What’s something you enjoy that contains garlic? Um, literally everything?
One of my culinarily-inclined friends here grew up with sound advice from her mother: "There's never enough garlic in recipes. You should always double however much garlic they recommend, and then that's enough." This piece of advice served my friend well until she tried a recipe from her garlic-loving mother that she didn't realized was already calibrated to have an appropriate amount of garlic. Yowza.
What’s something you enjoy that contains ginger? Probably a few things. Yujacha (Korean lemon honey tea) springs to mind. Ginger is a flavor I tolerate because it turns up in cuisine that I like (Korean), but on its own ginger is awful and I hate it. What’s something you enjoy that contains cloves? I'm sure I've had mulled wine or hot toddies or hot buttered rum with cloves at some point. No complaints. It's a cozy flavor.
What’s something you enjoy that contains cinnamon? There's a scene in the short-lived, maybe-underrated show "Welcome to Sweden" (starring Amy Poehler's little brother, with cameos from Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell) where baby Poehler turns down a kanelbulle and tries to explain to his Swedish girlfriend's family that he doesn't like cinnamon.
"How can you not like cinnamon?" they ask each other, bewildered, in Swedish baby Poehler can't understand. "It's just a spice. It's not like Hitler."
That moment was too real.
(The rest of the show relied on gags about how hard Swedish is to learn and fell flat for me then and there, because if you're a native English speaker, Swedish isn't that hard.) What’s something you enjoy that contains celery? If you put it in a chili or a stew, I'll eat it, but on its own celery is one of the more disappointing vegetables.
I first heard of The Power thanks to the half-dozen book bloggers I follow. A while ago, I started using GoodReads' "to-read" function as a storehouse for all of the books I heard about that sounded really cool but that I would otherwise forget after a couple days, and dumped The Power in there. Then the universe aligned: a book club buddy picked The Power off my GoodReads TBR to send to me in a New Year's book club exchange, and then my feminist science fiction club decided on it for February's book.
(Fun fact: today is the birthday one of the founding members of said feminist science fiction book club! Good job getting older, my dude!)
Image courtesy Penguin
The Power posits that if you give women the ability to produce electricity out of nowhere, thereby making them all walking weapons, within less than a decade you'll see an entire global culture shift. That's really the point that the book turns on, and how much you enjoy the book is probably based on how much you buy into Alderman's thesis. Less central to the story is that it's pure power (hah, hah) that drives sexual objectification and sexual entitlement. Still, if you disagree with Alderman's implied stance on this, there will be moments of characterization that fall flat for you.
Speaking of characterization, this is another book with an ensemble cast, a total of five major perspective characters (plus asides here and there). I'm not entirely convinced that all of those characters were entirely necessary to the story. And while Alderman included a graceful nod to the complexities of biological sex with how inconsistently the physiological source of the power manifests (i.e. some men have semi-developed skeins, and some women don't have skeins as developed as other women), the absence of any trans characters or an examination of what this development would mean for them is notable.
Despite these small bumps, the important thing about The Power is that it's just damn good hard(ish) sci-fi. I'm a perpetual Slowpoke about reading the new hot thing in books (unless the stars align and I get an early crack it at it thanks to NetGalley), so I suspect most of my readers (hi, Mom) will have already read this if they were going to read it at all, but nonetheless I want my opinion to go on the record: this is good.
Since the cabin was about two hours from Old Orchard Beach, we hit the road relatively early for bagels and other goodies at Aaron's aunt's house. Everyone else had made plans amongst themselves; Theophanes and I had decided yesterday to visit the International Cryptozoology Museum. One of my Hamilton friend's boyfriend has been there before: "It's just, like, two rooms of stuff, and this guy following you around, telling you how Bigfoot is real. One of the display is, like, a GI Joe doll standing next to a stuffed beaver to show how large giant beavers are supposed to be." He laughed and shakes his head; Theophanes and I looked at each other like YESSSSSS. That is definitely what we're doing next.
Her GPS didn't have an updated address for the International Cryptozoology Museum, which unbeknownst to us had moved to some old warehouse unit behind the Greyhound station, so we had a nice little wander around downtown Portland.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] That's a long fellow you've got there![/caption]
It was a cozy little wander full of graffiti and politically-minded stickers.
I felt at home here; I could imagine myself in Portland (if I ever wanted to leave Stockholm). As I texted my friend back in Austin: "The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland ME, too."
For our one and only actual stop in downtown, we visited The Green Hand and despite the incredibly temptation I resisted the urge to buy books. Still, I wanted to get something, so I bought a little High Priestess pin and a ton of postcards.
They very conveniently had a poster by the register with directions to the new location of The International Cryptozoology Museum, so we realized our mistake and (after a fight with the parking garage) were able to rectify it.
We had a little trouble finding the museum once we were on the warehouse campus—we literally walked right past it and didn't see it until we turned around—but we were still there before closing. It was everything I love in a tourist trap: weird and kind of grubby but incredibly enthusiastic. It's situated in a weird place; it splits the warehouse room with a fried chicken restaurant, so we had to walk through another place to find the entrance. (It has its own door, too, but on the other side of the building.) We watched the little introductory video by the founder first (Loren Coleman, no doubt the "creepy dude" mentioned earlier), then I paid for our tickets and we explored.
The first floor is a riot of assorted mounted weirdnesses—this is the "hoax" section, which the video explains is included because the founder wants you "to be critical and skeptical." It includes Fiji mermaids and Jackalopes and so on.
And bits about assorted species once considered mythical that turned out to be real: mountain gorillas, etc.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] The infamous GI Joe (actually an Indiana Jones action figure) and beaver.[/caption]
Upstairs is dedicated to hominids and the founder's little shrine to himself and assorted cryptid kitsch.
The museum It reminded me, a little, of The Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA, in that these are both vanity-ish projects that are kind of the crystallized, refined essence of what makes their founders tick. Only The Museum of Jurassic Technology isn't really self-aggrandizing about it and is much more about "here's this stuff I like!" The International Cryptozoology Museum is a little more, "Here's me, and here's the stuff that made me famous." Anything that made him famous: an overhead LED light that was used on a camping trip when he potentially saw Bigfoot, the computer Coleman used to write his first book on cryptozoology, that sort of thing. A wall-mounted TV plays a video of his appearance on some show or other (but we didn't stay long enough to find out if it loops).
They have a photo op set up, and naturally we availed ourselves of it.
I spend my last remaining pocket change on a postcard in the gift shop and we decided to try to the deep-fried PB & J food truck we saw while we were trying to find the museum.
Everything sounded really good, or at least really interesting; I settled on a sort of sample platter that's half a regular (deep-fried) PB & J and half something called a S'More: no peanut butter or jelly, but fluff and something vaguely Nutella ish. We chatted for a little bit with another customer, who was maybe itching to talk to people and so when he heard me give my name for the order opened up with a story about a woman he knew who was named, for real, "Katherine Katherine." We talked about unusual names and doping in sports and NASCAR and then our sandwiches were ready, so we took our leave and give them a try.
The cook in the truck helpfully pointed out which sample was which; I decided to start with the s'more sandwich since the PB & J seemed to be the flagship standard. The s'more one was an absolute delight; the PB & J less so, if only because the jelly seemed to have more or less evaporated with the heat of the deep fryer, so it was essentially a warm peanut butter sandwich with powdered sugar on top.
But the s'mores one was SO DAMN GOOD.
Hunger sated, we headed back to the car to decide what our next stop for the day would be. Theophanes had a couple suggestions, and we eventually decided on Fort McClary because it was the closest one to us. It was still an hour away, about, but we had time.
Some people from your childhood, if you meet them again as adults it's weird and you have nothing in common with them anymore and you struggle to understand why you were ever friends to begin with. Maybe sometimes you kept an inseparable circle of BFFs. Visiting Theophanes with is somewhere in the middle. Thanks to Facebook, we've more or less kept tabs on each other, though we never interact one-on-one. But in person it's fine, and it's not weird, and it's like: here's this person who's known you, if not always very deeply, forever. We drove a lot and what could have been long, uncomfortable car rides with a virtual stranger are perfectly comfortable. Silences occur and are natural, but most of the time there was easygoing conversation.
We poked around Fort McClary without paying the "suggested donation" because we're rebels. This is all you need to know about Fort McClary:
"During the Civil War, plans were drawn for large masonry forts on major rivers, but advancement in weapons caused them to become obsolete before construction was completed. The huge granite slabs on this site remain where they lay when work stopped."
We alternately poked around for pictures, enjoyed a view together, or stopped and shot the breeze. We quite possibly scared a couple of dudes away when the subject turned to birth control and periods. I watched the boats in the water and thought about Murder, She Wrote and drank in the smell of the ocean.
Somebody had it in for Sir William Pepperrell!
RIP Granite Wall
It's a small and unremarkable park, but it does have a lovely view. I can understand why someone would be honored by a memorial bench here.
We decided to leave when the sun started to go down, since we still had a long drive back to the cabin. By the time we get home, Theophanes's brother, girlfriend, and her nieces are already there. We knew that they were going to be staying overnight that night, so it wasn't not much of a surprise; we just didn't know what time they'd be arriving. For it being such a small cabin, though, it didn't feel cramped with all of those people. Theophanes and I are beat (we did a lot of walking), but we hung around and chatted a little bit about our plans tomorrow: driving to Boston, Walden, Boda Borg. Neither Theophanes nor her family were really familiar with the concept of escape rooms, so I explained.
"I hope they let you out if you can't solve the puzzle," the girlfriend joked.
We needed an early start the next day, though, and we were seriously bushed from our adventures. We didn't talk for long until we said our goodnights and collapsed into bed.
#GirlBoss! Lean in! #Hustle! Girl power! The future is female! // Katy Belcher
Hey, you! Do you want to be your own boss and never sleep again ever? Do you want a life with ~meaning~? Quit your day job and take your Etsy to the next level! Because work that's all about your special snowflake interests and hobbies is inherently more praiseworthy and of higher moral standing than a boring job working for other people!
These days I wipe my ass with $100 bills, but I started out as a mere peon just like you! I have plenty of heartwarming stories about making negative income on my shop and eating cup noodle and I will periodically pull one out to remind you that I'm a relateable, real person. See, if the secrets I'm going to sell you for $250 / month worked for me, they'll work for anybody!
It'll be hard work though, which I'll tell you to make it sound like my hype project will DEFINITELY propel you to success. If you just work hard and bootstraps yourself, you'll be successful! And if you're not, you either did something wrong or you don't want it hard enough!
I might even drop a couple of f-bombs throughout my otherwise bland PR hype to make it seem like I'm more unique than I actually am, and to give the impression that I'm "keeping it real." Or I might not and opt for the more saccharine mode. It depends: am I targeting hip young Millenials or am I targeting frustrated (possibly single?) mothers? Either way I'm probably targeting women. I guess it makes sense that women would want to opt out of a workplace culture where they get paid, on average, less money to put up with, on average, more bullshit. Which puts them in the perfect emotionally vulnerable spot to buy my expertise!
The one thing I won't own up to is that I sell items that are light on resources and often easily replicable (digital downloads, printable art, raw supplies), or that maybe I outsource to printers or drop ship my stuff. Maybe I'm even straight up reselling off of Alibaba. But never mind that! Surely the tips that work for my store that's based on bulk orders of inexpensive things that I can print again and again also apply to your store full of painstakingly handcrafted one-of-a-kind artisan goods. And try not to think about the fact the course costs $250 a month, and that earlier I boasted of 800 monthly subscribers. That's nothing to worry your pretty little head about.
How good are you at word games, and what’s a word game you really enjoy?
I'd like to think that I'm pretty good at these, but I haven't played any except Scrabble, and every time I've played Scrabble I've come somewhere in the middle because someone aggressively outmaneuvered me to get to, or to block, the bonus tiles.
How good are you at trivia games, and what’s your strongest category?
It depends on the game. Like, a copy of Trivial Pursuit from thirty years ago (and I suspect that might be how old my parents' copy of Trivial Pursuit is!) is not going to be my strong suit. Of course, there is something of a horseshoe effect with these things: there was a burger joint/diner near my college that included a handful of Trivial Pursuit: Boomer Edition cards at each table and out of my peers, I tended to clean up when it came to the arts and entertainment category, at least, just because of my movie and music taste.
But Best Chemist Friend and I were a two-woman trivia team for a while and consistently did well enough to win prizes, if not actual first place, until we got other people to join us, so I think that says it all. I don't know what my best category would be, but without a doubt my weakest category is sports.
How good are you at spot-the-difference or what’s-wrong-with-this-picture games?
Considering that the only ones I've played are the super obvious ones in Highlights for Children, I don't think I can really judge my ability based on my past experience.
How good are you at memory games, and have you ever played Simon?
Of course I've played Simon! But what does it mean to be good at Simon? I don't have enough data to really say.
Otherwise I play a lot of memory with my students. Confession: in the interest of making the activity maximally educational, I deliberately throw the game whenever we play.
What’s your favorite party game of all time?
I have a couple!
Since I have an astonishing memory for song lyrics, I always really liked playing Encore!. (My copy is still at my parents' house, now that I stop to think about it. The things that slip your memory when you're packing to move out!) I'm also preternaturally good at Tri-Bond, though I guess it's up in the air whether that counts as a party game? The same could be said for the aggressive and competitive Munchkinseries.
Thanks to Wil Wheaton's Tabletop series, I've found and fallen in love with Dixit.Apples to Apples is always a good time and I confess to getting a kick out of Cards Against Humanity, though when I've played with others there has always been the house rule that you're allowed to discard anything you feel is beyond the realm of good taste, no questions asked.
A new favorite I've encountered in Sweden is Orangino, which is maybe the most Swedish party game ever developed. The whole point of the game is to determine how well others know you, and how well you can gauge other people's perception of you. The game consists of cards with different personality traits and descriptions; you rate yourself (from 1 to 4) in secret, while everyone else does too, and people get points for matching your rating. There's no English version as far as I can tell, which is a shame because as dorky and feel-goody as it sounds, it's also a lot of fun! (Maybe a future translation project?)
This was another selection from one of my three book clubs, this one based on Discord and more generally YA focused. The earlier book I read with them was Roar.
This was a book that I was really excited about. I watch a couple of Booktubers now and again, and The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue had come up in a lot of their videos. The concept sounded interesting and these were people whose tastes I trusted, so when my Discord book club chose this book for February I was glad that, for once, I was going to read the new release I was interested in fairly close to release. (This doesn't happen often! Too many books!)
Once, as a kid, I took a sip from a cup without looking and expected apple juice. It actually had milk. The moment of confusion where my brain tried to sort out expectations versus reality meant the drink didn't really taste like anything, at least anything I was familiar with. It was just uncomfortable and disconcerting.
The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue is that moment in book form. I think I was expecting a subtle, more character-driven slow burn romance; when it turned out to be a Return the MacGuffin adventure story I was disappointed and slightly uncomfortable for the remainder of the story.
Additionally, Henry (or "Monty," as he's known for most of the book) takes a breezy, ironic tone that feels anachronistic, too modern for a book taking place in pre-Revolutionary France. Confession: I love 19th century adventure novels, as racist and sexist and issue-laden as they are. And The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue doesn't read like one of those at all. This wouldn't be a problem except I think Lee wants this book to be a more inclusive version of exactly those books.
To her credit, Lee gives a very thorough accounting of all of her research and inspiration for a number of aspects of the books (the Grand Tour, European politics, queer history, race relations) at the end. When it comes to Henry, she cites the journals of James Boswell as inspiration. This has made me rather keen to read them. His diaries about his own Grand Tour are a little hard to come by, but his account of traveling to the Hebrides is available for free on Kindle.
My love affair with variscite (also known as aqua terra jasper, impression jasper, or snakeskin jasper) hasn't really ended, though I admit I haven't used it in a while. That's how ridiculous my jewelry backlog has gotten; this Avogadro bracelet has been sitting around, unphotographed, for years now.
You can tell that this one was one of the last ones I photographed in the photography binge I went on a couple of weeks ago because I just took three pictures and left it at that.
I love the look of variscite with copper. Yes, I know it turns sensitive skin green, but I love the coloring. Sometimes silver is just a little too bland, but gold is a little too flashy. Copper is nice. It's in between. It's a happy medium. It's lagom. (Truly, I have become Swedish.)
Still, I'm always willing to change out base metal or copper findings for sterling. Sometimes it's necessary. I get it.
This bracelet features Avogadro's number in freshwater pearls, with small teal variscite beads acting as spacers in between digits. This is another way you can tell how old the bracelet is: which value of Avogadro it features.
Physical constants can be tricky to measure precisely, which is why the CODATA values are updated every couple of years. In an ideal world, I would sell out pieces as while their values were still current; in a real world, I have older stock that's technically incorrect. It bugs me a little, but the truth is that you don't need to be as precise as the CODATA values are to do good science. (I think with Avogadro's number, people just use 6.022 and call it a day? The same is true with pi; you don't need that many digits for accurate calculations.)
The current CODATA value for Avogadro's number is 6.022140857 x 10^23, as per the updated values that went into effect in 2015. But this bracelet predates those changes, and so features the version from 2010: 6.02214129 x 10^23.
What would be a better name for the color of goldenrod-colored paper?
What's wrong with "goldenrod"?
Where did you get your silverware?
Either IKEA or the grocery store downstairs.
It is a weird tradition in America (and possibly elsewhere) for parents to have their children’s baby shoes bronzed. What artifact from this past week would you have bronzed as a keepsake and heirloom?
Last week was pretty unremarkable. If I had to pick anything, it might be the toy dinosaur that lives with Chuck, one of my snake plants.
I have no sentimental attachment to the dinosaur or anything. (I bought it as part of a Jurassic Park costume a few years ago.) I just think it would be funny to have it bronzed. Maybe I'll just spray paint instead?
What was the most recent ceremony you attended?
The wedding I went to in August.
What east Asian cuisine is good for your Seoul?
I lived and taught in South Korea for over two years, as I've probably mentioned before, and one of the (many) things I miss big time is the food. The Korean diaspora means that Korean barbecue is familiar to most non-Koreans who live in any metropolitan area that approaches international; it seems that bibimbap is also gaining traction thanks to the recent health food obsession with "Buddha bowls."
But that is only the tip of the iceberg, my friend.
Korean street food is the best, hands down. (Apologies to all of the gatuköks and Philly pretzel carts out there, but it's true.) My favorite in this genre is tteokbokki: dense rice cakes in a sweet and spicy sauce. It wasn't uncommon for teachers at my first school to spring for a whole tray of these for a "snack party" after a particular class finished a level test, since they were cheap, tasty, and filling. It helped that we had a little snack shack in the first floor of our building.
A step up from street food are the ubiquitous gimbap restaurants. I don't know enough about Korean food history to know whether or not these restaurants predate the appearance of American-style fast food chains in the peninsula, but I would guess that they did. These places specialize in cheap, easy-to-make meals and are popular with broke students and people with criminally short lunch breaks. (This is also the kind of restaurant built into Korean spas.) The backbone dish of these restaurants is gimbap (rice, veggies, and sometimes meat rolled in a sheet of dried black seaweed) and all of its varieties, but the menus always include a wide assortment of variations on jjigaes, larger portions of popular street food, and a few odds and ends. Anything off the menu here will be fantastic, though my personal favorites are dolsot bibimbap, rabokki (a combination of the aforementioned tteokbokki and ramen), and cheesy ramen. I actually don't care that much for gimbap, ironically enough, because I'm not a huge fan of black seaweed.
When it comes to "real" restaurants, places start to narrow down their menus to a handful of specialty dishes (or a handful of variations on one particular dish). Now you have your Korean barbecue restaurants, with various cuts of pork or beef to grill at your table. I preferred the chicken stir-fry equivalent, the marinated version known as dak galbi; sometimes my coworkers and I even went out for duck. You have seafood restaurants, with raw fish, squid, and octopus. You have, borrowed from Japan, shabu-shabu. On a slightly lesser tier, you have chicken-and-beer joints. You have what are theoretically restaurants but are really bars with obligatory anju (bar snacks, or bar more-than-a-snack-less-than-a-meal), like stir-fried rice or seafood or kimchi pancake-fritters. (These bars are usually famous for the quality of their anju, though, so having to order to be allowed to drink isn't a problem at all.)
But for me, the crown jewel of Korean cuisine is something else entirely. The city where I lived, Uijeongbu, is famous for budae jjigae, a relatively modern invention that takes a traditional jjigae and incorporates the kind of meat found in American military MREs: sausages, hot dogs and (of course) SPAM. Unlike other jjigaes, it's usually served with ramen and glass noodles right in the dish.
By LWY at flickr - https://www.flickr.com/photos/lwy/2184707139/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3402989
As far as I can tell, Korean entrepreneurs haven't brought budae jjigae abroad yet. I guess the immediate connection with scraps and cast-offs from American military bases doesn't really jibe with the image Korea wants to present to the rest of the world? But that's a tragedy, because budae jjigae is so damn good. I've learned to make a lot of Korean food myself, to scratch my Koreastalgia itch, but the one thing that you can never just make yourself is budae jjigae. It's a dish best cooked in huge heaping batches, tended by a watchful restaurant employee, and enjoyed in the company of others. Like, if I were fabulously, obscenely wealthy, I would open a budae jjigae restaurant in Stockholm. That is how much I love this dish. One day...!
This is usually a spot where I hype some cool pi stuff I've found on my Internet meanderings, but truthfully I'm not really excited by a whole lot at the moment. I'd like to broaden the scope to mathart instead.
Mathart, as a hashtag, doesn't seem to have the same draw as sciart (has there ever been a mathart tweetstorm? it doesn't seem like it), but nonetheless you can find some cool stuff in there. One of the more popular artists (and one of my favorites) is Regolo and their abstract geometrical designs:
Another recurring theme throughout the mathart hashtag is islamicdesign. Not surprising, since so much of Islamic art is explicitly geometry-based. There are lots of different people chiming in on this hashtag; the best example is maybe in the Islamic Design workbook from Eric Broug. Here's a math teacher from Michigan working through one of those designs:
It's exactly this kind of symmetry and abstract geometrical art that I like best in adult coloring books. That's what I first got into, and then it seemed like the trend tilted towards the magic forest style of representational art with lots of little fiddly doodly bits. That's well and good, but I jut want my shapes to color...! I like that Broug's workbook has you first construct the design before you color it. That extra wrinkle makes it a little more engaging, and it's enough to make me want to order a copy for myself.
"Wouldn't it be funny if we saw Walter and Seth?" L asked as we tooled around, looking for a parking spot. I don't know if he said that because he'd already seen the two lanky figures, one blonde and one brunette, ahead of us or if he was just idly wondering, but there they were.
"That's totally them," I said, and waved my arms as we drove past. Maybe L honked? Somehow we caught their attention and they wave back. L found a place to park and we spilled out to say hello. Bucky with her family (baby Luca, husband Joe) and Becca with her boyfriend were also wandering around, so we stood and caught up in the middle of the sidewalk.
The last time I was in Old Orchard Beach was in 2008, at the very beginning of June, or maybe the end of May. Tourist season hadn't started yet and everything was largely abandoned. It felt like we had the whole town to ourselves. I couldn't imagine it being any kind of major travel destination.
In the short drive around with L, I could see there are a lot more people than the last time I was here. Parking along the street was pretty crowded (maybe it was wedding guests?) and a steady trickle of cars passed us by as we talked on the sidewalk. We didn't see anything of the bride (Shufang) beforehand, but we caught the groom, Aaron, and the groomsmen (and groomswoman) to say hello and introduce ourselves.
The ceremony was brief and bilingual, with Aaron's dad reading some bits in Chinese and Shufang's father reading some bits in English, and mercifully free of tepid Bible verses. ("If I have to hear 'love is patient, love is kind...' at one more wedding," L had grumbled on the way up. Saved!) They exchanged the rings and everything and, for the third time, they were married (they'd already had two weddings in China: one more or less ceremonial and one legal). In my head I made a joke about how does this mean they need to get divorced three times if they want it to stick, but I thought better of it and didn't say anything. Everyone left the venue to the tune of "Can't Help Falling in Love" as rendered by a dude with a guitar, and we had a few minutes to kill before the lunchtime reception at Joseph's By the Sea. L wanted to head to the beach, and I did too, so after we stopped for some coffee with Becca and her boyfriend, we wandered towards the shore.
I hadn't been to a beach in ages, so it felt really good to take off my shoes and get some sand between my toes. L and I both went right down to the water and got our feet wet. He was wearing long dress pants, so it didn't quite work out for him like it did for me in my knee-length dress.
We walked back to the reception, L soaked almost all the way up to his knees.
"Do you want a towel?" Becca asked. "We have one in our room."
"Nah, I'm fine. It's just water. It'll evaporate."
The reception wass at a mixed indoor-outdoor space, a restaurant that had a porch and then patio leading down to a lawn overlooking the beach. (Hence "Joseph's by the Sea," I guess.) L and I milled around and ate at a table on the lawn, accidentally separating ourselves from the rest of the Hamilton crew and spending the lunch with the bride and some of her friends instead, chatting about public health and economics.
Then it was time for wedding party photos. They took some photos of the bridal party on the little wooden porch, and during the photos of just Shufang and Aaron, a parasailer drifted by, in a huge skull-and-crossbones parachute. I immediately remembered Aaron as he was in college, plaid pants and a Misfits t-shirt; there couldn't have been anything more appropriate to suddenly fly over his wedding. I'm sure the photographer tried to keep that out of the shot, though, which is too bad.
We joined everyone else back on the patio after the toasts, and the cake was cut and the dancing began. There were a few short family dances to Aselin Debison's version of "Over the Rainbow / What a Wonderful World" and then everything really kicked off with "Ballroom Blitz." No one danced at first, except Aaron and Shufang. I was a few drinks in by now and fidgeting in my seat. After maybe thirty seconds I couldn't stand it anymore and rushed the dance floor to keep Aaron company. He grinned.
"I always want them to play this at wedding receptions and they never do," he said-shouted over the music. "I told the DJ I wanted this song at least. I don't care about anything else."
The rest of the playlist was equally danceable and we danced our collective asses off. L even got a chance to use his contradance powers to save the day when no one could remember how to do the electric slide. I always assumed it was like a collective racial memory; that a large enough group of people will just know how to do the electric slide, but nope.
All the Hamilton people drifted out to the lawn for a breather. The photographer wanted to get some photos ("Great, when everyone's all sweaty from dancing?" I complained mostly to myself) and so we crammed into assorted group shots in between conversations. All that taken care of, L decided it was time to drive back to Albany soon (eight hours in a car for four hours at a wedding? I guess...) and so he and Walter and I ducked out so I could drop my bag in Walter's car to make sure it didn't end up back in Albany.
When Walter and I got back to the restaurant, it was clear that the rest of the reception was beginning to wind down. The restaurant needed to start getting ready for dinner, so by 4 p.m. things had more or less wrapped up. We returned to the motel and I hopped into a closet to change out of my dress and into a tank top and bike shorts. My thighs were on FIRE.
I wanted to know what we were doing next so I could give Typhani a heads up, and eventually we decided on dinner. Things took a little negotiating and research, since both Becky and Becca have Celiac's and thus restaurants need to be reliably gluten-free. After all of the appropriate preparations are made--changing clothes, setting up baby playpens, using the bathroom--we left. We had a little trouble finding the restaurant. It was peak tourist hour along the boardwalk, and we were swamped with swarms of people and families, loud music, signs announcing beer specials, and kiosks hawking typical beach tourist gear. I had sudden flashbacks to the boardwalk shops at Rehoboth Beach, where my family vacationed every summer for years.
After some finangling and Google maps and asking a traffic crossing guard, we managed to figure out where we were and how to get to the beach shack/diner-y place Becca we had settled on. Typhani had a heck of a time trying to find parking, but she managed to squeak in right after we order. The food was filling, though not particularly memorable, and we talked and joked away for a couple of hours.
There were plans to go to some bar or other after dinner and hang out with Aaron and his friends. But first I had to go back to the motel and get my bag into Typhani's car. Becky was there before us, getting Luca settled and still coming down off whatever fight she'd had with her husband before dinner. I gave her a good, solid hug and then Typhani and I were off to the afterparty.
Oh good Lord, it was TOO MUCH. Now my long day was starting to hit me, also paired with Typhani and what I knew about her own sensibilities. The loud sports/dance bar with fog machine and lasers? Not her scene. And it wasn't feeling like much of mine, either. But I said hello to Aaron and introduced him to Typhani and congratulated him, and he let us know that there was a breakfast tomorrow morning for everyone courtesy one of his aunts. We hugged goodnight, and Typhani and I were officially on our way to the camp in Pittsfield. It wasn't as long a round-trip drive to make as the drive from Albany to Old Orchard Beach, but it wasn't a short one.
"The camp" is really a prefab little cabin, but it's surprisingly well-designed and roomy-feeling (and solid-feeling) for being what it is. The property belonged to Typhani's grandmother and used to house what she described as a crazy, rambling shotgun shack that kept having additions added to it, with light switches outside of rooms and wobbly stairs that went up too high and then had to descend down again. But it had burned down a while back and Typhani's mother used the insurance money to get the cabin. I dumped my bag in one of the two bedrooms and fished out my gifts: some Söderte and my copy of Journal of a Solitude.
"I think you'll really like it," I explained as I handed it over. "It's about a woman who just spends a year living out in the country, just writing."
Typhani is big into the homesteading and farming movement, and by her own admission she was on the verge of getting the farm she had set up with her ex to finally turn a profit when he dumped her. The plan now is set her nose to the grindstone and get her own homestead and community farm up and running herself, but these things take time, especially considering her invisible health struggles. In the meanwhile, I thought May Sarton could keep her company.
Typhani also has a gift for me: a little clay owl magnet that she made:
We stood around and chatted for a bit. It was close to midnight by now and I was feeling a little delirious from exhaustion and dancing. It felt like I'd been up for days. Exhaustion and dancing also meant I was sweaty and gross, so I hopped in the shower and heat blasted all of the grime right off of me. Nothing like hygiene to make you feel human again.
"How many bucks do I feel like?" I announced when I come out of the bathroom. "A million."
With that, I bid my hostess good night and collapse onto the brand-new bed.
Hey guys, remember when I used this space to talk about my jewelry and stuff? Yeah, me too. Now that the sun is making a comeback here in Stockholm, I can engage in my favorite hobby* again: item photography! And with new photos come new listings!
So I don't really know what color this is? The glass beads are a really fun and funky iridescent so it's hard to say what color they "really" are.
From a distance they look mostly pink or fuschia or magenta or something, so I guess choose one of those.
I realized too late, also, that I forgot to edit out or crop out that little bit of cupboard label in the bottom left there. It says "RICE IN HERE!" and surprise, that's where the rice lives! It's also where my international tea collection lives. Enjoy that peak behind the curtain!
Continuing in that "funky" theme, the spacer beads in this bracelet are aluminum cubes. (I'm guessing they're aluminum based on how lightweight they are, anyway.) I love, love, love cube as a bead shape and I want more of that in my bead box and in my life. It's such a simple shape (visually, at least), and yet it's so eye-catching.
Alas I couldn't continue the cube/square theme in the toggle, but a toggle is never not the perfect bracelet clasp so I don't really mind. The base metal toggles I have are understated and simple enough that it still works.
The number in this one, if you didn't figure it out by now, is Avogadro's number. It's Pi Day this week, but let's not forget that Mol Day (10/23) will be upon us before we know it! *Not actually my favorite hobby.
I'd like to think that I'm an unflaggingly loyal ride-or-die friend. I'm also usually pretty optimistic (or as optimistic as being a realist gets you) and bounce out of bad moods easily, though I wouldn't call myself full-on "cheerful."
What’s your favorite dog movie?
I'm going to go ahead and count Babe in this one. It's about a pig who acts like a dog and does a dog's job in a dog's world, so I say it's close enough.
When did you last have a hot dog?
Probably when I had a tunnbrödsrulle from a random gatukök (literally "street kitchen") back in the fall. For the uninitiated:
Image courtesy awesomehotdog.com
I don't really like hot dogs at all, but in the interest of Drunk Swedish Tradition opted to try one. The standard recipe calls for two but I could have sworn that mine only had one. It's some of the heaviest drinking food I've ever had; it's not a snack, it's a full-on meal. (These days I opt for the sit-down kebab places and go for a plate. No less filling, but more manageable. And no hotdogs.)
Who is (or was) a good celebrity dog?
I always felt sorry for the chihuahuas that got toted along in celebrity purses. Has that stopped being a thing? I hope so.
What are you doing for chow this weekend?
Friday nights are pizza nights. Saturdays I usually have tea or coffee and some sweets at my morning tutoring appointment, then a small lunch at home, then either dinner with one of my tutoring families (usually homemade pizza or a Persian dish of some variety) or at home. Sunday will be a morning tea and snack with another tutoring appointment, and then either food at home (sandwiches, pyttipanna) or take-out at a friend's.
I've long been interested in Russian literature, so when this title came up in the comments section of my favorite writing blog, I added it to my towering GoodReads "to read" shelf. A book club buddy gifted me a copy earlier this year and so I immediately sat down to read it.
Nothing happens, which will either bother you or it won't. I've long been a fan of the "slice of life" kind of stories, where small struggles gain epic proportions (television shows like The Adventures of Pete and Pete or Seinfeld, movies like Clerks), and that's largely what One Day... is. It's just that the backdrop is a prison camp instead of American suburban life. If your tastes overlap with mine, then you'll get a lot out of it. But if "a book about nothing, set in a gulag" sounds tedious to you, then it probably won't be a lot of fun to read. (Not that it was "fun," exactly.)
Aside: reading this in February in Stockholm is just like...the weather? Relateable struggle, my dude. Actual text I sent a friend (who currently lives in Dubai, the bastard) two weeks ago:
"IT'S SO COLD, IT'S SO FUCKING COLD, I WANT TO DIE"
On that particular morning I should note I was wearing a coat, hat, and scarf, plus two layers of bottoms and two or three layers of tops. Was it Soviet gulag cold? (Which according to the book was minus 20 *C?) No, probably not. But still. Relateable struggle.
I'm not naive enough to believe that we can build a complex and thriving society based purely on trade and bartering. We live in a global economy and you can't PayPal an order of groceries across the globe; much as I love freshly-baked bread, it would get pretty tiring to cart bags of it on the bus and then subway on my way home from a lesson every week. Thus, the utility of money.
At the same time, there's still plenty that can be traded or bartered for, as money is a way to value things, not a value in and of itself. (Though I'm sure most minor and mid-level bloggers and YouTubers reach a point where they'd rather get paid money than get a free monthly subscription box or bag of cat food or whatever.) Enter Simbi.
I joined as a favor to a friend of a friend, part of a holiday wishlist granting event. If you join Simbi through someone's affiliate-ish link, they get site credits ("simbis"). That's why I did it, originally; it was a free and easy thing to do, and it got someone else something that they valued. But then I stumbled on to a huge community of people with a variety of skills, services, and sometimes even goods to trade. Before the calendar rolled over to 2018 I'd already completed my first major deal—critiquing someone's sci-fi novella. Good practice for me as an editor, and while I wasn't paid in fungible government-backed currency, I still got something out of it. (In this case, the simbis I earned through novella critiquing were enough to cover the cost of social media promotion for my Etsy.)
Full disclosure: The links to Simbi I use throughout this post are my own affiliate-ish link, so if you join by clicking one of them, I'll get 25 simbis. I'll get another 25 if or when you complete your first deal. But it's not a pyramid scheme setup, so I don't take any cut of your deals.
When I first signed up, I was ambivalent about it; I will fully admit that it was the gamification aspect they added, with badges and completion percentages, that got me to set up my profile as thoroughly as I did and to offer as many initial services as I did. But then I was surprised when people immediately flagged interest in what I had to offer, including people who had knowledge that could really benefit me!
I can see how Simbi would be a really valuable platform for artists. Anyone trying to sell art or other indulgences (like, I don't know, STEM-inspired jewelry...?) knows that it's really hard to navigate the shark-infested reefs of consumer capitalism. Too much money and you price yourself out of the market; too little money and you're working for less than minimum wage. Psychology also means that sometimes things sell better when they're more expensive, because people perceive it as being of high quality (but not too much more expensive, or you have the problem of pricing yourself out of the market), but somehow you're still always trying to convince people that your art is "worth" the price you've put on it, whatever "worth" means.
But trading on Simbi can simplify that process. There are quite a few tax specialists on the site; maybe one of them could help settle your accounts with the tax man in exchange for a painting, sculpture, or photograph? Maybe you can find someone local to fix that creaky porch step in exchange for a custom portrait? One of my favorite Simbi deals was a custom piece of high-res digital art (which will shortly be professionally printed, framed, and up on my wall) in exchange for a few simbis, some Swedish candy, and one of my gel electrophoresis bracelets. I was able to work with an incredible artist and scratch an art itch that I've had for years.
Is it a substitute for being paid (like, actually paid) for your work? No, definitely not. But I've found it to be a meaningful supplement. Not the least because Simbi provides an environment for anxiety-free, meaningful social interaction. There are two factors at play here, I think. One is that because so much of the interaction around Simbi is based on negotiating deals and transactions, conversations with people are goal-oriented rather than open-ended. For me, that removes like 95% of the anxiety I have around talking to people. Smalltalk is hell, but transactions are easy. The other is that people on the site, by and large, have a healthy balance of idealism and practicality.* I'm an idealist at heart and at the end of the day that's where my inner compass points, but I won't deny that frou-frou hippie types can be (willfully?) ignorant and frustrating to work with. *There definitely some weirdos, though. But there are always weirdos, and the Internet means you can just choose not to engage with the weirdos.
Real talk: sometimes I get tired of the Kokoba Etsy. Like, really super ultra tired. (And I realize it's the height of melodrama to say this when I haven't listed anything new in, uh, a long-ass time. It's still true. Peep my pretty high-key inactivity here.) But I've always been more interested in sending my jewelry to appreciative nerds than making this a 24/7 job. Hobby artists and crafters who sell their stuff will spend 90% of their hobby time creating and 10% of it marketing; pros will spend 90% of their time marketing and 10% creating to be able to sustain themselves. That doesn't sound like an awesome work-life balance to me, and frankly I'm not cut out for that.
Simbi, for me, represents an alternative. I can keep cranking out pi bracelets and DNA necklaces to keep my hands busy, but now my only option to offload them isn't to market myself. If I can trade them for cool things (like custom digital map art, recipes, ASL lessons, help with my complicated expat taxes, or houseplant caretaking tips), why not?
You can never go wrong with Booker T and the MG's! Anything by them is great, but the one you know is "Green Onions." (And yes, really, you know it.)
What’s a good movie with rockets in in it?
October Sky? Apollo 13? I assume they're good; I haven't seen either in a long time.
In 1977, Voyager I took off on its very long journey, loaded with two golden records containing sounds meant “to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them,” according to Wikipedia. The contents were chosen by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan, but if Dr. Sagan called you today (you know, from beyond) and said there was room for ten more minutes of music and he was letting you choose it, what would you fill the ten minutes with?
Oh man, what a toughie! The original list is actually quite diverse (NASA has the playlist posted here) so the obvious answer would be musical genres that didn't really peak until after 1977. Rap and hip-hop are, then, obvious contenders. Lauryn Hill's "Everything is Everything" has long been one of my favorites and incorporates the best elements of the genre.
And then for peak silly (because what are humans if not silly?), "Gangnam Style." Of course, aliens won't be able to understand what's so silly about the song if they just listen to it divorced from the music video, but maybe they'll still like the beat.
And much as I love Bach (the Brandenburg concertos are part of my work playlist), I would suggest maybe taking a couple of those of in favor of something else.
What’s something you know about constellations?
That for a star nerd, I'm really bad about actually being able to point them out. I can find Orion and Cassiopeia, and that's about it. Finding the north star? Forget it.
That's a long fellow you've got there![/caption]
The infamous GI Joe (actually an Indiana Jones action figure) and beaver.[/caption]
