A week ago Monday morning Matt and I visited a Parisian landmark I neglected to see on my first visit to Paris 21 years ago. I don't know why I didn't go before; I just didn't. But it was very cool to see the Eiffel Tower up close, and to gaze down on Paris from a height of over 300 meters.
Here I am:
Here's Matt:
Sunday was my last full day in Brussels. I was sitting at Matt's computer doing my email when he walked in to say good morning. We began discussing what we'd do on my last day, and I felt compelled to ask him if I'd been an OK guest.
He frowned for a moment, then nodded. "You've been an OK guest," he said, emphasizing the "OK" while looking away. Then he looked right at me. "You're not the easiest person to live with."
I frowned and nodded myself. I already knew this. At this point in my life I generally find other people hard to live with, and I figure it must work both ways. I'm very habituated to living alone, to managing my money, my space, my stuff and my time as I see fit. I first did it when I was 23, after my mission (which involved as little privacy as possible--you're allowed to use the bathroom on your own, but the rest of your time is supposed to be spent in the presence of an assigned partner, so you have fewer opportunities to break the rules). The parents of one of my friends in Tucson had a studio apartment they offered to rent me, and it seemed like a good place to live while I finished my bachelor's degree. I was surprised at how much I liked living alone. Yes, I was often lonely, but there are many, many worse things in life than loneliness, and one of them is sharing a kitchen with someone who never does the dishes, either properly or at all.
Brussels has been hit by a freak snowstorm.
According to a Francophone newspaper I'm not going to link to because so few of my readers read French, the storm this weekend was one of the three most severe of the previous 100 years--for this time of year, anyway. Brusssels doesn't normally get 10 to 15 centimeters of snow in late November. (Actually, it rarely gets 10 to 15 centimeters of snow, but it's more likely in January or so than in November.) We woke this morning to--that's right, you guessed it--a winter wonderland, and I convinced Matt to take photos of the view from his balcony.
Here's a view from the guestroom balcony, which faces east:
I find the chimneys and snow-covered pitched roofs quite charming.
To the east of Matt's apartment is this lovely park. In mid-morning it was full of children sledding and building snow people.
Here's the street to the northwest:
Below is the view to the northeast--the dome at the right is the Palais de Justice.
Once upon a time, in January 1984, when I was 20, I got on a plane, went to London, spent a semester taking courses in English literature and English history, then hoisted a backpack with a sleeping bag strapped to it and set off to tour the British Isles and the Continent of Europe for two months or so BY MYSELF. I had one sweater, fewer pair of socks and underwear than I like to admit, a copy of Let's Go: Europe (at the time,Let's Go was the bible of the cheap traveler--I've been told its coolness has waned and the preferred travel guide is now The Lonely Planet series), my passport, and a Eurail pass. I was often profoundly lonely and on several occasions found myself in circumstances so desperate or extreme I was afraid for my life, but somehow I escaped not only death but serious injury--for that matter, I was never even robbed, though I was frequently menaced. Considering the class of hotel or hostel I stayed in, considering how often I slept in some isolated compartment of some night train, considering how willing I was to ask for and accept help from complete strangers, it's remarkable nothing truly bad happened to me.
Happy Thanksgiving from Brussels, which is where I currently am. I got here last night with my friend Matthew--before that we were in Cork, Ireland for about 20 hours (more on that visit later); before that we were in Paris for about 52 hours (more later on that visit as well); and before that he was hanging out in the luxurious Belgian penthouse apartment he shares with his partner, Leo, while I was spending my time getting to and from first the Detroit Airport and then Aeroport Roissy-Charle de Gaulle.
At the risk of sounding, uh, neither French nor francophilic, I must say that while I find Paris lovely and charming, I still prefer other cities to it, among them London and Amsterdam. I am glad to be in Brussels, partly because it is where Matthew lives and partly because it is not Paris.
Last night at dinner Matthew, Leo and I discussed the fact that the next day would be Thanksgiving. Matthew, who is British, spent a couple of years in Arizona (this is where I met him) and occasionally (OK, frequently) encountered people who were remarkably ignorant about the world at large and not always very tolerant or even interested when it came to other cultures, so he is sensitive to American arrogance and ethnocentrism. I said I planned to have a lovely Thanksgiving, even though neither Leo nor Matt expressed the slightest willlingness to cook a turkey for me. "It won't be Thanksgiving here, Holly," Matt gently explained to me, "because we don't celebrate Thanksgiving."
Wayne (aka Saviour Onassis) recently lost a lot of weight on what he calls the "WWBE?" diet, or "What Would Bowie Eat?" To truly understand the rationale of the lifestyle, you need to watch Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the movie featuring the last performance of Bowie's "leper messiah" before he retired the persona in 1973. The guy is SKINNY, and it's difficult to imagine him eating much of anything. (Saviour Onassis was kind enough to lay out the philosophy of this lifestyle on the blog we write together, Genius to Spare.)
But I bet Bowie would eat these cookies. I've been told by many, many people--Sweet Baby Jesus, among them--that these are the best cookies in the world. And as someone with a highly developed and discriminating set of dessert-loving taste buds, I can pretty much determine for myself that these cookies ROCK.
Double Chocolate Chip Cookies
½ cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
½ tsp. vanilla
½ cup sour cream
3 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips, divided in half
1 & 3/4 cups flour
½ tsp each salt, baking powder, baking soda
½ cup coarsely chopped walnuts or pecans, if desired
Melt 1 & ½ cups chocolate chips either in double boiler or in microwave by heating on high for one minute at a time, stirring after each minute of heat until thoroughly melted. (Should take two minutes.) In separate pan or bowl, melt butter. Stir melted butter and brown sugar together thoroughly. Add egg, vanilla and sour cream. Stir in melted chocolate. Add dry ingredients. Batter will be very runny; chill at least one hour. Roll into balls, then roll balls in granulated sugar for a nice finish on the cookies. Bake on greased cookies sheets at 350 for 9-12 minutes depending on how soft or crisp you like your cookies. Cool on pan for at least five minutes before transferring to wire racks for final cooling--cookies are extremely soft when they first come out of the oven. If desired substitute white chocolate chips for some of the chocolate chips added at end. I like to use 1/2 cup mini chocolate chips, 1/2 chunk chocolate chips, and 1/2 cup white chocolate chips. 3-4 dozen cookies.
What was it Winston Churchill said about the Soviet Union? "It is a CD, encased in a plastic box, sealed with an adhesive strip along the top, wrapped tightly in cellophane, inside a superfluous plastic bag"? OK, actually he said, "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," but I think the first statement does a better job of describing something profoundly and lastingly inaccessible.
Did I ever mention that I HATE excessive and extraneous packaging? What about disco--did I mention that I hate disco too? What about Madonna? Did I ever mention that I have a fierce loyalty to the Material Girl, even now that she's gone and morphed into a self-righteous religious loony and one of the worst lyricists in the world? (Whatever happened to the woman who wrote "Live to Tell," a song that can still make me weep?)
All of which is to say, there are several reasons why buying Madonna's new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, wasn't as rewarding an experience as I had hoped.
One year in my 30s, when I'd grown tired of keeping my hammer and my screw driver in a drawer in my desk, I asked my dad to give me a toolbox, well stocked with tools, for Christmas. Mom said I couldn't have asked for a better gift, that he hadn't had so much fun preparing for Christmas since my sibs and I were little kids. He spent hours at the hardware store, she said, choosing the best box, then finding a saw that would fit in it ("It's not long but it's all you'll ever need, unless you want to hack down a tree, and in that case, you'd be better off calling a tree service," he told me of the one he bought), picking out a good set of Allen wrenches and Phillips head screwdrivers. He even gave me a spirit level. I've used all the tools in that box, except for the saw, and I'm sure even that will come in handy someday.
He also gave me an cordless power drill. He told me that I should recharge the battery every month, that not only would it mean it would be charged up whenever I might need it, but it would also preserve the life of the drill.
I don't charge it every month, but I charge it pretty often. However, I never use it myself, though the handy man I occasionally hire to do stuff around my house is pretty glad I've got it. I admit I'm afraid of it. I'm afraid I'll drill a hole in my hand. Instead, I save up jobs requiring a power drill and then ask someone who's not afraid of it to do those jobs for me when they come to visit. Next time my parents visit, I'm thinking I'll ask my dad to install a couple of ceiling fans.
Maybe this makes me a wimpy girl, but I'm pretty competent in a lot of ways. There are a lot of things I can fix on my own. I'm just afraid of power drills.
In 1994, the landscape of Iowa City was forever changed when the Java House opened at 211 ½ East Washington. Its appearance heralded the arrival of the coffee craze in the general Midwest--sure, there were probably Starbucks all over Chicago at that point, but there wasn't one in Iowa City. (In fact, there wasn't a single Starbucks in Iowa City when I left in 2001, but there's one now, I saw with disappointment, though at least it's off the main drag and not nearly as crowded as other, older, cooler places.)
Iowa City's downtown features an area known as the pedestrian mall, the ped mall for short. It runs through four blocks bounded by Washington on the north, Clinton on the west, Burlington on the south, and Linn on the east. Paved with brick, dotted with trees, well-stocked with benches both in the shade and in the sun, equipped with a fountain and a playground, it's a cool place to hang out if there's no one you want to avoid; if there's someone you don't particularly want to encounter--say, for instance, an evil ex named Adam--you are sure to find him there, sitting on a bench in the sun, hitting on some undergrad who can't understand why this 30-something guy with the crazy eyebrows (his eyebrows were his worst feature, looking as they did like small furry rodents nesting on an otherwise attractive face) is putting on this act of intense and obviously fake sincerity. The restaurants, shops and bars (mostly bars) around the ped mall occupy prime retail space, because it gets so much foot traffic.
Prior to the arrival of the Java House, the only coffee house in downtown Iowa City was a place called the Tobacco Bowl, the retail equivalent of an AA meeting or an indoor cigarette break: no need to shiver in a snowstorm between classes or put up with the boozy smell of stale beer while you get your nicotine fix--heavens no! Why not enjoy a nice espresso instead of a beer and stay warm while you're at it? You can either study the cigars in the humidor--such a variety--or sit in front of a big window facing the ped mall, watching everyone who walks by! I admit I see the appeal of all that, I just don't see the appeal of smoking. I would never hang out there, even with friends who smoked, because I hated how I smelled when I left.
This is something I wrote during the summer, about a relationship I knew was doomed but still wasn't ready to abandon--I was so not ready to abandon it that I couldn't even acknowledge the real subject matter in the piece. I read it now and its intensity strikes me as strange, but then again, although there are situtions in my life I wouldn't describe as optimal, right now there's nothing I feel I should quit. Anyway, I came upon this piece and thought it might be better to post it when I don't feel all overwrought than when I do.
***
How many times do I have to say "I give up" before I believe it and mean it?
Or,
Why do I say "I give up" before I believe it and mean it?
One of my lessons in this incarnation must certainly be how to give up. I SUCK at it. We had all these lessons and lectures at church on "Enduring to the End," but what I really needed was some training in the fine art of judicious giving up, knowing when to quit, cutting my losses, calling it a day.
I knew within ten minutes of saying good-bye to my parents at the Missionary Training Center that I had made the biggest mistake of my life by going on a mission. But did I call my parents at that point and say, "Uh, yeah, Mom and Dad, I was wondering if I could catch a ride back to Arizona with you?" NO! I not only endured all freakin' nine weeks of the MTC, that "saccharin-coated hell-hole," as I had the good sense to call it at the time; I stayed on a mission for 18 and a half goddamn months, becoming more and more miserable, more and more ill, more and more damaged--but hey, I endured to the end of my mission and got a freakin' honorable release. It took me another three years to admit that I could not remain a Mormon, three years of struggle and failure and despair.
So why didn't I give up?
Because I didn't want to seem like a quitter.
I'm totally in love with my brand new boyfriend.
OK, this guy I'm in love with isn't REALLY my boyfriend--not yet, anyway, because we've never had a conversation. Not only that, but after the events that made me fall in love with him, I ran into one of my friends, who said, "Wasn't he GREAT? All the women at my table decided we were going to marry him."
Which made me feel better, sort of: at least I'm not some overwrought, self-deluded stalker, assuming after one utterly charming performance by an utterly charming man that he and I were going to spend our entire lives together: No, I was a NORMAL and REASONABLE groupie, the kind of woman who thinks, "I really, really, really want to spend some quality time with that man, so that he can decide ON HIS OWN that we are destined to live out the rest of our lives together, in noisy, intellectually stimulating, conjugal bliss."
But it also made me feel worse because I realize just how much competition I have: the world's majority of literate straight women.
I'm talking, of course, about the INCREDIBLE Pico Iyer, who gave a lunchtime talk on Friday and a Saturday night reading at the NonfictioNow conference I recently attended in Iowa. (I am happy to report that conference organizers promised it would be held again in two years--I can't wait!) Pico claimed his talk was impromptu, but it was more coherent and eloquent than many well-revised speeches I've heard. His reading was equal parts fascinating unrehearsed reflection and well-crafted prose: he read four short pieces, including an excerpt from an essay about losing his home and everything in it to a devastating fire (the first essay from the collection The Global Soul.)
Mr. Iyer is a slender gentleman in his late 40s, of Indian descent, who speaks with a slight British accent and incredible graciousness. He is particularly well known for his travel writing and has called himself "a global village on two legs." I admit I didn't bother to introduce myself to him--I couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't fawning and obvious--but I know that if I had, he would have shaken my hand and smiled at me with genuine beneficent warmth as he listened to me tell me how much I admired him and his writing.
I'm currently hanging out at my second alma mater, the University of Iowa. I'm here for a very cool conference on nonfiction, called, appropriately enough, NonfictioNow. I'm having a FABULOUS time, despite the fact that the conference organizers made no arrangements for attendees to be able to use computer facilities for anything: not email, not printing out last minute revisions of papers, not blogging. I'm only able to write this entry due to the generosity of an old classmate, who, saintly, trusting woman that she is, gave me her user name and password and let me log in on her account. My god.... I am still in awe of her benevolence.
But I'm so glad I came. I've been lucky enough to meet up with many old friends, which is always wonderful. I've met new people. Then there's the fact that I get to wander around someplace I lived for eight years. I didn't really love Iowa City when I was here, especially at first; it was cold and midwestern and filled with ugly architecture. But it has gotten WAY cooler in the four years since I left, and there's almost no comparison to what it was like in 1993, when I first arrived.
One of the standard lines about Iowa City went, "Oh, it's a nice little town, but there's hardly a decent restaurant in the whole place!" But now there are quite a few shishi restaurants just downtown. And there are all kinds of cool galleries and shops. And some of the ugly buildings have been torn down and replaced with buildings that aren't quite so ugly. (Though there are still PLENTY of HIDEOUS buildings, so that I still feel I recognize the place, and don't quite wish I could move back.)
Anyway. I'll no doubt have more to say about this trip and this conference when I get back to PA, but in the meantime, I thought I'd give a shout-out to you, my vast and devoted readership, and say HI FROM IOWA.
Someone recently expressed surprise when told how tall I am. “Really? Five foot six? That’s all? You seem taller. Must be the way you carry yourself.”
This is something I have heard many times in my life. The fact of the matter is, I just act tall. I always have. It’s not just a question of standing up straight, although I try to maintain good posture; nor does it have much to do with trying to appear tall: yeah, I own plenty of high heels (although I wear them less and less the older I get, because I’m less and less willing to be uncomfortable), but the point of heels is to look girly and dressed-up, and being taller is just a side effect. No, acting tall is often a natural consequence of feeling like you can occupy as much space as you need. I need a lot of space, and I take it.
The flipside of taking up so much space is that I try to give everyone else as much space as they need, too. And I am a terrible judge of other people’s height. I can usually tell whether someone is shorter or taller than I am, but as far as guessing exactly how tall someone is, I tend to assume most people are about the same height I am, give or take a couple of inches. One of the administrative assistants in our office asked me to help her make a skirt; in trying to figure out how much fabric she’d need, I asked her height and was shocked to learn she was only 4'10". Of course I knew she was shorter than I am, but I figured she was, say, 5'3" or 5'4". Another friend recently mentioned the he was 6'1"; I would have guessed he was 5'9". After I’m told this, I can stand back, survey the person, and notice that there is indeed a large discrepancy in our heights--but it always feels like an optical illusion, like I should distrust this visual evidence, that it’s really another one of those puzzles where two lines exactly the same length are somehow distorted so that one merely appears longer than the other.
The thing is, when you talk to people, you make eye contact, and unless I strain my neck maintaining that contact, I figure the person is about at the same level I’m at. You could say that this means I’m oblivious to details and don’t scrutinize others carefully, or you could say I have a strong egalitarian impulse. I’m going to go with the latter interpretation, because that’s what a person who acts tall would say.
I'm not a vegetarian. I wish I were. I feel about vegetarianism the same way St. Augustine felt about celibacy when he made his famous prayer: "Oh Lord, give me chastity, but not yet." I really want to someday really want to be a vegetarian.
In the meantime, I try to limit my meat consumption to a meal or two a week. This is in sharp contract to my upbringing, where we had meat at least once every day--often at every meal. That much meat isn't good for you, and it's really expensive, and it's hard on the environment.
One easy way to limit how much meat I eat is to avoid cooking it for myself. I'll order it at restaurants, but except for a very few things I sometimes just have to have, my cooking is meat-free.
One such exception involves a recipe my friend Matthew gave me five or six years ago, for Beef in Guinness, which he, being British, found in some British cookbook. He passed it on to me because he knows I love both beef and Guinness. I also really like hearty peasant fare, and that's exactly what this dish is. I make a big batch once a year, in the fall, and either invite someone over to share it with me, or else freeze the leftovers so I can enjoy it in future weeks, or both.
Here's the recipe, in case anyone is interested.
I confess: I've never been visited by the spirit of the Great Pumpkin. I've written here and here about various Halloween costumes I've worn, but I admit that dressing up is the only part of the holiday I care for. The whole ghosts and goblins thing doesn't appeal to me: I have never enjoyed being frightened out of my wits, and I don't see the entertainment value of skeletons, corpses and ugly witches. Nor can I see the point in wasting a perfectly good pumpkin by carving a design in it, inserting a lit candle, and putting it outside where it will attract bugs and fractious adolescent boys.
Then there's the whole trick-or-treat business. I have a highly developed, demanding and discriminating sweet tooth, and most of the candy handed out on Halloween does not meet my standards. With the possible exception of the Easter candy Peeps, I don't think a more disgusting candy exists than that vile candy corn. I remember seeing someone once who had painted her nails to resemble that candy corn; that's what the candy reminds me of now--it tastes like I imagine sweetened nail clippings would. I do not particularly care for peanuts or peanut butter, so I am not fond of Snickers or Reese's Cups, and I HATE peanut M&M's. I like hard candy in small and occasional doses. I can be happy eating a KitKat or plain M&M's or any flavor of Skittles, but what I really like is gourmet dark chocolate. Unfortunately, not many people hand out Godiva Truffles on Halloween.
I have written elsewhere about the fact that I can become emotionally attached to sturdy plastic bags from cool places like the British Library, but I have not yet said much about my efforts to prevent people from putting any and everything I purchase into those flimsy plastic bags that have THANK YOU stamped on them multiple times, and get thanklessly and endlessly caught in the branches of trees. "I don't need another bag; I'll just put that spool of thread in my backpack," I say to the cashier, which seems to me a perfectly reasonable decision on my part, but sometimes they look at me as if I had revealed myself as a marsupial intent on transporting my purchases in a pouch designed to accommodate my very young offspring.
I also ask the person bagging my groceries to refrain from giving me any bags that contain only one thing. I really do hate that, when they put the eggs in a bag by themselves. And when I object, they get all defensive: "But I don't want your eggs to get smashed!" they say.
"The eggs won't get smashed if all you put on top of them is three bananas and a loaf of bread," I say. I also bring in these capacious fishnet shopping bags my mother gave me years ago; when asked "Paper or plastic?" I say, "Uh, actually, I'd like you to get as many of my groceries as you can in these," and some people actually ROLL THEIR EYES at me, like there's something objectionable about passing up an opportunity to consume and discard cheap plastic goods.
Excessive and instantly disposable packaging: one of the great evils of the world. It wastes resources and clogs already overflowing landfills. I'm waging a personal war against it, but I don't see much success.
Several weeks ago, Wayne and I had phone chips and salsa, which is a lot like phone sex except with chips and salsa in place of the sex. (That's probably pretty self-evident, but I wanted to make sure everyone understood.)
That is only one of the many activities we have shared over the phone. We have also scrubbed our bathtubs together. We have gone for walks. We have plotted and taken fiendish but heartily deserved revenge against Adam, my evilest of exes. We have washed dishes. We have done laundry. We have googled our celebrity crushes and directed each other to websites featuring photos of obscure foreign actors without their shirts.
In fact, I got a cell phone a mere 14 months ago largely to facilitate talking to Wayne. He was very upset about a $400.00 phone bill he got, especially since most of the charges involved phone calls to or from me. So I got the same carrier he had and we both signed up for free mobile-to-mobile minutes, with the upshot that I began spending 25 to 30 hours a month talking to Wayne on the phone, and about two and a half hours put together talking to everyone else I knew.
That kept up for a good long while until we had a falling out over religion. I may discuss our six-month estrangement and reconciliation at some point in a future post, but let me say now that within days of reestablishing contact all the animosity disappeared and it was like we'd never quarreled, except that it took us a while to work back up to talking on the phone for so long that we'd grow peckish and have to rummage through our various cupboards for snacks.
After we both closed up the bag of chips and put the salsa back in the fridge on that Saturday several weeks back, we decided we needed some internet action, so we blog surfed by hitting the "next blog" button on blogger. We came across a site run by some guy in Vienna dedicated to enormous breasts. He provided plenty of photos of breasts, including a substantial pair on a naked blonde woman who sits on a fireplace mantle, drinking a beer and looking bored while some guy eats her out. I found that in rather bad taste, but what upset Wayne was a photo further down the page of Christian Bale from American Psycho, accompanied by a lavish and loving paean to the character CB portrays: the guy went on and on about how that was his favorite movie and how he really identified with that character--the one who tortures, rapes and murders women.
