools are going to close 2 hours early it's not worth driving all the way back there and then back here.

You see, we're having a little snow. Really. A LITTLE snow. And this has closed schools entirely for most of the state, Baltimore City being the exception.

For a while there my husband Bob was the Director of Facilities for the Baltimore City School System, so he was one of the people who decided whether weather would close school. We used to get a phone call at 4:30am and Bob would like, roll over and look out the window and go like, "Uhhh...". He was never gonna close school. He's from Cleveland, and out there, if the snow isn't actively trying to cling to you and take you down like a swarm of attacking bees, you can't really call it weather.

On the bright side, the basement will be all but done as of beginning of next week, so maybe we'll just live down there. And until today's snow, I was hoping the deck guys would finish the deck this week. It would be nice to get the grill out of the POD so that we could cook something other than rice and toast.

Overheard from downstairs yesterday:
[scream of reciprocating saw on metal]
Contractor Scott: Ok, it's cut!
Contractor Mike: No, it's not!
Scott: Yeah I just cut it!
Mike: What did you cut?
Scott: SHIT!
Mike: That was the gas line!
Scott: SHIT!

So we may not have heat either for a while. So I am at the coffee house. Also, yesterday I developed this massive headache because I spent the morning priming the drywall in the basement bathroom, and they had this like jet-engine gas heater going down there to thaw out some lumber that had gotten wet and froze, and the fumes, they made my head feel funny.

Hee hee.

STAY HUNGRY - Chili

You're going to have to bear with me. I have this tremendously earthshaking idea, and I have to rough it out visibly, because, unlike most of my great ideas, which affect only my family and sometimes co-workers and, much less frequently, my friends, who know me too well - to whom I really only have to vaguely explain an idea or, in more cases, just start ordering people around in order for those ideas to take monstrous, swaggering shape - this idea is being presented to People I Don't Know. And much as I like to think that me waving my hands around, gasping out sentence fragments, singing, and smiling encouragingly is a good presentation technique, in my heart of hearts I know I need a PowerPoint.

The Idea is a radio show that combines food and rock and roll. We like food, we like music. Blame my friend Sam, who out of the blue one morning told me that I should have a radio show with our friend Todd. I told him he was crazy - I still listen to Tom Tom Club - but maybe he's not.

Here's a combination of talking and music that might make a radio show about chili. There would also be a blog, with all the recipes online. Maybe with pictures. Me stirring shit up. Todd with food in his beard. It could be done.






So?


Chili.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Me and My Friends

It's chili season, no doubt. Chili works in winter because it's warm, you don't need hardly any fresh ingredients, AND you can make it ahead and carry it to the party. There are vegetarian versions that are perfectly fine, you can make it in a crockpot if necessary - which is kind of key at my house right now, as we are minus a kitchen, and, as I found out last week when I tried to make chili AFTER having packed up the spice cabinet, you can flavor it with almost anything.

Chili is important. No, just take my word for it. Chili is important. So instead of dealing out a whole hand of different recipes, we're going to walk through the steps involved in making chili, and trust that you can come up with your own variations. No, I'm lying. Nobody's going to trust anybody. We're going to have a batch of recipes up online.

M.I.A. - Galang

For meat chili, start the day before if you can, especially if you're using bones. Bones. Cheap cheap meat, braised for fucking ever, is the best start to chili. Pork neckbones are good, or if you're not ready for the bones, cubed stew beef is fine too. But that gelatin from between the joints is good stuff. It melts right into your stew and makes everything really soft and tender. Work up to the bones. You'll be ok.

So you start with onions in the big pot, sweated in oil. Make Todd dice the onions, he could use a good cry. You can be roasting the meat pieces in the oven at the same time, or just stick em in the pot to brown after the onions start to get translucent. Start adding chili powder now. The earlier the chili powder hits the meat, the more the whole thing is going to taste like chili. Some garlic, sweet or hot peppers or celery if you use it.

IMA Robot - The Hot Song

The next step, before you deglaze... Deglaze means you put liquid in to like boil up the crap on the bottom of the pan, it's kind of like cleaning as you go along... anyway, before you do that, sprinkle cornmeal into the bottom of the pot. Stir that around and let it brown a little. That way, when the liquid comes in, you have automatic thickening. It's always a pain to thicken chili later.

So what liquid do you use? Yes, I know, you want me to say beer. No, listen, if you haven't cracked a beer by now, my god, for pity's sake open a beer. It's definitely fun to deglaze your chili pot with beer. You just pour beer right in the pot, and it foams up and all, and you're like, hee hee I just poured beer in that pot! The plumber who installed a toilet in my kitchen this week said he steeps oregano in beer, then uses that beer, and that is some innovative shit, I think. You can't use much oregano in chili, it'll taste like pizza. But just a little, like this, that's a good idea.

But I deglaze chili with white vinegar. Maybe half a cup. Maybe more. The vinegar tenderizes the meat like a bitch, and you get this like mad-scientist roll of steam that you have to dodge out of the way of when it first boils or else if you inhale it, you go blind and lose all your hair, but after that, most of the sharp taste goes away. You taste the vinegar in the end result as just a little tartness.

Drink - The Jazz Butcher

Once the vinegar, or beer, or water or whatever boils down, but before it boils all away, put in tomatos. Two cans of whole peeled tomatos, smushed up with your hands, just stick your hand in the can and poke your fingers through the tomatos and smush them up and try not to think that they resemble testicles. Or, like, do, if that's interesting to you. Here's a good point to add more chili powder, and other seasonings.

What seasonings can you use? Well, as I learned last week, you can make chili that tastes like chili with nothing but some Taco Hell hot sauce packets, coffee grounds, and sugar. I don't recommend it. The coffee grounds are for the color, in case you don't have the chili powder. I always put coffee grounds in my chili anyway, basically just to freak people out who are watching me cook, but I swear you can taste a little bitter depth from them in the end.

Tilly and the Wall - Pot Kettle Black

I use basic chili powder - they make chili powder from specialized chilis now, like ancho chili powder, chipotle chili powder, but I find those too strong, in a way. You use that chipotle chili powder, your chili is going to taste like nothing but smoked chilis. So, chili powder, a bay leaf or two, cumin if you're a sensualist. Cumin smells like my husband's gym bag, but in, like, a good way. So use cumin if that's your thing. Add in some hot stuff now if you want - cayenne pepper, hot sauce, red pepper flakes. Some sweet - molasses, brown sugar maybe, even maple syrup - and some bitter - if you didn't use vinegar before, put in a quarter cup now.

This is your pot of chili, and you're going to let it cook really low for a long time. You have to stir it every once in a while, but if it scorches a little on the bottom, that is ok. Just scrape the scorched part up and into the stew.

Memphis Soul Stew - King Curtis & The Kingpins

IF you're using meat on the bone, come back and poke at the meat from time to time. When the bones are coming apart, turn off the heat and let it cool. You'll have to fish out the bones, and don't be grossed out, this is one of the perks of being the cook. You fish out the bones, and suck the rest of the meat scraps off 'em, and chuck the bones in the trash. Yes, it's exactly like being a zombie, if that was your question.

Heat 'er back up, and if you're using beans, put them in about 45 minutes before the end. Also corn. I cannot stress enough - if there is one secret to chili popularity, regardless of all this mess about cornmeal and vinegar and bones, it's the corn. Put one can of WHITE corn in at the same time as the beans. NOT YELLOW CORN. Yellow corn in chili looks like poo.

Basic meat chili recipe:
1 to 2 lbs meat (stew beef, pork or lamb neckbones, etc. NOT GROUND BEEF.)
2 medium onions, diced
2 T oil
6 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 cup white vinegar OR half a beer OR 1/2 cup water
2 T cornmeal
4 T chili powder
2 28oz cans whole peeled tomatos, OR fresh tomatos chopped coarsely
2 T brown sugar or molasses
something spicy
OPTIONAL: 2 cans beans (dark or light kidneys, black beans, pinto beans), drained
NOT OPTIONAL: 1 can white or shoepeg corn

In a large heavy pot over medium-high heat, saute the onions in the oil. If using bones, lay them in a baking dish and roast at 375 for 30 minutes.

When onions are becoming translucent, add the meat to the pot, sprinkling with half the chili powder. Brown on all sides. Add garlic. Do not allow garlic to brown.

Sprinkle cornmeal into pot, stir, scraping, until cornmeal is fragrant. Immediately dump in liquid and stir, scraping browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add more liquid if necessary.

Add remaining ingredients except the beans and corn, breaking up the tomatos with your hands. Set to low heat, and allow to simmer, partially covered and checking frequently, for up to 4 hours, or until desired consistency is reached.

45 minutes before serving, add beans (if desired) and corn.


Vag chili recipe:
2 medium onions, diced
2 T oil
6 cloves garlic, chopped
t cumin
basil
pinch cayenne
4 small zucchinis, diced
1 red pepper, diced
jalapeno or two, chopped
1 cup celery, diced
3 T chili powder
2 T cornmeal
half a beer OR 1/2 cup water
1 or 2 28oz cans whole peeled tomatos
1 T brown sugar or molasses
1/4 cup vinegar
hot stuff
2 cans beans (dark or light kidneys, black beans, pinto beans), drained
1 can white or shoepeg corn
cilantro for garnish

In a large heavy pot over medium-high heat, saute the onions in the oil.

When onions are becoming translucent, add garlic, cumin, basil and cayenne. Do not allow garlic to brown. Then add zucchini, peppers, and celery and saute until zucchini is tender and celery is bright green.

Sprinkle cornmeal into pot, stir, scraping, until cornmeal is fragrant. Immediately dump in liquid and stir, scraping browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add more liquid if necessary.

Add remaining ingredients except the beans and corn, breaking up the tomatos with your hands. Set to low heat, and allow to simmer, partially covered and checking frequently, for about 2 hours, or until desired consistency is reached. Adjust consistency with water or beer and cornmeal.

45 minutes before serving, add beans (if desired) and corn.


Cornbread:
1 c yellow cornmeal
1 c unbleached flour
3/4 t salt
1 t baking powder
1 1/2 t baking soda
1 c milk
1 egg
2 T olive oil
OPTIONAL: 1 jalapeno, minced OR half a red pepper, chopped fine

Preheat oven to 425.
Mix dry ingredients together.
Mix wet ingredients together.
Mix together.
Bake about 15 minutes.
My note in my handwritten cookbook says "Make sure you have ALL ingredients before you start."

Devil's haircut! In my mind!

haircut for Mao
Originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian

Oh my god I give the worst haircuts. Luckily the boys always come out of it smiling, thanks to the Dyson.

Apologies to my colleague Queen Isabella - I know you love how the boy looks with long hair, but it was driving him crazy.

I hit it with a hammer when I cannot make it move

I am so content.

My back hurts because I just took down 34 feet of rusty chain-link fence using nothing but a pair of vice grips, a hammer, and metal snips, but I am sitting here wondering if I'm going to get tetanus from this scratch on my thumb and I am SOOO content.

Content.

There are workmen in my basement. I can hear them rumbling to each other about football, and Palestine (guess which one they're most informed about) (no don't that's sexist); and I can hear lumber being dropped on the floor, and smell them smoking, and I am HAPPY.

TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO, when we hired architects to draw up plans for a renovation, we were pretty excited. We love our house, and making it better would just be... better! An updated kitchen. A new full bath. A finished basement! The second floor less likely to slide off into the backyard. Exciting! I had a reason to drag out the original 1922 blueprints of the house, which I had humidified, flattened, cleaned, and mounted on pH-neutral paper some months prior. Archivist geek.

But when contractors started coming around to bid on the project, they took one look at our basement floor, which is not only slanted front to back, but also side to side - and stopped nodding, stopped taking notes. The south corner of our basement is a full 19" deeper than the north corner. It was poured that way. Not because there's water, not for any reason that we can discover, just to be bitches I think. Maybe to make it easier to find ball bearings if you spilled a lot of them. Or maybe people were making hats down there and mercury fell on the floor a lot and they needed it all to collect in one place. Or maybe they were bitches.

Anyway, there's just no easy way to level that, and no contractor would touch it. We despaired. We despaired to the point that we decided fuck it we'll just buy a bigger house. We almost did! Our friend across the street was selling her house and we got very goddamn close to buying it. Our kids are still pissed we didn't. Damn empowered kids - we solicit their opinion all the time to give them a reason to think and a sense of self worth, and what happens? They think their opinions are worth something. Bah. We should just keep 'em in a box.

AFTER we decided NOT to move, we declared a moratorium on big decisions. We sat on our butts for a couple months and made no decision more momentous than "Mustard or mayonnaise?"

Gradually, we carved our initial reno plans down into something more manageable and less prohibitively expensive, called the nicest of the contractors back, and set about getting bids and a loan.

And THAT took most of a year. Jesus Christ. At one point, my voice shaking, I turned to Bob and said, "CAN YOU TELL ME THAT MEN WITH TOOLS WILL COME TO MY HOUSE AT SOME POINT IN THE FUTURE?!" He was in charge of the loan. He does that kind of thing. I pick out tile and countertops and cabinets and hardware and flooring and paint colors and appliances and I design the kitchen and the new bathroom and program the workflow.

Such a division of labor is acceptable to both of us. In fact, I suggest that anyone embarking on such a project sit down and devise such a division EARLY ON. It does not do to have conflict on something as ultimately invisible as faucet handles.

I mean, basically, people don't see their faucet handles. They just live with them and no longer see them. It's like singing along with Led Zeppelin - you know all the words, but if someone asked you, you probably couldn't recite them.

The exception to this is IF your faucet handles are WRONG, and then you see them every time you use them, and you hate them. Our friends Peter and Chris just recently replaced the side-swingy faucet handles in their bathroom with knobby faucet handles, because every time they turned on the water, the side-swingy faucet handle knocked over the cup. Yeah, man. That kind of thing will make you crazy.

So I will argue that while getting all the paperwork together and negotiating with bankers and lawyers and getting a loan is some shitty, boring work - my part is the part that keeps you up nights.

But:

• I may have been talked into the heated floor thingy in the bathroom.
• The cabinets are ordered. They are brown wood. (ehh, we won't even see them before too long)
• Sliding doors instead of French.
• Our pal Lui is giving us a whole batch of slate for the floor in new bathroom.
• Corner benches on the deck.
• A FIVE AND A HALF FOOT BATHTUB! And no, Juliet, you may not come and bathe in my tub every night. Maybe twice a week.
• The sink will be deep and wide and not made of stainless steel.
• The basement room is going to look like the set of Speed Racer.
• And I am looking for 4" ceramic tile in bright colors. I can't find it.

I like fish and mango pickle

Stocking loot, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Man, I know Christmas Is For The Kids and all that, but I have had one kick-ass fucking holiday season so far.

Gold
My husband bought me the lens I had decided I would buy in a year or so - a so-called macro lens, it will focus very very close, and, as it turns out, it just loves light. I do not deserve that lens. Let's be frank - I do not deserve that husband.

Frankincense
Also. I received an email on Christmas Eve from the review editor at School Library Journal. I am one of their volunteer reviewers, I get paid in books. But SLJ is doing a supplement, and they'd like me to do a compare-and-contrast of several nonfiction series, and they are going to PAY ME. MONEY. A paid writing job!

It might seem odd for me to be jumping up and down about it, because, well sure, I write all the time, and most jobs I've ever had have been jobs full of writing... but I got this assignment purely on the basis of me fucking around on the Internet, so it's kind of like making money off a hobby.

Plus it finishes paying for my laptop.




Myrrh
AND, after eight years of searching, I found a mariachi suit on eBay. A traje de charro, black, with metal botonaduras down each leg and at each wrist. Yes, basically what Antonio Banderas wears in Desperado. Make of that what you will, and then keep it to yourself.

I fully expected this thing to come in huge and short and beat-up and stinking of, let's face it, a mariachi, and I figured I'd only end up being able to wear the jacket, but after eight years of searching, oh I just wanted to put this whim to bed.

Imagine my delight when the pants fit like they'd been MADE FOR ME, and the whole thing is spotless and new. El Charro, the company that makes these things, only does custom, and somebody just my size must have ordered this suit, worn it once if at all, and decided - what? the mariachi lifestyle was not for them? That's a three-hundred-dollar custom-made suit that some tall, narrow man discarded without a backward glance.

I am grateful though - it means my botonaduras are untarnished.

I can only wish the same for you, amigo.

Walking Spanish down the 649's

Pain au chocolat at Tartine, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

The other day at work, I escorted a nice but worried-looking woman in her '30's to the nonfiction stacks to find a parenting book. It was not How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. Neither was it The Happiest Toddler on the Block: The New Way to Stop the Daily Battle of Wills and Raise a Secure and Well-Behaved One- to Four-Year-Old. Nor Sneaky Veggies: How to Get Vegetables Under the Radar & Into Your Family and not Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child : Eliminating Conflict by Establishing Clear, Firm, and Respectful Boundaries, the first 3 chapters of which I actually found kind of helpful one time several years ago.

Thank god, she wasn't looking for Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems: New, Revised, and Expanded Edition, which fucking traumatized us when Mao was about one. It was some different book full of disheartening and shaming messages to parents. Possibly The Petit Appetit Cookbook: Easy, Organic Recipes to Nurture Your Baby and Toddler. Or Itsy Bitsy Yoga: Poses to Help Your Baby Sleep Longer, Digest Better, and Grow Stronger. Maybe The Toxic Sandbox: The Truth About Environmental Toxins and Our Children's Health. I hope it wasn't How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor.

I like to think of that aisle as the Bet You Didn't Know How Many Ways You Suck As A Parent Aisle.

Individually, many of these books have merit. If you're a yoga person, by all means you should get a book about doing yoga with your baby. But the way they're marketed, the alarming titles - an insecure person (and what parent isn't insecure sometimes?) could take away a whole pile of disgrace and self-loathing along with her copy of The Five Love Languages of Children.

According to those books, she should be putting her child to bed at 7pm, after a dinner of sprouted quinoa and brewer's yeast. When her child misbehaves, which is her fault, by the way, she should gently but firmly take away a privilege. Or give him one more chance, and then (gently but firmly) put him in time out him right away. Or gently but firmly snap him into her homemade bamboo pillory on the front lawn. She should have been doing yoga, massage, and reflexology since birth so that the child has a chance at avoiding obesity and can integrate his right and left brain. If she didn't teach that kid sign language as a baby, she has doomed him to suffering traumatic storms of frustration before learning to talk, which, by the way, will occur later.

There should not be too many toys. But we should honor the pleasures of childhood. Our job is to provide the safest, most nurturing environment possible, although we do them a disservice if we insulate our children from...

Well fuck it. Taking clothes out of the dryer last night, it occurred to me that if what people are looking for is a book to make them feel bad about how they run their house and raise their children, I could write that! (see, it's totally a trend with me).

• How often do you scrub out your laundry baskets? What do you use for that? Oh. God. You still have that stuff in your house? Yikes.
• At what age did you first assign your infant simple household chores?
• How many languages does he/she know?
• Do you sit and play with your child at least one hour a day? How do you know that? Were you watching the clock? Shame on you.
• When was the last time you washed your potholders? Do you know what micro-organisms those things can harbor?
• Do you still help your child manage his/her little bank account? It's never too early for a child to learn about fiscal responsibility. If you don't fuck up, you can Raise a Future Millionaire, you know.
• Let me just go through your kitchen:

• Plastic? Jesus.
• Glass? What happens when this falls off the counter and shatters? I know kids look cute with eyepatches, but is that a risk you're willing to take? Let me give you a source for bamboo food containers.
• This cereal has sugar in it.
  
• Ketchup has sugar in it.
• Juice? Well, they're "only" baby teeth I guess.
  
• And you know they make saltines without salt, you don't have to buy these. See if you can find whole-wheat, at least.
• Grapes? See this? Exactly the size of your child's trachea!
  
• Placemats. Hm. And how do you clean those? Wow. That's not exactly... sterile, is it?
• Do you really use these paper towels or are they just for show? Because dishtowels - you know, you can use those more than once, and that way you're not, like, tossing garbage straight at your son's future.

I am enjoying this. After 8 years of getting fucked with by every parent, physician, educator or therapist with an opinion and an editor, I am getting some back. You do it! It's fun!

Into the mystic

creepy, crawly, creepy, crawly, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Bob and I had the rare chance to go out together last night. Little year-end party, people we knew, people we didn't know that well. Socializing! Colleen's cheese puffs! Beer! Now that's holiday.

Nowadays, living where we do, sooner or later most conversations come around to kids. Or school. Or kids and school. That's ok by me. We love our school. The teachers are motivated and smart and kind, the other parents are G-R-E-A-T, and the lighting is not too soul-crushing. We have lot of nice anecdotes about how well our kids are responding to it.

For example! Last week it snowed a little, and Mao, looking out the car window, started reciting a poem that had been in his Poetry Book last year in first grade.

Snow makes whiteness where it falls.
The bushes look like popcorn-balls.
The places where I always play
Look like somewhere else today.

And! Yesterday Zhou got into a scrap with a kid in his class. It's not like they were rolling around on the floor gouging each other's eyes out, but still, that stuff is taken really seriously: the teacher took them to the principal's office, and since it was the end of the day, the other mom and I were invited as well. The interrogation went like this:

Teacher: First of all, Zhou, are you all right?
Zhou: Sure!
Teacher: Ok, can you tell me why your pal here was hitting you?
Zhou: I was saying something he didn't like.
Teacher: What were you saying?
Zhou: Nuh-uh.
Teacher, turning to the other kid: Ok, what did you say that he disagreed with?
Other kid: I said 'Uh huh'.
Oh, it took forever to tease out what exactly they were arguing about, and by then the teacher was late for a doctor's appointment, so she said she'd put this discussion in her pocket until tomorrow, and then they'd play it out in class. This perked Zhou right up. "You mean a reenactment?" he asked, his eyes bright. "I LOVE reenactments!"

So we're telling all these tales to the other parents last night, and I realize we are BRAGGING. I realize that we brag about our kids ALL THE TIME. We brag discreetly, we brag openly, we do the back-door brag. After we got home, I brought it up to Bob.

"You know, we brag about the kids ALL THE TIME," I said.
"Well, they're pretty great kids," he says.
"Yeah," I said. "I think we should keep doing it. I think if we spend a lot of time talking about how great they are, they're going to think they're great, even if we don't do it right in front of them."
"I think you're right," Bob says. "If our default posture is that they are great, we will be more convincingly disappointed when they act like assholes."

Consensus. The essence of successful parenting.

You don't know me

and why not?, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Comments perfect strangers have made about my personal appearance in the last 48 hours:

• "What you need are a few more rings."
• "Your hair doesn't scare me."
• "I have to ask." (and then he didn't, just looked at me expectantly)

You know what, folks? I don't look like that young man who worked the entrance desk at the Whitney 13 years ago - the one with 8 piercings in each eyebrow and several in the lip? you know, the one with the large black tribal tattoos crawling up his neck and threatening to pull his ears down into his artfully ripped shirt? All I have is pink hair. But somehow... I just don't bet random visitors to the Whitney Museum of American Art made comments about that guy's appearance. Maybe that's what I need - I just need to look more scary.

I think I'll have horns implanted. You can do that now, I think. That would actually totally rock.

Also. Cleaning up after a few hours on the desk, here are some things I found scribbled on scrap paper:

• American Red Cross
• Doris Lessing
• jaundice
• origins of yoga
• taste buds gender difference
• Movies Christian
• Ragnarok
• Essential tremor vs. action tremor
• painter School of Athens
• Naked Ape

It's not poetry. But the mere mention of Ragnarok puts it maybe in the category of 'things that might be found lining the pockets of a man currently residing under a bridge.'

Also. Token Boy Librarian has observed that most pictures of my older son are perfectly reasonable until you take a closer look. He is right, in many cases: there are mismatched gloves, books being read upside down, Care Bears being decapitated, Danny Torrance hair. That's why I like this picture: the crazy is right there before your eyes. This weekend he was so stir-crazy, milling around like BBs in a blender, chattering nonsense syllables... I finally told him if he couldn't cool it or go outside I was going to have him tested.

Don't bank on it baby

Painting by Tamara Vandevender

A few people I know and used to know - once and future friends - began to reminisce about an enterprise that I used to be part of, a coffee house, and now I can't get it off my mind. I have barely thought about that place for fifteen years.

It was just a place, we had an espresso machine and cold drinks and muffins that got moldy if you didn't sell them quick enough. Tables and thrift-shop chairs and lots and lots of ashtrays. It was in an arty part of town where nobody would go unless they lived there or drank there or possibly were busting a crackhouse. The day the DEA came for the house two doors down was a good day for us. Cops drink coffee.

My ex-boyfriend Joe started it with some money he had inherited from his grandmother. I helped with the paperwork at first, and painting - lots of us helped. Our friend Chris did all the carpentry.



Our first customers were the resident artists down there. We had a guy who did decorative ironwork, we had glassblowers, a puppeteer, an arborist, mosaicists, a milliner, and the florists from two blocks away - the only people who bought the four-dollar mocha lattes. Loved those florists.



Before too long, the poets and art students and musicians found the spot. Young people. Young young young people, some of them just out of high school. I was all of 26, 27, but still - those people were young. The place turned into a clubhouse. I lived upstairs for a while, and I would come down still in pajamas to drink coffee and see who was there.


SoWeBoHemian festival, 1993

I worked behind the counter to help out. When it was busy, I poured coffee like a river, pivoting from carafe to register, my hands hitting every mark. That kind of physical proficiency is intoxicating: it feels like dancing. And I knew everyone who came in. I gossiped, I flirted: that felt like dancing too. When it was not busy, I hopped up on the counter and read, or daydreamed, or sat at a table and talked. The CD player was on top of the drinks cooler. To change the CDs we'd have to climb up on the counter. We'd put in The Pixies, Mozart, My Bloody Valentine, Meat Puppets.

Did people hook up, fall in love, break up? They did. Meaning compounds when you've had seven cups of coffee and have run out of things to say. Things ran at a pretty high pitch.

(For example, I am writing this at a coffee house, and three people, two men and a woman, are having a conversation about estimating weight. Woman: "Guess my weight. [First guy] was way off." Second guy: "Stand up. Huh. I'd say 106, soaking wet." She: "You guys are crazy! I weigh 138 pounds!" And these people are full-on adults.)

It bothers me that after I took over, the business did even worse. I was working full-time at a publishing company, 4 ten-hour days a week, with one weekday to get all the coffee house business done. Bank, icehouse, wholesale club, payroll, schedule. That was actually great. I loved having the day to myself, barrelling around town, carrying heavy stuff. I just didn't understand that we were losing money - I never saw the bank statements. I'm still embarrassed that I let Joe down.

We closed the thing down right around when I left town for New York. Late 1994 or maybe 1995. My chronologies for the early 90's are a mess: I try to date my few photographs by cross-referencing boyfriends, haircuts, tattoos, apartments. All of which there were too many of.


Polaroid Land camera photo by Katie O'Meara

Maybe that's why I get so blue when I think about those days. All that flux, all that running around, all those crushes and jealousies... it seems pretty pointless fifteen years later. Especially since the relationships I had have all but turned to ash. None of the people in the above picture speak to me, although it's mutual in the case of the tall guy. And towards the end, heroin hit our neighborhood pretty hard, and people died. Died or left town.

On the other hand, the ones who are still talking to me and are still living are some of the highest-quality people I know. Maybe the others are too, but I am not likely to learn of it.

Here are the things I learned:

1. I am a crappy manager
2. The correct amount of ground coffee to make a pot is .28 pounds
3. French presses are not worth the trouble
4. Poetry is not to be trusted
5. The eleven-ounce C-handle ceramic mug is one of the most durable items ever manufactured

photo by Joshua McKerrow