Oh, my stars and garters!

Weird food Thursday

I guess I should have seen it coming, but I trusted the recipe when it said I could put mustard seeds in a medium-high skillet. Those suckers immediately started dancing and popped and zinged all over the kitchen, and they stung when they hit my arms, in a very tiny way that made me laugh.

The mustard seeds were for the Indian-spiced okra Kristy sent me the recipe for (delicious; I would halve the salt), and I also made a pot of noodles mixed with a pale, goopy pesto that I made out of a bunch of different kinds of basil and way too many walnuts. It doesn't always work, but it's interesting to see what I can pull together without going to the grocery store.

Tuesday

Today I went here and had a Cuban sandwich with fries. I wish I could eat one every single day. Actually I could, but I shouldn't. Maybe you could go eat one for me every once in a while so I can live vicariously through you? You should go there. I hope lots of people go there. The commercial areas in that part of the city are woefully underutilized, so any investment that brings in tasty pork-and-pickle sandwiches and fresh coffee is welcome.

I also bought a box of Bumpits for my sister because they were on clearance. After fussing with them for a while, she declared her current curly style "too Bumpit-y already" and kindly affixed them to my hair instead. They work like a dream; finally, I am everything I could be!

Well, not everything, not quite, so I also joined the Y this afternoon. Mostly for their year-round heated lap pool, but also for their weight room and free classes. I'm going to need more upper-body strength if I'm going to do everything I want to do this winter. Like lifting 800 Cuban sandwiches to my lips and teasing my hair to perfection each morning.

Well, there goes the rest of the evening.

I don't know why I never knew about this before, but the University of North Texas library has been digitizing its Texas history materials and partnering with other libraries--including the Austin History Center--across the state to put everything in a very simply presented, searchable database.

I love this shit. If you like old pictures and/or are interested in Texas, or want to see a whole bunch of other stuff (I didn't get a chance to really look at any of it because I wanted to put up the link right away), well, here you go.

The tooth implant went fine. I spent the day high as a kite on the cumulative effects of whatever was in the IV during the procedure and the pain pills I was prescribed later. It was a beautiful day, so this afternoon I took a blanket and a book out back and spent an hour reading, dozing, and staring at the sky. Then I got up, walked a few steps, stopped, vomited into the grass, walked inside, and passed out on the couch. I also spent an hour edging the lawn around noon. I don't remember why, exactly, but it seemed very important and pleasurable at the time.

Other than that, and some soreness that the pills have so far kept to an indistinct mumble, I've been fine and will be back to work on Wednesday.

Surrender

Didn't come up with much tonight.

If my workspace is messy, and it usually is, I tend to avoid it (and everything I am working on in there) for months at a time. So it's really hard for me to finish things or start new ones, and instead of hanging out at a nice desk in a pleasingly tiltable captain's chair, I'm usually camped out with my laptop on the dining room table. That table usually has plenty of room, but it's also ringed by uncomfortable, spine-pinching chairs, and it's very far away from useful things like USB cables and pen tablets.

This less-than-ideal (ok, really stupid) setup has been going on for more than three years, and all that time I was honestly thinking I really needed to keep my office more tidy, that if I could just stop being such a slob I could get so much more done. This weekend it finally dawned on me that I am never going to stop being a slob. I don't need to clean more often, I need more surface area to keep a giant mess on and still have a place clear for my computer and some scrap paper.

I'm pretty sure the whole thing will be solved forever if I bring in one more table. I really can be slow sometimes.

Things I like right now

Mando Alvarez's pictures

flickr stream; website

This guy's photos blow me away. He is from South Texas and shoots with medium-format film. He selects the photos he posts very wisely, and the cumulative effect of looking at each shot is an unmistakable sense of his visual style, and, better yet, his point of view. I especially admire that, how each photo seems to be coming from the same place in the same person. It's something I feel like I've been trying and failing to cultivate the entire time I've been taking photos (and lately I seem to have given up; what's up with that?). Is point of view something you can even work on, or does it have to come naturally?

Enough about me. I hope you like the pictures because I sure do.

Eric Fischer's maps

"Race and ethnicity" flickr set

When we were in Louisville, Eric and Amy both told me that one of the things that they really don't like about the city is how segregated it is. When I had a moment, I looked up the stats--Louisville proper is more than a third black. That startled me because just based on the parts of the city we'd been hanging out in, you could be forgiven for assuming the city is about 95 percent white.

Eric Fischer uses open-source maps and the 2000 census to illustrate racial concentrations in the nation's largest cities, and the results are stark and sometimes surprising. I hope he does another set from the 2010 data when that's available because a lot has changed in this country in the past decade.

Here is Austin;  Louisville; Detroit (whoa, look at 8 Mile Road); New Orleans; and my hometown, Plano.

Any graphic novel by Rick Geary

I was pleased when Gary blogged about Rick Geary because it reminded me to go check out some more of his books. Eric gave me a copy of The Borden Tragedy from the Treasury of Victorian Murder series back when we were first going out, and I was impressed by the attention to detail, both in the art and the research, and the dry, restrained touches of morbid humor. I read the Jack the Ripper book not too long ago as well, and my neighborhood branch of the Austin Public Library just happened to have The Mysterious Death of William Desmond Taylor and Housebound the last time I stopped by.

I especially liked Housebound, a compilation of early one-offs and a bunch of stuff he did for National Lampoon, for being so fun to read, if only to watch a very fine and specific style evolve. I will be done with those very soon if you want to put them on hold, and if you are liking something a lot right now yourself, I wish you would tell me about it. 

Buzzy

Monday I go to get an implant to replace my old ham tooth. The procedure isn't a big deal, but I do have to go under. As I understand it, that is mostly to spare me the irritation of the drills and the indignity of spending an hour with my mouth wedged open and the oral surgeon pressing his hand against my face for leverage. So somebody--Eric--must stick around to drive my woozy, drooling ass home.

Festivities start at eight in the morning. That's a reasonable time for oral surgery, but for bartenders it's pretty much in the middle of the night. I was trying to make it sound less unpleasant, so I reminded Eric that at least he didn't have to work that night and could just go back to bed after we got home. Better yet, I said, he could sleep in the waiting room while I had my tooth done.

In response, he told me a story, and he told it so much better than I could that I had him repeat it to me when we got home so I could write it down. The story is this:

Do you remember what happened the last time I had to wait for you to be done with surgery early in the morning?* The chairs in the waiting room were really comfortable, they were reclining chairs. So I fell asleep instantly, and at first there was nobody else in the waiting room, it was just me.

So I was asleep for a while and I woke myself up by farting and I was like, “Huhhh!” and I snapped awake and looked around and the waiting room was full. And everyone was staring at me, rather disapprovingly. I think I had been farting a lot. So don’t fall asleep if you have gas in a waiting room because it’s bad. Although at the time I was so tired I didn’t really care.

So Eric will be sitting awake in the most uncomfortable chair he can find come Monday morning, and god knows what will happen to me. Wish us both luck.

*I did not, so I laughed until I cried when I heard this.

"Lament" is a nicer word than "whine" (and "growler" is the nicest word of all).

Yesterday I was ready to come home from our week's vacation, despite the fun friend city time in Louisville, the quiet lovely underground/cottage time in Mammoth Cave NP, and the family wedding time in Nashville. We'd had a great time, but we were weary. I missed my cats. I missed my bed and my friends and even my job, a little bit. I needed to eat some vegetables.

Now I've been home about 26 hours and I'm wondering what my big hurry was. Although the cats and the bed are dandy, it's sullen, gray, and humid here. Work was annoying today. Someone stole a Port-a-Potty sink and left it tumped over on the sidewalk down the street for no reason I can discern. It seems like it should be the time of year where things start to get interesting, but it isn't.

One thing that is almost certainly adding to my spasm of discontent: We walked and drove around Louisville for three days last week and Jesus, everything was so easy there. You don't have to plan some insane route around eight million poorly designed intersections that require two light cycles each; you don't have to have a Plan B and a Plan B-minus (or just pick C by default) in case Plan A has a 45-minute wait; you can just pull up in front of a place and leave your car there and go on in, or, better yet, wander over. Even if it's a long walk, it's most likely temperate and filled with nice trees and interesting architecture to look at the whole way there. And this is a good portion of the city, by the way, not just a few blocks here and there in a handful of highly desirable neighborhoods or planning districts or whatever the hell.

My point is, I hadn't realized precisely how much of a pain in the ass Austin has become and how much mental energy I spend calculating boring logistical bullshit until I could spend a few days just cruising around a nice city having a good time and not thinking about any of that. It was great.

I realize we were on vacation, not living there, and I also realize the rest of the reason it was easy can be divided between the beauty of halfway decent urban planning and the fact that people are not exactly knocking each other over to move to Louisville the way they are here. But you know, it's not exactly rotting away up there either.

I guess I can't really compare the two; I'm just saying it was nice, and we had a lot of fun there, and Amy, our hostess, showed us a fantastic time.

Plus they have bulk beer. On tap. In the supermarket. Point: Louisville.

Been away

I'm back now.