Definitely faking the joy now.

Arrival. Suburbia. My childhood home.

I've been here barely an hour and I've already been told that I'm not eating enough, that my shirt is too tight on me and that I'm a fool for having the job I have.

Ah. I love my family.

Only partially faking the joy.

I don't travel well, particularly when it involves family. I get myself way more stressed out than I need to be.

I rented my car yesterday for the holiday weekend--it was rather less expensive than I expected it would be and it will be nice to be able not to worry about other people having to shuttle my sorry ass around all weekend.

I'm working today in an hour, until 4, which is not going to be pretty, methinks. Not only am I on the verge of getting sick, I expect it's going to be a madhouse since I'm working at our highest volume store. It should be relatively okay, though--I'm on as an extra person so that should help to take some of the pressure off everyone. I was on as an extra last Saturday, too, and it really wasn't too bad.

So, after work, I come home and pack (which mostly will be grabbing my toiletries and my dirty laundry plus what I plan to wear Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which is all already clean) and then hitting the road.

The game plan is as follows:

Drive to mum's tonight, stopping at aunt's to pick up her Kitchen Aid.
See high school friends tonight and/or tomorrow morning.
Commence panettone baking tomorrow morning early enough that it will be done by midafternoon-ish so that it has a chance to cool.
Have dinner with mum's family on Christmas Eve before heading into Boston for Midnight Mass. Because I'm a queen like that and need some high church excitement.
After that, drive two hours west to grandparents', which should get me there around 3 am.
Sleep, with the option to get up to go to church with the grandparents' at 10.30.
Be merry. Eat. Enjoy the family.
Drive four hours back to Portland Monday night so as to be home and ready to go to work at 7.30 on Tuesday (an hour later than usual. Yay!).

I'm stressed out about having a rental car. I'm stressed out about getting sick. I'm stressed out about the fact that I've never made panettone before and that I'll be making it in my mother's kitchen (because she'll be standing over my shoulder the whole time, criticising how messy I'm being--never mind the fact that she would never undertake such a recipe). I'm stressed out about the fact that I didn't get anything for anyone even though I generally don't and give a donation to charity every year instead because who really needs more stuff (particularly my father's side the family--we're all such pack rats)? I'm stressed out about work today because I really don't want to work today. I'd rather sleep until noon or so and then hit the road and have a four day weekend. That would have been sweet but, alas, it was not to be.

And what's with the high of 7c today and rain?! I want a white Chirstmas, dammit.

Season's greetings. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Joyous Kwanza. Happy Eid. Merry Festivus. Happy Solstice. (Did I miss anyone?)

And big, big, big hugs to you all and best wishes for a joy filled new year. (I'll probably post again before the new year, but in case I don't...)

Work, work, work...

...work, work, date, work, date, work, work, work.

Not sure yet. Nice enough guy and all, but, I dunno. Do I hesitate because of him or do I hesitate because of me?

...not that I have any issues or hang-ups or anything like that. Pfft. Of course not...

iTunes free single

You all need to download the iTunes Music Store's free single this week, James Taylor's new version of 'Jingle Bells'.

Just for the horror of it.

Yeah. That's just not quite right.

There's something sad and ironic when one is his own top match when searching a personals site.

Just saying. I mean, if that should ever happen, it would be sad and ironic. Not to say that this has happened to me. Yeah. That's why I used the third person above.

Blog updating

I need to rework this layout, methinks. Update my links. As Kit-Cat has noted, the Dancing Banana disappeared a long time ago. Alas. Blogger has recently updated itself and added some new tools and such. I need to update my template to be inline with their changes but they've warned me that I will lose many of the changes that I may have made to this template in the update process. I don't think I quite have the ambition to do that right now. Soon, though, perhaps.

I'm trying to decide what to do with my day off today (other than continue to get sucked in by the car-wreck of a novel that is The Corrections. It's a grey and cold day here by the sea. Looks like it could snow but it's not going to get quite that cold. It's 4c now and we have a high only of 6c today.

I'm listening to The Mavericks' 'Music for All Occasions', which I've not listened to in quite a while. I think they should have called it 'Music for when you're depressed about a breakup'. Not that I'm any more or less depressed about things right now than I've been. Actually, I'm in a vaguely better space than I was a few weeks ago round about the one year anniversary of my first date with the ex. I am, perhaps, way too nostalgic for my own good.

I think I'll shower soon and head out into the world with the new toy. Take it out on the town and go to Casco Bay Books and work on some stuff. I happily was able to retrieve all of my files from my old iBook since it was only the video card that had gone and not the whole thing. I had been working on and off on an essay about the importance of costumer education in coffee and now, especially with my new position, I think it's really important that I work on that. Make a sort of essay-length mission statement for myself. A raison d'être for the new position. As I keep saying to people as I've been explaining my new job, coffee is one of the ways in which globalisation can actually work—as long as it's done correctly. Coffee is second only to oil in terms of the amount of money traded around the world for it and it impacts so many lives around the globe. Coffee is one of the few things that cuts across global cultures in its consumption and we owe it to the people who produce it to care for it and respect it.

Okay. That's enough sentimentalism for the moment. I need to save that for the essay.

NY Times Editorial

As it is, I hate the holidays. Mostly for the stupid family stress (everyone has to get along, dammit) and, of course, the crass consumerism. Even before I started going to church again, the consumerism of the holiday and the complete divorce of the original meaning of Christmas from the non-stop sale that has become 'The Holiday Season' really bothered me. I grew up in a house that measured the success of Christmas by how much money had been spent not by how happy everyone was by the end of the day—or the end of the week, even, when all the new toys had essentially been forgotten. (I don't really have any problems with the more p.c. 'holiday' versus 'Christmas'. It's easier than assuming the celebration of Christmas or wishing everyone a Happy/Merry/Joyous Kwanzaa/Christmas/Hanukkah/Eid/Etc.)

Anyway, it's always nice for other people to take notice of these things. Other people like the New York Times. Here's the conclusion from an editorial this morning:

For all the Santas sprouting in store windows around Halloween, Thanksgiving has remained the national holiday marker, like the Great Wall of China holding back the hordes of the Christmas-shopping frenzied. Now it looks more like a pierced Maginot line. Soon it could all end in a hostile bid to merge Christmas and back-to-school sales.

Click the link to read the rest of it.

Arrival!

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi rirovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Mentre ch'i' rovinava in basso loco,
dinanzi a li occhi mi si fu offerto
chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco.
Quando vidi costui nel gran diserto,
'Miesere di me,' gridai a lui,
'qual che tu sii, od ombra omo certo!'

I got my new MacBook today. As I mentioned in a previous posting, when Squirt died, he already had a name before he arrived: Virgil, after Dante's guide through Hell and Purgatory. Not a guide so much as a companion as a get through this mid-twenties angst thing that seems to be defining my life right now.

That, and he'll come in rather handy for work. Now that I've been promoted and all. The inevitable has happened and they've made me a manager. I say inevitable like it's a bad thing but actually I'm rather excited about the new position. It's a new position for the youngest location. I have a lot ahead of me to get things on track and to help to grow that location but it's going to be oh so much fun too since it's very much meant to be a location focused more on education and engagement rather than just a place to pop in for a cup of coffee. Tastings, mini-classes, drop-in workshops. Stuff like that. I'm not really going to get into details because most of them have to be worked out but it'll all start to take shape in the new year. For now, we have to get through the holiday season. Which shouldn't be too bad. We're well organised and we made it through last year rather unscathed.

As for myself, Yanksgiving was pretty good last week. Aside from the almost 500 miles of driving in two days and the horrendous rain on the drive home Thursday night. I managed to fit in both Mum and Dad over two days. Dinner with Dad and Step-Mum and that side of the family on Thursday, which was lovely. I hadn't seen them since last Christmas and it was really great to hang out even if it was only for eight hours.

Other than that, nothing really new to report. My roommate was in Montréal over the holiday (so jealous!) and she brought me back bagels and chocolate. Yum. I'm so easy to please.

That's all for now, I think. Now that I have a computer of my own again, perhaps I'll be better at keeping this silly thing up-to-date. Or not. We'll see.

Oh, one final thing: I started reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections over the weekend. I'm only about 75 pages into it but it's fantastic. Kind of like a car wreck. Really uncomfortable but you just can't look away.

Damn you and your lies, Jacqueline Bigar

According to my horoscope, it was a five star day and I was supposed to gain a progressively better mood.

So much for that.

The two hour walk in the rain didn't really help things, either. Sometimes they do. But this time it didn't.

Last night...

...I made perhaps the best tomato sauce I've ever made. Garlic, some more garlic, and then a bit more garlic. Some purple onion. Some white mushrooms. Sauteed in butter. Throw in some dry red wine and some saffron and cook it down until its almost gone. Then toss in the tomatoes and let it simmer for a while.

It was amazing.

But then I realised that I had no pasta. None.

And that's pretty much a metaphor for how I feel like my life has been going recently.

Technology Sucks. RIP Squirt 2002-2006.

So, my computer died a week ago. I'm typing this on a borrowed laptop that my friend almost never uses. Bless her. We need to work out the details of this custody thing (alternate weekends or something) but she's perfectly fine with my using this for as long as I need to until I figure out how to get myself a new computer of my own.

At least I'm not under deadline for anything...like when my logicboard died in the middle of November the first year I had Squirt (the old iBook, in case you didn't catch that) and I had five papers to write over the next four weeks.

It was the video card that died. To get it fixed would probably work out to about half of just getting a new MacBook and given that the old one was four years old and had seen me through the rough and tumble of university life, it seems better to let it go. Still, not all is lost. Right now, it's essentially just a large iPod charger. It turns out, I can log in and it'll update my iPod. But I can't see anything that I'm doing. And it won't connect to an external monitor, which is how I know that it's the video card and not just the screen.

So, at least I know that all my information is on there and retrievable at some point. It also means that I can use it as an external hard drive to back things up on after I get the new one. Not exactly practical but, again, not all is lost.

I named it Squirt when I first got it because it was so much smaller than the clamshell iBook that it was replacing. This morning I woke up with a name for the as yet purchased new one: Virgil. It will be my companion (not exactly my guide, but certainly trusty sidekick) as I'm figuring things out over the next little while. I don't know that I'm quite traveling through Hell right now, but it's at least some kind of Purgatory where I need to get my shit together and figure out what is the proper path for me to be on.

Hopefully, I'll have the new compute sooner rather than later, but I have to figure out how to pay for it. But I have more important things to figure out how to pay for, like new glasses and a new winter coat and new boots and heating oil and.... Yeah. You get the picture.

I could really use a Virgil about now to help point me on the right path though I have to remember, too, that Dante didn't get help straight away when he was lost. Yes, it came fairly quickly but he had a literary schedule to keep. He couldn't wander lost for 8 cantos. He had to get down to business.

Part of me has been puzzling recently about the coffee thing and about where, really, I'd be best to do it. I have the advantage here of being a big fish in a little pond. Still, as I've said before many a time, this pond is rather small for my liking and I don't have a need really to be #1. There's also part of me that feels like the ideals of 'third wave' coffee needs to be represented out here on the East Coast. This isn't me getting cold feet about the possibility of moving, more just a puzzling through my reasons for wanting to move and perhaps my path in coffee, if that is indeed where I'm meant to be. Add to that mix an idea that was pitched to me in outline form last night that would take a lot of work to bring together but that would potentially offer me an amazing experience in helping to set up and run a non-profit coffee endeavour that could focus much more on education than simply producing amazing coffee. Before my computer died, I'd been working on an essay about the vital importance of consumer education and trying to puzzle through how to balance consumer education with the need to make sure that you can get through a line to the door in 5ish minutes.

That essay is trapped on my computer right now, though I may soon start it from scratch since it was a bit of a mess anyway.

So, lots on my mind as of late, as always. Still plugging along, though, which is the important thing.

Exciting Night

I made ravioli stuffed with squash, parsnip, potato, cheese and some spices. Now I'm doing laundry and watching 35 Up. And I have 42 Up if I'm feeling ambitious later.

Way. Too. Much. Excitement.

Joy of joys

'This American Life', one of my favourite NPR shows is now available as a podcast. It's on usually when I'm at work on Sundays. Now I can listen to it at my leisure. Give it a looksee. It's fabulous.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I've just finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. When I started reading it a few weeks ago, I decided after only about 30 pages that it should be required reading for everyone in the country. Probably everyone who partakes of an industrialised food chain every day (which would include a lot of people).

The most basic, guiding question that Pollan takes for the book is 'What should we have for dinner?' It seems, as he points out, such a simple question. Indeed, eating food is perhaps the most basic thing that we humans have control over in order to continue to live. We don't have to worry about breathing but we do have to worry about what to put into our bodies in order to allow them to continue to function.

Pollan then tries to figure out what happened to make this such a difficult question to answer and he pins down the omnivore's dilemma, something that has plagued (or benefited, depending on how you look at it) our species since we became a species. When you can eat virtually anything, deciding what to eat can be a bit of a problem.

Yet, Pollan points out, for millennia, this never really was a problem. We relied on culture, on availability, on local climate to help dictate what we ought to eat and when. You want asparagus in January? Tough. Eat some beans. The modern industrialised food chain has warped availability and trumped locality so that we can, indeed, eat asparagus in January if we so choose. But at what cost? Are those dozen or so spears of asparagus really worth the jet fuel that flew them from South America to your grocery store?

Americans spend less on food than any other nation on the planet. Some might see this as the triumph of the American promise of equality and equal access. But remembering how basic food is to our existence, why, logically, should it be a good thing for food prices to fall continuously? 99¢ for a dozen eggs? What does that tell us about the quality of those eggs? Does the average person even have any idea where eggs come from or how they're produced anymore?

As I settled in at a bar one night with the book and a pint, I was chatting with the bartender who is always interested to find out what I'm reading (this is the same bar at which I did a lot of reading of the Divine Comedy this past Spring). She sort of recoiled when she saw what I was reading and said that I shouldn't read it, because it would turn me into a vegetarian. I told her that I was already essentially a vegetarian and she looked puzzled since I'd just ordered a steak quesidilla. Oddly enough, Pollan's section on vegetarianism and the ethics of eating animals has made me feel okay about when I do choose to eat meat and has given me some philosophical cud to chew (sticking with the food theme) about the topic.

If you click the link at the end of this post, it will take you to Pollan's website where you can read the introduction and the first chapter of the book. If that doesn't hook you then perhaps you're one of those people that Pollan suggests maybe shouldn't read the book. To quote the introduction,

'Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world: this book is probably not for them; there are things in it that will ruin their appetite. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kind of pleasures that are only deepened by knowing.

To know from whence our food came used to be such a benign question as not even to merit thinking about it. Do you know where your morning pop-tart came from? It started as some kind of organic substance somewhere along the line. Or, to take a subject closer to my heart and my everyday, do you know where your morning cup of coffee came from?

As I sit here typing this, my cat is hunting. The cold weather has brought a few mice indoors to join us. Every now and then, she'll catch sign of one and be occupied for hours. It's not as if we starve her, but it's fascinating to see her instincts kick in like this. What happened to our instincts about food? Shouldn't we want to know where our food came from? The supermarket, though convenient, is not a farm. The vast majority of our food does not come from farms as we conceive them. Neither I nor Pollan quite argue that this is necessarily a good or bad thing. Still, it is a thing. And a thing worth noting at that.

Ultimately, I think that a book like this should remind us all that we're still animals. Despite our civilisation, we are actively connected to the rest of life on earth and everything we do, everything we eat—even Twinkies—affect the rest of the planet somehow.

Run, don't walk, to your local library, bookstore, or favourite online book seller and read this book.

You'd be stupid to remain ignorant of where your food comes from.

And, after you've read it, if everything begins to taste suspiciously of corn, don't say I didn't warn you.

Dilemma

The Scissor Sisters are playing Sunday in Boston. Tickets are only $25.

This shouldn't even be a dilemma, right?

Slacking (as usual)...

...well, not really. Yes, I've not updated in over a week but I've been busy. I seriously thought about writing a post on the train back last weekend but was more content to allow my thoughts to free range through my mind rather than to commit them to either paper or screen.

And I'm not really going to say much about last weekend right now other than hanging out with my cousins was a lot of fun and seeing my mother could have been rather worse than it was. It could have been rather better, too, but I tried. And that has to count for something, right?

I've had a lot on my mind this past week about a lot of different things. I don't really have the time or the energy to delve into them right now but that's why I haven't posted: my thoughts are still free ranging. That and the fact that work has been fairly crazy...still. I actually got a day and a half in the office this past week (cut short by someone calling in sick and having to go cover a shift) and am scheduled for three days this week. Office work aside, though, the shop is still clipping along quite briskly. We haven't seen a slump in the increase in business that we've seen since the beginning of last month. Not that any of us are complaining, per se. All things considered, we're surviving quite well.

I don't think there's enough form to any of my thoughts to put them down here right now but we'll see how this coming week goes. If anything, I'll try to get a post together about last weekend. You know, to share the pain.

Dream

The scene: the house I grew up in.

The plot: I'm trying to leave, but there's a hit-man outside trying to kill me. My mother is there, very blasé about the whole thing. Somehow, it makes sense for me to make a run for the car (which is actually my father's truck) and try to get away. I woke up just as I was trying to make a run for the truck.

It had a very Godfather feel to it.

Anxiety about seeing my mother this weekend? Ya think?

Why does the classical music on MPBN in the mornings suck so much?

Often, as of late, when I'm walking home I think of great blog topics. Things I really ought to sit down and write on if not here at least in my personal journal.

And then I don't.

Because I get home and sit down and am just utterly exhausted. Work has been crazy busy lately. We've had a definite upswing in business since the beginning of September and it's not just that students are back in town. Thankfully, it hasn't been too frustrating, just really busy. It's keeping us on our toes to be sure.

So, that's mostly the reason that I've not been posting much recently: I've just been damned tired. I'll try to keep better on top of it, though.

I'll have something to blog about later this weekend anyway: I'm going to see my mother on Saturday for the first time in almost a year. I offered an olive branch and it was accepted. I'm going to be in Massachusetts to babysit my cousins (a long way to go, yes, but I'm happy to do it) on Friday and Saturday until my grandparents take over Saturday afternoon, which is when I'll see my mother. It will be a very defined period of time since my train back to Maine leaves at 7pm. From the beginning, there will be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Sono uno zio! (sort of)

I'm an uncle! (sort of)

My roommates back in Montreal had their baby! Yay! She's happy and healthy and as yet without a first name. Her middle name will be Alessina, thus satisfying the Italian side of the family. There's still the Irish side to satisfy. So, if anyone can think of some really rockin' Irish girls names, post them in the comments and I'll send them along. They have to be rockin', though, because this girl is going to be one cool lass if she's anything like her parents.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

For the record, not only was the film fabulous and definitely worth seeing, it's perhaps the gayest thing I've ever seen. Gayer even than gay porn.